Category Archives: Women’s Issues

Pam Geller Doesn’t Know How Women’s Birth Control Works, Either

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I have to assume she’s never needed the pill — I pulled this off Geller’s site (to which I do not link)

A 30-year-old poses as a 23-year-old, chooses a Catholic University to attend at $65,000 per year, and cannot afford ALL the birth control pills she needs… so she wants the US taxpayers to pay for her rampant sexual activity. By all accounts she is banging it five times a day. She sounds more like a prostitute to me. She must have an gyno bill to choke a horse (pun intended). Calling this whore a slut was a softball.

Do these people have any brains at all? Do they think, ever? Or do they honestly believe that women who have frequent sex have to take more pills than those on a strict once-a-week schedule?

I’m starting to think the entire American Right needs to be sent to a Masters and Johnson therapy clinic, if there are any around any more.

Charles Johnson quotes some of the comments — apparently Ms. Fluke is also a Muslim-lover.

Anyhoo — do read Dennis G., “You could hear the fear.” He thinks the loss of advertisers could really be putting some fear into Rush. Apparently most of his ads are “multi-level marketing deals with referral kick-backs for anybody who mentions the show when placing an order. And others—most of them it seems—were straight up grifts to fluff up Rushbo’s wallet and fund this or that aspect of the wingnut money machine.” If enough legitimate businesses drop out … well, we can hope. And join the fight …

Check out this “boycott Rush” site and also this one. Still go to — AOL, Sears, eharmony, Oreck Vacuum Cleaners, LifeLock, Tax Resolution, and Lear Capital. And Get Rush off of Armed Forces radio.

[Update: AOL is out!]

Update: Cenk Uygur believes Rush’s ratings claims are a lie, and that he couldn’t possibly have 20 million listeners as he claims. Also —

But one thing is for sure — he’s hurt, dog! That’s why we see the unprecedented apology from him on Sandra Fluke. When this controversy first broke, I predicted on our show that more advertisers would drop him (at the time, only two had). Advertisers are much more likely to drop a controversial guy if his numbers are already down. They’ll ride it out if he’s still delivering the goods. This is the same thing that happened to Imus. His ratings were miserable already, so advertisers didn’t have enough incentive to stick with him when trouble arose.

So, Rush is in big trouble now as more and more advertisers peel off. He’s in a tail spin. Why else would you triple down on the “slut” comments from Wednesday to Friday and then issue an apology on Saturday? He has over-reached (in his offensive comments) and undelivered (in his ratings). That’s a lethal combo.

Conservative: A Person Whose Understanding of Sexuality Arrested in the Fifth Grade

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So Rushbo is stirring up trouble by equating contraception with prostitution. As Mistermix says, “slut” is the new “liberal.”

At Cafe Hayek, an economics professor at George Mason University named Donald J. Boudreaux defends Rush, thus:

Mr. Limbaugh reacted to Ms. Fluke’s own violation of standards of civility. A truly civilized person doesn’t demand that other people pick up the bill for her contraception. A truly civilized person – especially one who can afford to be a full-time student at a prestigious law school – would refuse any invitation to publicly play the role of a victim wronged by being told to pay for her own pills or condoms. A truly civilized person does not hold in contempt other people for their resistance to being forced to subsidize his or her ‘lifestyle choices’ (whatever those choices might be).

A truly civilized person doesn’t demand that other people pick up the bill for her contraception. But to be in an insurance risk pool means you do expect other people to pay for things, as provided in the policy. Likewise, you are paying for other peoples’ medical care. Is Professor Boudreaux opposed to the insurance industry?

By the professor’s logic, a truly civilized person doesn’t demand that other people pick up the bill for his appendectomy. Or his prostate exam. Or his chemotherapy. Or to have his broken bones set. We should pay for these things ourselves, or suffer in silence.

Of course, we know what’s going on here. The particular item being discussed is associated with women. In particular, women who are having sex. And every right wing man in the country, as well as a disturbing number of women, has reverted to being a nine-year-old who just found a stash of Hustler magazines in the attic.

Contraception isn’t health care to them. It’s about women! And sex! Booga booga booga!

Never mind that there are sober, practical, dollar-and-cent reasons why including no-copay coverage for contraception won’t cost us anything extra and might save us all money in the long run. Logically, insurance companies ought to charge more for policies that don’t cover contraception.

For a generally healthy woman in her fertile years, which is a big chunk of her adult life, fertility is her single biggest health care issue. Whether she is pregnant or not is a rather huge factor in her life, and the possibility of pregnancy follows her like a shadow, whether she is faithfully married or in a monogamous relationship or a sex worker. For most women, putting limits on how many children we have is necessary for living a standard middle-class life in the 21st century. Using contraception is a health issue.

I’ve observed for a long time that a lot of men really don’t “get” that; they don’t associate sex with pregnancy as much as women do. And as revealed by sick, twisted bleeper Craig Bannister, some of them don’t even know how contraception actually works. They seem to think the amount of money a woman must pay for contraception is an indicator of how much sex she is having. Craig Bannister may have to take a pill every time he has sex, but it doesn’t work that way for women.

Younger women these days are not accustomed to being shamed for being sexually active. I hope this is a wake-up call for them.

Update: Via Whiskey Fire,, another Troglodyte heard from:

If we remove “slut” from our discourse, we thereby discard half the reward of chastity, namely the superiority of prestige that the virtuous woman should rightly enjoy in comparison to those who are less virtuous.

I’ll pause a moment to let you stop sputtering, or laughing, whichever the case may be.

The Left has substituted the clinical-sounding term “sexually active” for more value-laden terms used to describe promiscuity, because the Left is actively seeking to destroy the system of traditional moral values that condemns sex outside marriage.

And which moral values, oddly, rarely were used to punish men, but only to keep women shamed and submissive and controlled. Funny how that worked.

When we hear about a woman in the Middle East somewhere condemned to death because she was raped, while her rapist is considered blameless, we are all horrified, shocked, outraged across the political spectrum. But what our native Taliban is trying to pull differs only in degree. And for some of them, it differs only in degree because they know they wouldn’t get away with taking it further.

We can laugh at the hysteria — “Republicans are coming to steal your ladyparts!” — but we cannot ignore the fact that the Left is engaged in a Culture War offensive with potentially serious consequences.

I think this guy just earned today’s Toolie Award.

Those Sneaky Elitists

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Paul Ryan actually said this:

“We’re seeing this new government activism, paternalistic, arrogant, political philosophy that puts new government-granted rights in the way of our constitutional rights.”

See, the Constitution is not a document of government. It was handed down from God to Moses on Mount Sinai. Unfortunately Moses lost it in a craps game, but centuries later an angel appeared to James Madison and told him he could find it buried under Plymouth Rock.

Here’s the broader context:

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) on Sunday blasted the Obama administration’s moves to mandate religious affiliated groups to provide contraception coverage as “paternalistic” and “arrogant.”

“What we’re getting from the White House on this conscience issue, it’s not an issue about contraception, it’s an issue that reveals a political philosophy the president is showing that basically treats our constitutional rights as if they were revocable privileges from our government, not inalienable rights from our creator.” said Ryan on NBC’s Meet the Press.

You want to talk “paternalistic,” Mr. Ryan?

But in the Wacky World of Wingnuts, providing women with full coverage for contraception is paternalism and trampling on our gawd-given rights, whereas religious dogmas that demand women be barefoot and pregnant are not.

Meanwhile, Rick Santorum wants to protect us from elitism by denying coverage for prenatal screening tests.

He lambasted the president’s health care law requiring insurance policies to include free prenatal testing, “because free prenatal testing ends up in more abortions and therefore less care that has to be done because we cull the ranks of the disabled in our society.”

“That, too, is part of Obamacare, another hidden message as to what President Obama thinks of those who are less able than the elites who want to govern our country,” Santorum said.

In other words, Frothy wants to be sure prenatal testing is not covered, because some women who discover their babies will be born with major disabilities might choose to abort instead, and he knows better than they do that God doesn’t like that, so he wants to step in and protect women from the elites who think women should be allowed to decide some things for themselves.

Mitch McConnell: WTF?

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Do Republicans think this will be a winning issue for them?

Not satisfied with President Obama’s new religious accommodation, Republicans will move forward with legislation by Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) that permits any employer to deny birth control coverage in their health insurance plans, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said Sunday.

“If we end up having to try to overcome the President’s opposition by legislation, of course I’d be happy to support it, and intend to support it,” McConnell said. “We’ll be voting on that in the Senate and you can anticipate that that would happen as soon as possible.” …

…The push indicates either that Republicans believe there’s still an opportunity to score political points against Obama, or that they’ve simply calculated they cannot back down now. Regardless, the success of the strategy now rests on the gamble that Republicans will be able to continue framing the issue as one over religious liberty and not contraception, despite the new accommodation Obama carved out.

I know we’re talking about crazy people, but I can’t see how even Mitch McConnell thinks this is going to help the GOP.

Stuff to Read

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I’m still out of it with the motherbleeping cold. Entertain yourselves —

Matt Taibbi, Wall Street Should Stop Whining

Inside the New Hate

Ed Kilgore, Poor Handel-ing

The Bishops Overreach — see also USA Today —

The White House is “all talk, no action” on moving toward compromise, said Anthony Picarello, general counsel for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. “There has been a lot of talk in the last couple days about compromise, but it sounds to us like a way to turn down the heat, to placate people without doing anything in particular,” Picarello said. “We’re not going to do anything until this is fixed.”

That means removing the provision from the health care law altogether, he said, not simply changing it for Catholic employers and their insurers. He cited the problem that would create for “good Catholic business people who can’t in good conscience cooperate with this.”

“If I quit this job and opened a Taco Bell, I’d be covered by the mandate,” Picarello said.

From what I’ve heard, the White House is not caving. Fingers crossed.

Andrew Rosenthal, “It’s Not About Religious Freedom”

Karen Handel Pushed Onto Her Sword

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Karen Handel, the Fetus Person probably at the center of Komen for the Fail’s recent catastrophe, has resigned from (i.e., been forced out) of her job at Komen. Word is she has refused a severance package, which probably would have required her to keep her mouth shut. So she’s gonna blab. Should be fun.

Her resignation letter oozes with what the witty folks at Balloon Juice are calling “Handel’s Messiah Complex.”

We can all agree that this is a challenging and deeply unsettling situation for all involved in the fight against breast cancer. However, Komen’s decision to change its granting strategy and exit the controversy surrounding Planned Parenthood and its grants was fully vetted by every appropriate level within the organization. At the November Board meeting, the Board received a detailed review of the new model and related criteria. As you will recall, the Board specifically discussed various issues, including the need to protect our mission by ensuring we were not distracted or negatively affected by any other organization’s real or perceived challenges. No objections were made to moving forward.

I am deeply disappointed by the gross mischaracterizations of the strategy, its rationale, and my involvement in it. I openly acknowledge my role in the matter and continue to believe our decision was the best one for Komen’s future and the women we serve. However, the decision to update our granting model was made before I joined Komen, and the controversy related to Planned Parenthood has long been a concern to the organization. Neither the decision nor the changes themselves were based on anyone’s political beliefs or ideology. Rather, both were based on Komen’s mission and how to better serve women, as well as a realization of the need to distance Komen from controversy. I believe that Komen, like any other nonprofit organization, has the right and the responsibility to set criteria and highest standards for how and to whom it grants.

What was a thoughtful and thoroughly reviewed decision – one that would have indeed enabled Komen to deliver even greater community impact – has unfortunately been turned into something about politics. This is entirely untrue. This development should sadden us all greatly.

Poor baby. Not a clue.

IMO some sacrifice was necessary for Komen to hang on to any of its corporate sponsors. The people disillusioned by Komen’s bleep-up were not going to trust it again with their time and donations as long as Handel was still in place. Komen’s prestige will still suffer long-term damage, but this may earn enough forgiveness to enable it to continue some of its merchandising deals.

On the other hand, Art Caplan, a Ph.D. bioethicist, says Handel’s departure is too little, too late.

There is one last step that can be taken to save the mighty Komen from running aground permanently. The entire executive leadership and board must resign. Now. Anything less means that the prominence that Komen achieved will become simply one more in a long list of worthy causes that Americans may or may not choose to support.

What’s especially sad about this is that Komen CEO Nancy Brinker should have known better. Per Soonergrunt, in 2010 Komen turned down money from Curves because it came with a condition to cut off Planned Parenthood. Yeah, the guy who owns Curves is a five-alarm fundy and convicted deadbeat dad who thinks women are cows. Anyway, Brinker wrote,

“The grants in question supplied breast health counseling, screening, and treatment to rural women, poor women, Native American women, many women of color who were underserved—if served at all—in areas where Planned Parenthood facilities were often the only infrastructure available. Though it meant losing corporate money from Curves, we were not about to turn our backs on these women.”

A shame for Komen, but as I said, they knew better.

Update: The folks at LifeNews still don’t have a clue what just happened:

Kristan Hawkins of Students for Life expressed the sentiment of many pro-life advocates responding to the decision, by saying Handel resigned because of Planned Parenthood’s aggressive attacks on Komen after its initial decision.

“Karen Handel was sick and tired of being held hostage by the largest pro-abortion lobby in the country when she and the Komen Foundation were supposed to be focused on saving women’s lives, not endangering them,” she told LifeNews. “They held the Komen Foundation, and the millions of women they serve, hostage until they got their way, pocketing merely a drop in the bucket when it comes to their extensive funding.”

No, what happened is that a whole lot of women and men all around the country spontaneously took to Twitter and Facebook and raised hell. Planned Parenthood by itself doesn’t have the clout to hold anybody hostage. What smacked down Komen was a roar of public opinion.

Are you paying attention, Congress?

Or, Maybe Not

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Greg Sargent points out that Komen’s reversal statement gives itself lots of wiggle room to cut Planned Parenthood in the future. Komen also has no intention of firing anyone for the debacle.

The anti-reproductive rights site LifeNews is telling its Fetus People readership that

Austin Ruse, the president of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, who has been very closely following the Komen decision-making process, told LifeNews that the statement is not really a change in position but he says the sentence “We will continue to fund existing grants, including those of Planned Parenthood, and preserve their eligibility to apply for future grants, while maintaining the ability of our affiliates to make funding decisions that meet the needs of their communities” is “troubling” for pro-life advocates.

“This represents nothing new. We have known and have reported that they are continuing five grants through 2012. This is a reference to that. The second clause about eligibility is certainly true. Any group can apply for anything. It does not mean they are going to get anything,” Ruse told LifeNews.

“What this is is an effort to get the mafia off of their backs. As James Taranto said in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, this is a classic shakedown operation. Give us money or we will destroy you. This is Komen’s attempt to save their organization, which we should know is in peril. Our side should know that nothing has changed.”

The above is via Google cache; LifeNews is offline at the moment.

Komen Reversal! Planned Parenthood Re-funded!

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Seconds ago — the Komen Foundation just announced it is reinstating funding to Planned Parenthood. Here is the statement Komen just released:

“We want to apologize to the American public for recent decisions that cast doubt upon our commitment to our mission of saving women’s lives.

The events of this week have been deeply unsettling for our supporters, partners and friends and all of us at Susan G. Komen. We have been distressed at the presumption that the changes made to our funding criteria were done for political reasons or to specifically penalize Planned Parenthood. They were not.

Our original desire was to fulfill our fiduciary duty to our donors by not funding grant applications made by organizations under investigation. We will amend the criteria to make clear that disqualifying investigations must be criminal and conclusive in nature and not political. That is what is right and fair.

Our only goal for our granting process is to support women and families in the fight against breast cancer. Amending our criteria will ensure that politics has no place in our grant process. We will continue to fund existing grants, including those of Planned Parenthood, and preserve their eligibility to apply for future grants, while maintaining the ability of our affiliates to make funding decisions that meet the needs of their communities.”

You know what happened — the CEOs of the corporations sponsoring Komen merchandising deals have been having words with Komen execs.

Update: Personally, I doubt Konen will ever get all the toothpaste back in the tube. This episode is likely to leave a sour taste in a lot of mouths.

Notice that a lot of the backlash came from Komen affiliates. Seriously, women who are activists on women’s health care issues are likely to be pro-choice. Duh, Komen Foundation.

Update: When I heard the news I had just finished reading this interview by Sarah Kliff of Americans United for Life President Charmaine Yoest, whom Kliff argues was a behind-the-scenes influence in the de-funding decision.

Behold the Fail:

Americans United for Life has, for the past year, aggressively pushed Congress to end Planned Parenthood’s federal funding. It has also drafted model legislation that states can use to bar abortion providers from receiving federal funds. Nine states have passed such laws, although the Obama administration has blocked their implementation.

Yoest hopes that the Komen decision is the beginning of a similar push, on the private side, to curtail Planned Parenthood’s funding, although she does not expect other funders to get on board overnight.

“We’ll be looking at their other supporters,” she said. “Let’s be honest, they’ve been very fashionable amongst a certain philanthropic set. I hope that this is a beginning of people re-looking at associations with the nation’s largest abortion provider.”

Probably not, but it might cause people to keep Yoest at arm’s length.

Update: One of the comments coming from right-wingers is that Planned Parenthood doesn’t do mammograms, just referrals. According to a news story by the CBS Pittsburgh affiliate, the referrals also included vouchers to pay for the mammorgrams, and Komen was providing the money that Planned Parenthood was using for the vouchers. So cutting off Planned Parenthood really does amount of cutting off access to mammograms, even if the mammograms are not being done at Planned Parenthood.

The Komen Backlash Escalates

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This is turning into a first-rate watershed from which Komen cannot possibly survive in its current form.

It isn’t just the ties to right-wing whackjobs that’s a problem. In the past few hours the spotlight turned upon the Susan G. Komen Foundation has revealed it to be mostly a merchandising racket that has been spending much more money on executive salaries and self-promoting “awareness” events than on cancer research.

And Komen is going to lose its corporate sponsors, which means its done for. The big bucks haven’t been coming from individuals doing walk-a-thons, but through corporate merchandising deals. The walk-a-thons and other “awareness” events are less about raising money than about building the Komen brand to get the corporate sponsors on board. And I strongly suspect most of the women who have been supporting the walk-a-thons are middle- and upper-middle class ladies who may not be politically active, but they lean more liberal than conservative. DougJarvis Green-Ellis writes,

Right now, they get a lot of money from corporate sponsors—many of whom will drop them—and (I’m guessing here but I’m almost sure this is true) from affluent women in Westchester County, etc. That money is gone and it’s not coming back.

I was thinking of Westchester County women, too. The wealthier ones may be upper-class twits, but they are mostly progressive upper-class twits. Westchester has been voting Democratic since the 1990s, and Barack Obama got 63 percent of the Westchester vote in 2008. I’ll be very surprised if there is another Komen event here ever again. And without the support of that particular consumer demographic, the Komen brand won’t be worth much.

Yes, it can probably still do well with the Fox News and redneck crowd — older, less affluent — but the merchandising possibilities narrow considerably. A lot more women buy yogurt than attend gun shows.

The Yoplait Facebook page is running over with anti-Komen comments. But the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer page wants you to know it is completely unaffiliated with Komen. Komen is now officially radioactive.

Sarah Seltzer:

When the decision was announced over the Planned Parenthood email list (it had initially been broken a short while earlier), it felt like a crippling blow to women’s healthcare–and in some ways it still is. But the big story is actually how furious many Komen supporters are, how many have taken to the Internet, to petitions, and more to declare the end of their support and donations to Komen.

This is a big change, considering the fact that Komen was a beloved, celebrity-endorsed brand — and Planned Parenthood was increasingly under attack. But something shifted after this announcement: immediate analyses from social media in fact show that the number of angry comments against Komen and in favor Planned Parenthood vastly outnumbered the comments that applauded the decision — even as Komen began to frantically erase them on its Facebook page.

Marketing expert Kivi Leroux Miller calls Komen’s actions a “communications debacle unfolding before us,” writing, “At one point last night, I did a quick count and found the ratio of anti-Komen decisions to pro-Komen decisions to be about 80 to 1 on Twitter.” Miller has a blow-by-blow post on how the news broke and essentially how the Komen foundation utterly failed at every step to anticipate and properly deal with the outrage.

For all the noise they make, the Fetus People are a minority, and I strongly suspect most Americans would like them to crawl back under their rock.

Also — Komen’s excuse for defunding Planned Parenthood is that PP is under congressional investigation. Well, so is Penn State University, and Komen hasn’t cut off Penn State.

The big loser here may be breast cancer research. But a lot of articles written over the past few days have pointed out that throwing huge amounts of money at breast cancer hasn’t really done all that much to stop it.