A Gentleman’s view.

Conservative radio host, Neal Boortz, calls the poor ‘toenail fungus’

The Komen Foundation got a huge assist today and it didn’t even have to pay some sleazy PR firm a yacht of cash to do it. Earlier today, the Dallas News reported that the  Komen Foundation had issued an apology for its decision to stop funding cancer screen and prevention at Planned Parenthood, a decision that has inflamed many. It turns out that the apology was nothing more than a shameless attempt to take control of all the damage wrought to Komen, but the traditional media didn’t even bother to see the bait that it was blindly slurping up and ran with it anyway. Worse yet, they reported it as a reversal of the Komen Foundation’s decision.

From the Daily Kos:

“I just got off the phone with a Komen board member, and he confirmed that the announcement does not mean that Planned Parenthood is guaranteed future grants — a demand he said would be “unfair” to impose on Komen. He also said the job of the group’s controversial director, Nancy Brinker, is safe, as far as the board is concerned.”according to Greg Sargent of the Washington Post.

Apparently “reversal” is in the same lexicon as ‘refudiate’. Sargent’s article peels the onion back even further.

Pushed on whether this means the new announcement wasn’t really a reversal, [Komen board member John] Raffelli pushed back, arguing that Komen, in response to all the criticism, had removed politics from the grant-making process. “Is it really unclear that we’re changing the policy to address criticism?” he said.

Well, it looks like the Komen Foundation needs to disregard this incidental makeover and clearly state if it will continue its longstanding relationship with Planned Parenthood. If not, as the Daily Kos aptly put it, “this looks like nothing more than an attempt to try to change the narrative and the non-stop negative headlines about the foundation’s politicizing of breast cancer prevention.”

Maybe the former governor of Alaska was onto something with the whole “lamestream media” epithet. Thank you very much traditional media;  you actually made me compliment Sarah Palin.

 Michael is a comedian/VO artist/Columnist extraordinaire, who co-wrote an award-nominated comedy, produces a chapter of Laughing Liberally, wrote for NY Times Laugh Lines, guest-blogged for Joe Biden, and writes a column for MSNBC.com affiliatedCagle Media. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook, and like NJ Laughing Liberally Lab. Seriously, follow him or he’ll send you a photo of Rush Limbaugh bending over in a thong

 

 

No one should be surprised that the Tin Man has a tin ear.

After all, Mitt Romney is the same multimillionaire who joked that he was “unemployed” while he was “earning” more in one day than most Americans earn in a year and paying a lower rate on those earnings than most Americans do.

This is the same man who bragged last month that he liked to fire people at a time when nearly 13 million people are out of work and who accepted the endorsement this week of Donald Trump, who has made “You’re Fired!” his television catchphrase.

This is the same man who in November claimed that federal employees are making “a lot more money than we are.” What?! We? What we? Please direct me to the federal employees with the $20 million paychecks. In fact, The Washington Post pointed out in November that federal employees on average “are underpaid by 26.3 percent when compared with similar nonfederal jobs, a ‘pay gap’ that increased by about 2 percentage points over the last year while federal salary rates were frozen.”

And who could forget his remark that “corporations are people.” Classic.

But this week when Romney said that he wasn’t concerned about the very poor in this country, he jumped in the pickle barrel and went over the waterfall.

First, his statement:

“I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich. They’re doing just fine. I’m concerned about the very heart of America — the 90-95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling.”

Romney went on to say that his campaign was focused on “middle-income Americans” and that “we have a very ample safety net” for the poor.

He later tried to clarify, saying that his comments needed context. Then he said that the comments were a “misstatement” and that he had “misspoke.” Yeah, right.

Where to begin?

First, a report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities last month pointed out that Romney’s budget proposals would take a chainsaw to that safety net. The report points out that cuts proposed by Romney would be even more draconian than a plan from Representative Paul Ryan: “Governor Romney’s budget proposals would require far deeper cuts in nondefense programs than the House-passed budget resolution authored by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan: $94 billion to $219 billion deeper in 2016 and $303 billion to $819 billion deeper in 2021.”

What does this mean for specific programs? Let’s take the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, since “food stamps” have been such a talking point in the Republican debates. The report says the Romney plan “would throw 10 million low-income people off the benefit rolls, cut benefits by thousands of dollars a year, or some combination of the two.  These cuts would primarily affect very-low-income families with children, seniors and people with disabilities.”

Does that sound like a man trying to “fix” our social safety nets? Absolutely not. Romney is so far up the beanstalk that he can no longer see the ground.

Then let’s take the fact that a report last month by the Tax Policy Center found that his tax plan would increase after-tax income for millionaires by 14.5 percent while increasing the after-tax income of those making less than $20,000 by less than 1 percent and of those making between $30,000 and $40,000 by less than 3 percent.

For a man who’s not worried about the rich, he sure seems to want them to rake in more cash.

This has nothing to do with context. This has everything to do with a caviar candidate’s inability to relate to a chicken-soup citizenry.

Then there is the “ample safety net” nonsense. No one who has ever been on the low end of the income spectrum believes this, not even Republicans. According to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in October, even most Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who make less than $30,000 a year, which accounts for about a quarter of all Republicans, say that the government doesn’t do enough to help the poor. Only a man who has never felt the sting of poverty or seen its ravages would say such a thing.

But perhaps the most pernicious part of his statement was the underestimating of the rich and poor and the elasticized expansion of the term “middle income” or middle class. Romney suggests that 95 percent of Americans are in this group. Not true.

According to the Census Bureau, the official poverty rate in 2010 was 15.1 percent.

And that’s the income poor. It doesn’t even count the “asset poor.” A report issued this week by the Corporation for Enterprise Development found that 27 percent of U.S. households live in “asset poverty.” According to the report, “These families do not have the savings or other assets to cover basic expenses (equivalent to what could be purchased with a poverty level income) for three months if a layoff or other emergency leads to loss of income.”

On the other hand, the definition of “rich” is more nebulous. However, according to a December Gallup report, Americans set the rich threshold at $150,000 in annual income. And according to the U.S. Census Bureau 8.4 percent of households had an income of $150,000 are more in 2010.

So at the very least, nearly a fourth of all Americans are either poor or rich.

That would leave about three-fourths somewhere in the middle, but not all middle class. Tricking the poor to believe they’re in it, and allowing the wealthy to hide in it, is one of the great modern political deceptions and how we’ve arrived at our current predicament.

According to a New York Times/CBS News poll conducted last month, nearly a fifth of families making less than $15,000 said that they were middle class and nearly two-fifths of those making more than $100,000 said that they were middle class.

Romney is not only cold and clumsy, he’s disastrously out of touch, and when talking about real people, out of sorts. If only he had a heart, and if only that heart was connected to his brain.

6 Things You Need To Know About the Komen Foundation/Planned Parenthood Controversy (Updated: Komen Reverses Decision)

By now, unless you’re living on Mars, your newspaper reports, radio waves, Facebook and Twitter streams are being swamped with stories, images and chattering about the shocking decision of Susan G. Komen for the Cure, the nation’s most ubiquitous breast cancer awareness foundation, to essentially sever financial ties with Planned Parenthood.

1. Although it started off as a blow, this ended up as a PR disaster for Komen–and a win for Planned Parenthood. 

When the decision was announced over the Planned Parenthood email list (it had initially been broken a short while earlier), it felt like a crippling blow to women’s healthcare–and in some ways it still is. But the big story is actually how furious many Komen supporters are, how many have taken to the Internet, to petitions, and more to declare the end of their support and donations to Komen.

This is a big change, considering the fact that Komen was a beloved, celebrity-endorsed brand — and Planned Parenthood was increasingly under attack. But something shifted after this announcement: immediate analyses from social media in fact show that the number of angry comments against Komen and in favor Planned Parenthood vastly outnumbered the comments that applauded the decision — even as Komen began to frantically erase them on its Facebook page.

Marketing expert Kivi Leroux Miller calls Komen’s actions a “communications debacle unfolding before us,” writing, “At one point last night, I did a quick count and found the ratio of anti-Komen decisions to pro-Komen decisions to be about 80 to 1 on Twitter.” Miller has a blow-by-blow post on how the news broke and essentially how the Komen foundation utterly failed at every step to anticipate and properly deal with the outrage.

Meanwhile, Planned Parenthood, in a few short days, nearly raised the entire amount of money lost from Komen – $650,000 has been pledged as of February 1. On Thursday, NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced a $250,000 donation, and Facebook has been flooded by loyal supporters posting, “I still stand with Planned Parenthood” graphics on their pages.

2. Despite the uproar, this disheartening move was a natural end-result of the political “war on women”–a war which will continue to try to isolate abortion providers at all costs.

As heartening as the outpouring and the reversal has been, and as satisfying as it’s been on some level to watch Komen’s PR strategy implode, the initial decision is still bad news, and it comes after a year of bad policy. One of the primary items on the right-wing agenda since the GOP swept into Congress in 2010 has been to isolate, ostracize, harass and shame Planned Parenthood. They’ve tried to de-fund it at the federal and state levels and launched a bogus investigation. Planned Parenthood and all abortion providers are part of a never-ending paranoid obsession. Many bloggers have been comparing it to the Salem, Massachusetts hysteria, the kind of witch-hunt that taints everyone by association.

They’ve already succeeded in making abortion a pariah among medical procedures, the only one not funded by Medicaid, the only one hushed up and shunted aside. Now they’re trying to extend that blacklist to Planned Parenthood, and backlash aside, Komen’s move shows that this relentless campaign has met with some success.

3. Komen is a corporatist nonprofit organization with a dubious record when it comes to putting women’s needs above its own interests.

While some of what Komen has done is undoubtedly beneficial, it is an organization that has been in trouble for corporate ties and lack of concern for health issues for a long time. In a Daily Kos diary, user Betty Pinson has an explosive account of her own research into Komen. Her journey began with a rude awakening when she called a local politician to advocate for a cancer treatment funding program for low-income women–and discovered that Komen was lobbying against it. Here’s what she says about Komen:

They fought behind the scenes in my state to prevent the governor from adopting the treatment program. They worked for several years to stall or kill the Breast Cancer & Environmental Research Act. In the end, they eviscerated it by removing new funding for environmental research and substituting a panel to review all research on breast cancer & environment. Using private funds, they recently collaborated with the Institute of Medicine to develop said report. Released last December, it sadly detailed the same old arguments that there’s no evidence of links between environmental toxins and that no further research should be done on the subject since everyone has those toxins in their bodies already. Instead they chose to blame breast cancer patients for getting the disease (more here).

In 2009, Komen lobbied behind the scenes to weaken the healthcare bill (ACA) as it was being debated in Congress. They hired Hadassah Lieberman, wife of Joe, in an effort to convince Joementum to vote against the Public Option. Komen spent over $1 million in 2008 & 2009, on behind-the-scenes lobbying related to the healthcare reform bill, so who knows what else was on their agenda.

She also notes CEO Brinker’s ties to George W. Bush and other Republicans — which partially explains her institution’s opposition to progressive policy.

These kinds of positions go hand-in-hand with being buddied up to corporate behemoths, as Komen is–and becoming more focused on appearance than results.

The list goes on–Komen has also been accused of being overly litigious over use of the word “cure,” which began to raise public ire and suspicion that the charity was more concerned with its image than the “cure” it claimed to be desperately seeking.

4. Even within this context, this decision was so heated it led to resignations and defections within Komen.

Contrary to the spin put out by Komen, the decision caused tremendous friction within the organization. Jeffrey Goldberg at the Atlantic made some phone calls on Thursday morning, and his sources told him their perception of what happened once the decision was reached:

The decision, made in December, caused an uproar inside Komen. Three sources told me that the organization’s top public health official, Mollie Williams, resigned in protest immediately following the Komen board’s decision to cut off Planned Parenthood. Williams, who served as the managing director of community health programs, was responsible for directing the distribution of $93 million in annual grants.

Williams offered a statement to Goldberg saying she hoped that Komen and Planned Parenthood would find a way to work together. Meanwhile, several Komen chapters, including affiliates in Colorado and Connecticut, have expressed their dissent with the national group’s decision and their desire to stay in partnership with Planned Parenthood locally.

This may explain some of the reason for Komen’s eventual reversal.

5. The new policy was created expressly to defund Planned Parenthood, not as a blanket rule.

Susan G. Komen top brass are claiming that the sloughing off of PPFA is purely a side-effect of a new rule that prohibits funding organizations under political investigation. However, Goldberg notes that according to his research, the order was reversed: the investigation was a convenient way to get rid of PPFA.

But three sources with direct knowledge of the Komen decision-making process told me that the rule was adopted in order to create an excuse to cut off Planned Parenthood. (Komen gives out grants to roughly 2,000 organizations, and the new “no investigations” rule applies to only one so far.)

But if the “blanket rule” applies to all entities under investigation, why is Komen still funding Penn State? At Mother Jones, Adam Serwer makes this brilliant catch. Komen, he notes,

currently fund[s] cancer research at the Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center to the tune of $7.5 million. Like Planned Parenthood, Penn State is currently the subject of a federal government investigation, and like the Planned Parenthood grant, the Penn State grant appears to violate a new internal rule at Komen that bans grants to organizations that are under investigation by federal, state, or local governments. But so far, only the Planned Parenthood grants appear to have been cancelled.

Sounds like a double-standard is in place.

6. It is widely understood that the anti-gay, anti-choice Palin pal who’s a new VP at Komen had a major role in the company’s new direction–and replaced a Democratic lobbyist.

Jezebel dubs the aforementioned “no grants to institutions under investigations” rule the “Handel rule,” after Karen Handel, the company’s new vice-president, plucked from the far-right of the Republican party. Handel got caught red-handed retweeting a nasty little tidbit after the decision was announced, and then later deleted the tweet–but not before the screengrab was captured, with tens of thousands of views already.

This tweet disappeared, but others, revealing Handel’s ultra-conservative bona-fides, remain. At Jezebel, Erin Gloria Ryan goes back through Handel’s previous tweets:

Handel didn’t bother to scrub her earlier political tweets before becoming the Senior Vice President of Public Policy at Susan G Komen for the Cure. Like this one, where she talked about how great it was to hang out with pro-life organizations. Or this one, where she promised to pass a racist immigration law in Georgia, like the one they have in Arizona. Or the celebratory tweets where she’s just beside herself that Sarah Palin endorsed her, making her an honorary Mama Grizzly. Or all the tweets where she promised Georgians to get rid of Obamacare— because health care is something you earn, especially if you have cancer, right, non-doctor lady who works for Susan G. Komen for the Cure making health care decisions for poor women?

It seems that just before Handel was hired, a previous Democratic-leaning VP left Komen. Megan Carpentier at Raw Story has dug up information around that staff transition:

Before Handel’s hiring, Komen’s lobbying shop was staunchly Democratic — from its head to its hired guns…And when their lead lobbyist, former Democratic staffer Jennifer Luray, quietly left in 2010, she took with her a six-figure severance package not in keeping with an employee that just found a new job.At the time Handel was hired as a consultant — shortly after Luray left — Handel told the local magazine Northside Woman that Komen was her first and only client, and that her role was to “[work] with [the affiliates] to make sure they are as strong as they can be”…That would seem to belie Komen Foundation President Nancy Brinker’s assertion today that Handel wasn’t involved in the decision to end most affiliates’ grants to Planned Parenthood for breast cancer screenings, let alone her assertion that none of their decisions were “political.”

Handel and Brinker are in the middle of a genuine firestorm, deservedly so.

Here’s the reality — the war on Planned Parenthood will continue and the effort to isolate it from the medical community will continue. But the pro-choice community can be thankful that this nasty public breakup reflects well on Planned Parenthood, and poorly on those who disavow it. It reflects on those disavowers so badly that many of us have remembered just how pernicious certain aspects of the mainstream breast cancer awareness movement has been, and redoubled our suspicions.

Like many dozens of others this week, I’ve gone back to Barbara Ehrenreich’sCancerland to be reminded of this truth: “In the harshest judgment, the breast-cancer cult serves as an accomplice in global poisoning — normalizing cancer, prettying it up, even presenting it, perversely, as a positive and enviable experience.”

Planned Parenthood keeps its focus on women’s health, plain and simple, and includes abortion as part of that comprehensive approach. It doesn’t try to gussy up health issues, or prettify them, or politicize them. It’s the other side that does the politicizing. Maybe the outrage and the mea culpa it forced Komen to issue will finally make other organizations think twice before they stab a beloved health organization in the back the way Komen has done.

The Associated Press reported on Tuesday that the foundation is cutting off its financing of breast cancer screening and education programs run by Planned Parenthood affiliates. That means nearly $700,000 less for Planned Parenthood, which performed 750,000 such screenings last year, many thousands of them with money from the Komen foundation.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York pledged to matchup to $250,000 for Planned Parenthood, a generous move, although it addresses only one year’s financing. There was also an outpouring of support from small donors.

In addition to harming women, the foundation has also tarnished, perhaps permanently, its brand, symbolized by the pink ribbon that adorns yogurt cups and running shoes and tote bags and Federal Premium Ammunition’s pink shotgun shells. Companies like Ford Motor, Dell and Yoplait may not find the same value in identifying themselves with the foundation after its sharp departure from political neutrality.

To try to justify its move, the foundation cited a new policy against making grants to groups under federal or state investigation — in Planned Parenthood’s case, an inquiry into how it spends its taxpayer money by Representative Cliff Stearns, a Republican of Florida. That is just a flimsy fig leaf.

Mr. Stearns’s “investigation” is nothing more than a political witch hunt, stirred up by Republican leaders and by a right-wing antichoice group, Americans United for Life,which now displays the pink ribbon on its Web site as part of a fund-raising campaign for Komen. The inquiry is part of the Republican campaign to stigmatize Planned Parenthood and end financial support for its invaluable network of clinics. Abortions make up only about 3 percent of its work, but most of this crowd also objects to its leading role in providing access to contraceptives.

The Komen foundation should be speaking out against this abuse of Congressional power. At the least, the foundation’s leaders should have the decency and good sense not to do or say anything that even implies an endorsement.

It’s not clear whether this move reflects the political agenda of Komen’s leadership, including its new senior vice president for public policy, Karen Handel, who called for defunding Planned Parenthood during her failed gubernatorial campaign in Georgia in 2010. Perhaps the foundation just caved in to bullying by politicians, although it is not clear why it would have unless it was sympathetic to their cause. Either way, the result is the same: negative fallout for women’s health.

BREAKING News Today 2/3/2012: Susan G. Komen for the Cure has changed its decision regarding its partnership with Planned Parenthood. We are happy and relieved they have made this decision and hope women’s access to critical health care is uninterrupted.

BREAKING News Today 2/3/2012: Letter of Apology to public:

We want to apologize to the American public for recent decisions that cast doubt upon our commitment to our mission of saving women’s lives.

The events of this week have been deeply unsettling for our supporters, partners and friends and all of us at Susan G. Komen. We have been distressed at the presumption that the changes made to our funding criteria were done for political reasons or to specifically penalize Planned Parenthood. They were not.

Our original desire was to fulfill our fiduciary duty to our donors by not funding grant applications made by organizations under investigation. We will amend the criteria to make clear that disqualifying investigations must be criminal and conclusive in nature and not political. That is what is right and fair.

Our only goal for our granting process is to support women and families in the fight against breast cancer. Amending our criteria will ensure that politics has no place in our grant process. We will continue to fund existing grants, including those of Planned Parenthood, and preserve their eligibility to apply for future grants, while maintaining the ability of our affiliates to make funding decisions that meet the needs of their communities.

It is our hope and we believe it is time for everyone involved to pause, slow down and reflect on how grants can most effectively and directly be administered without controversies that hurt the cause of women. We urge everyone who has participated in this conversation across the country over the last few days to help us move past this issue. We do not want our mission marred or affected by politics – anyone’s politics.

Starting this afternoon, we will have calls with our network and key supporters to refocus our attention on our mission and get back to doing our work. We ask for the public’s understanding and patience as we gather our Komen affiliates from around the country to determine how to move forward in the best interests of the women and people we serve.

We extend our deepest thanks for the outpouring of support we have received from so many in the past few days and we sincerely hope that these changes will be welcomed by those who have expressed their concern.

Family Feuds

The Republican debates have becomes a showcase for the insanity of a slate of candidates who have shown no regard for the truth or for the wishes of the majority of the American people.

Newt Gingrich would have us repeal child labor laws in order to save on those egregious janitor salaries that are decimating our economy.

Mitt Romney thinks we’re all jealous of him because he grew rich exporting American jobs overseas. He says he knows how to fix the economy and Obama has never run anything in his life. Of course, the past three years keeping a listing Ship of State from sinking that was run onto the rocks by a Republican administration run amok doesn’t count for anything.

Rick Santorum says children would be better off with parents in prison than having a loving gay couple nurture and care for them.

Ron Paul believes we should get rid of the IRS, allow business owners to discriminate on the basis of anything they please and pretty much leave all of us to fend for ourselves.

All of the candidates scream about “big government” and how it should get out of our lives but to a man, they want to tell you who you can and cannot love, who will be allowed to serve our country and who has a say over the bodies of women. Hint: It isn’t the women.

The way I see it, if Republicans were allowed to do everything they want to do, we would live in a country where the rich paid zero taxes but the poor (and that’s all that would be left because the middle class would disappear) would bear the burden of paying for everything. The burden would be lightened significantly, however, because there would be no Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, EPA, Department of Education, Department of Consumer Affairs – well, I could go on but the only thing remaining would be the Department of Defense, which I’m certain would grow to even more megalomaniacal proportions than it already has. Disclaimer: The Department of Defense under Ron Paul would no longer exist.

When questioned about things like illness in a family or hard times caused by circumstances out of one’s control, the candidates like to point out that there are “agencies” one can go to get help. They fail to realize that those “agencies” are almost always state or municipal entities that are dependent upon taxpayer money to keep their doors open. The candidates also like to point to churches and community groups and then wax rhapsodic, recalling the old days when people helped their neighbors. How a charity is supposed to cover the outrageous cost of vital, but expensive, medical care is never made clear.

I’ve got a news flash for them. We’re not living in a Little House on the Prairie world anymore. The ratification of the 16th Amendment in 1913 recognized the very real fact that our country had grown to an extent where we needed a centralized method to collect money to distribute to insure the public good. Over the ensuing years, we’ve created agencies like FEMA to step in and provide the help needed when disaster strikes. It’s the same thing as having a barn raising when the windstorm took out the barn except we now do it on a national scale rather than a local one.

Sit down and talk to a right wing person and if you can get them to stop screaming in your face, you’ll find out that they don’t want Social Security to go away. Not theirs anyway. They don’t want Medicare to be dismantled. Not theirs anyway. They want good roads and want to feel safe when they board an airplane. They just don’t want to pay for it. But you can be sure if the bridge collapses while one of their family members is on it, they’ll sue the hell out of the Federal Government for not making sure the bridge was safe!

The whole idea of the United States of America is people pulling together to make something of themselves and of the country in which they live. That’s the promise of this country. If you work hard and do your part, you have a shot at the dream. That dream is different for each of us and not everyone wants to accumulate gobs of riches. What we all want, in one way or another, is the chance to make a decent living, take a nice vacation every year, enjoy our friends and families, educate our children, put something aside for our golden years and know that if trouble finds us, we have a system in place that will help us through.

We don’t envy the rich, although some of us aspire to be rich. Aspirations and envy are not the same thing. What we don’t want is for the wealthy to continually take what little we have and then accuse us of waging class warfare against them. We want a fair playing field and that is something none of the Republican candidates is willing to give. The Republicans all seem to want us to be like the orphaned child Oliver, begging with our hands out and saying, “Please, Sir, may I have some more?”

It’s going to be a long and interesting year.