WHAT'S NEXT, THE WAR ON APPLE PIE? Updated

As a stay at home mom, I have occasionally noticed a certain level of patronization and derision aimed my way by the more left-leaning, feminist career women sector.  There seems to be a perception that stay at home moms are rich women who are not pulling their weight in society and have taken the easy way out or, even sillier, that those women are victims of male hegemony who have been brainwashed and, poor creatures, simply don't know any better.  The reality is far different, but more on that in a minute.

Wednesday night Hilary Rosen, democrat strategist extraordinaire, came out with this little doozy:



The White House is scrambling to get some distance from her comments, not even waiting until morning to chastise her.  The bus she went under was chock full of top administration officials, including the President and First Lady personally.  Good for them. 

Ann Romney has said that her chosen career was being a mother. I couldn't agree more. For women like us, raising our children is the most important job we can have. For me, being the subject of my daughter's essay on role models is better than any bonus. Seeing my children using the life lessons I have tried to instill in them to raise themselves up and strive for more is better than any promotion. And contrary to Ms. Rosen's bungled talking points, staying home isn't a 'luxury' for most women, it just makes sense. I take nothing from working moms - I was raised by two and used to be one myself. I have enormous respect for women who pursue a career and manage to juggle it all. But because our priorities are different from Ms. Rosen's doesn't make them any less legitimate


It's pretty obvious that what Rosen was trying to do was go after Romney for being rich.  Thus the "never worked a day in her life" quip. The implication is that Romney spent her days eating bonbons and lounging around in a peignoir admiring her diamonds while her staff did all the work.  Too bad democrat strategist extraordinaire Rosen screwed it up so spectacularly.  Ultimately, she feels Romney shouldn't advise her husband because as a rich woman, she didn't have to deal with the financial  struggles many women are dealing with today while raising her children and thus can't really identify with the 'common people'.  Which, ironically, could have been a legit class warfare argument (if you go for that sort of thing), if only it hadn't been delivered by ol' Hamhands Rosen.

Non plussed by the negative blowback, Rosen doubled down:




Wow.  Talk about respectful and sincere!  Mind boggling, isn't it?  There were several more "clarifications" in the same vein.  Again, she is stretching to make the 'Mrs. Moneybags' argument and fails spectacularly. She apparently didn't realize that her statement sounds a lot more like sour grapes than reaching out a hand of reconciliation.  She has since offered a more traditional apology - via public statement.  I guess there's no phone call for Ann, either.

The really interesting part of all of this is that this wasn't just a case of momentary foot-in-mouthitis.  This might well have been a trial balloon for a line of attack against the likable Mrs. Romney.  We all know how necessary it is for Team Obama to shut down any threats quickly and thoroughly.  Rosen's clumsy, tone deaf attempt at marginalizing Ann has been an unqualified disaster, without a doubt.  But was it a fluke, or was it part of a greater plan?

With that thought in mind, I'd like to show you a little snippet of a speech President Obama made last week at the White House Forum on Women and the Economy that slipped under the radar (emphasis mine):

And once Michelle and I had our girls, she gave it her all to balance raising a family and pursuing a career. And something that, could be very difficult on her, because I was gone a lot. Once I was in the state legislature, I was teaching, I was practicing law, I’d be traveling. And we didn’t have the luxury for her not to work. And I know when she was with the girls she’d feel guilty that she wasn’t giving enough time to her work, and when she was at work, she was feeling guilty she wasn’t giving enough time for the girls. And like many of you, we both wish there were machines that could let us be in two places at once.”

You decide.  The setup for a line of attack against wealthy Ann Romney as an out of touch slacker lolling in the lap of luxury in contrast to hard working, guilt riddled working mom Michelle, or a simple attempt to appeal to middle class working women?  Remember, it's not just about "getting a fair shot" it's also about doing your fair share.  It's pretty safe to say that if this was a trial balloon, they probably won't follow up on it after the swift and damning reaction Rosen got, although they'll probably try coming at it from a different direction (do I see a Gloria Allred presser with a disgruntled nanny in our future?).  They really can't drop it.  "Hey, she's rich!" is about all they've got.

What I would really like to know is, who better than a stay at home mother would know about the economic impact of legislation and the economy on the family budget?  Sure, Ann Romney had more in the kitty than many stay at homes, but I fail to see how that disqualifies her from the discussion.

One more thing: I love to find the silver linings in things, and I've found one in this: Ms. Rosen's day job happens to be democrat strategist with access to the top echelons of the Obama administration.  Why is this a good thing, you ask?  Well, if this is the caliber of strategist they have working for them, this election is a shoo-in. 

For Romney.

UPDATE:  Before I start the update, I have a little question I'd like to pose:  If making a paycheck is as important as it seems to be to legitimizing who can have a say and who can't, why is volunteerism so revered on the left?
It seems Bill Maher might be having some money troubles, because he seems bound and determined to shame the Obama SuperPac into returning his million dollar donation. 
Left-wing pundits tried to move on quickly from the whole thing, calling it a non-issue and a waste of time.
As I predicted, they keep (clumsily) trying the "Hey, she's rich" line of attack, but could someone explain to me how Princeton and Harvard educated, multi-millionaire Michelle Obama is a legit voice for financially strapped women but Ann Romney isn't?   Officially, Mrs. Obama went back to work to pay off school loans, but what fails to get mentioned is her million-dollar house and expensive private schools for the kids  - luxuries many stay at home moms either scarifice or never have a chance to achieve.  At worst, they're both out of touch, but that doesn't mean they can't advise their husbands.  Besides, I'm pretty sure that no matter how dead-on Ann Romney's advice might be, neither Hilary Rosen nor the president of NOW would ever support either her or her husband.
And in conclusion, here is some food for thought on the deeper reason for why the left disdains stay at home moms. 

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WHAT'S NEXT, THE WAR ON APPLE PIE? Updated

HORROR IN PHILADELPHIA Updated

In West Philadelphia an abortion doctor, Kermit Gosnell, has been arrested and held without bail for the murder of a 41 year old woman and seven live babies.  The more information that comes out about this man and his squalid back alley abortion clinic, the more appalling it becomes.  If you have the stomach for it, the full grand jury report is here.

Under his "care" (and I use the term very, very loosely), numerous patients suffered from perforated bowels, cervix and uterus. He was known to stitch up the problem and not mention it to the patient or their loved ones.  The grand jury report is chilling (via lifenews.com):

One woman, for example, was left lying in place for hours after Gosnell tore her cervix and colon while trying, unsuccessfully, to extract the fetus. Relatives who came to pick her up were refused entry into the building; they had to threaten to call the police. They eventually found her inside, bleeding and incoherent, and transported her to the hospital, where doctors had to remove almost half a foot of her intestines.


On another occasion, Gosnell simply sent a patient home, after keeping her mother waiting for hours, without telling either of them that she still had fetal parts inside her. Gosnell insisted she was fine, even after signs of serious infection set in over the next several days. By the time her mother got her to the emergency room, she was unconscious and near death.

A nineteen-year-old girl was held for several hours after Gosnell punctured her uterus. As a result of the delay, she fell into shock from blood loss, and had to undergo a hysterectomy.

One patient went into convulsions during an abortion, fell off the procedure table, and hit her head on the floor. Gosnell wouldn’t call an ambulance, and wouldn’t let the woman’s companion leave the building so that he could call an ambulance.

He performed late term (6,7,8 months) abortions regularly (often telling first-time mothers they were only 24 weeks along), and when the baby survived as a live birth, he would kill it by severing it's spinal cord with a pair of scissors.

What is most horrifying of all is that there are few records, which means there is just no telling how many times he did this.  The reason there are only seven counts of murdering live babies is because those are the only documented cases (via CBS Philly):

Gosnell is suspected of killing hundreds of living babies over the course of his 30-year practice. However, he is not charged because the records do not exist.

Among other complaints were his use of a 15 year old high school student to administer anesthesia.  He used unsterilized equipment and performed the procedures in rooms that often had animals and even litter boxes in them.  Eight members of his staff were also arrested, some of them for being unlicensed.  Gosnell himself wasn't even certified as an OB/GYN.

His abortion mill truly was a house of horrors.  There were bags and bottles containing aborted fetuses throughout the clinic, and there were jars of severed baby feet lining a shelf in his office. 
Gosnell was in the business for thirty years, and it seemed to be a very lucrative living for him:

DA Williams said Gosnell made approximately $1.8 million in one year alone performing the procedures.

So why was he never shut down?  According to reports, even with numerous complaints and 46 malpractice lawsuits against Gosnell, there had been no inspections of his facility since 1993.  There are allegations that politics were the reason for the lack of oversight.  The Pennsylvania Departments of Health and State provided no oversight whatsoever for reasons unknown, and so he was allowed to victimize a community of poor, minority women with impunity.  It seems they came to the decision that it is better to have a butcher slaughtering innocents performing abortions than close him down and not have an abortion clinic in that neighborhood (not that there isn't another clinic about a mile away).

This man should be thoroughly evaluated by a mental health professional.  It's one thing to have a dirty facility (although probably not to the level that has been alleged), but it's a whole other thing to save severed feet in jars on a shelf.  They're almost like...trophies. 

The "doctor", his wife, and eight staff members have been arrested.  No one from Health or State  has even been reprimanded.  Animal slaughterhouses have more oversight than this man's facility, and the methods are more humane than those undertaken by Gosnell. 

To top it all off, this week marked the 38th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. It's hard to believe that in 38 years we have managed to go from dirty, back alley abortions to...this. 

Of course certain factions on the left are using this as a rallying cry for federal funding of abortions, arguing that if it were allowed, Gosnell would never have been able to do what he did.  In actuality, if the Departments of Health and State had done their job with regular inspections - heck, just investigated the multitude of complaints against him - he most likely would have been shut down years ago.  Instead, no one checked it out, because abortion is a political hot button and no one wanted to deal with the possible repercussions of an investigation. 

In this case, it wasn't just the lives of the children that meant nothing, but the lives of the mothers, as well.  This man victimized a whole community, for decades, in the most debased, disgusting way imaginable, and it makes barely a blip on the national media scene. 

God only knows how many women died or were permanently damaged from complications due to his botched abortions, and God only knows how many live babies were slaughtered at his and his staff's hands.  That there has been very little media coverage of this outrage practically assures that it will happen again, in another city, with another doctor.  It probably has already.  With our bureaucrats too frightened of the political ramifications of dealing with abortion issues, the odds are good that another house of horrors will crop up somewhere.

According to CBS News, Gosnell is "confused" by the murder charges and the fact that he was refused bail.  This man destroyed records and lied to patients about how far along they were so that he could perform illegal abortions, because he knew late term abortions were illegal in Pennsylvania.  He routinely murdered viable babies that would have lived had they received medical care (and not had their spinal cords severed with scissors). He injured patients and never notified them or their caregivers of the injury. His actions go beyond mere negligence.  He even went so far as to segregate white women who came for his services in cleaner rooms, because he thought they would be more likely to complain.  He knew what he was doing.  But don't be surprised if his "confusion" could well be the beginnings of a mental competency plea.

When he does go to trial, if he is found guilty and gets a death sentence, I humbly suggest that he die via his spinal cord being severed with a pair of scissors.

UPDATE:  The Abbess has a great piece on how the media is not covering the Gosnell story, and makes quite a compelling argument for why they should.  She also reminds them of another story that also deserved (and got) lots of media attention which helped to root out the evil. 
In Pennsylvania, twenty-two abortion clinics have been investigated and fourteen have had issues - although nothing on par with Gosnell, thank God. 
Delaware AG Beau Biden is investigating a clinic Gosnell worked at one day a week for a number of years.  He would often start abortions in DE and send the patient up to his clinic in Philly to finish the job due to Delaware's abortion laws.  He is also being investigated for defrauding the Delaware Pro-Choice Medical Fund by giving some of his PA patients DE addresses.
The Delaware clinic is owned by the same people who own a clinic in Louisiana that is so bad that a group of lawyers has threatened to sue the state Dept. of Health if they don't shut it down.
We seem to have forgotten that Roe v. Wade didn't just provide for legal abortions, it provided for safe legal abortions.  It's bad enough we're killing the babies; do we really need to be maiming and killing the mothers, too?

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HORROR IN PHILADELPHIA Updated

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY!

Happy Mother's Day, fellow Mommy Patriots!

I hope that your Mother's Day is blessed with lots of love and those wonderful little goodies made with our favorite little hands - those are the best kinds of presents. 

For me, the path to motherhood was a difficult one.  At the age of 22, I was diagnosed with endometriosis, and was told that I would never be able to have children.  So I got a second opinion.  And a third.  And a fourth.  And even a fifth.  All the same prognosis. 

But I refused to take no for an answer. 

I endured operations, procedures, and experimental therapies.  My husband endured me going through massive amounts of fertility drugs, bless his loving, infinitely patient heart.  I left a path of destruction during the hormonal highs of those drugs  and cried a river of tears with each unsuccessful cycle and heartbreaking miscarriage.

But finally, finally, we gave it up.  We had taken all that we could take, and resigned ourselves to the fact that children were not in our future.  It was an agonizing reality.  And so I thanked God for the blessing of my beloved husband and let my dreams of motherhood go.  We had each other, and that was blessing enough.

It was a heartbreaking decision to stop trying, but after four years of a hormonal rollercoaster that had left me depleted both physically and mentally and my husband yearning for the calm, rational woman he had married, it was time to move on.

And so we stopped the injections and the rounds of doctors and rejoined the world. 

Six months later I was driving home from work, and I was upset because one of my co-workers had "accidentally" found herself pregnant.  I cried on the way home, because of my jealousy and frustration over women who so easily found themselves in a situation that I just could not attain.  The pain was still so raw that it was hard to breathe when I heard the news.  But I kept it together and congratulated her with a happy smile - until the ride home, when it hit me like a sledgehammer and the tears came.

Why couldn't that be me?  Why couldn't I be one of those girls who suddenly realized she was...oops... three months late?  But then I took a deep breath, counted my blessings, and dried my eyes.   What would feeling sorry for myself do?  We'd done all we could do; it was in God's hands now.

That night I came down with a stomach bug.  A few days later, still suffering, I had an epiphany.

I suddenly realized that I was...oops...three weeks late!

I could barely breathe. Could my stomach bug possibly be something more?  I still had some EPT's under the sink and so I took a test.  And another.  And then I cried.  With tears streaming down my face, I walked into the livingroom and handed my man one of the tests.  He looked at it, looked at me, and told me to go to the doctor and have him do a test.

The next day, I went to the doctor.  I came home in tears, and my long-suffering husband wrapped me in his arms and kissed me tenderly, bracing himself for more bad news.

"We're pregnant," I whispered, clinging on to him for dear life.

"What?" he sniffled, sure he had heard wrong.

"We're pregnant!!" I shouted, and then I covered his bewildered face in  kisses and waited for the news to sink in.

I was put on strict bedrest and almost lost her twice, but eight months later I delivered our daughter, healthy, beautiful and the most perfect miracle I could have ever imagined.  I cry now just writing about it.  How is it possible to feel such joy without your heart bursting out of your chest from it?

Three years later, our second daughter was born; that pregnancy, too, was a complete surprise and an utter joy, and our family was complete.

For me, the trials and tribulations of motherhood happened before the children were born.  Everything since has been a piece of cake by comparison (although we have barely dipped our toes in the teen years yet, so I might be overly optimistic in my thinking).  

Sometimes, in my constant immersion in the political scene, I get that same sense of futility that I got towards the end of the fertility treatments. 

When I do, I step back, take a deep breath, and remember that sometimes, when things seem the most bleak, hope waits just around the corner.

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HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY!

HAPPY THANKSGIVING

Happy Thanksgiving to you all.

I look upon Thanksgiving as one of the ultimate 'Mom Holidays".  It is a day for our matriarchs to gather their families together and stuff them to the gills, showing their love in the most basic of ways - through food.  It is a decadent holiday, full of rich comfort foods almost to the point of obscenity.  It is a purely American tradition - other countries may have Thanksgivings, but none do it like we do.  And who do we have to thank for this wonderful, satisfying tradition becoming what it is today?  American moms.

The bountiful gifts this great country showers on us are taken by our mothers, grandmothers, sisters and aunts and fashioned into a feast that nourishes our bodies and soothes our souls.  The trials and tribulations of the past year are washed away in a deluge of turkey, gravy, sweet potatoes, and pumpkin pie.  Our bellies are filled, our minds are at rest, and it is all due to the magical women in our lives and the love they so lavishly put into every dish. 

Today we give thanks for the many blessings God has rained down upon us.  So while we are busy thanking Him for our great country, our troops who keep us free, the bounties on our tables and all the many other blessings in our lives, let's take a moment to thank the women who made it all possible.  Not just the ones who physically created the feast we are enjoying today, but those who came before us, who kept the tradition alive. 

Through wars, depressions, recessions and civil upheaval, the matriarchs have kept us going with their love, support and comfort food.  We are not just re-enacting what the Pilgrims did, we are celebrating the heart and soul of this country - the American family. Not just those we were born to, but those we invited in.  And presiding over it all are our matriarchs, infusing the day with the love only a mother could provide.

God bless them, God bless us all, and God bless America.

Let the feasting begin!

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HAPPY THANKSGIVING