Republicans are getting queasy at the gruesome sight of their party eating itself alive, savaging the brand in ways that will long resonate.
“Republicans being against sex is not good,” the G.O.P. strategist Alex Castellanos told me mournfully. “Sex is popular.”
He said his party is “coming to grips with a weaker field than we’d all want” and going through the five stages of grief. “We’re at No. 4,” he said. (Depression.) “We’ve still got one to go.” (Acceptance.)
The contenders in the Hester Prynne primaries are tripping over one another trying to be the most radical, unreasonable and insane candidate they can be. They pounce on any traces of sanity in the other candidates — be it humanity toward women, compassion toward immigrants or the willingness to make the rich pay a nickel more in taxes — and try to destroy them with it.
President Obama has deranged conservatives just as W. deranged liberals. The right’s image of Obama, though, is more a figment of its imagination than the left’s image of W. was.
Newt Gingrich, a war wimp in Vietnam who supported W.’s trumped-up invasion of Iraq, had the gall to tell a crowd at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Okla., that defeating Obama — “the most dangerous president in modern American history” — was “a duty of national security” because “he is incapable of defending the United States” and because he “wants to unilaterally weaken the United States.” Who killed Osama again?
How can the warm, nurturing Catholic Church of my youth now be represented in the public arena by uncharitable nasties like Gingrich and Rick Santorum?
“It makes the party look like it isn’t a modern party,” Rudy Giuliani told CNN’s Erin Burnett, fretting about the candidates’ Cotton Mather attitude about women and gays. “It doesn’t understand the modern world that we live in.”
After a speech in Dallas on Thursday, Jeb Bush also recoiled: “I used to be a conservative, and I watch these debates and I’m wondering, I don’t think I’ve changed, but it’s a little troubling sometimes when people are appealing to people’s fears and emotion rather than trying to get them to look over the horizon for a broader perspective.”
Alan Simpson, the former Republican senator from Wyoming, recently called Santorum “rigid and homophobic.” Arlen Specter, who quit the Republicans to become a Democrat three years ago before Pennsylvania voters sent him home from the Senate, told MSNBC: “Where you have Senator Santorum’s views, so far to the right, with his attitude on women in the workplace and gays and the bestiality comments and birth control, I do not think it is realistic for Rick Santorum to represent America.” That from the man who accused Anita Hill of perjury.
Republicans have a growing panic at the thought of going down the drain with a loser, missing their chance at capturing the Senate and giving back all those House seats won in 2010. More and more, they openly yearn for a fresh candidate, including Jeb Bush, who does, after all, have experience at shoplifting presidential victories at the last minute.
Their jitters increased exponentially as they watched Mitt belly-flop in his hometown on Friday, giving a dreadful rehash of his economic ideas in a virtually empty Ford Field in Detroit, babbling again about the “right height” of Michigan trees and blurting out that Ann “drives a couple of Cadillacs.”
Romney’s Richie Rich slips underscore what Ed Rollins, a Republican strategist, told the Ripon Forum: “If we are only the party of Wall Street and country clubbers, we will quickly become irrelevant.”
Santorum, whose name aptly comes from the same Latin root as sanctimonious, went on Glenn Beck’s Web-based show with his family and offered this lunacy: “I understand why Barack Obama wants to send every kid to college,” because colleges are “indoctrination mills” that “harm” the country. He evidently wants home university schooling, which will cut down on keggers.
His wife, Karen, suggested that her husband’s success is “God’s will” and that he wants “to make the culture a better culture, more pleasing to God.”
The barking-mad Republicans of Virginia are helping to make the party look foolish and creepy. A video went viral on Friday in which Delegate Dave Albo comically regaled his fellow lawmakers on the floor of the Statehouse with his own Old Dominion version of “Lysistrata”: he suggested that he was denied sex with his wife because of a Republican-sponsored bill that would have made ultrasounds, often with a vaginal probe, mandatory for women seeking abortions.
With music, red wine and a big-screen TV, he made a move on his wife, Rita, while she was watching a news report about the bill. “And she looks at me and goes, ‘I’ve got to go to bed,’ ” Albo said as his colleagues guffawed.
The Republicans, with their crazed Reagan fixation, are a last-gasp party, living posthumously, fighting battles on sex, race, immigration and public education long ago won by the other side.
They’re trying to roll back the clock, but time is passing them by.
Virginia ultrasound bill joins other states’ measures
View Photo Gallery — A bill that would require women to undergo an ultrasound before having an abortion has stirred up a fight in Virginia, sparking a massive protest on Capitol Square in Richmond and changing the governor’s stand. .. [link below] ..
In recent years, this common diagnostic tool has taken a greater role in abortion-related legislation. Seven states require ultrasounds before abortions. Twenty states .. http://www.guttmacher.org/statecenter/spibs/spib_RFU.pdf .. regulate some aspect of ultrasound exams, including requiring abortion providers to give women the option to view the image or listen to the fetal heartbeat if an ultrasound is performed.
Eleven other states have legislation pending. If all of the measures pass, more than half of the states will have laws governing ultrasound exams before abortions. “I think we’re in the middle of a wave of ultrasound bills,” said Elizabeth Nash, a policy analyst with the Guttmacher Institute, which studies reproductive health.
In most states that require ultrasounds, as will be the case in Virginia, women must wait at least 24 hours between abortion counseling and the procedure and make at least two trips — one for the counseling and ultrasound, and another for the abortion.
Providers say scheduling of those trips — and not the ultrasound — has been the most cumbersome and costly effect of the law.
“In the majority of cases, these are working moms who have to cancel two days of work, arrange transportation twice and arrange child care twice,” said Amy Hagstrom Miller, who operates five clinics in Texas.
In Texas and Virginia, women who live more than than 100 miles from a provider would not have to make two trips.
Despite the controversy over what type of ultrasound would be required in Virginia’s bill, both abdominal and vaginal ultrasounds are, in fact, used by most abortion providers. They are the most accurate tool for determining the development stage of a fetus, doctors said.
“It’s pretty much common practice,” said Willie Parker, a doctor who performs abortions in the Washington region and Philadelphia.
Abdominal ultrasounds are the most common. The vaginal ultrasound is mainly used in the earliest stages of pregnancy — between four and six weeks — when an abdominal ultrasound is unlikely to produce an image.
Only about one-third of abortions are performed at six weeks or less, according to 2005 data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Providers need to know how far the pregnancy has progressed to ensure that an abortion is taking place within a state’s legal time frame, that medically appropriate methods are being used, and to rule out ectopic pregnancies.
Sixty percent of abortions are done in the first nine weeks of pregnancy, when medication abortions are most effective, doctors said. More than 88 percent of the 1.2 million abortions performed each year in the United States occur in the first trimester of pregnancy. Most doctors will not perform them beyond 22 or 24 weeks.
Texas, which has the most restrictive ultrasound law in effect, also requires the person doing the ultrasound to be the same person who performs the abortion. That adds to the scheduling problem. In many cases, doctors have to fly from clinic to clinic, Hagstrom Miller said.
In Virginia, the Senate is expected to vote on an amended bill this week that mandates abdominal ultrasounds, but leaves the use of vaginal ultrasounds up to the doctor and woman. The bill was amended after protests in Richmond and spoofs by late-night comedians turned the national spotlight on Virginia. .. http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/nitty-gritty-knocked-va-abortion-bill-off-the-fast-track/2012/02/23/gIQAU4KnWR_story.html .. The original measure would have required women to undergo a vaginal probe. Gov. Robert F. McDonnell (R) has said he will sign the bill if it is amended. The law would go into effect July 1.
Proponents say the ultrasound requirement is intended to give women accurate, necessary information.
Ultrasounds “are not done 100 percent of the time,” said Olivia Gans, president of the Virginia Society for Human Life and an outreach director of the National Right to Life Committee. “This is to protect the other 2 percent,” she said. A doctor performing an abortion might not do an ultrasound if the patient has had one somewhere else.
Mandatory ultrasounds also make it easier to require that women be given the option of seeing the image. That additional information may help women make their decision.
Abortion rights activists say mandating ultrasounds violates the doctor-patient relationship and also assumes that women don’t know what they’re doing. About 60 percent of women having abortions already have at least one child, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
“This is really a bill that is about shaming and demeaning women seeking reproductive health,” said Laura Meyers, chief executive officer of Planned Parenthood of Metropolitan Washington.
Most women who get abortions don’t have health insurance. Of those who do, less than half use it because they don’t want employers or others to know, according to Guttmacher.
The cost of an abortion varies. In 2009, the average charge for a surgical abortion at 10 weeks was $543. At the Falls Church center, the charge ranges from $325 to $475, but includes the cost of ultrasound, if needed. At other facilities, reproductive rights activists estimate that an ultrasound requirement can add $50 to $200. In Texas, the $400 cost of the abortion has remained the same at her clinics, but some have added $25 to cover the extra doctor visit, Hagstrom Miller said.
As in other states, Virginia’s rule would require that a printout of the ultrasound image be placed in a woman’s medical record, regardless of whether she views it. In Texas, even if patients decline to view the image or listen to the fetal heartbeat, the law requires doctors to read a detailed description of the physical characteristics of the fetus, including any limbs or internal organs.
That process has not deterred women from seeking abortions, Hagstrom Miller said.
The impact of the provisions on the number of abortions is unclear, according to advocates on both sides. In several states that require women to make two trips, the number of abortions has fallen, according to the Guttmacher Institute. But in Louisiana, which requires women to make two trips and in 1999 required ultrasounds, the number of abortions has risen, from 13,100 in 2000 to 14,960 in 2008, according to the most recent data available.
The number of abortions being done in the United States has remained steady in recent years. Abortion opponents say that educational and legislative efforts have had an impact, but “pinpointing a particular piece of legislation is difficult,” said Carol Tobias, president of the National Right to Life Committee.
Abortion rights supporters say other forces are at work, including the dwindling number of providers and clinics, and increasing harassment of providers.
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