NYT's Peters Hits 'Waste of Time' Obama-Care Repeal Votes and GOP's 'Myopic Focus' on Deficits

New York Times reporter Jeremy Peters let the Republicans in Congress know he was tired of their silly and "waste of time" attempts to repeal Obamacare in Wednesday's "House to Vote Yet Again On Health Care Repeal."

(Peters was last seen helping Chuck Hagel, Obama's nominee for Secretary of Defense, limp across the confirmation finish line.) He wrote on Wednesday:

The 37th time won’t be the charm. But House Republicans are charging forward anyway this week on a vote to repeal President Obama’s signature health care overhaul, which will put the number of times they have tried to eliminate, defund or curtail the law past the three-dozen mark.

“This is what, the 40th time they’re going to do it?” scoffed Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic leader, confessing that she had lost count. “Thirty-eight? 39? 40? 41?” She eventually settled on “high 30s” as her best guess.

....since 2011, Republicans have spent no less than 15 percent of their time on the House floor on repeal in some way.

Liberals mock Republicans for what they dismiss as a waste of time. It represents a fitting ordering of priorities, they say, for a body whose few accomplishments this year include passing a bill that kept the Federal Helium Reserve open, heading off a critical shortage of the gas, and another that modifies the requirements for gold and silver coins commemorating the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

Indeed, the Republican House leadership is sensitive to the perception that they are squandering even more time on a repeal vote that is going nowhere.

With the national debt at over $16 trillion, Peters accused the Republicans of suffering from "an almost myopic focus on deficit reduction and budgets."

Republican leadership put off scheduling a vote on an outright repeal of the health care law despite pleas from conservative members who believe it is an issue of paramount importance to voters back home. After losing the presidency and seats in both houses in Congress, the House leadership initially wanted to focus on pursuing an agenda crafted by Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the majority leader, aimed at softening the party’s image by moving off an almost myopic focus on deficit reduction and budgets.

They were able to hold off a vote for some time. At this point in 2011, House Republicans had already voted nine times on some form of repeal.

But conservatives pressed on, noting that their newly elected colleagues had not had a chance to vote on something that is a Republican rite of passage.

Clay Waters is the director of Times Watch, an MRC project tracking the New York Times. Click here to follow Clay Waters on Twitter.

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Obama, female senators focus on economy, budget

President Obama hosted the 20 female U.S. senators for halibut, peach pie and a two-hour discussion of the economy and the federal budget Tuesday at the White House.

"The president enjoyed continuing his discussion with the senators about a wide range of items on the agenda, including working together to find common ground on budget issues and new initiatives to grow our economy, create jobs and strengthen the middle class," a White House official said.

Topics of conversation also included the bipartisan immigration bill under review in the Senate, last week's failed gun control vote and expanding education programs.

"The president also reiterated his commitment to ensuring all resources remain available as a part of the ongoing investigation into the explosions in Boston last week and commended law enforcement efforts," the White House official said.

Tuesday's meeting was the latest in a series of gatherings held by the informal female caucus. The event was originally organized by Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), who  suggested to President Obama that one of their dinners should be held at the White House.

“When I saw President Obama a few weeks ago, I told him about our quarterly dinners and, I said ‘Mr. President, if you want to see bipartisanship in Washington, invite the women senators to help you get it done.’ And he loved the idea and he plans to invite us to the White House,” Gillibrand told ABC News in January.

After the dinner, Gillibrand said there was "a great discussion" over the meal in a post to Twitter.

The dinners are usually hosted at the senators' homes, and Sen. Lisa Murkowsi (R-Alaska) was scheduled to originally host Tuesday's meeting. According to The Washington Post, the Alaska lawmaker had already ordered halibut from her home state, and offered to have the fish delivered to the White House.

That entree was served along with peach pie, according to a White House official.

The dinners are traditionally off-the-record, and none of the female senators spoke with press upon entering or exiting the White House.

The 20 female senators represent a high-water mark in the upper chamber, besting the record of 17 females in the previous Congress.

Tuesday night's meeting is the latest in a series of outreach efforts by President Obama in recent months, as the White House seeks to improve relations with Capitol Hill. Last week, Obama and a dozen Senate Democrats dined together at the Jefferson Hotel, four blocks from the White House. The president has hosted a pair of similar meetings — one at the hotel, the other at the White House — for Republican lawmakers.

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Indiana GOP Drops Forced Ultrasound Requirement To Focus On Shutting Down Abortion Clinics

Last month, Indiana Republicans proposed a measure intended to shut down a Planned Parenthood clinic in the state. The original SB 371 legislation also contained a clause that would have required women taking the RU-486 abortion pill to undergo two invasive transvaginal probes — one before taking the pill, and one after. But ever since the transvaginal ultrasound provision first erupted into controversy, the state’s GOP has been working to scale it back, hoping to assuage public outrage and quietly shepard the rest of the anti-choice legislation’s passage into law.

At first, the Indiana Senate removed the bill’s second ultrasound requirement to ensure its passage. And now, a House committee has removed the ultrasound requirement altogether. According to an Associated Press report, “Indiana Right to Life president Mike Fichter says the group agreed with the decision to drop the ultrasound requirement because debate over it in the state Senate had taken focus away from its goal of tightening regulations on clinics that provide abortions.” Now that abortion opponents have conceded to public pressure on the invasive forced ultrasound measures, the rest of SB 371 will seem moderate in comparison. But the anti-choice legislation would still have far-reaching consequences for women’s reproductive rights in the state.

Indiana lawmakers are pursuing a popular right-wing strategy for limiting abortion access: Indirectly restricting abortion by imposing costly, unnecessary requirements on abortion clinics with the intention of forcing them to close their doors. SB 371 would force health clinics that prescribe the abortion pill to adhere to the same standards as surgical clinics, even though medication abortions are not actually surgical procedures. It’s a direct attack on a Planned Parenthood clinic that provides the RU-486 to patients seeking to terminate a pregnancy during the first trimester, since that clinic would likely not be able to comply with the new restrictions.

Women’s health advocates consider these type of abortion restrictions to be some of the most dangerous assaults to women’s health — because they can take effect fairly quickly, they effectively limit women’s abortion access, and they often fly under the radar without inspiring the same kind of outrage that other laws, like transvaginal ultrasound requirements, do. That’s exactly why Indiana Republicans are willing to sacrifice mandatory ultrasounds to focus on their real “goal.”

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Heritage in Focus: How the HHS Mandate Revision Doesn't Stack Up

Recorded on February 11, 2013

Research Associate Sarah Torre discusses how the new HHS Mandate revisions don't quite stack up to what the President promised in terms of becoming more acceptable to religious groups and others who have moral objections to it on Heritage in Focus. Jackie Anderson hosts.

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Focus On The Family ‘Analyst’: Gender And Sexuality Are Only Determined By Procreation

Jeff Johnston is Focus on the Family’s resident ex-gay, who regularly promotes harmful ex-gay therapy because he claims conforming to heteronormativity is ideal for society. He applies this to trans people too, rejecting transgender identities as disordered. In a new screed against LGBT equality today, he discounted any understanding of gender whatsoever, claiming the only determining factors in gender are what men and women contribute to human reproduction:

Despite years of brainwashing from academia, radical feminists, the media, and entertainment, most people know that men and women are different, unique and complementary. A society that attempts to erase male and female or to create new categories to stand next to male and female is living in unreality. Which of the supposed “other genders” being created by individuals or groups can reproduce or replicate itself? [...]

As Christians we also reject the reduction of humanity to groups defined by their sexual attractions and behaviors. Male and female are categories of existence – there is the biological reality of being male or female, and we live in the spiritual reality of a masculinity or femininity that reflects God’s image. It is de-humanizing to categorize individuals by the ever-proliferating alphabet of identities based on sexual attractions or behavior or “gender identity” – LGBBTTQQIAAFPPBDSM – however many letters are added. No. We stand with the truth that there are male and female. There is no recently discovered race of “homosexuals” or “gays” or “lesbians.” We don’t define people’s essence, their being, by their sexual appetites or by other desires.

Actually, there is a biological reality of being gay or straight too, and no sexual orientation compromises whether someone is male or female. And gender involves so much more than just whether you contribute sperm or eggs — it is the complex intersection of socially constructed roles, behaviors, expressions, activities, and attributes that might be associated with one’s sex and how they interact with society.

Johnston believes he successfully erased his own sexual identity so now he works to erase others’. His simple-minded view of the world ignores wide swaths of diversity within sex, gender, and sexual orientation to the detriment of all. He may claim that Christians “reject the reduction of humanity,” but his narrow categories for who people can be does just that.

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