GOP to Planned Parenthood: Hand over records

[tyr_13]

As far as I know, they are subject to special audits, if Congress should ever choose to do so. How or why should they be categorically exempt? I certainly never suggested they should be.

My point is that if a program you backed was being bullied like this, I doubt you'd just shrug your shoulders and I'm all but certain you wouldn't be chastising those opposing the wrongdoing.

Again with the "should". People should be nice. But they frequently aren't. Government should be staffed with only competent politicians and bureaucrats who have only our best interests at heart. But it isn't. The complaints in this thread amount to people getting upset when they're confronted with this fact.

People 'shouldn't' kill each other, but they frequently do. People shouldn't get upset when confronted with this fact. Come on, that's a non-argument.

And that's a naive request. You're never going to get it. The best you can ever hope for is strings that favor you, but even that is only ever temporary.

I don't care if it's naive, I want them to at least pretend they are being fair, and have to keep up appearances. They aren't even trying. I don't care that wanting fair and honest policies is naive or that it's 'never' going to happen, I still fight for it. We'll never have a perfect society, but that doesn't mean one stops trying or accepts it when things get worse.

That's what government does. You think that's new? Of course not. The only difference is now it's your ox that's being gored.

Right, it's much better to never have an ox in the first place. Well argued.

I didn't say there weren't legitimate complaints about what's going on. But they're the same complaints that basically always apply to government. So if you want to complain less about government, try this on for size: have less government to complain about.

This logic is astonishing. These Republicans are being inefficient and wasteful bullies to attack a program that is a good use of public funds, so the solution is the agree with the Republicans, make government smaller, and let the good program go away! While you're at it, cut your nose off to spite your face.

If we did make government smaller, would these inefficient Republicans promise to leave or at least govern better? No, so that seems to be a poor solution to the problem doesn't it? I'll stick with promoting good government rather than simply giving up because these Republicans are going to ruin it anyway. Because they think government is bad, we should expect them to govern badly? Humbug.

 

[Ziggurat]

My point is that if a program you backed was being bullied like this, I doubt you'd just shrug your shoulders and I'm all but certain you wouldn't be chastising those opposing the wrongdoing.

It has never been my position that Congress is above any criticism for its actions here. But the criticism has not simply been that it's a waste of time or that it's not productive. Go back to the OP again if you're not certain what I mean. Much of the criticism here has tried to paint this action as somehow unprecedented or uniquely threatening. It isn't. It's run-of-the-mill government lameness. And I'm not chastising people for opposing lameness, I'm chastising people for not recognizing the kind of lameness it is.

Right, it's much better to never have an ox in the first place.

It's better to not rely on people you cannot actually rely on.

This logic is astonishing. These Republicans are being inefficient and wasteful bullies to attack a program that is a good use of public funds

By what metric is it a good use of funds? By the metric that you prefer. But not by the metric that many other people prefer. Welcome to democracy. We have ways of sorting out these conflicts. You're seeing one of those ways in action. It's messy, it's imperfect, but that's what it is. This is democracy. You can't escape these problems without abandoning democracy.

 

[tyr_13]

It has never been my position that Congress is above any criticism for its actions here. But the criticism has not simply been that it's a waste of time or that it's not productive. Go back to the OP again if you're not certain what I mean. Much of the criticism here has tried to paint this action as somehow unprecedented or uniquely threatening. It isn't. It's run-of-the-mill government lameness. And I'm not chastising people for opposing lameness, I'm chastising people for not recognizing the kind of lameness it is.



It's better to not rely on people you cannot actually rely on.



By what metric is it a good use of funds? By the metric that you prefer. But not by the metric that many other people prefer. Welcome to democracy. We have ways of sorting out these conflicts. You're seeing one of those ways in action. It's messy, it's imperfect, but that's what it is. This is democracy. You can't escape these problems without abandoning democracy.

And part of democracy in action is speaking out against what you don't like. Which is what I'm doing right now as it happens.

 

[mhaze]

....

If we did make government smaller, would these inefficient Republicans promise to leave or at least govern better? .....

Smaller DOES mean less stuff to complain about.

 

[Ziggurat]

And part of democracy in action is speaking out against what you don't like. Which is what I'm doing right now as it happens.

And I'm not stopping you.

 

[leftysergeant]

Smaller DOES mean less stuff to complain about.

Not really. Then there would be plenty else about which a rational person would complain, like the fact that the country is falling into total ruin while the investor class gobbles up money and resources and dumps all manner of vile crap into the water, the air and the food supply.

 

[mhaze]

I think they are, indeed, a-goin' fishing. Here's the letter from Rep. Stearns:

Please provide all official written policies and procedures provided by PPFA and its affiliates that explain how to ensure compliance with federal mandates that the Title X funding each affiliate receives is segregated from its abortion business/sources of funding for abortion-related services.

Sounds reasonable. I guess all the radical left wouldn't be screaming their heads off unless this type of question can't be well answered.

And what about these claims?

http://liveaction.org/blog/breaking-congress-to-investigate-planned-parenthood/

Last February, the Live Action team released undercover videos showing seven Planned Parenthood clinics aiding and abetting the sex trafficking of children. In the wake of the videos, the House of Representatives voted to defund the abortion giant of the over $360 million they receive in federal funds. This step by Rep. Stearns to further investigate Planned Parenthood’s abusive and lawless activities is essential to protecting victims of abuse, our young girls, and our unborn brothers and sisters.


Over the past four years, the Live Action team has been conducting national undercover investigations of abortion giant Planned Parenthood. Our undercover footage has documented the widespread cover-up of child sexual abuse in 10 different states, the aiding and abetting of child sex trafficking, willingness to commit race-based abortions, and the coercion and manipulation of women. Despite these and other crimes against women and children, Planned Parenthood continues to receive over $360 million in taxpayer subsidies each year. Americans stand with Rep. Stearns’s step to hold Planned Parenthood accountable for their on-going abusive activity that endangers women, the victims of abuse and young girls.​

 

[leftysergeant]

Sounds reasonable. I guess all the radical left wouldn't be screaming their heads off unless this type of question can't be well answered.

And what about these claims?

http://liveaction.org/blog/breaking-congress-to-investigate-planned-parenthood/

Last February, the Live Action team released undercover videos showing seven Planned Parenthood clinics aiding and abetting the sex trafficking of children. In the wake of the videos, the House of Representatives voted to defund the abortion giant of the over $360 million they receive in federal funds.​

In other words, the republicon morons aided and abetted a criminal organization in its campaign to destroy an organization giving assistance to women with health care needs that they could not address alone.​

 

[mhaze]

In other words, the republicon morons aided and abetted a criminal organization in its campaign to destroy an organization giving assistance to women with health care needs that they could not address alone.

It's nice that you can make stuff up, but back in the real world....

the Democratic morons aided an abetted a criminal organization - a Mexican drug gang, helping and directly delivering over 2000 assault weapons, resulting in the deaths of over 200 people.

 

[leftysergeant]

It's nice that you can make stuff up, but back in the real world.

Live Action is a criminal organization. Did you miss the big flap last year when the sludge monster's pimp made a bunch of faked videos "proving" that ACORN was into human trafficing?

Anybody who takes those scuzzbags for responsible citizens is unfit to hold public office because they are idiots.

 

[FattyCatty]

Here's a press release from Planned Parenthood dated today, September 29, 2011:

Planned Parenthood: Republican Proposal Continues Assault on Women’s Health​

Revives Failed Efforts to Bar Planned Parenthood from Participating in Federal Health Programs and Eliminates Funding for the Title X Family Planning Program

Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) today roundly criticized Republican leaders in the House of Representatives for releasing a FY 2012 Labor Health and Human Services appropriations package that puts politics over women’s health by reviving unprecedented proposals to take away preventive care from women, which were rightly rejected by the Senate only months ago.

“This budget not only guts effective programs that keep women and families healthy, it will make women and families worse off economically, at a time when they are already struggling,” said Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
<snip>
“This budget is further evidence that Republican leaders have no new ideas and are merely recycling failed attacks that undermine women’s health,” said Richards. “Eliminating funding for the Title X family planning program and prohibiting Planned Parenthood from providing preventive health care through federal programs will result in millions of women across the country losing access to basic primary and preventive health care, including lifesaving cancer screenings, birth control, annual exams, and STD testing and treatment.”

The House Republican budget includes the following provisions aimed at preventing women’s access to health care. It:

• revives the failed attempt to prohibit Planned Parenthood from participating in federal programs like Medicaid to provide preventive health care, including birth control, lifesaving cancer screenings, annual exams, and STD testing and treatment;
  
• eliminates funding for the Title X National Family Planning Program, which provides access to birth control, cancer screenings, and other family planning services to five million low-income women each year;
  
• revives the failed attempt to effectively ban insurance coverage of abortion in the new health exchanges under the Affordable Care Act — taking away a common health benefit that most private health plans currently offer;
  
• prevents the implementation of the groundbreaking health care reform law, including new benefits that include insurance coverage of women’s preventive services like mammograms, cancer screenings, and birth control, with no additional co-pays;
  
• cuts the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Initiative by $64.79 million — from $ 104.79 million to $40 million — and stipulates that $20 million of that money must be used for grants to provide ineffective, abstinence-only education;
  
• includes a sweeping new refusal provision that undermines patients’ access to quality health care.

<snip>

The Republicans seem to be coordinating their attack on Planned Parenthood. And isn't the provision for abstinance-only education based on minority religious views? Is that legal?

 

[FattyCatty]

Sounds reasonable. I guess all the radical left wouldn't be screaming their heads off unless this type of question can't be well answered.

And what about these claims?

http://liveaction.org/blog/breaking-congress-to-investigate-planned-parenthood/

Last February, the Live Action team released undercover videos showing seven Planned Parenthood clinics aiding and abetting the sex trafficking of children. In the wake of the videos, the House of Representatives voted to defund the abortion giant of the over $360 million they receive in federal funds. This step by Rep. Stearns to further investigate Planned Parenthood’s abusive and lawless activities is essential to protecting victims of abuse, our young girls, and our unborn brothers and sisters.

Over the past four years, the Live Action team has been conducting national undercover investigations of abortion giant Planned Parenthood. Our undercover footage has documented the widespread cover-up of child sexual abuse in 10 different states, the aiding and abetting of child sex trafficking, willingness to commit race-based abortions, and the coercion and manipulation of women. Despite these and other crimes against women and children, Planned Parenthood continues to receive over $360 million in taxpayer subsidies each year. Americans stand with Rep. Stearns’s step to hold Planned Parenthood accountable for their on-going abusive activity that endangers women, the victims of abuse and young girls.​

You omitted the first sentence in the first paragraph of this media alert. Here it is:

We applaud Congress’s first concrete steps to investigate Planned Parenthood, the biggest abortion business in the nation.

Live Action is committed to ending abortion; they have repeatedly attacked Planned Parenthood. I doubt their veracity.

Regarding Live Action, Right Wing Watch gives an example of the caliber of people they employ:

Jim Daly, the president of Focus on the Family, thinks that the Hallmark Channel should make a movie about Abby Johnson, the Planned Parenthood clinic worker turned anti-choice leader. Johnson, who now works with Lila Rose’s Live Action, has received plaudits (and earnings) from Religious Right activists for her book deal and speaking tour. At the center of Johnson’s experience is a purported account where she saw a fetus on the ultrasound machine move away from the doctor during an abortion, and she abruptly quit and joined a 40 Days for Life protest outside the clinic.

While Daly says that nobody “has ever questioned her haunting description,” it is quite likely that the event never happened.

Nate Blakeslee Texas Monthly found out that on the day Johnson claims to have assisted the doctor with an abortion, the “physician on duty told the organization that he did not use an ultrasound that day, nor did Johnson assist on any abortion procedure.” The only time he used an ultrasound that month was two weeks prior.

The exposé also discovered that the details of Johnson’s story simply don’t add up with the official records the clinic presented to the state of Texas’s Health Services Department: “Johnson has consistently said that the patient in question was thirteen weeks pregnant, which is plausible, since thirteen weeks is right at the cusp of when physicians will consider using an ultrasound to assist with the procedure. Yet none of the patients listed on the report for that day were thirteen weeks pregnant; in fact, none were beyond ten weeks.”

Johnson claims that the woman undergoing the abortion was black, but the only black woman who had an abortion at Planned Parenthood that day “was in the sixth week of her pregnancy. There would be no medical reason for a doctor to use an ultrasound to guide an abortion performed on a woman at such an early stage. Even if one was used, it’s hard to imagine how Johnson, who said she has seen hundreds of ultrasound pictures in her career, could mistake a one-quarter-inch-long embryo for a three-inch, thirteen-week fetus.”
<snip>

The Christian Science Monitor says this about Lila Rose and her Live Action group:

<snip>
Both Rose and O'Keefe were trained by The Leadership Institute, a conservative Washington organization led by Morton Blackwell, Reagan's youth mobilization coordinator. O'Keefe has taken his creative extremism to greater lengths. He is currently serving a three-year suspended sentence after pleading guilty to trespassing at the New Orleans office of Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu, apparently in an attempt to set up another exposé. Earlier, his Acorn "pimp" sting basically destroyed the minority-rights organization.

But Rose, too, has engineered her own stings before now. In the past, she posed as a 14-year-old who claimed to be impregnated by a much older man in order to see how Planned Parenthood reacted. A staffer told her: "Just say you have a boyfriend, 17 years old, whatever."

That case prompted Tennessee to pass a law in 2009 that compels the state health department to award contracts to public clinics before looking at private clinics like Planned Parenthood.

Campaign against Planned Parenthood

The videos released this week are an attempt to persuade Congress to take similar action. They are part of "Expose Planned Parenthood," an initiative joined by several antiabortion groups to push the "No Taxpayer Funding of Abortion Act" in the House. Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D) of New York this week called the bill "the deepest attack on a woman's right to choose in my lifetime."

"The goal [of the Live Action effort] is to take public support or public funding from clinics to limit the number of service providers" and, thus, the number of abortions, says Nancy Maveety, an abortion-policy expert at Tulane University in New Orleans.
Planned Parenthood, which fired a worker shown in the New Jersey video, has called Rose's tactics "an astoundingly cynical form of political activity." The organization notified the FBI in January, correctly surmising that the visits by Live Action's purported pimp to 12 of its clinics might be a sting.

"If a multistate sex-trafficking operation is in place, those responsible must be pursued to stop the exploitation of girls and young women," said Planned Parenthood spokesman Stuart Schear in a statement. "If these visits are part of a 'dirty tricks' campaign, they must be condemned."
<snip>

 

[mhaze]

You omitted the first sentence in the first paragraph of this media alert. Here it is:Live Action is committed to ending abortion; they have repeatedly attacked Planned Parenthood. I doubt their veracity.

Regarding Live Action, Right Wing Watch gives an example of the caliber of people they employ:

The Christian Science Monitor says this about Lila Rose and her Live Action group:

Unacceptable. You've presented ad hominem attacks on individuals in response to my question about "their claims". I'm not willing to derail into their character.

As for the "first sentence", so WHAT?

Their claims are what I asked about.

You doubt their veracity, the Congress committee doubts the veracity of PP......

 

[johnny karate]

Sounds reasonable. I guess all the radical left wouldn't be screaming their heads off unless this type of question can't be well answered.

And what about these claims?

So heavily edited videos from right wing provocateurs that resulted in zero criminal prosecutions are now sufficient grounds for a Congressional investigation?

So much for those "facts" for which you claimed to be waiting.

 

[mhaze]

You omitted the first sentence in the first paragraph of this media alert. Here it is:Live Action is committed to ending abortion; they have repeatedly attacked Planned Parenthood. I doubt their veracity.

Regarding Live Action, Right Wing Watch gives an example of the caliber of people they employ:

The Christian Science Monitor says this about Lila Rose and her Live Action group:

Unacceptable. You've presented ad hominem attacks on individuals in response to my question about "their claims". I'm not willing to derail into their character.

As for the "first sentence", so WHAT?

Their claims are what I asked about.

You doubt their veracity, the Congress committee doubts the veracity of PP......

... And isn't the provision for abstinance-only education based on minority religious views? Is that legal?

Huh? there is funding for various types of sex ed, INCLUDING abstinance-only, NOW.

Is it based on minority religious views and is it legal? That's a weird question. Well, I guess you'd have to examine the teaching curricula, and see if it included things that were improper. A Priori it isn't illegal, and it probably doesn't matter what it was "based on" - what would matter is what it contains in black and white. It has religious references, or it does not.

 

[mhaze]

So heavily edited videos from right wing provocateurs that resulted in zero criminal prosecutions are now sufficient grounds for a Congressional investigation?

So much for those "facts" for which you claimed to be waiting.

You are assuming an assertion that wasn't made, in response to my question about those claims.

But anyway, where and how would you have assumed those criminal prosecutions to have occurred? At the state level?
Federal? Under what law? As a result of a congressional investigation?

 

[johnny karate]

Their claims are what I asked about.

Their "claims" are unsubstantiated. In other words, there are no "facts" to support them.

You doubt their veracity, the Congress committee doubts the veracity of PP......

And what is the factual basis for that doubt? You remember "facts", right? Those things you said were so important?

 

[johnny karate]

But anyway, where and how would you have assumed those criminal prosecutions to have occurred? At the state level?
Federal? Under what law? As a result of a congressional investigation?

These are at least two allegations being made about Planned Parenthood as enumerated in your link:

- child sexual abuse
- child sex trafficking

Now, I'm not a lawyer, but I feel like there might be a few laws against those things at both the state and federal level.

Live Action claims to have video evidence of those crimes.

If they're telling the truth, where are the criminal prosecutions?

 

[mhaze]

These are at least two allegations being made about Planned Parenthood as enumerated in your link:

- child sexual abuse
- child sex trafficking

Now, I'm not a lawyer, but I feel like there might be a few laws against those things at both the state and federal level.

Live Action claims to have video evidence of those crimes.

If they're telling the truth, where are the criminal prosecutions?

???

Sure looks like the sort of materials being requested by the committee might be the beginning of such prosecutions. Or are you suggesting that in the absence of PRIOR legal standard of proof of wrongdoing, established by convictions, prosecutors should not look for wrongdoing?

 

[mhaze]

Live Action is a criminal organization. Did you miss the big flap last year when the sludge monster's pimp made a bunch of faked videos "proving" that ACORN was into human trafficing?

Anybody who takes those scuzzbags for responsible citizens is unfit to hold public office because they are idiots.

Dainty tip toeing around the reek of dead bodies noted.

Repeating.

It's nice that you can make stuff up, but back in the real world....

the Democratic morons aided an abetted a criminal organization - a Mexican drug gang, helping and directly delivering over 2000 assault weapons, resulting in the deaths of over 200 people.