House Republicans continue their attack on Planned Parenthood. They’ve threatened to shut down the government to defund it, they’ve formed a special committee to explore all that baby part selling hogwash, and presidential candidates can’t stop talking about it. Yesterday, the Oversight and Government Reform Committee hauled PP President Cecile Richards in for more than 5 HOURS of questioning (which she unflappingly answered) about important things like her salary and the group’s travel expenses. But the attack doesn’t seem to be working:
A new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll finds that Americans have a more favorable view of Planned Parenthood than of any other entity tested, including the Republican Party and presidential candidates. The group’s favorable/unfavorable impression, 47 percent to 31 percent, is actually up slightly from July. What’s more, 61 percent oppose eliminating federal funding of Planned Parenthood. Even among the 35 percent who support defunding, only 9 percent favor shutting down the government to do it.
Team Blackness sat down to have a frank discussion about all things surrounding Planned Parenthood and why this attack is so very ridiculous.
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Yatsuno
This has so been Imani’s beat. She has been all over teh Twitter knocking heads about this and I’m sitting back munching popcorn as they make further jackasses of themselves.
kc
This is just so typical of the GOP – it seems like all they do is stage lengthy, stupid, and pointless shitshows that don’t do one goddamn thing to benefit citizens.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
But haven’t you heard? Margaret Sanger was a racist who wanted to exterminate all Black people by butchering their babies! Why can’t you Black people just listen to us wingnutz when we tell you who the real racists are? Why you always wanna go with things like your own experience, or the experiences of people you know, or, you know, shit like history when you make your minds up who’s racist and who isn’t? Why won’t you listen to us? What’s wrong with you people? Don’t you know we fought a war to free you people (for which you ingrates never even thanked us!)? What more do you want from us, anyway?
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
I mock those people, I know, but, shit, I don’t really know what to think about them in some ways. They’re so fucking earnest–some of them–about this shit. They truly cannot understand why Black people just flat out won’t listen to them when they presume to lecture them about how Democrats are the real racists, and Republicans like them are “color blind” and Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are the real bad guys. Their utter, befuddled cluelessness would almost be endearing if they were less poisonous to society.
rikyrah
2 questions:
1. what percentage of services that Planned Parenthood does are abortions
2. where would the millions of women that get their healthcare from PP go?
I know the answers to both, which is why I roll the eyes at the GOP attacks.
patroclus
I think that their nonsensical fact-free assault on women’s liberty (this time) has actually had an educational effect. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a more cogent factual summary of how exactly Planned Parenthood “gets” federal funding (through Medicare reimbursements made for Medicare patients who choose to receive health services at Planned Parenthood for all sorts of things, not including abortions) than I did from Cecile Richards nor have I ever heard a more pithy summation of the fetal tissue research issue than I did from her yesterday as well. All these idiotic attcks have really sharpened her “A” game – she deserves every penny of the salary she gets and probably should be paid better!
A guy
Pope met with the Kentucky clerk to praise her. Wish he’d have met with the pre of PP to scold her
Betty Cracker
The fetus fetishists won the federal funding for abortion debate so long ago that the fetuses of that day are now middle-aged people. And yet, to hear the GOP reps’ puerile, self-aggrandizing orations on it, you’d think Uncle Sam was financing the construction of multi-theater abortionplex facilities in every state and hauling pregnant women in by the truckload. It would be laughable if it didn’t convince so many knuckleheads that this is an actual issue.
I wish congress had devoted a fraction of the zeal, time and money spent on this fucking non-issue to examining the “intelligence” used to lie us into the Iraq War.
Frank
The hot new lie is “the video wasn’t edited” as proven by an independent testing company (Coalfire). Which is true in that the 12 hours long video was unedited, but not true that the shorter excerpts were heavily edited. This “truth” is enough for those who want the videos to be true to find comfort. It’s on InfoWars so you know it’s true.
A guy
We killed some mighty deserving people in Iraq. Innocent unborn children are not so deserving of their fate
Frank
@A guy: I’m glad this came out though, cause the warm and cuddly good pope just poofed back into not mattering to anyone but Catholics (excluding Catholics on the Supreme Court.)
geg6
@A guy:
And fuck the innocent woman for whom carrying that fetus will be a death sentence.
You don’t give shit about the children of forced births and you certainly are just terrified of the women and would be happy to see them dead, as all anti-choicers are. Terrified of female power, freedom and sexual agency. Fuck you, you little, little man.
geg6
@Frank:
Yup. Frankie is dead to me. For the first time in 40 years, I wasn’t feeling complete and utter disdain for the Cult of Rome. That’s over now and for good.
catclub
@Frank: It was supposed to be a private meeting, unlike all the meetings with individuals that the Pope-team did inform the public about. yet Davis’s team blabbed about it. My concern is very low.
benw
@geg6: Where we agree with hippie pope on helping the poor and especially climate change we should try to work with him. When it comes to women’s and gay rights, we should tell him to stuff his head back up his medieval church asshole.
A guy
Especially climate change??…I’m sure the poor are glad you prefer a climate that’s always changing over them. And I’m sure the poor would be happy to mine coal to feed themselves while the climate changes.
rikyrah
ABL was on fire!!!
Loved it.
Gin & Tonic
@geg6: From what I’ve read, a Catholic bishop from Kentucky who’d had some kind of meeting arranged previously, brought her in as his guest, basically sandbagging the Vatican. My feeling (based on no facts, obviously,) is that Frankie said something anodyne like he does with people he doesn’t know, and she interpreted that as support or blessing.
I may be talking out of my hat, though.
burnt
@Betty Cracker: An oldie but a goodie: theonion.com/article/planned-parenthood-opens-8-billion-abortionplex-20476
I had this link forwarded to me and the forwarder thought it was a real story.
ThresherK (GPad)
It wasn’t until listening to the podcast that I learned that Cecile Richards is Ann Richards’ daughter. Now I know where she gets her steel when worrying idiocy.
(Maybe I heard before, but that’s the kind of nugget a good liberal should only have to discover once.)
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I saw Jason Chaffetz, who looked like a dimwitted punk, and Jim Jordan, who looked like a cable access crank. They were both so incredibly obnoxious, and Chaffetz of course made a complete ass of himself with that chart. Yet when Nov 2016 rolls around a whole lot of affluent tote-baggy “fiscal conservative-social moderate” types are going to tell themselves, “Oh they don’t really mean it”. Hopefully, a larger number will notice that they really kind of do.
And I’d bet that Chaffetz before the decade is out will take Orrin Hatch’s place in the Senate, even if Dick Cheney Jr decides she likes Deer Valley better than Jackson Hole. Nothin’ but good times ahead, as Miss Molly said. (And how I would have loved to hear Molly’s and Cecile R’s mother’s takes on yesterdays buffoonery. RIP, ladies)
ETA: and the Pope kind of made a fool of himself with Kim Whosits. Still glad he spoke up on climate.
Starfish
@Yatsuno: She has had the patience of a saint. I do not know if I could tell so many stupid people that they were wrong every morning. Is it better to do that kind of thing before or after morning coffee?
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@A guy:
So the children and babies we killed in Iraq deserved to die?
Also, since you’re here, I’m curious to see if you can answer a question: what is the purpose of a Pap smear? No fair Googling it — I want you to answer to the best of your understanding at this moment without cheating and looking it up.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
On a slightly different subject, the New Yorker has a blockbuster article up about community efforts to stop the violence in some of NYC’s worst projects:
newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/05/a-daughters-death?intcid=mod-yml
There is a point in the article where you’re going to want to stand up and scream, and I think the author (who had been following these community efforts for months) did the same thing when she heard what the city’s “solution” was.
Geeno
@Gin & Tonic: That sounds plausible. But even though he’s on the side of good on many things – he’s still a devout catholic with all the baggage that entails.
A guy
The Iraqi children and babies deserved to die just as much as the unborn child
PurpleGirl
@patroclus: I think you meant MEDICAID. The contracts for health care are between Medicaid and PP.
geg6
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
Brave, brave a guy bravely ran away. He bravely, bravely, bravely ran away. Perhaps he’d like an extended and detailed description of my cervical cryosurgery and maybe tell me what is the most common reason to have such a procedure. That should keep him busy for awhile. Or just shut his ugly mouth up because woman parts and their workings are his greatest fears in life.
A guy
I don’t care about your surgery as it relates to killing unborne children. As the father of 5 kids, four of them girls and married to the same woman for 26 years, I am acutely aware of women’s Heath issues. And as my wife says, abortion is not one of them. How long have you been married?
geg6
@PurpleGirl:
I believe they also take Medicare but most reimbursements come from Medicaid because the population that makes up the largest proportion of PP clients are younger and poorer women. Older women need STD and other gynecological services, so poor older women can access at PP so I’m almost completely sure they take Medicare.
lefthanded compliment
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.): “What more do you want from us, anyway?”
Some semblance of sanity would be nice. Too much to expect from RWNJs, I know.
geg6
@A guy:
Apparently not, since you don’t seem to know why one gets a Pap smear or would need cervical cryosurgery. Not to mention the fact that neither have anything to do with abortion. And I’m not married and never was. And never will. But I’ve been with my current man for eight years and my previous live-in lover was with me for over 18 years. And the guy previous to that was 7 years until he decided to move south. And I’m still good friends with all of them. What does that have to do with anything?
A guy
Neither has any thing to do with abortion unless you are defending planned parenthood abortion practices with all the good they do for women in other matters.. And your lack of stability in relationships has everything to do with what’s wrong with the world. Just ask the pope.
rikyrah
@A guy:
This is a simple question.
what part, PERCENTAGE WISE, of the services that PP provides are abortions.
it’s a simple question.
Answer it.
SiubhanDuinne
Odd advice to the person who wrote this: geg6
Nancy Cadet
A good critique of the latest fake PP video , posted by a doctor : drjengunter.wordpress.com/2015/09/29/the-center-for-bio-ethical-reform-promotes-illegally-taped-vide…