Here is a bit of video from the Sunday meeting.

Here is a bit of video from the Sunday meeting.

By @BGinKC

I think the Bishops are going to look back one day and ask themselves why contraception in the United States was the hill they chose to die on.

For me, and for a lot of people, it isn’t about doctrine at this point. It’s about reality. You know reality — it’s one of those things that has a well-known liberal bias.

That’s why conservatives and authoritarians are so damned set on ignoring it, marginalizing it, even stamping it out if they get half a chance. They cling to their dogmatic view as fiercely as any redneck teahadist clung to his guns and e-van-gelical religion.

I’ve known since I was a schoolgirl in a plaid jumper saying the Stations of the Cross every Lent and praying (okay, singing lyrics to Specials and Clash songs in my head after about age 13, but I was kneeling) that what they were teaching me in catechism class wasn’t all their was…probably because my mother wasn’t Catholic and never went through the motions. Instead, she quietly continued to light her own candles on Friday. It was understood that we went to Catholic school for the education and not the indoctrination. We could move and we weren’t lost for a semester, we could pick up where we left off, no matter what the orders said.

I read the Casti connubii in theology class, but I didn’t swallow it whole. Instead I was enraged at the singular focus, and the fetishization of a fetus over the worth of a living, breathing woman who already existed and had her own worth, her own value. It sparked something inside me and I vowed I would never be nothing but a handmaiden of Mary, why, I might not even be a Catholic when I grew up. I certainly didn’t believe that the loving god who I was assured was good “all the time” would want my mother to die if she was pregnant and ill, and could be saved, but saving her would doom the fetus. She already had kids to take care of. We mattered, too, I thought, but even we didn’t matter as much as my mother’s life.

First, I was horrified.

Then, I was pissed.

Then…I looked around me.

I went to school with a lot of youngest children in the family. Or at least the tail-end of a cluster and then there was a long stretch before the next one came along.

This was the mid-seventies.

Two things happened that dramatically reshaped Catholic families in the early sixties. One was the Pill, which was granted FDA approval in 1960, but wasn’t available nationwide until Griswold v Connecticut in 1965.The other one was the Vatican II council that liberalized Catholicism.  I was born in 1962, at the tail end of the baby boom. I don’t believe for an instant that birthrates dropping below 4 million per year for the first time in an entire generation coinciding with the introduction of oral contraceptives is a coincidence. Nor is the fact that practically all of those babies-of-the-family I went to school with were the youngest of five or six. Those of us who were the oldest kid mostly had only one or two younger siblings and they weren’t stair-steps.  

Obviously, the mothers of my classmates weren’t paying any attention what-so-ever to Pope Paul VI’s Magesterium on Life.

American Catholic women have been going their own way for fifty years.

That, my friends, is reality.

And the Bishops really don’t like it. They don’t like it at. all.

Now ask an American Catholic woman if she gives a good god-damn that the Bishops have their Cassocks in a twist over her lady parts.

Then hang on to your hat.

You’ll find out that she cares — but not in a way that the Bishops will be prepared for or want to hear.

That’s reality.

It doesn’t matter that E.J. Dionne and Tweety and so many more of the mostly-liberal Catholic male punditocrisy takes the side of the Bishops in this fiasco. They keep saying that the President was going to “lose the election” because over-65 Catholics would revolt and refuse to vote for Obama based on the this issue alone, but I don’t think so.

Those over-65 Catholics are the ones who had four or five kids instead of seven or eight…or maybe even only one or two.

Fifty years is a long time, and that is how long we have had dominion over our bodies, and once a freedom has been granted, it is hard to take away.

I have always known that the real target of the revanchist, hard-right, hair-shirt wearers — a tiny minority, but extremely loud — was Griswold because with out it, there would be no Roe.

But I honestly never thought that it would happen that they would get to this point that they would actually have to make an open, public stand and admit that it wasn’t just abortion that they want to arrest, but birth control itself, and along with it female autonomy and freedom. It’s about pushing us back into a subservient role, we’ve gotten uppity and forgotten our proper place, you see, and our rebellion must be put down.

Now honestly, I don’t think that most of them ever really wanted it to get to this point. Too many people have made too much money over the years raising funds and organizing protests. It’s a business, and they don’t want to close their doors, they want to increase profits. And now their hand has been called and they are watching in horror, because the ground that has been crumbling under the feet of the feminists and pro-choicers for the last thirty years has started to solidify. A couple of weeks ago when Komen tried and failed  to defund Planned Parenthood, I think they started to panic in the face of the public backlash, and they foolishly doubled down.

Just as the pendulum started to swing back the other way.

There has been a lot of sturm and drang about freedom and liberty and throwing off the yoke of tyranny over the last few years. It might not be the best time for a minority religion to try to force it’s doctrine down the throat of over half the country, whether they follow that religion or not.

Or it wouldn’t be, if there was a functioning left-wing in this country, or the Democrats knew fuck-all about messaging and framing.

This is not a winning issue for the Bishops or the right. If it was, the “personhood” amendment would have passed in Mississippi last November instead of losing in a landslide.

That, too, is reality.

If you are like me, you are probably still poking your finger in your ear trying to figure out if you heard Mitt Romney correctly when he called himself  a “Severely conservative Republican.” That one goes in the gaffe hall of fame for numerous reasons. Here is a new radio ad that my organization AmericanLP has going up on ABC Radio in Michigan later this week.

Who is Mitt Romney?

Voiceover from Romney ‘I was a severely conservative Republican.’

Severely conservative???

The word ‘severely’ is most commonly used to describe the following: Disabled, depressed, ill, limited, injured.

So, Michigan conservatives, Mitt Romney basically thinks conservatism is like a ‘disease.’

If you’re a moderate/independent Michigan Republican, how do you feel about a politician who doesn’t believe in anything, but implies, ‘I’ll pretend to be a diseased extremist, even if I think it’s crazy?’

Mitt Romney’s father, George Romney was a great Michigan governor who always spoke his mind. He stood up to his church and GOP extremists regarding civil rights.

But Mitt Romney? Has he ever stood up for something unpopular?

Mitt Romney, he’s not his father’s son. Mitt Romney thinks he can ‘brain wash’ the rest of us.

Paid for By AmericanLP, not associated with a candidate or candidate’s committee.

By @BGinKC

The Law of Unintended Consequences is a term that is thrown around a lot, but it is rarely defined, since it isn’t a black-letter law but a “natural” one, so let’s start by giving it a working definition. In a nutshell, it states that the actions of people and groups, and especially the actions of governments, always result in effects that were unanticipated or unintended.

Wise people and those in the social sciences have heeded it since the dawn of civilization. Hell, it’s what Adam Smith was talking about when he referred to the “invisible hand.”

Nonetheless, politicians and so-called opinion leaders, and therefore broad public opinion, have for the most part, ignored it for just as long.

Look no further than the Citizens United ruling two years ago for evidence of it in action.

This year, the GOP should be cruising a calm sea with the wind at their sails. Instead, they are like sharks following a whaling vessel and snapping at one another in the bloody broth.

A Democratic president is facing the worst reelection environment in a generation. The conservative base is fired up to defeat him and should be riding high after securing the largest GOP House majority since the 1940s. Looser campaign finance restrictions have unleashed the ability of the party’s wealthiest donors to spend unlimited amounts.

But instead of a smooth ride, the party is experiencing the bumpiest presidential primary season in anyone’s memory, one that has at times seemed more a carnival than a coronation. It is all happening at a moment when the party knows it has little margin for error, given its fervor to bounce President Obama from office and its desire to incorporate the burgeoning tea party movement into the GOP fold.

The latest bump came last week, when former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum won three contests in a single night, a surprising sweep that revived his flagging candidacy and — once again — ignited angst about front-runner Mitt Romney and whether the party would ever unite.

Given Obama’s vulnerability, “it’s a nomination worth getting, but nobody’s really sat–isfied with who is in the field,” said Matthew Dowd, who was a top campaign strategist for George W. Bush. “There are these real fissures in the party now, and nobody is capable of unifying them.”

The old cliche has it that when it comes to picking their candidates, Democrats fall in love while Republicans fall in line. But this year it would seem that Republican voters are doing neither.

The rank-and-file just can’t get excited about Romney, but without the superPAC money flowing in, he would have the nomination sewn up by now instead of batting .444, having racked up only four wins out of nine contests to date.

Two years ago when the Roberts Court handed down the Citizens United ruling, republicans rejoiced. They wouldn’t have to actually beat the Kenyan-Muslim-Athiest-Communist-usurper (you know what they mean by all that — he’s black!!!) they could just drown him in money!

Democrats were rending the cloth from their breasts and losing many sleepless nights worrying and fretting and wondering how the hell we were going to counter billions and billions of dollars directed at tearing down Democratic candidates and further corrupting our political system.

Well thanks to the Law of Unintended Consequences, they celebrated too soon and we were too quick to feel despairing.

Turns out there’s this thing called “primary season” that we all failed to consider.

Personally, I started breathing a little easier when the GOP failed to take the Senate as well as the House in the 2010 midterms. Even though the superPACs had little if anything to do with that epic GOP fail, the primaries that saw the likes of Christine O’Donnell, Sharon Angle and Ken Buck lose seats that should have been picked up by the republicans were a harbinger of the GOP presidential primaries.

And that’s where the Law of Unintended Consequences rears it’s head.

Tea party (that sounds so much more pleasant than “pig-ignorant, racist, authoritarian assholes” doesn’t it?) plus unlimited amounts of cash = some truly fucked up republican nominating contests — and, most likely, a missed electoral opportunity that will not come along again in this lifetime.

And that opportunity will have been lost forever because of all the money in the primary cycle.

If not for all the superPAC money that has kept the campaigns of Gingrich and Santorum alive, Romney would have had it sewn up after Florida and cruised to the convention. Instead, the republicans are still fighting it out and there is actual, serious talk of a brokered convention, and in some circles it’s gaining traction. (I don’t think it will happen, I still think it’s Romney, but every day that Sure-Shot Santorum and Newticles stay in damages him more and makes him that much easier for Obama to beat in November.)

Before Citizens United, when a campaign ran out of money, it was over. The candidate went home and, unless they were a total douchebag, endorsed one of the remaining candidates, but that isn’t the case any longer. Now, when a candidate runs out of money, they go begging to their sugar-daddy gazillionaire backers to write another check for a few million to the superPAC, and they keep going…all the while telling the public and their opponents “I didn’t coordinate those attacks that called you a pig-fucker with the superPAC, that would be illegal.”

And the realization of what they have wrought is starting to sink in every time Santorum wins a primary or Newt lobs another bomb.  

This year, the Democrats may not feel the passion they felt when they first fell in love with Obama, but the republicans aren’t falling in line — but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. With every intra-party squabble that flares up, with every shot one of them takes at one of the others, the rank-and-file they need to turn out and vote for them get more and more turned off, and they just don’t bother to show up and vote, because they don’t like any of them.

In a speech last week at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, celebrating what would have been the former president’s 101st birthday, former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour noted that as far back as 1912, Democrat Woodrow Wilson was elected because he “got to run against two Republican presidents, Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, so great was the rift within our party.”

And in the decades since, the party has split into wings as often as not – Thomas E. Dewey’s vs. Robert A. Taft’s; Nelson Rockefeller’s vs. Barry Goldwater’s; Gerald Ford’s vs. Reagan’s.

What’s troublesome now, Barbour said, is that “some voters are seeking purity in their choice. In politics, purity is a dead-dog loser. You need unity, and purity is the enemy of unity.”

I don’t know about you, but purists always piss me off. Hell, I’m honest enough to admit that if I had a purity test — I wouldn’t be able to pass it my damn self. No matter what it is, there is always more to it than meets the eye, and it’s the part you can’t see coming that gets you, every freakin’ time. You could ask the captain of the Titanic if he hadn’t gone down with the ship.  

Ever study a foreign language? Like Spanish maybe? Remember how the meaning of an adjective like “grande” could change depending on whether or not it followed or preceded the noun?

We may have something similar when it comes to the idea of a Fair tax vs. tax fairness (Okay – it’s not quite the same thing). The term “fair tax,” for instance, which is often used interchangeably with “flat tax,” usually a flat sales tax, means that the littler the guy the more he’s stiffed to pay for government services. Which is why rich guys like Rex Sinquefield really, really want a fair tax. Tax fairness, on the other hand, means that everybody gets to pay based on what they receive.