Tag Archives: North Dakota

April 12, 2013 · 10:17 AM

In Just Three Months, States Proposed An Astonishing 694 Provisions About Reproduction

Think about that for a second.  A majority of male politicians across the country have proposed over 690 provisions about reproduction.  It’s amazing and horrifying all at once…

Think Progress

In the first quarter of 2013, states have proposed 694 provisions related to a woman’s body, how she gets pregnant, or how she chooses to end that pregnancy.

A new report released on Thursday by the Guttmacher Institute takes a comprehensive look at how the War on Women has continued past the election cycle and into 2013. It shows that the new legislatures across the country are still very much dedicated to restricting sex education, availability of medication, and abortion access for women. Indeed, 47 percent of the 694 provisions were directly related to abortion:

During the first three months of 2013, legislators in 14 states introduced provisions seeking to ban abortion prior to viability. These bans fall into three categories: measures that would prohibit all abortions, those that would ban abortions after a specified point during the first trimester of pregnancy and those that would block abortions at 20 weeks after fertilization (the equivalent of 22 weeks after the woman’s last menstrual period, the conventional method physicians use to measure pregnancy). All of these proposals are in direct violation of U.S. Supreme Court decisions.

Legislators in 10 states have introduced proposals that would ban all, or nearly all, abortions. In eight states (AL, IA, MS, ND, OK, SC, VA and WA), legislators have proposed defining “personhood” as beginning at conception; if adopted, these measures would ban most, if not all, abortions.

Seven states are edging closer to achieving full approval for laws that would reduce or essentially eliminate abortion access.

Enforcing unconstitutional abortion laws isn’t just a threat to women’s rights — it’s also costly to the states caught up in legal battles. Last year, Kansas spent $628,000 defending its unconstitutional abortion restrictions. North Dakota is in the middle of spending $400,000 to defend its ban, and Arkansas is set to do the same.

But if the number of proposed abortion restrictions is discouraging, the upside of the Guttmacher report is that states are moving toward the prevention of unintended pregnancy through sex education: It finds that two states — Montana and North Dakota — are pushing for more restrictive, less informative sex education laws, but that both Colorado and Hawaii are pushing for more comprehensive, inclusive, and scientific sex education for students. Colorado’s would even prohibit abstinence-only instruction, which has been proven to be more harmful than effective. ThinkProgress’s own survey of state legislation has found a total of five states that, like Colorado, are pushing for better sex ed. These findings track with popular opinion that increasingly recognizes the value of sex education.

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January 4, 2013 · 10:02 AM

Biden ‘kills it’ on C-SPAN2

In my opinion, Joe Biden is a National Treasure…

Politico

The twitterverse lit up when CSPAN-2 carried Vice President Joe Biden greeting families and swearing in new senators Thursday:

Holy s[---], @vp Biden is killing it on C-SPAN 2. c-span.org/Live-Video/C-S… Killing. It.

— Emil Caillaux (@emilcDC)

There should be one of those puppy cams but for Joe Biden.

Watching @VP Biden schmoozing on CSPAN2 is more entertaining than it sounds. I swear 

There may be no more charismatic politician than @VPJoe Biden. Turn on C-SPAN to see for yourself. He’s currently swearing senators in.

“Mom, you realize in parts of Arizona this is going to hurt your reputation?” - @VP Biden to Sen. Flake’s mother, on standing next to him

The @VP commentary with the family during swearing in photo-op is my favorite part of the new Congress!

“It’s a Democrat I know, but it’s okay.” @VP Biden to Sen. Ted Cruz’s crying young child.

Watching CSPAN right now kinda make me want to hang out with Joe Biden (@VP) @CarolineWren. “Oh hey there, buddy, you’re alright!”

There is nothing more entertaining than @VP Biden on! He is so much fun.

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July 28, 2011 · 6:10 PM

The Teen Suicide Epidemic in Michele Bachmann’s District

Michele Bachmann Official Photo circa 2007

Image via Wikipedia

Michelle Bachmann has been absolutely silent on this issue…

Mother Jones

Two years. Nine suicides. Why critics blame the congresswoman’s anti-gay allies for contributing to a mental health crisis.

The first was TJ. Then came Samantha, Aaron, Nick, and Kevin. Over the past two years, a total of nine teenagers have committed suicide in a Minnesota school district represented by Rep. Michele Bachmann—the latest in May—and many more students have attempted to take their lives. State public health officials have labeled the area a “suicide contagion area” because of the unusually high death rate.

Some of the victims were gay, or perceived to be by their classmates, and many were reportedly bullied. And the anti-gay activists who are some of the congresswoman’s closest allies stand accused of blocking an effective response to the crisis and fostering a climate of intolerance that allowed bullying to flourish. Bachmann, meanwhile, has been uncharacteristically silent on the tragic deaths that have roiled her district—including the high school that she attended.

Bachmann, who began her political career as an education activist, has described gay rights as an “earthquake issue,” and she and her allies have made public schools the front lines of their fight against the “homosexual agenda.” They have opposed efforts in the state to promote tolerance for gays and lesbians in the classroom, seeing such initiatives as a way of allowing gays to recruit impressionable youths into an unhealthy and un-Christian lifestyle.

But in 2008, when Michele Johnson and her daughter, Samantha, moved from rural North Dakota into the 38,000-student Anoka-Hennepin school district, the largest in Minnesota, they had no idea they were landing on ground zero of that culture war. Coming from a rural small town, Samantha barely knew what the word gay meant when she arrived at Fred Moore Middle School (now Anoka Middle School for the Arts) as a seventh-grader. But by the fall of 2009, the 13-year-old was at the epicenter of the public school fight over gay rights.

Continue reading here…

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September 30, 2010 · 1:54 AM

Banana republic

The income gap between the rich and the poor is becoming more clear everyday…

Daily Kos Diary – Meteor Blades

An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailments of all republics.
       – Plutarch

The Census Bureau reports that the gap between rich and poor reached its widest amount since records started being kept in 1967. Add that to the Joint Economic Committee’s Income Inequality and the Great Recession  and the Census Bureau’s report on Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2009 and you’ve got a nasty little synopsis of economic failure.

Americans in the top 20 percent of income – $100,000 or more a year – collected 49.4 percent of all income. Those below the poverty line earned 3.4 percent. This ratio of 14.5-to-1 in 2009 was an increase from 13.6 to 1 in 2008. In 1968, the ratio was 7.69 to 1.

[...]

As we’ve been reminded the past year, quite a slew of rightist ideologues have not given up their dream of getting that rich-poor ratio into banana republic territory by pushing additional tax cuts for the wealthiest and by further shredding of the safety net, including Medicaid, Medicare and the grand-daddy of all, Social Security.

The JEC report noted:

Over  the  past  three  decades,  income  inequality  has  grown  dramatically.    After  remaining  relatively  constant  for  much  of  the  post‐war  era,  the  share  of  total  income  accrued  by  the  wealthiest  10  percent  of  households  jumped  from  34.6  percent  in  1980  to  48.2  percent  in  2008.  Much  of  the  spike  was  driven  by  the  share  of  total  income  accrued  by  the  richest  1  percent  of  households.  Between  1980  and  2008,  their  share  rose  from  10.0  percent  to  21.0  percent,  making  the  United  States  as  one  of  the  most  unequal  countries  in  the  world.

[...]

It’s not as if there aren’t policy changes that could return that ratio to a more reasonable level. Revamping trade policy, creating disincentives for companies to off-shore jobs, reinstituting a truly progressive income tax system, boosting the minimum wage, making unionizing easier, providing a real safety net that adapts good ideas from Europe, and creating programs to spur the creation of rivals to corporate hegemony over everything. These latter could include state banks like North Dakota’s and worker-owned and -operated businesses.

While all of that could improve matters, and ought to be part of the platform of any political party that claims to really supportive of rank-and-file Americans, it will take more than these few remedies to create a new, environmentally sustainable economics for the 21st Century in which inequalities in income and wealth are reduced along with the power of the oligarchy. However, merely getting to the point of even seriously considering such a shift in thinking will require persuading vastly more Americans that their ultimate rulers are oligarchs.

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