CNS News did some investigating, and Ed Morrissey came up with this analysis:

At least ostensibly, this is an unfunded mandate on the states, which run the exchanges. What happens when no insurer in the state offers abortion coverage? At the moment, 87% of all abortions are purchased outside of third-party payers, so this is not an academic question. Do the feds intend to shut down an exchange that doesn’t offer an abortion plan? Or do they expect the states then to cover abortions instead?

… Once Congress stops re-enabling the Hyde Amendment, the mandates in Reid’s Section 1303 will force the federal government to supply the coverage for abortion where state exchanges have none. It will give the federal government an entree into broader health-insurance offerings, and that will have one ironic effect: it will crowd out those few private insurance plans that offer elective abortion coverage. Where Stupak’s opponents insisted that his language would create a “price signal” that would encourage private insurers to abandon abortion coverage, this would all but guarantee the same result, as private insurers would get undercut by the federal plan that would come into play.

This is nothing more than a mandate for federally-funded abortions. How long would it take a court to make that same determination? I suspect that Planned Parenthood and NARAL already have their legal counsel preparing for it.

It’s not exactly a surprise that the health care bill would include funding for abortion. Feminists have been howling about the Stupak amendment, the abortion lobby has been furious. Liberals were bound to cave in to their demands, and they were bound to try to hide it from the federal public. It is typical of liberals. And it’s infuriating to anyone with any kind of morals or respect for the sanctity of life. It’s bad enough that abortion is celebrated as some kind of right in this country, like it’s glorious for a woman to be able to go and kill her baby. Feminists in particular revel in it, like it’s some kind of sacred cow. Apparently, you have to be a member of the “I <3 Abortion" club in order to be a feminist in today's world. There are currently about 1.3 million abortions performed a year, and this isn't good enough for feminists. They not only want abortion to be free and legal, they want it to be paid for by Americans whether they like it or not. It has to be taxpayer-funded.

It's important that we all understand this. It's not good enough for feminists just to have abortion be legal and freely accessible. Any woman who wants to can get an abortion. And there is already $300 million a year in taxpayer subsidies for Planned Parenthood. There's plenty of federal funding for abortion, but feminists always want more. It isn't enough for abortion to be legal, it isn't enough for it to be federally subsidized. How much do they want? Does every single abortion performed need to be taxpayer funded so that any woman who wants one never has to pay for it out of her own pocket? It's a disgusting state of affairs. Half the country is morally opposed to abortion. But liberals are a special group of people. If they believe in something, then everyone must be for it and it must be federally mandated and subsidized. If they don't believe in something, then no one should believe in it and it must be totally banned. And so, thanks to this mental outlook and the carping of the feminist/abortion lobby, we are now looking at forcing half of the people in this country to fund something to which they are virulently opposed.

Burn up that switchboard today. You can find contact information for your senators here.

Cross-posted from Cassy’s blog. Stop by for more original commentary, or follow her on Twitter!

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Just hearing her name causes me pain and normally I wouldn’t waste a minute’s time worrying about what this vacuous little child has to say on much of anything — as is evidenced by the fact that this is the first time my keyboard has shuddered out her name. However, Meghan McCain’s latest blog post is a piece of conventional wisdom that, while not unique to little Meaggie’s fallow mind (which itself is de rigeuer for the girl, sadly), it is one that has been heard since the day women began to stride into the world of western politics. However, it is one that I think no longer applies. So, I’d like to address the empty reasoning on women in politics despite that it emanated from McCain’s somewhat barren pen.

Here is McCain’s prosaic premise: The attacks on Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton have made it harder for women and is proof that no woman will ever be “just right” for politics. To which anyone not looking to make excuses can only say a resounding “yeah, right.”

The simple matter of fact is that anyone that clamors for great power will stir great passions in those whom they wish to govern. And those that find wide support among the people will find that such support is ephemeral once decisions start having to be made. It doesn’t matter if the powerful is man or woman.

Let’s take General George Washington, for instance. He was the Father of our country, we all know. When he first deigned to accept the title of our first president his approval rating would most assuredly have been in the upper reaches of the 90th percentile range should early Americans have had the misfortune to have had nation-wide polling services like Zogby or Pew Research in the 1780s.

But even as he took his seat at the head of the nation the grumbling began. It wasn’t long before much of the good will he had truly earned as the general that won our independence began to wear thin, replaced by rumors of his doddering mental state, his purported lack of intellect, and his detached unconcern for his nation. The sniping got so bad that President Washington almost refused to run for a second term and always preferred to be called general instead of Mr. President. Save James Monroe, few presidents since have ever enjoyed an “era of good feeling” without the poison pen of his enemies nipping at his heels.

And this is true of any great leader. It’s been true of Senators, Speakers of the House, presidents, generals and statesmen all over the world and throughout time.

For her part, McCain worries that the constant and virulent attacks on Palin and Clinton is emblematic of how women are unduly attacked in the political realm. She terms it “misogyny” and feels it’s a “double standard” exclusively used against powerful women. Finally she feels that these illicit and unusual attacks will only serve to keep young women from an interest in politics.

The reality is, however, that only one thing is used against women that isn’t used against men: physical looks. Clinton is too ugly, Palin too pretty, so they say, but looks are rarely held against male politicians. If they were Henry Waxman could never have been elected, even to such a lowly position as dog catcher. So, yes, there is one thing unfairly used against female candidates. But is this really such a major factor as to make it so much harder for women to have successful political careers than for men? I, for one, don’t see it.

Long gone are the days when a female politician was looked upon as derelict in the duties of femininity for seeking office. Gone are the days when men considered politics not something women were “allowed” to join. It isn’t 1920 any longer.

But there is still this whiny notion that women have a tougher time in politics merely because they are women. I say pish tosh to that notion. Women of strong opinion are no worse treated than men of strong opinion. Ask George W. Bush if he thinks he gets an easier way cleared for him because he was born a George instead of a Georgina! Ask anyone if they think Teddy “the Swimmer” Kennedy was less virulently opposed by the right merely because he was a fella!

No, I believe we have soared past the time when women in politics were eschewed merely because they were women. Women have achieved equality with men in every way that matters in the political arena. Now we can rejoice because we can hate Hillary Clinton because she is a closet Marxist. We are free from having to worry if she’s woman enough to be allowed to run for office. The left can attack Governor Palin because they feel she is an idiot and they don’t have to worry if her gentler, female side will make her too weak to be a politician.

We no longer have to hate a woman solely for her gender. Now, at long last, we can hate her because of her ideas. Now THAT is progress!

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Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi scored a giant gain for feminism last weekend. In shoving her controversy-plagued healthcare reform bill to victory by a paper-thin margin, she conclusively demonstrated that a woman can be just as gritty, ruthless and arm-twisting in pursuing her agenda as anyone in the long line of fabled male speakers before her. Even a basic feminist shibboleth like abortion rights became just another card for Pelosi to deal and swap.

Wait, I thought Feminist’s hated when men acted in that manner, so, it is OK that Pelosi does?

Whether or not her bill survives in the Senate is immaterial: Pelosi’s hard-won, trench-warfare win sets a new standard for U.S. women politicians and is certainly well beyond anything the posturing but ineffectual Hillary Clinton has ever achieved.

So, even if her legislation fails to pass, she done good. Except for that failure part. Here comes the cherry on top

As for the actual content of the House healthcare bill, horrors! Where to begin? That there are serious deficiencies and injustices in the U.S. healthcare system has been obvious for decades. To bring the poor and vulnerable into the fold has been a high ideal and an urgent goal for most Democrats. But this rigid, intrusive and grotesquely expensive bill is a nightmare. Holy Hygeia, why can’t my fellow Democrats see that the creation of another huge, inefficient federal bureaucracy would slow and disrupt the delivery of basic healthcare and subject us all to a labyrinthine mass of incompetent, unaccountable petty dictators? Massively expanding the number of healthcare consumers without making due provision for the production of more healthcare providers means that we’re hurtling toward a staggering logjam of de facto rationing. Steel yourself for the deafening screams from the careerist professional class of limousine liberals when they get stranded for hours in the jammed, jostling anterooms of doctors’ offices. They’ll probably try to hire Caribbean nannies as ringers to do the waiting for them.

There are so many negatives in that paragraph that attempting to put anything in bold is worthless.But, don’t forget, Nancy rocks. As a failure. But, she rocks.

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Last week Mary Fitzgerald argued that climate change is a feminist issue on the basis that population control is a way to prevent the situation spiralling out of control. And, she posited, this could be achieved by giving more women more autonomy over their own bodies, through improved access to contraception and abortion.

I’m not going to get into the arguments around whether population control is a good solution to climate change. Others have already done so; George Monbiot’s piece barely more than a month ago, for this newspaper, is a great place to start.

Ensuring all women have full reproductive freedom and reproductive justice is a necessary goal in its own right moving towards a more equal and just world. I get that it might be tempting to hitch this issue to climate change, which has so much political capital.

I thought she wasn’t going to get into that issue, which she discusses for two more paragraphs after the first three? Anyhow

But Fitzgerald is completely right that climate change is a feminist issue. Everyone stands to suffer if climate change is allowed to spiral out of control, of course, but a gender analysis of both the impacts and causes of climate change shows that globally women contribute less to the problem and yet are likely to be hit especially hard.

Poor people are likely to bear the brunt as the climate changes and 70% of the world’s poor are women. According to one estimate, 85% of the victims of climate disasters are women. Another study found 75% of environmental refugees are women. (Statistics from the Women’s Manifesto on Climate Change).

Gotta love the source of the study. Here’s a clue for you, Ms. Jesse McAbe: you enact all your crazy global warming plans, and the women in the poor countries will suffer way, way, way more.

After some more quibbling about how this is a feminsta issue, we end with

So, yes, climate change is a feminist issue; women are on the front lines of climate change impact and need to be part of creating solutions. And women all over the world are in dire need of access to full and real reproductive justice. But linking the two by advocating population control as a solution to climate change isn’t the way to achieve either of these aims.

Only in Liberal World can we link access to abortion around the world to globull warming. Sigh.

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If you spend any time looking at social media demographics, there’s one stat you see over and over: women dominate the space. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter — all are more popular with women than men.

So it was a bit jarring this week to see that 67% of bloggers are male, according to the newest installment of the Technorati State of the Blogosphere report.

Admittedly, this isn’t a new stat. In least year’s report, Technorati’s survey put the male blogger ratio at 66%. But compared to the other mainstream social media activities, it seems bizarrely guy-heavy.

What’s the deal? Why is blogging a boys club at a time when women are such a powerful force in creating social media content?

Well, that’s a complicated question with a simple answer.

First of all, women like social networking sites more than men for a very obvious reason: women are inherently more social than men. Yes, men bond with their friends just as much as women do, but in very different ways. Whereas women will sit with their girlfriends and just talk for hours about their jobs, boyfriends, husbands, children, and so on, men will not. Men do not typically have those kind of relationships in their lives. So it’s only natural that women would be the ones drawn more towards social networking sites. Women can go onto Facebook and catch up with the people in their lives, and men just don’t do that. They might log on and send a quick what’s up to their buddies, but that’s about it. Women want to share pictures, play games, message back and forth. Social networking is another method of bonding with the people you care about, and let’s face it: men just don’t have as high of a priority on bonding as women do.

Second, women aren’t nearly as aggressive as men, nor are they as thick-skinned. This isn’t to say that no women are aggressive or thick-skinned, but I’m just talking in generalities here. Women tend to start blogging and then realize that it is a tough, tough world out here. You say something someone doesn’t like, and they don’t dispute your point calmly and politely with rational, well thought-out replies. They attack you, personally. They call you fat, ugly, stupid. They’ll call you a whore or a bitch or a slut. And these are the mild insults. A lot of women have no clue what they’re getting into when they start blogging. And when they see how rough it is, they quickly get out, because to them it’s not worth it.

Every conservative female blogger I know gets this kind of abuse, and it’s often sexualized. We all get it. It’s a fact of life when it comes to blogging. Michelle Malkin had to move because her family was threatened by a blogger who published her personal information — address, phone number, everything. There is nothing that is off-limits when it comes to blogging, and anything can be held against you. Anything can be used as leverage against you to make you quit, to make you give up. And frankly, there are not many women who are as tough as Michelle is, who would be able to keep going. For many women, it wouldn’t be worth it.

A lot of women also don’t like the competition factor. Men tend to be more competitive by nature, and there are plenty of women out there who just don’t want to have to fight for readers and advertising. Again, in order to make it as a blogger, you’ve gotta be tough. Some women can take it. Others simply can’t.

Now, here’s the thing. I don’t want there to be more female bloggers. I like the fact that I’m a minority in the blogosphere. It’s a huge selling point for me. I’m not afraid at all to say it. With so few women bloggers, it automatically makes me stand out, and that’s a good thing. Throw in the fact that I’m… ahem… well-endowed, shall we say?, and not bad-looking and it’s even more of a plus. Men don’t get those benefits. A great looking male blogger is not going to attract much traffic, because readership online is mostly male, at least when it comes to politics. A great looking woman, however, who can write well and is not afraid to take shots and shoot back is going to be very attractive to their male readers. It makes you stand out, and if the blogosphere suddenly becomes crowded with female bloggers, then I’ve just lost my edge. I’m a conservative. That means I’m a capitalist, baby, and when it comes to my being successful in the blogosphere, there is always going to be a level of competitiveness there. Competition is part of succeeding. There are thousands of bloggers out there, just as talented as I am, ready to work just as hard as I do if not harder. I have to be able to give myself that edge somehow, to enable myself to be successful. Being a young, conservative, attractive woman certainly does give me an edge. I’m not about to complain about being one of the few female political bloggers out there. I personally hope that doesn’t change. With that said, there are some fantastic female bloggers out there that I look up to and admire. Michelle Malkin immediately comes to mind, along with other amazing women like Mary Katharine Ham, Melissa Clouthier, EM Zanotti, Katie Favazza, Ericka Andersen, Amanda Carpenter… the list could go on and on. There are a lot of great, talented female bloggers and there are certainly no men trying to hold us back. There is no invisible barrier keeping women from being successful as bloggers.

And frankly, the people who think otherwise are just trying to find another way to exploit their status as the liberal-beloved “victim”. They need to get over it and start taking some personal responsibility for their blogging careers.

But then, that goes against everything liberalism stands for, doesn’t it?

Hat Tips: Melissa Clouthier and Little Miss Attila

Cross-posted from Cassy’s blog. Stop by for more original commentary or follow her on Twitter!

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A few weeks ago Jon Fleischman of FlashReport.org was fortunate enough to snag an interview with gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman. But the results of one segment of the meeting left him admittedly non-plussed, or as he termed it “unnerved.” Fleischman was aghast to learn of just how extreme Meg Whitman’s views on abortion really are. And after reading Fleischman’s interview myself, I have to wonder if her views makes her completely unelectable amongst California’s pro-lifers?

In the interview, Whitman was completely upfront about the fact that she stands solidly behind public funding of abortion. She was unequivocal about it, really. Whitman explained why she felt that public funding of abortion was the right decision telling Fleischman, “My view is that if we are going to be pro-choice… that it needs to be available to all women, and whether you are rich or poor, you need to be able to access that right. And it’s unfair to women who can not afford an abortion, and that’s why I support public funding.”

It’s one thing to say that a woman should be allowed to chose abortion — this is quite a common determination among liberals — but quite another, indeed, to say that the taxpayers should have to pay for that abortion.

Whitman obviously believes there is a “right” to abortion and that this “right” must be paid for by our tax dollars to be “fair.” This quixotic view of rights is quite an extreme one. After all, if public funds are used to pay for infanticide, then the rights of every taxpayer not to be a party to such actions is necessarily violated. Apparently Whitman doesn’t care that those with staunchly anti-abortion views might get queasy that their taxes are going to fund abortions.

Thankfully, Whitman agrees that late term abortions are wrong, but one has to wonder what arbitrary reasoning she uses to justify claiming that abortion is a “right” on one hand, but must be outlawed three to four months before full term on the other? Since when are rights based on age requirements? Does a person have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness only at a certain age? Or are true rights endemic to the human condition as has always been believed? If the later then Whitman hasn’t a logical leg to stand on with her view on rights and if the former then rights are transitory and open to the capriciousness of temporary popular sentiment making them less a right and more an mere opinion.

Whitman’s abortion views seem to have placed her decidedly in the minority, too. A recent Pew Research Poll finds that support for abortion is falling nation-wide.

Polls conducted in 2009 have found fewer Americans expressing support for abortion than in previous years. In Pew Research Center polls in 2007 and 2008, supporters of legal abortion clearly outnumbered opponents; now Americans are evenly divided on the question, and there have been modest increases in the numbers who favor reducing abortions or making them harder to obtain. Less support for abortion is evident among most demographic and political groups.

Pew found that opinions were even stronger against abortion when the question became one of making abortions far and few between, the pro-abortion view in the minority. The Pew poll also found that the number one reason cited for being anti-abortion was religious beliefs. Whitman’s views put her in direct opposition to those religious views.

Apparently, though, this does not worry her much. She feels that her abortion views should be cast off as the least important of the challenges facing the next governor. She reminded Fleischman that she is running on economic issues, after all. And if you happen to be a single issue voter?

You know what? People need to know where I stand, and what I have said is people will look at the whole package of attributes of my candidacy; my experience, what I bring to the table, my point of view on the social issues, and then people will weigh it. And if there are single issue voters, which there are on almost every issue, if I don’t agree with that person on that issue, whether it’s this issue or gay marriage or how I want to approach creating jobs in California, people just have to look at the whole package and say, “Okay. I don’t agree with her on every issue, but I like the general approach and I like her authenticity and what she says.

Public funding of abortion is an extreme view even for many Democrats. But for Republicans it is an infinitesimally minority position. I cannot help but feel that if Whitman’s abortion views become more widely known, she won’t [find it] so easy to blow it all off as a mere side issue.

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Meghan Daum of the L.A. Times has had an epiphany. The story of adulterous South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford is still in the news, she’s decided, because America’s men see themselves reflected in him. Yes, Daum apparently feels that all men are adulterers, so they sympathize with him causing the story to keep bumping along.

Daum spies some “gasp–empathy” for the governor in various corners of the Old Media and this, she has decided, must mean that there is a “tiny bit of Mark Sanford” in men across the country. One wonders if Daum spied this same lecherous “sympathy” abounding among Democrats when a certain president was wagging his finger in our faces and saying he “did not have sexual relations with that woman, Monica”?

Betcha she didn’t. As a matter of fact, I’ll bet no such thing crossed her mind as the Clinton’s Monica-gate raged on and on.

Check out this baseless rumination.

So what’s left to say about the Sanford saga? Call me crazy, but amid all this finger-wagging, am I detecting just a little bit of — gasp — empathy? Is there something about Sanford’s puppyish comportment, not to mention the fact that, unlike many adulterous politicos, he seems to be truly in love with his mistress (or at least truly convinced that he is) that’s making him less a pariah and more a symbol of the male midlife crisis? For all his duplicity and entitlement, are some Americans — particularly men — feeling as much pity as outrage? Consider this small sample:

She answers herself thus:

But as we slog through another week of the Jackson postmortem-paloooza and wonder at the fact that we’re also still hearing about the South Carolina governor’s love for certain tan lines, maybe it’s worth asking ourselves why. Is it because we’re uncategorically appalled? Or is it because maybe, just maybe, there’s a tiny bit of Mark Sanford in, if not all men, quite a few of them?

So, what do you think, guys? Are you feeling sorry for the adulterer because you are secretly just like him? Do you have a stack of Argentine frequent flyer miles secretly piled up waiting for redemption at a later date? Is there redemption at a later date?

Is it impossible for men to really feel any outrage? Are they all just using the mask of outrage to cover their sympathetic feelings?

Or is Daum a she-male, man hater that is reaching too far for a column?

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Wonkette sneeringly refers to Trig as “the New Jesus,” “the Sacred One,” and “the Holy Infant,” and denounces Saracuda for using him “as a cheap political prop” by holding him in public. The post is illustrated with another nasty photoshop of Trig, with links to plenty more. At least moonbats have found something creative to do with their time. A couple of examples:

Lovely people we’re up against.

Hat tip: Legal Insurrection. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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Pop’s parents, both 24, made a decision when their baby was born to keep Pop’s sex a secret. Aside from a select few — those who have changed the child’s diaper — nobody knows Pop’s gender; if anyone enquires, Pop’s parents simply say they don’t disclose this information.

In an interview with newspaper Svenska Dagbladet in March, the parents were quoted saying their decision was rooted in the feminist philosophy that gender is a social construction. …

Pop’s wardrobe includes everything from dresses to trousers and Pop’s hairstyle changes on a regular basis. And Pop usually decides how Pop is going to dress on a given morning.

Although Pop knows that there are physical differences between a boy and a girl, Pop’s parents never use personal pronouns when referring to the child — they just say Pop.

“I believe that the self-confidence and personality that Pop has shaped will remain for a lifetime,” said Pop’s mother.

Or rather, the psychological damaged Pop’s moonbat parents are inflicting will last a lifetime. A similar experiment was tried in 1967,

when a circumcision left one of two twin brothers without a penis. Dr. John Money, who asserted that gender was learned rather than innate, convinced the parents to raise ‘David’ as ‘Brenda’ and the child had cosmetic genitalia reconstruction surgery.

She [sic] was raised as a female, with girls’ clothes, games and codes of behaviour. The parents never told Brenda the secret until she [sic] was a teenager and rebelled against femininity. She [sic] then started receiving testosterone injections and underwent another genetic reconstruction process to become David again. David Reimer denounced the experiment as a crushing failure before committing suicide at the age of 38.

But moonbattery can never fail enough times to warrant giving up, or socialism would have been abandoned generations ago. All we need is a little more coercion. Maybe if we got the federal government more involved in child rearing…

On a tip from MP. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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A “man-cession.” That’s what some economists are starting to call it. Of the 5.7 million jobs Americans lost between December 2007 and May 2009, nearly 80 percent had been held by men. Mark Perry, an economist at the University of Michigan, characterizes the recession as a “downturn” for women but a “catastrophe” for men.

Men are bearing the brunt of the current economic crisis because they predominate in manufacturing and construction, the hardest-hit sectors, which have lost more than 3 million jobs since December 2007. Women, by contrast, are a majority in recession-resistant fields such as education and health care, which gained 588,000 jobs during the same period. Rescuing hundreds of thousands of unemployed crane operators, welders, production line managers, and machine setters was never going to be easy. But the concerted opposition of several powerful women’s groups has made it all but impossible. Consider what just happened with the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

Last November, President-elect Obama addressed the devastation in the construction and manufacturing industries by proposing an ambitious New Deal-like program to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure. He called for a two-year “shovel ready” stimulus program to modernize roads, bridges, schools, electrical grids, public transportation, and dams and made reinvigorating the hardest-hit sectors of the economy the goal of the legislation that would become the recovery act.

But then the shrill feminazis at groups like NOW complained to Comrade Obama about jobs going to “burly men.” So…

He changed his plan. He added health, education, and other human infrastructure components to the proposal. And he tasked Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein, Joseph Biden’s chief economist, with preparing an extraordinary report that calculated not only the number of jobs the plan would likely create, but the gender composition of the various employment sectors and the division of largess between women and men.

Romer and Bernstein delivered “The Job Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan” on January 10. They estimated that “the total number of created jobs likely to go to women is roughly 42 percent.” Lest anyone miss the point, they added that since women had held only 20 percent of the jobs lost in the recession, the stimulus package now “skews job creation somewhat towards women.”

Tough luck for the guys — all the tougher if they’re Caucasian guys, as Obama economic advisor Robert Reich made clear:

The free market doesn’t care what color or gender you are, so long as you can do the job. But the government sure does.

On tips from Gregory of Yardale and Edward. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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