Barack Obama's Second Inaugural Address

By Mustang Bobby

We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth.

It is now our generation's task to carry on what those pioneers began. For our journey is not complete until our wives, our mothers, and daughters can earn a living equal to their efforts. Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law – for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well.

Including Stonewall — the birthplace of the gay-rights movement — along with Seneca Falls and Selma in a presidential inaugural address for the first time.

Do not tell me that the universe has not shifted.

Here is the full speech as prepared for delivery.

A cure for the GOP fixation on rape and sex and women's bodies

By Ramona

So I guess you heard what House Science Committee member Todd Akin (R-MO) said when asked whether rape would be reason enough for abortion:

People always want to try and make that as one of those things, well, how do you, how do you slice this particularly tough sort of ethical question. It seems to me, first of all, from what I understand from doctors, that's really rare. If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let's assume that maybe that didn't work or something. You know, I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist and not attacking the child.

To which even the most thoughtless of the thinking people have to be going, What in the pluperfect HELL???

This is the Tea Party-backed guy who just recently won the Republican Senate primary and will go against Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill in November. Maybe. McCaskill wasted no time jumping in, saying, in effect, Uh-uh, morons, you chose him, now you better let him run -- I hope, I hope, I hope. 

But her reaction was nothing compared to the scrambling, the fumbling, the hasty word salads coming out of the Republicans who, bless 'em, saw immediately how this could royally screw things up come November if people kept linking that idiot Akin to their almost-main guy, Paul Ryan.

That same Paul Ryan who calls himself the most pro-life person in government.

That same Paul Ryan whose views on personhood -- the belief that the life of each human being begins with fertilization -- meshed so thoroughly with Todd Akin's they co-sponsored a bill calling for the legitimization of that loony theory.

That same Paul Ryan who, along with Akin and a couple hundred other GOP House members, actually tried to make laws about the degrees of rape, defining "forcible rape" as the only violation worth noting -- as if, in fact, "forcible" could be defined; as if, in fact, there was any other kind.

So, because Akin reminds them too much of Ryan and all that's unholy about him, the rest of the Republicans would like nothing better than to see Akin just fall in a hole, his name erased from any future historical references to the Great Race of 2012. 

On Hardball, Cynthia Tucker told Chris Matthews that this notion about a woman's body protecting her from a rapist's sperm -- in a "legitimate" rape -- is nothing new. She said Georgia Representative Don Thomas, a physician, said much the same thing -- in 2003.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's Jim Galloway quotes Thomas as saying, "Relying on my personal experience in my home county of 90,000 people, we don't have rape cases resulting in pregnancy."

Galloway found another instance of the same crazy theory, this time by a North Carolina legislator (Republican) in 1995:

"The facts show that people who are raped -- who are truly raped -- the juices don't flow, the body functions don't work and they don't get pregnant," said [Henry] Aldridge, a 71-year-old periodontist. "Medical authorities agree that this is a rarity, if ever... [t]o get pregnant, it takes a little cooperation. And there ain't much cooperation in a rape," he said.

Rachel Maddow found even more instances of Republican office-holders using the same loopy rape reasoning. (They're always Republicans. I mean it. Always.)

How long before Republicans finally have to admit that they've encouraged and nurtured this craziness long enough? If they get skunked in November, will they finally come to their senses? I doubt it. Their fixation on rape and sex and women's bodies is a powerful habit. It won't go away overnight.

But what if the craziness continues and they don't get skunked? What if Romney wins and the Republicans take both the House and the Senate, and Paul Ryan, entrenched as the second most powerful man in the country, comes out of his shell, no longer having to pretend that there are any circumstances where women have any rights over their own bodies? 

It's our job to keep reminding potential Romney-Ryan voters that Todd Akin is not an anomaly, he is a symptom. Five minutes before he gave that interview his loony beliefs about women's bodies were right there with him, and five minutes afterward he was feeling no pain about what he said. He is who he is, and Paul Ryan and his fellow sex-masters are right there in the peapod with him.

There is no cure for what ails them, but there is a cure for us.

We quit them, pronto.

 

(Cross-posted at Ramona's Voices.)

New Republican reality show: Real World GOP Agenda 2012

By tmcbpatriot

I never thought I would see this day, but it's beautiful. Sadly, I am sure it will pass without so much as a memory of the amazing opportunity that has fallen into the laps of Democrats. Of course, I am referring to the monstrous comments by Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) about "legitimate rape." If ever there was a reality show for the GOP, this is it.

Will Democrats f**k this up? Of course they will. Why? Because somehow Dems have become known as the party of civility. Why is this? And why do we embrace it? Why can't we just be the party of facts and intelligence and leave civility at the f**king door? This is politics, is it not? When has politics known civility?

Let's face facts: Republicans are falling over themselves to kick this Akin monster to the curb. FOX tried to deflect and deflate, and even doubled down:

Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor and onetime Republican presidential candidate, opined that although rapes are "horrible tragedies," they sometimes produce amazing people.

Seriously, that's a real quote. Problem is Mike, everyone is looking at Akin, and perhaps you too, as a monster. So much so that Republicans are running from this guy faster than Sean Hannity after receiving a draft notice in the mail. Even Rush Limbaugh, RUSH F**king LIMBAUGH!, is running away from his comments. Meanwhile, Democrats are begging Akin to stay in the race.

This is big! Really big! Akin exposed the real Republican agenda and it was broadcast across the airwaves for all to hear, and goddamn, it was horrific!

Make no mistake, what we all heard Todd Akin say about rape, and his definition of it therein, was just another day in the life of a Republican in today's GOP. These are extreme people who will do anything to get elected, people with views so extreme they may actually be fascist, as opposed to the lip service paid to President Obama about his being some kind of socialist. It is manipulation of the highest order, where up is down, welfare is for lazy people, guns are for our own good, and the government should get out of our lives – except in cases of rape, gays marrying, blacks voting, and making sure Mexicans don't shovel our shit, pick our fruit, or mow our lawns.

The bottom line is that Todd Akin went way off message with the real agenda of the GOP in 2012 and it has threatened their whole plan to re-take the Senate and, god forbid, the White House.

Jobs? LOL!

Abortion has been the GOP's agenda even since taking back the House in 2010. Is anyone still dumb enough to believe that Republicans want to help, that they want to give people a decent wage, that they want to keep our taxes low or put us back to work with affordable health care? Did eight years of W. even happen in these people's universe? Did the last four years, with its record obstructionism by this Congress?

Is ignorance bliss or is it just plain ignorance?

Republicans don't want a minimum wage, they don't want to pay for infrastructure projects or green initiatives, they don't want public schools, and they don’t want the EPA. Last I checked, these were places where jobs existed and people benefitted from them.

So what do they want? They want private schools, private prisons, war with Iran, fracking, and lower taxes for themselves while the rest of us pick up the slack. Republicans care nothing for "we the people." Todd Akin and the collective Republican freakout that is happening right now proves it.

If Akin stays in the race, they have to support a crazy man. They have to take 100% claim of the Tea Party as nothing more than the GOP's insane cousin on steroids. They have to take responsibility for a man who blatantly spilled the beans about how the GOP feels about women's rights and their disdain for separation of church and state. And they claim the Constitution actually means something. Ha!

Republicans are not shocked by what Akin said. They support it! But it's less than three months before the election and this is supposed to be about the economy and imaginary jobs. That is what their talking points dictate. No diversions!

You think Republicans are surprised by Todd Akin, as if they didn't know his extreme views? Don't make me come over there and slap you. You can't be that dumb!

Media, Democrats, Tweeters, anyone out there who can help get the message out... please... Todd Akin is the Republican Party and they want him out because he pulled the curtain away and the rug out from under them and both have been blown away in his sh*t storm. He said rape when he should have said jobs, economy, and evil Obama. He let slip what Republicans are really all about and all they will focus on if re-elected.

So please, before their Death Star is operational again, before independents go back to not paying attention, get in there with your star fighters and let's blow this thing and go home. There is a very, very small window to do this and the response must be spot on or it will ricochet off the side. And don't be expecting the Millennium Falcon to swoop in at the last minute, because it ain't coming. It's all you.

Surely we must have a Luke Skywalker with the force to get this done. Is it Obama? Lando? He may be the best we have. To that I say, Mr. President, you may fire when ready. Just don't turn off your targeting computer just yet. Obi Wan may be one of them.

(Cross-posted at Take My Country Back.)

It's settled, then: Women, we're at war

By Ramona

Don't expect me to be going over every single attack on women's rights just because I'm writing about modern-day, 21st-century, 2012, just-in-the-last-month attacks, which, as you might have noticed, are escalating at such a dizzying pace we can no longer ignore the rumblings of war.

It's ugly and it's all out there. Even Rush Limbaugh's scrubbed transcripts of his diatribes against Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown University student who had the temerity to attempt to testify before certain members of congress about the need for free contraception. Even Patricia Heaton's deleted tweets about that same student (aka G-Town Gal). They're out there. They're not going away.

No, we're here today to look at the big picture: How did this latest war of the sexes start? What was the catalyst? And what can we do to grind it to a halt now that it's started? 

The obvious answer to question number one is that it's all Obama's fault. As a part of his health plan (the catalyst), he told insurance companies they would have to offer contraceptive care at no cost to women. (That would mean, for most, no co-pay.) Birth control aids would be free and available everywhere, and since it was mandatory, not to mention laudatory, not to mention commonsensical and a long time coming, that was supposed to be it. End of conversation.

Ha! We wish!

President Obama's first mistake was that he thought he was taking steps toward helping women more effectively and responsibly manage their reproductive years, when what he was actually doing was antagonizing pissants who have been posing as Manly Men for so long they're not about to be ousted from their comfy zones.

A whole host of Catholic Bishops, pseudo-religious politicians, and paid-to-be-mean pundits jumped on the bandwagon called Control the women by denying birth control, and weren't they surprised when the women they were so itching to suppress wouldn't give in? A real donnybrook ensued, with everybody weighing in, pro and con, and here we are, in the middle of it all, coming out swinging, and if they want a war, okay, they've got one.

Some highlights:

• The Susan G. Komen Foundation is taken over by a right-wing zealot who makes it known from Day One that Planned Parenthood can kiss SGK goodbye. Susan Komen's sister/founder helps figure out a way to do it. A huge, unprecedented fuss ensues. Right-wing zealot goes on to greener pastures. The sister stays and apologizes -- a Pyrrhic victory that nobody feels good about.

• Long probes up the vagina with cameras on the end used not as medical tools but as instruments of shame -- Zap! Gone! Battle won!

• Gooey cold stuff massaged onto a bare belly so a government-issue wand can be waved, not to detect a zygote already determined by other methods to be there, but to establish once and for all that a woman doesn't actually have control over her own body -- still working on it but we've got them in our sights.

• Dozens of state legislatures scrambling to make laws against contraception and abortion so harsh Draco the Greek, if he were still alive, would be crying foul -- this one may take a while.

The legal issues, having some semblance of form and substance, are easier to deal with. There are wise and learned people on our side ready to take them on. But there's another, uglier issue and it's one we've faced many times before. It's our old but formidable nemesis: blind, consuming hatred toward people of our gender.

With the rise of the Tea Party and pressure from the Religious Right-to Life-Until-It-Actually-Becomes-A-Child, fortified by resident misogynist Rush Limbaugh and hardline Catholic men in red robes and black robes and pullover sweater vests, the battle to enforce the reproductive rights we've already fought long and hard for is a battle we can't afford to lose.

The spotlight is on Rush Limbaugh at the moment, but it's Rick Santorum we need to keep an eye on. He showed his hand when he talked about his reaction to John F. Kennedy's 1960 speech to the Baptists, where JFK said he would fight hard for the separation of church and state.

Santorum wanted to throw up when he read that. Why? Because it's disgusting and unforgivable that  Kennedy had the chance to pave the way for an American Pope and he didn't take it. Rick will remedy that when he's president. And guess who will suffer the most under his reign?

The obvious goal is to make sure Rick Santorum never becomes president, but once that threat is gone we'll still be fighting those others working to take us down. We thought that war was over, but all we really won, we know now, was détente.

Men (and, incredibly, other women) are fighting against those of us who go on believing our reproductive rights are sacrosanct. Suddenly they're coming out of the woodwork, no longer pretending that Roe v. Wade is all that's keeping us apart. Now it's about contraception -- a real puzzler, since birth control is the obvious remedy for unwanted pregnancies.

Only women can incubate babies. It's a fact. If they get knocked up and it's not a good time, the sex police want us to believe they have no one to blame but themselves. Really? What other species on the planet punishes the female for being impregnated by a male? Birth control is a two-way street. It's irresponsible and gutless to pretend that women did this to themselves, and yet we're hearing it louder and clearer every day.

And why is that? Because to the people who are coming at us with the same hoary arguments, it's not about the control of birth, it's about the control of sex. That nutty comment by Santorum backer Foster Friess about birth control being as simple as holding an aspirin between our knees? The admonishment from Rick Santorum that all birth control should be banished because it can only lead to badness? Rush Limbaugh's crazed, three-day masturbatory fantasy about the reasons women want free birth control? Sex, sex, and, yet again, sex.

It's the same tiresome struggle, but this time we're going to win. Why? Because we have a secret weapon.

It's men. There are more than just a few good ones out there and they're on our side. They're men who work with us, talk with us, and see us as equals. They're men who live with us and see our roles as complementary and not competitive or without merit. They're men who can love unconditionally and have grown so far beyond the ancient need to keep women bound and tethered, they're willing to fight beside us until this war is ended. Some of them are already at the front lines.

So put that in your pipe and smoke it, you dirty old men of yesterday. A new day dawns and you've been left behind. It has to be this way. It's the way human progress works.

(Cross-posted at Ramona's Voices.)

Republican men to all women: Put an aspirin between your knees, pray to God, submit to us, and shut the fuck up about birth control

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Not all Republicans are saying that, whatever the implications of their crusade against birth control, but one prominent one is, Santorum's main benefactor, via his super PAC, the repugnant Foster Friess, who had this to say today about what women should do about birth control:

On this contraceptive thing, my gosh, it's so inexpensive. You know, back in my days, they used Bayer Aspirin for contraceptives. The gals put it between their knees and it wasn't that costly.

With Republicans on their theocratic rampage, you knew it was only a matter of time before one of them brought this sort of thing up, but it's still somewhat hard to believe that it would be quite to this extent, with its sense of paternalistic oppression. It's one thing, after all, for the Catholic Church to say in theological terms that birth control is wrong, or even for Santorum to talk about how sex should be "special," quite another to tell women to do what they're told. And make no mistake, this isn't about women having a choice, or being empowered to say no, it's about controlling women so that sexually, and indeed socially, they are really nothing more than receptors, willing or not, for sperm.

Oh, and it's not like things were so wonderful in Friess's "days." Women, like men, are sexual beings who may not want to have to close their legs. Abstinence is fine for some, and certainly for those not yet ready for sexual activity, but it should be a choice, not a requirement, and it's ridiculous to think men or women will just abstain from all non-procreative sex. And, of course, some men will force a women's legs open whether she likes it or not. This was true in Friess's "days" and it's true today. Women have been liberated from the shackles that constrained them for so long, as have men as well. And if you're such a fucking idiot that you don't understand what sex is really all about, in all its multifaceted ways, you should really just shut the fuck up yourself.

But also make no mistake, Friess isn't alone in thinking this. Just today, as you may know, House Republicans led by the repugnant Darrell Issa held a hearing on birth control that featured no women testifying. And across the country Republicans are  promoting "personhood" legislation that would criminalize abortion. It isn't enough to say Republicans are re-waging the culture wars of the '90s, and on issues like birth control the '60s or even earlier. This is now an all-out assault on women's rights, the goal being to deprive them of control over their own bodies and more broadly to restore a sexually tyrannical social order based largely on the dominance of men and the de-humanization of women.

I'd like to think it's hard to believe that we're even having this conversation in 2012, that birth control and women's rights are even issues anymore, but of course this is the Republican Party we're talking about, a party that is descending further and further into madness, a party increasingly of fringe extremism, a party deeply out of touch with the overwhelming majority of Americans, out of touch with contemporary life generally.

This day in history - August 18, 1920: The 19th Amendment is ratified giving women the vote

By Richard K. Barry

It really is quite incredible to contemplate the fact that women have only been able to vote in the United States since 1920. Specifically, the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibited United States citizens from being denied the right to vote based on sex.

Up to that point, most states, having the right to determine qualifications for voting, disenfranchised women.

Thanks in large part to the women's suffrage movement, and women like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, women got the vote.

My parents were born in the 1920s. It was simply not that long ago. Positive change does come, just never fast enough.

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

But the GOP "Cares about women."

Over 9,000 women in Indiana just lost their health care provider thanks to Gov. Mitch Daniels and the Republican misogyny machine.

Planned Parenthood of Indiana will stop seeing Medicaid patients after Monday because of an Indiana law that cut the provider's funding.

PPIN went to court last month to prevent Indiana from cutting funding to the state's largest reproductive health care provider. U. S. District Judge Tanya Walton Pratt said she would make a decision on whether to enjoin the law by July 1.

"Our 9,300 Medicaid patients, including those who had appointments Tuesday, are going to see their care disrupted," Betty Cockrum, president and CEO of PPIN, said in a statement.

Oh, it gets better.

Medicaid patients won't be seen starting Tuesday unless they can pay, two disease intervention specialists will be laid off, and most employees around the state will be taking a day off without pay on Wednesday, according to a statement from PPIN.

If the judge doesn't make a favorable ruling by July 1, PPIN said it will start closing health centers and reducing staff.

And remember, it's Republicans who said health care reform would increase waiting times and force doctor's offices to close.  Looks like the only people bound and determined to make that happen are all Republicans.  And remember, this is part of their nationwide solution for America: to close down Planned Parenthood for good.  Women don't need health care.  Just suck it up, like men.

(Cross-posted at ZVTS.)

Craziest Conservative of the Day: John Derbyshire

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Derbyshire, who writes for the National Review, is one of those retrograde conservatives who wants to take America back to the '50s. The 1850s... or the 1650s... back to some idyllic right-wing Dark Age.

Appearing on Alan Colmes's radio show the other day, and asked by Colmes about a section in his new book called "The Case Against Female Suffrage," he actually argued against women having the right to vote:

DERBYSHIRE: Among the hopes that I do not realistically nurse is the hope that female suffrage will be repealed. But I'll say this – if it were to be, I wouldn't lose a minute's sleep.

COLMES: We'd be a better country if women didn't vote?

DERBYSHIRE: Probably. Don't you think so?

COLMES: No, I do not think so whatsoever.

DERBYSHIRE: Come on Alan. Come clean here [laughing].

COLMES: We would be a better country? John Derbyshire making the statement, we would be a better country if women did not vote.

DERBYSHIRE: Yeah, probably.

Now, one would hope that Derbyshire was joking. But he wasn't.

And what is Derbyshire's argument against women's suffrage?

The conservative case against it is that women lean hard to the left. They want someone to nurture, they want someone to help raise their kids, and if men aren't inclined to do it -- and in the present days, they're not much -- then they'd like the state to do it for them.

So he's against it for partisan (women are anti-Republican) and ideological (women are pro-government). Of course, that's partly true, but what Derbyshire's argument amounts to is the desire to take away the vote from anyone who doesn't vote the right way, Derbyshire's extreme right-wing way. And of course he also wants to silence women along the way.

Nice to come clean, Derbyshire (no doubt speaking for many on the right). You don't just want women in the kitchen, obeying your orders and reduced to non-citizen status (if you don't have the right to vote, you're not really a citizen, are you?), you want to rig the political system so that you're guaranteed to win each and every time. Why not just come out against suffrage for blacks and Hispanics, too?

Hey, here's an idea, and it's certainly no crazier than Derbyshire's: I think America would be a better country if Republicans didn't vote. I'd lose a little sleep, I suppose, given my liberal support for universal suffrage, but I'm sure I could put country first and support what's best for America.

Anyone with me?