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Barack Obama now can officially be known as the president who did the most damage to a woman’s right to choose… even if the AP thinks it is ‘obscure.’
From the AP this morning:
Abortion opponents fought passage of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul to the bitter end, and now that it’s the law, they’re using it to limit coverage by private insurers.
An obscure part of the law allows states to restrict abortion coverage by private plans operating in new insurance markets. Capitalizing on that language, abortion foes have succeeded in passing bans that, in some cases, go beyond federal statutes.[my bold]
You can’t make this up. The veal pen will try, but history will show that Obama threw away over 35 years of pro-choice blood, sweat, and tears to give health insurers $474 billion over 6 years… and set us down the path to a country where most women will live in the pre-Roe world.
38 Comments
It is so sad.
Policies that would be railed against under a repuke, they are swallowed whole by so many democrats.
I can’t stand Obama. He is such a complete and total worm.
When the corporations/Banksters pay your salary as they do with Obama, you dance when they say so.
America run by Business, for Business and by Business.
It would be one thing if any of the large businesses were actually adding any value. Unfortunately the only profitable business they know is various forms of fraud and rent seeking. They’re parasites, including their employees.
Just remember the all important message:
“They’re not quite as bad as the other guys”.
Yeah the other guys would make it so a woman can’t choose on abortion because it’s against the law while the guys that aren’t as bad as them would make it so a woman can’t choose on abortion even though it’s legal.
That’s right, “Vote Least Worst for the Greater Good!, forever and ever, Amen!” the motto of the (D) captured ‘progressives’ isn’t working out so well, is it? The need for alternatives has been clear since Clintontime, but Faith is the Blue Donkey is stronger than adherence to humanistic, anti-corporate values for most folks, apparently.
Baracoat Hanger Obama
From Obama to Obummer in 16 months. Must be some kind of record. Well, at least he got the troops out of…of a….Denver.
At least he’s a Black man.
So it ends, not with a bang but with a whimper. What ideology couldn’t stop, “pragmatism” will. It won’t be against the law, so it will be much harder to fight to keep access to abortion for most women, and everyone already hates the insurance companies, so letting it appear to be their fault is really a master stroke.
Thanks for the diary.
But of course, we knew this at the time, but the point was lost in the fervor over “pass the bill because it’s from a Democratic president and he’ll be crippled and Sarah Palin will become president” meme shoved down our throats all over the media map (except of course here, where attention had to be paid to attacks on the site’s founder).
In its final, most degenerate stage, American “liberalism” becomes as toxic as its “conservative” cousin ever was.
If Obama will deal the death blow to “lesser evilism” than he will have served some purpose, but I won’t be holding my breath. The American political order is so frozen and petrified, it won’t be changed, it will have to be shattered under the blows of terrible social events. That’s not an alternative that pleases me, in fact, it scares me terribly. But there we are. We didn’t create the historical era into which we exist. But it is our duty to try and change it.
Oh, did you ever nail my recurring nightmare about my country. Every night I dream of violent revolution, bombs exploding, hoarse screams, and streets deep in blood.
I try, but I cannot see another future, and I am frightened.
Since Kennedy, and crowned by George W., this country has been dragged so far into the government of the greedy, by the greedy and for the greedy realm that (thanks to hold in place Obama) when the next conservative president again steals women’s and minority’s rights (assuming there are any left?), there will be blood. I believe the majority of our country’s citizens believe in the Bill of Rights but too much wealth has been siphoned off by a culture of greed into the hands of too few. They have the power but we have the numbers. I fear that future of bloody carnage until a balance is again reached.
Pervasive surveillance, unaccountable cops, taser-armed drones in the streets and mindless depravity as entertainment is more like it. Oh, wait…
This nation had its revolution. I think it is all citizened out.
Why don’t Republicans just love Pres. Obama? He is corporatist, imperialist, royalist and oilist. He is basically a Republican, just like Pres. Clinton. Twenty-eight years of Republican corporate rule of USA; millions of American jobs shipped overseas. Hardly a peep of protest from progressives, liberals, Democrats, Independents or Republicans or teabaggers. Heck of a job, Americans…
Roilist, for short.
Thanks for posting. This was always going to happen with Hyde in the context of the new plan. Progressives need to stand with women and fight this, state by state. Or not.
rahm’s little sock puppet never ceases to disappoint… however – I’m sure markos and the rest of the cattle will continue to offer a steady stream of verbal fallatio.
Book Salon up at the Mothership with Dr. Larry Rosen’s Rewired: Understanding the iGeneration and the Way They Learn hosted by Jayan Kalathil and Melissa Bolton-Klinger
Well yeah, Orahma had to do it, don’t you see? It’s for the good of everyone because it was done in a “bipartisan” way. The Flying Spaghetti Monster forbid that we’re governed by a man who would remember who elected him… he just let’s his Chief of Stiff run the administration while he gets photo-ops, lies to the American people about Afghanistan to keep the wingnuts happy and writes his next soaringly, rhetorically spot-on speech.
Face it, we got took. Fool me once shame on me, fool me twice shame on me we won’t get fooled again — some ex-Preznit guy.
Ah but, but
We can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good…
“Just remember the all important message: They’re not quite as bad as the other guys”
Extortion, in other words.
And my own personal “favorite” – Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. barf
“Nice Presidency you got there Mr. Obama, be a shame if anything happened to it”… like getting your ass tossed out of the WH in 2012 because you can’t keep your word and sell out at the drop of a nickel….
Could FDL funding be made available? For example, create an account to accept donations and disburse the funds to providers as needed for women who can’t otherwise pay for abortions – The FDL Women’s Choice Account.
Thanks for this great post, azhealer.
Totally agree with you: twice over ;)
Will Barack Obama revoke more Americans’ rights than any President since the Great White Fathers?
Did Obama revoke more Americans’ rights than any President since the Great White Fathers? Yes, he did.
“The veal pen will try, but history will show that Obama threw away over 35 years of pro-choice blood, sweat, and tears to give health insurers $474 billion over 6 years… and set us down the path to a country where most women will live in the pre-Roe world.”
And the FDL plan is: ‘More and better Democrats.’
the FDL plan is to be the outer limits of permissible dissent, where people can complain as much as they want, and these critiques are acknowledged if valid, but in the end, in November of even numbered years, the firepups are herded down from the far valleys into the ballot box to vote least worst, to vote (D) yet again, because who wants to make the perfect the enemy of the good?
(ironically, a phrase Jane herself was fond of for awhile, until it was applied to her by other cynical ‘pragmatists’ in the Beltway.)
But she wasn’t using as euphemism for “sell a piece of shit as the best available choice”
horrifyingly sickening. It took a Democrat to undo choice! Had I known, I would NEVER have voted for Obama in the general election, for SO many reasons!
So I guess the health care bill isn’t all bad.
Had enough yet? Think Obama was a better choice than Hillary? Think again.
My sister’s roommate in college was Sue Ragle, whose sister was Sarah Weddington, who argued Roe v. Wade. For myself, insofar as I am aware, I am the only psychologist in Kansas who has publicly supported abortion rights–not one female colleague has done so–for thirty years. I addressed the joint house-senate committee of the Kansas legislature on behalf of George Tiller.
So, I am one who has been on the forefront of abortion rights.
To say that somehow the actions taken by the Obama administration regarding health care pushes “most women” into the pre Roe v. Wade era is just crap. It is just crap. Please recall, abortion was pretty much illegal. That would be illegal. And you folks are carping about it not being covered by insurance?
I live in a state where women’s suffrage is regarded by one senator and two congressmen as a grand social experiment. Makes me crazy when I hear my community college students take for granted their right to birth control as if that could not change. I was at Texas A&M when the president declared that birth control would not be made available at the student health center. Of course, when two weeks later, a co-ed delivered her own baby in her dorm room, he sang a bit of a different tune. And you folks are faulting Obama as if there was some great betrayal of women’s rights?
You need to understand that abortion is a ‘hot button’ issue, so gets a lot more hyperbole than, say, just killing a million or so Iraqis and Afghans, displacing many millions more from their homes, and generally destroying their countries’ infrastructures (more in Iraq than in Afghanistan, where there was far less infrastructure to destroy).
People (even progressives) tend to be self-absorbed. That’s why our government can get away with what it gets away with.
Obama has managed to derail women’s rights and hand over Americans to the Health Care Insurers and Drug Companies who deny women these hard won rights.
This was a stealth move by Obama and Co. Yet women’s right groups, Planned Parenthood, NOW, etc. stood by and did NOTHING.
Obama had NO opposition. Women had been taking their rights for granted, and the women’s movement had ceased being a movement.
Politically this move helped Obama and he knew well that he would have little opposition, and too late at that. This weakness was ready to be exploited, and Obama seized the opportunity. He sat on the sidelines as it all happened and did nothing.
So we ladies allowed ourselves to get snookered by a so called Democratic President who was going to offer progressive change, and we had become lazy and indifferent to the forces working against abortion reform. We made noise sometimes, but we were clearly out of the loop of exerting any power. We thought we were ok and Planned Parenthood,Now, and all the others did NOTHING to warn us. They exist to alert us, inspire and mobilize women when their rights are in legislative peril.
We had ceded our power to Obama never dreaming he would destroy 30 years of women’s struggles for the right to choose, for equal protection, and
our right to privacy and self determination.
So it will be up to the next generation of women to do this all over again and create leadership that can undo the great harm that has been done to us.
As long as we are regarded as the Second Sex we will not be able to exercise free will in determining our fate, and the State owns our bodies
and makes decisions that are only ours to make.
There has been a consistent betrayal of women’s rights and an indifference on the part of many women and their elected representatives to get involved
for a long time.
But our administrations are also responsible for the legislation it either sponsors, or silently allows. This has nothing to do with Insurance per se. Our right to choose had been undermined by Hyde, but this goes one further. In fact Hyde dealt mostly with Federally funded abortion.
The current situation is deplorable on so many levels. Women are not educated or engaged in fighting for their personal freedoms and until they are, and are motivated to demand change the law will treat them unfairly.
Obama is responsible for allowing this sorry state of affairs regarding privacy,choice,insurance, to get worse and erase many good things that were still in place inspite of women’s complacency and their elected representatives hypocrisy.
It simply will be up to women and what they demand and how effectively they create momentum for change. Regarding birth control, 60 years ago this was not easy or even possible for young women in…believe it New York City.
Hopefully women will take their fate into their own hands and fight again for more equality and rights to determine their present and their future.
And this is why 7 out of ten high school valedictorians at high school graduations will be young women? Been that way pretty much for twenty years.
The ‘O’ had some help