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Carl Wimmer. Husband. Father. Former SWAT team leader. Chairman of the Utah Family Action Council Team. Republican in the Utah House of Representatives. Glenn Beck sycophant and proud 9/12er. Also a proud teabagger and founder of the new Patrick Henry Caucus, whose goal is to “restore and uphold the sovereignty and rights of the individual States as guaranteed by the tenth amendment of the United States Constitution.”

What does that actually mean?

The Patrick Henry Caucus adopted a unanimous position Wednesday, December 23, 2009, to oppose the Health Care Reform Bills, and to support a lawsuit against the federal government in order to stop the national health care bill from becoming law.

Carl’s standards for deciding whether to support a bill are very straightforward. He always asks himself these questions:

“Is this something that the government should be involved in?”

“Does this law enhance freedom and strengthen the constitution, or does it restrict it?”

“Does this bill uphold traditional family values?”

That’s why he opposes the new bill in Utah to ban smoking in cars when children are present.

Rep. Carl Wimmer, R-Herriman, said the Legislature this year is passing other bills and resolutions to get the federal government out of people’s lives and should not now create greater state impositions.

“To think that we are smarter, or know more, or even care more about other people’s children is absurd,” Wimmer said.

Carl doesn’t want the government to regulate guns. Or schools. Or water conservation. Or health care for children of documented (that means “legal”) immigrants. ’Cause lord knows that the state has no interest in ensuring that other people’s children receive health care — once they’re born.

Carl doesn’t want the government to touch a damned thing. Liberty, and all.

But Carl does want to see women thrown in prison for “recklessly” endangering or harming their fetuses.

Like the 17-year-old girl in Utah who was seven months pregnant and paid a man 0 to beat the shit out of her to induce a miscarriage. It didn’t work; the baby was born and put up for adoption. But the local authorities investigated her and tried to charge her with soliciting murder. The case was thrown out because “a woman who is seeking to have or obtains an abortion for herself is not criminally liable.”

Carl was “absolutely outraged.” Not because this scared kid found herself unexpectedly pregnant at 17. Or because the laws in Utah require parental consent for a minor to obtain an abortion. Or because she was so desperate to terminate her pregnancy that she was willing to be beaten. No, Carl was “absolutely outraged” that this girl is not rotting in prison for her crimes.

And Carl wants to make sure that never happens again. So he’s written a bill:

This bill amends provisions of the Utah Criminal Code to describe the difference between abortion and criminal homicide of an unborn child and to remove prohibitions against prosecution of a woman for killing an unborn child or committing criminal homicide of an unborn child.

His bill won’t stop girls from seeking to end unwanted pregnancies. It won’t prevent those unwanted pregnancies either. It won’t provide resources for those girls once their babies are born. Carl doesn’t vote for that sort of thing.

But he does want to make sure that if anything ever happens to a fetus — not a child, of course — but a fetus, well, the mother just might be to blame. And she should have to pay.

What could be more pro-family than that?

The purpose of this bill, like all the other bills, is perfectly clear. Carl says so himself, on his issues page.

This year, through my leadership, we began to chip away at Roe v. Wade by passing HB222 and HB90. I sponsored HB222 entitled, THE UNBORN CHILD PAIN PREVENTION ACT. This law required that Doctor’s who are going to perform an abortion on a child, shall inform the mother that the child may feel pain, and requires that the Doctor to offer an anesthetic to alleviate the pain. I also co-sponsored HB90 which made an illegal abortion the equivalent of a 2nd degree homicide.  

Both of these bills create some basic human rights for the unborn, and thus chips away at the nation’s abortion laws…We are continually working to pass pro-life legislation which will weaken Roe v. Wade.  

Because Carl believes in life. He believes in it so much that women’s sovereignty and liberty be damned. It’s life, after all. What is more important than preserving life?

But Carl doesn’t really give a damn about life. He’s outraged by the “excessive appeals that criminals on death row receive.”

Carl is a hypocrite and a liar — and he’s in a position of power to make his will the law of the land, even when he knows it’s unconstitutional. But Carl is really no different from those who came before him to criminalize women.

Women like Regina McKnight:

Her crime? Giving birth to a five-pound, stillborn baby. As McKnight grieved and held her third daughter Mercedes’s lifeless body, she could never have imagined that she was about to become the first woman in America convicted for murder by using cocaine while pregnant.

Women like Kawana Ashley, a pregnant teenager who shot herself in the stomach and was charged with murder.

Women like Brenda Kay Peppers, who was arrested and charged with child endangerment for using cocaine while pregnant.

Women like Tayshea Aiwohi, who was convicted in Hawaii of manslaughter because she smoked crystal meth while pregnant.

The list goes on. There are plenty of cases of women — overwhelmingly young, poor women of color — charged with the crimes of endangering their children while pregnant. Their prosecutions were supposedly in reaction to the inevitable epidemic of crack babies who, according to President Reagan, would one day overrun and destroy America.

Except that never happened, as studies have shown that “the hysteria over crack babies was more a product of the media than of scientific data.”

But controlling and punishing women for their reproductive decisions didn’t start with Reagan’s racist fearmongering either.

In Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, Dorothy Roberts details the horrifying history of the forced sterilization of black women. Between 1970 and 1980, there were more than half a million cases of sterilization, largely performed without the patient’s consent or even her knowledge. They were so common in the South, they were called “Mississippi appendectomies.”

Carl Wimmer’s latest effort to “chip away” at Roe v. Wade is nothing new. From forced breeding of slaves, to sterilization without consent, to murder charges for crack cocaine users, to restrictions on access to safe abortion — these are all part of the same long and ugly pattern of men with power making decisions about women’s bodies. The fight over abortion has never really been about protecting life, as the so-called “pro-lifers” make clear again and again, by opposing laws to provide health care to children, advocating for the death penalty, or terrorizing patients and murdering doctors.

Carl and his predecessors don’t care about children. And they don’t care about women. They care about controlling women. And the laws they pass are part of the obscene belief that women’s reproductive organs are somehow unique and therefore necessitate government control.

The laws Carl fights for, and all the laws that came before Carl set foot in the Utah House of Representatives, are intended to deprive women of their sovereignty. They tell women, again and again, throughout history, that they do not own their bodies. Their reproductive organs make them the property of the government, subject to the distorted beliefs of people like Carl. And any woman who dares to assert control over her own body will be punished. She will be made a criminal.

Because Carl believes that the government should stay out of the decisions of private citizens — unless those citizens are women.

Carl is wrong. He is part of the problem, as is every other elected official who supports this sexist, racist, draconian system of controlling women. The right to women’s bodies does not belong to Carl. It does not belong to the government.

It belongs to women.

AP – The White House called for a “simple up-or-down” vote on health care legislation Sunday as Speaker Nancy Pelosi appealed to House Democrats to get behind President Barack Obama’s chief domestic priority even it if threatens their political careers.

AFP – President Barack Obama will muster the votes in the House of Representatives to force his flagship reform of US healthcare through without Republican support, House speaker Nancy Pelosi said Sunday.

AP – The Senate’s second-ranking Republican leader says he expects GOP lawmakers will vote to extend unemployment benefits this week — derailing a fellow Republican’s objections.

3.27 pm: Republican House leader John Boehner speaks: “This bill is a dangerous experiment with the best healthcare system in the world.” What, this bill also affects Japan?
White House healthcare summit liveblog, The Guardian UK

This Republican talking point is parroted by the segment of our society most at risk – those who feel they are “entitled” only to their own healthcare because they’ve worked all their lives and paid into their insurance, and those who cannot afford insurance have no right to others’ “hard-earned” money. As long as they have a job, they are safe.

Unreal.  Ask any of the 49 million who are uninsured, or any of the almost equal number who are underinsured. There is no safety in numbers.

If I could have lifted the damned TV screen on Summit day, I might have thrown it out the window. Boehner’s “best healthcare system in the world”?

It’s possible to make the case that some elements of health treatment function better here than many places. Arguably, the quality of cancer care I’ve received (and the research behind it) has increased my own lifespan by a few months, thanks to aggressive chemotherapy treatment. Much of the success I’ve had so far is related more to my geographical location, access to an excellent facility, and the pure luck that I happen to be insured, than it has to do with any U.S. “healthcare system”. If I had no insurance and no health-disposable income, you wouldn’t be reading this.

As for cost? My most recent session covered five days in the hospital in January, with every-three-hour monitoring of my vitals, urine tests, blood draws, and the periodic checking of my chemo port for leaks – all done by nursing staff whose shifts are 12 hour shifts three to four days a week. I had an early morning visit from resident doctors on their rounds for five minutes once a day. This five day cruise is billed at a bit over ,000. The final cost negotiated by my insurance is around ,000. Every 21 days.

Factor in 00 for each CAT scan every six weeks. 00 to 00 for bone scans every eight weeks. Add in doctor bills assessed for each follow-up visit outside the hospital. There is the Neulasta shot each cycle at around 00 a shot which keeps my white blood cells from bottoming out.

Why should I care? I’m insured. For now.

As of 2007, “about one in 26 Americans have had cancer. By 2020, roughly one in 19 will have been diagnosed with the disease”.

The typical price of family coverage now runs about ,000 a year (employer-sponsored health benefits), but premiums are expected to nearly double, to ,000, by 2020. Commonwealth Fund. This represents an average median increase to 24% of family income by 2020.

The number of uninsured individuals are expected to increase from about 49 million today to between 57 million and 66 million by 2019. Currently, “almost 21 million uninsured individuals—45% of the total—have a full-time job“.

I’ve spent nearly six hours since the televised Healthcare Summit plowing through reader comments to articles in some of the nation’s major papers, listening to several iReport videos CNN’s website featuring viewer opinion on the Summit and on healthcare in general, and scanning blogposts. I spent another two hours going through my own packet of information on Long Term Disability from Prudential, a benefit offered through my employer. And another hour or two has been lost forever reading up on COBRA coverage and applying for Social Security Disability Insurance, a requirement of my long term disability coverage to offset benefit payments so that I will still receive a portion of my current income.

I’ve discovered that if I don’t die within the next two years, I won’t be able to afford to live.

Those who think the status quo is sufficient, or the best, or that they are entitled to what they’ve earned through a lifetime of work and that they shouldn’t have to pay for anyone else (public option or single payer or expanded Medicare, or any one of the other options), seem to think they have what they don’t have. Security in things staying as they are.

No one in this country has health security. It doesn’t exist.

Social Security statistics indicate that a “ 20-year-old worker… faces a 3-in-10 chance of becoming disabled before reaching retirement age”.

No one can be assured of adequate health care unless they happen to be one of those in the top 1 to 2% of income bracket in the Unites States and can afford any procedure at any price. Why?

This post from The Baseline Scenario gives four reasons:

• Your company could drop its health plan. According to the US Census Bureau, the percentage of the population covered by employer-based health insurance has fallen every year since 2000, from 64.2% to 59.3%.
• You could lose your job…
• You could voluntarily leave your job, for example because you have to move to take care of an elderly relative.
• You could get divorced from the spouse you depend on for health coverage.

We can all add to this list.

• Your company asks you to carry a higher employee portion of your premium and you can’t afford the additional premiums.
• Your company has contracted with a health insurer that is effectively a “junk” insurance company – few procedures actually covered, high deductible for the insured.
• You become disabled, remain medically insured while in long term disability coverage offered by your company, but those benefits end per the policy written after a certain period of time (often between 6 and 24 months) and your company lays you off if you can’t return to work. Most long term disability insurance carriers move you towards Social Security Disability Insurance and COBRA if you remain disabled for a longer term than 6 months.
• You are covered under COBRA for any reason and the premiums are more than you can afford.
• You were employed with a pre-existing disease and the contract between your insurance carrier and your employer allows denial of coverage for your condition.

The most fearful, insecure voters in the United States, those who move farther right with each invocation of terrorist, deny the inherent instability, insecurity, of our healthcare system.

Representative Boehner might have a hard time covering his own health costs should his current employer become unable to cover employee benefits due to budgetary concerns in this, our “best healthcare system in the world”.

As we watch the battle over health reform play out against the backdrop of an H1N1 pandemic, I am reminded of many of the political lessons learned over the years (“don’t get mad, organize”, “all politics is local”) including the exhortations of many posters here (“are you going to complain, or are you going to do something?”) to work for change, real change that you can measure and see and feel.

As it happens, my home state of Connecticut is also home to a campaign to improve ordinary people’s lives by highlighting a local legislative battle to mandate paid sick days for employers of larger companies. This is legislation that’s come close to passing before (it’s passed each chamber, but not in the same year), and this year, there’s a concerted push to get it done.

Who doesn’t have paid sick days? Among others, day care and nursing home workers, bus drivers, grocery workers and very likely your neighbors or someone you know. And from a societal and public health perspective, coming to work sick for these folks is a great way, for example, to spread flu and other illnesses, exactly what you don’t want.

Here’s a paragraph from the Connecticut Working Families Party blog:

Why paid sick days? Here’s my reason:

According to a new study (pdf) , 8 million Americans went to work infected with swine flu. And 7 million caught H1N1 from a sick co-worker. And don’t forget, 24 people in Connecticut actually died from swine flu.

There are a thousand reasons we need a basic workplace standard to allow Connecticut workers to earn paid sick days. But like clockwork, corporate lobbyists are already trotting out the same old canard that it’s too expensive for businesses. (As if it’s really profitable to make sick employees come to work.)

Here’s local coverage of a hearing this week on the topic in Hartford:

Jon Green has been the Executive Director of Connecticut Working Families since 2002. Working Families is a coalition of neighborhood activist, community organizations and labor unions that is united to fight for the ‘kitchen table’ economic issues that matter most to working class and middle class families in Connecticut, like affordable healthcare, good jobs and fair taxes. He’s kindly consented to answer a few questions on the issue of paid sick days in terms of practicality, affordability, politics and more.

Daily Kos: What’s the CT Working Families Party? Are you a political party? Do you endorse candidates?

Connecticut Working Families Party http://www.ct-workingfamilies.org/  is a independent progressive party formed by formed by union leaders and grassroots activists to fight for ‘kitchen table’ economic issues like affordable healthcare, living wage jobs and progressive taxes. We’re deeply troubled by the growing gap between the rich and just about everyone else. We work to hold elected officials in all parties accountable on issues of economic fairness for working and middle class families.

It’s important to point out that Working Families is very different from typical third parties. We operate in states that allow cross-endorsement http://www.ct-workingfamilies.org/… (also called “fusion voting”) which means candidates can be nominated by a major party and a minor party like ours. For every office, from City Council up to Governor, Working Families studies the records of the candidates and endorses the ones who are most committed to fighting for our progressive values. Then we work our butts of to help them get elected.

In 2008 in Connecticut, our top priority race was helping to elect Democrat Jim Himes in CT-4. We knocked on tens of thousands of doors, talking to mostly unaffiliated suburban voters, asking people to vote for healthcare and jobs by voting on the Working Families line for Jim Himes – we delivered over 9000 votes on the Working Families ballot line to help push him over the top in an extremely tight race. Statewide, Working Families garnered about 85,000 votes for cross-endorsed Democratic Congressional candidates.

But Election Day is just the beginning. After Election Day, we work year-round to hold them accountable to their progressive promises on our issues. The paid sick days campaign is our top legislative priority this year.

Working Families is now a ballot-qualified party in 6 states — New York http://workingfamiliesparty.org/ , Connecticut http://www.ct-workingfamilies.org/ , Oregon http://www.oregonwfp.org/ , South Carolina http://www.oregonwfp.org/ , Delaware http://www.delworkingfamilies.org/  and Vermont http://www.vtworkingfamilies.org/ . So look out for Working Families on a ballot near you.

Daily Kos: Who has responded to your call for new legislation?

The issue of paid sick days has been debated in the State Legislature for the past few years and has gained a fair amount of traction. The bill has actually passed in each of legislative chamber, but not in the same year. 

The majority of Democrats in both the House and the Senate support the bill and have voted for it. In the Senate, the bill has even received support from two Republican State Senators. 

Some state legislators have made the bill a very high priority and have worked very hard to persuade their colleagues. There are still some nay-sayers – most of the Republican caucus and some Democrats as well. But we’re optimistic that the bill will pass – hopefully this year.

I should add that we’re not alone in this fight. This year, we’ve built a broad coalition, including public health professionals, including the Connecticut State Medical Society <https://www.csms.org>  and the Academy of Pediatrics <http://www.ct-aap.org> , women’s advocacy organizations including Momsrising.org <http://momsrising.org> , NARAL <http://www.pro-choicect.org> , Planned Parenthood <http://www.plannedparenthood.org/ppsne> , CT Sexual Assault Crisis Services <http://www.connsacs.org>  and CT Coalition Against Domestic Violence <http://www.ctcadv.org> , unions — particularly those who represent service sector employees — like SEIU locals 32BJ <http://www.seiu32bj.org>  and CSEA <http://www.csea-ct.com>  and UFCW <http://www.ufcw371.org> , anti-poverty organizations like CT Assocation for Human Services <http://www.cahs.org> , and more, and even a handful of small business owners.

Having a broad-based coalition, including a few who are not the usual suspects, has been instrumental, not to mention gratifying.

Daily Kos: Some might be surprised at who doesn’t have paid sick days. What kind of people in CT need this kind of legislation passed, and why?

According to research by the National Partnership for Women and Families (pdf) <http://everybodybenefits.org/psd_study.pdf> , an estimated 600,000 workers in Connecticut lack paid sick days. That includes lots of people in jobs with a high level of public interaction, people who prepare and serve our food, work as retail clerks, drive our children to school and take care of the sick and elderly as home health aids. More than 80% of restaurant workers lack paid sick days. In other words, the very people who have the highest chance of spreading illnesses are generally those most likely to lack paid sick days.

But to answer the question of who needs this legislation, the answer is all of us. Workers without paid sick days would of course by most impacted. Especially in a tough economy like this, we don’t think people should be forced to choose between their livelihoods and their health or the health of their families.

For the rest of us, this is also a serious public health issue. Especially in the wake of the H1N1 outbreak, it should be clear that when people have no choice but to go to work sick, it puts us all in danger. According to research by the Institute for Women’s Policy (pdf) <http://www.iwpr.org/pdf/B284sickatwork.pdf> , an estimated 8 million people went to work with the H1N1 swine flu virus. And workers without paid sick days were much more likely to do so. As a result, 7 million people caught the virus from a sick co-worker.

And it’s not just about the swine flu. Do you ever go out to eat and catch a ’stomach flu’? According to the Center for Disease Control <http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dvrd/revb/gastro/norovirus-factsheet.htm> , about half of the 23 million annual ‘norovirus’ infections are linked to an ill food service worker.

Allowing workers to take paid sick days could really take a bite out of the skyrocketing cost of our healthcare system. When employees can’t get time away from work to go to the doctor, they are less likely to get the kind of preventive care and early treatment of illnesses that we all know lowers overall healthcare costs. Without paid sick days, people are more likely to wait until a problem gets very serious (and very costly) and end up in our overcrowded emergency rooms.

Daily Kos: Does this actually have a chance to pass?

It does. Last year, our bill passed in the State House, but wound up deadlocked in the State Senate. The prior year, it passed in the Senate, but wasn’t called for a vote in the House. We’re building a massive grassroots campaign to make sure both houses do it this year.

If you live in Connecticut, you can ask your state legislators to support the paid sick days bill here:
http://action.workingfamiliesparty.o…

It certainly won’t be easy: as you can imagine, our opponents, the CBIA (Connecticut’s Chamber of Commerce) are trotting out the same old ‘bad-for-business’ canard. It’s fear tactic without a lot of evidence, but there are some legislators who are more motivated by fear than by facts.

Of course, if we could pass a law to stop people from ever getting sick, we surely would. But in fact, people do get sick. And if they face a choice between staying home and losing pay (maybe even losing their job) or going to work sick, more often than not people will go to work sick. That’s not good for anyone, including their employer. They are less productive employees, they take longer to recover, and by spreading their illnesses to others they simply compound the productivity loss.

Serious academic analysis actually suggests that businesses save money in the long run by enacting a paid sick days policy, mostly because of reduced spread of illness at the workplace and lower turnover.

And the experience that San Francisco had after enacting a paid sick days policy in 2007 confirms this research. According to the IWPR (pdf) <http://www.iwpr.org/pdf/B264_JobGrowth.pdf> job growth in San Francisco remained a strong as, or stronger than, any surrounding county. And in the restaurant industry, job growth actually ticked up following the implementation of the paid sick days policy.

Sunday opinions and flights of fancy. And hockey (men’s) gold at noon 3:15 ET. For noobs, remember hockey is the only game with only three quarters (they quit after the third, unless it’s tied.)

Dan Balz:

The health-care debate, at times, has seemed petty and small. But the endgame shapes up both as a major test of leadership for the president and his party and then a big national debate about the consequences of the outcome. If bipartisan compromise is out of the question right now, then a midterm election fought over big ideas and genuine philosophical differences seems entirely appropriate.

David Broder: But Newt Gingrich and Bill McInturff told me that Republicans are winning the argument. They said it, so it must be true.

Gallup:

President Barack Obama averaged 49% job approval from Americans for the week of Feb. 15-21. His recent approval ratings, based on Gallup Daily tracking, have shown a high degree of stability, with the weekly averages ranging between 48% and 51% since mid-November.

Have I mentioned recently that what Republicans think doesn’t matter?

Frank Rich:

The leaders embraced by the new grass roots right are a different slate entirely: Glenn Beck, Ron Paul and Sarah Palin. Simple math dictates that none of this trio can be elected president. As George F. Will recently pointed out, Palin will not even be the G.O.P. nominee “unless the party wants to lose at least 44 states” (as it did in Barry Goldwater’s 1964 Waterloo). But these leaders do have a consistent ideology, and that ideology plays to the lock-and-load nutcases out there, not just to the peaceable (if riled up) populist conservatives also attracted to Tea Partyism. This ideology is far more troubling than the boilerplate corporate conservatism and knee-jerk obstructionism of the anti-Obama G.O.P. Congressional minority.

You went there, Frank. You really went there.

WaPo:

The sirens sounded in Hawaii at dawn. Tsunami warnings were posted from Panama to Japan, from Ecuador to New Zealand. Australia made the tsunami-warning list. So did Antarctica.

Authorities told Californians to get out of the water to avoid being swept away by strong currents. The forecasts showed the waves reaching Nome, Alaska, more than 24 hours after the huge earthquake off the coast of Chile.

By Saturday evening, the calamity had not materialized. Although reports were still coming in, it did not appear to have been a killer tsunami like some in the past.

Jenifer Rhoades, tsunami program coordinator for the National Weather Service, said officials would rather err on the side of warning people about the worst-case scenario than play down the risk.

Well, duh. What do we expect, government sponsored surfing contests? The idea that “everyone didn’t die, so what’s the caution for?” is as old as the hills and dumb as dirt. From pandemics to hurricanes, disaster preparedness needs to cover calamities, as Katrina, Haiti and Chile show us all too clearly that we are not always lucky about “near-misses”.

Al Gore:

It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.

Alas…

NYT Sunday Magazine interview with Harry Markopolos:

What was it like to spend nine years trying to persuade the Securities and Exchange Commission that Bernard Madoff was a fraud, only to learn that the agency thought he was perfectly reputable?

For nine years I was the S.E.C.’s doormat.

Now you’re triumphant, a hero in investment circles who exposes the S.E.C. as the most futile of agencies in your new book, “No One Would Listen.”

It was a trip through the twilight zone.

Why do you think the S.E.C. failed to wake up to Madoff’s billion Ponzi scheme until he turned himself in?

They weren’t even asleep at the switch; they were comatose. They didn’t respond to heat and light, much less evidence of wrongdoing. They were not engaged in the fight.

The future of President Obama’s health care overhaul now rests largely with two blocs of swing Democrats — abortion opponents and fiscal conservatives.

Politico – Late revelations on Edwards undermine idea that press is best at clearing bids for the White House.

Marathon negotiations in the Senate on financial regulatory reform were set to continue on Sunday with a renewed focus on financial consumer protections after key Republicans rejected a compromise offer from the banking committee chairman.