Pretzeldents and Monopoly..

Googolopoly, actually, I could not resist the pitch fork… 😉

…try to get it straight: it’s now 10 residences on 9 properties. There may be 3, 4, 5 or 6 residences or structures on the main family compound in Sedona. Woo Hoo.

IMO, one guy owns Park Avenue, the other wants in.

Color me so unimpressed. However! It has helped move us to the bloodletting stage, I see that is a bonus.

A tad dark? I don’t think so.

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Here is the article in SF Gate yesterday on the moves coming from HHS w/r/t religious exception, protection for Catholic hospitals, doctors, and other religious health care professionals who do not wish to provide care to women, or to any one else, based on religious exception. It will over ride the hodge podge of state laws that we have… additionally it will exempt Catholic and religious orgs from having to provide birth control coverage in health plans. When an EMPLOYEE chooses (their fragile conscience!) to not dispense birth control in a pharmacy (which are state licensed) currently, under our state law, they are to direct the woman to another provider who will. I thought that was a goddamed concession to Catholics and fucked fundies, in my opinon, at the time…

Now they will not even have to do that… Now based on a health care provider’s personal belief that you should not receive care, for moral religious or personal reasons, they can withhold information.

OH FUCK ME TWICE

Although some have interpreted the proposal more narrowly, Deirdre McQuade, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ spokeswoman on abortion, said the goal is to protect those who object to any form of artificial contraception.

“Pregnancy is not a disease to be treated by abortion, and neither is fertility,” she said. “To be coerced to treat it as if it were a condition that is pathological is unjust.”

Under this they will not have to make a referral. Maybe in a city, a big one, this does not seem to be an inconvenience, in small towns it will be.

Here is the kicker…

Violators would forfeit federal health care funds, which in California amount to as much as $37 billion a year.

The draft regulation describes the problem as laws such as those in California and New York that require employers to include contraceptives in any prescription drug coverage they offer to employees. The federal agency had no comment Wednesday on the proposal.

I am at the end of patience, with politics, with religion, with both parties and with all electeds.. And coming right at the end – before BushCheney skate off, I doubt there is great energy, any energy, in the weak limbed, brain fogged and RW compliant Democrats to do more than mumble. They did nothing to amend Medicare, Part D, a mess and a horror.

Religious beliefs

According to the draft regulation, health practitioners are often unaware of their rights and are encountering “an environment in the health care industry that is intolerant of certain religious beliefs, ethnic and cultural traditions, and moral convictions.”

Requiring states and federal fund recipients to honor the refusal of health care practitioners and others to take part in procedures they find objectionable would promote “a more inclusive, tolerant environment,” increase diversity in the medical field, and affect states “only insofar as they engage in illegal discrimination,” the proposal says.

Planned Parenthood’s Kneer said opponents will campaign as hard as they can to stop the regulation, lobbying Congress as well as federal officials. If they fail, she said, they’ll ask the next administration to repeal it.

Last, our CASC just ruled that a lesbian who was denied IVF care at a practitioner, has to be accommodated, regardless of the provider’s opinon of her sexual orientation or marital status. She herself did finally find care and did become pregnant, but the case was to establish the law of her right to seek the procedure and not be denied..

OUT THE WINDOW, if HHS, Bush, Wingers and conservative – and collaborator – Dems get away with this one. The problem is that the Right always wins part of what they want, then, as zealots, they keep on.. til they get more.

IMO this codifies, further, the right of the religious, in their perceived victimisation (forced to do their fucking JOB, forced to acknowlege that the secular world is important), to abuse the rest of us.

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Classic.

Ryan Lizza is up with another profile of Ob… I was going to skip it – I can only take so much, LOL – until I saw it was premised on what CO’s Gov. Ritter has to teach Ob. I really have little left to say, maybe add that The New Yorker is fucked, gone and absorbed inside some despicable body part of the Dem party. It is a Dem party sales job.

Ritter, who is scheduled to address the Convention on Thursday night, is an improbable choice to be pointing Democrats toward the Party’s future. He is a Catholic in a Protestant state. In his opposition to abortion, he is out of synch with Party members as well as with the Party platform; twice during his rise through Colorado politics, pro-choice Democrats tried to derail his career—in 1993, when he was appointed district attorney of Denver, and in 2005, as he was preparing to run for governor. “When I was making phone calls, raising money,” he said, “I probably talked about abortion in ninety to ninety-five per cent of my calls.” Many potential donors said that because of his view they couldn’t support him.

And there is this, as though the world is static from 1865 onward:

“We never had slavery out here,” Gary Hart said. “I mean, it’s a Southern issue. And obviously the number of African-Americans is smaller, but that’s not the point. The point is we just didn’t have the heritage of slavery.” The Obama campaign has claimed that a huge increase in black turnout could make him competitive in the Deep South, especially Georgia. But this doesn’t seem a likely outcome to most analysts, who argue that the larger the black population in a Southern state the more the white population tends to vote Republican. David Beattie told me, “From a lot of work we’ve done in Georgia in state legislature seats, we learned that when the black percentage passes eighteen per cent, the whites in that seat tend to be more Republican than whites in seats where it is under eighteen per cent black.”

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UPDATE, KGO is saying the personal exception will extend beyond religion to personal and moral reasons for refusing. And fully covers an event in a hospital related to something the worker refuses to take part in, they cannot even sterilise instruments. And I assume they would refuse a box of Kleenex for a rape vicitm who will be receiving the day after pill.

Gil Gross is spending the hour on it, about the 4th or 5th hour they have given this, over the past weeks… since this draft doc was leaked.