{"id":184479,"date":"2012-04-17T19:04:00","date_gmt":"2012-04-18T00:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2012\/04\/17\/betraying-women-for-fun-and-profit\/"},"modified":"2012-04-17T19:04:00","modified_gmt":"2012-04-18T00:04:00","slug":"betraying-women-for-fun-and-profit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2012\/04\/17\/betraying-women-for-fun-and-profit\/","title":{"rendered":"Betraying Women for Fun and Profit"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It looks like the Democratic establishment in Michigan is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.americablog.com\/2012\/04\/does-dccc-back-anti-woman-democrat.html\">going all in for a Congressional candidate who has voted to defund Planned Parenthood<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<div style=\"color: blue;\">That&#8217;s a serious question: Who does the DCCC back in the Michigan 3rd CD race? <\/div>\n<ul style=\"color: blue;\">\n<li>Steve Pestka, who voted to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.michiganvotes.org\/RollCall.aspx?ID=20381&amp;Print=true\">defund Planned Parenthood<\/a> when he was in the Michigan House, or <\/li>\n<li>Trevor Thomas, an actual <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/#%21\/TrevorThomasMI\/status\/190247877702991872\">pro-woman<\/a> Democrat<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"color: blue;\">Context \u2014 Obama&#8217;s White House is in the <\/span><a href=\"http:\/\/www.americablog.com\/2012\/04\/carney-gets-pummeled-over-lgbt.html\" style=\"color: blue;\">process of trying<\/a><span style=\"color: blue;\"> (and <\/span><a href=\"http:\/\/www.americablog.com\/2012\/04\/criticism-mounts-over-obamas-punt-on.html\" style=\"color: blue;\">failing<\/a><span style=\"color: blue;\">) to damp down the firestorm from the gay community about <\/span><a href=\"http:\/\/gay.americablog.com\/2012\/04\/more-fallout-from-no-go-enda-executive.html\" style=\"color: blue;\">Obama&#8217;s pointed refusal to grant the same protection<\/a><span style=\"color: blue;\"> against same-sex\u2013preference bias as it routinely grants to other biases.<\/span> <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Marcie Wheeler, who lives in the district <a href=\"http:\/\/www.emptywheel.net\/2012\/04\/13\/the-democrats-had-already-conceded-the-war-on-women\/\">pointed it out this way<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"color: blue;\"><p>Meanwhile, the Democrats are still going to use GOP attacks on women as a political stunt. DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz tweeted or re-tweeted 7 comments about women\u2019s issues yesterday, in addition to the seemingly mandatory condemnation of Rosen.<\/p>\n<p>I was particularly amused by this DWS tweet:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Bottom line: Choice, affordable contraception, and Planned Parenthood are at stake in this election. http:\/\/j.mp\/I6A8c0<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>As it happened, a few hours after DWS sent that tweet, I went to a Debbie Stabenow event hosted by a local women\u2019s group. As we were waiting for the Senator to speak, a top county Democrat was sitting several rows behind me trying to convince some of the women not to support Trevor Thomas. \u201cThere is absolutely no way he can win,\u201d the guy said (the polling says he\u2019s wrong, and I suspect he knows that). In addition to saying a gay man can\u2019t win, he also said a pro-choice person can\u2019t win in the district (his listeners pointed out that Stabenow herself had won the district; so have at least two other pro-choice candidates). Then he described Steven Pestka, using the line Michigan Democrats used to defend Bart Stupak as he was rolling back access to choice for women across the country.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>He\u2019s with us on everything else.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>But the really appalling comment, uttered by a man at a women\u2019s event, was this:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I need to win this year.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>If the guy were reasonably intelligent, he might have said, \u201cwe need to win the gavel back for Nancy Pelosi.\u201d But he couldn\u2019t even muster a \u201cwe need to win\u201d this year. Nope. It was \u201cI need to win this year,\u201d and that\u2019s why women have to suck it up and vote for someone who has attacked their autonomy in the past.<\/p>\n<p>Steve Pestka\u2019s with us on everything else, this guy said at a women\u2019s event. But he\u2019s not just anti-choice. When he was in the State House (the experience locals point to to claim he\u2019s a better candidate than Trevor) he scored a whopping 0% on votes to support choice. That included a vote for HB 4655, which singled out Planned Parenthood to be defunded, precisely the outrage\u2013at the national level\u2013that Democrats use as the cornerstone of their metaphorical attack on the GOP for its \u201cWar on Women.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>It really is remarkable just how craven, and willing to abandon core principles the professional Democrats are, and how f%$#ing <b>stupid<\/b> this sort of behavior is.<\/p>\n<p>Cowardly political calculation, particularly with the active <b>public<\/b> support of the party establishment, turns off voters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It looks like the Democratic establishment in Michigan is going all in for a Congressional candidate who has voted to defund Planned Parenthood: That&#8217;s a serious question: Who does the DCCC back in the Michigan 3rd CD race? Steve Pestka, who voted to defund Planned Parenthood when he was in the Michigan House, or Trevor &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[998,1000,1051,1003],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-184479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-congress","category-elections","category-hypocrisy","category-philosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184479"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184479"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184479\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}