Penn Jillette – magician, activist, raconteur, and all-round interesting character – posts this YouTube video in which he passes on what he says is the best advice ever given for relating to your elderly or incapacitated parents.

It is.

Thanks, Penn.

(See here for a similar observation from an equally-surprising source.)

So, much has been made this week of the fact that the Republican National Committee, throughout its longstanding berserker campaign against women seeking control of their own bodies, has in fact been providing comprehensive healthcare insurance to its own employees – including female employees – for almost 20 years. Many fingers were pointed over the hypocrisy of attempting to prohibit abortion access for all women in America by every means possible, while covering abortion care for its own employees under their internal health insurance plan. (This in fact is in keeping with right-wing approaches to the issue generally: their values legendarily evaporate when it’s their personal interests at stake, and stories of women’s clinics providing abortion care to the same women who were picketing those clinics before and after the procedure are legion.)

Predictably, Michael Steele, the hapless RNC head, announced less than 24 hours after the story broke that that coverage provision had been rescinded unilaterally. The usual right-wing hysteria has erupted, with demands that people be fired and angry denunciations that donors to the RNC had not been allowed to deny healthcare to its female employees as they wanted to do. As Ben Smith rightly points out, not one female employee of the RNC – the ones whose coverage has now been stripped without their consultation (and presumably without any reduction in their premium contributions) – has been quoted or consulted in this move.

I note also that pro-choice ideology within the Republican party has run at about a steady 35-38% for most of a decade (a recent poll shows it down somewhat among Republicans, but is widely regarded as an outlier). I presume the large majority of those are women. Assuming further that women are half the GOP membership, that would mean that roughly two-thirds of GOP women are pro-choice (I suspect they’re actually less than half the membership, which would push the prevalence of pro-choice ideology even higher within that smaller female group). Now, I don’t know if the RNC employee base is representative of the Republican Party generally, but if it is, that would mean that about a third of its staff, and about two-thirds of all its female staff, are in favor of abortion rights. There are other factors to be considered, for which we don’t have data (what percentage favor having abortion covered in their health plan, as opposed to its just being legal; to what degree the RNC staff skew even crazier on abortion than the rank and file; what percentage of the staff are female; and so on), but any way you slice it it seems inevitable that there is at least some considerable degree of support for abortion services among the RNC’s staff, to say nothing of the GOP generally. Yet the RNC leadership revoked their own staff’s coverage without consultation, and without the slightest apparent consideration for that staff’s wishes, needs, or rights.

The message is clear enough, and, I suppose, fair and consistent in that peculiar GOP way: for Republicans, hurting women is more important than anything else – certainly more important than providing real healthcare for an entire nation, but more important also than seeing to the needs of their own membership. The Republican National Committee – a body that exists solely to cater to the interests and welfare of registered Republicans – stripped healthcare services that had been available for almost 20 years away from Republican women employed in the service of that body and their party, without the slightest hesitation or apparently without even talking to them.  Within the highest levels of the Republican Party itself, your lack of status as a woman trumps your preferential status as a Republican.

Michael Steele could have just made it much more simple and direct:

Goldman Sachs has just issued a helpful report for the insurance industry, identifying the profit potential for them in various likely outcomes of the current healthcare access reform initiative. Their conclusion: the best thing for the insurance companies is no reform at all, followed by the weakest possible reform; the worst thing for them is real reform with universal access and a publicly-backed plan option.

In other words: the current disaster of a system is the one that provides the greatest possible profit potential to the insurance industry; any effort at increasing access to care is against that industry’s interests, and a robust and successful reform effort is the worst possible thing from an industry whose profits are entirely dependent on charging the highest possible premiums and delivering the least possible care.

The Senate Finance Committee bill, which Goldman’s analysts conclude is the version most likely to survive the legislative process, is described as the “base” scenario. Under that legislation (which did not include a public plan) the earnings per share for the top five insurers would grow an estimated five percent from 2010 through 2019. And yet, the “variance with current valuation” — essentially, what the value of the stock is on the market — is projected to drop four percent.

Things are much worse, Goldman estimates, for legislation that resembles what was considered and (to a certain extent) passed by the House of Representatives. This is, the firm deems, the “bear case” scenario — in which earnings per share for the top five insurers would decline an estimated one percent from 2010 through 2019 and the variance with current valuation is projected to be negative 36 percent.

What the firm sees as the best path forward for the private insurance industry’s bottom line is, to be blunt, inaction.

The study’s authors advise that if no reform is passed, earnings per share would grow an estimated ten percent from 2010 through 2019, and the value of the stock would rise an estimated 59 percent during that time period.

The next best thing for the insurance industry would be if the legislation passed by the Senate Finance Committee is watered down significantly.

Coincidentally, no doubt, the report arrives from Goldman Sachs – recipient of uncountable billions in public bailout dollars for their executives’ bonuses, from the Obama administration – just as the healthcare access reform plan being pursued right now by that same administration is nearing its final legislative conflict. Goldman helpfully notes in a disclaimer that the firm “does and seeks to do business with companies covered in its research reports.”

All you have to do to see how utterly repulsive the healthcare insurance industry is is to simply watch how they talk about their own business. It is impossible to be disgusted enough by an industry that – uniquely in the industrialized world – treats people’s bodies, health, and lives as saleable commodities in a free market in misery.

The AP reports that Scott Roeder, the terrorist who killed Dr. George Tiller, publicly and in cold blood, last May, has openly confessed to the crime and justified it with the usual religious-radical gibberish about “unborn children”. In the article, he explicitly equates fetuses with independently-living persons and claims that killing to prevent abortion is justified if at least one forced pregnancy results; he encourages others to perform similar terroristic murders, and states he intends to base his legal defense on an argument for a religious-political justification for murder. None of this is new, except possibly that he has stated all this on record now.  It confirms what we knew about him, anyway.

The real question is whether those who are so agitated about real or imagined terrorism of other kinds (especially by Muslims), and who have been so complacently accepting of anti-woman terrorism in the US for decades, will condemn or even acknowledge an open statement of Christian religious-terrorist ideology in the case of yet another anti-choice fanatic.

Just this week we’ve seen a terrible mass murder committed by a Muslim military officer who was apparently distraught over the war in Afghanistan and his possible deployment. Literally before the bodies were cool, various right-wingers jumped in to denounce “Muslim terrorism” and to cite vague links between the suspect and Al Qaeda (he visited a mosque which was also visited by someone who knew someone who was connected with Al Qaeda); however, it is not clear that the apparent perpetrator’s motives were intended for a political end at all – as opposed to merely an outburst of personal anxiety – and there is little to suggest that it was terrorism in any reasonable sense. The murders of doctors by anti-choicers, beyond any question, are defined by the features of terrorism found in most of the commonly-used definitions: they are acts of violence committed against civilians for the purpose of inciting fear in other, third-party individuals, to promote a particular political end. We heard nothing of this at the time of Dr. Tiller’s death (nor of any of the previous murders and other acts of violence); will we hear it acknowledged now that the terrorist has so openly proclaimed his murderous religious ideology?

Anti-choice terrorism is intended to prevent women from exercising a legal and moral right involving their bodily health and autonomy, by terrorizing those women and their healthcare providers – it is violence intended not merely against its chosen (often random) targets, but to terrorize and thus paralyze a larger group, to further the religious and political ideology of the perpetrators and their vast army of supporters and admirers within the religious right. Yet it has never been acknowledged as such, and the large subculture on the right wing who have made a profession of terrorism scare-mongering have never acknowledged the persistent anti-choice terrorism ongoing in the US. (Nor has the FBI: fake anthrax attacks had been staged on almost 700 abortion clinics in the US in the days before 9/11 – not one of them resulted in an arrest, or any obvious urgency about the issue, and they were not treated as domestic terrorism. One person was charged with terrorism for fake anthrax attacks on clinics in the wake of 9/11 and the Congress anthrax mail attacks – the first and only such charge in the entire history of anti-choice terrorism. None of the anti-choice murderers, including Roeder, have been charged as terrorists.)

Now we have an admitted terrorist openly advocating further political killings to promote his religious obsessions. If Roeder were a Muslim and his targets were not women and their healthcare providers, the shrieking loons of the right would be off their heads screaming about his crime, his religious beliefs, his unrepentant stance, his advocacy and rationalization of violence, and his links to other extremists with similar religious and political beliefs. Will we see even the slightest acknowledgment of Christian anti-choice religious terrorism and its dangers in this blatant case?

At this moment, debate is proceeding on the House votes on the landmark healthcare bill. I haven’t blogged about it, because, frankly, it was overwhelming and I didn’t know what I could say that would help. (The Democrats’ stealth approach to bill-crafting, while possibly politically astute, made it hard to get a clear handle on the thing, too.) This will be, without question, one of the most important legislative events of my lifetime; if the bill passes the Senate and is finally voted into law in a reasonably intact form, it will be the most significant development in American history that I will see. More importantly, it will be – largely, though not entirely – an end to crippling insecurity and lifelong anxiety for hundreds of millions, and of irremediable pain and suffering for tens of millions who now live in the only affluent country that permits its business class to sell life itself for profit.

The bill on offer is far from optimal. It locks in the profiteering on death and misery that the vast majority of the country is burdened with, and is needlessly complicated and limited in what it offers to the rest. It deliberately cripples its own modest offering by restricting it only to those whom the profiteers have absolutely refused to serve at any price, prohibiting the rest of the country from accessing healthcare organized on any saner and more humane basis. But worst of all, the bill is being held hostage by the insane and vicious anti-choice army that infests the right wing and has wholly captured the Republican party. And, too predictably, the omnipresent contingent of grandstanding asshole Democrats is giving them exactly what they want, as they always do.

Right now, the “Stupak amendment” is being debated: an amendment that will prohibit any person enrolling in the government-backed “healthcare exchange” – which is to say, the poorest and most desperate, who are the only ones eligibel to enroll in that plan – from being offered a full range of healthcare services in cases of unwanted pregnancy. For those people, the “public options” will be forced pregnancy, death in childbirth, or an abortion that she likely can’t afford and the right-wing terrorists have likely made unavailable anyway. The Republican House caucus has already stated explicitly that they will refuse to vote for the healthcare bill in any form. But they – with their unconscionable Democratic allies – are holding up the bill to demand the anti-choice amendment in a bill they will not support even if they get it. And enough Democrats are equally indifferent to women’s lives and women’s needs to help them do it.

Democratic women are putting up a good fight – and their male allies deserve thanks, too. The Republicans have shrunk from merely legislative misogyny to outright thuggery, as they so commonly do. Michele Bachman led crowds of right wingers through the Congressional office buildings earlier today, invading offices and screaming at people to, in her words, “scare” them away from supporting women and healthcare for all. House Republicans staged an organized disruption on the floor today, systematically interrupting Democratic women as they spoke in favor of women’s interests and full healthcare coverage. The healthcare debate is being conducted the same way the Florida recount was in 2000: in the face of Republican assaults and intimidation, and without regard for the truth or significance of the actual substantive issue.

I have little to say about the whole thing. I feel helpless – particularly frustrating in the face of an issue so central to my personal and professional concerns – and am waiting as on election night for the outcome of votes that will – with great good luck – mean so much to so many, and move American one huge step closer to the decency and commitment to humanity that has been so sadly lacking in so much of our history. I can only wait and hope, like everyone else. In the meantime, there is an organized, vicious, and relentless minority that is fiercely dedicated to their own hostility to any notion of a decent regard for others, and to the freedom of others to live their own lives unconstrained by that minority’s backward and reactionary values. They are fighting – in the most literal sense – right now to keep tens of millions of people at the mercy of any illness they may suffer, to keep hundreds of millions at the mercy of an insurance system that rivals only those reactionaries themselves in its hostility to the needs of the people they nominally serve, and to keep every woman in America at the mercy of the nasty and bitter men who despise them and their bodies.

I can’t stand watching this unfold. And I can’t say, can’t express even fractionally, how much, how gut-wrenchingly much, I hate and revile these disgusting creeps.

UPDATE: Rayne at Firedoglake reports “Stupak Amendment Passes: 64 Dems Ask for Primary Opponents“. That’s exactly how I feel about it. I had already promised myself that I would contribute to the primary opponents of any misogynist Democrats; I’m saddened, and shocked, that there are so many of them. I will certainly target all that I can afford to. Read the rest of the post; it’s exactly right.

UPDATE: The final bill has passed, 220 – 215. Exactly one Republican voted in favor – 39 Democrats voted to withhold healthcare from over 40 million Americans. This is a great – but very partial – victory. There still remains the Senate bill – which will be a far tougher fight, with looser rules and a larger percentage of heartless and misogynist Democrats in the mix – followed by the conference committee and the final vote. The Republicans and reactionaries will do everything they can to destroy other people’s hopes for a decent life, and their control over their own bodies and life plans – the rioting, disruption, demagoguery and thuggery seen today are just a taste of what is coming. And this step, momentous as it is, comes bitterly. The discussion in the followup post at Firedoglake captures it perfectly; as one commenter put it: “It’s like winning a huge battle, but half of your friends were killed or wounded.”

UPDATE: I’ve added the reference to Democrats in the headline. I didn’t make it clear above that Bart Stupak, who led the charge to destroy healthcare reform for over 300 million Americans if they didn’t let him destroy autonomy for 150 million female Americans, is a Democrat. Along with 63 other misogynist traitors, he put the people’s party against 51% of the people, to indulge their personal medieval religious obsessions. Fuck him and all of them.

UPDATE: Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns, and Money gets the power dynamic exactly right: “Certainly, there are many potential criticisms of how Democratic leadership has dealt with health care, although when you actually care about expanding access to health care it’s hard to negotiate with the Stupaks of the world who don’t, but want to use other people’s progressive impulses to attack women.”

A former healthcare clinic administrator in Texas today announced that she had quit her job, joined a far-right anti-healthcare group, and dedicated herself to harassing other women to prevent them from receiving surgery and other forms of “icky” healthcare, after seeing a video of an appendectomy that she didn’t like.

I just thought I can’t do this anymore, and it was just like a flash that hit me and I thought that’s it,” said Jonhson. . . .

Johnson said she was told to bring in more women who wanted [icky procedures], something the Episcopalian church goer recently became convicted about.

“I feel so pure in heart (since leaving). I don’t have this guilt, I don’t have this burden on me anymore that’s how I know this conversion was a spiritual conversion.”

Johnson reports that she is likewise convicted about gall bladder removals, most forms of cancer surgery, and liposuction, although she does not criticize the decisions several of her friends have made to have such procedures, because “that’s different”. She is semi-convicted about breast implants, believing they are the work of the Whore of Babylon but also something you could understand that a woman needs sometimes. She justifies these distinctions with random Bible quotes and references to her own idiosyncratic feelings, which she cannot coherently articulate but is happy to impose on others by law.

This otherwise trivial story about one small-town individual’s weird religious hangups was trumpeted by the religious right as a stunning victory over the right of other people to make healthcare choices they don’t like, claiming other people’s healthcare was now “in meltdown mode” and “total disarray”. Every healthcare clinic in the country, including the one that has now hired a new director, went about its business as usual.