What happened yesterday

In light of the defeat of the background check bill yesterday (or, in light of its inevitable rejection by the Republicans in the House, its premature defeat), it's worth thinking about what actually happened.

And why? Because I can already hear people saying that this is one more sign that in their view the Democratic Party is useless, Democrats lack spine, Democrats won't fight for anything.

So let's be clear. This was not a failure of the Democrats in the Senate, this was a Republican filibuster.

Sure, there were conservative Democrats who voted to support the filibuster, but even if all of them had voted to end debate, the Republicans had enough votes to maintain the filibuster and block the legislation, even though the bill had the support of a majority of the Senate.

Ii have no problem criticizing Democrats when it's deserved, and I have great contempt for the Democrats who voted with the Republicans yesterday, but they're not who killed the bill. It was the Republicans.

Pink gun?

UPDATE: I just came across an article from just about a year ago talking about this same gun manufacturer and quoting the Komen people as saying they had nothing to do with them.  Good news. I hope they can come up with a copy of a cease and desist letter, since they seem to enjoy handing them out pretty liberally to charities they don't like.

Just a quick note. After earlier reports to the contrary, posts later today have indicated that the Susan G. Komen Foundation had nothing to do with the pink gun with which a three-year-old boy, apparently thinking it was a toy, shot himself last week.

According to The Atlantic, a company called Discount Gun Sales had advertised a Komen tie-in for a pink gun they were selling. The Komen Foundation is maintaining that it never had anything to do with the gun promotion and never received any funds, as the ad had promised.

I hope this is true. After their problems last year with Planned Parenthood it would be unconscionable for them to be doing something like this. On the other hand, after their problems with Planned Parenthood it would also be inconceivable for the public to accept the Komen statements at face value. If they're smart, or at least smarter than they were a year ago, they will throw open their files and release everything they have that proves they had nothing to do with the pink gun promotion, and I hope they do exactly that.

Small government, Republican style.

Don't you love the way Republicans claim to be committed to small government?

For years they've decided that there is one small segment of society who isn't entitled to privacy: women.

Things have gotten worse in recent years. We have seen an unprecedented wave of anti-choice, anti-woman legislative proposals.

Legislatures in more than 30 states are weighing — and in some cases passing — many fast-moving bills to restrict abortion rights in a blitz that could prompt the Supreme Court to revisit the issue.

Along with bills prohibiting abortion outright, or in certain circumstances, they're also pushing bills that go to the heart of the doctor-patient relationship, limiting where abortions can be performed, telling doctors what they have to say to their patients, and the like.

I think it's important to keep straight in our minds what these bills are. To say they are anti-abortion bills oversimplifies it, and it really plays into the other side's hands because abortion is more controversial among the general public than other choice related topics.

The Supreme Court has recognized in its precedents that the questions of choice, contraception, and procreation are decidedly based on our constitutional right to privacy.

You would think that a political party that pretends to a commitment to individual autonomy and limited government would be against these laws that restrict the doctor-patient relationship, wouldn't you? After all, not only do they impinge on the personal autonomy of the person, the interfere with what is, at least in part, an economic transaction between the doctor (vendor) and patient (customer).

But no.

Here's the latest. I don't ordinarily link to Fox News, but they're kind of the source for this stuff.

With a stroke of the governor's pen, Florida is positioned to become the first state in the nation to prohibit physicians from asking patients if they have guns in their homes, a move some doctors say will interfere with health care.

That's right, a coalition of gun nuts and small government Republicans have decided that those private conversations between doctors and patients are just a little, well, too private, and the way to fix that is for the government to reach its hand into every doctor's office in the state, and tell those doctors what they are and are not allowed to talk to their patients about.

So let me get this straight. We need to have small government because it's un-American to have government interfering with people's private lives and individual economic transactions.

Except that if protecting privacy rights means protecting women's rights, well, then, privacy rights go out the window and so does small government.

Or if privacy rights interfere with someone's paranoid fantasies of big, scary government, well, there again, we can't stand up to those paranoid fantasies so the privacy rights get chucked aside.

Thanks, Republicans. Stay consistent.