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Brain Trauma inducing thought of the day: By trusting women and giving them control of their reproductive future, less unplanned pregnancies and less abortions will occur. [tick tick tick….head asplodes….]
I know, how crazy is that? Women…you know the ones that have children…are in the best position to decide whether the conditions are right to have a child. (whoops, that’s two brain frying statements in the same post – apologies).
Offering women affordable healthcare (really, it should be universal and free; come join the rest of the civilized world America) makes for a more egalitarian, healthier, happier society. Making it easier for people to access reproductive health services? What is this sorcery? The Guttmacher Institute summarizes the case nicely.
[read the whole report from the Guttmacher Institute here]
“A recent national survey of publicly funded facilities that provide family planning services found that facilities with a reproductive health focus were better able to meet the contraceptive needs of their younger clients—by incorporating youth-friendly service delivery, being accessible and ensuring confidentiality—than were primary care-focused facilities. Additionally, facilities with more youth-friendly services offered more long-acting reversible contraception (LARC), including the IUD and implant.”
[…]
“These juxtaposed concerns highlight the importance of offering women of all ages a broad range of contraceptive methods to choose from in the context of comprehensive, patient-focused counseling. The authors suggest that counselors manage expectations around LARC methods, highlighting both the reversible nature of these methods and that they are “set and forget,” making them highly effective. They also suggest that misconceptions about LARC methods that persist among both providers and patients be addressed through better education and counseling. Additionally, improved training on LARC methods for staff at all levels, not just clinical staff, will help facilities move toward a more comprehensive package of contraceptive services for young women, integrating IUDs and implants into the range of methods offered, which will ultimately help young women avoid unintended pregnancy and meet their reproductive goals. However, all of this requires financial support.
“Expanding insurance coverage that includes the full range of contraceptive methods is key to giving women access to the most highly effective—and often most expensive—methods,” said Adam Sonfield, senior policy associate with the Guttmacher Institute. “Implementation of the Affordable Care Act may go a long way toward easing cost issues related to LARC methods for U.S. women. In particular, it will make it easier for providers to offer these highly effective methods to younger clients, and provide the counseling they need to understand their options and choose the method that best meets their needs.”
Remember who was/is throwing a craptacular shit fit over healthcare? Oh ya, the republicans and the church. Women should keep that tidy little non-coincidence in mind.
Just to darken your day a little –
“The Obama campaign greatly impressed the public relations industry, which named Obama ‘Advertising Age’s marketer of the year for 2008,’ easily beating out Apple computers. A good predictor of the elections a few weeks later. The industry’s regular task is to create uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices, thus undermining markets as they are conceptualized in economic theory, but benefiting the masters of the economy. And it recognizes the benefits of undermining democracy in much the same way, creating uninformed voters who make often irrational choices between the factions of the business party that amass sufficient support from concentrated private capital to enter the electoral arena, then to dominate campaign propaganda.”
From Hopes and Prospects
I think the West Wing television show had such a long and successful run because it gave people a constructed reality about politics that showed what it could be like. I’ve only seen snippets of episodes, but I generally like what I see. This clip for instance is a wonderful tweak on the nose of the political right who actually believe their soundbytes(note how that turned out in 2012).
I have done a few ‘Hero of the Day’ posts and I have a few more on the way. The recipients have done great work spreading important information, rallying against injustice, educating us masses, and have been generally awesome. But today’s hero is special. On top of those usual achievements, she’s done it all while personally facing off against one of the leading threats to civilization as we know it. Oh, and she’s only 15.
The Taliban, with its “all powerful god”, is threatened by literate females. So much so, it will use brutal violence, murder, torture, and arson to enforce its view that girls should not be allowed in schools. What else would you expect from the “religion of peace”?
Malala Yousafzai, from the Swat district of Pakistan, however, does not agree. With aspirations of becoming a doctor or a politician, Malala is a strong advocate for gender equality, especially for equal access to education. Like many other girls in Swat, Malala has risked her life to attend classes against the wishes of the Taliban. At the same time, she was also doing something extraordinary. Malala, using a pseudonym, started blogging for the BBC, reporting to the world what it was like to be an ordinary child under the Taliban as it destroyed schools and forbade girls from attending the ones they hadn’t destroyed yet.
Adam B. Ellick from the New York Times made a documentary called Class Dismissed profiling Malala, her activism, and the difficulties and dangers for girls wanting to go to school.
Since the documentary, Malala’s has kept on advocating for girl’s education, growing in influence and visibility. This earned her and her father numerous death threats from the Taliban. Undeterred, Malala kept working for equal education opportunities.
On October 9th, 2012, the Taliban tried to make good on its threats. To preserve the glory of Islam an Allah, Malala was shot in the head.
Now recovering in a UK hospital, Malala isn’t done yet. Her message and story are spreading and the world is taking note.
Tarek Fatah, from Toronto, started a petition on change.org to nominate Malala for a Nobel Peace Prize. The response has been tremendous. The Prime Minister and the leaders of all of our major parties have unanimously endorsed this petition. If you haven’t done so already, please sign as well.
In the west we’ve had huge media organizations cower and retreat when islamist extremists raised their hate filled voices. In Swat, a 15 year old girl stood directly against the guns, bombs, soldiers, and machetes wielded by the worst of brutal zealots, just outside her door.
Oh, those silly wage-slaves you think they would want to be healthy and stuff. Well, the upper-crusty important people certainly won’t have any of THAT nonsense being bandied about. Alter.net details six chain restaurants that are being yoked to the onerous Obamacare provisions and it will cost them dearly in profitability.
Heard from corporate HQ – What is this strange language you are speaking healthcare? low-wage earning people…get sick?, since when?
What do you mean we have to treat the people we employ humanely?
WTF?
What happened to disposable, work them till they drop press-gangs that we campaign for in every election? How much money do I have to give to the GOP to fix this indecency??
Here’s a handy list, courtesy of Wonkette , of the restaurants you need to avoid if you want to avoid having your food handled by sick people:
Papa John’s Pizza
John Schnatter, founder of Papa John’s pizza, is LIVID and he is NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE. You want his employees to have health care coverage? Well FINE, he’ll GIVE them health care coverage but it will cost you do-gooder liberals ten cents more per pizza, does that make you HAPPY? Actually, it might make you happy. We at Wonkette have concluded that we will pay ten cents more per pizza if it will ensure that the person making it is able to see a doctor when he gets sick. And we wonder why this didn’t happen sooner, if all it took was ten cents more per pizza to get employee health care coverage. Is that really all it costs? Ten cents per pizza? If so, then maybe the CEO of Papa John’s should have done this a long time ago. But again, this attitude is why we are not the CEO of a multi-billion dollar pizza company.
Olive Garden / Red Lobster
The CEO of this company is a real ball buster, and he is NOT going to make YOU pay ten cents more for a plate of noodles, no way Jose. That is a solution for pussies. This CEO is just going to cut back on employees’ hours so that they work 29 hours per week instead of 30, exempting them from health care coverage mandate. So the next time you go to Olive Garden or the Red Lobster, rest assured that your server is not going to have health care coverage. There, does that make you feel better?
Hurricane Grill and Wings, and also some Denny’s and Dairy Queen Franchises
John Metz is nobody’s fool, so John Metz, CEO and owner of Hurricane Grill and Wings as well as some Denny’s and Dairy Queen franchises, is going to pass the cost of Obamacare onto the employees AND the customer. “If I leave the prices the same, but, say on the menu that there is a five-percent surcharge for Obamacare, customers have two choices. They can either pay it, and tip 15 or 20 percent, or if they really feel so inclined, they can reduce the amount of tip they give to the server, who is the primary beneficiary of Obamacare,” Metz told The Huffington Post. Metz is a WINNER, you guys, and WINNERS do not pay for the health care coverage costs of others. They make you, the customer pay for it (SUCKER) and if you don’t want to, then YOU get to be a winner and make the waitress pay for it.
Applebee’s
Obamacare is going to cost Applebee’s “some millions of dollars” according to CEO Zane Tankel. Will these “some millions of dollars” be an increase in costs per year? Per month? Per restaurant? We don’t know, and it’s not important. What IS important is that Applebee’s will not be able to build more restaurants, or create more low-wage go-nowhere jobs, THANKS OBAMA. The solution to these costs is for the CEO to take a hit on his $9.6 million dollar per year salary or lay off employees.
There are a lot of chain restaurants in this country. If I’m going to eat in one I’d like for the employees to have access to health care. I’d prefer not to have germ-laden, typhoid Mary’s handling my food, thank you very much. And it is common sense to ask, if they are cutting corners on this, what other health regulations are they skirting? I think I’ll be eating elsewhere.
Lesson one in Alberta politics – Don’t fuck with private oil revenue.
Lesson two in Alberta politics – There is no lesson two, please refer to lesson one for all concerns about governance.
Full marks to Ed Stelmach for attempting to get the public’s meagre spoon into firehouse of wealth that is flowing out of this province. He had a Royalty Review and everything. It cost him his job because he violated rule Number 1.
“Now Arb,” says the gentle reader, “Why are you talking about Ed Stelmach and the Royalty Review in a post with Danielle Smith in the title?”. And I say here, “Eager padawans be patient – to understand the present, one must look to the past.
Alberta politics, like most politics, are insipidly structured to make the average person not want to care about what happens as long as the status quo is maintained. The status quo in Alberta is structuring the laws and society around the model that makes it easiest for the oil companies to extract wealth from the province. The oil companies make out like Scrooge McDuck taking their heady profits out of province and straight to the offshore bank accounts while leaving the population scratching in the tailings-pond for the pittance we call “royalties” here in Texas North. This state of affairs is nothing new (see Lesson One) in Alberta.
What amuses me is when Ms.Smith of the oh so populist corporatist Wild Rose Party finds a microphone (usually the Sun chain of media, as they do their best to be fox news north) and goes after the government for its spending. Ms. Smith says:
“The PC legacy of waste and mismanagement is everywhere. Huge salary hikes, new MLA offices, handing corporations billions of taxpayer dollars, and accepting paychecks for doing no work are only some instances in the long list of PC waste that has come to define this government as out of touch and only out for themselves.”
So, Ms.Smith is going after the government for handing corporations billions of dollars when it was those same corporations that gave her so much darned money in the first place. Getting all sanctimonious about the corporate pigs at the trough is rich irony as the Wild Rose Party exists to make said trough wider and deeper as soon as they are “elected”. The Socialist Bullet puts is succinctly with regards to recent election in Alberta:
“The Globe and Mail editors were reflecting the point of view of big sections of Corporate Alberta. Those who travelled in the rarefied air of that section of Alberta, were very comfortable with a victory by either Wildrose or the Tories. Both parties received corporate donations running to the hundreds of thousands of dollars, in the case of Wildrose almost reaching one million dollars. […]
Individual voters take our vote very seriously. We care which party is elected – which is why, of course, there are election campaigns in the first place. Very few people walk about the streets sporting buttons for two parties. People pick one, and cast their ballot. But corporate Alberta had a sweet situation. A victory by either the Tories or Wildrose would be fine. Under either party, it would be business as usual.”
Business as usual. That folks is the core of why the Wild Rose Party of Alberta is stuck. It is because their plan is just more of the same (with double plus exploitation of the public trust and resources), but with Bigotry and Lakes of Fire. How do you make selling the people of Alberta down the river more palatable to your “populist base”? You go after government waste and corruption. Going after Alison Redford’s sister and Ms.Redford’s expense accounts makes for great media attention, and might just distract people from the fact that the Wild Rose Party would fleece the people of Alberta for the benefit of the oil companies at a rate that makes any personal expense oversights of the Redford’s laughable in comparison.
The Socialist bullet notes:
It is no exaggeration, then, to say that both parties are parties of big oil. For big oil, the key is continuing the rush to pull oil out of the mud of Northern Alberta, regardless of the environmental consequences. We dodged the bullet on a government of social conservative dinosaurs. But we entrenched in power another majority government enthusiastically committed to Alberta’s boiling mud economy, absolutely focused on a systematic increase in the exploitation of the tar sands.
Remember Lesson Number One. – Just a piece of advice Ms.Redford, because let me assure you Ms.Smith has it tattooed on her Executive Assistant’s forehead.
Our neighbour to the south tends to influence the world and North America. As a citizen of said region, I would have to endorse the lesser evil of Obama rather than Mittens. Betty Bowers helps reinforce that idea.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
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