I am so angry about this I am now thinking I should have made it a SHOUTING THREAD. What's next, the legislation that freezes all women's bank accounts a la The Handmaid's Tale?

But for at least the next two years, it is moot, right? The Senate and Obama would never follow through, at least I hope not. After that, who know?

Where's the roll-call list?

No federal funds go to Planned Parenthood for abortions right now. So I suppose this eliminates funding for contraception and the general health care that PP provides?

Fuck you to every representative who voted for this. Fuck your health care plan and fuck your privilege. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.

Do the Senate and Obama even have a say in this? They can only approve spending, I thought, and if the House doesn't allocate, everyone else is out of luck.

Yes, Senate and President have a say as bill heads next to Senate. Oh, and they also defunded net neutrality. And they DID fund Nascar. Because we don't need birth control services for poor women -- but we DO need auto racing.

Will add link for roll call when I see it. Slate says they are waiting too but anticipate Senate Democrats will vote differently. They'd better.

Because we don't need birth control services for poor women -- but we DO need auto racing.

Well, that about sums it up.

And of course, it's worth noting that PP doesn't only provide low-income patients with birth control, but with a wide range of health services. This isn't just about depriving those patients of access to birth control, which is bad enough, but of depriving them of cancer-detection and a host of reproductive-health care and beyond. From their website:

General health care services vary by location. They may include

* anemia testing
* cholesterol screening
* diabetes screening
* physical exams, including for employment and sports
* flu vaccines
* help with quitting smoking
* high blood pressure screening
* tetanus vaccines
* thyroid screening

Blocking federal funding for PP can very well mean a reduction in GENERAL HEALTH SERVICES available to many low-income patients. That's a a point that all too often gets elided in conversations about PP.

As I understand it, the Planned Parenthood portion is an amendment to a bill that funds federal operations from March 4 to the end of the fiscal year. If the Senate and/or Obama reject this bill, then the federal government goes into shutdown mode.

What's next, the legislation that freezes all women's bank accounts a la The Handmaid's Tale?

Funny you should mention Handmaid's Tale. Lately, I've been of the impression that the Republicans are attempting to turn the country into some hideous amalgam of Handmaid's Tale and Jennifer Government.

OK, Daily Kos has the name of the Ds who voted yes, cursed be each of them, and the Rs who voted no or present. And guess what, they actually eliminated ALL Title X funding, meaning ALL funding for low/middle income people to do family planning AND get preventative health services.

AAAAAARGH. So angry I'm losing my words.

the Planned Parenthood portion is an amendment to a bill that funds federal operations from March 4 to the end of the fiscal year.

If so:
A) why not divert it from another source? I understand that funding issues are complicated, but it's hard not to see this as yet another in a long string of recent attempts to reduce women's reproductive rights at the cost of our general quality of life.
B) Oh, that's because IT IS... or, even if it is only incidentally and conveniently an overall budgetary concern that can be temporarily corrected by another pointed attempt to limit reproductive freedom, it's easy to think that limiting reproductive freedom (knowing that it's at the cost of poor women's general quality of life) the point of it, when Republican leaders crow about it doing exactly that.

"This afternoon's vote is a victory for taxpayers and a victory for life," Pence said Friday. "By banning funding to Planned Parenthood, Congress has taken a stand for millions of Americans who believe their tax dollars should not be used to subsidize the largest abortion provider in America."

[source]

The most likely reason they did not divert funds from another source is that other amendments to this bill also defund major portions of Obamacare. Healthcare overall is under fire, not just Planned Parenthood.

Good point.

And I hope you know that my ire isn't aimed at you. Anytime I talk about politics lately, I get the same horrible feeling, like my head is full of hornets and I'm about to burst out sobbing. I think I'll exit this thread for the good of all. See ya!

Oh, I know. Politics nowadays is maddening for almost everyone.

Democrat Jackie Speier let them have during the debate. Go Jackie!

I'd like each of you to go watch this Rachel Maddow segment and then come back and read the remainder of this comment. I don't care if you like Maddow or don't; I really know close to nothing about her show but this is worth the watch.
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Watch it? Okay.

Planned Parenthood, like the public employees' unions in Wisconsin, is merely collateral damage. The real push here is to, I'm convinced, hamstring any and all orgs that get out the vote for Democrats. That means you attempt to defund, derail, ratfuck, and tie them up jumping through their assholes for their very existence so that their very successful GOTV efforts, organizational associations, donor lists and general wherewithal are nullified. A little political capital expended now makes for the permanent wingnut majority that these folks feel is their right as ordained by their Creator.

This really is high stakes shit, and I'm not convinced all the lawmakers in Congress realize this. By my lights, each and every lawmaker who votes in favor of this, of defunding public broadcasting, or for more corporate control of the public sphere needs to be put on notice that they will be unseated next time around. And then we need to look at their campaign disclosure info, and we need to contact their corporate donors, and threaten to boycott their products unless they pull their campaign contributions. And then we need to spread the word, and then we need to do it.

I'm a long-time supporter of and contributor to PPUSA. I've done clinic escorts, stuffed envelopes, etc. But this is way bigger than they are, and if we take our eyes off the ball then I figure the Islamic Republic of Iran or Laurent Gbagbo's Cote d'Ivoire is a better model for our future than is The Handmaid's Tale.

Maddow: "The headlines about this are mostly wrong." - That is almost always the case.

The Pence Amendment to H.R. 1 would effectively eliminate desperately needed clinics across the nation for women of lower income and indeed even as much as 1 in 50 American women who have no access to desperately needed health and preventative measures not even associated with abortion. None of the money specified to be cut by this amendment is ever used on abortion, no matter what side of the fence you fall upon with choice and it is only fractions of a penny from each tax payer that goes to help Planned Parenthood maintain their service. It is cancer treatments, prenatal care, education, preventative care for sexual health and all that entails... and in truth, it is not only our struggling poor who need these services but the great expanse of American women, men, and children who greatly benefit from their aid. Most of all, it is an organization that *works* and *does it right.*

Indeed I am a corporate professional who once had a long stint of being uninsured who had to rely upon the good graces of Planned Parenthood to ensure my own health, productivity, and longevity. A well cared for populace is a population able to move forward together. The rest of the world laughs at our so-called first world status when we can’t even agree that collectively we have to protect each other on this most basic of health needs. A healthy woman, a planned family, a future for our children both female and the men who will love them need Planned Parenthood as they have done for the last 95 years. If you have a mother, a sister, a cousin, or a friend who is female, I urge you to take a measly few seconds and fill out the form letter that will alert Congress of your human interest in our family and their enduring struggle for health. This is no small matter and no matter to quibble over one’s utopian vision of what the future should be. This is a real and desperate situation put into crosshairs by uninformed, uneducated angry men who want to punish women for simply being born female.

I don't care about their agenda to hobble the democrats, what I care about is this very basic and very needed serivce. Please, please take a minute and sign the petition! Or call 202.224.3121 to be directed to your Senators' offices to tell the staff how you feel; and, call 202.225.3121 to be directed to your Representative's office. Elected officials' staffs keep logs of every phone call and letter/email sent directly to them, and it helps shape their speeches/votes on issues.

"I don't care about their agenda to hobble the democrats"

Therein lies the reason why Republicans can get away with so much damage. The constitution structures Congress such that spending is a difficult endeavor, and in that, the Republicans will always have the upper hand by definition. If you want the federal government to spend, you will have to fight for every penny, and continue fighting for that same penny each and every fiscal year. That was why Obamacare was dead in the water before it ever began. Hillary had a plan that had a decent chance of surviving the first Republican takeover of the House, but we all know what happened to her.

tortillathe hun ...thanks, thanks, thanks, thanks.

I feel that I've been watching bombs drop all week: Planned Parenthood, definitely, but also the bills to defund the CPB, the NEA, and the NEH, each of which generated a separate set of emails from separate organizations that I feel I need to respond to. It feels like the beginning of the American Dark Ages. OF COURSE it's coordinated - I should have percieved that. I assumed, oh, it's the Tea Party wave coming in to end programs they think are wastes of public funding. But this makes much more sense. It's not just random pot shots - it's an approach focused on dismantling not just things that help Democrats organized, but anything that encourages the sense of public good in America.

Naive of me not to put it together. Thanks for pointing to something that helps it fall into place.

It feels like the beginning of the American Dark Ages.

Yes, that.

GOD I feel so stupid I couldn't figure out this was coordinated before Rachel Maddow spelled it in big shiny letters.

Tenth Amendment Center:

Of the sixteen executive branch Cabinet-level departments, a limited Constitutional case could be made only for the departments of State, Treasury, Justice, and Defense. Any legitimate operations of the Departments of Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs could b>e subsumed under the Department of Defense. This means that the functions and bureaucracies of the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Labor, and Transportation should be eliminated in their entirety. The original four departments (Justice, State, Treasury, and War) might conceivably serve some useful purpose — but only if they were scaled down considerably, and especially the Defense Department, which spends most of its budget on empire and offense.

Next to go would have to be the alphabet soup of government agencies like the SEC, DEA, FEMA, FTC, FCC, OSHA, EPA, BATF, NASA, FDA, EEOC, LSC, TVA, NEA, FHA, NEH, CPB, SBA, NIH, NLRB, USAID, and NTSB.

This means no more funding for income redistribution schemes like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, SCHIP, food stamps, WIC, TANF, housing subsidies, foreign aid, refundable tax credits, Head Start, the National School Lunch Program, unemployment benefits, and farm subsidizes.

This also means no more funding for science, education, medical research, or climate change.

Oh, and there should be no office of surgeon general or drug czar, AIDS czar, or faith-based czar.

It's the Cato Institute agenda, evergreen but resurgent with the freshmen:

Congress should
● cut federal spending from 21 percent to 16 percent of gross
domestic product over 10 years, as detailed in this chapter;
● terminate, privatize, or transfer to state governments more than
100 programs and agencies, including those involved in agriculture, education, housing, and transportation;
● reform Social Security by cutting the growth in government
benefits and adding a system of private accounts;
● cut Medicare spending growth and move toward a health care
system based on individual savings and choice;
● convert Medicaid into a block grant and freeze federal spending; and
● impose a statutory cap on the annual growth in total federal outlays

Here's the only bright spot. One of the calls to action we've received at the museum this week talks about how incredibly green and naive the incoming Congressional freshmen are. They're all pumped up with their agenda, riding a wave of populist anger, and are coming in feeling like they can direct all the terms. But what they have never experienced - a lot of them having no political background at all - is the powerful backlash of the people, especially constituents in their states who stand for themselves or their clients to lose services, public health, and public access to needed resources. What that means is that we can meet these attempts with a shock wave of response and outrage and chasten these folks into understanding that they're ALL OF OUR servants, not the servants of a minority ideology.

Y'all might want to watch Rep. Jackie Speier. D-CA, talk about this amendment...and also about losing her own baby at 17 weeks, resorting to a procedure that was, thankfully, legal.