http://exiledonline.com/exposing-the-familiar-rightwing-pr-machine-is-cnbcs-rick-santelli-sucking-koch/

http://exiledonline.com/astroturf-revolution-dispatch-koch-activists-teabag-media/

"Within hours of Santelli’s rant, a website called ChicagoTeaParty.com sprang to life. Essentially inactive until that day, it now featured a YouTube video of Santelli’s “tea party” rant and billed itself as the official home of the Chicago Tea Party. The domain was registered in August, 2008 by Zack Christenson, a dweeby Twitter Republican and producer for a popular Chicago rightwing radio host Milt Rosenberg—a familiar name to Obama campaign people. Last August, Rosenberg, who looks like Martin Short’s Irving Cohen character, caused an outcry when he interviewed Stanley Kurtz, the conservative writer who first “exposed” a personal link between Obama and former Weather Undergound leader Bill Ayers. As a result of Rosenberg’s radio interview, the Ayers story was given a major push through the Republican media echo chamber, culminating in Sarah Palin’s accusation that Obama was “palling around with terrorists.” That Rosenberg’s producer owns the “chicagoteaparty.com” site is already weird—but what’s even stranger is that he first bought the domain last August, right around the time of Rosenburg’s launch of the “Obama is a terrorist” campaign. It’s as if they held this “Chicago tea party” campaign in reserve, like a sleeper-site. Which is exactly what it was.

ChicagoTeaParty.com was just one part of a larger network of Republican sleeper-cell-blogs set up over the course of the past few months, all of them tied to a shady rightwing advocacy group coincidentally named the “Sam Adams Alliance,” whose backers have until now been kept hidden from public. Cached google records that we discovered show that the Sam Adams Alliance took pains to scrub its deep links to the Koch family money as well as the fake-grassroots “tea party” protests going on today. All of these roads ultimately lead back to a more notorious rightwing advocacy group, FreedomWorks, a powerful PR organization headed by former Republican House Majority leader Dick Armey and funded by Koch money."

I am generally on the pro-choice side of this, but I too am somewhat uncomfortable with the idea of the government being able to force private practitioners to perform certain tasks. A previous poster made the following argument:

I can only imagine how my boss would react if I pulled a Bartleby at work and just said that "I would prefer not to" do the work I was hired to do. I don't think I'd last very long! This is a very bizarre law indeed.

But there's the difference - in that example, it would be your boss firing you at his own discretion. If both you and your boss agreed that you didn't have to do said task, the government wouldn't be stepping in and forcing you to do it regardless. Ideally, if we had an actual free-market society (instead of the corporate-government state envisioned by most "free market" advocates), there would be no problem with certain providers refusing to perform certain services. Others would just step in and reap the profit.

Of course I am fully aware that we don't have an ideal free-market society. There are barriers to entry in any enterprise, particularly when we're talking about entire clinics or hospitals, and many of these are the only ones in an entire area (which to me seems like a problem in itself). So I understand that in the short run, for the women whom it personally affects, compelling providers to offer all the necessary services makes sense. But theoretically, I cannot fully get behind the idea.

What would make far more sense to me is simply a requirement that private providers who wish to restrict their services in such a way clearly identify themselves as "Conscientious" (or whatever label we can agree on - personally, I'd prefer fundie nutjob, but hey). If it's a matter of the Hippocratic Oath, all the better - the relevant medical board can simply refuse to license them, and they can come up with their own alternative certification if they have the means and support to do so. At a more immediate level, people could simply boycott such providers, even for non-controversial services. All of these things are preferable to the government being able to tell people how to do their job. I can imagine myriad ways in which such a precedent could come back to bite us in the ass.

Unless of course we're talking about providers that receive government funding, in which case there is no question. But I don't think that's what we're talking about.

I don't think I've ever spent more than $70 on food for myself in a month, and that's a pretty generous estimate. I buy chicken breasts for $2/lb, ground beef for $1.79/lb, $1.39 loaves of white bread, and potatoes at $2 for a 5 lb bag. Some tough shoulder steak on sale for $2.79/lb is a rare treat, and to drink, I make my own iced tea. If I had a bit of extra money, I would possibly allow myself to buy a brand name cereal once in a while or perhaps ANY fresh fruit instead of the canned kind. Maybe get me some of that flavored cream cheese with the veggies in it. Or upgrade to real American cheese instead of the imitation kind. But as soon as I do all that, I'll start eating "ethically", I promise.

No matter how hard you try to artificially recreate the conditions of people who are on a budget, you will inevitably fail. The fact that you had to look up government statistics just go have an idea of how 'normal' people eat and then touted this ridiculously high number as some austere restriction shows how out of touch you are.