We like to tell ourselves that, as long as Roe stands, abortion is legal. We like to think that "reasonable" restrictions on abortion are ... reasonable. We like to think that this is an issue best left ignored, shoved aside, open to compromise.

I beg to differ.

Two days after the GAO exposed underhanded political stonewalling on Plan B, I take the occasion to offer a different tale of what's currently legal in the United States....

Five months ago, this post appeared relating one woman's ordeal of find herself pregnant in this world where abortion is supposedly a Constitutionally-protected right:

Last October, Gabriela Flores ended her 16-week pregnancy by taking misoprostol pills sent by her sister from Mexico. She had no choice but to risk her life by taking illegally imported drugs, without any doctor's supervision, because although abortion is technically legal in South Carolina, in Gabriela's situation it may as well have been illegal.

South Carolina laws force women to get permission from their husbands, listen to biased anti-abortion "counseling" riddled with misinformation, and to undergo a mandatory waiting period. And abortions after 13 weeks are so restricted that no provider in the state will offer them.

Gabriela would have had to travel to another state, two and-a-half hours away, and since such a procedure is done over two days, she most likely would have lost her job. Gabriela was working in the fields supporting three children and herself on $150 per week. There is no way she could have afforded the $700 procedure.

Can we calk about the pink elephant in the room?

Once upon a time I was a moderate. I believed in Keynesian economics. I believed in using market forces to help institute desired policy. I believed in empowering people so that they could take charge of their own lives. I believed in incentives in business and personal tax deductions and rebates. I believed that people had a right to privacy. I believed that the government should stay out of people's private lives, but that the government is needed to protect people from not just crime but from abuse through pollution and fraud. I believed in free speech.

That was then. I was a moderate.

This is now ... and I still believe all those things. But now I find myself labeled as "left."

I can't say which is worse: embarrassment and shame that I haven't blogged this yet? Or embarrassment and shame that virtually nobody in the blogosphere has written a single thing about this.

But worse than embarrassment or shame is the horrible situation in Pakistan, where tens of thousands have died, and tens of thousands more, including children, still have not received any aid.

Let's look at the facts:

50,000 dead, maybe more, many of whom were children, who were in school at the moment the quake hit.

10,000 more children are facing imminent death due to injury, infection, disease, starvation, dehydration, exposure to the sub-zero temperatures at night. 120,000 children are at risk.

Ask a dozen progressives what progressive means, and you'll probably get a dozen answers. But odds are that they'll all touch on the same core values: human and civil rights, effective government, improving the social safety net, including healthcare, anti-poverty programs and unemployment programs. Individuals will have their priorities within these areas, but this is the terrain. The priorities of individual progressives are not mutually exclusive. It's a progressive coalition based on values.

Today, in one of his more weakly-reasoned posts in a year of some real doozies, Markos attempts to toss progressivism out the window and claim for himself leader of "the new progressives." True progressivism apparently is a real problem for progressives, but most of us just don't realize it.

The basis of this claim?

Wait for it....

The generation gap. (Oh, if I could buy the world a Coke!)

It hasn't taken long for the big blog boys on the right and left to sound off on Harriet Miers. Not surprisingly, Markos and John Aravosis are already salivating. Apparently a Bush insider is just dandy for them. They seem to think this is a huge GOP blunder. Markos goes so far as to claim that Miers is a moderate -- though how he would figure that, given that she has virtually no paper trail, who knows?

Here's another take:

Karl Rove is no fool, and perhaps John and Markos and gloating Dems are falling for a feint. What happens if there's enough suspicion and resistance on both sides of the aisle so that she cannot win an up or down vote?

[posted on mediagirl.org....]

Imagine we're in the decade of the 1960s. Imagine that the civil rights movement is heating up. Imagine African Americans agitating for their rights as Americans, demanding equal protection, equal access to the commons, equal rights under the law.

Imagine the heat they direct at the white racist establishment. Imagine the harsh words they have for the Jim Crow enforcers. Imagine white bigots in both parties getting outraged and indignant over these "Negroes with their pet issues."

Imagine Democrats fighting these developments. Imagine white bigots representing the Democratic Party, taking money from the Democratic Party, speaking for the Democratic Party, saying miscegenation is an abomination, that blacks should know their place, that our American traditions demand this, that our children our being corrupted by these disruptions. Imagine bigotry being framed as "moral values." Imagine bigotry being accepted as "divergent views."

Cross-posted on MediaGirl and DailyKos. Read on....

Of course, if you don't want a cola -- or any kind of sugared, carbonated beverage -- this kind of question doesn't help.

It seems that the same kind of thing is happening in politics, where people increasingly are seeing the two main brands, Democrat and Republican, offering two slightly different variations on the same basic treacly, gassy content.

You'd think that the disruptive nature of the internet would mean that bloggers, who ostensibly are not constrained by the mainstreaming pressures of mainstream political cultures, would be pushing for real progressive policies, or, for that matter, real conservative policies.

Strangely, when it comes to the mainstream bloggers, that does not seem to be the case. (Or maybe it's not so strange, considering how some bloggers are now in bed with political PACs.)

There's been a lot of calling for real accountability when it comes to Bush and his administration's neglect of essential government programs related to our national security and civil infrastructure, leading to the failures so bloody apparent in the aftermath of Katrina.

And I agree, Bush should be held accountable.

The Republicans are now trying to mount a big coverup campaign, by maintaining control over any investigation of what really happened. Why are they doing this? What do they have to hide? What are they afraid of?

The truth?

But I think it's important for progressives to understand that this disaster is not just about Bush, and it's not just about the Republicans who collaborated with Bush to dismantle our government -- all the while increasing spending and feeding at the taxpayer trough.

The more important thing that happened in the past few weeks is the exposure of the utter bankruptcy of conservative ideology, which since Ronald Reagan (at least) has tried to claim that government is the enemy, that government must be destroyed.

When one person breathes, one person eats, one person shits, then there's (duh!) one person.

A woman is one person. A pregnant woman is one person.

When a baby is born, that is the beginning of the baby's life.

And before anyone scoffs at that notion, consider that life-beginning-at-birth is how we as a people, in our own culture, treat the entire issue. Consider:

If you read some of the überblogs on the John Roberts hearings, you'll see a lot of talk about the right to privacy -- which Roberts himself called "the so-called right to privacy" in an internal memo when he was a young, bright-eyed legal turk in the Reagan administration.

So what is the average American to think? To most Americans -- who, contrary to popular belief, are not lawyers -- a "right to privacy" means a right to be able to close the door on governmental snooping, the right to private lives. And in that much, they are right.

But what the average American may not realize is that when legal eagles talk about "privacy," they're also talking about liberty -- the right to do what one will without governmental interference or control.

But the war is already well underway. And battles are already being lost. The perceptions that the war has yet to start are wrong.

Some 25 years ago, the Democratic Party did something precipitous: they abandoned progressive values in a political gambit to ride the coattails of the conservatism that was sweeping the country. Like Judas, they cried, "I'm not liberal. I don't even know any liberals!" The gambit paid off in the form of two terms for Clinton, and massive losses in Congress.

Yet they've stuck to their guns, under the guidance of the DLC. They generally backed many of the conservative attacks on our government infrastructure. They are culpable.

And now, in the disastrous man-made disaster following Katrina, We The People are paying the price.

CIA Probe Moves from Leak Source to Perjury, Obstruction

more....