Penance At Other’s Expence: The Hypocrisy of Anti-Choice

Rick Santorum exudes an unbelievable hypocrisy over abortion.  You can read the article here. Basically, Mr. Santorum has it in mind to use the law to prohibit a medical procedure his wife had to go through in order to save her life.  As the piece makes clear, in October of 1996, Karen Santorum underwent an abortion in the 19th week of pregnancy in order to save her life from an infected fetus.  She had a 105 degree temperature.  She would have died without the procedue. Santorum would make that option illegal.  Basically, his position seems to be that sacrificing his wife for the fetus would be his choice now.  This overlooks the fact that had they not done the procedure, the fetus would not have survived, either.  He would have lost both.  Sacrifices to his conscience, which seems incapable of the kind of triage humans must make all the time. Well and good, some people just can’t go there.  But this man is running for president.  He intends that his personal inability to cope be made a national policy of denying anyone the choice of coping. [More . . . ]

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AT&T and Verizon’s wireless duopoly is on the rise and it will hurt YOU

John Conyers, Jr. (D-Mich.) and Congressman Ed Markey (D-Mass.) held a press conference to raise antitrust and public interest concerns surrounding the proposed merger of AT&T and T-Mobile wireless telecommunication companies.  Markey explained further:

The AT&T - T–Mobile deal is like a telecommunications time machine that would send consumers back to a bygone era of high prices and limited choice,” said Markey. “AT&T and Verizon have divided the nation into Bell East and Bell West. Approving consolidation of the number of nationwide carriers from 4 to 3 and then inevitably to 2 would return consumers to a duopoly in the national wireless market. This would be an historic mistake. Consumers will be tipped upside down, with the money shaken out of their pockets as the lack of competition leads to higher prices. It is innovation and investment in new technology that ultimately leads to the changes that protect consumers and promote competition. Anything less is a huge step backwards for our country’s ability to compete and win in the global marketplace.

Here is an excerpt from Free Press:

AT&T and Verizon would control nearly 80 percent of the market for mobile telecommunications.

As a result of the merger, the wireless market would be more consolidated than the markets for oil, banking, automobiles and air travel. What does that mean? It means that to achieve comparable consolidation in the oil industry, ExxonMobil would have to merge with BP, Shell, Chevron-Texaco and Citgo. And to make the comparison still more accurate, Exxon would not only have to merge, but would require you to buy only Exxon gas for the next two years.

We should all be concerned about this level of concentration in the market for a service that all Americans increasingly depend on. Mobile service is as critical for families as affordable, reliable water and electricity, and communities who can least afford to pay more will bear the cost of lining AT&T’s corporate coffers. That’s why 50 organizations dedicated to social justice filed a letter today with the Department of Justice and the FCC opposing the merger.

In 1984, when the Justice Department broke up the old Ma Bell, the prevailing consensus was that AT&T had gotten too big. But the AT&T-T-Mobile merger would create a behemoth that’s substantially bigger than the old Bell conglomerate. It really is 1984 all over again.

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United States Citizen Consent Form and Survey

I suspect that only a smallish minority of people deeply care about the many dramatic political and legal changes that have been occurring in the United States over the past ten years. Just to make sure, though, I have created a United States Citizen Consent Form and Survey, and I would like to propose that it be distributed to all U.S. citizens and they be compelled to fill it out by federal mandate.

Maybe the results will substantiate my fears that I am an outsider living in what used to be my own country.

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“Retard” and other disability-insults.

The word "retard" possessed dual meanings for a long time. First used as a term for intellectual disability in 1788, the word took on a pejorative sense in the 1970s. For thirty years the two meanings curiously co-existed. Universities had "Mental Retardation and Developmental Disability" Departments and students who drunkenly called one another 'retards' for lobbing bad beer-pong balls, and the two existed in tandem. But once medical and social service experts finally disavowed the word 'retard', it vanished from official usage with amazing swiftness. The Special Olympics ceased using the 'r-word' in 2004, initiating the trend. In 2006, the (former) American Association of Mental Retardation changed its name to the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities. By 2008, Special Olympics turned the abolishment of 'retard' into a full-time effort and launched R-word.org. The site protested the derogatory use of 'retard' (including a protest campaign against the 2008 film Tropic Thunder, which featured a lengthy discussion on 'retard' roles in film). Special Olympics and R-word.org also pushed for their fellow disability-service organizations to drop the term. In 2010, 'retard' was legally banished from the professional lexicon. On October 5 of last year, Obama signed "Rosa's Law", which banned the use of "retard" in all federal health, education, and labor policy. "Intellectual disability" and "developmental disability" became the approved nomenclature. Non-federal organizations followed hastily: in Ohio, Google directs you to the "Department of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities", but the website itself has already been scrubbed of the R-word(even if the url still has the dreaded 'r' in it). It's official: 'retard' has no place in formal usage. Once a medical term for someone with an intellectual disability, it lives now only as an insult. One that means, roughly, unintelligent. Like moron, which began as medical terminology for one with a mental age of 8 to 12. Or imbecile, which meant 'a mental age of 6 to 9'.

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