Jessica Hopper talks about girls rocking out. Also, the health care lies continue, and is a new ABC show pushing an anti-choice message?

 

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Contraception junkies?

Defying Gravity

James Parriott responds

Girls Guide To Rocking

Palin drops a stinker

 

 

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll be interviewing
Jessica Hopper about her book "The Girls Guide To Rocking".  Also, more coverage of the escalating
lies about health care reform, and what’s with the new TV show "Defying
Gravity" and abortion?

 

Leave it to Stephen Colbert to leave me in stitches in a
segment about a Virginia high school teenager who got busted under a zero
tolerance policy for the most absurd reason.

 

• baby
  poofies *

 

She was busted for taking her pill at lunch, which is what
you’re supposed to do.   The
school claimed she had possession of a controlled substance and tried to expel
her.  They actually get a
representative from the school board to say the pill is as bad as heroin.

 

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Last week, I covered the way that the euthanasia lie is
being trotted out in an attempt to shut down health care reform.  But don’t let that fool you into
thinking that the taxpayer-funded abortion lie is going away any time
soon.  For instance, Mike Huckabee
is all over Fox News telling people that if we get health care reform, there
will be coverage for elective abortion paid for with tax dollars.  This is a complete falsehood.

 

• abortion
  1 *

 

There’s so many layers of dishonesty in that statement.  First of all, anyone who supports the
war in Iraq, as Huckabee does, supports using tax money to kill.  You don’t even get away with that hedge
about how the only life you think is sacred is unborn, since I guarantee that
the war has taken the lives of some fetuses, as well as the women surrounding
them, not that we can get Huckabee to care about that.  Second of all, Huckabee carried out the
death penalty more than any other Arkansas governor. He not only supports using
tax money to kill, he’s a cheerleader for it.

 

But Huckabee’s whole schtick during the campaign was about
how he was conservative, but he wasn’t a monster.  He was the real compassionate conservative.  Socially conservative, of course, but
not against all forms of assistance to the needy.  If that’s so, then how come he’s lying about abortion
funding in a direct bid to maximize the number of Americans without health
insurance?  How come Mr. Compassion
is not on the "kill health care reform" bandwagon?  Could it be that his compassionate conservative face was
simply a façade?

 

• abortion
  2 *

 

Shows you how shallow the term "pro-life" is.  Huckabee would shoot down a bill that
would save, at bare minimum, the 18,000 real people Americans that die each
year straight up from lack of health insurance.  And that’s not including all the people that die that
wouldn’t have to if they had more lifelong health care access.  The lives of real people don’t count
one bit in Huckabee’s world.  Just
the lives of potential people, and then only if they can be used to punish
fornicators and oppress women.

 

Of course, he’s lying. 
The reason not to include the language is that the Hyde Amendment
already bans using federal money to pay for abortion.  The amendment was a direct attempt to force private insurers
not to cover abortion.  And,
knowing the wingnuts, there was probably an outside hope they could read the
amendment in such a way as to make the birth control pill impossible to get or
to shut down Planned Parenthood.

 

Unfortunately, the lies about abortion and euthanasia have
grown to the point where it’s doing its job, and wasting the time of the
serious people out there who are trying to deal with reality.  Such as Senator Claire MacSkill, who
called a press conference and had to spend a bunch of time debunking the
nonsense.

 

• abortion
  3 *

 

The problem with these lies is that they’re easy to
understand.  Most of the health
care debate is complicated, with a lot of policy wonking about stuff most
people don’t really understand. 
But they understand women trying to have sex without punishment, and
they understand the concept of euthanasia, since most people have put down a
family pet at some point.  And so
they latch onto these lies, because even though they’re lies, they’re lies that
are easy to understand.  And being
simple and loud is the hand that right wingers know how to play, so they are
going to play it. And play it.  And
play it.   No matter how
dishonest it is.  It’s like playing
poker with cheaters, except the stakes are the lives and health of ordinary
Americans.

 

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Insert interview

 

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

Thanks to Jessica Valenti for finding, clipping, and posting
on ABC’s new sci-fi show Defying Gravity. 
On the show, which is set in 2052, abortion is outlawed, as are
pregnancy tests.  Of course, the
idea that you could render women helpless against pregnancy without a drugstore
test is laughable, but to the show’s credit, they do establish in the first two
episodes that women are smart enough to know what pregnancy symptoms are.

 

• gravity
  1 *

 

Okay, so far, I’m actually on board with this.  It’s all very dark and serious, but the
law on this show reflects how much laws trying to control women’s fertility
rest on the assumption that women are incredibly stupid.  As if women wouldn’t figure out how to
tell if you’re pregnant without pregnancy tests!  They didn’t have them throughout most of history, and yet
women still managed to figure out that they were pregnant and get abortions
early on in the pregnancy.  But
after that, I have to agree with Jessica’s assessment that the show falls into
the trap of moralizing about the evils of women who want to control their own
bodies after they’ve had sex. 

 

For one thing, they have the requisite smart-mouthed
feminist character who is naturally amoral because she’s so smart.  Or I think that’s the point of this bit
of dialogue.

 

• gravity
  2 *

 

Or maybe I’m wrong, and the show will come around to showing
that someone who mistakes a 10-celled embryo for a child is the one who is
actually short on morality. I can’t think of anything more dehumanizing that
valuing a living, breathing child the same as you do something with fewer cells
than you lose when you pick off a hangnail.  That’s an insult to children.  It’s weird that people who call themselves "pro-life" have
so little regard for child life that they’d suggest that it’s no more than that
of a 10-celled embryo.

 

Anyway, I hope the show realizes how ridiculous this
character is being, and that the scientist is obviously in the right.  But I’m not holding my breath.  Why not?  Because the character in the first clip who was scared that
she’s pregnant is, as you can imagine, pregnant.  And because abortion is illegal in this world, she has to
get an illegal abortion.  And she’s
punished—I kid you not—by hearing a crying baby all over the place.  She’s haunted by a crying baby.

 

• gravity
  3 *
• gravity
  4 *

 

I can imagine every wingnut watching will sagely nod about
how this is what happens to sexually active women who are seen as suppressing
their maternal side.  It certainly
plays that way in the clips.  But I
found myself baffled.  Since when
is a crying baby an argument for the
evils of fertility management? 
Personally, every time I’m out in public and some baby starts crying his
head off and his mother is distressed and trying to shut him up, I both feel
bad for her and check to make sure I remembered to take my birth control
pills. 

 

I’m not crazy, either. 
There was a clever German condom ad bouncing around the internet a
couple years ago that went with this same idea.  A man is shopping with his son, and he denies the small boy
a bag of candies.  This is what
results.

 

• gravity
  5 *

Tagline: Use condoms. But leave it to a bunch of pious,
preachy, sexphobic Americans to think that the endlessly crying baby thing is
supposed to make you sad that you don’t have one. 

 

In interest of fairness to the writers of "Defying Gravity",
I’ll be putting a link up on the show notes page of head writer James
Parriott’s reply to Jessica.  He
claims he wanted to make a pro-choice statement by showing that abortion isn’t
easy, and that anti-choicers who think it is are in the wrong.  Well, it’s not easy for a lot of women,
but it’s also not something that causes crying baby hallucinations. And
frankly, sci-fi dystopia’s really don’t work like that.  You’re supposed to make the forbidden
thing seem like it’s important and necessary for people’s lives.  It’s not like the characters in
Fahrenheit 451 were like, "Well, we finally got to read some  books, and frankly, we found it as
distasteful as the government said it was."

 

*********

 

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, why lie a little when
you can lie a lot edition.  I’m
sure you’ve heard about Sarah Palin’s infamous death panels speech, but if not,
I have a clip of the host of the Young Turks reading it. 

 

• death
  panels *

 

Obviously, that’s a level 10 lie.  Up until she spouted this, most conservatives were trying to
tie their lies to some kernel of truth in order to get away with it, but Palin
realized that you can just make stuff up and that will always sound even
scarier.  And I am scared.  But not of death panels, since that’s
just nonsense.