During the Superbowl, Focus on the Family, James Dobson's group, will run a commercial spot featuring Tim Tebow's family. Family lore has it that in the late 1980's, while pregnant and living in the Philippines, Tebow's mother became ill with amoebic dysentery and doctors there recommended that she abort the pregnancy because they said the medication she took to recover from the illness would cause damage to the fetus. She refused to have the abortion and twenty some years later her son is a star college quarterback about to go through the NFL draft. And--oh my goodness--if she had listened to doctors' advice the world would have been deprived of a super-athlete-all-around-good-guy. 

I don't mean to diminish Mrs. Tebow's decision. She is, of course, entitled to make her own choices about her own body. She believed abortion was the wrong choice for her. It is the leap of reasoning that I find offensive: I didn't end my pregnancy, even though doctors told me to, and I ended up with an extraordinary athlete for a son. If you abort your pregnancy, you might be giving up your avenue to fame and fortune.

Now, as it turns out, the story may not be as clear cut as it seems. 

According to Gloria Allred, in the Philippines, abortion is illegal and punishable by imprisonment in all circumstances, and it has been since 1930. The law also mandates a prison sentence for anyone who assists in the procedure, including doctors. 

I don't know if Mrs. Tebow is lying, but I am interested to hear the story fleshed out in more detail. Did the doctors suggest she travel back to the United States for the medical procedure, for example? It seems highly unlikely to me that a doctor in the Philippines would risk his or her career, let alone a few years in prison, to perform an abortion, especially considering the diagnosis doesn't appear to have included a risk to her own health. 

In any case, Mrs. Tebow is confident that she made the right decision. That's great. She has a son to be proud of. But I'll thank her and all anti-abortion advocates to be confident in their own decisions and leave the rest of us to be confident in ours.

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Cross posted at Dagblog.com.

Last night, Congressman Alan Grayson stood up on the floor of the House and read out the number of people who died from lack of health insurance in each Congressional district represented by a Republican. It was the latest in a steady stream of very public, sometimes over-the-top statements he's made in an effort to shine the light on Republican obstructionism in order to help get healthcare reform passed.

Ok. So suffrage isn't really under attack. But twice this year I've read accounts of writers who think it wouldn't be such a bad idea to deny women the right to vote. It makes me wonder if the Republican party, having just this year burned major bridges with minorities and gays, is going for the trifecta.

The first account was by some blogger in Chico, California. I wrote about it here.

Now, we have another account. British-American conservative thinker extraordinare John Derbyshire suggests that we would be a better country if women didn't vote. Apparently, he's devoted a whole chapter to the topic in his new book. But from an interview he gave on Alan Colmes' radio show, it seems to boil down to his idea that women "lean hard to the left."

So, Derbyshire thinks women shouldn't be granted the vote because they don't vote the way he wants them to. What a shining beacon of democracy this guy is. I wonder what he thinks of women in office. More importantly, I wonder if Michelle Malkin and Laura Ingram both voted for hard-left candidate Ralph Nader in 2000. Maybe it's their fault we got President Bush.

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Cross-posted at Dagblog.

When I want to learn about something, I generally start with my good friend, the Google. Depending on how much I want to know, it can stop there, or lead me to the local public library. Sometimes, when I want to know a lot about one particular thing, I even head for one of the university libraries in town.

What I want to learn today is why climate change is bad. Apparently, that can't be learned through Google or the library. It also can't be taught with access to the most current scientific studies or personal consultation with experts in the field.  It appears to require about a hundred grand, access to airplanes, and true bi-partisanship. 

Bi-partisanship is supposed to be what it's all about, right? So when ten members of Congress (and their spouses) took an eleven-day trip to Australia and the South Pole to see for themselves what climate change is doing to the planet, it ought to warm our hearts that four of them were Republicans and six were Democrats.

And warm my heart it does. I'm so happy that they put aside their partisan bickering for the good of the country. They snorkeled together. They played with penguins together. That's just awesome. I'm so glad that both parties can talk--without irony--about cost control and deficit management when they are spending $100,000 plus (not including air transportation on military planes) on a "fact-finding" trip. I'm interested to hear about the samples that they collected and what conclusions they reached when they brought the samples back to their labs for analysis.

I'm also interested to hear about what another bi-partisan delegation, of Senators this time, learned after spending $121,000 (not including airfare) to attend the Paris Air Show. For that price, it's got to be good.

Congressional overseas travel cost the taxpayers $13 million last year, almost 10 times the amount spent in 1995.  The spouses have to pay for their own food, but not the airfare or hotel. To hear one representative tell it, if spouses didn't get to go along, either nobody would travel or marriages would end. Probably Governor Sanford didn't get that memo.

I'm not suggesting that overseas travel isn't necessary. Visiting our military installations, for example, is important. But if bi-partisan Congressional delegations are dropping more than twice what the average American makes in a year in what amounts to a vacation so that they can "learn" what I'm guessing I can find out in twenty minutes on the Internet, they should probably think twice the next time they try to convince us that universal healthcare is too expensive.

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Cross posted at Dagblog, as usual.

Yesterday, Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly pointed out that Paul Ryan had a piece at the American Spectator Web site. In it, Ryan writes:

The American character itself and the principles of free market democracy which protect and preserve it may be lost beyond recovery if Congress chooses the wrong path to health care reform

Ryan's core argument is that even though healthcare falls into the inalienable right category, government shouldn't provide healthcare no more than it should build homes for its citizens.

Before I explain why reading Congressman Ryan's argument makes me very, very angry, I'd like to unpack it just a bit.

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So she could smack down shit like this:

http://tpmtv.talkingpointsmemo.com/?id=2977330

In the video, Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-KS) suggests that the mothers of both the President of the United States of American and a sitting Supreme Court Justice may have chosen abortion if only they had been able to access public funding for the procedure.

I've heard a lot of intellectually dishonest arguments in my life. Until today, my favorite was conveniently forgetting the marginal tax rate when calculating tax burden on our beleagured wealthy citizens. Tiahrt has reached a staggering new level of crass and insulting by suggesting that if public funding for abortion had been available decades ago, we'd be deprived of two of our current leaders.

But if the Congressman wants to play the What If game, I've got a couple scenarios for him to consider:

*If Congress had stopped sitting on their collective thumbs in fear of losing elections, and stopped George Bush from launching an agressive war, we wouldn't have been deprived of all of the soldiers killed in Iraq. What if one of them would have been our president some day?

*What if, in 1995 when Tiahrt first went to Congress, instead of using stem cell research as a political football, they would have gotten serious about providing funding for research into cures for Parkinson's and Alzheimer's and a whole bunch of other diseases? How many people have been lost to illness that could have been stopped or slowed since then?

Why doesn't he talk about those hypotheticals on the floor of the House, instead of whose mother would have chosen abortion if only she'd had the money 50 years ago?

This is a man who is running for Senate in 2010. The mind reels.

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This one is not cross posted at Dagblog, but there is a health care cost savings discussion just itchin' to get started.

Congressman Mike Pence (R-IN) and Congressman Howard Berman (D-CA) have introduced a resolution expressing support for Iranian citizens, condemning the violence in Iran, and spouting off about the importance of free and fair elections.

Berman said, "It is not for us to decide who should run Iran, much less determine the real winner of the June 12 election...but we must reaffirm our strong belief that the Iranian people have a fundamental right to express their views about the future of their country freely, and without intimidation."

When I read this statement, my immediate thought was, "Why?"

Why must we reaffirm our belief in freedom of expression and democracy? It's not exactly a big secret that the United States holds these beliefs. And, current decade notwithstanding, we can be pretty good at working with longstanding and emerging democracies around the world.

Where we fail, again and again, is trying to overlay not only our ideals but how we put those ideals into practice onto countries whose cultures and traditions are different from ours. Our leaders have not, over the long term, shown much imagination when it comes to understanding that other socieities might have their own path to achieving such important ends as freedom and democracy.

Smart, experienced foreign policy experts of all political persuasions have suggested that President Obama has taken exactly the right approach to the situation in Iran, and that any strong response by the United States could be used by the Iranian government against the protesters. Yet, conservative members of the House and Senate, as well as conservative talk show hosts, have been insisting over and over that the President is not going far enough; that he needs to decry the election results and make demands.

In my opinion, these people don't know anything about Iran, don't care about Iran or the Iranian people, and couldn't care less what position they're advocating for as long as it's the opposite of what the President is doing. That's become the Right's MO on all issues since Obama took office. Whatever Obama says is wrong--reason, public opinion, and even public safety be damned.

And here we go again. Iran is reaching a tipping point. After the Ayatollah's speech today, protests are now increasingly dangerous. What will happen on Saturday, when protesters return to the streets? I don't know, but I fear the worst. I fear that the government will put down the protests, brutally and violently.

Pence, Berman, and the like are behaving as if they are blind to this potential outcome. They see an opportunity to score political points, and if it results in the deaths of tens or hundreds or thousands of citizens in a country so far away, who cares? The goal is to undermine the President for the benefit of the Repbulican party.

Such naked narcissism takes my breath away.

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Cross posted at Dagblog.

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Sometimes, I get confused when people use slang or terms of art. I'm more of a straightforward, un-fancy communicator. I'm ashamed to admit it might be something I have in common with our former president--although I tend not to make up my own words.

Something I am less ashamed to admit is that I don't always follow some of the terms bandied about on the blogs. One of those terms is "strawman." I'm from the Midwest. Out here, strawmen live in fields and they don't generally talk, which makes it difficult for them to participate in arguments.

But, I'm proud to admit that today, for possibly the first time, I feel I have an absolute grasp of what "creating a strawman" means. Thanks, Republicans!

See if you can follow the trail of metaphorical straw. (Side Note: Real strawmen leave a straw trail too, only it's not metaphorical and it makes me sneeze.) From what I'm hearing coming out of conservative mouths this week, here's what I've got so far:

• President Obama is going to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay.
• There are bad men who have been living there for many years.
• We will have to find a new place for the bad men.
• During the campaign, then-Senator Obama and his staff saved money by asking supporters to allow out-of-town campaign staff to stay in their spare bedrooms.
• We can save money and solve the detainee housing crisis by asking Obama supporters to house terrorists.

Wheeeeeeee. Because it's not like we have maximum security prisons or anything. Those prisoners are coming to your neighborhood and Republicans want you to be hiding-under-your-bed-wetting-your-pants scared.

Honestly. It's not like we should expect anything remotely honest from the people who want you to believe that dinosaurs weren't extinct until a few thousand years ago, at which point we were calling them dragons. But just how stupid do they think we are?

Don't answer that. I can only handle one strawman per day.

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Cross posted, as usual, at Dagblog.com