Stephan: Let there be no doubt, the Right does not like democracy. They don't like the idea of every citizen being able to vote, and proponents of this worldview do everything they can to undermine universal suffrage. This is an irrefutable fact, as this story makes clear, and I could have picked a dozen other stories with the same message.
The good news is that this attempt to debase democracy is taking place at the State level, where citizen action can more easily stop it. The bad news is that, particularly in Red value states, where a strong push back is needed most, the citizenry is either passive, or supportive. This is becoming part of the Great Schism Trend, and it is time to acknowledge that the American people get the kind of government they vote for.
In 2011 and 2012, 180 new voting restrictions were introduced in forty-one states. Ultimately, twenty-five laws and two executive actions were passed in nineteen states following the 2010 election to make it harder to vote. In many cases, these laws backfired on their Republican sponsors. The courts blocked ten of them, and young and minority voters-the prime target of the restrictions-formed a larger share of the electorate in 2012 than in 2008.
Despite the GOP’s avowal to reach out to new constituencies following the 2012 election, Republican state legislators have continued to support new voting restrictions in 2013. According to a report by Project Vote, fifty-five new voting restrictions have been introduced in thirty states so far this year. ‘The 2013 legislative season has once again brought an onslaught of bills to restrict access to the ballot, including proposals to undercut important election laws that have recently opened the electorate to more voters,
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LAURAN NEERGAARD, AP Medical Writer - The Advocate
Stephan: You may have already heard about this decision from the FDA. I view this as very good news for many reasons, not least because although it is far from perfect it would go a long way toward eliminating the need for abortions, and would provide an option in those Red Value states where women's reproductive health services have been virtually eliminated. I have been increasingly concerned we were going back in those states to life before Roe v Wade, when women often resorted to dangerous measures in the absence of safe, legal abortion services, and an estimated 47,000 of them died or were rendered sterile each year from backroom abortions.
But the decade long struggle to get Plan B into the market ain't over yet. A few hours ago Obama's Justice Department announced it would appeal the court ruling by a Federal Judge that the pill be made available to all regardless of age.
WASHINGTON — In a surprise twist to the decade-plus effort to ease access to morning-after pills, the government is lowering the age limit to 15 for one brand – Plan B One-Step – and will let it be sold over the counter.
Today, Plan B and its generic competition are sold behind pharmacy counters, and people must prove they’re 17 or older to buy the emergency contraception without a prescription. A federal judge had ordered an end to those sales restrictions by next Monday.
But Tuesday, the Food and Drug Administration approved a different approach: Plan B could sit on drugstore shelves next to condoms, spermicides or other women’s health products – but to make the purchase, buyers must prove they’re 15 or older at the cash register.
Manufacturer Teva Women’s Health, which had applied for the compromise path, said it planned to make the switch in a few months.
The question is whether Tuesday’s action settles the larger court fight. Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Edward Korman of New York blasted the Obama administration for imposing the age-17 limit, saying it had let election-year politics trump science and were making it hard for women of any age to obtain emergency contraception in […]
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TIMOTHY LANGE, - Daily Kos
Stephan: You think I am kidding or exaggerating about the Theocratic Right's drive to defund social science, and eliminate fact based policy? Try this on then. There are so many of these stories I could do whole editions of SR daily for many days just with reports like this one. The Democrats often disappoint me, but the Republican Party is becoming a menace to our national wellbeing.
Rep. Jeff Duncan has a plan to help us cope with information overload. His H. R. 1638 would simply eliminate all the data collection that the U.S. Census Bureau does except for the decennial population count. In particular, it would do away with the American Community Survey that has been undertaken in some form since a guy named Thomas Jefferson was president. (And along with it the Economic Census, the Census of Governments, the Census of Agriculture, the mid-decade Census and other information-gathering not explicitly stated in the Constitution.) The House of Representatives voted last year 232-190 to dump the ACS, but the proposal failed to gain traction in the Senate. That probably will be its fate this year as well.
Together with the Census itself, the American Community Survey used to be done every 10 years, with one of out six Americans required to fill out the ‘long form.’ But, as a cost-saving measure, President George W. Bush switched it to a annual survey of one in 38 households. Advantages: cheaper and more up-to-date. The problem, according to Republicans like Duncan (as well Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ted Poe of Texas who want it to be optional), […]
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LEE SIEGEL, - The Daily Beast
Stephan: If you have been reading SR for a while you know my views on the Great Schism Trend, and my belief that it was only a matter of time before social progressives woke up to the benefits of States Rights and to letting the Theocratic Right, as it constantly claims it wants to, take the Red value states and go its own way. It is happening, as this essay makes obvious, and I believe we will hear more and more about this.
I want to be clear, I publish this in SR, as polemic as it is, because agree or not agree it is a developing trend, and I want my readers to be aware of the trends that are shaping our future.
Let’s face it-on nearly every important issue, from gun control to immigration to gay marriage, red states are holding America back.
Let’s not be fooled by all the bipartisan rhetoric that has been streaming out of the GOP since Romney’s self-destruction. Hundreds of thousands of petitioners in a handful of red states still want to secede? Well, don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
Mason Dixon Line
A solid block of Southern states continues to refuse to expand Medicaid, thus squashing one of the linchpins of the president’s health-care reform. The South will likely be the last and most stubborn battleground in the fight for gay marriage. Gun control? The more the two sides seem to get cozier with each other, the faster gun-control legislation gets watered down-and more and more red states are passing laws making it legal to carry a concealed weapon. As for immigration, the red states seem to be relaxing their anti-immigrant fervor, but nothing approaching new legislation is even on the horizon.
The sad truth is that ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness
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TRAVIS WALDRON, - Think Progress
Stephan: This is the bitter truth of the economic policies that have dominated the U.S., and the world since Reagan, through Republican and Democratic administrations. The Sequester alone, I believe, we will discover killed thousands of people.
And I also predict that the supply side austerity nonsense being peddled by Paul Ryan and his fellow Austerites will continue because, at its core, it is not about money so much as it is about an Ayn Randian view of the world in which the poor are, and should be, punished for being poor. This philosophy is destroying the country, and yet these men and women are voted into office over and over by the people in the Red value states.
Austerity in the United States and Europe isn’t just placing an unnecessary drag on economic growth that has harmed the global economic recovery from the Great Recession. The rapid deficit reduction efforts are also making people less healthy, causing higher rates of suicide, depression, and infectious disease, according to research from Oxford University economist David Stuckler and Stanford University medical professor Sanjay Basu.
HIV rates have risen 200 percent in Greece as it has cut its HIV prevention budget, and the country also suffered its first malaria outbreak in decades after budget cuts to mosquito-related programs. Increased unemployment has led to higher rates of suicide and depression across the continent, and the United States is seeing the effects as well, Reuters reports:
And more than five million Americans have lost access to healthcare during the latest recession, they argue, while in Britain, some 10,000 families have been pushed into homelessness by the government’s austerity budget.
‘Our politicians need to take into account the serious – and in some cases profound – health consequences of economic choices,
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