Ezra Klein and Paul Kane of the Washington Post laid down their claim about a move toward government shutdown April 8th in such stark terms that I thought they must have had their facts wrong.
But I checked. The Washington Post reporters have their facts right. On April 8th, the Republican Party moved to shut down the federal government in order to stop condoms.
Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner declared he wouldn’t back down in the final hours of negotiations: unless he got a complete federal defunding of Planned Parenthood stuck in as a rider, he would shut the government down.
Look at the latest available 2009 annual report for Planned Parenthood. Here’s the breakdown of the services they offer:
35% Contraception
34% Testing and Treatment for Sexually Transmitted Diseases
17% Cancer Screening and Prevention
10% Women’s Health Services
3% Abortion
1% Other
Abortions only count for 3% of what Planned Parenthood offers — and the government already has withdrawn its funding of those services. The Republicans won that battle long ago.
No, deep into the night of April 8 John Boehner and the Republican Party was
- threatening to shut the government down
- threatening to withhold services to millions
- threatening to cut off paychecks to 800,000 Americans in the middle of a bruising economic downturn
- threatening to terminate death benefits to the families of soldiers killed in war
- cutting off Americans’ access to parks, monuments and museums across the country, wrecking the tourism industry just as it’s starting to recover
- messing with the filing of taxes and mailing of tax refunds by mail as April 15 approaches
- stopping the flow of passports for Americans who need them
… and on, and on, and on
…why?
To make sure that the United States government isn’t involved in the distribution of condoms.
To make sure that Planned Parenthood doesn’t stop the spread syphillis.
To make sure that low-cost or no-cost clinics to screen poor women for cervical cancer are shut down.
This is why the John Boehner and the Republican Party were prepared to shut down the government.
And they wonder why some people think the GOP is out of touch.
Yeah – the ususal distraction (concentrate on women or gays or abortion or welfare queens. . . ) to provide cover for the fact that they actually PASSED THE DIRTY AIR ACT, which of course nobody but the big polluters wanted. Everyone takes clean air for granted – even the coal and other industries which use the atmosphere, like the rest of the earth, as a FREE dumping place to spew their toxic pollutants so we can all breathe them in and get sick and die. No skin off their noses, our health deterioration being an “act of God” in their minds.
i’d like to see the dismantling of corporations. These dinosaurs of rampant greed and pollution just aren’t worth it to the rest of us.