Recently the Democrats have been praising the Health Care Reform bills on the grounds that they save lots of money and reduce the deficit. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) the bill will MAKE money every year and over ten years reduce the deficit by over $100 billion. And that’s good and it’s good for them to praise it. It’s definitely a real accomplishment.

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Often people suppose that when they see a mess that something is wrong. They assume that the person making the mess is missing something or is pyschologically unstable or overly lazy or incompetent whereas the person who keeps things clean is more well adjusted  and “normal”.

I would like to propose a different theory.

I believe that for some people, people like me that is, cleaning is something that we do whenever we do it when we need a renewed sense of control. Why? Because cleaning is something you can fix. When the whole world is topsy turvy and nothing seems to go right and everything is hard and problem after problem after problem arises and no matter what you do, you can’t fix it, at least not right away and not in any easy fashion, it’s nice to know that cleaning is task you absolutely can succeed in. It might be easy or it might be hard, but it most certainly IS doable. It’s a certain number of systematic steps. You don’t have to wonder. You don’t have to doubt yourself. You can just clean.

So then for us, letting things get messy is a sign that  we’re MORE stable. Not a lot is weighing on our minds so we feel no urge to clean things up. We just let things go. And indeed there may even be, most probably IS, a part of ourselves that is subconsciously letting things get messier as a sort of early preparation. We suspect or fear that inevitably there will come a time when we lose our sense of control and we’ll need that grounding stabilizing period of cleaning as anchor from which  we can put ourselves back on track.

How about you? Are you like me who cleans during bad times and messes things up when times are good? Or are you one of those who cleans during the good times and only lets things get messy when everything is going downhill?

The other day I got this strange urge to torture myself.  My chosen arbitrary and completely undeserved punishment was randomly perusing the comments on certain popular youtube videos.

Here’s one thread of comments I read:

I’m not one to generally feel offended by profanity. People can say whatever they want and I think it’s really important to defend the rights of people to speak as they choose even if some find their words offensive.

However, youtube comments are just ridiculously absurd. They are pretty much universally reviled throughout the internet as amongst the most unintelligent, childish, and petty forums you can get. Jokes about the ridiculousness of youtube comment conversations were rampant three years ago.  I thought they would have surely improved since then. Judging by the discussion I posted above, apparently they have not.

Youtube doesn’t seem to care either. The only real mechanism youtube ever created for moderating comments were the thumbs up/thumbs down buttons that almost nobody uses.Indeed when I looked at the comments I listed above only a couple had just a single -1 marking. I rarely see comments modded up.

Contrast that to how youtube treats its videos. It takes only the slightest bit of profanity, violence, perceived nudity, or anything perceived as “indecent” to cause youtube to moderate a video so that it needs you to verify your age in order to view it. I see many video creators going out of their way to cut and edit videos to avoid even the slight chance of someone reporting their video. And yes it’s based on user reports. And there appear to be a large group of users who exert an enormous amount of effort seeking out and reporting videos they consider “inappropriate”.

Indeed youtube has been known ban users and take all their videos offline rather rapidly if they perceive any kind of abuse. The excuse is that the user broke the terms of service. But that could be anything from posting one video that was considered overly sexually explicit or to a user whose posted hundreds of videos that directly violate another person’s copyright.

Again though, youtube responds primarily to complaints and inevitably caves without even giving the user an opportunity to defend themselves. Hence, all viacomm videos were removed in response to the company’s suit no matter how much a video was edited or altered to be a derivative work.  You couldn’t make a fair use argument. Your case wouldn’t go to trial. Your video would simply be removed no questions asked. And your account might be banned in the process.

For another example, recently there was a youtube video poster who posted many clips from television news media outlets to highlight their hypocrisy. A great many of those clips were from Fox News showing some host or another saying or doing something stupid.  Many many bloggers across the internet used this poster’s videos in their posts to highlight Fox News’s incompetence and absurdity. Fox News complained about their videos copyright being violated. Immediately the user’s account was taken down. 

Now you might say, yeah but he WAS violating copyright. But here’s the thing. Unlike with Viacomm this was not a universal removal of all their videos from the site for copyright violation. No, many many users who post videos of Fox News programs to promote conservative principles remained online. Fox News didn’t complain about them even though they were just as much instances of copyright violation. Rather Fox News complained about the user that made them LOOK bad so that user was forced to lose their videos.

Am I the only one that finds it ironic that youtube has become so obsessive in policing its videos and yet lets comments run so wild? It’s a weird double standard. Kids don’t get exposed to people cursing in videos, but if they scroll down and read comments they get exposed to all kinds of unregulated filth.

But that’s just the way youtube works. When it comes to policing their video content they bend over backwards to accommodate any complaint, but when it comes to their comments they clearly couldn’t care less.

There is much discussion about timestamping. It’s even not surprisingly expanded into a discussion of pulsing and recommends and the ISH sites and all manner of other features that people think are problematic.

I would like to argue for a shift in perspective about these matters.  We speak sometimes as if timestamping were the problem. Timestamping is not the problem. It’s a symptom. It might be a particularly annoying frustrating and ugly symptom but it’s still just a symptom.  

The same goes for seeing excessvie pulses in your inbox, or excessive entries for ish sites. These are just symptoms of a deeper problem.

How do we know that?  Well it requires only a very simple thought experiment. Imagine a world where all those annoyances did not exist. There is no timestamping or date manipualtion of any kind. Let’s say for the sake of argument that ISH sites, recommends, and pulses are abolished. 

Now imagine what happens as your friend and subscriber list grows without bound.  Indeed imagine for the sake of argument that you had an infinitely large subscriber list all of whom wrote and posted a blog entry say every minute or so. And imagine that everyone else does too. Now you write a blog entry. What is the probability that anyone will read it? What is the probability that anyone will comment?

As the number of friends and subscribers each user has approaches infinity the probability that your blog will be noticed by anyone approaches zero.

That should be pretty obvious.  But you can see then that the problem of relevant interesting blog entries being pushed off the page isn’t exclusively caused by timestamping or pulses or anything else. Those things might exacerbate the problems but even if you got rid of them the problem would still exist.

Indeed, people pulse and timestamp and recommend as a means of FIGHTING that inherent problem. They are trying to combat the natural tendency for ANYTHING you write on the internet to vanish beneath the waves of the inevitable scourge of DATA FLOOD.

Data Flood is a problem all online services struggle with.  Users want to feel relevant so they want people to see and read their stuff. On the other hand users are also interested in having access to as much stuff as possible. The more stuff they see the less likely they are to notice anything or to find the one thing they are really looking for.  Services like Facebook and Twitter are constantly evolving to find new ways to deal with data flood in order to keep their services useful to people even as they grow without bounds. People still want to see a lot of data, but they don’t want to see irelevant boring or uninteresting data, an inherent contradiction..

If you think about it social networking in general is a way to control data flood. It does so by making you connect to users who presumably want to read your works and so you share only with those who have interest. This reduced pool of viewers reduces the risk of data flood drowning out your work.

Microblogging was also introduced as a way to combat data flood. By limiting writers to 140 characters you could streamline the process of skimming through data to find the things that interest you. You could then be exposed to a lot but only find that small piece.

Consider email. It’s an ancient technology that was very much plagued by problems of data flood. The result was ultimately people found that the  best way to get their emails read was to send 50 billion of them to as many people as possible. Emails became spam. That’s because there was no way to control the data flood.

Typically you combat data flood, not by restricting what people can post or how they can post it, but by empowering the users in two ways.

1. Give them the means to find the data that is RELEVANT
2. Give them the means to ignore the data that is IRRELEVANT

Often ironically to do this you actually have to provide users with MORE data. It seems like a contradiction but it’s not. 

Consider Twitter’s new Lists Beta feature. This allows twitter users to categorize the users  they are following into lists. This allows twitterers to find more RELEVANT information by looking at the lists that combine related users who are likely to post the information they want to see. It adds more information about every single user though, which lists they belong on and who created what lists. Nevertheless it makes data flood easier to control.

Consider say a Spam Filter on Email. This allows an email receiver to filter out emails they don’t want. In effect it adds metadata to every email you receive about whether it meets or doesn’t meet some arbitrary threshold of what is considered spam. That’s more data, however, without it for many of us email would be so polluted by Data Flood that it’d be nigh on unusuable. With it though, we can filter out data that is IRRELEVANT to us hence saving us from drowing in the data flood.

Let’s take a look at ideas related to Xanga.

Take for example CelestialTeapot’s idea to provide a history of timestamping dates to a blog entry that has been timestamped and the initial publication date. That’s more data so it increased the flood, but at the same time it’s USEFUL data. A person can use that data to filter out and ignore posts that have two many timestamps or to view posts only in the order of initial publication. Those who just overtimestamped posts as irrelevant can then ignore them.

Or for example take The_Brink_of_Omniscience’s idea to give Xangans the ability to mark entries as read or unread. That’s an additional piece of data about a post. However, it allows users to filter out posts that they deem no longer relevant to them because they’ve already read them.

Or take ModernBunny’s idea to create Xanga categories in order to organize it more like a forum. That’s adding more information to each post. You now know what category they belong to and what users reading them and commenting on them are likely to be interested in.  Yet it makes it easier to find blog entries that are of direct interest to you. If you’re interested in tech blogs you can read just those blogs that have the tech category and consequently those bloggers who write in tech category will find their blogs more likely to be read BY those people perusing the tech category.

Generally that’s the best way to deal with data flood. You don’t try to head it off at the source by building dams that prevent the flood from happening. Instead you give people the means to swim and navigate the floods effectively. Categorization, Search Tools, Spam Managemetn, Ratings systems, Folders, Tagging, Lists, Meta Moderation, Linking and Forwarding are typical ways in which services have managed data flood in the past.

There are a lot of good ideas out there. It will be interesting to see how Xanga chooses to answer this challenge in the future.

It’s weird that we talk about dreams as if there were only two types. Good dreams and bad dreams. And by good dreams we generally mean dreams that make us happy, dreams that give us joy. By bad dreams we almost universally mean nightmares. Dreams that scare the living daylight out of us. Those are what we call “bad dreams”.

But it occurred to me that we talk a lot less about dreams that evoke other kinds of powerful emotional response.

For instance last night I had a dream that woke me up with a profound feeling of extreme anger. While I don’t remember much of the dream, I do remember that there was a character that did and said things that utterly pissed me off. I woke up fuming and found it hard to make myself go back to sleep.

And yet I don’t think this was a bad dream. Not really. It was nothing like the terrifying nightmares that I’ve had that I would do anything to avoid ever experiencing again. The angry dream was just an angry dream. It was neither good nor bad. If anything it was interesting. Sort of a unique kind of dream that had a profound emotional impact on me.

So if there are those dreams that have deep emotional effects why not the save for other emotions? Can you have a dream that leaves you weeping in sadness? Can you have a dream that makes you restless or bored, disinterested, or apathetic? How about a dream that makes you giddy? Can you have a dream that makes you feel pain? Real physical pain. Or emotional pain? How about a dream that makes you despair? Can a dream bring you a sense of adventure or a sense of wonder? Can a dream make you weary. tired, or worn down? Can a dream make you depressed? Can a dream leave you with a sense of self doubt or a strong overwhelming sense of pride or respect in others or yourself? Can a dream make you feel humiliated or embarrassed? Can a dream make you yearn for revenge? Can a dream bring a sense of jealousy?  Can a dream lead you into waking with hatred? Or for that matter love?

Can a dream make you wake up laughing?

Maybe most dreams don’t have any of these characteristics and the vast majority of the most common dreams just invoke basic emotions of happiness and fear. If so then could those be the root emotions from which all other emotions derive?

Or maybe I just haven’t had enough dreams. And most people regularly experience dreams that invoke powerful emotions of all types in equal measure. But if the latter is true, why is our language of dreams so limited? Why do we only generally speak of good dreams and nightmares and not the myriad set of others dreams out there for us to experience?

I saw 2012 last weekend. It was an odd experience. The people in the theater actually clapped at the end. The three people I went with all reportedly enjoyed it.

Me?

I couldn’t stop rolling my eyes throughout the movie.

While 2012 wasn’t the worst movie I’ve ever seen, not by a long shot, it was quite possibly the stupidest.  I found the plot to be completely ridiculous. It’s basically a movie full of the worst kinds of hollywood cliches and stereotypes imaginable.  Seriously, anybody could have written this movie. You just watch end of the world movies and splice them together without any thought. There is zero depth to this movie.  There is nothing in it that makes you think. At all.

2012 would have been a better movie if it had simply forgone the plot and any semblance of a story and just given us two hours of images of beautiful global environmental destruction.  Watching the awesome power of the Earth beautifully tearing apart civilization was probably the best part of this movie. The pitiful pretense of a story just got in the way.

Some more specific complaints (spoilers):

1. The movie completely fails to get you to care about what happens to any of the barely developed characters
2. Nevertheless the movie annoys you by killing characters in a worst than arbitrary fashion. The character deaths are designed to make the story fit into a nice little package.
3. The coincidences in this movie that drive the plot forward are sooo ridiculously improbable it smashes verisimilitude into some form of earth destroying subatomic particles.
4. There should be some kind of rule that says no more than 2 plane takes off in the nick of time scenes in any given movie.
5. The Dog must Survive, Captain goes down with the ship, Witness to Destruction, Death of Love Rival, Heroic Ex, Evil Pragmatist, Spoiled Rich Kids, The Speech that Changes Everybody’s Mind, The typical atypical American Family (1 boy, 1 girl, mother, divorce/separation, 2 dads), Danger heals all wounds. President as Moral Voice, President must be black (recent movies/tv shows), Inexplicably Long Countdown to Destruction, Crazy Stoner out in the Wilderness —   those are just some of the over used standard stereotypical representations in the film. The movie is basically MADE of these stereotypes just strung together in an arbitrary order.

There were many other things that bothered me about the movie but this is enough for now.  Basically this movie is more hollywood movie candy like we’ve been subjected to for years now.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not one of those that thinks there’s no place for silly unintelligent special effect flicks. I have no real inherent problem with them. There just, I think gets to a point where it’s clear the movie makers have zero respect for their audience at all and treat them like children. That’s inherently different from trying to elevate your viewers to another level. The latter is what all movies should aim at least a little to do, even the ones that exist just to make money. 

Otherwise every person just gets to a point eventually where they just can’t take the absurdity of it any longer. There’s only so many times you can see the same stories with the exact same characters and the exact same concepts and the exact same coincidences and the same jokes before you feel the urge to give up on movies entirely (either that or shoot yourself, either way it’s one less customer for the movie industry). If 2012 is the symbol of direction in which hollywood blockbusters are going, I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what will happen. The movie industry is doomed.

I think critics need to include a stupidity category rating on movies. So at least people know that this movie might be entertaining but it’s going to make you dumber just by watching it. That would be a huge help.

Just a quick thought.

When we talk about some past atrocity and ask the question whether we should do anything about it, we have a tendency to say something like:

“That’s ancient history. We didn’t do that atrocity. We’re not responsible for the sins of our ancestors. Why should we care?”

But then when we talk about figures from the past we tend to say something like this:

“Well that’s just the past society we can’t really equate it to values that exist in modern times. That historical figure can’t be blamed for those atrocities after all they’re just a product of their times. They were simply acting in a manner consistent with the social values of the time.”

Both principles seem to make logical sense. However, the end result of these two principles used in concert is that NO ONE takes responsibility for ANYTHING in the past. The people who are dead who did them are exempt from critique because they were just puppets controlled by the society and besides they’re dead so nobody wants to malign the dead. And the people alive today are exempt from critique because they conveniently weren’t alive when the atrocity took place. The fact that they may well reap the benefits of those atrocities is a fact deemed irrelevant to discussion.

It’s as if those things that happened before you were born simply do not exist.

And I think that’s the point of these principles. There’s a desire to forget all the evils that have gone by and focus only on the present and the future because the past makes us uncomfortable. 

Of course if we do that, it naturally means we can neither correct the mistakes of the past nor learn from them.

I found these videos to be fascinating.

Also as always Jon Stewart insightful:

Let’s do a sort of intellectual puzzle. It’s a puzzle for people who are pro-choice and people who are pro-life but who believe that abortions can be allowed in some sort of special cases such as the oft-cited “rape, incest, and to protect the life of the mother and/or child”.  This is NOT a puzzle for people who are pro-life and believe that no abortion under any circumstances should abortion ever be countenanced. I have absolutely nothing to say to  people with such a rigid ideology.

But for the rest of us, the vast majority of the population that believes in both choice and life and don’t believe that you have to choose one or the other, there is much to discuss. Most of us believe in abortions under certain circumstances and don’t believe in them under other circumstances and those circumstances we might disagree on. But by and large we all want less abortions to occur.

Put another way, it’s a discussion for people who want a society that is neither like China where abortions are rampant nor a society like the Philippines where laws against abortion drive women to regularly put their own lives at risk to abort unwanted children. We want a society where abortions don’t happen often. And a society where worse abortions happen less frequently than not as bad abortions. Not one where abortions are pushed under the table into backrooms and not ones where abortions happen so frequently that people have stopped altogether valuing entities before they are born and simply use abortion as a convenient substitute for contraception.  Even if you consider abortion to not in any way be causing a death under any circumstance, surely you can agree that abortion is a medical procedure that we’d like to do less of anyway, if only because it’s a lot more expensive than preventing a pregnancy in the first place.

So the question is, how do we get there? What would we do if we were really serious about eliminating abortions except in the most extreme necessary cases? What would we as a society do?

Well there are certain pretty obvious things we can do right now. They aren’t difficult nor are they particularly expensive. Here’s a quick list off the top of my head.

1. DON’T outlaw abortion -
Or put any unnecessary restrictions on it. The reason for this is about the same as the reason why it’d probably be a great idea to have all congressmen have the words “prohibition doesn’t work” tattooed on their foreheads. If you want to stop a thing from happening that is prevalent you have to know when it is happening. You can’t control things happening in backroom deals hidden from the public view. Nor can you ensure the safety of the people when you prohibit their behavior with proclamations instead of teaching them what they need to know in order to become better citizens. All you can do is lock them all up and America already leads the world in prison populations at our great expense.

2. FUND sex education -
I’m talking about a massive influx of money into ensuring that children are given comprehensive sex education and health education from a very early age. Believe it or not most people don’t want to get pregnant and have children before they are ready. So if you want to create a world where people have children and not abort them it obviously makes sense to give them as much knowledge as possible so that they know what they can do to avoid getting pregnant.

3. FUND easy access to contraception -
This is perhaps the easiest to understand. The more people who can easily get contraception the less often they will be get pregnant when they don’t want to. That’s less cases where someone would even need to worry about whether or not they have to get an abortion.

4. FUND research into better forms of contraception -
This is important. All commonly used forms of contraception are not full proof. If we want to minimize abortions we have to minimize cases where contraception fails. The more reliable contraception is the more people will use it.  Likewise research into other things that make people more likely to use it such as convenience, ease of use, comfort is important. And research into rapid manufacturing mechanisms that drive down costs are equally important.

5. CREATE support networks for people who are pregnant and people who have children –
These networks don’t exist to convince people to or not to abort. Such things are cruel mockeries of compassion. No. What we need are groups of women who share experiences and talk to one another and help each other through difficult times. Not judging one another. The less alone you feel when dealing with hard decisions the more likely you are to feel confident in your ability to make those decisions and deal with the consequences, even if those consequences are the need to raise a child. It’s reasonable to assume that women in supportive households with supporting family are more likely to choose to have a child than women in abusive households or who have very little in the way of family to turn to for help. Support networks would substitute for those who lack a supportive home life.

6. FUND early childhood education/universal education, preschool programs, and safe daycare services -
Basically we know raising a kid is hard. Many people have an abortion because they don’t feel as if they can do it.  They don’t feel they have support. They don’t know that there’s help out there for them. The more you can reduce that uncertainty the more likely a woman is to feel it’s ok to take a risk and have a child. One of the biggest uncertainties is how you can have a child and maintain a work life. Knowing that there will be someone safe and reliable to look out for your child when you cannot makes it much easier to choose not to abort.

7. REGULATE maternal leave -
Lots of women will choose to have an abortion rather than risk their career. It has to be very clear then that women are not allowed to be fired because they are pregnant. Further more, women need time off when they are pregnant and during the early months after the child is born so that they can take care of their health and that of their children. The government can and probably should help businesses pay for that should it result in a loss, but businesses have to be required to stick to it. In the end they’ll find it is more productive for them to do so, since happier workers generally are more productive workers.

8. FUND adoptive services -
Many women will refuse to bring a child into this world if they feel that putting that child up for adoption is a terrible and cruel fate. People need to believe that giving up a child for adoption will still result in that child living a full and happy productive life even if no one ever adopts them. If they instead fear the children will fall through the cracks, feel alone and forgotten many will do what they can to avoid having that on their conscience.

There. Eight simple easy steps society could do right now if they wanted to seriously curtail the number of times people choose to have an abortion, without stepping on anyone’s rights, without shaming anyone, without jailing or arresting anybody. You don’t have to deny anyone health care to do these things and doing all these things would make lots of people’s lives better in real measurable ways. If you believe that a fetus at any stage in a pregnancy is alive, then doing these things will clearly save many lives and at very little cost.

Some will object that these things are “too much government interference”.  But on the contrary, prohibiting the right to abort a fetus is the government interfering in the way people live. Further if you don’t want the government to do these things they can all be funded through private entities, non-profit organizations, and charities.  The important thing is that they get done, not who does them. Saving lives and lowering costs is not a job for just the State or just private industry or just the individual. It’s the job of everyone.

I’m sure there’s many other easy things we can do that will reduce abortion rates while at the same time not limiting anyone’s rights and indeed providing people more choice and freedom. Feel free to suggest them. Regardless this is the debate we should be talking about. Not what laws we should be creating to make it illegal or too costly to afford an abortion but what incentives we can create to make people less likely to want or need an abortion.

There’s no reason why we can’t as a society if we choose care about both women AND the unborn. This idea that proponents on both sides often advocate that we have to choose one or the other is unnecessary divisive and dangerous.

Those are just the easy simple ideas for things we can do. Stay tuned for part 2 where I suggest the more crazy off the wall kinds of ideas to achieve even greater reductions in abortions while preserving freedom.

Here is the text of the first part of the Stupak Amendment to the Universal Health Care Bill that just passed the House.

Mark these words well. For history may one day show that these were the words that finally killed Health Care Reform.

Most of this is just language describing the Abortion Riders, called “supplemental plans or insurance”. As I described in my post a few days back, Abortion Riders are nothing but a load of crap. If you can find a way to ensure such riders actually exist and are cheap enough for people to be able to afford, then maybe it might be worth talking about.

Two important things need to be said that I did not mention in either of my previous entries.

1. The exclusion provision states “except in the case where a woman suffers from a physical
disorder, physical injury, or physical illness that would, as certified by a physician, place the woman in danger of death unless an abortion is performed, including a life-endangering physical condition caused by or arising from the pregnancy itself, or unless the pregnancy is the result of an act of rape or incest.”

The exclusion is interesting in that it does not protect the health and well being of the woman but only their life. Psychological harm is not even a consideration. Nor is physical harm that does NOT risk death. Logically then bearing a fetus to term could cause all kinds of physical harm to the mother and that is entirely irrelevant to whether the abortion will be paid for. Even if that harm is lasting or permanent.

There’s no further condition on that either. The condition does not care about the life or health of the child. Not all abortions result in the termination of a fully healthy viable fetus. Plenty of them involve removing a fetus that is already dead.  Lots of others involve terminating a fetus that has slim to no chance of ever being able to live outside the womb. In such situations the woman would not be able to have their abortions covered by health care. They would be forced to carry a dead child to term.

2. As described here. The bill does not allow abortions coverage to be in plans that receive ANY funding from this bill. That may very well include numerous employer based plans as well as individual and group market insurance. Currently 87% of employer based plans offer abortion coverage.

Now I hope I’ve impressed upon you how ridiculously horrible this amendment is as worded. People are describing it as eviscerating women’s rights and making them into second class citizens. And while that’s a little bit of hyperbole it’s not far off.  Ezra Klein put it best: “Abortion coverage will not be outlawed in this country. It will simply be tiered, reserved for those rich enough to afford insurance themselves or lucky enough to receive from their employers.”

While I”m not entirely convinced that the writers of this amendment were aware of how far reaching its wording would turn out to be. I doubt they really intended to touch employer insurance for example. I think that only because if wealthy women in their districts start losing abortion coverage there will be hell to pay, especially for the Democrats who voted for this. And nobody wants to offend big employers. 

On the other hand, I doubt hte pro-life people are particularly upset about it. The wider the better. They thing abortion is Wrong with a capital W. So if they can slip by more restrictions on abortion they’re more than happy to do that. Certainly the Catholic Church which pushed strongly for this amendment at the last minute will not be shedding any tears.

President Obama has weighed in, in a pretty luke warm way suggesting that the House/Senate probably should “revise” the language so that it does what is intended (or at least what pro-life parties SAY they intend) that is to enforce rules against federal funds going toward abortions.

I think, it’s rather ridiculous to even be trying to do that. But anything is certainly better than the amendment as it stands. But will they be able to?

Over 40 Liberal Democrats have sworn in pretty wriggle-proof language in writing to vote against any final bill that has Stupak-like language in it.  On the other hand there’s a good chunk of Conservative Democrats who refused to vote for the bill WITHOUT Stupak which was the reason why the amendment was added in the first place.

So what happens when these two forces clash? Presumably they will stare each other in the eyes and see which ones blinks first.  Democrats as a group cannot afford to have Health Care reform fail. It will be bad for ALL of them. (Not to mention horrible for the country) 

But I think people on both sides consider this important enough to screw their party for the sake of their principles.

Compromise will then be the word of the day. Can Stupak be rewritten to appease the Pro-Life Democrats while not offending the Pro-Choice Democrats?  President Obama clearly thinks it can be.

I think he’s a bit too optimistic.

If the internet community is any indication, women are really REALLY pissed off by this. They feel used and taken for granted. And it most certainly did NOT help with the Republicans were yelling “I object” like a bunch of two year olds at them when they were trying to express their ideas during the Health Care debate.

I believe Pro-Choice women in the House will want more than just a lukewarm Stupak Amendment. They will, and in my opinion totally SHOULD demand some price for their support of anything, remotely like the Stupak Amendment. And by a price I mean something real and meaningful that goes as far toward protecting and enhancing women’s rights as Stupak does in repealing it.

In a compromise, typically the ones who are nicest, the ones who are most willing to go along for the greater good, tend to get screwed the hardest.  And they get stepped on again and again up until they hit their breaking point. The point at which they can yield no longer and take a stand.  I wonder if the progressive Pro-Choicce women in the House may well have hit that point. If so, they won’t stand for simply being taken for granted again and again.  They’ll make their stand and Health Care Reform be damned.

And that’s Good. Because if they don’t then in the end people will keep telling them “oh it’ll just get revised” and “don’t worry about it” only they’ll turn around and one day find themselves forced to choose between voting for something that sells out their constituents on Pro-Choice or something that sells out their constituents on Health Care. NO ONE should be manipulated like that.  But the only way the amendment can possibly be forced to change is if the progressive Democrats speak out Now vociferously against it and make it clear that this is the one line they will never cross

Of course the Pro-Life Democrats have less interest in reform passing in any case. They can always jump on the Republican bandwagon and claim the whole thing was stupid from the get go, blame the pro-choice Democrats, distance themselves form Obama and beg for conservative votes.  That might even work for some of them. In any case many of them are driven by the fires of faith in a firm and absolute belief that they have to do something to fight to save the lives of the unborn. Reasoning with them to reach a compromise may be impossible too.

If this turns out to be the case, and God I hope it doesn’t, we may find that Health Care died because Americans have not yet resolved our feelings on Abortion.  That will be a sad day for everyone.