THE HOUSE actually voted on a bill to penalize doctors who perform “sex-selective abortions.”
The Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act (PRENDA), H.R. 3541, was defeated in a 246-168 vote. While that’s a clear majority of the House, Republicans called up the bill under a suspension of House rules, which limits debate and requires a two-thirds majority vote to pass. In this case, it would have required more support from Democrats.
Twenty Democrats voted for the bill, while seven Republicans opposed it. The bill would have needed 30 more yeas to pass.
It all started when a Live Action video of some Planned Parenthood minimum wage worker was taken, showing her saying something reprehensibly stupid, immoral and unethical, for which she was fired. A new word was learned, “gendercide,” and America was off to the races.
There should be absolutely no sympathy for Planned Parenthood in Texas on this one. After all the scrutiny they’ve been under, to have a incompetent person on staff serve up such a soft ball to people waiting for some lone lunatic to do something stupid makes you wonder if Planned Parenthood has lost their mind.
Let’s also take a time out here to talk a moment about Live Action and the woman who runs it, Lila Rose, of the whole James O’Keefe fake pimp/prostitute infamy, someone who’s also obsessed with Planned Parenthood. Live Action “news” had to be “alerted” by some right wing UK Telegraph hack that Secy. Clinton “opposes” what’s now being called “gendercide.” Besides not being able to list anyone in favor of gendercide, other than one person caught on tape being stupid, What’s really alarming is the people over at Lila Rose’s place actually thought Hillary being against “sex-selective abortions” was news.
Come on, people.
That Live Action can then drag the media around, Bill O’Reilly chief among them, then the House of Representatives, by hyping this story, reveals just how egomaniacle the hard core are on an issue that doesn’t exist as a problem in this country. It’s like worrying about sharia law.
This shouldn’t even be an issue, but since the House decided to vote on a bill, we have to turn our head toward this train wreck. If Congress was a serious institution Speaker John Boehner would be impeached for allowing this idiocy; but he’s too afraid of the Tea Party to stop it.
But our politics is so intellectually corrupt that twenty idiot Democrats actually voted for “PRENDA,” acknowledging their stupidity that “sex-selective abortions” actually exist in any number whatsoever. Either that or they are so incompetent they are incapable of arguing “gendercide” doesn’t require legislation, and are so scared they’d get “caught” being “for” “gendercide” that they just went along anyway. Every one of them has earned a primary challenger.
This is a prime example of why no matter who is elected president in November our country will remain on the skids.
It must be nice to be in a position to hire some minimum wage worker that is an incompetent person, That way they get to be the fall person. Seems if these videos keep on happening, it is a systematic problem. Lack of training, supervision, a problem more to due with the leadership than some lowly peon.
It also involves penalizing doctor’s who perform race selective abortions.
As far as the absurd train wreck that is congress what do you expect? The repugnantklan/teabagger express is full throtle gibbering shit house rat crazy….about what?….abortion.
“It also involves penalizing doctor’s who perform race selective abortions.” another dumber then dog shit non issue designed to stir up the crazies on the right. Just like the whole voter ID bullsh*t a non existent problem that gets the wack jobs blood pulsing.
As far as the planned parenthood workers, how many places did these weasels go before they got this? Please, these bastards are openly and aggrersively trying to deny constitutional rights to women…why aren’t they being investigated and prosicuted for it?
Not just Republicans voting for it, Sec. dumbocrats did too.
Yep, an f-ing disgrace.
If there was ever a case where
, this is it. The rule being: Sex selection through abortion is rare (the exception) in the States. This is not and never will be China or India or Afghanistan (Oklahoma outlawing Sharia and the US Congress trying to outlaw sex selection when neither of these things is the rule is grandstanding and fear mongering at it’s worst).
Here’s a report by Jezebel from April 2012. http://tinyurl.com/7zh93l3
As noted in that article, this incident was not an isolated one (there were 11 incidents of this sort) by Live Action and fact-free Lila Rose who declared to the Daily Caller on Monday:
Which is a load of steaming bullshit, the exceptions are not the rule.
And, I couldn’t agree more with the headline of your post Taylor than if I wrote it myself.
A couple of weeks ago, in a comment on the economy and the sick politics and small-minded politicians involved, I quoted a memorable line from the film “Sunset Boulevard” which bears repeating here:
Not many left in Congress who are not cowardly, ignorant and/or small minded. Talk about exceptions proving the current rule. Sad and tragic for us all. As I mentioned earlier, I’m currently reading Robert Caro’s 4th volume of his epic bio of LBJ and it just is a hard hitting reminder of what a great leader is supposed to be as well as the politicians who stood by him and voted in laws for the common good (even though it wasn’t a walk in the park and even though LBJ knew his party could lose the South forever) and just how small a majority of our leaders and those supposedly representing us have fallen.
Kudo’s to all the Republicans who voted NO to this trojan horse of a bill and shame on the Dems who voted YES, they are as bat shit crazy and reactionary as their bat shit crazy and reactionary GOP counterparts.
And, those speeches on the house floor yesterday by those voting for this trojan horse bill were vomit-inducing inasmuch as they professed to name this BS as the true “war on women”. I don’t think I witnessed a new low in politics because there have been so many in recent memory but this was as close to a contender for top dog in new low in politics as I’ve seen.
Oh, and while I’m here at the same time as cjoblak, when we were all discussing that gross depiction of S E Coup and agreed that it was horrific, we disagreed that this was something new and/or that it was the worst (or to use your phrase “a new low) photo shopped depiction of a political woman, I promised that I would try and find that interview I saw in 2007 on Bill Moyers show. He interviewed Kathleen Hall Jameison, who is one of the most respected and impartial academics working in the field of communication and politics.
Well, I found it and here it is: http://tinyurl.com/2wzlby
The Hillary Clinton misogyny discussion starts at 6:53
The disgusting depiction of S E Cupp is not unique nor new or the worst, it’s just more of the same horrific garbage. Using pornography to vilify the woman in politics or the woman with whom you disagree who may have some power. Standards and practices prevented Moyers from showing the explicit images they speak about but the edited versions are included.
I think you need to dig a little bit further Taylor. The video is from NYC, or at least purports to be. Also the name on card indicates, a LMSW. To get that title you have to have a Master’s degree.
http://www.op.nysed.gov/prof/sw/lmsw.htm
I find it hard to believe that a LMSW, working for PP, would be getting paid minimum wage.
My guess is that Project Live worked the seams of PP policy and found some lower echelon worker-bee as a fall girl. Even from the Breitbarted video it seems that our worker bee was just answering questions posed by the anti-choice fifth columnist. Whether she was actually paid to do such an action is a very good question. Again, I’m guessing the PP worker was slowly worked into giving out the info.
Frankly, I don’t know what PP could have done about this. Every organization has people who do not follow policy guidelines. I can even see the PP Worker Bee doing what she did because she wanted to be “helpful.” Scheduled the procedure, no big deal, the woman will get counseling before the procedure, and most likely the woman will change her mind. It’s just a paperwork drill, people cancel all the time.
I would dearly love to see the full, uncut video though. I’m guessing that this was a 1000% BS Brietbart operation, with critical information left out. How many times did the PP rep suggest that terminating the pregnancy on gender alone was a bad idea? How many times did she present options? How many times did she state PP policy? I would bet my bottom dollar that the video is a gross distortion of what happened.
I will also observe that if you do support a woman’s choice to choose, you have to support a decision that seems be frivolous in your opinion. Granted, were dealing with what is essentially a unicorn, something that does not exist in the real world, but who knows, it could happen; when pigs fly. Hey, I found something even more important than gendercide; we must act on banning porcine aviation immediately! Call, write, e-mail your Congresscritter now!!
Yes, I’d say that if PP was foolish here, then Shirley Sherrod was equally foolish for mentioning that there was a moment in her life when she had a prejudiced thought about white people. After all, we now all know that every moment of our professional lives, it’s possible that there will be someone with a hidden camera filming us saying a bunch of things that they can then edit to mean something that we didn’t say.
Difficult as it might be for folks inside the Beltway to believe, most of us don’t conduct our lives this way. We all have our unguarded moments when we make jokes about our jobs that could be interpreted as not taking them seriously, don’t argue with someone making an outrageous point, or otherwise do something that could look bad later when someone gets creative with the tape. People who do this sort of “creative” editing need to be called out as the lying sacks of dung that they are, and the rest of us need to be aware that it’s possible. Demand the full, unedited video, and if you can’t get it, don’t believe a word.
I suppose we can put this in the same category of legislation as banning human cloning, which Congress and President Clinton did. They’re just staying ahead of the trends.
Too bad they don’t do that when it comes to emergency management, education, war, economic trends, or pretty much anything else of any real consequence.
I suppose we can put this in the same category of legislation as banning human cloning, which Congress and President Clinton did. They’re just staying ahead of the trends. –Cujo359
I would not even call it a possible trend dear puppy, I would call both human cloning and gendercide Chimera; totally mythical, not going to happen, no way no how events.
No women in her right mind is going to willingly abort her fetus at 18-20 weeks just because of gender. In patriarchal cultures and in patriarchal nations a woman might be forced to terminate the pregnancy, she might do it under duress, but not willingly. What is more, that forced abortion is as wrong as a forced pregnancy.
That Congress wasted time on this snipe hunt is an outrage. It is also, unfortunately, par for the course for a institution filled to the brim with reactionary whack-a-loons and the moral cowards that enable them.
gad, what I would do to have the old system, missed a very important verb there.
Should read:
“I will also observe that if you do support a woman’s choice to choose, you have to support a decision that seems to be frivolous in your opinion.”
And since I’m here, let’s get a little more granular. A woman’s right to choose is not up for discussion. Granted, if I were PP, I would have policies and procedures in place to find out why a decision to abort was solely made on the gender of the fetus. I would definitely have the father in for a nice long talk. I would rule out spousal abuse. I would screen for other forms of duress, and yes I would have the woman psychologically evaluated if came to that. This is my bias coming through, I just don’t believe that any woman would terminate a wanted pregnancy, especially at 18-20 weeks- deep into the second trimester, for the reason of gender bias alone. That woman does not exist, she is a figment of anti-abortion fanatics’ imagination. No rational women would make that decision of her own free will. A real live woman might put that rational out as a smoke screen, because she is under deep pressure up to duress by her partner, but it is up to the medical professional to pry that info loose.
This is why I fairly sure the NYC tape is pure horseshit. If the PP member is a licensed LMSW in the state of NY, there is no way she is going to be as cavalier as the tape make her out to be.
And as I’m in a correcting type mood, I did not see the TX tape, just the NYC tape. More to the point, I don’t really care about what happened in TX because the location is trivial. What happened in TX could have happened any place where PP had to hire low-wage, low moral, poorly educated staffers. You get what you pay for. Plus after being burned by the Shirley Sherrod incident and the incident in San Diego with ACORN, I would not be so quick to condemn that TX PP staffer. Remember the pimp video left out some very important details about what went down in San Diego; you know, the whole ACORN staffer was trying to get info to pass on to law enforcement angle.
Last point, I’m not surprised by the smattering of weak sister Democrats who voted for this abomination. When your default is : safe, legal, and rare you’re already in a deep hole with no other option than to raise a white flag. A true pro-choice position is safe, legal, and available for all.
Abortion will never be rare, so to promise that it would become so is to oversell one’s position. Plus why should abortion be rare? It’s a medical procedure, I don’t see anyone supporting the position that dialysis should be safe, legal and rare. Why should there be a cut-out for abortion? Why other than people’s need to slut-shame and indulge in other forms of misogyny?