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When Roger West first launched the progressive political blog "News From The Other Side" in May 2010, he could hardly have predicted the impact that his venture would have on the media and political debate. As the New Media emerged as a counterbalance to established media sources, Roger wrote his copious blogs about national politics, the tea party movement, mid-term elections, and the failings of the radical right to the vanguard of the New Media movement. Roger West's efforts as a leading blogger have tremendous reach. NFTOS has led the effort to bring accountability to mainstream media sources such as FOX NEWS, Breitbart's "Big Journalism. Roger's breadth of experience, engaging style, and cultivation of loyal readership - over 92 million visitors - give him unique insight into the past, present, and future of the New Media and political rhetoric that exists in our society today. What we are against: Radical Right Wing Agendas Incompetent Establishment Donald J. Trump Corporate Malfeasence We are for: Global and Econmoic Security Social and Economic Justice Media Accountability THE RESISTANCE

Friday, February 10, 2012

The Truth About Birth Control

BIRTH CONTROL

Often is the case with teapublicants - facts are often manipulate to suit their audience, or better yet, completely ignored. Take POTUS' birth control stance - "Most of Obama's "Controversial" birth control rule was law during Bush years."

Radical teabaggers have been livid over POTUS' administration rule requiring employers to offer birth control to its employees, when in fact most firms already had to do it!

Teapublicants and conservatives make it really, really difficult for us to avoid focusing on their lapses in intelligence. And with a conga-line of top shelf teapublicans front and center for the 2012 presidential nomination, we're being treated to more examples of buffoonery from these people.

In the last six or seven months alone, there are enough examples of teapublicants botching very basic ideas and facts to fill volumes of "Bushism" style novelty calendars.

What teapublicants once wanted is no longer on the table, for they now have turned coat and backtracked, an ideology they envision, a time when horses were the only transportation mode, where men owned slaves, and when rope was a high fashioned type of belt that held ones pants up.






First let me say the comment in the video about Rachael and her parents not using contraceptives, totally putrid, but this is the "conservatives" we come to know and love. Second, as always, if it isn't teapublican, its got to be "unconstitutional"! How many times have we heard this theme from camp teabag?  These facts are indeed the answer as to why CPAC 2012 is lobbing hate grenades towards Maddow. But often is case, facts frequently offend the less intelligent. And yes teapublicants, your very existence is why the scientific community created contraceptives - for there is no life guard at the gene pool, so please remember to breed responsibly.



As reported by "motherjones":

President Barack Obama's decision to require most employers to cover birth control and insurers to offer it at no cost has created a firestorm of controversy. But the central mandate—that most employers have to cover preventative care for women—has been law for over a decade. This point has been completely lost in the current controversy, as Republican presidential candidates and social conservatives claim that Obama has launched a war on religious liberty and the Catholic Church.

Despite the longstanding precedent, "no one screamed" until now, said Sara Rosenbaum, a health law expert at George Washington University.

In December 2000, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled that companies that provided prescription drugs to their employees but didn't provide birth control were in violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prevents discrimination on the basis of sex. That opinion, which the George W. Bush administration did nothing to alter or withdraw when it took office the next month, is still in effect today—and because it relies on Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, it applies to all employers with 15 or more employees. Employers that don't offer prescription coverage or don't offer insurance at all are exempt, because they treat men and women equally—but under the EEOC's interpretation of the law, you can't offer other preventative care coverage without offering birth control coverage, too.

"It was, we thought at the time, a fairly straightforward application of Title VII principles," a top former EEOC official who was involved in the decision told Mother Jones. "All of these plans covered Viagra immediately, without thinking, and they were still declining to cover prescription contraceptives. It's a little bit jaw-dropping to see what is going on now…There was some press at the time but we issued guidances that were far, far more controversial."

After the EEOC opinion was approved in 2000, reproductive rights groups and employees who wanted birth control access sued employers that refused to comply. The next year, in Erickson v. Bartell Drug Co., a federal court agreed with the EEOC's reasoning. Reproductive rights groups and others used that decision as leverage to force other companies to settle lawsuits and agree to change their insurance plans to include birth control. Some subsequent court decisions echoed Erickson, and some went the other way, but the rule (absent a Supreme Court decision) remained, and over the following decade, the percentage of employer-based plans offering contraceptive coverage tripled to 90 percent.

"We have used [the EEOC ruling] many times in negotiating with various employers," says Judy Waxman, the vice president for health and reproductive rights at the National Women's Law Center. "It has been in active use all this time. [President Obama's] policy is only new in the sense that it covers employers with less than 15 employees and with no copay for the individual. The basic rule has been in place since 2000."

Not even religious employers were exempt from the impact of the EEOC decision. Although Title VII allows religious institutions to discriminate on religious grounds, it doesn't allow them to discriminate on the basis of sex—the kind of discrimination at issue in the EEOC ruling. DePaul University, the largest Roman Catholic university in America, added birth control coverage to its plans after receiving an EEOC complaint several years ago. (DePaul officials did not respond to a request for comment.)

As recently as last year, the EEOC was moderating a dispute between the administrators of Belmont Abbey, a Catholic institution in North Carolina, and several of its employees who had their birth control coverage withdrawn after administrators realized it was being offered. The Weekly Standard opined on the issue in 2009—more proof that religious employers were being asked to cover contraception far before the Obama administration issued its new rule on January 20 of this year.

"The current freakout," Judy Waxman says, is largely occurring because the EEOC policy "isn't as widely known…and it hasn't been uniformly enforced." But it's still unclear whether Obama's Health and Human Services department will enforce the new rule any more harshly than the old one. The administration has already given organizations a year-long grace period to comply. Asked to explain how the agency would make employers do what it wanted, an HHS official said that it would "enforce this the same way we enforce everything else in the law."
 

But it is important to remember that those who are most loudly criticizing the President and his policies are those whose policies and ideology created the economic mess he inherited.

There's a spectrum of anti-intellectualism on the right, and that's a fact. The teapublicants spectrum of ignorance runs the gamut.

Categories or levels of unlettered teapublicants:
Genuinely Smart but Wrong,
Deliberately Ignorant,
Un- or Mis-educated,
Incompetent and Incapable,
Genuinely Stupid.

For teapublicants, education and intellectualism is the enemy of their wafer-thin bumper-sticker marketing strategy, and in so doing they deny their base facts - which has become a matter of survival for the teapublican party.

Teapublicants are welcome to act like idiots as a means of pandering to their dumbass base. Just leave the rest of us alone. America needs more intelligence, and I don't think we can afford to wait for the reich-wing to catch up to speed.

Facts are, 97 percent of catholic women use contraceptives. The 2004 John Jay Report was based on a study of 10,667 sexual abuse allegations against 4,392 priests accused of engaging in sexual abuse of a minor between 1950 and 2002. One priest even abused 200 deaf boys.

This church has no right to telling anyone what to use and what not to use, and for the Holier than thou conservative jumping this band wagon, I say two things to you:
I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ~ Mohandas Gandhi,

I respect those who oppose contraception and thus embrace the alternatives, overpopulation and starvation.

During the time of publication of this blog, BREAKING NEWS from the White House is that POTUS will re-align his administrations rule on contraceptives. Stay tuned!


UPDATE: 2/10/2012 13:07

POTUS Speaks:

"No woman’s health should depend on who she is or where she works or how much money she makes. Every woman should be in control of the decisions that affect her own health. Period." -President Obama

I find fault with all the right wing media outlets - based on the fact they just can't tell the truth. For instance, after POTUS' speech today (noon EST) regarding the backlash from teabaggers and catholic pedophiles alike - these media muckrakers are saying that POTUS "walked back" his contraceptive mandate. That is just not true.

Nothing was actually changed if you read the mandate and comprehend what the President has said. What he did was clarify that women's health care coverage will continue to be affordable to ALL women regardless of catholic church opposition. He actually, used intelligence and tactful demeanor, and told the pedophilia catholic church and radical teapublicants to kiss his Presidential posterior!


NFTOS
Editor-In-Chief
Roger West