A few thoughts

1.  On the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, there has been a steady drum-beat of states passing laws restricting access or otherwise making it harder and harder for women to get abortions.   Pro-life folks rejoiced when this year, for the first time, a Gallup poll showed that 50% identified themselves as "Pro-Life," with 41% identifying as "Pro-Choice."

    However, that is a misleading statistic when it comes to Roe v. Wade.  According to Katha Pollitt's article in the Nation magazine, a different poll shows that 35% of those who call themselves pro-life also support retaining Roe v. Wade.

    I think the problem, at least in part, is that conservatives have succeeded in demonizing the label "pro-choice" to be synonymous with militantly pro-abortion.   But that's not what it means at all.   It means choice, that decisions about abortion are best left up to a woman and her medical and spiritual/psychological/ethical advisers.    So it seems quite sensible that many people might make the personal choice not to have an abortion but do not want to have a law that makes that decision for everybody.

2.  Remember that New Year's Day fiscal cliff bill that was pushed through Congress to avoid us going over the cliff?    Well, somebody played fast and loose with it.  After it had already been debated, but before the vote, somebody slipped an extra paragraph into Section 632 that delays some Medicare price restraints on a class of drugs that includes a drug made by Amgen pharmaceutical company for dialysis patients.

This surprise inclusion gives Amgen another two years to sell their lucrative drug at high prices before controls set in.   And this comes on top of it having previously received another two-year delay.

It is estimated that this bit of political perfidity will cost Medicare up to $500 million over that period of time.   Are you surprised to learn that Amgen has been especially generous in doling out political contributions to members of the Senate Finance Committee, Democrats and Republicans alike?

3.  We're beginning to wake up to the fact that Republicans have entrenched themselves in state governments -- and one of the advantages they have is redrawing congressional districts to favor themselves.    That's largely why Democrats collectively won a majority of the popular votes cast for members of the House, but Republicans actually won more seats because of district gerrymandering.

And now Virginia is about to compound the trickery.   They've introduced a bill to change how electoral votes for president are awarded, a plan that if carried out throughout the U.S. would have given the presidency to Mitt Romney.  And Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is looking at this and calling it "interesting."

Now, many liberals have also been calling for eliminating the Electoral College and electing the president by popular vote nationwide.   Because that would require a constitutional amendment, some have advocated the simple change of having each state award its electoral votes according to the proportion of the popular vote in that state.

But this Virginia plan is different.  It would combine gerrymandering of districts and then proportioning the electoral votes according to who wins each district.  By linking the proportional votes to rigged district voting, this would produce a very distorted outcome.

Which, of course, is the point.  Republicans are very clever at coming up with ways to steal elections -- it's their only hope of winning.

The Republicans taking back the U. S. House in 2010 may not have been the worst outcome of that midterm election.   It may have been what happened at the level of state governments -- governors and state legislatures with the power to do things like this.

Bah humbug.   A pox upon them all.

Ralph