Looks like we'll be spending another exciting Saturday night in front of the TV watching Congress debating a health care reform. I'm awfully glad women are so important that our bodies and our health seem to be a center of attention. On the other hand, I'm furious that the attention is once again on taking away abortion coverage rather than working to make sure women have access to all the basic health care services they need without Congress telling them what to do about their own lives, especially decisions as profound as childbearing and reproductive health.

It's urgent that all senators hear from us TODAY AND TOMORROW.  I vote in Arizona. My senators are Jon Kyl and John McCain, both 100% anti-choice Republicans who are almost certainly going to vote against the final bill. But still, they need to hear from me and you. Let them feel the heat.

So I've just signed this letter to my senators, prompted by the Center for Reproductive Rights which has it all set up so it'll even figure out who your senators are and send it to them for you. Actually, I made several edits to the CRR letter and you can to if like me you find it too wussy for you. Here is my version--lif anything you want:

I’m joining with the Center for Reproductive Rights to urge you to vote in favor of opening debate on the Senate healthcare reform bill HR 3590.

I hope you’re working hard to make sure every American has access to fair, quality healthcare. I have children in Arizona without health insurance because they can't afford it now despite working very hard to make ends meet, and they need more affordable options. It’s critical that women’s needs are accounted for and protected within any health reform bill, in order to make it viable and worthwhile.

It is absolutely crucial that the current Senate bill prevail. While I am not altogether happy about the compromise that has been struck to restrict abortion coverage, Sen. Reid's bill at least ensures that women across the country keep the coverage that already they have.

Abortion decisions are not the government's business. Abortion is however a common experience and a constitutionally protected and morally appropriate medical procedure that one in three women will have in their lifetime and that's why a majority of private insurers cover it today.

Women's health care needs have already been compromised substantially and shamefully in order to help pass the bill, and Senator Reid's merged bill contains even more stringent segregation of funds and other requirements to ensure that no federal money will pay for abortion services.

I urge the Senate to fight for women in this country and reject any attempts to roll back the clock on women's health and rights.

Thank you for your time.

Gloria Feldt

htttp://www.GloriaFeldt.com

Democratic leaders have said that the Stupak amendment's draconian new restrictions on abortion contained in the House health-reform bill will not appear in the final version.  Here why voters who value women’s health cannot sit back and accept such assurances. Reposted here courtesy of the Women's Media Center which originally posted it as an exclusive and is rolling out a public and media education campaign to help Stop Stupak. But I think stopping the bad is only the first part of what we need to do... 

House Democrats broke into a paroxysm of self-congratulation for passing a health reform bill. By embracing the Stupak-Pitts amendment, however, they entered the women’s hall of shame. They had promised no more limitations based on preexisting conditions. But House leadership allowed a codicil: Except if you are a woman.

The Stupak-Pitts amendment to the health bill is a sweeping ban on insurance coverage of abortion. It expands the 1976 Hyde amendment, which outlaws abortion coverage by existing Federally funded programs, to middle class women participating in the public option, even if they pay from their own pocketbooks. Hyde began a juggernaut of restrictions on abortion and birth control that I’d hoped the current health care debate would rectify.

Headlines blaring, “Abortion an Obstacle to Health-Care Bill,” got it backward. And the biggest obstacle was President Obama’s approach, which meshed all too well with Speaker Pelosi’s: they are both so averse to feather-ruffling that one wonders why they entered the rough and tumble of politics in the first place. No amount of Rahm Emmanuel’s mean-guy interference could have kept this chicken’s eggs from breaking, let alone its feathers in place.

Smart as he is, why didn’t Obama know that when you start from a position of compromise, you'll end up with a fragment of what you wanted, if that? The public option is too weak to exercise serious cost-cutting control. And now women have been sacrificed, like so much detritus, even though we are 51 percent of the population and (in case they haven't noticed) 60 percent of Democratic voters.

In response, I’m seeing the most intense wave of anger building among women voters of all ages since the Senate’s 1991 trashing of Anita Hill culminated in the 1992 “Year of the Woman”.

I am not convinced by after-the-fact reassurances that the final bill will reflect the already unjust status quo via the Capps amendment “compromise” that codifies existing restrictions. That’s because the table for expanding prohibitions on abortion was set by the Democrats themselves.

Nancy Pelosi and I walked together on the frontline of the March for Women’s Lives in April 2004—at 1.2 million strong, the largest civil rights protest ever mustered in the nation’s capital, demonstrating that the majority of Americans stood for women. But Pelosi, like many Democrats, allowed herself to be frightened by misinterpreting Republican victories that fall.

Frankly, John Kerry lost that election all by himself, in no small part by taking increasingly equivocal positions on issues—from war and peace to abortion—that concerned women. That Karl Rove’s grassroots machine then prevailed over Kerry’s demoralized base shouldn’t have shocked anyone. But post-election, the losing Democrats took the predictable circular position and started shooting at one another. Pelosi excoriated me for blasting anti-choice Tim Roemer’s candidacy for chair of the Democratic Party, a possibility that was one of the first signals to me of principles gone rogue.

The Democrats jubilantly regained control of the House in 2006. But in doing so they built their own Trojan horse and rolled it right into the center of the party’s soul. Howard Dean, who had entered the 2004 presidential race proclaiming himself the candidate from the “Democratic wing of the Democratic Party,” became, ironically, one of the main architects of a desperation plan to recruit any anti-choice pol who had a chance to defeat a Republican. 

Some strategists, like Daily Beast columnist Peter Beinert, assert this was the smart way for the Democrats to gain a governing majority. But if party powers had recruited, supported, and funded progressive women candidates at the level they wooed Blue Dogs, they could have saved both their integrity and their majority, and they’d be much stronger today.

Pelosi said she was “breaking the marble ceiling” when she accepted the speaker’s gavel. As sparkly-eyed and optimistic as any other attendee, I wrote about her swearing in for the Women’s Media Center, saying she would be smart to “spend less time cultivating the ‘Blue Dog’ Democrats and recognize the progressive women as her greatest asset.”

Clearly she didn’t get that message.

But many women in Congress did. Congresswoman Diana DeGette (D-CO) assured the Washington Post the day after the vote: "There's going to be a firestorm here. Women are going to realize that a Democratic-controlled House has passed legislation that would prohibit women paying for abortions with their own funds. . . We're not going to let this into law." To back up her claim, she’s collected 41 and counting signatures from House Democrats that they will kill any final bill retaining the Stupak amendment’s restrictions. That’s enough to block passage of one of the cornerstones on which Barack Obama has staked his presidency.

And while we must keep pointing the finger of blame at the weasely Democrats, the fact is that the Catholic Bishops and the National Right to Life played with the kind of hardball tactics that pro-choice advocates failed to employ. From here out, we need a different, bolder, more proactive approach. 

So how do women get out from the underside of the bus and start driving it?

First, we cannot accept any health care reform that retreats on women’s human right to reproductive self-determination. Second, this health reform debate is the opportunity to revisit and excise the cancer represented by the Hyde amendment and make women’s health care whole again (yes, President Obama, abortion IS health care).

But let’s not stop there. President Obama said during the elections that the Freedom of Choice Act, which would guarantee women's civil right to make our own childbearing decisions and give us at last the right to our own lives, would be among his top priorities. He subsequently took it off the priority list, but we must hold him to his promise by the fire of our political engagement.

That’s how the Democrats can send their Trojan horse packing and get back on the road to fairness and justice for which their party stands. For if they think a health reform bill betraying women is victory, they’ll soon find out it's a Pyrrhic one indeed.

Gloria Feldt is the author of The War on Choice: The Right-Wing Attack on Women’s Rights and How to Fight Back, a political commentator, and former president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. She serves on the board of the Women’s Media Center.

url for original post: http://womensmediacenter.com/ex/111209.html

I was at my computer frantically trying to finish a book chapter in the wee hours this morning when I noticed a tweet saying Obama had won the Nobel. I thought it was one of those Twitter rumors that spread like wildfire, but it piqued my interest enough that I clicked BBC, CNN, and AP until I was convinced this was no hoax.

My first reaction was a feeling in the pit of my stomach that winning this global prize so soon on his presidency would be a political loss at home. It’s not going to help him pass health care, and there’s going to be a lot of skepticism—not just from the right--about whether he’s earned such an honor yet. Because he hasn’t, really.

And I hope there is never a hint that any kind of campaign was waged for him to receive the prize, for that would devastate his standing and sully the honor.

No matter about any of that, I still see a hugely important message to America in this award. It starts with "Thank you."  The same “breathing out” moment many of us had when Obama won the election reverberated around the globe, and it was as much about what a bad leader George Bush was on the world stage as how good Obama might be. So the promise of Obama is almost as important as the performance.

When you are taking on a leadership position, it’s always wise to follow someone who has made a big mess, as Bush did so egregiously, with world opinion. But Obama as leader of the free world is not just a breath of fresh air, he’s also a global citizen who respects and walks easily in multiple cultures. The un-Bush. The beautiful American with the winning smile. Our standing in the world has skyrocketed since Obama’s election. We're the 900 pound gorilla, and voters need to need to realize how important a message it is to the rest of the world that we elected a president who believes in talking before pulling the trigger.

So I’m happy about all this. But still, it would be better for Obama’s standing in the U.S. for him to have received it a few years hence.

Guest post By Ellen Bravo, originally published as a Women's Media Center exclusive.

The author, an expert on the prevention of sexual harassment and other issues of women in the workforce, suggests that human resources professionals and corporate executives take the occasion of David Letterman’s revelations to revisit their companies’ policies with the understanding that “sexual favoritism is sexual harassment.” I'm posting her commentary here because I think it is one of the best and most realistic about 21st century sexual mores for the workplace that I've read on the Letterman affair(s). Your thoughts? Read on...

I don’t know David Letterman or any of the staffers he had sex with.

I believe fidelity is the business of only one person, the philanderer’s partner.

Extortionists aren’t whistle-blowers—they’re criminals, and should be put away.

But whenever I hear the justification, “I didn’t violate company policy and no one complained,” my hackles jump up.

Let’s talk about why it’s bad business for the boss to sleep with subordinates.

The key part of consent is that the right to say “yes” is balanced by the right to say “no.” When the person doing the asking is the boss, declining becomes dicey.

Even if there’s no threat or demand involved, how do you know there won’t be repercussions for refusing to go along?

If there’s a problem, whom do you tell? Especially when company policy is silent on the matter,

I used to kinda like Sen. Max Baucus. During the Bush2 administration, he was one of the best we could go to when we needed to make the Republicans' legislation less draconian. Now that he is the pivotal leader for health reform, however, he's acting like the Republicans are still in control. As you can read here and here, he obsessively dumbs down what should be the Democrats' signature legislation.

Thanks to Credo, sponsored by Working Assets, here is a link to a petition you can sign to urge Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to keep pressing for a public option in the health reform plan despite the Baucus bill. More explanation below:

Next week, the Senate Finance Committee is expected to start debating and voting on its health care reform bill. Of the five Congressional committees writing health care bills, this will be the only one not to include provisions for a public health insurance option.

We can't sit back and let the Senate Finance Committee kill the public option. That is why Open Left is joining with CREDO Action to tell Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to make sure a public option is included when the bill goes to the floor of the Senate.

The next step in the process is for the Senate Finance Committee and the Senate HELP Committee -- which passed a public option under the late Ted Kennedy -- to combine their bills into a single piece of legislation. This merging is largely determined by the Senate leadership, and so it is important that the Senate leadership hear from us.

Senator Max Baucus, the Finance Committee chair, has tried to justify his bill by claiming there are not enough votes to pass a public option. However, Senate experts say the public option can pass with 51 votes, and none of the 58 Senators elected as Democrats have categorically stated their opposition.

We have the votes to pass a public option in health care reform. We have to make sure the public option is not abandoned before a Senate vote even takes place.

Join us in demanding that Senator Reid keep the public option alive when the bills from the Senate Finance and Senate Health committees are merged!

http://www.GloriaFeldt.com/heartfeldt-politics-blog