By request.
Damage Done
Truly frightening, and still underway, in Kansas:
The prosecution of a Planned Parenthood affiliate here, the first such criminal case in the nation, has been treated locally as something of a proxy in the battle over abortion rights. Derided by supporters of the organization as politically motivated, the prosecution was celebrated by opponents as the capstone of increasingly aggressive actions here and elsewhere against Planned Parenthood, which provides abortions and other services at clinics around the country.
Remarkable that it is now acceptable to casually state that a criminal prosecution is being used as a “proxy” for a political battle. Not good, Kansas. Never a good idea.
So it came as a surprise to many this month when county prosecutors here announced that after years of legal battling, they had been forced to drop nearly half the charges, including all of the felony counts, citing — of all things — faulty record keeping. The misdemeanor charges, which involve accusations of failing to fully determine viability before performing some abortions, are still pending. The revelations that documents in the case had been destroyed years ago added a fresh dose of controversy to what has been a particularly strange chapter in the abortion fight in Kansas, a messy and tangled case that emerged out of a wide-ranging investigation into abortion providers and has been consumed by allegations of misconduct by political leaders on both sides of the issue.
The state’s vocal, and increasingly empowered, contingent of abortion opponents, including a number of Republican elected officials, wondered aloud whether a cover-up was to blame. And Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri questioned whether prosecutors were encouraging conspiracy theories as a way to blame abortion rights supporters while abandoning a losing case.
Peter B. Brownlie, president and chief executive of the local affiliate, praised the dismissal of the most serious charges and said the organization would prevail on the remaining ones. “There’s no question that political opponents of Planned Parenthood and abortion would have been emboldened by a conviction, particularly on a felony charge,” he said.
The case emerged from a long investigation by one of the state’s most polarizing elected officials, Phill Kline, who had used his position as Kansas attorney general and later as Johnson County district attorney to crusade against abortion providers, earning a series of official rebukes along the way for his tactics, including a recommendation last month by a state board that he be prohibited from practicing law in the state. Though the investigation, started in 2003, initially centered on explosive allegations that abortion providers were not reporting all cases of child rape, the charges Mr. Kline eventually filed in 2007 were far less wrenching, including that Planned Parenthood failed to maintain copies of abortion paperwork (a misdemeanor) and, fearing detection, completed the paperwork after an investigation was begun (a felony)
So he never had anything at all on the child rape allegations. Not that it matters. The damage was done and the political objective was met when he made the allegations.
As the case was being prepared for trial, Steve Howe, the Johnson County prosecutor who took up the case in 2009 after defeating Mr. Kline in a Republican primary, discovered that the records that were to be used as evidence had been destroyed years earlier, the originals by the Department of Health and Environment and the only authenticated set of copies by the attorney general’s office. As a result, Mr. Howe told a judge this month that there was no longer enough admissible evidence to proceed with 49 charges, including 23 felonies.
But supporters of abortion rights disputed the allegations that the documents were intentionally, rather than routinely, destroyed, and questioned why they had not been requested and secured previously. “It’s a red herring to avoid having to walk into court, present the case and lose on the merits because there was never any crime,” said Pedro Irigonegaray, a lawyer for Planned Parenthood.
Abortion opponents have spent a lot of time, money and energy rebranding their movement as akin to a soft-focus mother and baby Hallmark card, rather than as a religious crusade focused on vengeance and punishment. Tactics like this one contradict that carefully crafted marketing, and more like this may make people sit up and take notice.
They’ve been engaged in what looks like a purely politically motivated prosecution in Kansas since 2003, and now that the anti-abortion state-actor crusaders can’t prove the explosive and damaging allegations they threw around, they’ve come up with an elaborate conspiracy theory to save face and cover for the fact that it sure looks like they never had much of anything to begin with.
Oh, and extra points for dragging Katherine Sebelius into this dog and pony show, conservatives. It just wouldn’t seem right if Obama wasn’t somehow implicated, in everything.
Forget all the sentimental blather about mommies and babies, and look at the actions. These folks play hardball.
Commenters Behaving Badly
I don’t know why anyone should ever have to mention this or deal with it, but I just deleted a couple of comments in ABL’s Naomi Wolfe thread. Two different commenter names, two different email addresses, both pushing the same theme, the same IP address for both. If you can’t make your point without resorting to sock puppetry, you don’t have anything worthwhile to say.
Despicable Mitt, Ad Guy
Talking about Romney’s anti-President-Obama assault ad, David S. Bernstein, at the Boston Phoenix, thinks normal political practitioners just aren’t as jaded and dishonest as “Mad Men” corporate advertising types like Willard Romney:
… People look at me funny when I say this, but people in and around politics are remarkably, and rather naively, honest. Yes, they spin and hyperbolize and stretch context and so on, but they really don’t very often just flat-out lie in obvious ways like in the Activia example. (I’m excluding sideshow entertainers like Ann Coulter and such.) Which is why so many political insiders and commenters have been so worked up about this Romney ad. It’s also, to a great extent, why all of Romney’s competitors in the 2008 GOP primary ended up hating him so much — because they really do believe that there is honor among political campaigns, and the Romney campaign kept doing things that are perfectly normal in cutthroat corporate competition, but really take people aback in the political world.
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I’m quite sure that to Romney, all of this is A) baffling, and B) exploitable weakness. Just as, to Activia’s parent corporation, the unwillingness of Yoplait’s parent to lie about its bacteria-injected yogurt was a baffling, exploitable weakness…
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We certainly feel like there’s something wrong here — that Romney shouldn’t just be able to manipulate America into making him President the way Activia manipulated them into buying their yogurt or Axe manipulates people into buying their cologne, or the millions of far less obvious manipulations that go on all the time in the corporate world all the time, without anybody in the press or elsewhere blinking an eye — indeed, it is exactly what Romney did for a living for 25 years or so. It’s an awful lot to think that I, or some New York Times reporter, or some talking head pundit, can effectively stand athwart of it now…
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So I ask you: how could anybody have stood athwart of Staples’s successful, and completely bogus, rebranding of its image? Any ideas? And if so, can that be applied to Romney’s bogus attempts to brand Obama as an America apologist, for example? Or his bogus attempts to brand himself as having a smart foreign policy platform? And so on?
Song of the week
That “Bloodrock” song from a few weeks ago now goes through my head every time I’m on a plane that’s flying low…spooky.
Here’s this week’s Song of the Week, from Can’t Explain…
Big Star, “Jesus Christ” (1974)
It’s that time of year again, and for the next several weeks I plan to wage make peace in the war on Christmas by featuring seasonal songs. As always, you are invited you to share better songs, similar songs, or anything you’ve a mind to in the comments. I know this first one is not particularly Christmassy, but they will mostly get sweeter from here on out, I promise. And besides, what else can you call a song that repeatedly goes to the line “Jesus Christ was born today / Jesus Christ was born”? It comes from my favorite album by Big Star, Third (also known as Sister Lovers), which is an astonishing amount of heartache anyway. For some of us, it appears that’s what we’re looking for in the first place, and year round, whether we know it or not.
One more before the veins open: “Nightime”
More at Can’t Explain.
Republican of the Week: Jon Kyl
Dana Milbank reminds us of Kyl’s greatest hits:
In the days following Hurricane Katrina, the nation was reeling over the death and destruction in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast. But Kyl, now the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, saw opportunity: According to a voice-mail recording left at the time by Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), Kyl and Sessions were hoping to find a business owner killed in the storm so they could use that in their campaign to repeal the estate tax.
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It was vintage Kyl: cold and ruthless.
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So when the Arizonan was named as one of six Republicans on the debt supercommittee, Democrats feared the worst — and they got what they feared. It exaggerates little to say that Kyl thwarted agreement almost singlehandedly. While some Republicans on the panel — notably Reps. Dave Camp and Fred Upton — were, with House Speaker John Boehner’s blessing, prepared to strike a deal, Kyl rallied resistance with his usual table-pounding tirades…
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Norquist, who worked to defeat a compromise, brags about his control over Kyl. When Kyl made remarks in May that appeared to leave open the possibility of tax increases, Norquist called Kyl and adopted “the tone of a teacher scolding a second grader as he recalled the conversation,” Politico reported. Norquist boasted to the publication that, after he upbraided Kyl, the senator “went down on the floor and he gave a colloquy about how we’re against any tax increases of any sort. Boom!”
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Kyl had demonstrated his distaste for negotiation before. In June, he joined House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) in walking out of budget talks with Vice President Biden. He had also displayed his disdain for fellow Republicans who were willing to negotiate. During the health-care debate, when Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) was negotiating with Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee, Kyl went on TV and said Grassley “has been given no authority to negotiate anything.” Amid hints that GOP leaders might punish Grassley by denying him the top Republican slot on the Judiciary Committee, Grassley reportedly told colleagues: “Maybe I should just go home and ride my tractor.”
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“Walking napalm” is how one Democratic aide involved in the supercommittee described Kyl this week. And if the senator makes some mistakes as he burns down the village — well, that’s just a cost of doing business. Earlier this year, when Kyl was leading an effort to cut off funding for Planned Parenthood, he claimed on the Senate floor that abortion is “well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does.” The actual number is 3 percent. An aide to Kyl explained: “His remark was not intended to be a factual statement.”
Senator Kyl — Norquist’s bitch and Cantor’s mentor. I’m sure there’s an element of “blame that GOPer over there, the one who’s leaving anyway, not the party as a whole” in play here, but stay on topic. Kyl was a mean, lying lobbyist before he started his nationwide career as a mean prick in the House in 1987 and then ascended to Senator Mean Prick in 1994. Anybody mouthing pap about a newborn decline in legislative “civility”, or the tawdry behavior of today’s GOP leaders as opposed to the mythical statesmen of an earlier golden age, should be reminded that Jon Kyl has been a notorious disgrace to the American congressional system for at least a generation.
Football Open Thread
I hope the games are better than that WVU/Pitt debacle last night, which was an epic struggle to see who could suck the most. It was a shame they couldn’t both lose.