AG Beshear says he won't defend one of Kentucky's new prolife laws

The Lexington Herald-Leader ran the story yesterday. I am quoted in the latter part of the story:

Attorney General Andy Beshear said Tuesday he will defend only one of two new laws that limit abortion in Kentucky. 

In a statement, Beshear said his office would defend House Bill 2, which requires doctors to perform an ultrasound and present the results to their patient before providing an abortion, but will not defend any legal challenge to Senate Bill 5, which bans abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy.

Read more here.

KY House Democrats have little ground to criticize Republicans on prolife bills #KYga17

On the day that the New and Improved Kentucky General Assembly passed two prolife bills, Planned Parenthood held a rally in the Capitol Rotunda to warn against the dangers of saving unborn babies.

But at least no one was offering fetal body parts for sale. We'll give them that.

Planned Parenthood's defenders in the House, of course, voted against the bills. The opponents charged Republican leadership with "railroading" the bill through (at "breakneck speed," said the ACLU). That's right. A bill (or something very similar to it) which has been introduced repeatedly and which has even had several legislative hearings (but no votes, other than in the Senate) over the course of several years just hasn't received enough scrutiny.

And, anyway, it's a pretty simple bill.

House Democrats, of course, don't like railroads when it comes to passing prolife legislation. They prefer cemetaries.

The Republicans "played ... political games" in passing the legislation, said Jeff Greer, (D-Brandenburg).

Now let us pause for a moment to consider the fact that no one has ever played political games in Frankfort before. Particularly Democrats. And Jeff Greer has never done it himself.

Democrats have never buried bills in committee. Democrats have never threatened members with punishment for either voting for bills they didn't like or for not voting for bills they did like. They've never replaced members of the committee the night before the committee was to take up a bill. They've never used parliamentary rules to make it impossible to make amendments to a bill. They've never held a bill in the Rules Committee indefinitely.

Ever.

And no Democrats were seen on the floor yesterday assailing parliamentary moves that they themselves not only defended just last year, but used themselves.

Did House Republicans use parliamentary procedures to further their legislation? Of course they did. Lawmakers do it all the time. That's what parliamentary procedures are for. Legislatures pass rules so that members can use them. That's what House Republicans did when they recessed to hold a judiciary committee meeting and rolled changes to House Bill 2 (the "ultrasound" bill) into a committee substitute to prevent Democrats from offering amendments, many of which were "poison pills" to make the bill unconstitutional and therefore subject to rejection by the courts.

And did any of the people now criticizing House Republican leadership for "playing political games" to pass the bill stop to consider that the games the Republicans were playing were designed to prevent Democrats from playing political games to kill the bill?

If they did, they kept it to themselves.

The people now criticizing House Republicans for "playing political games" with a prolife bill need to ask themselves whether having their motions to suspend the rules voted on in open roll call votes isn't a little better than having the Democratic speaker ignore Republican calls for roll call votes and instead take voice votes and rule that their side won when clearly the votes were in the other direction.

Or maybe they should just stop being hypocritical.

Family Foundation calls on Democratic candidates to disavow support of #PlannedParenthood

Today's press release from The Family Foundation:

LEXINGTON, KY—The Family Foundation called on the campaigns of Jack Conway and Andy Beshear today to disavow support they are receiving from Planned Parenthood. The group said it had received reports that Planned Parenthood Action Kentucky was conducting get-out-the-vote calls to Kentucky voters discouraging them from voting for Matt Bevin and Whitney Westerfield, the Republican candidates for governor and attorney general, respectively.

"Planned Parenthood is making calls urging voters not to vote for Republican candidates for governor and attorney general, which is an implicit endorsement of their Democrat opponents," said Martin Cothran, spokesman for the group. "We are calling on the Democratic candidates to disavow this effort, and we would hope that these candidates would want to distance themselves from groups engaged in the selling of baby parts for profit.”

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"Another fifty livers a week": More Planned Parenthood outrages

I wonder if they had to go to this much trouble getting people worked up over Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

The Center for Medical Progress video that StemExpress tried to stop with a court order went up on YouTube overnight — or perhaps more accurately, one of the videos. The undercover investigation catches StemExpress CEO Cate Dyer describing their now-former partner, Planned Parenthood, as “a volume institution,” but insufficient for their needs. They need “another 50 livers a week” to meet their demand for fetal tissue.

Read more here.

If slavery were only one part of an organization's purpose, should taxpayers have to fund it?

Planned Parenthood is the subject of growing controversy because it is no longer just killing babies (which is acceptable in some parts of our culture), but selling their parts. It has even given Hillary Clinton pause. And that's saying something: Very few things give robots pause.

Maybe killing babies is only wrong in the eyes of progressives when capitalism is involved.

I have now heard one particular argument in defense of Planned Parenthood several times. It goes like this: "Abortion is only one part of Planned Parenthood's services and it is hardly a sufficient cause to de-fund their entire operation."

Okay. Fine. If killing babies is just one part of your business, your still legitimate if you do other, less horrific things.

So let's just replace the word "abortion" in this argument with another word and ask what we would think if anyone ever actually uttered it in defense of any organization: "Slavery is only one part of [Insert Organization Name Here]'s services and it is hardly a sufficient cause to de-fund their entire operation."

Which human beings Obama thinks should be respected

Barack Obama, whose spokesman today made it clear that he supports Planned Parenthood selling the body parts of babies killed in abortions, has been giving African countries moralistic lectures about how they should treat other human beings (in this case, gays).

Just thought I'd point it out.

The Great Republican Surrender: CPAC and the GOP's abandonment of social issues

Imagine you are a Republican living in the year 2027. CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Committee, is having its national convention and straw poll for 2028 Republican presidential hopefuls. But markedly absent from speeches and discussion is any mention of free market principles. Few mentions of the problem of big government. Little or no rhetoric about over-burdensome taxation.

The Party is almost almost silent on economic issues.

If you think that sounds preposterous, then ask yourself whether, twelve years ago, you would have thought the Republicans would have almost entirely given up on values issues, which, along with free market economics and a strong national defense, was one of the three fundamental pillars of post-Reagan Republican policy.

If you bothered to watch the coverage of the 2015 CPAC convention you would have noticed a loud silence on what used to be one the Republican Party's major themes. Other than a few fleeting mentions of marriage and abortion, there was mention of nothing other other than economics and foreign policy.

Even when candidates were asked about where they stood on same-sex marriage, they punted—or sounded like they were. When Sean Hannity interviewed all the candidates who showed up for the event, only a few had even a well-thought out answer on the issue, but the eventual winner of the straw poll, Kentucky's Rand Paul, sounded as if he had heard the question for the first time, saying little about the federal courts declaring martial law on the issue and talking instead about the virtues of civil unions.

"I'm old-fashioned," he told Hannity, "I think marriage is between a man and a woman, but I'm also open in a sense that legally I don't think we should discriminate against people and that if people want to have a contract with another adult, there's no reason why the law should discriminate and prevent them from having benefits, or custody, or seeing people in the hospital, all that stuff can be arranged through contracts [between] adults."

This is the comment of someone who clearly is uncomfortable talking about the issue and all and really doesn't want to talk about it. Just imagine if someone ask him about free market economics. Would he say, "Well, you know, I'm a believer in free market economics, but I'm also open in the sense that there are circumstances in which the government needs to get involved in markets and I don't think we should be against that."

Not on your life.

In the same interview in which Paul declared himself a "constitutional conservative," he seemed to express little concern about the wholesale federal court takeover of state marriage policy in violation Supreme Court precedent.

The worst thing that could happen to the Republican Party is happening: Long charged by its Democratic detractors with not having a heart, Republicans are now doing their best to prove their point.

Say "Hello" to the Materialist Right: Republican politicians who have nothing to say about the most deeply-held convictions of Americans, who can no longer connect with their voters on issues of the heart, who cannot spare time in their analysis of the ills of big government to address the ills of the family.

The Republican Party's social policy agenda used to be marriage, the traditional family, and traditional values. In states like Kentucky this still survives, albeit in etiolated form. But the national party has dropped all three, and they have nothing to replace them with.

Am I saying Democrats are winning on social issues? I sure am. But the reason isn't because they have a better argument than the other side; the reason is that they bother to make an argument and the other side doesn't. It's easy to win a battle when the other side doesn't bother to show up.

The banner under which the Republicans are marching on social issues is a white flag.

It is a shallow cliché among the less politically astute that people vote their pocket books. The decisive refutations of this view are too long to catalog, but the would include at least the last two presidential elections. The dirty little secret in politics is that people don't really vote their pocket books: They vote their hearts, and the candidate who knows that and exploits it wins.

Barack Obama. Bill Clinton. Check it out.

The libertarians now controlling the Republican Party think they can win elections by doing a political heart bypass operation. Economic issues and criticisms of Democratic foreign policy are what they think will win them national elections. But it won't work. Ask Mitt Romney how this worked out for him.

If the choice is between a candidate who only appeals to the intellect of voters on the one hand, and one who appeals to their sentiments on the other, they will pick the second one every time.

The Republican Party has a huge constituency of cultural conservatives who are simply being ignored by Republican rhetoric. The current crop of candidates knows this and their strategy isn't hard to discern: They are willing to say the absolute minimum they can to keep these voters in the fold. And where else are they going to go anyway?

But the fact is they do have another place to go: Nowhere. That is, they can just sit out the election. This is what more than a few people did the last time around and it resulted in a second term for Obama, whose foreign policy missteps would, in any other world than the one Republicans have constructed for themselves, have been enough for him to be defeated.

There has not been a major party realignment in some time, but if you read history, you know that it does in fact happen periodically. If you look at polling data it is very clear that there is a huge plurality of voters that don't go along with the Elen Degenereses of the world. So substantial is it, in fact, that under any other circumstances it would be considered a situation to exploit. To Republicans, however, it has become an advantage to squander.

I have never been an advocate of a third party, but it is becoming increasingly clear that if Republicans don't recapture their cultural soul, they will unwittingly undermine their position as a viable party and produce, however unintentionally, a third party--one that probably couldn't win many elections, but could certainly decide them.

This is Your Culture on PC: Abortions for men

It gets weirder and weirder:

A Texas pro-abortion organization, Fund Texas Women, has announced that it is changing its name to Fund Texas Choice.  This is because the reference to “women” excludes trans-sexual individuals who now identify as “men” but who still have female reproductive organs and who may thus get pregnant and “need” an abortion.  This is from the announcement

HT: Gene Veith

Since males and females are now interchangeable, surely men have some kind of right to abortion too.

UN lectures the Vatican on being nice to children, except if their not born yet

Wait, the United Nations is still operating? Who let that happen?

Turns out it is still around and lecturing other people on their behavior despite its sorry record of corruption. This is the organization, remember, which elected Sudan to its Human Rights Commission, which is sort of like appointing Joseph Goebbels to conduct relations with the Jews.

Oh, darn. Did I say "the Jews"? I better be careful about that because the UN doesn't seem to like them very much.

One organization which has suffered the indignity of being rebuked by these questionable people is the Vatican, which was told last week by the UN's Commission on the Rights of the Child that it has not properly handled child abuse by priests and that it needs to shape up—something which the Church has already acknowledged and been working on for almost fifteen years now with no help from the UN thank you very much.

Interesting, the Commission also demanded that the Vatican drop its opposition to abortion. Under the UN's definition of "child abuse," the actual killing of a child apparently doesn't count and, in fact, counts in your favor.

Oh, and then there were the demands that the Vatican change its position on contraception and homosexuality in order to meet its obligations under the Convention despite the fact that these positions are not actually, you know, in the Convention.

Will somebody please inform these people that they are an embarrassment and need to cease operations immediately?

Thanks for your help.

The Facts of Life: The Wendy Davis debaucle

Wendy Davis, the Texas gubernatorial candidate who rose to fame for filibustering a bill in the Texas legislature that would have prevented abortions of viable unborn babies for eleven hours in tennis shoes has had a bad week. But it was even worse for her now embarrassed admirers.

Turns out her hard luck story about being a single mom raising her kids in a trailer park bore little resemblance to her real life in which she married a guy who took care of her kids for her while she took all expense paid leave from her family to get Harvard Law degree after which she dumped said guy the day after he finished paying off her school loans. As Ann Coulter put it:

The reason Wendy Davis' apocryphal story was impressive is that single mothers have to run a household, take care of kids and provide for a family all by themselves. But Wendy was neither supporting her kids, nor raising them. If someone else is taking care of your kids and paying your tuition, that's not amazing.

Apparently her pro-choice ideology doesn't translate well into campaign propaganda: You can't choose the facts of your past.

Memo to Davis Supporters: Bad things can happen when you champion someone for supporting late-term abortions.

The liberal war on science: Abortion edition

Liberals not only coined the expression "War on Science," they seem to be the ones engaged in it.

The "War on Science" was a term invented by liberals to use against conservatives. It was conservatives who have a troubled relationship to the material facts. But in a congressional hearing on a bill that would ban abortion in the last four months of pregnancy except in the case of danger to the life of the mother. As John McCormack at the Weekly Standard describes it:

During the hearing, [Rep. Jerrold] Nadler called the bill "facially unconstitutional" because he said it would ban abortions prior to viability, the point at which a baby can survive long-term outside the womb, and the point at which the Supreme Court has ruled abortion bans may be enacted.

But medical studies show that Nadler is factually wrong: Some babies born 20 weeks after conception--the point at which the bill would ban most abortions--can survive long-term outside the womb. "In June 2009, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported a Swedish series of over 300,000 infants," Dr. Colleen Malloy testified before Congress in 2012. "Survival to one year of life of live born infants at 20, 21, 22, 23, and 24 weeks postfertilization age was 10%, 53%, 67%, 82%, and 85%, respectively."

Tsk, tsk. Read the rest here.

Planned Parenthood removes blinders on PA abortion doctor

Not that we expect them to keep them off.

Planned Parenthood is apparently concerned that a Philadelphia abortion doctor may give baby-killing a bad name. Here's Michelle Malkin on the group's new-found concern over Kermit Gosnell:

Planned Parenthood now says it’s “appalled” by the Philadelphia house of horrors run by accused serial baby-killer and pregnant-mom murderer Dr. Kermit Gosnell. Bull. The appalling inaction of the nation’s largest abortion provider, along with countless other clinics and “pro-choice” groups in the know, speaks far louder than their belatedly self-serving words.

Read more here.

Keep Abortion Legal (Even when it's not safe)

Remember the bad old days when abortion was illegal and back alley abortions killed thousands of women every year? You do? That's strange, since it isn't really true. But what about back alley abortionists who have practiced since abortion was made legal in Roe v. Wade?

Right now a trial is in progress on whether Kermit Gosnell, a Philadelphia abortionist, committed first degree murder of seven babies who were born alive and were killed by Gosnell ("ensuring fetal demise," he calls it). But you wouldn't know it if you had only the traditional news media to rely on.

Patients ignored. Workers uncertified. Flea-infested cats roaming the clinic defecating on the floor.Walls spattered with urine. Corroded vacuum tubes used for abortions--and for resuscitation. Blood spattered floors. Botched surgeries. Patients being infected with STDs from abortion procedures.

State health officials knew about some of these as far back as 1979, and repeated complaints were made, but nothing was ever done. Where were the people like those at Planned Parenthood who talk about keeping abortion safe and legal? They were nowhere to be seen.

They guy isn't even an OB/GYN. But he plied his grisly trade for three decades in West Philadelphia, where, according to some of his own employees, 40 percent of his abortions were performed on women over 24 weeks pregnant, as health officials looked the other way. Now that a trial is exposing just how inhuman his practices were, it is now the media's turn to avert its gaze.

Abortion being a secular sacrament, it's not hard to understand why this would be. 

Here's Kirsten Powers at the Daily Beast on the media blackout of Gosnell's atrocities:

I can only think of a handful of times in my eight years as a Fox News contributor that I’ve discussed abortion. The people who obsessively cover it and anything vaguely related to it are those in the mainstream media and in the left-wing media, which is why their silence on this is so remarkable. Mollie Hemingway did yeoman’s work chronicling how faithfully The Washington Post’s health reporter, who covered Todd Aiken, the Susan G. Komen controversy, and the murder of abortion doctor George Tiller, didn’t write a single story on the Gosnell trial. No abortion regulation is too small for the mainstream media to cover; no stupid comment about abortion by any Republican goes unnoticed. So her disinterest in this trial is inexplicable.

But while the left has alternately attacked the right for its alleged lack of interest and for paying too much of the “wrong sort” of attention, I haven’t heard a lot about the near silence from the feminist organizations that lecture us endlessly about how they stand for women’s health. I find the claims now that feminists were deeply upset about poor minority women being abused and killed along with their babies a little tough to believe. A search for “Gosnell” on NOW's website yielded only two hits, both from 2011. Search for “Gosnell” on the League of Women Voters website and you will find nothing. The same search on the NARAL and Planned Parenthood sites returned the same number of hits: zero.

Read the rest here.

"... we claim that killing a newborn could be ethically permissible in all the circumstances where abortion would be."

That's from a paper by Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva published about a year ago in the Journal of Medical Ethicists entitled “After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?” It's also apparently the belief of at least the Florida chapter of Planned Parenthood.

Here's an exchange between State Rep. Jim Boyd the lobbyist for Planned Parenthood during a discussion in a committee of the Florida Legislature on a bill that would have required medical care to be given to a baby in the case of a botched abortion:

“So, um, it is just really hard for me to even ask you this question because I’m almost in disbelief,” said Rep. Jim Boyd. “If a baby is born on a table as a result of a botched abortion, what would Planned Parenthood want to have happen to that child that is struggling for life?”

“We believe that any decision that’s made should be left up to the woman, her family, and the physician,” said Planned Parenthood lobbyist Snow.

So the answer to the question, "should we kill an infant that is living and struggling to breath that is outside the womb is "Yes." Just so long as everyone agrees it's okay.

Read the rest of this sorry story here.

Keep procedures where babies brains are sucked out safe and legal

The Republicans need to offer Democrats a deal: They'll stop supporting the campaigns of candidates who think that killing an unborn child who was the product of rape should be illegal if the Democrats will promise not to support the campaigns of candidates who support partial birth abortion, a procedure in which a doctor partially delivers a baby and sucks out its brains.

Of course that would be difficult, given that the Democrats platform would prevent making it illegal and President Obama has supported keeping it legal.

DNC: All pro-abortion, all the time

QUESTION: If the Republicans, at their convention, had talked as much about being pro-life (and pro-marriage) as the Democrats have talked about being pro-abortion (and pro-same-sex marriage), what would the media have said?

For those in the Vital Remnants Peanut Gallery who can't figure this out, please check back for the answer later today.

UPDATE (8:45 p.m. est): Okay, I'll have to say I'm disappointed in the Peanut Gallery. Where are the excuses? Where are the rationalizations? The answer is:

The media would say that the Republicans are extremists.

BREAKING NEWS: Obama refuses to drop out of the presidential race for opposing restrictions on infanticide

WASHINGTON, DC--President Barack Obama is apparently unwilling to drop out of the presidential race in the wake of revelations that he opposed legislation protecting infants born alive in abortion procedures and opposed legislation banning partial-birth abortions.

In fact, the President is still saying nothing about it. As is the liberal media, which is too busy talking about Todd Akin, a candidate for the U. S. Senate in Kansas, who repeated a discredited theory of how women's bodies react during rape to pay any attention to Obama's tacit support of infanticide.

We will keep you posted with up-to-the-minute updates on the President's candidate status...

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Is Obama's support of infanticide less controversial than Akin's position?

U. S. Senate candidate Todd Akin said something stupid in a radio interview and has said he made a mistake. He is being called upon to step out of politics by the liberal media--and not a few conservatives. Meanwhile Barack Obama has opposed legislation that would provide protection for babies who survive abortion. He has not apologized for it--and he is being lauded by the same liberal media and the conservatives who presumably oppose him but are ignoring is pro-infanticide record.

In 2002, Obama voted against the "Born Alive" bill, which would protect babies who have been aborted who give indications that they may be alive.

In 1997, he voted against a bill banning partial birth abortions.

Having a silly view of how female bodies respond to rape is worse than refusing to prevent infanticide. Go figure.

HT:  National Review

The Old Boys Club (a.k.a., the Kentucky House)

Time magazine claims that Kentucky is one of the "top five worst" states in the nation for women. Of course their criteria includes the liberal sacrament of abortion, which it says is not available to many women in the state. One wonders how this is a detriment to women, particularly those still in utero.

But what is also remarkable is that even though one of their criteria is the participation of women in government, and the fact that they never mention the fact that no woman has ever served in a party or chamber leadership position in the Democratic controlled State House. Ever.

Compare that with the Republican controlled State Senate in which several women have served and one is serving right now.

One guess as to why they didn't mention that.

Why are the advocates of "reproductive services" against the reproduction of poor people?

The Caring and Compassionate Liberals Who Want to Control the Population of Poor People are in a tizzy over the prospect of the Catholic Church taking over University of Louisville Hospital and Jewish Hospital of Louisville partly because, they say, it would prevent these hospitals from offering "reproductive services" to poor people.

Under Catholic strictures on such things, these hospitals could no longer offer abortion, sterilization, and birth control, the things the Caring and Compassionate Liberals call "reproductive services."

But who is against "reproductive services"? The Kind and Compassionate Liberals Who are Against the Reproduction of Poor People? Or the Catholic Church, which is for the reproduction of everybody?

In fact, isn't it anti-reproductive services the Caring and Sympathetic Liberals want to perpetrate on poor people?

Just thought I'd ask.