Harbingers of a Majority

For Canadian readers of DJ! who may not be following events in the Excited States, two matters. And they do matter, because if Stevie Peevie gets a Majority, this is exactly where Canada is headed.

Item 1

This week Rethugicans stole the Wisconsin Supreme Court election -- I know, weird to elect judges, but hey, otherwise they might be 'activist' judges.

A little back ground: when Rethug Gov Scott Walker pulled his TeaBag-, Majority- and Koch-feuled union-busting attack on the middle class, a number of recall efforts started, but democrats (small and Large) saw an early chance to rebuke (at least) the Thugs in the Supreme Court election on April 5. The good people of Wisconsin campaigned hard for a woman named JoAnne Kloppenberg (D) against incumbent David Prosser (R).

And for a heady but short time, it looked like they were winning a little. Kloppenberg held a 204-vote lead.

Then, ooopsie!

The Political wing of the Tea Party Terrorists have found 7,582 votes for their pet Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate.

The Clerk involved took her computer systems off the State network so vote tallies could not be verified. Some history:

Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus’ decision to go it alone in how she collects and maintains election results has some county officials raising a red flag about the integrity of the system.

Nickolaus said she decided to take the election data collection and storage system off the county’s computer network – and keep it on stand-alone personal computers accessible only in her office – for security reasons.

Check the link for Nickolaus's history of electoral oopsies.

And, oddly enough, the 'found' votes are just enough to avoid a state-funded recount. So, if anyone wants to investigate, it's gonna cost big time. Remember Al Franken's long drawn-out ordeal?

When Michael Moore said: 'They may have the money but we have the numbers', perhaps he should have added: 'But then again, they have the money to corrupt the numbers'.

Sad and disheartening as that is -- not to mention the precursor of much more to come -- dig this.

Item 2

The entire US federal government is about to grind to a halt over Planned Parenthood.

Yes, ladies, the greatest country in the world will stop paying its bills and its soldiers, teachers, and public servants because you sluts insist on having some say over your own bodies, or to use the latest swear word, 'uterus'.

Negotiations on the federal budget failed yet again last night, with reports coming out of Washington that the two parties are more or less in agreement on the numbers, but that they cannot agree on several “social” issues:

Republicans are threatening to shut down the government unless Democrats agree to cut funding for Planned Parenthood. They’re also demanding the de-funding of the UN Populations Fund and the Environmental Protection Agency, because if you’re slutty enough to get accidentally pregnant, your unplanned children don’t deserve to breathe clean air.

Here’s what the Republicans are demanding, in convenient and infuriating bullet point form, thanks to the New York Times:

• No federal financing for Planned Parenthood because it performs abortions. Instead, state administration of federal family planning funds, which means that Republican governors and legislatures will not spend them.
• No local financing for abortion services in the District of Columbia.
• No foreign aid to countries that might use the money for abortion or family planning. And no aid to the United Nations Population Fund, which supports family-planning services.

'More or less in agreement' except for UTERUSES GOING ROGUE!!!!!

(Aside to skeptics: Yes, at DJ!, we do occasionally exaggerate. Check the bloody links. This is true.)

OK, the Excited States have always been particularly insane when it comes to abortion and women's rights. But they gone totally batshitoverthetoploco BECAUSE last November's elections gave the Tea Baggers a Majority.

Majority, as in 'we can do whatever the fuck we want and you can go suck lemons' or bleach or Lysol or other creative concoctions.

Again, we are taught that women's rights are always negotiable.

Coincidentally, a gang of NeoTheoCons here in Canada, who happen to number way too many fetus fetishists among them, want the very same thing. A Majority.

And they need us wimmins on their side -- or the sidelines -- in order to get it.

We cannot let this happen.

Vote. Vote strategically.

And drag every woman you know -- and every friend of women -- to the polls.

There's a saying: 'When fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag and waving a cross.'

Well, when it comes to Canada, it will come wrapped in apathy and waving a double-double.

Vicious, Vindictive Vultures

You remember the Vulture Culture, don't you?

Here is deBeauxOs's definition of it:

It's a loose alliance of fetus fetishists, religious fundamentalists, neocon rightwing authoritarians and women-haters that have come together in one MASSIVE shriek-fest for the purpose of re-criminalizing abortion. Some of them engineered last year's fiasco, The Pill Kills! campaign.

They're at it again. LifeShite sights a kill:

The director of the pro-life group Citizens for a Pro-Life Society (CPLS) is calling on pro-lifers across America to respectfully urge Cardinal Sean O'Malley of the Boston Archdiocese not to allow the passing of notorious pro-abortion advocate Sen. Ted Kennedy to be honored with a public Catholic funeral.

And other vultures begin to circle.

Vicious, vindictive, and absolutely despicable. And sooooo christian.

ADDED: If you'd like to counter the fetus fetishists' cruel campaign, I'll save you from a visit to those odious sites. Here is the contact info for Cardinal O'Malley.

phone: 617 782-2544
email: sdiago@rcab.org

I-See-Dead-People: Palin and her sycophant.

Last year, The Fetus©™ fetishists went on the rampage, claiming that recipients of the Order of Canada would return their snowflake medals in the hundreds, as a protest against Morgentaler's award. To date, the convergence of various astroturf zygote zealot organizations has produced 10 returned medals, including one from a priest convicted of physically abusing 2 children in his care, and three deceased recipients. Those who presume to defend the interests of the "pre-born" now also speak for the post-dead.

In a recent post, Blob Blogging Wingnut yammered:

"I recently read the story of someone I knew who told me his mother almost aborted him, but at the last minute decided against it. I was rather blown away by the thought that he might never have existed-- all those years, he would have been non-existent. You might object: but you would not have been none the wiser. But the truth is, just because you don't know something doesn't mean reality has not been altered. His person would not have been around to enrich his world. The world would have been poorer without his presence. More and more of these people will be coming to prominence."

As always, SUZIE ALL-CAPS's ideological glurge has the capacity to stun, with all the finesse of a RCMP-wielded Taser™. Someone with a secret Magisterium decoder might understand the above tirade.

In this SHE ressembles HER idol, Sarah Palin who has a similar way with words.

Funny how Sarah and Sainte-Nitouche never "see" any of the hundreds of thousands of women who have died as a result of AIDS, ectopic pregnancies, and self-administered or illicit abortions.

They may “see-dead-people” but only the ones that it is politically expedient for them to see.

And furthermore: Go read Ann Leary, a US citizen who provides a heartwarming/hearwrenching first-person account of her experience with the UK National Health Service when she went into premature labour, here.

Merci to BlastFurnaceCanada for that!

Hey! we said it FIRST!

One vulture to the other: "If something doesn't die soon, one of us will have to go kill it."



Whoever said that imitation is the most sincere form of flattery is wrOng.

By way of Blob Blogging Wingnut, I discovered that a US apologist for Dr Tiller's public execution has re-purposed the term that DAMMIT JANET! coined in 2008 - Vulture Culture - in support of his own pro-lie, anti-abortion position.

If you're wondering how he came across the expression, a post that I wrote last Sunday Pity the poor abortion criminalizers was reposted here, by the blogger Kansas Jackass.

Robert DeWitt's tactic comes directly from the Karl Rove playbook: if your opponents corner you & you can't find a better, bigger, more powerful comeback, steal theirs and try to use it against them.

Pity the poor fetus fetishists: they have no scruples or imagination.

Venomous Vultures

That is the only appropriate qualifier for the author of this shriEEEkkk!!! rant passing itself off as a reasonable opinion piece.

You remember the Vulture Culture, don't you? It's a loose alliance of fetus fetishists, religious fundamentalists, neocon rightwing authoritarians and women-haters that have come together in one MASSIVE shriek-fest for the purpose of re-criminalizing abortion. Some of them engineered last year's fiasco, The Pill Kills! campaign.

As for the drivel posted at KX.net, the standard disclaimer distances the site owner from the poison oozing from the rant:

This article is a blog post and does not represent the views or opinions of Reiten Television, KXNet.com, its staff and associates ....

But of course. Consider this gem:

What’s also stupid is this notion that abortions are somehow saving these children from lives of hardship when, in reality, most abortions are basically just birth control exercised by women too lazy or careless to either live their sexual lives responsible or face up to the consequences of their irresponsible actions. The pro-abortion crowd loves to emotionalize this issue with stories about women who allegedly would have died in pregnancy were it not for abortion, or babies who would be born with awful birth defects, but the truth is that the occurrence of these cases in overall abortion cases is so low as to be inconsequential.

Aside from the self-righteous preachiness and contempt for women, this statement trivializes women who have died in pregnancy. Women who chose pregnancy and who were confronted with state legislators, health care providers and hospital administrators who supported extraordinary medical interventions to "save" the embryos or fetus they carried - by depriving them of their own right to life.

Vulture culture zealots - because dead flesh excites them and turns their crank.

Update on the carrion gang - I wrote this before I read JJ and her blogpost at unrepentantoldhippie's about the fetus fetishists' internet pile-on when news regarding the Montana plane crash disclosed that nine members of the same family, seven of them children under the age of nine, were related to Irving Feltkamp, who owns a chain of clinics that offer abortion services.

So, about those vultures who feast on carnage? Look no further than Jill Stanek, exploiting this family tragedy with bloody beak and sharpened claws and shrieeeking about the righteousness of her fundamentalist God's vicious and unholy revenge.

No-choice Vulture Culture: let women die or go to prison

The vituperative backlash of no-choicers, following the announcement that Dr Henry Morgentaler would be awarded the Order of Canada, was informative. Like maggots suddenly exposed to the light, the no-choicers scurried about, firing off letters to the editor, freeping online opinion polls, shoving the usual suspects - Margaret Somerville et al - into public view to spout the fetus fetishizing party line. CanWest obliged them, in great numbers.

It was thus no surprise that middle-of-the road Canadians, that ’silent majority’ that abortion criminalizers claim as supporters, recoiled from the hateful propaganda and deliberate lies and declared themselves to favour the decision to honour Morgentaler.

There is history behind all of this brouhaha, and a Montreal Gazette reporter writes about it:

When Sharon Hager finally got a abortion in 1964, she feared it would kill her. “It was hell, terrible. I thought I was going to die,” recalled Hager, then 20 and living in Vancouver.“It was illegal to have an abortion and it almost impossible to find someone to do it. A man who called himself a doctor - and you didn’t know for sure he was - came to my home and on the kitchen table put gauze in my womb and broke my water. … That’s what it was like before Dr. Morgentaler,” said Hager, later a member of the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada. “People forget how terrible it was for women.”

Many of us remember. The Royal Victoria Hospital, mentioned in the Gazette article, is where my friend O trained.
There is also a compelling background to the booklet that was produced by a group of students at McGill University in the 1960’s. In her 2006 essay, Christabelle Sethna traces the evolution and the context of the Birth Control Handbook. This list (quoted in The Gazette article) from the 1971 BCH - as it was known - details the fatal dangers of illegal abortion techniques, self-induced or assisted.

… These methods involve extreme pain and can lead to permanent disability, infection or death.

Oral means: Nothing that is swallowed can cause abortion without also causing death or severe disability to the mother.
• Ergot compounds- overdose is poison.
• Quinine sulphate - can cause deformities in fetus or death to mother.

Solids inserted into uterus: Common danger of perforation of womb and
bladder - death from infection or hemorrhage.
• Knitting needles
• Coat hangers
• Slippery Elm bark
• Ballpoint pen
• Pastes
• Catheters
• Gauze (packing)
• Curtain rods
• Telephone wire

Fluids inserted into the uterus: Severe burning of tissues, hemorrhage,
shock and possible death.
• Soap suds
• Alcohol
• Potassium permanganate
• Lye
• Lysol
• Pine oil

Air pumped into uterus: gas emboli in the blood stream. Immediately
fatal.

Injections into uterine wall: Overdose is toxic.
• Ergot
• Pytocin
• Sodium pentothal

Vacuum cleaner: Connected to uterus - not to be confused with vacuum
aspiration - is fatal almost immediately. Rips uterus from pelvic area.

Even though they claim to be ‘the culture of life’, no-choicers have declared their intent to criminalize abortion and, in effect, to return to the days of illegal abortions. As Antonia Zerbasias notes and quotes in this article, no-choicers propose that women who attempt to terminate an abortion be charged and prosecuted.

Mary Ellen Douglas, National Organizer, Campaign Life Coalition: Our society has denied justice for unborn children who are killed daily in their mothers’ wombs at the request of the mother. We need
to correct this and return that protection to the unborn. It then follows that jail time for those who commit the crime of abortion is not only just, but absolutely necessary.

This is the future that women dealing with unintended pregnancies will face, if the no-choice Vulture Culture re-criminalizes abortion.

First posted at Birth Pangs.

Any difference between abortion criminalizer and vulture?

What’s the difference between vultures and C-484 supporters?

None.

Vultures are carrion scavengers. C-484 supporters, and this one in particular, have become obsessively concerned with dead pregnant women.

Members of the Vulture Culture display photographs of them. They feed off the tragedy of their deaths. They fabricate lies and spin propaganda around the violent and brutal murder of these women. They revel in all the gory details and plot retribution because that discourse is familiar to them.

Feminist organizations have, over decades, opened shelters for women and children escaping domestic violence. They have advocated for the rights of women and children for safety, and for protection from those who batter them. They have worked with elected officials to change laws and with municipal police to improve their staff training and their services.

But according to the screed from a Blob Blogging Wingnut, feminists do not care about Amanda Power or her pregnancy or her death. Note the absence of any substantive documentation for the spurious statements SHE makes. Abortion criminalizers, under the camouflage of their suddenly awakened and overweening concern for violence against women, are supporting C-484. In a bid to create media-savvy optics, they have recruited grieving family members as props in their campaign to deny that this bill will provide them with an opportunity to limit women’s reproductive choices.

That’s the thing about vultures. They stink so much, they can’t distinguish their own stench from the rot that surrounds them.

First posted at Birth Pangs.