Health care reform gets ugly. Also, Yvonne Bynoe talks about diverse models of motherhood, and hooking up demonstrated not to break your sanity.

 

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Michele Bachmann doesn’t know what this means

Is Lieberman petulant or not?

Lieberman promotes Medicare buy-in

Lieberman denounces Medicare buy-in, after finding out liberals like the idea

Glenn Beck wants to kill Medicare altogether

Sluts are not crazy

Glenn Beck goes full General Ripper

 

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll be talking to Yvonne
Bynoe about her new anthology chronicling the diverse experiences of motherhood
in the U.S.  Also, the health care
reform process gets even uglier, and new evidence shows that the hysteria over
the so-called hook-up culture is misplaced. 

 

And this week in stupid statements from health care reform
opponents comes this one from Michele Bachmann to a group of tea baggers that
are organized to fight health care reform. 

 

• light
  brigade *

 

Okay, well clearly Bachmann and her followers don’t know the
poem or the history behind it. Because not only did the light brigade not win
their battle, but the poem also has the famous line: "Theirs not to reason
why;/Theirs but to do and die." True, the tea baggers are opposed to reasoning
why, but I don’t imagine they’d like to have that pointed out.

 

**********

Now that the Nelson amendment’s been defeated, the health
care reform debate in the Senate is only getting uglier and more
complicated.  It almost makes you
long for the days when it was a simple matter of being outraged at the way that
misogynists are hijacking health care reform.  But now they’ve been shut down for the time being, and the
question has emerged: is this health care reform bill going to be reform-y or
not? 

 

The obstacle that’s emerged this past week was Joe
Lieberman, who is clearly enjoying the opportunity to stick it to the liberals
that pushed him out of the Democratic party but not out of the Senate.
Lieberman has strong-armed his way into this debate by being the crucial vote
for a filibuster and using that to get rid of both a public option and a
Medicare buy-in.  Liberals such as
health care expert Ezra Klein immediately denounced Lieberman for being petty,
and then were immediately denounced themselves for slurring Lieberman’s good
name.  But Lieberman’s critics have
every reason to believe Lieberman is more about pettiness than sincere
concerns.  For instance, here’s
Lieberman 3 months ago on the Medicare buy-in option. 

 

• health
  care 1 *

 

Here’s Lieberman now.

 

• health
  care 2 *

 

The so-called Medicare buy-in looks exactly like what
Lieberman used to claim he supported. 
Of course, he used to support a public option, but now claims that he’s
against it because it would be owned by the government.  Which means he was either too stupid to
realize that’s the definition of "public option" before, or he’s being
disingenuous now. 

 

So why are liberals so hellbent on having a public option or
at least a Medicare buy-in?  It all
comes down to costs.  Yes, a health
care reform bill without these things should lower costs because it will
increase the rolls, increase competition, and provide subsidies to help people
afford health care.  However, there
is still the matter of insurance companies and their desire to drive up
profits.  The assumption that the
savings in health care will immediately be passed to the consumer is a
questionable one, not when insurance companies executives would far prefer to
keep that money for themselves and the shareholders.  And as long as every insurance company in the system keeps
the savings instead of passing it on, then there’s no competition.  But a non-profit public option has no
shareholders to pay, and so they can pass the savings right along.  That will mean other insurance
companies have to do the same or lose in the free market.  But so-called free market capitalists
are doing their hardest to shield insurance companies from free market
competition.

 

Meanwhile, the actual right has gone completely off the
rails because of all this, probably because the Democrats have given up any
hint of wanting a bipartisan bill and are simply spending all their time trying
to convince conservative Democrats to stop screwing this up.  The tea party types have moved towards
attacking already existing and popular programs.  Check out Glenn Beck.

 

• health
  care 3 *

 

Good luck with that strategy, tea baggers.  Telling your elderly base that they
don’t need the health care that they’re getting isn’t going to really work out
for you as well as you’d hope.

 

**********

insert interview

 

**********

I know you’ve heard the hysteria.  If you listen to this podcast, you’ve heard me cover the
hysteria.  But even if you haven’t
heard my coverage, it’s hard to miss the hysteria out there. 

 

• hook
  up 1 *

 

OMFG! People, okay, young women are choosing to have sex and
we can’t stop them.  They just keep
taking off their pants and doing it and just well, doing it!  All this sex and we’re not a part of
it!  All these college kids getting
laid when we remember wondering if we would ever have a date.  We watch a lot of TV and these kids are
hooking up and we’re angry!  We’re
hysterical!  We want them to stop
it already, especially the girls. 

 

And so of course, on the heels of the hysteria comes the
inevitable mischaracterizing of the beliefs of those of us who think that
freedom, education, and safety are important considerations.

 

• hook
  up 2 *

 

That’s Jennifer Roback Morse, who was put on the Glenn Beck
show with her title as a PhD, but they didn’t note that it is in
economics.  Yes, they implied that
she has some kind of expertise on society or psychology, when in fact she was
brought on the show because she’s a very conservative Catholic with an
anti-contraception agenda, that she dropped in there, implying that condoms
themselves are little harbingers of evil. 
Watching that segment, one gets the impression she thinks merely touching
latex to your skin might ruin your life permanently.  Remember, the forced birth agenda is usually behind most
hysteria about the so-called hook-up culture.  People getting hysterical about it have a model of sexuality
that is based around trapping young women in relationships at a young age through
pregnancy, with the hopes that those young women will have to give up their
ambitions to care for their families as their young husbands are being put
through school by their young wives. 
Their faith that this can be achieved by getting college kids to quit
using condoms is touching in its naivete, but dangerous in its effects. 

 

But of all the silliness that comes from the hysteria over
the hook-up culture is the pseudo-scientific claims that because women want
love, but men only want sex, women are being permanently damaged by casual sex.

 

• hook
  up 3 *

 

Actually, that’s all a lie.  Both men and women create oxytocin, but the forced birthers
deny this because they are invested in the misogynist belief that commitment
only happens when a woman uses sexual access as leverage to get a man to
pretend to like them.  If men could
feel intimacy during sex, or actual attachment or love for women, the whole
hysteria about casual sex falls apart. 
Their theories are based on the belief that it is impossible for a man
to actively choose to be with a woman, which implies that women are just that
awful and hateful.  And so they
argue that women feel attached after sex, but men don’t, and so sex is bad for
women.  They usually argue that
women are made mentally ill by this, and that sexual women are more suicidal,
etc.

 

This oxytocin theory, and the way they lie about men not
having the hormone, shows how silly and unscientific the anti-choice crowd is
being.  They’re not interested in
evidence or helping people, but about rationalizing their misogynist belief
that women are basically asexual and so unlikeable that being loved for
ourselves is impossible.  But when
real science weighs in to measure the effects of casual sex, another picture
emerges.

 

• hook
  up 4 *

 

This actual research is getting buried in the mainstream
media because it doesn’t trip up ratings-raising hysteria over youthful
sexuality.  But it’s really
important research.  For one thing,
it demonstrated that for all that hysterics claim hooking up is the norm on
campus, only 1/5^th of respondents had casual sex as their last
encounter.  Whoops, claims that
kids don’t date anymore destroyed right there!  But the other finding was that for the  kids who did engage in casual sex,
there was no measurable difference in self esteem or mental health. They aren’t
saying that casual sex is for everyone, of course. But what they found is that
people who engage in it usually know themselves better than the anti-choicers
would allow, and handle it as well as anything else. Yes, even the women.  Killing that other pet anti-choice
theory that women are too stupid to make our own decisions and have to have
others do it for us. 

 

***********

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, pants of fire
edition.  Politifact has given its
pants on fire award to those promoting the lie that White House science and
technology adviser John Holdren promoted forced abortions and sterilizations as
population control.  Holdren did
not; he wrote in his book that other people suggested this but he didn’t even
come close to endorsing it.  But as
you know, there’s no lie too outrageous not to be promoted by wingnuts.  Here’s Glenn Beck, repeating it.

 

• beck *

 

Of course, this shows that reality has superseded satire.
This is a clip from the 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, which satirized that era’s
wingnuts.

 

• beck 2
  *

 

It’s like Glenn Beck is using it as a model.