I was really surprised at this column by E.J. I was raised Catholic too, but I'm outraged at the Church's hostility towards contraception and I didn't think he bought into this narrative. And let's be honest E.J, many pro-lifers will not vote or support Obama anyway so why should this matter to him or any progressive Catholic? Why should the president do any more for them than the Democratic Party already has?

Obama’s breach of faith over contraceptive ruling

All religions live in the U.S. and must honor our laws. What's being offered is not illegal. How many times are women and progressives supposed to kowtow to the religious right? It's infuriating and I grew up Catholic.

Digby writes:

Tell me again why I'm supposed to care that "progressive" Catholics are unhappy that president Obama mandated that Catholic institutions that employ people who are not members of the faith have to provide birth control coverage under the health care law? I'm hearing they feel "betrayed."

Welcome to our world folks. Now you know what it felt like for the rest of us when the administration made a deal with the Church to give abortion coverage pariah status in the health care law and treat it as though it is something so dirty that decent people wouldn't even want their money to touch the money of those who bought this dirty coverage. It wasn't pleasant.

I don't pretend to understand why progressive Catholics, who I'm told practice birth control at similar rates to non-Catholics, are upset that the government is mandating low cost coverage for everyone—for something they personally practice. That sort of hypocrisy is simply beyond the ken of a heathen like myself. But as a political matter, the*President made the right decision. Pro-choice progressive women have been shafted over and over again on reproductive issues and to enable this growing anti-birth control crusade to gain traction at the hands of a Democratic president would have been a true betrayal of epic proportions. Keep in mind that Democratic women outnumber Democratic men by nearly 10 points.

I feel betrayed by a religion that taught me only how to be a better person when I attended in the '60s and '70s. I'm so sick and tired of these hypocrites telling women what they can and cannot do.

Today, 1 in 3 women has trouble affording birth control. The U.S. has one of the highest rates of unplanned pregnancies in the industrialized world, and studies show that women who plan their pregnancies are likely to be healthier, seek prenatal care, and have healthier children.

Given all of this, shouldn't the question be why a group of mostly men—bishops or otherwise—need an extra-extra special exemption from prioritizing the health of women? Sadly, this is no freak occurrence. When the Obama administration made the misguided decision not to allow Plan B to be sold over the counter, the debate focused exclusively on the way he—"as a father"—viewed the idea of 11-year-old girls getting Plan B with their pack of gum. The overwhelming majority of young women who were simply trying to avoid pregnancy or abortion, both far more risky than Plan B, were ignored. And when a collection of almost all men pushed the "Bart Stupak amendment," holding health reform they supposedly supported hostage for the sake of inroads on their anti-choice agenda, the actual impact their amendment would have on women was virtually absent, as news coverage lionized these men's dedication to their consciences.

Shouldn't we ask why women's health, our ability to control our lives and bodies and careers, is such a popular political football? Is it because the women who actually are affected have no voice in our political system?

Bart Stupak got run out of office for supporting these people. They are not interested in facts or freedoms. We do not live in a monarchy where men are the lords and women are the chamber maids. Dionne's instincts have been compromised by the same propaganda as so many Americans have been over the years. It's really sad.

Irony Alert: Bart Stupak nearly scuttled health care reform over his fear that federal dollars could be spent on abortions, even though the Hyde Amendment already makes that illegal to do so. No longer in Congress, Stupak has moved to a lobbying firm...with Planned Parenthood as a client.

Just hours after announcing his move to K Street, former Rep. Bart Stupak is already getting some attention for an existing client of his new firm.

The Michigan Democrat, who opposes abortion rights, is joining the law and lobbying firm Venable, which represents Planned Parenthood of Maryland. As a Member of the House, Stupak became a champion of the anti-abortion movement during last year’s debate over President Barack Obama’s signature health care overhaul. Stupak put the brakes on the overhaul with his amendment to bar federal funds from being used to pay for abortions, but he ultimately reached a deal on the issue with the White House.

Some in the anti-abortion community were quick to point out the Venable connection to Planned Parenthood, which provides abortions. House Republicans have sought to cut federal funding for the health care provider from a spending bill to fund the government for the remainder of the current fiscal year.

A Venable spokesman said that even if Stupak were to work for Planned Parenthood, it would be consistent with his Congressional voting record. Although Planned Parenthood does provide abortion services, much of its work focuses on women’s health, preventive care and birth control counseling.

With all due respect to the Venable spokesman, I think as a woman, I'd prefer to keep Stupak as far away as possible from Planned Parenthood. His inability to think that women deserve the right to control their own bodies kinda hurts his credibility.

Meanwhile, let's hear it for DC Mayor Vincent Gray and six DC Council-members who were arrested yesterday protesting the Congress' complete apathy to the district's lack of say or representation in the congressional rider prohibiting them from using local money to fund abortions.

Under the budget agreement reached Friday, the details of which are still uncertain, the city will likely be unable to spend city dollars on abortions for low-income women. It may also be banned from spending city money on needle exchange programs thought vital to curbing the spread of HIV in the city, where the disease is considered an epidemic. Also back: a school voucher program favored by Republicans.

Angry that Congress appears ready to take away autonomy granted to the city in the last several years, Mayor Vincent Gray and six Council members including the chairman were among 41 people arrested Monday outside the Capitol while protesting the changes that might be inevitable.

So one of the most profitable companies in the world was cutting safety corners to make a few more bucks. Why am I not surprised?

WASHINGTON (AP) -- BP took measures to cut costs in the weeks before the catastrophic blowout in the Gulf of Mexico as it dealt with one problem after another, prompting a BP engineer to describe the doomed rig as a "nightmare well," according to internal documents released Monday.

The comment by BP engineer Brian Morel came in an e-mail April 14, six days before the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion that killed 11 people and has sent tens of millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf in the nation's worst environmental disaster.

The e-mail was among dozens of internal documents released by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which is investigating the explosion and its aftermath.

In a letter to BP CEO Tony Hayward, Reps. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and Bart Stupak, D-Mich., noted at least five questionable decisions BP made in the days leading up to the explosion.

"The common feature of these five decisions is that they posed a trade-off between cost and well safety," said Waxman and Stupak. Waxman chairs the energy panel while Stupak heads a subcommittee on oversight and investigations.

"Time after time, it appears that BP made decisions that increased the risk of a blowout to save the company time or expense," the lawmakers wrote in the 14-page letter to Hayward. "If this is what happened, BP's carelessness and complacency have inflicted a heavy toll on the Gulf, its inhabitants, and the workers on the rig."

How can the blowout device be considered fail-safe? Because the free market is powerful enough to do anything!

A senior House Democrat said that the blowout preventer that failed to stop an oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico had a dead battery in its control pod, leaks in its hydraulic system, a "useless" test version of one of the devices that was supposed to close the flow of oil and a cutting tool that wasn't strong enough to shear through joints that made up 10 percent of the drill pipe.

In a devastating review of the blowout preventer that BP said was supposed to be "fail-safe," Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) said in a hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday that the device was anything but fail-safe.

Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) pressed BP on why it had assured regulators in its exploration plan that it could deal with a spill 50 times larger than the current one when the current one seems to have defied control technology. "The American people expect you to have a response comparable to the Apollo project, not 'Project Runway,' " Markey said.

Stupak said that the committee investigators had also uncovered a document prepared in 2001 by the drilling rig operator Transocean that said there were 260 "failure modes" that could require removal of the blowout preventer.

"How can a device that has 260 failure modes be considered fail-safe?" Stupak said.

Perhaps this is the answer:

In addition, an oil industry whistleblower told Huffington Post that BP had been aware for years that tests of the device were being falsified in Alaska.

Mike Mason, who worked on oil rigs in Alaska for 18 years, says that he observed cheating on blowout preventer tests at least 100 times, including on many wells owned by BP.

As he describes it, the test involves a chart that shows whether the device will hold a certain amount of pressure for five minutes on each valve. (The test involves increasing the pressure from 250 pounds per square-inch (psi) to 5,000 psi.) "Sometimes, they would put their finger on the chart and slide it ahead -- so that it only recorded the pressure for 30 seconds instead of 5 minutes," he tells HuffPost.

Mason claims that a BP representative was usually present while subcontractors performed the tests.

The 48-year-old veteran oil worker claims that in the oil industry, particularly at BP, "the culture is basically safety procedures are shoved down your throat and then they look the other way when it's convenient for them." He claims that oil operators often wouldn't report spills and that when he spilled chemical fluid in 2003, he was told by his superiors not to report it. Mason, who now runs a small operation hauling freight in the Alaskan bush and owns guest cabins, says he was fired by a drilling company in 2006 after he wrote a letter to the editor of the Anchorage Daily News to condemn the firm for incorporating overseas and thereby avoiding taxes.

Teabaggers must really believe they are the majority in America and John McCain won the election, but Obama is just keeping the Oval office warm because McCain has to win his Senate race against JD Hayworth first before he can be sworn in. It's just a formality. That's teabagger logic.

Amanda's post rocks!.

Digby is amused/disgusted at conservatives who simply will not accept that having a majority in both houses of Congress and having the Presidency means that Democrats get to pass legislation.

--

Well, it’s simple, really. They assume, if they don’t state it outright, that large numbers of American voters shouldn’t have the right to vote. That’s the implicit argument when Sarah Palin praises white rural voters as “Real Americans”, when Birthers obsess over the idea that the first black President simply can’t be eligible for office, when tea baggers yell racist and homophobic slurs at politicians, and when they insist that you eliminate black voters from the count if you want to find out how popular a politician “really” is. When Bart Stupak laughed out loud at the very idea that nuns have opinions worth listening to---and listed a bunch of men whose opinions were the ones that counted---you had a similar sentiment being expressed. Universal suffrage seems like a fundamental part of democracy to liberals, but it appears that conservatives think it de-legitimizes the results of elections. And that if you do something without Republicans on board, you’re eliminating those who represent the only people who count.

The irony here is that Republicans are already way overrepresented in Congress. Because of the constitutional rules that give every state two Senators, no matter how underpopulated the state, you see rural, white-dominated areas having way more representation than they deserve. For instance, South Dakota has a little over 800,000 residents, but New York has almost 20 million. New York City has over 8 million people alone, which means that if the Senate had a representational system like the House, just the city of New York would be owed 20 Senators to compete with South Dakota’s two. Think about how irrelevant the Republican party would be---at least the current wingnutty Republican party, since it’s obvious New York can elect Republicans---if representation was actually fair...read on

I've been meaning to post this for a few days.

Despite his best efforts to look like a legitimate conservative media type, Erick Erickson is just another pot-stirrer inviting more hate to rain down on Bart Stupak. Sunday he posted this on his RedState blog:

We can’t [let] Bart Stupak go without a parting gift. Judas, after all, got 30 silver coins to sell out our Lord. Stupak needs something for selling out all the children sent off to be slaughtered thanks to his “compromise” that any President can pen away to oblivion — notwithstanding the questionable legal assumptions behind it.

He suggests fake silver coins. Whatever. This post might be interpreted as less than a threat, were it not for the comments. This comment, in particular is disturbing:

If this were a novel...

Stupack would eventually be found on the end of a rope, after realizing the extent of the lies on which he based his traitorous decisions.

It’s one thing to sell out. Quite another to sell out for no real reason at all. It eats at a man.

And then there's this incredibly confused commenter:

I donate for causes when I’m financially able to. Mrs. S. has been fighting cancer for 7+ years and the medical bills are piling up. Need to get all the medical help we can NOW, before she gets put on the Obama/Reid/Pelosi “Death Panel” list and won’t be able to get the treatments any more because her life isn’t worth saving!!!!!

One commenter offered to stop by Stupak's offices and leave a small gift:

Since I am in D.C. anyway, I will go by his office tomorrow or Tuesday and leave 30 pieces of silver (nickels) at his office with a little note.

How does “Here is your 30 pieces of silver for your betrayal of the unborn.” sound?

Another one thought it might be nice to send Rep. Stupak photos of aborted fetuses.

So here's my question for CNN: Given this guy's obvious bent toward wingnuts and hot rhetoric that whips already-frothy folks into a frenzy, why legitimize that behavior by giving him your brand to trounce?

Never mind that the very same abortion funding rules in effect on March 22, 2010 remain in effect on March 23rd and following. It goes without saying that this group of anti-choicers hoped to kill the entire health care reform effort with the Stupak wedge, but from the comments, it almost seems like they expected even more than that. It appears that the expectation was to ban abortions outright and overturn Roe v. Wade through the back door. When Stupak didn't deliver, they turned on him. Hard.

As I've said, I'm no fan of what he did. Abortion should never have been brought into this debate. But it was, and in the end nothing changed. It is the same today as it was before, but having the debate evidently raised expectations in these hard-core, hang-em-high types to the point of utter despair when the effort failed.

Some days it's hard to believe I share a country with people like this, but it's even harder to understand why CNN thinks it's a good idea to give them a daily platform from which to spew. Faux lite, I guess.

Watch CBS News Videos Online

I'm no fan of Bart Stupak (D-MI), but there's no way any Representative should be threatened the way he was. These are messages left on his voice mail, left by supposed Christians and supporters of "life".

CBS News reports:

"Congressman Stupak, you baby-killing mother f***er... I hope you bleed out your a**, got cancer and die, you mother f***er," one man says in a message to Stupak.

"There are millions of people across the country who wish you ill," a woman says in a voicemail, "and all of those thoughts that are projected on you will materialize into something that's not very good for you."

CBS News also obtained copies of faxes sent to Stupak, which include racial epithets used in reference to President Obama and show pictures of nooses with Stupak's name.

I think Stupak's injection of the abortion issue into the debate was a low-life thing to do. I support his primary challenger, Connie Saltonstall. Still, listen to the dripping hatred in these people's voices, the implied threat of their words. There is no place for this in our politics, even against those who play games with wedge issues and bow to Catholic bishops.

The thing is, in this country we elect people. We get to vote every couple of years or so. Violence is for dictatorships, not democracies. Like it or not, they're not going to turn the US into Teabagistan, no matter how hard they wish it, or how nasty they get.

MSNBC is reporting that Stupak is now voting "yes" for HCR. Baird and Giffords are also reportedly "yes" votes as well.

CSPAN reported on MSNBC's report just a few moments later.

Information on why he switched his vote is slowly coming out. It appears that he was promised an Executive Order from Obama upholding the Hyde Amendment.

What did Dems give up for his yes vote if anything? Or, did he flip because he saw the writing on the wall and felt threatened by Connie's challenge?

Here's a little more:

MSNBC's Mike Viqueira: "Many of these Democratic leaders are now ensconced in Speaker Pelosi's office. They think they have an agreement with Bart Stupak. Remember, he was here at the White House very late last night trying to work out language for an executive order to clarify and affirm the president's position with regard to abortion language... They think they have the Stupak 8

But can this language go too far for the pro-choice members of the house to sign off on?

UPDATE: Bart Stupak is holding his presser at 4 PM EST.

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Bart Stupak's trying a new tactic to get the abortion deal that he wants into HCR. He calls it the "enrollment corrections bill." He was on GMA today and shed some light on it.

Stephanopoulos asked about the idea floated by Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-OH), another pro-life Democrat, to hold a separate vote on reinstating the Stupak language on abortion insurance, as a whole different bill. Stupak said that this was one possibility -- but he wanted to make sure such a bill would in fact be signed into law.

"Okay, we pass the bill, it has to go to the Senate. This is an enrollment corrections bill. It has to be passed before the president would sign the Senate bill. So there's a long ways to go," said Stupak. "And you know, dealing with the Senate has been unusually difficult these last two years, so I'm not a lot of confident it's gonna go any farther than the House of Representatives."

David Waldman explains what Stupak has in mind.

Lordy, Lordy, Lordy. You're not gonna believe how low down in the weeds we're gonna have to get for this one.

We just learned from mcjoan that Bart Stupak is after a deal that would somehow jam a foot in the health insurance reform door for his now-notorious Stupak amendment on abortion:

This morning, during an appearance on Good Morning America, Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) reaffirmed that he might vote for the Senate health care bill if Democrats pass the Stupak abortion amendment as a separate measure. Stupak said that Democrats have shown a "renewed" interest in tying his amendment to the Senate bill:

STUPAK: George, that’s called an enrollment corrections bill. I presented that to leadership about ten days ago. There’s renewed interest in that piece of legislation that I and a number of us are ready to introduce. It’s prepared. Everybody’s looking at it right now. That’s one way, maybe. But we set the deal with the Senate. You give us a vote in the House. We had a vote in the House. It was overwhelmingly 240-194, to keep public law, no public funding for abortion.

It seems to me that if the Senate parliamentarian is indeed insisting that the reconciliation bill address "current law," then that means the Senate bill must be not only enrolled, but signed by the President before reconciliation can be considered, at least in the Senate. I assume the House parliamentarian has no such objection to the House beginning its work (which is curious in itself), since he's apparently allowing the House to consider and pass reconciliation before the Senate bill is enrolled.

He went on MSNBC later with Norah and she first tried to get him to admit that the HCR bill as it stands now does not allow for government funding for abortions, but even with all the facts that she had like the AP and fellow pro-life Dems who are now supporting the bill, he flatly denies it. He calls it a "drastic break from current law for the last thirty three years." Even Allen Boyd is voting yes now.

(h/t Heather for the video)

There are a lot of rumors swirling, but we're hearing that Stupak may very well get his wish since the vote appears to be so close in the House and as a friend emailed: "I knew they would go there because that was the path of least resistance."

Please donate to Connie's campaign so we can take Stupak down.

Via Twitter:

Pro-choice female Dems are shuttling in and out of Pelosi's office and they won't say why.

Even if they calculate accurately and know this latest Stupak bullshit won't pass, it really sucks that pro-choice women have to deal with this issue from the Democratic Party for years to come.

While Bart Stupak and the Catholic bishops continue to shill for the US Chamber of Commerce and health insurers with their ridiculous stand on abortion and health care reform, Arizona's Republican governor affirms what we already knew: "life" to Republicans is nothing more than a talking point.

Arizona governor Jan Brewer signed legislation today ending the CHIP program in Arizona, effectively tossing 47,000 low-income children off the insurance rolls and out of doctors' offices.

Not content to stop there, the state is also rolling back their Medicaid coverage to toss an additional 310,000 adults off the rolls, claiming the state budget is simply too stressed to handle the load, which is strange, considering the federal matching funds they sacrifice along with the state's children.

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