Mammograms and abortion distort the health care reform debate. Also, John Marcotte explains how he plans to protect the traditional family.

 

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Bunch of dudes stand for their right to own ladies

David Horowitz lies

Marsha Blackburn deceives

Sarah Palin misleads

Oh noes! Pap smears, too!

Bill O’Reilly makes stuff up

Steve Doocy expresses a falsehood

Chris Matthews assists in deception

Rescue Marriage

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll be interviewing John
Marcotte about his efforts to ban divorce in California.  Also, I’ll be talking up the role of
boobies and other lady parts in the ongoing health care reform frenzy.

 

So the right wing organization the American Center for Law
and Justice put out a trailer for their upcoming documentary chronicling the
rise of the anti-choice movement. 
See if you can spot what’s interesting about all the people they have to
interview. 

 

• nuts *

 

Yep, all men. In fact, the only women you really see in the
trailer are the pro-choicers, which creates this real sense that this movie is
about a bunch of evil men that are so certain that they own women’s bodies that
they’re willing to dedicate their lives to it.  Which is probably not the message they wanted to send, but
is nonetheless accurate.

 

************

 

Did you hear that a task force recently released a set of
new recommendations for breast cancer screening?

 

• boobies
  1 *

 

Well, that was the reaction that the panel’s findings
received.  Personally, I was
relieved to hear that the panel didn’t really see a point in starting
mammograms until you’re 50 if you don’t have any risk factors. I’m looking forward
to 10 more years free of boobie-squishing.  Also, they found that self exams don’t do much, which is a
shame, but also means that most of us who forget to do them have less cause to
beat ourselves up about it.  This
whole story shouldn’t really have been that big a deal, but it just so happened
to come out right as right wingers are both raising false fears about health
care rationing while also rationing your access to abortion.  And so a lot of people immediately grew
concerned that this was about finding a way to cut back on health care at the
expense of women’s lives.

 

Concerned, or in the case of most of the conservatives
trumpeting this, faux concerned for politically convenient reasons.  Opponents of health care reform
immediately and falsely implied that this panel had created a binding
recommendation that all people would have to live with under health care
reform. For instance, David Horowitz and Glenn Beck pushed this lie. 

 

• boobies
  2 *

 

This is what we like to call in the biz a straight-up
lie.  The Democrats have nothing to
do with this independent panel’s recommendation, and the HHS has already
declared they’re keeping the old standards in place.  The panel’s recommendations were based in a desire to help
women, because the current standards are creating too many false positives for
every case of cancer detected, and that’s no small thing, when you consider how
false positives can sometimes result in painful or harmful treatment.  Also, the tests themselves are painful
and give you a significant and dangerous dose of radiation.

 

But this reality hasn’t stopped health care opponents from
saying the most outrageous things about how the Democrats just made this up
because they’re stealing from you. Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn went on TV
and outright claimed that the HHS is behind this.  Luckily, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz was there to fight
with her about it. 

 

• boobies
  3 *

 

The problem is that opponents of health care reform are
allowed to just lie like this on TV without anyone stepping in to correct them,
except other politicians, and so the audience is left splitting the
difference.  In this instance, it
was even more disturbing, because you had 3 people lying and only one person
telling the truth.  It was unbelievably
frustrating to watch.

 

Of course, no cavalcade of dishonesty is complete lately
without Sarah Palin hopping in. 

 

• boobies
  4 *

 

In fact, the only threat of taking people’s actual care they
currently have away is one that Palin and her buddies support, the Stupak-Pitts
amendment, which does get between you and your right to abortion care.  But of course, Palin, like all the rest
is lying about this.  The
government has made it clear they’re sticking to the 40 plus
recommendation.  What’s interesting
is the bigger lie that’s being pushed, the idea that more women will die of
breast cancer if we pass health care reform.  In fact, the opposite is true.  Right now, if you don’t have health insurance and you get
breast cancer, good luck with that. 
What reform will do is make sure that women who currently aren’t getting
screened or treated because they can’t afford it will get that care. 

 

Mammograms aren’t the only kind of cancer screening that’s
being reconsidered in light of new evidence about the dangers of false
positives.  Another panel indicated
that cervical cancer screenings could also be less frequent, which some
conservatives used to lie and fear monger. 

 

• boobies
  5 *

 

This is doubly dishonest, because younger women who are at
risk of cervical cancer are even less likely to see a doctor regularly because
of lack of health insurance.  Also,
the same conservative voices that are suddenly so concerned about cervical
cancer were singing a different tune with the HPV vaccine was invented, and the
religious right faced losing an entire STD to scare kids with. But to be fair,
right wingers aren’t hitting this note as much. That’s probably because they
know they’re simply not going to reach younger women with this scare-mongering,
and are more interested in playing to older people who have been falsely told
that Medicare is threatened.

 

*********

insert interview

 

*********

Now the Senate has started to debate health care reform, and
the good news is, as expected, while the Senate is generally more conservative
than the House overall, there is a much lower chance of seeing an explicit ban
on private abortion funding like the Stupak-Pitts amendment.  Which means, you guessed it, another
round of anti-choice hysteria and lies. 
Bill O’Reilly is leading the dishonesty charge. 

 

• abortion
  1 *

 

This is a blatant lie, of course.  If Stupak-Pitts is stripped, there will not be any federal
funding of abortion.  All that will
change is that women who buy private insurance through the health care
exchange, most of whom will have some subsidies to do so, will maintain
privately-funded abortion coverage. 
Privately funded.  There is
no way that federal dollars will be going to abortion. That’s already
explicitly banned by the Hyde Amendment. 

 

Now make no mistake. 
The Hyde Amendment is a very bad thing, and it’s incoherent, too.  The idea behind it that anti-choicers
have a special right not to pay taxes for something because they don’t like.  The rest of us, however, have to pay
for all sorts of things we don’t like, such as killing actual people in
war.  Which is to say that the Hyde
Amendment puts Sperm Magic on a higher pedestal than any other thing in our
society, bar none.  That’s a lot of
penis power right there.

 

Still, the Stupak-Pitts amendment does the Hyde Amendment
one worse, because it prevents private companies from using private money to
pay for women’s private medical decisions.  But defenders of it are denying that this is true and
implying that it’s more limited than that. For instance, here’s Steve Doocy
lying on Fox & Friends.

 

• abortion
  2 *

 

Ha!  I wish they
banned federal money from ending a life. 
That would mean an immediate pull out from Iraq and Afghanistan, as well
as an end to the federal death penalty. 
What he said has no actual relationship to the Stupak-Pitts amendment,
which very specifically bans insurance companies from using private funds to
cover abortions for women receiving subsidies to buy health insurance. But nice
how Doocy inadvertently revealed that the only "life" that counts to
anti-choicers is that of non-sentient fetuses.

 

Bart Stupak has been burning the midnight oil at one thing
and one thing only, which is misleading the public on what it is exactly that
his amendment does.  And many
so-called journalists are letting him do it, even when he’s not on the Fox
Propaganda Network.  For instance,
Chris Matthews let Stupak lie on air. 

 

• abortion
  3 *

 

See?  Blew right
past that blatant lie without batting an eyelash, even though I do believe that
Matthews is technically pro-choice. 
Stupak-Pitts is not consistent with current law.  It expands it, and this means that
abortions that would be covered under current law will not be covered in the
future.  That’s a change, and
therefore is not consistent with current law.

 

**********

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, let’s make that subtext
the text edition. I’ve been saying for months now that a lot of the opposition
to health care reform can be best understood if you see that the opponents are
afraid they’ll have to sit in waiting rooms next to poor people and people of
color. Well, leave it to Lamar Alexander to nearly come right out and say that.

 

• Medicaid
  *

 

Yep, he just compared universal health care to forcing
so-called Real Americans to live in a ghetto.  Nothing racist about that, no sir.