If You Don't Read Digby, You Don't Know Squat...

.

...About The Real Numbers.....

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First - the background.....

Yesterday, during the horse trading that led up to the historic vote on Healthcare Reform in the US Congress, which includes a provision for a real, honest-to-goodness kinda/sorta/almost 'public option', there was a vote on an amendment that was fronted by Michigan Democrat Bart Stupak to bar any government and/or private insurance funding of any procedure that could be even remotely construed as contributing to an abortion.

In the original voice-vote it looked like Stupak was going down....But then they went to a roll call vote....The Blue Dogs caved and....Surprise!.....The Neanderthals won.

Now, the fallback postion in all of this, as near as I can figure it, is that this would give the Conserve-A-Dems cover so that they could then vote (or at least allow) the Healthcare Reform bill to pass.

And it did.

But barely.

So, what does Digby have to say about what really went down and why?

Well, here is her (yes, her) take:

....There are only 76 women in the House out of 435 --- 17%. 59 of them are Democrats and 17 are Republicans. Three of the Democrats are non-voting members (DC, Virgin Islands and Guam.)

Out of the 56 women in the Democratic caucus, only two voted for Stupak. All 17 Republican women voted for it.

What this adds up to is that 97% of the Democrats who voted for the Stupak amendment were male. 90% of the Republicans were male.

I would have to guess that if more than 17% of the congress were women, there would be a little bit less likelihood that women's rights would be so often used as a handy tool to placate neanderthals.

That's just a guess.

Habits are hard to break....."

You bet.

And hard numbers are hard to ignore.

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What does this mean (as the puffed-up punditry are so fond of saying) 'going forward?

Well, if US Americans want to protect themselves from the Neanderthals they have to vote for more women.

Thing is, if you look really hard at Digby's numbers you can see that they have to be Democratic women because the Republicans of the female persuasion are, based on the evidence, apparently asexual Neanderbots from Uranus.

Or some such thing.

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Now.

Lest we up here get too smug about all of this....

It is probably worth mentioning that we could soon find ourselves in a very similar situation in this, the country formerly known as Canuckistan?

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