The GOP strategy of telling as many fucking lies as possible between Labor Day and Election Day is off to a roaring start with this one:
During the North Carolina debate tonight, Republican nominee Thom Tillis trotted out a new line of attack that his fellow Republican Senate candidate in Colorado, Cory Gardner, tried out this week too: Win over women voters by trying to seem in favor of greater access to contraception by pushing for over-the-counter access.
The flat, simple response to this is that pharmacists don’t insert IUDs and they don’t give you Depo shots, and buying the pill over the counter is a hell of a lot more expensive than getting it paid for by insurance. From the coverage I’ve seen, it looks like the Udall campaign took a while to spit out that response to the Gardner campaign, but I’m not reading the local papers in Colorado.
One of the these stories quotes a political scientist who says that attacking opponents as flip floppers isn’t proven to work. Maybe, but I’m a big fan of the “Who’s the real Cory Gardner” flavor of flip flopper ads. “Flip flopping” is a silly political game that’s easy to ignore. “Who’s the real Cory Gardner” is more of a core question of whether you can trust anything that comes out of their mouths.
Villago Delenda Est
Well, they’ve acknowledged they have a problem with women, and they’re adjusting their message (but, of course, not their policy) in yet another attempt to convince us that their shit does not stink.
Baud
Tillis is pushing the same line in North Carolina, so it’s a national strategy. Funny thing is I recall how much opposition there was the FDA was urging to make certain types of birth control available over-the-counter (Plan B?).
Anyway, the only voters that will fall for this are the voters that want to fall for this. Unfortunately, that group of voters may be decisive.
Schlemazel [was Schlemizel till NotMax taught me proper yiddish!]
We were in CO a couple weeks ago & the TV was saturated with ads mostly Udall v. douchebag. Douchebag had 3-4 different ones but all based on the evils of ‘Obamacare’ and how Udall was “THE DECIDING VOTE!!!” A charge I have heard made about Al Franken, a charge that shouldn’t work on any 10 yer old who has had a 3 grade civics class (so it DOES work on GOP voters).
Udall had a couple of ads that were only abut women & the right to birth control and choice. If douchebag flipped this hard they must be working. I know the wife’s family (rock-ribbed, pray over dinner christians) complained about the guys position & fully support BC and choice. It made me hopeful.
Lee
Here is an interesting story about reproductive rights.
The Dem candidate for Texas Gov just had a memoir published. In it she talks about the 2 pregnancies she terminated.
Here is a link to the story.
I’m very impressed she did this. Anyone else also see this as some serious political hardball?
WereBear
@Lee: That took some ‘nads.
I’m one of the people who has been saying for years “Don’t be Repub-Lite. State what we believe and sell it.”
Looks like this theory will be tested in the Laboratory of the States.
Schlemazel [was Schlemizel till NotMax taught me proper yiddish!]
@Lee:
Bless her, more people who have had the experience need to speak out to counteract the crazy. At this time & place it seems like political suicide, particularly in Texas. That took guts.
Iowa Old Lady
@Lee: Sadly, I think Davis may be too far ahead of the curve on this one. OTOH, the discourse on abortion would be strongly affected if women who’ve had one come out, so to speak. I’m reminded of Harvey Milk saying gays need to come out so people know who they’re talking about.
One thing that’s interesting is what gets classified as an abortion. According to the personhood people, for instance, ending a ectopic pregnancy must count. I once heard a woman say that the D&C she had wasn’t an abortion because she was bleeding to death.
shelley
Sure, get your birth control at the local pharmacy, unless of course, the pharmacist’s conscience won’t allow him to sell you these ‘slut drugs.’
WereBear
If you don’t put your hand on the curve it will never get bent.
Which wound up being more hipster-poetic than I planned, but I stand by my first draft.
Bobby Thomson
How very villager of you. Facts be damned, you know in your gut what the true narrative is.
Iowa Old Lady
@WereBear: That’s true too. And very zen.
Villago Delenda Est
@Lee: Wendy Davis most certainly has ovaries.
This puts her ahead of her dipshit opponent, who has no balls.
Villago Delenda Est
@Iowa Old Lady: It all depends on who is getting the procedure done. A good “Christian” woman, or some slutty slut.
Also, too, if it happens to you, well, IOKIYAR.
beth
I know that I’ve heard right wingers talking about the dangers of birth control pills and how the liberals aren’t telling you the truth about all the bad side effects. Now they’re so safe they can be sold over the counter like aspirin? They really do think women are idiots don’t they? (The sad part is that so many women won’t think twice about this flip-flop.)
skerry
Yesterday, Cosmopolitan magazine announced that they would be endorsing candidates for the first time – but only candidates that are pro-choice.
I think this is a huge move. They have a young adult audience that needs to understand how fragile their reproductive rights / choices are.
Trentrunner
I wish outlets like Vox would stop saying that Wendy Davis “admits” she had an abortion.
An abortion is (generally) private, but it’s not shameful.
One “admits” one has a drinking problem or ate the last piece of pie.
It’s no “admission” to say you’re gay or to say you had an abortion.
Win or lose (she’s overwhelmingly likely to lose, sadly), Davis did a good thing. Good on her. Milk is a good comparison.
scav
A quick reassurance that the sufficiently wealthy will always be able to get that which is anathematized as platform always goes down a treat. All the hard line posturing, the consequences thereof, are for those others, the hoi. Don,t fret your pretty little head.
Botsplainer
@beth:
The effort is about shoring up right-leaning women who are queasy about all the slut-shaming. Since making contraceptives OTC is a decision of the FDA (which has big issues with it, for obvious reasons), it’s a pander that never has to be acted on.
Politically, it’s like an Klukker voting for Alan Keyes in Illinois in 2004.
WereBear
I think events have proven Harvey Milk’s assertion to be correct. Be out, be proud, let the uncertain realize they have actually known gay people all their lives.
Villago Delenda Est
@WereBear: Not only have they known gay people all their lives, but the gay people are not what the homophobes say they are.
The homophobes (overwhelmingly “Christian”) project their own culture on to gays…the notion of “recruiting children” to be gay is a flat out projection of their own efforts to spread their memes.
Omnes Omnibus (the first of his name)
@Trentrunner: There was pie? Why wasn’t I told?
WereBear
@Villago Delenda Est: True. Their obsession with sin and coercion and eternal suffering is also pure projection.
In fact, it’s amazing Freud was Jewish, because modern fundamentalists prove every single one of his coping mechanisms.
Biscuits
@Lee:
I read that too. I wish more women would do what she’s done. I think it’s good when a women can say she’s had an abortion and is not ashamed of it. I had a friend (female) who thought abortion was evil and scandalous. I told her I had had one and was fine with it. No guilt or shame…at all. I know that’s not always the case, but she got the message that my decision was not hers to judge or make…full stop.
Villago Delenda Est
@Omnes Omnibus (the first of his name): Because we knew you’d be the one to eat the last piece.
bemused
I wonder how many conservative women actually believe it’s a terrific idea they should pay more for the pill otc they need for birth control or other health reasons than be covered by insurance or don’t think the pill should be covered by insurance at all. I just find it hard to believe large numbers of women are that foolish and self-punishing.
I’d like to know how many conservative legislators’ wives are availing themselves of insurance covered birth control and if those who do believe IOKIYAR but not for others.
WereBear
Unless they belong to a religion which makes a religion out of God wanting them to be exactly that.
skerry
@Trentrunner: This
Also, in my experience and contrary to the Vox tweet, women do talk about abortion. Just with each other. I know many of my friends who have had an abortion and they know about mine. I don’t know that any of my male friends know that I had one.
Villago Delenda Est
@bemused:
Oh, they’re not punishing themselves. They’re punishing those damn hussies who act like they’ve got agency.
Anoniminous
@skerry:
This is incredibly good news.
Wag
Let me from out on a limb here
Point one: Randomized clinical trials have proven that hormone revetments therapy increases risk of breast cancer and increases risks of blood clots and heart attacks in the first few years after starting therapy. As a rational result, physicians have prescribed much less HRT over the past decade than in the past
Point two: the GOP has firmly defended the unregulated nature of the vitamin/herbal suppliment industry for decades, in part citing the need for people to be able to make medical decisions (for good or ill) without governmental interference.
Point three: the average age of a woman supporting the GOP is mid fifties, well within the peri/post menopausal age range, where women often push hard for HRT. Physicians do a good job of educating women about the risks, so relatively few women start HRT
Point four: OCPs can be used for HRT
Point five: patients do a good job of hiding which supplements and OTC medications they take. Physicians do a crappy job of asking about these medications.
Point six: OTC status for OCPs opens the market to their use for HRT, increasing “freedom” for peri menopausal GOP voting women.
Just a thought experiment.
CaseyL
@bemused:
They are.
I once worked with a RW God Botherer who was deeply unhappy in her marriage, but insisted she couldn’t get divorced because staying was God’s plan for her. I asked why God wanted her to be miserable. She said something about how her happiness wasn’t the point; the point was obeying God.
The point of what? you may ask.
Getting into Heaven. She was serenely and totally convinced she was going to Heaven.
(Later, she did divorce him; I was no longer in touch with her, so I don’t know if she’s still a RW God Botherer.)
danielx
@Villago Delenda Est:
“You just make shit up.” – Jon Stewart to Ann Coulter
It ain’t like this is exactly a new tactic for Republicans. Hey, if it worked for Joey Goebbels…if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
bemused
@Villago Delenda Est:
Yes, sadly I also think this is a big motivator for conservative women biting off their own nose.
I’m unclear how buying OTC pill would work. Maybe I missed it but are the Republicans pushing this mentioning a doctor’s role in determining just what the right and safest pill is for the individual woman or do they think it is as simple as a man buying a condom?
Wag
@bemused:
This.
Micheline
Dems just need to respond by saying that “Women should have access to birth control either by prescription or over the counter.It not either/or; both options should be available to women.” Keep it simple.
Southern Beale
I’m so old, I remember when Republicans were AGAINST over-the-counter sales of the “morning after pill,” (not the abortion pill but the one that gives a high dose of hormones to prevent implantation) because BAYBEEEZ.
Hypocrites.
Wag
Of course the fop is wrong. Selecting birth control is NOT like buying a condom.
George carlin described OTC status for birth control really well in the 1970’s
Wag
Link fail
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@bemused: @Wag: I remember when Rush Limbaugh was railing about Sandra Fluke and demonstrating his lack of understanding about how birth control works, Rachel Maddow was as gleeful as a four year old with a new big wheel, “If I understand how birth control works better than you…” I think she even mentioned the fact that he was on his fourth (childless) marriage.
CaseyL
Goopers are wildly, utterly, completely ignorant about how women’s bodies work.
Remember Newt Gingrich’s saying women can’t be allowed in combat because they “come down with infections” every month?
Like everything else, they’re ignorant on this subject because they want to be. Knowing actual facts gets in the way of their ideology. This will not change.
Wag
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=htx_6REAZ9Q
Wag
See above for my link to George carlin on OTC birth control
Botsplainer
@CaseyL:
Newt undoubtedly rabbits, grunts and rolls over, leaving the mrs. to finish if she has any desire.
Mike in NC
The TV ads by Thom Tillis make me doubt that he can walk and chew gum at the same time. He really comes across as a complete imbecile. Yet somebody voted him into office.
WereBear
@Mike in NC: They vote for their own.
I’ve met Goopers with a sneaking admiration, “Why, that boy is stone stupid, and he does just fine!”
bemused
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Most Republican men don’t appear to know how birth control or a woman’s body works and have no interest in finding out or worse, for those who do understand, cheating women and their families is just collateral damage in the war to win.
It doesn’t matter how much they lie to their base. Their base likes it way.
Jewish Steel
@WereBear: There was once this president they called, W…
WereBear
@Jewish Steel: The dream of fuck-ups across this great nation…
JPL
@CaseyL: I met a woman who stayed married for two decades until god finally told her, she could divorce the man who beat her. I came close to saying that it wouldn’t take god that long to tell me.
Good for Wendy Davis opening up about her decision to end her pregnancies.
WereBear
@JPL: Funny how god never shows up to tell the guy to stop beating her… there’s never any sermons from the pulpit on the eeeeevils of beating a woman… and no one seems to fear the eternal lake o’ fire for so doing.
That particular religion sure is funny that way.
Mnemosyne
@bemused:
This. It’s one of those things that sounds reasonable unless you actually have enough knowledge to think it through. Plus, frankly, I’m guessing it’s appealing to really repressed women who are too embarrassed to discuss sex and birth control with their doctors.
Iowa Old Lady
@Wag: During the Hobby Lobby debate, some cardinal said women didn’t need health insurance for birth control because you could just buy it at a 7-11. So yeah, they think it’s like condoms.
WereBear
Do they want to know how anything works? They tend to be the most incurious of humans.
bemused
I think it’s embarrassing for a lot of guys to talk about male and female private parts other than in junior high boy trash talk and can be even more nasty about women’s parts. Ignorance and immaturity. Some guys never out grow out of that and I see it most in conservative men. If you think women are your lessers, it’s not a surprise that knowing much about women physically or emotionally isn’t something they think is worth their time.
bemused
@WereBear:
Yup, very incurious people which is why it’s no damn fun having anything but brief conversations with some of these folks. Boring as hell.
Good quote from somewhere: Reality is just wrong so you have to ignore it.
Ruckus
@WereBear:
They don’t need to know how anything works, they believe. Belief is enough, everything is in the bible. You do have to look real hard to find the passage about iPhones though.
Ruckus
@bemused:
It’s embarrassing because they never had any discussions other than jr high schoolyard giggles.
WereBear
LOL!
If I really want to make them leave me alone, I start asking them about sacrificing goats, or keeping kosher, or having slaves and multiple wives… Aren’t you a Bible believer? and they back off in a hurry.
bemused
@Ruckus:
Comprehensive sex ed in every school would go a long way to reducing that.
Villago Delenda Est
@bemused: It only encourages the kids to experiment.
No, really! They all pair up and start playing with each other’s junk because NOW they know what the junk is for.
Well, this is the theory, at least, of broomstick up the ass fuckheads who apparently were so unsocial as kids to have never played “Doctor”.
I remember my sex ed as constituting very dry explanation of the biology of reproduction with nary a word about how the wang makes it to the vay-jay-jay. That is, the entire social part of it, the human interaction that leads to sexual intercourse, was totally neglected because, well, we just can’t discuss that with 13 year olds who are now biologically capable of becoming parents, but are certainly not socially capable of that.
We’ll not even mention the importance of foreplay in getting to the magic moment, either.
bemused
@Villago Delenda Est:
So delusional. As if thoughts of experimenting would never enter kids’s minds if they didn’t have that corrupting sex ed. Idiots.
rikyrah
This is who they are.
But, the women’s gap has them shook.
bemused
@rikyrah:
I would hope they are shook but what can they or will they do about it? If they try to back off even a little from their anti-woman stances, they risk infuriating much of their base.
rikyrah
@bemused:
but, the lies are part of the ‘ reform’. Like women don’t know how they get birth control, and that it would mean far more expenses for them. It’s just supposed to get women to say, ‘ Oh, those Republicans want me to be able to get birth control over the counter, so they’re not anti-women’.
Never mind that they back PERSONHOOD, which would get rid of damn near all birth control.
but, women aren’t supposed to be able to connect the dots.
Villago Delenda Est
@rikyrah:
Well, of course not. It’s too hard, like math, or something.
bemused
@rikyrah:
@Villago Delenda Est:
Patting them on the head saying, “Now, now dear, don’t worry your little head about these things, just let us men folk take care of it for you”.
Villago Delenda Est
@bemused: The correct response to that statement is a knee in the junk.
Lee
Just in case anyone is still monitoring this thread and feels like trolling some forced-birth supports AND is not to opposed to being on reddit (so I’m down to …3 people?)
Here is a good thread.
evodevo
@CaseyL: “(Later, she did divorce him; I was no longer in touch with her, so I don’t know if she’s still a RW God Botherer.) ”
She probably is … all the fundies I work with are g-d bothering divorcees – some divorced twice. They all rationalize it somehow. AND there is total silence when I quote Jeebus on the subject (NO divorce, nohow, noway is basically what he said (Mark 10:11-12). Funny, that. They all believe in contraception, too. I call cherry-picking.