Who do you think is Donald Trump’s worst cabinet member?
In a normal world we would never be asking this question because, of course, you would have no idea. In a normal world, an American who could come up with two cabinet names besides the secretary of state’s would be regarded as an unusually dedicated citizen.
.. Under normal circumstances we do not talk a whole lot about, say, the secretary of housing and urban development. You would be forgiven for forgetting that this one is Ben Carson. Until you heard that the new head of the department’s massive New York-New Jersey office is going to be the woman who planned Eric Trump’s wedding.
.. Tom Price, secretary of health and human services — he of the “Mr. President, what an incredible honor …” quote. This is the guy who’s got a woman who doesn’t believe in contraception in charge of a government program on family planning.
Price also has a sleazy history of advocating legislation that could boost profits for health care companies whose stocks he was betting on. And I haven’t even mentioned that he’s supposed to be the administration’s titan of Trumpcare.
.. she froze Obama-era reforms aimed at protecting students who enroll in for-profit schools, an area in which her family happens to have significant investments... You have to give extra attention to the people who actually appear capable of getting a load of terrible things done, like Scott Pruitt of the Environmental Protection Agency. “The problem is that Pruitt knows what he’s doing,”.. [Budget Director Mick] Mulvaney by a nose.” You may remember that when Mulvaney introduced his first budget, observers discovered he had counted the same $2 trillion twice... Jeff Sessions. (“Racist on voting rights and more, bringing back mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses, promoting the cancer of private prisons.”)
Kristoff: Abortion and Contraception
The best way to reduce abortions is to help young women access LARC contraceptives (70 percent of pregnancies to young, single American women are unplanned). That’s what Planned Parenthood does, along with combatting cervical cancer, which already kills one American woman every two hours. I understand the passions that abortion raises, but this move will inadvertently increase the number of abortions, as well as cancer deaths. How is that “pro-life”?
For Melinda Gates, Birth Control Is Women’s Way Out of Poverty
we not only believe in, we use in the United States — more than 93 percent of married Catholic women report using contraceptives
.. What would be the payoff if you can get to 120 million women?
You’d start to break the cycle of poverty. Women in the United States, when we were finally able to really use contraceptives, look what it did to women going into the work force. All over Africa, young girls getting pregnant early when they don’t want to keeps them out of school. So you’d keep more girls in school, and then you’d have educated girls who would go into the work force.
And we know that when a girl or woman has economic means in her own hands, it shifts the whole power dynamic in the family, whether it’s with her mother-in-law or her husband. It’s the beginning thing that unlocks a woman’s potential.
A Supreme Court Hijacking
As the government’s brief and Mr. Verrilli’s argument made perfectly clear, once the organization notifies the government of its religious objection to covering birth control, the coverage obligation passes to the organization’s insurance company without any cost to or further involvement by the employer. “Employers are not to bear any financial burden for the contraceptive coverage,” the solicitor general told the court.
.. What these organizations — colleges, charities and nursing homes that employ and serve people of all faiths — want is the complete exemption that the government has made available to actual churches.
.. It took Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the only woman among the five Catholics on the court and the only one among them who doesn’t regularly attend Mass, to bring this case down to earth, slyly suggesting that the plaintiffs didn’t trust their female employees to refrain from using birth control. “Why don’t we assume that if the majority are part of the religion, that they are not going to buy contraceptives?” she asked Mr. Francisco. “That’s their religious tenet. And so, why are we worried about this case at all?”
.. So the threshold question in the Zubik case is whether the religious nonprofits are substantially burdened by the requirement that they inform the government of their objection to covering contraception. Their claim is that as a matter of religious doctrine, informing the government is the first link in a chain of events that makes them complicit in the sin of contraception.
.. Both Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. seemed to assume, against all evidence, that a new form of contraception-only insurance could magically come into existence and could adequately meet the needs of the women who work for the objecting employers.
.. because they are after bigger game: getting the Supreme Court to interpret the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to mean anything they say it means.