Why does abortion make people crazy?

The recent laws passed in Kansas and Texas to try to prevent people from having abortions bother me deeply.  They seem to have skipped all the reasonable approaches to try to reduce abortions and just jumped to the extremes.

In Texas (and a few other states) they are mandating extreme and often embarrassing medical procedures before you can get an abortion.  Many of these procedures involve sticking large rods into the woman's vagina and are known to be uncomfortable in some cases.  I know that pro-life people are often willing to go to almost any extreme to prevent abortions (which they consider murder) but this is not the methods that we use in this country to mold peoples behavior.  Imagine if the government wanted to improve the gas mileage of vehicles on the road and they forced everyone who wanted to buy a truck to go through some kind of anal probing.  This would seem like a ridiculous solution to almost all American but for some reason, anything goes when abortions are involved.

We as a country almost always start with something much more benign like taxing the undesirable behavior.  This is the primary way we have addressed smoking in this country.  In the 60s and early 70s the per capita cigarette consumption in the US was over 4000 cigarettes a year.  In 2006 it was only 1600.  So by using taxes (and information concerning the dangers of smoking) we have reduced the average cigarette usage to one third of what it was 50 years ago.  So why don't states start with something much easier for the general public to swallow like taxes when we deal with abortion?

Sadly, the laws passed in Kansas have been even worse than the laws passed in Texas.  In Kansas, it is now legal for your doctor to lie to you to try to prevent you from getting an abortion.  This is going to seriously damage the doctor-patient relationship over time and cause some people to not take their doctor's advice because they are no longer trustworthy.  So this "pro-life" stance is going to result in people not getting the care they should get and likely result in more preventable deaths.  We have enough problems with healthcare in this country that we don't need to manufacture more.

Ironically there are 2 methods to help prevent unwanted pregnancies (and therefor abortions) that pro-life conservatives seem to oppose rather than embrace.

1) comprehensive sex education  (There are multiple research studies that show teenagers start having sex at a later age if they have comprehensive sex education rather than abstinence-only or no sex education.)
2) wide spread use and easy access to birth control  (what better way to prevent unwanted pregnancies?  It would also be useful if we had some form of contraceptive pills for men since men seem less likely to want children at younger ages than women.)

I firmly believe that if we as a country focused on better sex education, easier access to contraceptives and taxed abortions as undesirable that we could reduce the abortion rate by 80+% over the next 40 years.  Once abortions become rare, it would be easier to make them illegal because people would see them as less useful and necessary.

It would also help that after taking such a reasonable approach to reducing abortions that the pro-life movement would no longer be seen as crazy by many of the people in this country because right now the pro-life movement is scaring off all the moderates in this country with their actions.  It is hard to win a war of ideas when you scare away the potential new recruits.

A little research

Someone asked me why I believed that gas prices don't go down when we increase production and I found this research.

This is an article:
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2012/03/22/ap-gas-prices-analysis/
Discussing this research data:
http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/327163-gas-production-and-prices.html

Do presidents really have any power over gas prices?

One thing that I never understand is people who blame high gas prices on the president.  I'm never sure what they want the president to do.  The president in no way sets gas prices unless he institutes price controls (which would require congress's help) and price controls only result in shortages where you can't buy gas at any price.  Please reference the 1970s...

The only thing that the president can do that will even remotely affect gas prices is to open more areas of the US to drilling and this won't have any effect for the several years in takes to get the oil fields up and running.  Also, based on what I have read from leading economists, people vastly over estimate how much this would lower gas prices.  This means that the president has virtually no control of the gas prices during his term in office.

The problem is that gas prices are highly visible and almost everyone needs to buy gas so it is something that everyone likes to complain about.  However, none of this means that there is an easy way to reduce gas prices.


Note: This is not really what I wanted to write about today but I've heard too many people blame Obama for high gas prices recently when it makes no sense.  I'm not a big Obama fan but if we are going to bash him lets at least blame him for things that are actually his fault.

Fixing Congress

Just a quick link to some good ideas on fixing congress.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/15/opinion/avlon-fix-congress/index.html?hpt=hp_bn9

I think it would take a lot more than these 3 changes to fix congress but all 3 of these are good ideas.

Where Obama went wrong

I had some hope for Obama when he was first elected.  He said a lot of the right things about how partisan our politics were and tackling problems that he could get bipartisan support on.

Then he decided to push healthcare reform.

It is obvious from the reactions in the media and the statements made by Republicans across this nation that he had no bipartisan support on this issue.  This has hurt him in multiple ways.
1) It changed Obama from a political outsider that would change how Washington worked (which is how he ran his campaign) into a liar like all other politicians because he wasn't working on bipartisan issues like he promised. 
2) This also alienated Obama from a significant segment of the moderate and independent voters that helped get him elected because they either didn't like the healthcare reforms Obama proposed or viewed the entire bill as a waste of time and money.
3) Because of all the controversy around ObamaCare, Obama had to spend pretty much all his political capital to get his healthcare bill passed and this has crippled his ability to get other legislation passed.  Right now there are almost no Republicans that want to be seen working with Obama on any issue.
4) The fight to get ObamaCare passed resulted in lots of compromises that significantly weakened the bill from its original form.  Now Obama will always be associated with this weakened reform that will likely not work very well.

With all of these negatives of healthcare reform, Obama would have been much smarter to focus on something like tax reform.  Here is what I think would have happened if he had done tax reform instead of healthcare reform.
1) He would appear to be addressing an issue with bipartisan support.  There are numerous Republicans that also want tax reform.  Yes, there would be differences of opinion on what needed fixed but he could have found some support among Republicans.
2) He could claim that addressing tax reform would help our lagging economy (I don't know that it would have really helped the economy but tax reform would have appeared to help the economy more than healthcare reform).  I believe that addressing healthcare while the economy was down made Obama appear disconnected from the needs of normal citizens and is what really cost the Democrats the midterm election.
3) Tax reform would not have been as easy for Republicans to rip apart and as headline grabbing as healthcare reform was.  Raising taxes on the rich and removing abused deductions is a lot less sensational than "death panels" and socialism.

So this is how Obama went from an unstoppable force that had better than 60% approval to where we are today with approval ratings in the 40-50% range and significant questions of whether he will get re-elected.

NOTE:  Personally, I think that healthcare in this country has significant issues that need to be addressed.  However, regardless of whether Obama was "doing the right thing," he crippled himself with the fight to pass his healthcare reform and ended up with a crippled form of the original bill that has little ability to fix our core healthcare problems.

Who am I?

I am an average American.
I don't subscribe to the Republican or Democratic rhetoric.  I don't think conservatives or liberals are right all the time.  I think for myself and come to my own conclusions. 

I am a self proclaimed moderate and am proud of it.  Both Democrats and Republicans view the term moderate as an insult because they don't want us thinking for ourselves.  They want us to blindly vote for them so that they can continue to get their big salaries and big kickbacks unopposed.

I believe in democracy but that doesn't mean that I think the American form of democracy is perfect.  We have massive problems with gerrymandering, pandering to special interests, and laws that promote our 2 party system.  All this works to make our representatives care much less about us and our needs.

I believe in God but that doesn't mean that I automatically vote Republican.  It also doesn't mean I'm a social conservative.  I believe that there is a very good reason why the first amendment to the constitution says "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof".

I think that America has some serious issues that need to be addressed soon and I'm not convinced that we are ready to face those issues yet.  I think that if want to preserve America's place in the world that we need to start acting proactively rather than hiding under a rock and pretending our problems don't exist.

I am going to propose real solutions and many of these ideas will be unpopular because change is never easy and often scary.

I hope I get followers that want to read about my American Dream and discuss the various benefits and disadvantages of my ideas.  I'm sure as heck not perfect (just ask my wife) but I think I have good ideas and will defend them.  All I ask is that everyone attack ideas and not people.  If you think my ideas are stupid, say so and try to logically explain why they won't work.  Calling people names never changed anyone's mind.