Friday, February 18, 2011

First Lady Attacked for Advocating Breast Feeding!

I was hoping I might not ever come to this but it did. First Lady Michelle Obama has been attacked, seriously attacked mind you,  for supporting  breast-feeding for mothers with young children! 

 

From an ABC News blog 2/15/11

Rep. Michele Bachmann spoke out Tuesday against First Lady Michelle Obama’s reported support of tax breaks for breast pumps.

On Laura Ingraham’s radio show Tuesday, the Tea Party favorite criticized Mrs. Obama for reportedly endorsing steps she warned could lead to a “nanny state.”

"I've given birth to five babies and I breast fed every single one of these babies," Bachmann, R-Minn., said. "To think that government has to go out and buy my breast pump for my babies. I mean, you want to talk about the nanny state? I think you just got a new definition -- a new definition of the nanny."

The IRS announced last week that breast pumps and supplies that assist lactation are medical care under Internal Revenue Code “because, like obstetric care, they are for the purpose of affecting a structure or function of the body of the lactating woman.”

Bachmann, who is in her third term and considering a challenge to President Obama in 2012, declined to elaborate on her comments through a spokesperson Tuesday evening. The Office of the First Lady also declined to comment.

This is not mind you a program to out and out buy breast-milk storage systems, no, just a tax break.  Yet this modest change in the tax laws has brought condemnation in the American far Right perennial campaign to condemn everything not controlled by their leadership as bad for the nation. 

 

It seems the First Lady has made speeches in the past suggesting it would be good for mothers to breast-feed children at least in the first six months after birth. Scientific studies have shown it reduces the likelihood that said babies will grow up to be obese.   

(above) From a April 10, 2010 CBS Evening News report with Harry Smith

Nobody could be against mothers breast-feeding their kids, right?  Surely there are some points in the health care spectrum which politicians and professional special- pleaders in America can agree on, right?        

 But this is not so. To some, like Minnesota Congresswoman Michelle Bachman, Sarah Palin--who snarled that Mrs. Obama was only advocating more mother's milk use because the price of store bought milk was getting higher-- and the usual cast of knee-jerk reactionaries, this is actually a step toward.....I don't know what...you tell me...I'm guessing they fear the spectre of centralized economic planning, all   centered around a nation of families who let breast pump tax breaks blind them to the loss of freedom as we know it...yeah, that sounds like the group I'm thinking about.  

Is there no end to this hysterical anti-government hyperbole?   Well no, as this selection from an article on the asinine imbroglio todays' Washington Post shows.   

"Her worldview on child rearing is totally oriented to institutionalizing children!" said Cathy Ruse, a senior legal fellow at the Family Research Council. "Giving tax breaks for breast pumps helps only those moms who are working outside the home and does nothing for us stay-at-home moms. This is consistent with President Obama's pledge to increase the childcare tax credit as opposed to the child tax credit, incentivizing putting your kids in daycare over any other childrearing arrangement."

  The far Right in the United States is so zeroed in on the track of disagreeing with anything government does to help working families that they attack even a small incentive to reduce childhood and adult illness.  

Color me gobsmacked.

 

It's come to this.  Good thing Mrs. Obama didn't come out for a heliocentric solar system or helmets for  high school  football players; then she'd really have kicked up a tempest!         

19 comments:

  1. Doug this really and foremost here own very own privacy. My how everything is exposed these days.

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  2. It's really an incredible attack on her advocating what should be the most bipartisan issue possible, Jack: how to raise healthy children.

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  3. I could not agree more Doug...you nor I would ever nor any leader or any nation's wife be ridiculed by such...I just don't get that.

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  4. Certainly not for saying anything so obvious and seemingly benign.

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  5. Geez Louise! Well, Michelle Bachman and Sarah Palin.. that pretty much says it all, I'm thinking.
    Sometimes i really wonder if our forefathers would have given us freedom of speech if they'd known what kinds of idiots would use it!

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  6. My grandfather had a saying regarding people who would complain about anything, categorically: "They would bitch if ya hung 'em with new rope!"

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  7. "Sometimes i really wonder if our forefathers would have given us freedom of speech if they'd known what kinds of idiots would use it!" Ha!

    "Rep. Michele Bachmann spoke out Tuesday against First Lady Michelle Obama’s reported support of tax breaks for breast pumps.

    "I've given birth to five babies and I breast fed every single one of these babies," Bachmann, R-Minn., said. "To think that government has to go out and buy my breast pump for my babies. I mean, you want to talk about the nanny state? I think you just got a new definition -- a new definition of the nanny."

    The idiot doesn't even know what she's talking about. "Bachmann, who is in her third term and considering a challenge to President Obama in 2012" Babe, dream on!

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  8. Yes it does, Jacquie. They will pander to their political base on any issue.

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  9. Ha! Exactly Will. Your grandfather must have read about the GOP stalwarts of his day and shook his head as I did today.

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  10. She had better consider a challenge to better understand that the health of a nursing mother and her kid should come before her reflex hyperbolic attacks on all things from the White House, Lucija.

    Bachmann's loose-with-the-facts style might indeed make her presidential ambitiions (?) a moot point. She'll have a lot of company from the Unhinged Right side of the GOP. Perhaps the Libertarians will take her on as a spoiler in 2012.

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  11. So now what was it that the rich folks got tax breaks for just recently? Nothing? Oh that is what I thought. They don't even have to breast feed to get their tax cut. Lazy good for nothing pfffts.

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  12. Its rather difficult to see what all the fuss is about really. It is obvious that if mammalian mothers feed the life giving milk they produce to infants for that purpose, to give life... these same neonates will fair better than peers fed some commercially concocted profit making gunge dreamed up by a focus group at Nestlé. I mean shock horror, breast milk is good for babies!

    The fact that Mrs Obama is getting flak for uttering such truisms is evidence that her critics are intellectual breast feeders themselves, never having matured sufficiently to be trusted with the solid food of fully formed maturity, so to speak.

    These profoundly needy individuals were probably denied the maternal teat at some crucial moment in their emotional development which irreparably stunted their cognitive growth.

    The very fact that these emotional epsilons are reported in the media as if what they think actually mattered, only goes to show what a titty baby level of sophistication the corporate media has devolved to. I blame CCTV myself, its cheapened the medium by making everybody a celebrity in the eyes of the local Stasi, well... a potential anti-hero at least!

    After all, breast feeding is a great recruiting sergeant for the War On Shopping, catch 'em young Doug, that's the answer, teach those infants that there really IS such a thing as a free lunch and we'll be home and dry Doug.... (except the Wet Nurses of course)!

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  13. Lazy and privileged it would appear, Mary Ellen.

    They must have Washington lobbyists breast-feeding their congressmen with the mother's milk of politics: money!

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  14. Nestle had a bit of trouble back in the 80's I remember: marketing substandard baby formula to Third World mothers in Africa and Central America. "Never let a defective baby product go to waste" was the motto.
    LOL!

    I always thought that Woody Allen was correct in linking excessive onanism in adolescence to certain excessive campaigning political behavior in men. I now think we can add weening difficulties to excessive political posturing.

    I used to joke that if certain politicians came out for mother's milk, the likes of Michelle Bachmann or the Angry Right in the media would jump on him or her like a pack of furies.

    I now see my attempt at humor was a prescient notion, a foreboding. It is clear some party hacks will stop at nothing to demonize any political view that perverts their simplistic visions. I wanted to point this out not to make a defense of Michelle Obama as a First Lady (she can more than handle herself and is likely the stronger partner in that marriage) but to show just what kind of jerks we are dealing with here.

    And why these pathetic ramblings are even reported in the larger media is a good question, AA. That there might really be two equal sides to this natural nutrition issue is beyond parody.

    Thanks for your keen observations, AA. Attacking basic science is a specialty of the secular and church-going far right in the USA and will continue as long as hyperbole is the coin of the media realm.

    The likes of Bachmann and Palin and all the hosts at Fox News really deserve their own country and I think the island of St. Helena may be just the place for them.

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  15. I think perhaps they do indeed need some sort of exile, but since the colonials decided some time ago that they wanted no part of Great Britain, indeed fought a war on that premise, it's difficult to believe that we'd now want to deal with rejects from the colonies now!

    ;-)

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  16. Yes, Jim, many bridges have been burned ... we don't even have a national cricket team.

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  17. Within a new era Doug, I don't believe that bridges ever do come to be burned. In some manner things revolve and evolve. As that is really just the manner and the way of the world.

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  18. One certianly can't keep evolution and human change down, Jack. Good point.

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  19. Doug, I truly believe this. The human condition is one that is an array of so many things that we do see yet at the same time I am pretty realistic with things and within this as many come to see and it might just be the case that the media does take a turn. As many do want to know what has a point but not what is pointless as you presented so well here.

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