Republican Congressman Mike Pence flip-flopped on Planned Parenthood funding being a deal breaker on the budget battle with Democrats. Cenk Uygur breaks it down.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Romney forms exploratory committee
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Mon Apr 11, 2011 5:37 PM EDT
One more Republican is finally making his 2012 intentions known. Earlier today, on the fifth anniversary of Romneycare, M. Willard Romney went to the Internets to tell the country that he's launching his presidential exploratory committee. His tweet (which you can see that I retweeted) even included the hashtag, #Mitt2012.
Twitter
Slate.com
If you followed the link in Romney's tweet to his website, you were also introduced to Romney's 2012 logo. And if people thought Pres. Obama's logo looked like a Pepsi logo, the folks at Slate are already making comparison's with Romney's logo.
"Come in today to see if you are a candidate for natural pregnancy termination"
MONDAY, APRIL 11, 2011
Have an unplanned pregnancy in Southwest KY or Northwest Tennessee? Looking for full "medically accurate information" without "judgment" about your "options" from a fully licensed "crisis pregnancy center"? (wink, wink)
Well why not head over to Martin, Tennessee to the Agape "Medical Clinic". Their "professionals" will be able to give you sound accurate medical advice, like this:
Well why not head over to Martin, Tennessee to the Agape "Medical Clinic". Their "professionals" will be able to give you sound accurate medical advice, like this:
Q: Is abortion the best choice for me?OK, besides the factual inaccuracy of the 1 in 4 claim, try to fully wrap your head around that quote.
A: Before seriously considering abortion, you should realize that you may not need an abortion! About 1 in 4 pregnancies ends naturally, in what is called a miscarriage or spontaneous abortion. If this will happen, you can avoid the pain and cost of a surgical abortion. Agape Medical Clinic is not here to sell you a surgical abortion. So come in today to see if you are a candidate for natural pregnancy termination.
The 3:1 Vegas odds... pray for miscarriage!
Asking a "health care professional" if you are a good candidate for a miscarriage.
The exclamation mark.
Do they offer the stairs to their basement?
Remember, as the fetus fetish freak with the "Genocide Awareness Project" told me at UK last week, they are just about giving women the full "truth", you see.
Us Economy in charts
Military spending a political third rail
What a government shutdown means for working Americans
Under the bus: The Planned Parenthood concession Obama and Reid did make
While pro-lifers lament Planned Parenthood wasn’t defunded in the final 2011 budget, Harry Reid andBarack Obama threw 7 Senate Democrats under the bus in the process.Reid and Obama agreed to let the Senate have an up or down vote on defunding PP. We already know such a vote will fail, since 41 Democrats signed a letter on April 4 saying they’d oppose such a measure, making it bullet-proof.
But House Majority Leader John Boehner’s strategy is to force so-called Democrat moderates to go on the record, potentially getting ammo for the 2012 elections.
“Clearly a handful of ‘pro-life’ Democrats’ are in the toughest spot on the vote,”LifeNews.com’s Steve Ertelt wrote me. “ Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, and Bob Casey of Pennsylvania all face tough re-election matchups in 2012, and if any of the 3 cave in to PP and vote against yanking its taxpayer funding will face an even more intense opposition from pro-life voters.”
Such a vote would also make a primary challenger that much more likely. Of note is none of those 3 senators signed the aforementioned letter.
Ertelt continued, “Other Democrats who are pro-abortion but are looking at very competitive Senate races are also going to be watched very closely by pro-life groups. Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Bill Nelson of Florida, Jon Tester of Montana, and Sherrod Brown of Ohio are 4 who will see more motivated pro-life voters working to re-elect them if they vote for funding this massive abortion business.”
Of note is all 4 of those senators signed the aforementioned letter. I’m sure they never expected they’d have to put their votes where their mouths were.
Ertelt also noted that a Republican senator, Dick Lugar of Indiana, is at risk on this vote. “Despite his status as someone who normally votes pro-life, Lugar has already upset pro-life advocates with his vote for the Supreme Court nomination of pro-abortion Elena Kagan,” Ertelt wrote. “He is vulnerable to a challenge from the right from pro-life State Treasurer Richard Mourdock. A vote to fund PP would likely erase whatever pro-life support he has left among Hoosier voters.”
Actually, Obama and Reid also threw PP under the bus by agreeing to Boehner’s demand. A vote in the Senate to defund PP keeps it in the news, further tarnishing its brand.
Ertelt called Boehner’s strategy “brilliant,” explaining it will give pro-lifers fodder for the 2012 elections. “It sets up the pro-life movement to know where these and other senators stand for use in defeating them in the 2012 elections,” wrote Ertelt. “It gives us the ability to make the changes we need to capture the Senate and vote next time around to defund PP. Without this vote, it would have been more difficult to know where we stand and where we need to go to make this happen.”
Right-wing publisher: We run "some misinformation"
MONDAY, APR 11, 2011 18:37 ET
WorldNetDaily's Joseph Farah explains the journalistic standards at his Birther news website
wnd.com
Joseph Farah
Earlier today, I wrote a piece about the falsehood being perpetuated by Donald Trump that Barack Obama has spent $2 million on legal fees fighting Birther lawsuits.
Trump's claim was based on a series of stories on the right-wing and Birther news outlet, WorldNetDaily. I emailed WND editor and CEO Joseph Farah 90 minutes before my story was published to ask if he thought Trump's comments were accurate, and whether WND had evidence to back it up. After my piece came out, Farah angrily emailed me to take issue with my characterization of WND as "a discredited birther website." Our subsequent email exchange -- in which Farah acknowledged that WND publishes "some misinformation by columnists," which he claimed all opinion journals do -- is telling for what it says about the standards of one of the most influential news websites on the right.
The exchange started with Farah calling me a "smear merchant" and writing: "I notice you don’t bother to cite how WND has been discredited. That’s certainly excellent reporting on your part."
Now, WorldNetDaily regularly publishes falsehoods (e.g. about Obama'sbirthplace) and wild conspiracy theories (e.g. about Democratic plans to create concentration camps) that have earned the site criticism even on the right. The organizers of the Conservative Political Action Conference, for example, rejected Farah's request to host a Birther panel at the annual event in 2009. That said, WND is influential. Its stories regularly find their way onto the big cable channels (Trump's "$2 million" claim is a good example) and even get picked up by members of Congress.
In any case, I wrote back to Farah with just one example, the latest, of WND's credibility problem. That would be this column by WND's Jack Cashill on "Barack Obama's missing year." The lead of the column aimed to debunk a famous photo of a young Obama flanked by his grandparents on a bench in New York City. As proof, Cashill embedded a YouTube video that purported to show that Obama had been photoshopped into the picture, and that the real image included only Obama's grandparents.
Unfortunately for Cashill the supposed "genuine" image -- the one without Obama -- was itself a sloppy photoshop job that still included part of Obama's knee between his grandparents. This was pointed out byMedia Matters about eight hours after Cashill's column was published on WND.
At that point WND simply scrubbed the first two paragraphs of the story, without so much as an update, let alone a correction. These lines were now gone:
In his definitive 2010 biography of Barack Obama, “The Bridge,” New Yorker editor David Remnick features a photograph of a dapper young Barack Obama sitting between his grandparents on a Central Park bench.The bench is real. The grandparents are real. The wall behind them is real. Barack Obama is not. He has been conspicuously photo-shopped in. Who did this and why remains as much a mystery as Obama’s extended stay in New York.
When I pointed this out, Farah fired back (emphasis added):
Jack Cashill is an OPINION columnist. Admittedly, we publish some misinformation by columnists, as does your publication and every other journal that contains opinion. Bill Press seldom gets anything right in his column, but because we believe in providing the broadest spectrum of OPINION anywhere in the news business, we tolerate that kind of thing. Yes, Cashill’s column contained an egregious error, which we corrected almost immediately, which is far more than I expect you to do in what I assume is a NEWS piece you wrote.
I asked Farah if it is standard practice at WND to remove major sections of stories without any correction. To which he responded:
How long have you been in this business, punk? My guess is you were in diapers when I was running major metropolitan newspapers. You call what you wrote a news story? You aren’t fit to carry Chelsea Schilling’s laptop.Worm.
(Chelsea Schilling is the WND staffer who wrote the stories on which Trump's "$2 million" falsehood is based.)
A bit later in the afternoon, I got an email from Cashill saying he had asked for the lead of his column to be removed after the "questions about the legitimacy of the photoshopping were raised." He then offered this explanation for why his column was an example of "responsible journalism":
The original photo was apparently released by the Obama campaign in April 2008. The experts with whom I consulted after the fact were not convinced that the original was legitimate, but they were confident that the photo of the couple together in the video had been reverse-doctored. The person who sent me the video did so in good faith, and I suspect that the person who created it did so in good faith as well, but my readers depend on me to be right. So out it went. That strikes me as responsible journalism, especially since I only added it incidentally as a symbol of the mystery surrounding the Obama campaign.
The Base
Apr 11th, 2011 at 6:41 pm
CNN Poll: Majority support deal to avert government shutdown
 | CNN Political Unit |
Washington (CNN) – Who won last week's showdown over the federal budget and the government shutdown-that-wasn't?
It looks like the public gives the Democrats more credit for the deal than the Republicans, but it's nothing like the slam-dunk that Bill Clinton scored during the 1995 government shutdown, and it certainly has not been reflected in President Barack Obama's overall approval rating, according to a new national poll.
A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Monday indicates that the budget agreement that prevented a government shutdown is popular, with Americans supporting it by a 58 to 38 percent margin. But there's a partisan divide, with two-thirds of Democrats and a majority of independent voters backing the deal, and Republicans divided.
A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Monday indicates that the budget agreement that prevented a government shutdown is popular, with Americans supporting it by a 58 to 38 percent margin. But there's a partisan divide, with two-thirds of Democrats and a majority of independent voters backing the deal, and Republicans divided.
Read full results HERE.
By a 48 to 35 percent margin, the public thinks Democrats are more responsible than the GOP for the late Friday night agreement, which prevented a shutdown of some government services and offices. And according to the survey, which was conducted Saturday and Sunday, 54 percent say they approve of how the president handled the budget negotiations, compared to only 44 percent who approve of how the Republican leaders in Congress handled themselves last week.
But this doesn't mean Obama gets a political boost from the deal.
"The president's overall approval rating is now 48 percent; in late March, that figure was 51 percent. This is the first time this year that a CNN poll has found his overall approval rating below 50 percent," says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. "And although President Obama has a ten-point advantage over the GOP leaders on how their handling of the budget negotiations, that's nothing compared to the 30-point advantage President Bill Clinton had over House Speaker Newt Gingrich after the budget showdown in November, 1995."
Back then, 49 percent approved of how Clinton handled those negotiations; only 19 percent approved of how Gingrich handled the deal making.
Speaking of approval ratings, 41 percent approve of how current House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio is handling his duties. Forty-four percent of people questioned say they disapprove of how Boehner's doing as Speaker, with a relatively high 15 percent sure. Significantly for Boehner, 66 percent of Republicans and 61 percent of Tea Party movement supporters think he is doing a good job as Speaker.
"Nonetheless, the GOP rank and file appears to be a bit restless about Friday's budget agreement, while Democrats don't have the same concerns. Did the GOP leaders give up too much in the budget agreement? Only 25 percent of all Americans think so, but that figure rises to 50 percent among all Republicans," says Holland. "Did Obama and the Democrats in Congress give up too much? Only a third of Democrats feel that way."
What about the non-budgetary issues that suddenly became so important in last week's endgame?
The poll indicates that two-thirds think that the federal government should continue to provide funding to Planned Parenthood, although six in ten continue to oppose using public funds for abortions for women who cannot afford them. Currently, federal law prevents any federal funds from being spent on abortions.
According to the survey, seven in ten think the government should continue to provide funds for the Environmental Protection Agency to enforce regulations on greenhouse gases, and only four in ten would favor legislation to prevent the government from spending money to implement the new health care law that Obama signed last year.
The CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll was conducted by telephone, with 824 people questioned. The survey's overall sampling error is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
-CNN Deputy Political Director Paul Steinhauser contributed to this report
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