Elliot Spitzer (4/6/11): Congressman, thank you so much for joining us tonight….Look, I want to begin with the question that goes to a simple notion of fairness. And here’s how I want to frame it for you. The top one percent of income earners in our nation get 25 percent of the income and control 40 percent of the wealth. Those numbers have gone through the roof over the last decade or two. And yet Paul Ryan’s budget plan imposes two-thirds of its burdens on the poor. Two-thirds! Right after we gave a big tax cut to the rich. Does that violate your sense of fairness in a very basic sense?
Todd Akin, R MO: Well, no.
Day: April 8, 2011
Health care is another matter. That has to be taken very methodically because people’s lives are affected. Nobody’s life is affected by NPR. Nobody’s life is affected by Planned Parenthood. These are options.
Bill O’Reilly, apparently believing the notion that Planned Parenthood is merely the place one goes for on-demand partial birth abortions and the like.
Pop quiz: Number of federal dollars used by Planned Parenthood to fund abortion?
That would be ZERO. The Hyde amendment way back in 1976 made that illegal.
The right wing that increasingly makes up and already makes all important policy decisions for the GOP is after contraception. Always has been, always will be. In their world women are chattel who cannot and should not be allowed to make decisions about their own fertility, especially since all sex should be reproductive and within a “traditional” marriage. Anything else is a threat to the GOP approved sanctity of marriage and inevitably results in men marrying box turtles and the like.
Pop quiz: Number of federal dollars used by Planned Parenthood to fund abortion?
That would be ZERO. The Hyde amendment way back in 1976 made that illegal.
The right wing that increasingly makes up and already makes all important policy decisions for the GOP is after contraception. Always has been, always will be. In their world women are chattel who cannot and should not be allowed to make decisions about their own fertility, especially since all sex should be reproductive and within a “traditional” marriage. Anything else is a threat to the GOP approved sanctity of marriage and inevitably results in men marrying box turtles and the like.
Shutdown Number One
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Thursday morning that he and House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, have agreed on a deal to cut about $38 billion from current spending levels, but added that Republican insistence on including a policy rider blocking federal funding for Planned Parenthood, is the only stumbling block.
“We agreed on a number last night,” Reid told reporters in the Senate Press Gallery. He said he is “really upset that this government is going to shut down” because of GOP efforts to limit access to abortion.
A spokesman for Boehner has challenged Reid’s account, saying that continuing differences over spending cuts, not the abortion rider, remains the problem.
On the wager: Planned Parenthood will be the Newt Gingrich bad seat on Air Force One of this shutdown. Simple and easy to understand, and it pushes most of sensible America’s “that’s just rank insanity” button.
Lemkin 