Mississippi: Civil rights for cells?

 

November 8th, Mississippi voters will will either support or defeat a proposition that would give a fertilized human egg the same legal rights and protections under the State’s Constitution that apply to living breathing people.

Few voters in Mississippi would bother to turn out to support particulars of defining the legal status of the fusion of two haploid gametes. Most folks might think that was a pair of some new deer species and the vote would regulate its hunting season.

But clarification of those biological terms quickly spread in evangelical conservative code for anti-abortion, suddenly making zygotes, diploid cells and gametes candidates for legal ‘personhood’ among the fervent and zealous.

The Mississippi proposition’s draconian redefinition of abortion and commonly used methods of contraception as murder would do away with a woman’s rights to make her own decisions about childbearing. The so-called ‘personhood’ measure seeks to do away with those rights guaranteed under the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.

Such a state constitutional change would not only ban all abortion care but could also outlaw many common forms of birth control, limit medical treatment options for pregnant women and ban reproductive technologies such as in-vitro fertilization.

This was tried in Colorado twice, in 2008 and 2010 and voters overwhelmingly defeated the ballot measures each time.

But that that was Colorado and this is Mississippi, the state that tops the Gallup poll list of America's most frequent churchgoers with 63% of the population attending church weekly or almost every week. Vermont, incidentally, has the least churchgoers with only 23% attending regularly, but then they are a bunch of Yankees.

Mississippi's strong religious voice has long determined what folks can and can't do in the state. Alcohol was made illegal in 1907, and Mississippi was the last state to repeal Prohibition in 1966. When I moved here to the gulf coast in 1980, sale of alcohol was from state controlled “package stores,” whose signs had to be flat against the building and in letters of a specified size. No neon and no hanging signs like other stores.

I stopped in one my first week here for a bottle of sour mash bourbon and after ringing up the purchase, the nice lady leaned over the counter and asked, sweetly and helpfully, if I “wanted a Baptist Bag.” I must have had a totally puzzled look so she pulled a regular large brown grocery bag from under the counter and mentioned that “lots of customers prefer to carry out their bottles in this kind of bag.” At the time, I found this all rather provincially colorful.

Thirty one years later you still cannot buy hard liquor on a Sunday even in the "wet" counties, and Mississippi’s provincialism has a much darker hue today that is potentially much more dangerous. Many evangelical and fundamentalist believers now want to impose their narrow, extreme beliefs down to the human cellular level upon all who live in the State of Mississippi.

And with 63% of the population being steady church goers ... and voters, both the Republican and Democratic candidates for governor are making it clear that legal human rights for a single fertilized human egg is just peachy with them.

Abortion foes piously proclaiming their belief in the sanctity of life seem to look at that sanctity differently regarding Mississippi’s death penalty. Their opposition to family planning, birth control and contraception is loud and clear, but there seem to be no voices raised against the biblical evils of fornication. The libidinous Viagra and Cialis commercials still dominate the nightly news.

November the 8th will show if Mississippi’s reckless religious fundamentalists would, as The New York Times noted, “ … protect zygotes at the expense of all women while creating a legal quagmire - at least until the courts rule it unconstitutional, as they should.”

I have to hope that Mississippi will ultimately not vote to support this attempt by a vocal segment of organized religion to limit the personal and civil rights of the women who live here.

But then again, as far as civil rights are concerned, from the cellular level on up, we have to realize that it was just one year ago that a federal judge ordered the Walthall County School District in Mississippi to halt policies that had allowed some of its district’s schools and classes to become segregated ... again. Segregation was outlawed in 1970.

Graphic by Larry Ray

Tattered Leadership and Toxic Tea

A fetid brew of public ignorance and indifference flavored with abject partisan stubbornness forms the growth medium in America's political petri dish. A virulent voter virus feeds upon it, spreading a plague of indecision, impotence, Presidential pusillanimity, and contemptible congressional charade.

The voter virus was created by pseudo patriotism and the excesses of a previous decade of lax government whose singular priority was to reward the already wealthy.

Sober regulation of our banking and real estate industries was blithely and irresponsibly sidestepped for more than a decade. Then in late 2008 Wall Street's wild, reckless ride came to a crashing halt.  Finally the virus was loosed, infecting the American economy and reducing it to a rattling house of tumbling cards, all jokers.

Since 2009, more time has been spent in assigning political blame by our elected leaders than in launching a vigorous joint effort to cure and strengthen our economically bedridden nation. Confused Americans have not questioned flawed and false narratives from a brash, opportunistic and well funded conservative chorus.

Repeated GOP mantras shamelessly blame the new black

democratic president for the entire mess, for all the nation's out of control spending. But these duplicitous accusers never acknowledge the inherited debt racked up and left by their party.

This absurdity was parlayed into political propaganda gold by tax free groups, notably the "American Legislative Exchange Council" formed in 1973 by conservative activists. Finally, their time had come after the bruising they took in the 2008 Democratic election sweep. Millions of dollars from the ultra conservative billionaire Koch brothers slid into these "Councils" as fast as they could qualify for non-profit status.

The word "debt" is understood by everyone, and when the GOP heralded "an out of control national debt that must be stopped at all costs," the warning was accepted as readily as an FDA ordered ground turkey alert after a multi-state Salmonella outbreak.

Raising the U.S. debt ceiling, was routinely done eight times under the Bush administration and countless other times all the way back to 1917 with no serious opposition whatsoever. But now "Debt Ceiling" was suddenly spotlighted and used as the hostage in a mad extortion plot.

Freshmen congressmen wearing tea bags as blinders had signed pledges to "change government in Washington" and their zealous naivete and self righteousness quickly clogged the old boy congressional sewer pipe leaving rookie Speaker of the House, John Boehner unable to control his GOP vote.

The new conservative clog, after first finding their offices, quickly found the C-Span TV cameras and began to immediately promise their admiring ideologues back home that they would let America go into default unless a sweeping but ill defined debt reduction bill was passed and signed by the president.

Most of these freshmen had no idea of how or why the debt ceiling has operated since 1917 or what the ruinous consequences of default would be. And they wore their ignorance as a badge of courage.

But back in November, 2010, Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell made the GOP goals and strategy crystal clear, setting the stage for the debt ceiling drama to come some seven months later. McConnell loftily proclaimed on national TV that if President Barack Obama wouldn't go along with his key GOP goals, "the only way to do all these things is to put someone in the White House who won't veto any of these things."

After 27 years in the isolated, nurturing environment of the U.S. Senate McConnell, who is worth an estimated $35 million dollars, has become the dour poster boy for America's out of touch professional politicians. There are no poor people in elected office up in Washington.

Blinded by wealth and power, McConnell angrily told the nation that his forces would make the president bend to their will or they would have him removed ... chilling echos from the 15th Century and the pronouncements from the House of Medici. And from that point forward with a new House majority all GOP votes were NO, hobbling the president and actively designed to make his life as difficult as possible.

Now, just moments ago, like the ending to a cookie-cutter Hollywood movie, Speaker John Boehner finally unclogged the congressional sewer main, and repacked the House sausage machine producing a 269-161 vote approving a budget agreement, thus certainly ending the threat of a U.S. Treasury debt default, and setting the stage for a heroic rally on the US and foreign stock markets.

Boehner sent the winning sausage recipe on to the Senate tonight where it is expected to be approved tomorrow, and sent to President Obama for signature, leaving a full twelve hours before the Treasury Department would have gone into default for the first time in the nation's history.

Both chambers on The Hill think they have swallowed bitter pills but they weren't strong enough medicine to wipe out the voter virus. As America's woes worsen, the voter virus will thrive on increasing universal voter disgust with the endlessly sorry and unacceptable performance of their House and Senate leaders.

The voter virus is predicted to attack the CDC (Completely Dysfunctional Congress) and erupt into a nationwide epidemic on November 6th, 2012. Mark your calenders.

Graphic by Larry Ray

US Debt Ceiling: A Quick Refresher Course

I posted this article in June, 2009. The spending and debt figures were taken from the Congressional Budget Office. It occurs to me that this article, even more valid two years after it was written, should be required reading for voters as well as the ignorant, deluded, greedy fabulists in Washington who are flirting with fiscal disaster for our Nation. Mitch McConnell, Mr. Cantor, Mr. Boehner and their ilk all voted without even a murmur of concern not once, but eight times during the Bush administration to raise the debt ceiling. Other seemingly forgotten hard facts are even more galling.

So, hit the Cliffs notes below. There will be a test August second, 2011.

As soon as Barack Obama's hand left the Lincoln bible after taking his oath of office as President of the United States of America, the race was on within the tattered ranks of the Republican party to see who could scream "tax and spend" the loudest.

The same conservatives who uttered not a dissenting word during the past eight years of Republican "spend and spend" now sputter forth about their perceived perilous excesses of President Obama.

It is time for a review of some hard facts and numbers.

Mr. Obama has calmly and deliberately taken charge, faced with inherited wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the threat of a global financial meltdown, and a laundry list of national and international challenges. And all the while he is pressing ahead and funding promised new programs and change. His Republican detractors, ranting about the national debt, seem to have forgotten George W. Bush's early months as president.

Mr. Bush inherited a federal budget that had been balanced for three consecutive years with a surplus of $236 billion, the largest surplus in American history. Even sweeter, we were running an on-budget surplus no longer diverting surplus from the Social Security Trust Fund to fund other government programs. This conservative largess, of course, came from the previous Democratic administration.

When Mr. Bush took office, the national debt was $5.727 trillion. By September 2008, the national debt had soared to more than $9.849 trillion, an almost 72 percent increase during Mr. Bush’s two terms. And those are the debt figures before the basically unregulated, free-for-all banking and financial system received Mr. Bush's $700 billion Wall Street bailout money.

Hastening things along, Mssrs Bush and Cheney, with the approval of their GOP leadership, doled out billions from the inherited surplus in the form of tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

Any extra surplus cushion in the budget was quickly depleted as Mr. Bush rushed to invade Iraq which had no participation in the 9-11 attack on the USA, and no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. The costs of Iraq and Afghanistan were also kept on a different set of books or the US debt figures at the end of eight years of the GOP under Bush would have been even more shocking.

And as President Obama walked into the Oval office, Mr. and Mrs. George W. Bush were closing the deal on their mansion in a Dallas, Texas gated community, leaving the biggest increase in the national debt under any president in U.S history as a going away present to the American people.

Mr. Bush must have erased the collective memory of his record national debt from the minds of the Republican party. With stern faces they attempt daily to paint the accumulated national debt as President Obama's dangerous "socialist" agenda to send America to the poorhouse. Well, we have already been sent there, and Barack Obama did not do the sending.

Here's a quick review:

• Shortly after taking office, President Bush spoke to the the Republican Congressional Retreat in Williamsburg and blithely declared that his budget would “pay down the national debt."

• President Bush raised the national debt limit eight times during his administration with no uproar or opposition from the GOP.

• On July 30, 2008 President Bush signed the Housing and Economic Recovery Act, which contained a quiet little provision raising the debt ceiling to $10.615 trillion.

• One week before leaving office, Bush asked Congress for the remaining $350 billion of the GOP $700 billion Wall Street Troubled Assets Relief Program or TARP bailout package.

• That same last week, Bush signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 raising the national debt ceiling for the eighth time to $12.104 trillion to accommodate the $11.3 trillion all time record debt he left the incoming administration.
  

• George W. Bush's $11.3 trillion record debt comes to more than $37,000 each for every man, woman and child in the United States. And it will get worse because of what it is costing to clean up after him while still moving ahead on badly needed changes like national health care to rein in its current out of control cost.
  

I find it both bewildering and angering when Republican conservatives lambaste President Obama for the present state of indebtedness on America's balance sheet as if it was all his fault, not Bush and Party spending like drunken sailors. As if the previous eight years never happened.

Mr. Boehner, Mr. Steele, Mr. Cantor and the rest of the GOP spokespersons du Jour should all be given special pocket calculators with a built in factor of $11.3 trillion that is automatically deducted from any figures they use to attack the Obama administration.

The factor could have a new four letter mathematical name, the DEBT factor, a word that also works perfectly to describe the Bush presidential legacy.



Graphic with apologies to Cliffs Notes