Please don't pee in our uterus, we don't swim in your church

Why do Republicans hate for other people to have sex?

Do Republicans really want to take on the contraception fight? Have they lost their ever-lovin minds? They insist that this is about religious liberty not contraception. I, like so many others, disagree.

When the religious right showed its true intent by focusing more of their political power on issues having to do with sexual behavior instead of economic justice and human rights, it became clear that their fight against a woman's right to choose would not stop at abortion. As they chipped away at reproductive rights, they  began to work on their plan to attack the affordability and accessibility of contraception.

Because even I, with my limited knowledge of Christianity and Jesus' teachings, know he spent way more time talking about charity, kindness, peace, love and forgiveness than he did about pee pees and wee wees. But hey, sex sells. It stokes something in our lizard brain. If you're talking sex, even if you're railing against it, people are more likely to listen.

When the story about Catholics being upset about the provision requiring employer-provided health insurance to cover contraception exploded, I understood how the issue could be framed as an affront to religious liberties, but my question was what if you live in a place where the only medical services provided are through Catholic-affiliated health care facilities?

Well, it turns out that you would be without options. Your personal liberties take a back seat to the institution's beliefs.

It's not all bad news. People are fighting back. Including governors.

I'm not anti-religion. What you do in your home, your head, and your church concerns me not one bit. But if you're going to take federal and state money to provide health care services, you should have to operate as a health institution first, not as a religious institution.

With the growing movement from the right to limit the rights of women, it's time for all of us to take a good look at their aims. What is it about us and our innie reproductive parts that frighten them so?

Radical!

Question posed to an Wall Street Occupier:  Do you know who Saul Alinsky is?
Answer:  Does he have a deli on the Lower East Side?

Question posed to Bob Grainger, Chair of the Lake County Democratic Committee: Do you know how Saul Alinsky is?
Answer: Al who?

Question posed to MathMan, a native of Chicago:  Do you know Saul Alinsky is?
Answer:  No. Why?
Me: Newt Gingrich is talking about him in relation to the President and he's trending on Twitter.
MathMan: Oh. Here, look at this graph of the x^2cos(1/x)

Question posed to a regular consumer of Fox News and right wing radio:  Who is Saul Alinsky?
Answer: He's the guy from Chicago who wrote Rules for Radicals which influenced the radical methods of Obama when he was a community organizer and who is now taking our country in the wrong direction with his radical ideas and trying to turn us into a radical European style socialist version of Europe. With its radical ideas. I think he was a communist.

Ah. And, of course, only radical liberals use Alinsky's principals for organizing.

Alinky's main message for organizing: Pick the target (Big Government), freeze it (Do Nothing Congress), personalize it (Gov't wants to take away YOUR rights), polarize it (We're going to take OUR country back). Don’t try to attack abstract corporations or bureaucracies. Identify a responsible individual (Obama) . Ignore attempts to shift or spread the blame (Stop blaming Bush, this is YOUR mess, Obama!).

The Politics of Envy

Envy.

Mitt Romney, the man who has finally gotten to the head of the line, thinks we envy him and those of his stratospheric ilk.

Let's not lie to him or ourselves. We do envy him. But it's not for the reason he thinks.

Since it's rude for me to speak for you, I'll stick to why I am envious. My envy of Mitt Romney is specifically because he's never known what it's like to be financially insecure and it has nothing to do with his superior skills, hard work, or intelligence. By virtue of his birth, Romney has never had to worry about a lack of money. No, his only money worries have been about the accumulation of more wealth.

So that's the basis for my envy. What's at the root of my dislike for Romney is the fact that he seems unwilling to even imagine for a second what it's like for most Americans who have worked hard for the last thirty years and are still just running in place.

His refusal to acknowledge that there might be valid reasons for people to be pissed off tells us what we need to know about Mitt. He has no interest in understanding the plight of the middle and working classes, the poor. He subscribes to the idea that, unlike his situation of being born to wealth setting his destiny, if you're not rich like him, it's because you're not smart enough, you don't work hard enough. The fact that American socio-economic mobility is pretty much a myth and getting worse holds no sway with Romney.

I would say that by virtue of that same solid gold birth, perhaps Mitt Romney is incapable of empathy for the less fortunate, but then how do you explain wealthy families that breed bleeding heart liberals? Does it really come down to how the brain is wired?

Mitt Romney wants to run on his record as a businessman. Fine. Look at his record at Bain Capital where he was far more comfortable dealing with profits and numbers and data. People who lost their jobs were merely collateral damage. No, that's too generous. They were the cost of doing business and they were expendable.

Running a government is far different from running a business. The missions are different. Romney isn't smart enough to know that. As President, he would do just as he did at Bain. He would increase profits for the shareholders by any means just this side of legal while cutting out the waste and inefficiency.

What Americans need to understand is that unless you're a top investor, you are waste and inefficiency.

Read Bob Lefsetz on this.