6 Ways That the Republican War on Women Is a Real War

There are Six Significant Ways That the Republican War on Women (RWoW) is a Real and Dangerous War:

1. Women are dying.
2. Soldiers are on the front lines.
3. Congress declared the war.
4. Propaganda is used to gain public sympathy.
5. Additional funding is sought from the public.
6. Women are questioned as to their allegiances.

Women are dying.

Let it be known far and wide that war kills people. In this case, the casualties are primarily but not limited to women. The first to die in the Republican War on Women (RWOW) are in the lower economic class. Take for instance, 29 year-old Anna Brown, who died in a St. Louis jail cell after being refused treatment at a local hospital and having the police called on her for trespassing. Her story is one of the private sector in healthcare refusing to do for a woman what it is required by law to do. The police of St. Louis made it a crime for Anna to seek medical help. One can only assume that this might happen to men too.

Women around the world (including the United States) die every year due to botched do-it-yourself abortion procedures where medical expertise is not sought. But the shocking truth is that these deaths are not only acknowledged legislatively, but even encouraged. Under the Bush administration and with a Republican-ruled Congress, the Food & Drug Administration considered the effects of a medication that poor women were using to induce abortion at home. Though more than 10 years of research has overwhelmingly shown that Cytotec is a safe way to induce abortion when administered correctly during normal pregnancies, the Food and Drug Administration has never approved this particular use. What the FDA did, in fact, recognize was the drug's use by obstetricians to induce contractions in routine deliveries – a method which they know causes extreme hemorrhaging and risk to both the baby and the mother's lives.

One of the most awe-inspiring discoveries made about the Republican Presidential candidates in the 2012 election so far has been the far reaching grasp they have on the mental health industry under the guise of religion under George W. Bush's “Faith Based Initiatives” program. Michelle Bachmann, Rick Santorum and Rick Perry were all discovered to sit on boards, take ownership of or otherwise run pseudo-healthcare rehabilitation facilities that focus on teenagers and children. A majority of these supposedly “troubled” youths are female and “at risk” for lesbianism or abortion according to their religious “therapists”. At least two of these girls are known to have died under rather ominous circumstances.

Related News: Recent Fire-bombings of Abortion Clinics on Rise Again In Florida and Wisconsin.

A Christian Fundamentalist Holding a Sign
Celebrating the  Murders  of Women at a
Democratic Event in  Arizona.

Soldiers are on the front lines.

On July 28, 2005 a female 'soldier' named Jamie Leigh Jones was stationed in Baghdad by a Halliburton subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown & Root (called “KBR” in short) as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom. On this day, Jamie Leigh Jones was, according to her and many witnesses (to varying degrees at various stages of the saga that was yet to come), gang-raped and then subsequently locked in a shipping container without access to a phone by her colleagues at KBR.

Three years after her rape (I refuse to use the word “alleged” on principal here), Jones lost her case against KBR and was counter-sued by the military-industrial contractor to the tune of $2million for what they claimed was a “frivolous” lawsuit. (A federal judge did at least dismiss those counter-claims). While the case was lost quietly, in comparison to the swell of outrage that finally led up to it, it is worth noting that none of the defendants were deemed innocent of having sex with Jones. Her case was lost primarily due to insufficient evidence that the sex was not consensual. Photos of the trauma to her vagina, anus, ruptured breast implants and torn pectoral muscles were not-so-mysteriously missing from the evidence collected by her colleagues themselves (the very defendants in the case).

Congress (30 white, male Republican Senators) Declared This War.

Jones' case against KBR (and thereby against the United States, considering the nature of their business), although certainly the most high-profile is not the only rape nor sexual discrimination case against a military-industrial contractor. What came to light in her 3-year struggle to face her attackers in a court of law was the audaciously horrible “mandatory arbitration clause” in her contract with KBR. KBR argued successfully that they had the right to deny Jones the ability to sue them for any reason at all. This contract, which was commonly administered to most contractors at the time, defied the very nature of justice and demanded that all legal disputes, no matter how severe or how outrageous the offense, would be handled “in-house” by the company itself – effectively giving persons wronged by the company NO RECOURSE to defend themselves legally.

One Senator, Democrat Al Franken, from Minnesota, had a serious problem with this injustice and drafted legislation which proposed that the United States stop doing business with companies that required such an egregious erosion of civil liability. When it came time for a vote on the Senate floor, the bill passed with bipartisan support. All were in favor of protecting women from becoming the Jamie Leigh Jones' of the future... Everyone except for the 30 White Male Republican Senators who voted against the measure. One such Senator, shockingly, was John Sidney McCain, whose daughter Meghan is exactly Jones' age.

The outcry and backlash from the public was widespread but short-lived. 30 White Male Republican Senators had essentially voted (albeit unsuccessfully) to legalize rape... Let the War Begin.

Pro-War Propaganda is Issued By Governmental Pundits and The Media

In any war, the real nucleus of the battle is known to be over “the hearts and minds of the people”, as George W. Bush famously noted. For that purpose, political propaganda is employed. There are currently no better propagandists in the world than our Republican party here in the USA. To illustrate this, there are far too many examples to simply list without format. The blogosphere is riddled with senseless arguments ranging from biblical scripture to ad hominem attacks against democratic female legislators and liberals. To provide this point with some citation at least, I've randomly selected a few of the most obvious attempts to culturally re-frame the RWOW as an acceptable and justified movement.

1. A female Republican legislator in Florida blames child rape-victims for dressing “like prostitutes”.
2. Due to pressure from Tea Party astroturfers, Republican legislators in Michigan spend weeks on end and countless public dollars on a law forbidding a kind of abortion that they admit is not even practiced in the state to anyone's knowledge. The procedure that they have incorrectly termed “partial birth abortion” is really called dilation and extraction and is only used by abortion doctors in 1/5 of one percent of all procedures and only when medically necessary.
3. An anti-abortion activist group called LiveAction sets up fake “sting operations” in which they target female employees of Planned Parenthood. Many professional women have their careers ruined by “Brietbart-style” video editing in which the public is falsely led to believe that Planned Parenthood is in cahoots with the perpetrators of human trafficking and sex-slavery.
4. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), Mary Bono Mack (R-CA), and Connie Mack (R-FL) all vote against their own best interests and against the interests of their female constituents by voting against the Paycheck Fairness Act of 2009. Fortunately, thanks to a Democratic Majority and the vote of only ONE Republican woman (Ileana Ros-Lehtinen), the bill passed anyway and now women must be paid equally for doing the exact same job as a man.
5. Florida Representative and amateur pundit Allen West launches a full-scale attack (in writing no less!) against Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz after she dared to call his judgment into question regarding detrimental cuts to Medicare. West sent out public emails that termed his female colleague “the most vile, unprofessional and despicable member of the US House of Representatives”, “not a lady” and “a coward” who “wants a personal fight” and needs to “shut the heck up”.
6. Georgia's Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss is also a legislator-pundit hybrid who advocates the most extreme measures to deal with the most insignificant of problems. When his office isn't busy sending death threats to gay bloggers, they are advocating legislation which would make it illegal to use your car for the purpose of driving a woman to a clinic known to have performed abortions.
7. Republican blogger and ALEC propagandist Michelle Malkin has given birth to what she calls “the war on conservative women” (her feeble yet not-too-timid attempt at counter-spin) and in a nutshell, this is just a steady stream of tweets (every 5 minutes, depending on the day) on her Twitter account which attack Hilary Rosen, the Democratic pundit who dared to question Ann Romney's fitness as her husband's appointed expert on “Women and the Economy”.

Stay Tuned Tomorrow for 6 Ways That RWOW is a Real War Part II – Funding and Allegiance

YouTube & MSM Once Again Helping Republicans Cover Their "Privately Owned" Tracks

Thanks for visiting my blog! So glad you could make it...
Really... because who knows how long it will be available...

The entire internet could shut down at any given moment should we wake the sleeping giant...

Or that giant could simply take me down a peg or two... in your search results.

It doesn't surprise me at all when I see "unavailable" or "terminated" YouTube videos with "third-party" copyright claim notices like the one above... but it does sadden me. A capitalist "free market" and corporate, advertising-based media are practicing their secret handshake while consumers and voters are asleep at the wheel.

Here's how you notice it and why it should bother you as much as it bothers me:

I was busy promoting the Obama Campaign's Website En Español (just put /es after the .com) on my facebook page when I remembered to tell everyone that Republicans frequently tell lies in their spanish-version advertisements and to keep an eye out for that this year - especially in Florida. When they're not lying, they omit certain facts or give some irrelevant aspects of their campaign undue importance for spanish-speaking Americans.

Of course, I'm always called upon to prove these accusations when I make them, so I went to a few sites that I remembered having discussed the problem with Meg Whitman's English/Spanish propaganda and falsehoods campaign.

The Meg Whitman (picture a woman whose face just has "gringo" written all over it) Spanish Language Ads were probably the most egregious example from 2010... She might as well have said "I love you" in Spanish and "I hate those hispanics" in English. It was almost that stark in contrast between messages.

This kind of racist translation-exploitation and audacious hypocrisy, while standard fare for Republicans these days, is the kind of thing that will ensure Republicans take Florida... even if the Goldman Sachs-funded Marco Rubio isn't "coincidentally chosen" as Goldman Sachs-funded Mitt Romney's VP running mate. (That deal has already been sealed, by the way... you heard it here first.)

Not so much to my surprise, the videos associated with the "naughty meg's video" scandal have all been removed.

This is certainly NOT the first time this has happened, either.

The problem with this is two-fold:

1) YouTube is soooo popular that people don't even think to host their videos anywhere else. YouTube is able to censor videos en masse and delete anything it wants out of existence permanently... Their technology only takes mere seconds to scan their entire network of uploads and find every instance of a clip, image, scene, song, movie, or commercial... It's totally arbitrary whether or not YouTube and the mainstream media choose to delete or keep so-called "infringements of copyright" that appear on the video site. This has a propagandizing effect on the United States and other countries because people don't really think about what they're NOT seeing... They will simply scroll over to the next video by Lady Gaga and forget about the video that would have told them that their milk is poisoned.

2) It's actually ILLEGAL for YouTube to do this, but nobody is calling them on it... Our legislators are paid shills, so who is going to call them on it if not me? ... If not you?
The reason it's illegal (I see you rolling your eyes like you don't believe me), is that these types of videos (political campaign ads and controversial or "newsworthy renderings") fall under a category of materials called "fair use". All media events, whether copyrighted or not that can be deemed newsworthy or relevant enough to warrant illustration and dissemination are good candidates for "fair use" reproduction... This is so reporters, bloggers, artists, satirists, pundits, writers, researchers, teachers, students and pretty much everyone else can go about their daily business without having to ask permission from some corporation before every little move they make.

This is how they get away with it:

1) Most people don't notice because they don't do it on things that they know everyone is looking for at that moment. They do it incrementally. The Meg Whitman scandal has been out of the drive-by media's loop now... Therefore if you're one of the very few Americans who intends on remembering such details, you won't be able to prove anything and your facts suddenly become "assertations".

2) It's us versus them and "them" has all the power. Just try to stick up for your shoddy little YouTube video... but you better have the support of the ACLU or you're going to have to take out a 2nd mortgage for the legal fees.

3) YouTube will just "blame the government" since 70 percent of their takedown "requests" come from Government agencies anyway... Here's the thing to consider: Those "government agencies" are Republicans and Police. But by simply saying "the government told us to take them down", who do you think that benefits? Of course, only one party capitalizes on scary stories, half-truths and innuendo regarding a horrifically huge, all-powerful American Federal Government that won't allow them their "free speech".

My blog is mostly about politics - therefore, if I get a copy of the Meg Whitman campaign ads with translations in "mashup" format, it's FAIR USE and I will be posting them here on Google/Blogger/YouTube and if they dare try to take them down, I'll sue Google... and move my blog elsewhere, and stop using Chrome (even though I am starting to like it). These corporations want you to believe that they are "too big to fail" (and therefore we're supposed to let them write their own laws and them give million dollar bonuses just for screwing us)... But if Democrats win this next round, we'll be ready to remind them otherwise.

Unless Google has already taken over our nation's government websites and starts selling them on Ebay by November...

Ok, that last line was a bit of sarcastic hyperbole... It sounds as obtuse and imaginary as a Republican billionaire robber baron becoming Governor of a swing state and then being allowed to hand-pick only true believers of "Tea Party Economic Dominionism" to teach Economics classes at State Universities and Colleges.

Peace!

P.S. - After looking at the translated Obama site, the only element of possible pandering or clash of messaging that I noticed is that the campaign chooses to focus on the Dream Act instead of the fact that ICE deportations have dramatically increased under the Obama Administration... While that's not exactly an isolated fact that would score Obama the Hispanic vote, it is indeed something that might make moderates and libertarians consider his merit. Still, I think Obama should address the increase in deportations directly with Hispanic voters just to be clear and upfront.

Why Celebrities Need Privacy in Dealing with their Addictions

Some people have found the stance in my editorial about Whitney Houston to be "peculiar" or "surprising" coming from me. The idea is that I am a muckraker who once blogged about Rick Scott's hypocrisy in demanding that Florida State employees submit to regular and random urinalysis for possible drug use.

Let me clarify - Politicians who demand sobriety from the rest of us (and thereby a breach of privacy) are in the wrong... especially when they exempt themselves and those closest to them. It is in the spirit of democracy that I try to bring them down a notch or two. The only thing I apologize for there, is invoking Charlie Sheen in the subheader... He (like everyone else) deserves to be known for his achievements and not just his struggles.

With entertainers, artists and celebrities I feel that our tendency toward supermarket tabloid journalism has gone a bit too far and we actually prevent these struggling people from acheiving the one thing that we seemingly demand of them... sober perfection.

One only needs to peruse this list of 16 celebrities who have died from overdoses to see how this strange phenomenon has held a grip on our most beloved. The list stops short of including Heath Ledger, Whitney Houston, Amy Winehouse or Michael Jackson but does list Brittany Murphy (all of whom died with legally prescribed medications found in their rooms or in their toxicology reports).

12 step programs (also known as the "anonymous" programs) advocate that their members keep a low profile for their own good. This is across the board - not just for celebrities. The reasons are numerous and practical. An addict will most frequently "relapse" to their drug of choice as a response to stress. A sinking career and horribly unflattering photos in supermarket tabloids are most certainly stress-inducing. They would be hard for anyone to deal with, let alone those whose careers depend on a positive public image.

If I could tell struggling celebrities only one thing, it would be that "You are NEVER alone." Many of your peers deal with the same issues even if they are unwilling to discuss the matter. Another thing that they might need to hear is that fans are fickle... They might turn on you today but come back with flowers in hand tomorrow. A bad hair day or a rough interview with Diane Sawyer is not the end of your world.

One person that I admire in this department is a supermodel who fought back against the tidal wave of nasty paparazzi who made every sober day a challenge for her... The story of Naomi Campbell's groundbreaking lawsuit against the Daily Mirror made the UK recognize a virtual "right to privacy" that celebrities previously didn't have. The lawsuit dealt with photos of the supermodel leaving a building known to house Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous and other 12 step meetings.

Perhaps we should also mention here that the street goes both ways. Certain entertainers have also been a bit too forthcoming with their "recovery" in the media and made attempts to capitalize on newfound respect for their courage in the face of struggle. Although 12 step programs are not the "authority" on addiction recovery, many PIO's (public information officers) within the 12-step programs warn against this too. Anonymity is the foundation of these programs for a reason - the realization that addiction (in the disease model) strikes without prejudice for class or social status.

A former PIO in "CMA" (Crystal Meth Anonymous) tells me that he has frequently warned his sponsees and other program members not to seek media attention during the recovery process by appearing on television shows like "Intervention". The problem, he says, is that "when you're new to recovery, you get excited about your new possibilities and want to share them with the whole world. But what you don't realize is that there are hidden challenges that surface later and the group has not selected you, specifically, to represent all of us to the world. Your recovery is private and personal - you might relapse and if you do, it will be easier to hop back on the wagon if you haven't already portrayed yourself as a know-it-all."

"Also," says my source, "a lot of addicts find that excessive controlling behavior from their friends, family and coworkers are a source of many of their problems. They lose their sense of personal identity and these reality shows feed into that process."