Late-Term Abortion, Kirsten Powers, and the Gosnell Trial

I am sharing this a little late, but it is still worth reading (if you haven't already).  Kirsten Powers wrote an excellent piece on the Daily Beast recently.  Aside from her NRA references I think it's very good.  Kirsten Powers is a Democrat and liberal, but she has an excellent perspective on late-term abortion.  She has received much criticism from the left on her positions, and it's very encouraging to see someone like her taking a stand.  Powers has held this position for some time, and I believe she was actually the one to bring the story of the Kermit Gosnell trial into the mainstream media and hence give it much more attention (though it still hasn't received as much coverage as it deserves).  The big Atlantic article by Conor Friedersdorf (which I also encourage you to read- it includes large segments from the grand jury report which shows just how bad conditions were at the Gosnell facility) came after he read her column in USA Today.  The media silence on the Gosnell horrors was so bad that Snopes.com actually published a piece on the urban legend site confirming that it was in fact true.


The Gosnell trial is in its 8th week, and the jury is in its third week of deliberations, considering 4 counts of 1st degree murder for infant deaths (several have already been thrown out by the judge since the start of the trial), one of 3rd degree murder, and many lesser charges.  Two House committees have begun investigations into similar poorly regulated abortion facilities throughout the country, prompted by the PA Department of Health's failure to properly investigate reports they had received for some time about the Gosnell abortion mill.   


***Update: As of this afternoon, Gosnell has been found guilty of 3 out of the 4 1st degree murder charges, guilty of involuntary manslaughter for the death of a woman under anesthesia, and guilty of aborting 21 babies that were over the 24 week limit at which abortion is legal in Pennsylvania. 

The Hypocrisy of Media "Fact-Checking"

Ramesh Ponnuru has a great article up on National Review's website about the bias of the media in its "fact-checking" of this election.  Ponnuru points out that most of the time when the media has accused Romney or Ryan of lying during this year's election campaign, the issue at stake has been one of opinion or interpretation, not fact.  He also points out that the Obama campaign has peddled at least as many debatable claims as the Romney campaign, but those claims have completely avoided scrutiny by the media.  This double standard is a fact of life for Republican candidates in this country, but has seemed to be the worst it has ever been during the last two presidential elections.  I hope the public is smart enough to see through the media bias and make an informed choice on November 6th.

Campaign Notes

Joe Biden made the following comment, speaking to an audience more than half black in Danville, VA:

Look at what they [Republicans] value, and look at their budget. And look what they're proposing. [Romney] said in the first 100 days, he's going to let the big banks write their own rules -- unchain Wall Street. They're gonna put y'all back in chains.

Both Obama and Biden were subsequently asked about these racially charged remarks and defended them as perfectly appropriate.  (Are there any campaign tactics that are not appropriate with these people?  Murder accusations against Romney are also Obama-approved.)

Mitt Romney has been hitting his stride lately on the campaign trail, fighting back against Obama's barrage of negativity.  Here's part of what he said at a recent campaign event in Ohio (partly in response to Biden's above quote):

In 2008, Candidate Obama said, "if you don't have any fresh ideas, then you use stale tactics to scare voters." He said, "if you don't have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from." And that, he told us, is how, "You make a big election about small things." 

That was Candidate Obama describing the strategy that is the now the heart of his campaign. 

His campaign and his surrogates have made wild and reckless accusations that disgrace the office of the Presidency. Another outrageous charge came a few hours ago in Virginia. And the White House sinks a little bit lower. 

This is what an angry and desperate Presidency looks like. 

President Obama knows better, promised better and America deserves better. 

Over the last four years, this President has pushed Republicans and Democrats as far apart as they can go. And now he and his allies are pushing us all even further apart by dividing us into groups. He demonizes some. He panders to others. His campaign strategy is to smash America apart and then cobble together 51 percent of the pieces.  

If an American president wins that way, we all lose.

I think Romney is exactly correct.  Obama's re-election strategy all along has been to distract attention from the big issues, destroy his opponents with a barrage of negativity, and divide the American people by pandering to specific racial and gender groups (war on women, amnesty for illegal immigrants, gay marriage, etc.).  Romney needs to stay on the attack the rest of the campaign.

Of course, the media continues to stand as the biggest obstacle to a Romney victory.  Shannen Coffin of National Review's The Corner blog points out the biased way in which The Washington Post has covered this back-and-forth between the candidates.  There has been little coverage of the Obama team's outrageous claims, but when Romney finally fights back with far less outrageous responses The Post makes a front page news story about how Romney is "lashing out" with some of the "harshest rhetoric of his campaign." 

Meanwhile, many in the media have been doing their best to confuse the American public about Paul Ryan and the Medicare debate as well.  As an example, Patrick Brennan of National Review points out the dishonesty of CNN anchor Soledad O'Brien in regurgitating false Democratic talking points about Paul Ryan's plan and ObamaCare under the guise of objective fact-checking.  It is worth reading Brennan's articles here and here to inform yourself of the kind of subtle bias that we are facing from the media in this campaign season.

Finally, on a somewhat unrelated note, there was a shooting at the Family Research Council's headquarters in Washington, DC yesterday.  The shooter was a volunteer for The DC Center for the LGBT Community and shouted out something about FRC's values of hate before wounding a security guard.  I think this shooting is significant.  Much of the media has been echoing the vicious claims of the gay rights community that Christian groups like the Family Research Council are "hate groups" and homophobic bigots because of their opposition to gay marriage and support for the traditional family.  Left-wing groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center even produced a specific listing of "hate groups" that includes the Family Research Council.  So what a surprise.  The media makes them a huge target, and now a mentally unstable individual steeped in this rhetoric goes out and shoots somebody.  Even worse are the multitudes of Twitter responses (well documented by twitchy.com here) that condemn the shooting while suggesting that FRC had it coming to them and even suggesting a moral equivalency between the hatred of the shooter and the "hateful" beliefs of FRC.  Unbelievable.  I am not one to blame an entire group of people based on the unhinged actions of a single individual, but I think the way the media has tried to tar anyone who believes marriage is between a man and a woman as a hateful bigot is shameful and this shooting may well be a consequence of that.

UPDATE: I assumed that the media would largely ignore the FRC story, but I have actually been surprised how much coverage it seems to have gotten, from the front page of The Washington Post to MSM radio. 

Liberal agenda and Perception

I've watched the first few episodes of a new series on TNT called Perception.  It is about a troubled genius and neuroscience professor Daniel Pierce (similar situation to the movie A Beautiful Mind) who helps the FBI solve cases using his knowledge (and personal experience) of psychology, mental disorders, and human behavior.  While I find it fascinating and I like the actors, my husband can't stand to watch it because of the extreme liberal agenda.  I just finished watching the episode from Monday night, which involves a Monsanto-like agricultural company that forced farmers out of business and into foreclosure.  The corporate giants are evil and the "little man" may in fact be somewhat justified in taking extreme vengeance.

While I have heard there may be some problems with Monsanto's business practices (I don't know much about this issue), that doesn't justify murder and they are not necessarily the corporate norm.  Television shows like this want us to sympathize with the downtrodden, the 99%.  We can sympathize, and certainly there are situations in which people are taken advantage of by big business, but this isn't the fault of the capitalist system.  This is a function of living in a fallen world and of too much government intervention in business. 

Spoiler Alert: Just in case the liberal bias wasn't glaring enough for the viewer, at the end of the episode the producers throw another hint out.  Pierce is trying to talk the murderer down from a hostage situation and prevent him from blowing up two innocent people, himself, and the professor.  Pierce understands how this man feels and how he's been wronged and is trying to prevent more lives lost.  The FBI SWAT team is outside, and they have a sniper in position ready to shoot this poor wronged individual (and save 3 other lives in the process) as soon as he goes in front of a window.  The sniper is wearing a "Don't Tread on Me" baseball cap.  Hmm, you think they got their point across?

Headline Mix-Up?

In April 2012, this was Bloomberg Businessweekly's cover:

(This with the official unemployment rate above 8%, real unemployment well into double digits, anemic and slowing economic growth, soaring gas prices, a deficit near $15 trillion, and huge majorities of Americans believing the country is on the wrong track.)

A month later, this was Bloomberg Businessweekly's cover:

I'm fairly certain this magazine mixed up its headlines.  The first picture was supposed to go with the second headline.

October Baby and the NY Times

I thought I'd share this brilliant movie "review" from the New York Times for October Baby.

Priceless, isn't it?

The movie opens today. Go see it.

The Hypocrisy of the Left

Michelle Malkin has a great column out showing the mind-blowing double standard of the left-wing media when it comes to civility towards women. She lays out the case pretty compellingly, quote by quote. Kirsten Powers, a refreshingly honest Democratic consultant, has recently done the same thing.

There are some more worthwhile comments on this topic from Jim Geraghty's blog The Campaign Spot here and here. And James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal has some interesting thoughts on a broader related them -- the cultural contradictions of feminism.

The bottom line is, if you are a conservative, you should expect to be accused of hating women, gays, immigrants, blacks, Muslims, Mormons, and the poor. (Or even if you're not conservative - just ask Juan Williams.) You should expect to be accused of being racist, intolerant, and backward and of being against science and against the separation of church and state. The epithets will be much worse if you are an outspokenly conservative woman or an outspokenly conservative black, because such people break the mold in a way that threatens the Left.

That's not to say there isn't nastiness and hate on the Right as well. There certainly is. Nor is it to say all liberals are nasty and hateful, because they certainly aren't. Some of my nicest co-workers are liberal. But I believe that vulgarity and hate are far more prevalent on the institutional Left than the institutional Right. Part of this, I believe, is due to Leftist ideology that tends to divide people into different racial and demographic groups for the purpose of addressing grievances and promoting equality of outcome. I have found that Leftists often tend to assume things like all women are pro-choice or all blacks are in favor of affirmative-action, and if they are not then they are somehow betraying their niche group. (Conservatives generally prefer to think of people not as African-Americans, or gay Americans, or Latino Americans, or female Americans, but just Americans.) And of course, this strategy of dividing people along racial or demographic lines is an important part of the Democrats' political strategy, because they depend on overwhelming support from niche racial and demographic voting blocs for their overall success as a party.

But I think the primary reason for the prevalence of vulgarity and hate on the institutional Left compared with the Right is the simple fact that it is far easier to get away with it if you are on the Left. Pretty much all of the liberals cited by Michelle Malkin faced no public outcry or serious consequences for their comments due to media bias and selective reporting. Conservatives, even ones as powerful as Rush, cannot slide by so easily. If, in an alternative universe, the media was dominated by conservatives, I suspect we would see a greater predominance of hate on the Right. In a polarized political environment like the current one, people tend to say whatever they think they can get away with.

UPDATE: Kirsten Powers has written a follow-up column on the double-standard of the media when it comes to misogyny, and it is outstanding! Read it here. Among other things, she notes that Bill Maher is slated to have top Obama advisor David Axelrod appearing on his show in a week or two, and also that Maher donated $1 million to an Obama super-PAC run by a long-time Obama aide. (We found out today that the Obama super-PAC has no intention of returning that money. After all, Maher supports Obama, so his comments about women are no big deal.) Powers adds that Keith Olbermann, another liberal noted for his respect toward women, viciously attacked her for her column on his show, and his followers then contacted her en masse to tell her, among other things, that she was "just another brainless plastic doll Fox puts on camera to appease the horned up 60-year-old white dudes at home.” (These people cannot help themselves.) She notes in conclusion that "the uproar over Limbaugh is only because it fits into the Democratic narrative that the GOP is 'anti-woman.' It’s Democratic Party activism dressed up as feminism."

Oh yeah, and guess who is slated to speak at the upcoming Radio and Television Correspondents Association Dinner? Another left-wing "comedian" who has said unbelievably vile and disgusting things about women, including Sarah Palin. So all these self-important media types who are so exercised about Rush Limbaugh are apparently quite happy to go listen to Louis C.K., who is ten times worse than Rush. At least one journalist, Greta van Susteren, has the guts to speak out against this double standard. Here is her statement about boycotting this event. How many other journalists will do the same?