Preach On, Sister!

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A story of discrimination by Kaili Joy Gray aka Angry Mouse

This will be short. It will not be sweet.

Edwin A. Graning worked as a bus driver for the Capital Area Rural Transportation System in Texas. On January 29, 2010, he was assigned to give a woman a ride to a location in Austin. He refused. He was fired.

And now he's suing. You see, Mr. Graning believes he was fired because of his religious beliefs. He believes he is the victim of discrimination. He wants his job back. He wants back pay. And he wants money for his “pain, suffering, and emotional distress.”

Why did he refuse to do his job?

Because the woman he was supposed to drive wanted to go to Planned Parenthood. And Mr. Graning believed that she was going to get an abortion. It didn't matter to Mr. Graning that she might have been going for a pap test or breast exam, that it was, in fact, unlikely that she was seeking an abortion because despite the constant smears from the forced birth movement, abortion is only 3 percent of the services Planned Parenthood provides.

It didn't matter to Mr. Graning that abortion is a legal medical procedure, and that the woman whom he refused to drive, even had she been going for an abortion, was merely exercising her legal rights.

It didn't matter to Mr. Graning because despite his lawsuit, he doesn't give a damn about legal rights.

Mr. Graning believes it is perfectly acceptable to discriminate against women, to deprive them of their rights, to deny them access to legal medical procedures to which they are entitled -- all under the guise of "religious beliefs."

We have seen this before. Pharmacists around the country refuse to fill prescriptions for birth control because of their "religious beliefs." And five states actually protect their "right" to deprive women of their rights.

We have seen this with the homophobic bigots who complain about violations of their free speech rights to spew hatred and pass homophobic legislation.

It's absurd. And the idea that Mr. Graning should have the right to discriminate against a woman who is exercising her legal rights is absurd. And the idea that he is entitled to his job, as well as money for "emotional distress," is absurd. Mr. Graning doesn't care about the emotional distress he inflicted on the woman to whom he denied a ride. He doesn't care about the woman whose rights he violated.

This is really quite simple. Women have a right in this country. Anyone who stands in the way of women exercising that right doesn't give a damn about rights and doesn't give a damn about the law and certainly shouldn't be complaining about their rights. Mr. Graning had a job to do: drive the damn bus.

Mr. Graning doesn't deserve to have his job back. He doesn't deserve back pay. He certainly doesn't deserve money for his "pain and suffering." One person in this short-and-not-sweet story is owed something: the woman who actually suffered discrimination. She deserves an apology from Mr. Graning.

Bare-foot, pregnant and in the kitchen.

Make no doubt about it: there is a "Forced Birth Movement" afoot in this country.

A sassy, "uppity" woman who controls her own body is powerful and, therefore, must be kept in her place.

Watch out, Sisters!
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Surprise! Surprise! Surprise!

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"We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals, now we know that it is bad economics." Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Jan. 20, 1937.

Some things never change.

BP is not paying the contractors involved in the clean-up along the Gulf coast nor have they paid into the trust account which they agreed to fund.
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The Pain Caucus

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Once again: gosh, I wish I had said this.

Who’s To Blame?

BY KENNY BELFORD

A large part of the lingering recession was caused by the collapse of the housing market. As I frequent a number of political message board sites it’s common to find wingnuts posting comments railing away about the poor people that got into a mortgage they can’t afford, causing this mess.

They love to blame poor people for a variety of issues. I suppose it helps them justify turning their back on those in need. Sort of some kind of punishment thing for the crime of being poor. I don’t understand that twisted logic, but I’ve always been closer to the Mensa crowd, than the tinfoil hat teabagger set. That’s probably why I’m a Democrat, but anyway, back to the topic.

Facts never seem to matter much to wingnuts, unless they just made them up to support their uninformed views. That’s the case about the mortgage problem. It’s not the poor folks in over their head, and it’s not the middle class overextending themselves creating the continuance of the problem. It’s the wealthy that are sinking the market.

In a story just released, the New York Times researched this issue and discovered some very revealing facts. For the benefit of the wingnuts, that means some truth about the issue. A portion of their report states:

– “Whether it is their residence, a second home or a house bought as an investment, the rich have stopped paying the mortgage at a rate that greatly exceeds the rest of the population.”

– “More than one in seven homeowners with loans in excess of a million dollars is seriously delinquent, according to data compiled for The New York Times by the real estate analytics firm CoreLogic.”

– “By contrast, homeowners with less lavish housing are much more likely to keep writing checks to their lender. About one in 12 mortgages below the million-dollar mark is delinquent.”

It’s no wonder the wealthy want Republicans to return to power. They need more tax cuts like George W. Bush gave them, so the poor and middle class can give them more government welfare enabling them to keep their mansions.

Just makes you want to cry for them, doesn't it? I am going for a hanky right now.

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Gone to Texas

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Happiness is a train ride to Texas!
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Death Panels--Again

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Nearly every other industrialized country recognizes health care as a human right, whose costs and benefits are shared among all citizens. But in the United States, health care is treated as a commodity that is purchased, in one way or another, by those who can afford it. Conservatives embrace this notion as the perfect expression of the all-powerful market; though they make a great show of recoiling from the term, in practice they are endorsing rationing on the basis of wealth.

The public option for universal coverage was the one provision that addressed the cancer of the system: private insurance. When the whole system is designed so that private insurance companies can make as much money as possible, the incentives are always going to be wrong. Since they have a permanent incentive to lower costs by denying care and increase profits by charging more for premiums, they will always find a way around the regulations and reforms. And they have an army of lawyers and lobbyists to help them do so--and a whole department full of public relation operatives to sell their right to do so to the citizenry.

In a country that already spends more than 16 percent of each GDP dollar on health care (PDF), it's easy to see why so many people believe there's simply not enough of it to go around. The US spends 134 percent more than the median of the world's most developed nations, but we get less for our money—fewer physician visits and hospital days per capita, for example—than our counterparts in countries like Germany, Canada, and Australia. (We do, however, have more MRI machines and more cesarean sections!)

Where does the money go? By most estimates, administration and insurance profits alone eat upward from 30 percent of our total health care bill (and most of that is in the private sector—Medicare's overhead is around 2 percent). In other words, we don't have too little to go around—we overpay for what we get, and we don't allocate our spending where it does us the most good.

But in the absence of any serious challenge to the health-care-as-commodity system, we are doomed to a battlefield scenario where Americans must fight to secure their share of a "scarce" resource in a life-and-death struggle that pits the rich against the poor, the insured against the uninsured—and increasingly, the young against the old.

Rep. John Conyers fought for universal health care throughout the Bush II administration. But when it came time to legislate, his bill was passed over for the current behemoth crafted by lobbyists. On 10 March 2010, Rep. Alan Grayson introduced a bill (H.R. 4789) which would give the option to buy into Medicare to every citizen of the United States.

There are answers out there. The solution is available. Medicare for All!

You Have Got to Be Kidding!

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What a mess. When he was asked about cuts he would recommend to the President and Congress, Alan Simpson said “We are going to stick to the big three,” meaning Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Alan Simpson starts from the premise that the Treasury will default on the bonds issued to the Social Security trust fund, because all the best people apparently know that it’s better to default on America’s senior citizens and plunge them into poverty than it is to default on, say, the Chinese.

Despite Simpson’s assertions, raising the retirement age to 70 IS a benefit cut. It would put an estimated 1.5 million senior citizens into poverty. After two years of watching billions of dollars in taxpayer money being paid out to Wall Street CEOs in lavish bonuses, that takes a fat load of nerve.

You know, my gentle snowflakes, raising eligibility age for Social Security is just wrong on so many levels: 70 for a Congress person may not be old, but it is really old to a miner, a crude oil driller, a ditch digger, a waitress/waiter, a farm worker, a carpenter, a fisherman, a mason, etc., etc., etc. If you don't get this, I can not even begin to explain it. I have tried. Lord knows, I have tried.

[As] more and more old people began to receive SS benefits, the quality of life of the older population increased dramatically. Their lives regained some dignity. The poor farm closed.

As far as I am concerned, "good" fixes for Social Security include (there may be others):

• means testing (if you have enough other taxable income to render your SS benefits taxable, reduce or eliminate your SS benefits)
• raise the limit from which Social Security is withheld; still limit the top benefit received
• income taxes paid on benefits of high income individuals should be returned to Social Security fund
• increase the % of benefits subject to income tax to those with high incomes.

Let's keep the poor farm closed.

As for our esteemed Congress Critters:

The Congress, with it's relative geezerdom, isn't a particularly fair reflection of life in the real world, where few 70 year-olds have multiple staff people to get them through their days. That's true now, and it will be true for the now middle-aged people who will be facing a longer working life if these guys get their way.

Here's something our Members of Congress should be occupying their noggins with: the middle-aged and older are the largest group of the long-term unemployed. A little job creation could potentially go a long way here. Maybe if they actually were working, and contributing into the system by paying both income and Social Security taxes, our economic picture would be a little less bleak. Telling these people now--who want to be working--that they'll have an extra 15 years to be stigmatized by being unemployed is just cruel.

Official "Retirement Age" has been advanced enough. No more.
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Depressed ?

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Some days I just feel like a wet dog smells.
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