Goldilocks SOTU: Not Too Big, Not Too Small, Just Right

"I am feeling so disempowered,” the woman prefaced her question to me at a “Passion to Action” conference in Grass Vally, CA, sponsored by the See Jane Do organization. But her face telegraphed very powerful emotions: anger, frustration, fear. It was a look we’ve seen on the faces of teabaggers as they shouted wild allegations and disrupted town halls across the nation.

This woman was no teabagger. She was a progressive Democratic woman, a key member of Obama’s base. The impassioned ones who swept him into office on a frothy wave of belief in the change he promised; the ones now feeling somewhere between skeptical and cynical.

“I want real health reform. What happened to that and what can I do about it?” The questioner lobbed this at me after my speech encouraging women to use our power as activists. If hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, then it would be very important to listen to what women like her had to say about Obama’s State of the Union address.

So I went to the discussion boards, the White House Facebook page, Twitter, and posted a query on my own Facebook page to see what my friends were saying about his speech.  The focus on jobs and the economy was clearly the top priority for most people and rightly so. Capping government spending, being transparent about who’s getting the pork, becoming a global leader in solar energy, and a tax break for small businesses all got shout outs for being ideas that people appreciated. He apologized elegantly without showing weakness. He said bipartisan twice, enough to keep the centrist

Click to read more ...

Jump on the Bus and Make a Difference for Women's Health Today!

So we are where we are with health reform and coverage of abortion.

The time to be purists and hold politicians' feet to the fire is at the beginning of any battle. 

Here is what I wrote about abortion coverage back in September that summarizes how I think the issue should have been framed and fought for, hard, so that we would been able to mount a stronger campaign for fair health reform and then on to rescind the Hyde Amendment going forward

Accepting (and even defending!) the Capps amendment in the first place was a huge mistake. The opening salvos of the health reform debate should have been the time to challenge the entire notion of separating out one aspect of basic women's health care from any other. No, let me back up a bit and say I would have slammed Obama when he allowed family planning to be labeled controversial in the first stimulus package.

After acquiescing on those first two moments of decision, we were pretty well sunk. But the silver lining is that women began to realize--and got angry--that we'd been thrown under the bus by Congress, the president, and even some of our own advocacy organizations who had been complicit. 

But it good that anger breeds activism. We can do something about this, you know. It is always up to advocates to make politicians do the right thing. Today is the best day to start driving our own bus, and turning things around. The Women's Media Center has declared today Not Under the Bus Day. Go to their website and find lots of direct action you can take that wil make a difference. Whether or not it changes the outcome of this particular health reform vote, it will without question set a new and better path down the road to women's heath care that's fair, safe, and fully covered. 

I'm personally on this bus. Won't you jump on and make a difference for women's health going forward?

Hillary Reiterates: Women's Rights Are Human Rights--Yes!

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending Hillary Clinton's speech recommitting the United States to the International Conference on Population and Development's consensus goals ratified by the world 15 years ago. The chandeliered Benjamin Frankin room was kinetic, as men and women from public and private international women's rights and health endeavors greeted one another in a virtual old home week. 

I served on the U.S. government delegation to the 5-year evaluation of progress toward achieving the Cairo goals in 1999. But during the Bush administration, not only did the U.S. fail to pull its pledged share of the global load to empower women through health and development programs, the right wing led a vigorous charge to dismantle those efforts. Believe me, people like me weren't invited to take tea in the Ben Franklin Room!

Fortunately, women leaders from other countries refused to go backward. They held back the Bush onslaught. There was a global sigh of relief when President Obama rescinded the Global Gag Rule as one of his first acts after being inaugurated last year. With Clinton at the helm at State, there's no question women and girls globally have a champion who will work to make sure progress begins again. For as she herself first said in her groundbreaking 1995 speech at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing: women's rights are human rights and human rights are women's rights. Watch the video of her speech here:

What were your thoughts, feelings, worries when the Senate passed the health reform bill?

What were your thoughts, feelings, worries this morning when the Senate passed the health reform bill?

This is the question I asked on Facebook this morning and there were so many thoughtful and interesting responses

that I just had to share them here. Please add yours too!

Jack Cluth

I was thinking that we deserved better than a gift-wrapped Christmas present for the health care industry. This is

neither health, nor care, nor even reform.

Patricia M Sears

It felt good to have 60 votes for progress towards health care reform... and we Must point out that the opposition

votes are against any health care reform as they did not even offer an alternate plan.

We Must Remind Americans that we're FOR reform (albeit it's not a pretty sausage at the moment) and the

Click to read more ...

Who Do You Nominate for the Bum Steer Award?

They say you can always tell a Texan, but you can't tell them very much. Or at least some have said that about me.

Though I've been away from the state of my birth for almost as many years as I lived there, I have continued to subscribe to the Texas Monthly wherever life has taken me. It's a great magazine in general, but I especially look forward to their annual "Bum Steer" awards, in which they skewer the high, the low, and the absurd. The intro to the just published 2010 awards reads, in TM's typically diffident (and alphabetical) fashion:

It was a year of accomplice apes, bedraggled Bugattis, Christlike Cheetos, dim-witted deli-owning Democrats, egregious errata, fatal foreplay, gun-toting golfers, heartless high school hoopsters, ignoble implants, jackass judges, killer Kims, laughingstock legislators...shameless Stanford, territorial T-Boone, useful urine, vituperative vixens...and zero tolerance zealots.

Since my son lives in the former Sugar Land congressional district--arguably the most conservative in the nation--of the #1 Bum Steer, I cannot resist sharing the cover with you. Get your barfbags out, Ladies and Laddies. It doesn't get any "bummer" than this, but who else would you place on your bum steer list if you were doing the choosing?