If you take taxpayer $$, are funded by the city, state, federal governments, then you cannot discriminate. You must allow equal protection - including with regard to health matters.

Um, no. Equal protection is equal protection, whether you take tax money or not.

(And don't think they're not already upping that ante:

The White House is “all talk, no action” on moving toward compromise, said Anthony Picarello, general counsel for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. “There has been a lot of talk in the last couple days about compromise, but it sounds to us like a way to turn down the heat, to placate people without doing anything in particular,” Picarello said. “We’re not going to do anything until this is fixed.”

That means removing the provision from the health care law altogether, he said, not simply changing it for Catholic employers and their insurers. He cited the problem that would create for “good Catholic business people who can’t in good conscience cooperate with this.”

Fuckheads.

There's some level of crisis going on in the apartment next to me. I can hear her yelling at her kids--she was disciplining them, and then something happened, and she's asking for bandaids and asking one of them to get her phone but not come into the room. One on level, it sounds like broken glass, no big worries, but she's really freaking out about getting her phone.

Both her kids are under 6. I hope it's nothing serious, but it definitely sounds like coming to the door to answer an eavesdropper's questions isn't practical right now.

brenda,

thanks for the clarification! of course you are right.

I know parenting isn't supposed to amuse me, and parenting with bullets is a dodgy premise, but, seriously, child? Shut up.

Dang.

As a former teen girl, I sympathize with the daughter. As a parent, I want to buy this guy a beer.

"911. Excellent idea. But not right now." says my nextdoor neighbour through the wall.

Great. Just as I get on a con call.

With the chattiest support tech ever...seriously, I don't care that your buds get drunk and talk for hours about Superman. Please tell me you don't do this to everyone. I can't imagine my boss or manager being remotely amused.

That means removing the provision from the health care law altogether, he said, not simply changing it for Catholic employers and their insurers. He cited the problem that would create for “good Catholic business people who can’t in good conscience cooperate with this.”

So one religion should decide policy for everybody?

Apparently I'm hard-hearted because I don't see the everpresent threat that no straight man can avoid, that every time he has sex, it can be turned against him and used to ruin his social standing and cost him his job.

Hahahaha, because women, of course, could never experience negative consequences or lose social status due to having sex. Jesus.

Here's what confuses me about Cat Breading: Where are all the in-bread cat jokes???

Looks Like There's a New GOP Frontrunner

Early indications from two polls in the field -- Public Policy Polling and Gallup -- show Rick Santorum either taking over the lead among Republican voters nationally or at least tied with Mitt Romney.

A new Fox News poll also shows Santorum surging and in the last two days the poll was in the field he moved into a dead heat with Romney, 30% to 30%.

I suppose there's a joke in there about how Romney is in over his head in the Santorum surge....

CNN just posted an update on the new compromise; honestly, at first read it sounds okay to me:

Under the new plan, religiously affiliated universities and hospitals will not be forced to offer contraception coverage to their employees. Insurers will be required, however, to offer complete coverage free of charge to any women who work at such institutions.

...

But conservative Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, insisted the revised rule still violates the Constitution.

"This ObamaCare rule still tramples on Americans' First Amendment right to freedom of religion," Jordan said in a written statement. "It's a fig leaf, not a compromise. Whether they are affiliated with a church or not, employers will still be forced to pay an insurance company for coverage that includes abortion-inducing drugs."

I @@ forever and ever at Jim Jordan. Unless he expects religious-run hospitals and universities to withdraw from the US altogether and form an island state on some godforsaken rock, his big problem is still going to be a problem and, frankly, has been a problem since the Pill was invented. How many insurance companies are out there that don't cover any chemical BC at all? Somewhere, somehow, through however many layers of bureaucracy, isn't it pretty damn well guaranteed that practically all the religious employers in the US have already been paying insurance companies for coverage that includes abortion-inducing drugs?

And that's not even beginning to get into the sheer idiocy of the very term "abortion-inducing drugs," which can include a huge number of drugs that are vitally necessary for a wide range of conditions that have absolutely nothing to do with reproductive issues. By that ridiculously wide criterion, it's well nigh guaranteed that even the most ragingly anti-abortion insurance company on the planet has at least a couple of Items Of Ultimate Evil in its formulary.

I... I kind of don't hate the compromise. Women who work for religious hospitals and unis are still covered, and the whining of the whiners sounds even more nakedly whiny and foot-stompy and irrational.