(Ted Rall via GoComics.com)
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By request (and how soon you bet Cole bumps this down?) Mock the team or sport of your choice.
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ETA: Twelve/Nineteen minutes, depending. See, it works!
“The Real War on Moms Has A Mortality Rate”
Excellent reminder by Sara Mead, guesting at the Washington Monthly, on what the statistics say about our national priorities:
… One of the distasteful things about the tendency to label all sorts of debates or initiatives as “wars” is that in real wars, people die. But the reality is that a shockingly high number of American moms are dying for preventable reasons. The U.S. Maternal Mortality Ratio (the number of maternal deaths per 100,000 live births) is shockingly high, well above the average for the developed world, and higher than virtually all of Western Europe as well as some countries in Asia and the Middle East. Even more troubling, U.S. maternal mortality has increased in the last two decades, and is now more than twice as high as it was in the late 1980s. The Affordable Care Act included provisions designed to help stop this scary trend—not just by expanding health care access (many maternal deaths could be prevented with proper care)—but also through the Maternal, Infant and Early Childhood Home Visiting program, created as part of ACA, which provides nurses and social workers to work with high-risk moms, starting before they give birth, to help them have healthy pregnancies and deliveries and support their babies’ health and development after birth.The program is modeled after programs, such as the Nurse Family Partnership that have a strong track record of improving maternal and child outcomes, preventing abuse and neglect, increasing fathers’ involvement in their kids’ lives, improving kids’ school performance, reducing crime, and saving the taxpayers a boatload of money over the long term. But all that could go the way of the dodo, if ACA is struck down or repealed (and some of the right wing fear-mongering about this program must be seen to be believed).
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For all we hear about “family friendly” conservatives promoting traditional families to keep us from going the way of G-d-forsaken Europe, the reality is that the U.S. actually has a higher percentage of infants and toddlers in childcare (as opposed to home with mom) than all the OECD countries except Denmark, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden (and we’re closer to Sweden than we are to the OECD average). That’s the direct result of policy choices we’ve made, including the total absence of paid parental leave (for which we stand alone among developed countries, in a small and shrinking field that includes Papau New Guinea, Swaziland, and Lesotho). And even as the recession has increased the number of moms of very young children in the workforce, states have cut funding for child care and made it harder to get in other ways as well…
For better or worse, ours is a capitalist society, and in a capitalist society anything “priceless” is by definition worthless. If the politicians and other grifters snuffling about “mommies driving the economy” and “our precious, precious children” actually cared about the real women & children outside their own gated communities, they’d talk less about giving the so-called job creators further breaks and more about supporting the next generation and the people doing the hard work of raising them.
“The Real War on Moms Has A Mortality Rate”Post + Comments (45)
I like a series of skirmishes better than a war, turns out
We made some Obama organizing calls last Tuesday night, before pundit-gate, so I’ll go ahead and give you my take on the war on women because I haven’t seen it anywhere. Maybe I’m alone in this, who knows.
We had five callers Tuesday. Four were women. All of the women mentioned the war on women. We were all smiling benevolently and constantly at this guy, too, in a mildly creepy way that might have made him uncomfortable, because, you know, he’s helping us. He was not actually there to do that, help women win the the war on women, specifically. For all I know he came because he’s concerned about marginal tax rates but we just collectively decided he was there for us:
I think the response to the onslaught of commands targeted at women was one of those things that bubble up. It had the slow-build feel to me of authentic anger that comes from ordinary people, slowly but surely. That’s why it was so heartening (and really interesting) to watch it develop, here locally, on the site and elsewhere. In purely practical terms, I think the state-by-state nature of the thing helped. Women were watching this crazy single-minded focus in state after state after state, where they live, for close to two years. When it blew up nationally, with Komen and then Obama versus the council of clerics and Rush Limbaugh, they, we, a lot of us, were already halfway there. I know that Democrats and political pros saw it and named it and pushed it, I recognize all that, but I think that was a collateral assist to something authentic that was actually happening “on the ground”. Too, female congressional Democrats are constantly talking about these issues, and they’re usually completely ignored. This was different.
There are some comparisons that fit, I think. One that comes to mind is Issue Two in Ohio, where a really massive majority rejected gutting collective bargaining. Unions ran a great logistical campaign, but all they did is focus what was already there. That’s not nothing, what unions did, it doesn’t matter how many grim and determined people one has if they don’t have a path to translate that into something productive, but the union organizing and spending on ads was tapping into what was there. I passed petitions and held events, but I wasn’t doing any persuading. I was quite literally just collecting signatures and holding events.
The Culture of Corruption (2006) was another one that felt this way to me. The GOP Congress that year was really corrupt, and people really did know that. The state issue here in Ohio, the thing that bubbled up from below, was that the state-level Republicans were ALSO incredibly corrupt in 2006. By the time Culture of Corruption was national, big majorities here were wholly convinced. National Democrats named and pushed something that already existed.
These issues had a nice, us against them, underground feel to me, talking to people here. It’s like there’s this “national conversation” (everyone hates unions, rightfully, because everyone knows unions suck; women are whiny sluts and most people will side with the bishops; Tom Delay isn’t THAT corrupt, both sides do it) and then there’s this whole other conversation going on. I love when that happens, because those issues are ours, they belong to us, if only for the time before the professionals grab them and frame them. When that happens, when we become pundit-fodder, they’re all but proclaiming that hostilities have ended and they’re pushing us back into some boring, comfortable groove that they love like The Mommy Wars, something safe and familiar, because, Jesus, talking about mandated trans-vaginal ultrasounds and aspirin between our legs is uncomfortable. That’s a little too…real. It couldn’t last.
The war on women was over for political media the moment Mitt Romney’s handlers came up with a strategy, and Ann Romney and professional pundits then began discussing, framing, defining and then redefining the issue. They’re done with ordinary women and what I believe was our authentic anger on this. It’s now in the hands of the pros and it will be put into context and watered down and explained away. I think it was inevitable. It was just a matter of time and the right opportunity. It doesn’t necessarily mean the authentic ground-level energy goes away, but I was still sad to see it happen.
I like a series of skirmishes better than a war, turns outPost + Comments (102)
ranking culture and other contributors to rising tuitions
I’ve been writing for quite some time about the destructive rise in college tuition and how to stop it. One aspect that is underdiscussed is how the US News and World Report rankings, and the culture they help create, contribute to the rise in tuition and student loan debt.
As I’ve long argued, two of the primary drivers of college costs are the rise in administrative costs and rampant physical expansion. These might seem like unconnected phenomena, but in fact I think the speak to one dynamic: the rise of thinking about college as a kind of resort where you also happen to take classes. Administrative creep is present in any human bureaucracy, of course, but a big part of the reason that colleges hire so many administrators is because they are running so many programs. At a large school, the number of purely extracurricular activities, organizations, groups, charities, campaigns, and sundry others is frankly incredible. All of this stuff costs money to run, and nowhere more prominently than in hiring more administrators. Meanwhile, while the recession appears to have somewhat leveled off the building boom, too many colleges are still building too many new buildings or renovating buildings that don’t absolutely need it.
ranking culture and other contributors to rising tuitionsPost + Comments (78)
God and guns
This just seems strange and offensive to me, using a child with a debilitating genetic condition as a pro-gun prop:
Rick Santorum unveiled some new details about his three-year-old daughter, Bella, while speaking at the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting in St. Louis on Friday.
“(My wife) Karen and I are life members of the NRA, and we wanted to announce today that…now Bella is a life member of the NRA, too,” Santorum said.
Heroic Penguin Bites Newt Gingrich (Open Thread)
This really happened, apparently, but I can find damn little information on the flightless counterinsurgency. MSNBC inexcusably relegates THE story to an introductory clause, an item in a list and then posts boring shite everyone already knows about Gingrich’s awful, awful campaign:
The day after Newt Gingrich was bit by a penguin at a zoo, he acknowledged he is “the underdog” and said his campaign began renting their donor list because they needed money.
[snip]Following a tour of the NASCAR museum, Gingrich said he spoke with Santorum in St. Louis, Mo. but only briefly. (This was the same day the Speaker visited the St. Louis Zoo, was nipped by a penguin and met a tiger named Callista – just like his wife, he joked to reporters.)
Jaysus! Where are the photos of the penguin attack? Where is the site a grateful public can use to contribute money to purchase herring treats for that penguin? As for Callista the tigress, somehow, it made me think of this:
There was a young lady of Niger
Who smiled as she rode on a tiger;
They returned from the ride
With the lady inside,
And the smile on the face of the tiger.
Newt has to sleep some time.
Heroic Penguin Bites Newt Gingrich (Open Thread)Post + Comments (29)
We Don’t Need No Education
North Carolina Rep. Virginia Foxx went on convicted felon G. Gordon Liddy’s wingnut talk radio show last week to denounce all these students and recent college grads who are bitching about their student loans:
I went through school, I worked my way through, it took me seven years, I never borrowed a dime of money. He borrowed a little bit because we both were totally on our own when we went to college, totally. […] I have very little tolerance for people who tell me that they graduate with $200,000 of debt or even $80,000 of debt because there’s no reason for that. We live in an opportunity society and people are forgetting that. I remind folks all the time that the Declaration of Independence says “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” You don’t have it dumped in your lap.
Of course, the expense today’s students incur is a bit more steep than the cost of obtaining a Bachelor of Science in Dinosaur Husbandry during Foxx’s youth, even spread out across seven years. How much more? It’s hard to do a direct comparison since not all of the chiseled stone tablets used to record educational expenses in Foxx’s day have been digitalized. But here’s a chart that illustrates how tuition costs have risen since 1985:
Could a near 600% increase have something to do with ballooning student indebtedness? Possibly! Here’s the punchline: Foxx chairs the House Subcommittee on Higher Education. Hahahaha!
[X-posted at Rumproast]