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Health Care Costs Curb Holiday Spending
Posted by mcjoan, Daily Kos on December 24, 2009 at 4:30 PM.

Happy Holidays, if you can figure out how to pay for it.

An opinion survey ... finds that two out of five Americans plan to spend less this holiday season because of rising health care costs, and three out of ten say health care costs have led to arguments and tension within the family....

Additional findings:

· Nearly a quarter of Americans admit that they would consider withholding information from an insurance provider if it might limit their ability to access health care. Those who consider their views “very liberal” are more likely than others to withhold information or bend the truth about their family’s’ and their personal medical history.

· Nearly a quarter of Americans are taking fewer sick days at work (a finding that bolsters concerns that workers are not taking time off when they get the flu, for fear of losing their job).

· The recession has pressured Americans to change their behavior regarding health care, primarily by visiting the doctor less. A third of Americans are concerned about losing their health care insurance and one in ten Americans has been forced to drop their health care insurance.

· More than 90% of Americans are satisfied with their insurance coverage. However, 33% do not take advantage of preventive health testing/screenings even when it is available through their current coverage—an interesting finding, given the fierce debate over mammograms, and the amendment just passed in the Senate requiring insurers to pay for annual mammograms for all women over 40. Perhaps this issue isn’t all that critical to the electorate?

· The majority of Americans feel either annoyed or frustrated by the current health care debate. Older Americans nearing retirement are following the debate most closely and tend to feel more anger, tension and helplessness.

I think the majority of Kossacks feel annoyed and frustrated by the current health care debate, too. Watching the debate in the Senate, with all the misinformation about Medicare, with all the irrelevant focus on abortion, with very few in this debate focusing on the fact that the American people are hurting and that the cost of healthcare is a huge part of that hurt is alienating. It's a reflection of how out of touch too many of our elected official are with real life.

Christmas Eve Marks the 3,000th Day of the War in Afghanistan, the 30th Anniversary of the Soviet Invasion
Posted by Zaid Jilani, Think Progress on December 24, 2009 at 3:02 PM.

Yesterday, Rep. Eric Massa (D-NY) — a 24-year Navy veteran and former Special Assistant to Supreme Allied Commander of NATO Wesley Clark — wrote an op-ed in The Hill noting that today, Christmas Eve, marks the 3,000th day of our war in Afghanistan and also carries another historic significance for the nation of Afghanistan: It’s the 30th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of that country:

As we begin our deployment of 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, this Christmas Eve will also mark the 3,000th day of the war in Afghanistan and the 30th anniversary of the initial Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Thus far, this war has already cost the American taxpayer a minimum of $300,000,000,000 according to the Congressional Research Service (and that’s just the funding that’s “on budget”).

Sadly, the fact that we’re spending about $101 million per day in this war is the good news. The financial cost of this war is nothing compared to the fact that 937 American troops have been killed, and 4,434 have been wounded (and that’s not counting the thousands more that will carry the memories of this war for their entire lives).

Massa went on to call for an up-or-down vote on the funding for the upcoming escalation of troops, and insisted that we begin to drawdown our forces from the country — something President Obama has indicated he supports and which most Americans do as well. During an interview two months ago, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev shared his feelings on the Afghan war, given his country’s experience there. When asked what lessons he learned “that President Obama should heed in making his decisions about Afghanistan,” Gorbachev –- who ended the Soviet Union’s 10 year war there in 1989 — replied, “One was that problems there could not be solved with the use of force. Such attempts inside someone else’s country end badly.”

ACORN Broke No Laws - Dems Still Threw Them Under the Bus
Posted by Ian Welsh, Open Left on December 24, 2009 at 2:00 PM.

As with David, I'd like to take a moment away from the holiday to highlight a story which I don't want buried.

The NYTimes reported yesterday that Acorn broke no laws.  None.  In the last five years.

But the Democratic Congress still threw them under the bus, with an illegal bill of attainder, banning them from receiving any government money before waiting to see if they really had done anything wrong.  Very similar to how they censured MoveOn for daring to challenge Petraeus.

Can you imagine the Republicans doing the same?  When the Swift Boat Vets lied repeatedly about John Kerry, did the Republicans vote to censure them?

And for that matter, did Dems try and censure the Swift Boat Vets?

Democrats constantly throw their own supporters to the wolves.  It’s one of the reasons there is little real loyalty on the left.  On the right, someone may occasionally have to take a bullet for the team, but afterwards they’re well taken care of and even rehabilitated if possible.  And major conservative organizations aren’t repudiated, nor do Republican leaders generally speak of “conservatives” with the sort of contempt that Democratic leaders reserve for liberals and progressives.

Democratic Congresspeople, as a group are weak people without strategic sense or the ability to bargain.  The exceptions, the strong ones, are unfortunately mostly conservadems - Republicans in drag like Ben Nelson.

If 40% of Dems are thinking of not voting in 2010 it’s exactly because Democrats won’t stand up for their own base.  For their own people and what those people believe in and need.  They only stand up for Pharma, banks, insurance companies and other entrenched powers.

Loyalty.  It’s a two way street.  And neither the White House, nor Congress, have shown any.

The Senate Deal May Be a Sh*t Sandwich, but If You're Hungry Enough ...
Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet on December 24, 2009 at 1:20 PM.

I'm pretty far to the left, so I'm not accustomed to taking fire from that direction as I have on occasion during the debate over health-care reform. I get the sense that it's become popular in some progressive circles to demagogue both the Dems' compromised reform package and anyone who doesn't attack it with lupine ferocity (the folks over at FireDogLake have kind of gone off the deep end and are threatening a primary against Bernie Sanders, of all people, because he held his nose and voted for the bill).

I'll freely admit that I'm willing to eat a shit sandwich in order to get 31 million people decent health insurance. Maybe not a shit smorgasbord, but a sandwich. And the thing that I don't get is why others aren't just as eager to gobble it down.

Here's the thing: for my entire adult life, Congress has pushed through big legislative packages that showered tax dollars on various industries. Every single year we eat a 5-course shit-meal when the defense bill is passed. The health scheme will cost us $900 billion to set up over ten years -- then it pays for itself. The Iraq war cost $915 billion over seven years, will continue to cost us in the foreseeable future, and will come with huge long-term costs in terms of veterans' care. We got fat defense contractors -- Blackwater, anyone? -- and dead Iraqis for that one.

The bailouts... nobody really knows how much they cost. But it's a hell of a lot more in just two years then we'd spend on health-care in a decade -- it was a sumptuous feast of shit. We didn't insure 31 million people with those dollars -- we bought bonuses for Goldman Sachs execs and financed Morgan Stanley's take-overs of smaller banks.

These are just two examples. I could go on -- look at the money we spend on trade promotion, R and D for the private sector, financing organizations like the IMF that impoverish developing countries. Look at how many dollars we give in tax breaks, at every level of government, to corporations to expand or relocate. It seems very odd to me to think about drawing our line in the sand on this massive give-away -- the first one I can remember that would have real benefits for real people.

Now, I'm not fighting a straw-man here -- I know progressives weren't happy about the bailouts and the costs of our imperial wars. They're not happy about the fact that Corporate America has become the worst kind of welfare queen.

But the point is that I don't remember another shit sandwich that actually delivered something to ordinary working people.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

GOPer Says Health-Care Scheme Won't Be Repealed
Posted by Steve Benen, Washington Monthly on December 24, 2009 at 11:41 AM.

 Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) conceded that if/when health care reform becomes law, it's not going anywhere.

"Technically it could be peeled back if the circumstances were right," Crapo said during an appearance on a conservative news radio syndicate. "But we would have to have a president who would sign such a bill, and we would have to have 60 votes in the Senate -- not just 50."

"So it would be a very tall order, and frankly, the likelihood's that that's not going to develop in the near future," he added.

That's true, but it's incomplete. Crapo's right that the legislative circumstances are almost certainly not going to materialize to facilitate a repeal, but there's also the political problem Republicans are reluctant to acknowledge.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

For the Record, I'm No Holocaust "Skeptic"
Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet on December 24, 2009 at 10:24 AM.

Earlier this week, I wrote about this silly "study" purporting to find wide-spread anti-Semitism* among progressive bloggers.

Among the really pathetic bits of innuendo that passed for evidence of this dark truth was this: a blog-post written by the very liberal Glenn Greenwald was linked to, approvingly, by David Duke. This supposedly means that, in their heart of hearts, Greenwald and Duke share a similar world-view. Duke's a well-known anti-Semite, ergo ...

Anyway, I won't provide a link, but a Holocaust denier has now approvingly linked to my post on his blog, calling me "an honest Jewish writer."

According to the logic of that study, it's now perfectly legitimate to assume that I, too, am a Holocaust "skeptic" because of the link. Or at least it's an open question. So I figured I'd just go on the record to reaffirm my long-held belief that the Holocaust really did happen!

Thanks for your attention to this matter.

*No, I don't care that Arabs are technically a Semitic people as well, and I'm not sure why commenters always think this semantic point is so significant -- I'm just employing the common usage.

The Top Ten Years of This Decade
Posted by D. Aristophanes, Sadly, No! on December 24, 2009 at 9:54 AM.

We want in on the end-of-the-decade list pr0n, thank you very much:

10. 2001: The year started ominously with a peasant blouse revival and only got worse with the worst thing that ever happened ever. Thankfully, a new generation of wiser heads with larger nutsacks would prevail in the cauldron of the very next year, and both transgressions would be avenged to this very day.

9. 2009: Some say that 2003 was worse. You know who also said 2003 was worse? Hitler, that’s who.

8. 2007: Historians will remember this year as the calm before the storm, but also as the unending nightmare two years after the hurricane. And how many Olympic gold medals did America win in what is now regarded as a nebish of a year? Hint: Just three, and they were in rhythmic gymnastics.

7. 2003: On the one hand, 2003 saw the end of a tyrant who cut off people’s hands. On the other hand, the hand just referred to was blown off in the effort to topple that same hand-cutting tyrant.

6. 2000: In 2000, it was still possible to trick non-Dilbert readers into paying you to fix their Y2K bugs. But not really. Fitting for a year that was confused as to whether it even belonged in the decade under review at all.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Ezra Klein: A Win on Health-Care, but an Ugly One
Posted by Staff, AlterNet on December 24, 2009 at 8:27 AM.

On Dec. 24, in an early morning vote, the United States Senate passed health-care reform. It was the first time the body had been in session on Christmas Eve since 1963. That's fitting, as it's arguably the most important piece of legislation the body has passed since 1963.

H.R. 3590, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, passed with 60 votes, and though that sounds a razor-thin margin given the odd rules of the Senate, it is a landslide in the more normal context for major choices in American politics. The last time a president won with 60 percent of the vote, for instance, was when Lyndon Johnson trounced Barry Goldwater in 1964. Health-care reform passed the House with only 50.5 percent of the body voting for it. And the senators making up this morning's 60 votes actually represent closer to 65 percent of the population.

Read the rest at WashingtonPost.com

Senate Passes Health-Care Reform Bill; Feingold, Rockefeller Issue Appeals to Progressives
Posted by Adele Stan, AlterNet on December 24, 2009 at 7:00 AM.

Some day, I hope to pen a report on a congressional vote that does not begin with the words, "On a straight party-line vote..." Alas, today will not be the day (although, for a moment, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., appeared to have joined his Republican colleagues in voting against the bill).

At around 7:00 a.m., on a straight party-line vote, the Senate passed its version of health-care reform legislation, a feat many months in the making. So exhausted was Reid, who has been working virtually around the clock over the last seven days, that he initially voted "no" on his legislation when his name was called by the clerk, but he instantly righted -- or shall we say, lefted -- himself to vote "yes."

At his press conference after the vote, Reid quipped that his vote flub was an attempt at bipartisanship.

Despite the significance of this morning's vote, the health-care deal is a long way from done, and senators are feeling the heat from the left, as groups like the Progressive Change Campaign committee and FDL Action continue to pressure senators to bring back some form of a public health-insurance plan when House and Senate negotiators meet after the holiday recess to craft a single bill out of two. But given the Senate's peculiar arithmetic and the determination of Republicans to filibuster virtually any piece of legislation offered by Democrats, that seems unlikely to happen.

Responding to dismay from the progressive base about the loss of the public option, which was stripped from the final version of the Senate bill in order to win the votes necessary to bring the bill to the floor for a vote, several senators addressed the left's concerns directly in their floor speeches preceding today's vote.

"I am deeply disappointed [that the Senate bill] does not include a public option to help keep down costs and I also don’t like the deal making that secured votes with unjustifiable provisions," said Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wisc. " I will work to improve the bill, including restoring the public option, when the final version is drafted." (You can view video of Feingold's statement after the jump.)

The Progressive Change Campaign Committee is targeting Feingold with an ad it is airing in his home state.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller appealed more directly to progressives. "To those on the left, who are disappointed in what the bill does not do -- and in some cases are even calling for its demise -- I implore you to reconsider, to be a part of this solution even as we keep working on others, which I promise you I will do," Rockefeller said. "And I think you know I mean that when I say it." (I will add a link to video of Rockefeller's speech once it is posted on C-SPAN.)

Defeated in their attempts to stall passage of the Senate health-care bill to death, Republicans have set out to challenge the bill's constitutionality, a theme that will likely see amplification as senators return to their home states over the holiday recess. The constitutionality question is gaining enough steam that Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., one of the bill's architects, felt compelled to issue a statement [PDF] on the subject on Monday.

So, at last the senators go home for Christmas, giving us all a little breathing room -- until the next round. Can't wait to ring in the new decade with that House-Senate conference committee negotiation.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Gay GOP Group Co-Sponsors Conservative Political Conference, But Not Allowed to Speak at It
Posted by Matt Corley, Think Progress on December 24, 2009 at 3:00 AM.

Earlier this month, conservative gay rights group GOProud announced that it would be a co-sponsor of this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). But the group’s inclusion as a co-sponsor has led to a backlash from the anti-gay right, some of whom are threatening to boycott CPAC if GOProud’s sponsorship isn’t removed. CPAC director Lisa De Pasquale told Hot Air last week that she was “satisfied” that GOProud “do not represent a ‘radical leftist agenda’ and thus “should not be rejected as a CPAC cosponsor.” But David Keene, the head of CPAC’s main organizing group, tried to calm the potential boycott by using a different tactic. In an e-mail to a right-wing radio host, Keene promised that GOProud would not have a speaking spot and that gay rights issues would not be “open to debate”:

In his e-mail response, Keene admitted GOProud “has signed on as a CPAC co-sponsor, but will have no speakers and we told them that, in fact, since opposition to gay marriage, etc are consensus positions (if not unanimous) among conservatives, these topics are not open to debate.” [...]

“I know that there are those who are as opposed to the sinner as the sin, but our view is that CPAC is inclusive and welcomes all of those who agree with us on most issues. I don’t know the GOProud people personally, but we find it difficult to exclude groups because of disagreements on one or two issues no matter how important many of us believe those issues to be … other examples: we have pro-life and pro-abortion co-sponsors, advocates of restrictive and more open immigration, supporters and opponents of the war in Afghanistan and supporters and opponents of some of the restrictions adopted in the war on terror since 9/11,” he continued.

“Some of these issues draw significant support on both sides of the question from the broad movement and these we often debate at CPAC … trade policy, immigration are example … while others like abortion are consensus positions and while we accept those who differ from the consensus, we see no reason for further debate. Gay issues fall within this category,” he said.

Polls Are In: People Really Do Hate Joe Lieberman
Posted by BarbinMD, Daily Kos on December 23, 2009 at 7:00 PM.

The Award for Nonexcellance in Climate Journalism Goes To ...
Posted by Dr. Joseph Romm, Climate Progress on December 23, 2009 at 4:48 PM.

Okay, I think it’s pretty obvious to regular Climate Progress readers who the winner is.  Indeed, I was originally going to ask readers to vote on the winner from the top 10 list below — but it’d be like asking readers to vote for which major sports figure fell from grace farthest this year.  As always, though, I welcome your thoughts on the “winners” and any omissions.

I do a lot of media criticism, so I thought I would end the year with an award for the major media outlet and/or reporter who has moved furthest from journalistic excellence.  Next year I might name the award after this year’s winner, but for now, it’ll be named after Citizen Kane’s “Declaration of Principles,” which publisher Charles Foster Kane idealistically enunciated early on in the film classic, but later on “Without reading it, Kane tears it up, throws it into the wastebasket at his side.”  And no, I’m not including any of the “new media” in the list because none of them has even one-tenth the impact of any of the major media outlets on this list nor do most of them claim to be journalists.

And yes the entire media deserves a dishonorable mention for its generally poor coverage of climate science, politics, and economics this year:

• The clean energy revolution will not be televised, Part 2: Kathleen Hall Jamieson lambastes MSM for under-reporting climate bill
• U.S. media largely ignores latest warning from climate scientists: “Recent observations confirm … the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realised” — 1000 ppm
• CNN, ABC, WashPost, AP, blow Australian wildfire, drought, heatwave “Hell (and High Water) on Earth” story — never mention climate change

Skipping the musical number I had prepared for the awards ceremony, let’s dive straight into the top ten list:

10.  Nicholas Dawidoff, the author of the NYT magazine cover profile on Freeman Dyson — not just because the piece was deeply flawed (the media does bad profiles all the time) but because the author apparently didn’t care:

• Media stunner: When asked “Does it matter, from a journalistic point of view, whether [Freeman Dyson is] right or whether he’s wrong?” his NYT profiler replies “Oh, absolutely not.”

9.  Fox News — just because they are dreadful on every subject doesn’t mean they don’t deserve to be on this list:

• Fox News on EPA endangerment finding: “Some skeptics say regulating carbon dioxide, a byproduct of burning fossil fuels, may be a difficult task, especially since people emit carbon dioxide with every breath”
• Glenn Beck proves he’s a brainless frog, warning (?) “Barack Obama has galvanized the country…. He’s forced us to think!”
• Fox News blurts out its agenda: “Now that Jones has resigned, we need to follow through…. First, stop cap-and-trade, which could send these groups trillions,” and then put “the whole corrupt ‘green jobs’ concept outside the bounds of the political mainstream.”

8.  NYT’s John Tierney — the main reason he isn’t higher is that I’m not certain many people take him very seriously and his output level in print is on the low side (the second bullet below is actually from 12/26/08):

• John Tierney makes up stuff — does the New York Times employ several know/do-nothing fact checkers
• John Tierney IS the country’s worst science writer, not Gregg Easterbrook

7.  David Broder — uninterested in the gravest problem of our time (except, that is, when he writes nonsense about it), and more interested in quick decisions, than right ones:

• David Broder is the sultan of the status quo, stenographer of those centrists who are fatally uninformed about global warming
• Status-quo-media stunner: David Broder urges Obama to make a decision on Afghanistan right now, “whether or not it is right.”

6.  Rush Limbaugh — a buffoon, yes, but his remarks in this case are far beyond the pale even for his brand of extremism:

• Limbaugh to NY Times environment reporter Revkin: “Why don’t you just go kill yourself?”
• Limbaugh rejects an apology for Revkin

5.  Newsweek — they win a special award for the single worst story of the year, and make the top 5 here because it turns out they’ve been selling access to the subjects of that story:

• Newsweek gets duped by Big Oil — for real — in worst Big Media story of the year
• Media stunner: Newsweek partners with oil lobby to raise ad cash, host energy and climate events with lawmakers — while publishing the uber-greenwashing story, “Big Oil Goes Green for Real”

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

In (Very Reluctant) "Defense" of the Insurance Mandate
Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet on December 23, 2009 at 3:00 PM.

I have no interest in defending the mandate that individuals buy an insurance policy. I think it's self-evident that coercing people to shell out their hard-earned cash to Big Insurance is a distinctly sucky thing.

So I won't.

I do, however, want people to take a deep breath, and at least have a serious discussion of the policy without all the hand-wringing and hyperbole that have been flying around of late.

I used to labor under the naive delusion that liberals tended to be rationalists -- sometimes too nerdy in their reliance on factual arguments -- and conservatives were the ones who appealed to our basest emotions, our fears. Thankfully, the health-care debate's set me straight on this.

Over at FireDogLake, they have a petition to kill the Senate bill. It has one of those list of ten reasons for doing so. The first:

Forces you to pay up to 8% of your income to private insurance corporations - whether you want to or not

When I read that, I had to think hard about what it is they were talking about -- there's certainly nothing in any bill I've read that says you have to pay 8 percent of your income to the insurance companies whether you want to or not.

It turns out to be some Death-Panel quality spin. What are they actually talking about? The Senate bill requires everyone to have insurance, or pay a penalty. But, if the cost of getting insured exceeded 8 percent of your income, then the fine would be waived.

The maximum penalty is 2 percent of adjusted income, which is probably around 1.4 percent or so of the average person's gross pay. That money would not go to "private insurance corporations," but would in fact defray the costs of the uninsured on our public health system.

Or consider the following from David Sirota's column in USA Today:

Worst of all, it doesn't actually extend "new coverage" to 30 million more Americans. Through the "individual mandate," it simply makes people criminals if they don't buy expensive insurance from the private corporations that helped create the health care crisis in the first place.

Again, I'm not defending the mandate so much as calling David out for pushing the idea that people who didn't buy insurance would be "criminals" -- that kind of rhetoric could appear in Townhall or The National Review or some wing-nut blog.  Obama's Gestapo will put you in a FEMA camp if you don't carry health insurance!

The big problem as I see it is that lot of people are discussing this policy in isolation, free of context. And I think the most important bit of context is this: we're not discussing a mandate alone -- it comes with subsidies that make coverage much, much more affordable for working people. Consider some numbers for the Senate bill -- again, much weaker than the House's -- that my colleague Daniela Perdomo brought to my attention the other day:

(click for larger version)

So we're mandating that people carry coverage while decreasing the costs of that coverage by up to 90 percent for the working poor, and 20 percent for a family making $85K.

Another thing to keep in mind is that we can't forbid insurers from denying coverage based on previous conditions -- something that absolutely everyone (except for the insurers themselves) believes is necessary without mandating that people carry insurance. If we did, no healthy person would have a policy -- why would you pay premiums if you could just buy a policy once you become ill?

Another piece of context that I think is missing is this:  right now, if your family's covered through an employer and you pay taxes, you are already paying approximately $1,000 dollars each and every year for the uninsured.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

3 Reasons Why Progressives Are So Frustrated
Posted by Chris Bowers, Open Left on December 23, 2009 at 2:32 PM.

If I may be so bold, I believe I can sum up, in three main points why progressives are so frustrated right now:

1. They are on the short-end of a left-progressive vs. Third Way ideological divide with the leadership of the American center-left coalition;
2. In attempts to not be on the short-end of #1, and persuade the coalition rank and file to join them, they face a massive organizational deficit against the coalition leadership;
3. Finally, if progressives look to split with the coalition in response to #1 and #2, more often than not they just end up getting squashed for it.
    

Full explanation on the flip side. 

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Commander Changes Tune, Says He Won't Court-Martial, Jail Pregnant Soldiers
Posted by Amanda Terkel, Think Progress on December 23, 2009 at 12:47 PM.

This week, news outlets reported on a controversial new policy that threatens women soldiers on active duty who become pregnant — and the men who impregnate them — with jailtime. Maj. Gen. Anthony Cucolo issued the new rule, which took effect on Nov. 4, “because he said he was losing too many women with critical skills” and needed the threat of jail and a court martial as an “extra deterrent.”

Since the news of the directive came out, Cucolo has faced strong criticism from women’s rights advocates. The National Organization for Women (NOW) called it “ridiculous.” Four women Democratic U.S. senators — Barbara Boxer (CA), Barbara Mikulski (MD), Jeanne Shaheen (NH), and Kirsten Gillibrand (NY) — wrote a letter to Cucolo urging him to rescind the policy, saying they could “think of no greater deterrent to women contemplating a military career than the image of a pregnant woman being severely punished simply for conceiving a child.”

Yesterday, Cucolo clarified the directive, saying he has no plans to court-martial pregnant women:

While violation of any of the rules in “General Order Number 1″ could lead to court-martial, Cucolo said he never intended such a drastic punishment for pregnancy.

“I believe that I can handle violations of this aspect with lesser degrees of punishment,” Cucolo told reporters. “I have not ever considered court-martial for this. I do not ever see myself putting a soldier in jail for this.”

The general said he alone would decide on each case based on the individual circumstances.

So far, there have been “eight cases of women getting pregnant while deployed under his command. Four were given letters of reprimand that were put in their local files, which means they would not end up in their permanent files and they would not be a factor in being considered for promotions. The four other women found out they were pregnant soon after they deployed; because they were not impregnated while deployed, no disciplinary action was taken.”

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »