Well here's a nice tactic: take an otherwise innocuous legislative amendment designed to exempt grandmothers and Greyhound drivers from liability for transporting a minor across state lines for medicinal purposes, and rewrite the summary to say the amendments are all about protecting rapists and pedophiles. Attempts to change the summaries back to something halfway accurate failed in the Rules Committee on a party-line vote. As Representative Louise Slaughter (D-NY) put it:

At least five amendments to this bill, which were designed to protect the rights of family members and innocent bystanders from prosecution under this bill, were rewritten as amendments designed to protect sexual predators from prosecution and were then included in the committee report as if that was the original intent of the authors. The thing is, sexual predators were not mentioned anywhere in any of these amendments.

[...]

We can argue over how well [a bill or amendment] has been written or what language it should include to be more effective. But regardless of how that debate turns out, the caption on the top of that bill or amendment serves to instruct the American people as to what original intent of that legislation was.

It serves as an unbiased reading on what that amendment aims to accomplish.

To falsify and rewrite that description as a political attack, is not only unprecedented, it is fundamentally dishonest and it is an abuse of the power given to the Majority by the American people.

The Democrats had better get cracking on those retaliatory bills to provide for veterans and prevent maniuplation of the energy market.

And, dude, legislators have diaries on Daily Kos? Dude.

Tippy-hatty to Rana and Bitch Ph.D.

It's unfortunate that the top Google result for Roe vs. Wade is a site full of anti-abortion propaganda. Following
RadGeek's suggestion, then, it's time to start pointing out more appropriate sources of information about abortion.

This has been a public service announcement. Now, I need some more ripe-key-limeade - in what universe does it make sense to have limes turn yellow when they're ripe? I demand that botany be rejiggered to look more like a cartoon.

Not really, but at Alas (and subsequently Mousewords) there's been discussion of an essay which attempts to take precisely the opposite of my preferred approach to abortion rights: namely, it considers the problem of fetal value in a hypothetical universe where it cannot be counterbalanced by a right to bodily integrity. And then gives a bunch of straw men a good drubbing for displaying the wrong emotions about such a universe (or possibly they're tin men in this instance, since they evidently have brains and need hearts).

I'm explicitly uninterested in the question of fetal value (and implicitly uninterested in the Lakoffish blah-de-blah about whether or not it's politically savvy to display such an interest) but this is so precisely opposite my thinking that I feel obliged to point it out.

I feel like I've been abnormally serious here lately, what with the politics and the politics and the what-all. I almost had a bit last week on the disgusting way I clear my sinuses, but just couldn't muster the enthusiasm for a good old-fashioned TMI yuck-fest. This isn't supposed to be a serious blog, but, you know, fuck it.

Hearing/seeing progressive men talk about how, in light of political realities, preserving abortion rights should be carefully weighed against preserving the constitutionality of the New Deal just makes me break out in a cold, Handmaid's Tale sort of sweat. True, if push came to shove, the overall harm caused by back-alley abortions and/or forced childbearing would probably pale in comparison with the harm caused by destroying OSHA, the EPA, etc etc etc, but jeebus! For one, I don't think this is a reality-based dichotomy - in what backwater of the judicial pool will you find someone who would uphold Roe v. Wade but overturn everything else? - so it's a creepy way to frame a discussion.

For two, I happen to have a pet angle on the question, which would solve everything if only it could gain some traction in the debate. Or if not everything, at least the problem of pro-life "feminism". Below the fold, I am right and everybody else is wrong! Except Patricia Beattie Jung, who is way ahead of me.
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