When Outrageous Propositions Disguise Indecent Acts
Photo "Scorpion Sucker" by Flickr user voteprime. Used under a Creative Commons license.
Brady Swenson of RHRealityCheck.org says
I'm sure you know the story by now... the Bush administration's department of Health and Human Services leaked a proposed rule two weeks ago that would limit women's access to contraception by redefining popular birth control methods as abortion and legally empowering medical practitioners to deny dispensing birth control to women with a prescription. The regulation would also remove all federal funding from subsidized birth control that millions of low income women depend on.
Read the quote in context here.
I can't remember the term at the moment but there's a word for when you create a really big stink (that you might not even really care that much about) in hopes of letting a smaller stink slip past unnoticed. Or at least unnoticed till too late.
You see it a lot, of course, in things like service contracts, and before people were required to release A.P.Rs you'd see something like that with various kinds of loans. And of course in politics there's the "Fireman First" procedure where you say "well, to meet this budget crisis we'll have to lay off 10% of our fire fighers... and the mayor's office remodel... so we need that budget increase." In each case you wind up so distracted by a big plum that the perhaps costlier, or less essential, or otherwise more outrageous item passes unnoticed.
Anyway, I wonder if that's what's happened with the big "contraception is abortion" buzz from last week that seems to have completely distracted everyone from the complete defunding of low-income contraceptives!
And by the way no, I'm not giving the "Mayberry Machiavellis" credit for thinking this up. It's just as likely that, just like me, the redefinition story was so disruptively absurd *proposal* we all just dropped the ball on the outrageous *act.*
%@!&#%#
How does that subsidized funding works? Isn't it through the money that is given to the states for Medicaid and isn't that money spent at the discretion of the state?
I had sent each of my congressmen an email on their system about the proposals. Today I received my one and only non-response. I followed their web site at the recommendation and found no opinion at all about birth control, abortion or funding of such. I did find he sponsored a bill for fire fighters though. Congress a real bunch of gutless wonders.