Justin's Political Corner

Not content with attempting to impose his anti-abortion agenda upon the women who live in the nation’s capital, Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) now intends to push for a nationwide bill to criminalize abortions after 20 weeks. Franks, who invoked the illegal abortion provider Kermit Gosnell to justify his decision to re-introduce a 20-week abortion ban in DC, now says that Gosnell’s crimes have compelled him to amend his bill so it applies to women across the country.

The Arizona congressmember announced his decision to expand his bill on Friday. In a statement, Franks compared Gosnell — who has been convicted of killing of three infants that were born alive following botched illegal, unsanitary abortion procedures — to all late-term abortion procedures. “Had Kermit Gosnell dismembered these babies before they had traveled down the birth canal only moments earlier, he would have, in many places nationwide, been performing an entirely legal procedure,” Franks said.

However, that’s a gross mischaracterization of the state of legal abortion services throughout the country. Abortion opponents have repeatedly attempted to twist the facts surrounding Gosnell’s high-profile murder trial to make it appear as if his crimes are rampant throughout legal abortion clinics. But that’s simply not the case. The Philadelphia-area abortion doctor was guilty of much more than simply breaking Pennsylvania’s law that criminalizes abortion after 24 weeks of pregnancy; he was also able to offer discounted prices for his services because he didn’t employ medical professionals or adhere to safety standards. Gosnell’s “house of horrors” isn’t analogous to the way that legal, sanitary late-term abortion clinics provide care to thewomen who need it.

Furthermore, it’s misleading to pretend that Franks’ quest to cut off legal abortion care at just 20 weeks represents a push to ban late-term abortions. In fact, 20-week abortion bans are a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade‘s guarantee of legal abortion rights until the point of viability, which is generally accepted to occur around 24 weeks of pregnancy. That’s why, after a handful of states recently enacted 20-week bans, several of them landed in court.

DC Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (D) has fought against Franks’ 20-week abortion ban every time he’s proposed it. She maintains that imposing abortion bans on the District of Columbia is a “stealth way” for abortion opponents to discreetly challenge Roe, since DC doesn’t have anyrepresentation in Congress. Now that the bill will apply to the rest of the nation, she remains committed to working to defeat it. “With the help of women nationwide, we defeated the D.C. abortion ban bill on the House floor last Congress. Now that the Franks bill will expressly target all U.S. women, we can expect an even stronger national response to this attack on women’s health,” Holmes Norton said in a statement.

Ironically, pushing to restrict women’s access to abortion isn’t actually an effective policy solution to prevent future Kermit Gosnells. If Franks and his anti-choice colleagues wanted to ensure that desperate women in other states don’t have to resort to illegal providers like Gosnell, they should actually be working to make abortion services more affordable and accessible to low-income women.

h/t: Think Progress Health

After the tragic death of Savita Halappanavar, the 31-year-old woman who died after being denied an abortion in an Irish Catholic hospital, the fight for reproductive rights has taken on a new fervor in Ireland. Activists flooded the streets to declare that Savita’s death won’t be in vain, demanding a policy shift in the socially conservative country’s stringent abortion laws. And now, inspired by the momentum sparked by Savita’s case, pro-choice activists are risking up to 14 years in prison to spread the word about how Irish women can safely travel to Great Britain to obtain an abortion.

Under Ireland’s total abortion ban, women aren’t able to legally terminate a pregnancy unless their lives depend on it — but, as Savita’s case illustrates, doctors in the deeply Catholic country are often wary to provide abortion care even in cases of medical emergency. The rest of Europe allows for much greater reproductive freedom. On average, about 11 Irish women travel to Britain each day to terminate a pregnancy. Activists are risking jail time to disseminate information to those women, giving them more resources to help them access the care they need either abroad or online:

They are targeting cafes, pubs, clubs, gym changing rooms and public toilets with thousands of leaflets giving contact details for British abortion clinics as well as the price of terminations. The literature includes a website where Irish women can buy early abortion pills (effective up to nine weeks of pregnancy) online via womenonweb.org.

Organisers and supporters behind the campaign, which began after Savita Halappanavar’s death in Galway University Hospital last autumn, say they intend to intensify their leaflet blitz after the government approved a bill on Tuesday to allow for strictly limited abortions in Ireland.

Disseminating information on how to buy early abortion pills is illegal in the Republic and under the new legislation those helping to procure an illicit termination risk being jailed for up to 14 years.

The Abortion Support Network (ASN), a Irish charity that helps women access abortion services in Britain, applauded the guerrilla campaign. “The leaflet is a one-stop shop that tells women which local organisations can provide unbiased information about all their options, contact details for clinics in England and information on where to turn to for financial help or access to early medical abortion pills,” one of ASN’s founders, Mara Clarke, told the Guardian. “This information needs to be put into the hands of women and I hope the leaflets find their way into every women’s toilet, changing room and pub in Ireland.”

The proposed measure also doesn’t include any exceptions for rape, incest, or fatal fetal defects. A group of women who were forced to travel to Britain to obtain an abortion because their fetuses had fatal abnormalities, and therefore would have died shortly after birth, told the Guardian they have been “left out and let down” by the new legislative push.

h/t: Tara Culp-Ressler at Think Progress Health

There are two roles anti-choicers like to play for which they are ill-equipped. First, they like to play doctor. And second, they like to play God. In doing so, they spread outright lies about both abortion and contraception to mislead and whip the public into a frenzy about sex, pregnancy, and childbirth. And then, believing themselves to be the righteous ones, they seek to capitalize on their self-created panics to make public health and medical policy for the country based solely on emotion, facts be damned. Their end goal, as they make clear, is to outlaw abortion and contraception no matter the costs to public health, women’s lives, or society writ large.

The trial of Kermit Gosnell provides anti-choicers and their allies with a perfect platform for their efforts. In Gosnell, they have an unethical, unscrupulous criminal acting as a doctor. He preyed on women too poor to seek early, safe abortion care, ran a filthy “clinic,” and conducted illegal abortions during which, it is alleged, some infants were born alive and killed. In their quest to make safe, legal abortion care as inaccessible as possible, anti-choicers are now seeking to sway public policy by conflating safe abortion care with Gosnell’s atrocities, to tar all legitimate providers of safe abortion care as Gosnell clones, and to use a criminal case as a justification to drive legitimate providers out of business.

Rubin, for example, calls for changes in Medicaid but appears not to understand how Medicaid works in the first place. She also calls for changes in federal funding of abortions, but appears not to understand that current law already severely restricts public funding of abortion.

She writes:

First, all Medicaid and other federal support for abortion services should come with caveats—health standards (of the type Pennsylvania refused to issue and enforce) and appropriate training for all personnel. Second, federal taxpayer dollars should not go for late-term abortions.

Let’s start out by making clear that this is the kind of grasping for irrelevant straws I described above (using the existence of a criminal to tar and feather an entire field of professionals who have no relationship to the criminal activity). For one thing, as confirmed in a phone call today to thePennsylvania Department of Public Welfare, and notwithstanding the fact that what he did was illegal in the first place so the case illustrates nothing about safe abortion care, Gosnell was not receiving Medicaid payments for women seeking abortion. In fact, in 2010, there were only seven abortions in the entire state of Pennsylvania paid for by state tax funds, and no federally funded abortions anywhere in the state that year. As in zero. Zip.

Rubin’s suggestion that federal taxpayer dollars should not go for abortions also is a head-scratcher, since the Hyde Amendment already forbids the use of federal funds for abortions except in cases of life endangerment, rape, or incest. This law has guided public funding for abortions for low-income women under joint federal and state programs since 1977. 

Perhaps Jennifer Rubin was out of the country or not reading the papers in 2002 when President Bush signed into law the Born-Alive Infant Protection Act. This is federal law, as in it covers all the states. Since Kermit Gosnell is and was a criminal, he was not adhering to the law, as is the nature of the term “criminal.”

And exactly how far does Rubin want to go to eliminate late abortions? Under Roe v. Wade, states may not prohibit abortions even after fetal viability in cases where it is “necessary to preserve the life or health” of the woman. Third-trimester abortions, which make up an estimated 1.3 percent of abortions in the United States, happen when there are medical complications that compromise the life or health of the woman in question or fetal anomalies incompatible with life. In the Gosnell case, women who came for late abortions came for them because they didn’t have enough money to get early abortions, conditions created by the very policies Rubin advocates.

If she wants a total ban on late abortions without exceptions for life and health, which women does Ms. Rubin suggest should be left to die? Which women should be left with lifelong health problems from a pregnancy gone horribly wrong? It’s a little harder when you have to face real people in need, so I ask, for which of these women does Rubin feel she or others are better equipped to decide what to do? Would she make the choice for Kate? For Gracie’s parents? For Autumn Elise’s parents? Why does Rubin or anyone else get to decide for these families what is best for them?

The inconvenient truth here is that the very policies anti-choicers espouse are the ones that create the conditions in which Gosnells thrive: limiting access to safe abortion care by closing clinics, driving up the costs, requiring women to go through innumerable unnecessary hoops to secure an abortion, and driving them later in the process—denying women living in poverty public support for safe abortion care. All of these and other policies espoused by anti-choicers drive women to desperate circumstances, as a trip to any number of countries with high rates of maternal mortality from complications of unsafe abortion will tell you.

Remember this, anti-choicers: YOUR failed ideology on reproductive choice (aka abortion) is going to be responsible for MORE Kermit Gosnell-type situations, NOT fewer.

h/t: Jodi Jacobson at RH Reality Check

But is it true? Let’s take a look at several issues and how both mainstream liberals and mainstream conservatives respond. I will be adding links to the conservative side to forestall the usual “Straw man” complaint.

1. Abortion: Can a woman abort a fetus and if so, up to what stage of development?

Liberals – Currently, there is no way to know when a fetus/zygote becomes a  person with the same moral weight as a “post-uterine” individual. In the absence of anything more solid than, “That’s how I feel about it,” liberals are willing to let the choice belong to the woman up to the point of viability. No one is comfortable with a 30 week abortion except under dire circumstances.

Conservatives – Not only have they declared that a single celled zygote is the same as a 10 year old child but have tried to pass laws to allow civilians to kill abortion providers and arrest women suspected of trying to induce a miscarriage.

Who is more extreme?

2. Religion in school – Should religion be promoted in school through teacher-led prayer and religious iconography or should schools be “religion neutral?”

Liberals – They would prefer to keep religion out of schools so no one religion is promoted over others in a country with literally hundreds of different faiths and sects (or none at all). This way, no one is ostracized or pressured.

Conservatives – They want Christianity, only Christianity and a particular brand of Christianity (No Catholics or Mormons!) taught in schools. At the same time, they do not want objective and verifiable science taught because it runs counter their very specific brand of fundamentalist Christianity. No evolution and no six billion year old Earth.

Who is more extreme?

3. Banning religion – Should the United States pass laws against unpopular religions in direct contradiction of the First Amendment?

Liberals - Militant atheists, not all of whom are liberals, talk about banning religion but they are a minority and no lawmaker has tried to seriously do this.

Conservatives – Conservatives talk about banning Islam all the time and have passed several “anti-Sharia” laws.

Who is more extreme?

4. Guns – Does society have the right to limit certain kinds of firearms and accessories like semi-automatic assault rifles, extended clips and fully-automatic machine guns while requiring all purchases of guns to be subjected to a background check to weed out criminals, the mentally ill, potential terrorists, etc.?

Liberals - Militant gun control proponents would like to ban all guns like many other industrialized countries have done with no ill effect. They are a minority and no lawmaker has tried to seriously do this. Liberals, in general, believe that background checks will reduce gun crime and banning certain kinds of guns and accessories will reduce, but not eliminate, the ability of killers to commit mass murder.

Conservatives – They have suppressed gun control laws so much that anyone can buy almost any gun at anytime with no oversight whatsoever and want to continue to do so. Conservative lawmakers have pushed laws to allow guns in churches, pre-schools and bars that serve alcohol. Some towns have mandated that every household MUST have a gun. They even want people just released from mental health facilities to immediately be able to buy a gun as well as convicted violent felons. They believe more guns make them safer in direct contradiction to evidence that show states flooded with guns have a high level of gun violence.

Who is more extreme?

5. Marriage – Can the definition of marriage be expanded to include homosexuals? 

Liberals – Considering marriage used to be prohibited between blacks and whites and nothing bad happened when we changed it, liberals would like for people to be able to marry the person they love regardless of their sex.

Conservatives – They insist that marriage has remained unchanged for centuries despite all evidence to the contrary. They also insist that same sex marriage is no different than bestiality and pedophilia despite it being between two consenting adults.

Who is more extreme?

6. Voting – Should we require citizens to obtain special ID in order to vote?

“Big government” Liberals – Everybody should be able to vote with a minimal amount of interference.

“Small government” Conservatives – Everyone should be forced to have “Voter ID” that costs time and money to get in order to fight wide-spread (but strangely impossible to find) “voter fraud.” Curiously, if you ask these same people if guns should be subject to the same kinds of rules to combat the well established tens of thousands of gun deaths and hundreds of thousands of gun crimes a year, they get very upset at this “infringement” on their “freedom.”

Who is more extreme?

7. The President – Does the office of the President of the United States deserve unquestioning respect and obedience in a time of war?

“Totalitarian” Liberals – No. No president should have carte blanche to wage war in our names or be immune to criticism. The right to to petition the Government for a redress of grievances is in the very first amendment in the Bill of Rights. Yet, anyone that criticized President Bush in any way, including about about non-war related policies, was labeled “traitors” by conservatives for “not supporting the president in a time of war” as if he were the God-Emperor of Arrakis.

Conservatives – During the very same war in which Bush was not allowed to be criticized, President Obama has been accused of being a secret Muslim from Kenya, a Nazi, a Communist, a Socialist, a homosexual, a gangsta, a traitor, a terrorist and racial slurs have been tossed around like confetti at a KKK gathering. The calls for impeachment haven’t stopped since almost his first day in office.

Who is more extreme?

8. Taxes – How should the broken tax code be fixed?

Liberals – We want tax loopholes closed for the rich and corporations and for them to pay what they actually owe. Hiding money in tax havens should be aggressively discouraged with confiscation and jail time (just like the rest if us face when we dodge our taxes). A modest tax hike on billionaires wouldn’t be so bad, either but not terribly necessary if the previous steps are taken.

Conservatives – They want to pay no taxes at all (but not a penny to be taken from their Social Security and Medicare) because they’ve been taxed enough already despite having lower taxes than at any point in the last 30 years..

Who is more extreme?

9. Rhetoric – Whose rhetoric displays a disconnect from reality and/or violence?

Liberals – We yell about the banks stealing our money with bailouts and being “Too big to fail,” getting money out of politics, the rich not paying their taxes, no more warmongering, no more rape, no more discrimination, respecting women’s rights, feeding the poor and hungry, stopping Climate Change and freedom of, and from, religion.

Conservatives – While they happen to agree with liberals about the banks, getting money out of politics and no more warmongering, they also say that liberals are violent thugs that are planning on putting conservatives into concentration camps, regularly talk about secession, revolution, Second Amendment remedies, shooting liberals and pray for Obama’s death.

Who is more extreme?

10. Rape – Is rape…rape?*

Liberals – Yes. It doesn’t matter if violence, drugs or coercion were used. If the sex was not consensual, it’s rape.

Conservatives – Well, it depends. Was it legitimate? A Gift from God? Did she get pregnant? Was it forcible? Was her vagina shredded by the rape? If not then it wasn’t “real rape.”

*I’m leaving out all of the slut shaming and “she was asking for it” because that is a product of rape culture and is almost entirely independent of political affiliation. While it is more prevalent among conservatives it’s not remotely confined to them. I’m not even sure they represent a majority in this regard.

Who is more extreme?

Now, conservatives will complain that I’m “misrepresenting them” or “using straw man arguments.” This is why I included all of the links to actual quotes from actual mainstream Republicans or conservatives. These are not fringe beliefs for the right. This is what their elected officials and media representatives say. When a conservative uses the most extreme of left wing positions (They want to ban all guns!), they have to find a blog no one has heard of or random Facebook comments to support their accusation. It certainly isn’t a part of mainstream liberal ideology.

h/t: Justin Rosario at AddictingInfo.org

WARREN, NH — Women in full-time year-round jobs earned 77 cents for every dollar earned by a man. Yet, at a town hall earlier this week, Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) claimed that Congress has done enough to ensure that women receive equal pay for equal work. Indeed, she justified her vote against legislation intended to prevent employers from dodging federal equal pay lawwith an excuse similar to the National Rifle Association’s explanation for why we do not need any more gun laws — we just need to enforce the ones we have:

QUESTION: My grandmother, who was an extremely intelligent woman, trained many, many men who then became her boss, and so on and so forth. [She] never received a pension, never, um, was really paid what she was worth. And I was disappointed that you voted against the Equal Pay Act, but maybe there was something in the bill that you thought would be detrimental to the economy or whatever. But I was curious if you could explain your philosophy about equal pay and how, maybe, you could suggest something that we could all agree upon so that women would stop making 75 cents for every dollar a man makes … .

AYOTTE: We have existing laws — Title VII, um, Lilly Ledbetter, all those existing protections in place — that, I believe, enforce and provide that people doing equal jobs are, certainly in this country, should receive equal pay. So, uh, that bill, in my view, didn’t add — in fact I think it created a lot of additional burdens that would have been hard, um, to make it more difficult for job creators to create jobs… . The reason that I voted against that specific bill is that, I looked at it, and there were already existing laws that need to be enforced and can be enforced and I didn’t feel like adding that layer was going to help us better get at the equal pay issue.

It should go without saying that, if similarly situated women are not making the same amount as their male colleagues, then we aren’t doing enough to close this pay gap. So Ayotte’s suggestion that our current laws are sufficient cannot be squared with the reality facing women in the workplace. The backbone of modern workplace discrimination law was formed by the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and it is indeed true that the pay gap narrowed significantly in the quarter-century after these workplace protections became law.

So when Ayotte voted against this bill, she stood up for employer’s rights to make completely irrational judgments about how much a female worker should be paid, and their right to retaliate against employees who are trying to figure out if they are being treated fairly.

h/t: Think Progress Justice

T-Mobile forced a pregnant employee to clock out every time she used the restroom, even after she obtained, by company request, a doctor’s note urging her to drink more water, ABC reports.

Kristi Rifkin worked at company call center in Nashville for four years before she became pregnant with her third child. As she explained in a blog post for MomsRising.org, “it was a very, very rough pregnancy” that required special medication, twice weekly visits to the doctor, and high water intake.

As Rifkin naturally started using the restroom more often, her employers warned her that trips to the toilet were at the expense of company time. In her post, Rifkin describes the pressure she felt to keep her job, even going so far as putting her physical well being at risk by eating and drinking less.

“Essentially the message was, ‘You can go, but understand that if you don’t meet that metric at the end of the day, week and month, we have the opportunity to fill your seat,’” Rifkin writes. “They didn’t tell me that I couldn’t use the toilet. But the reality was that this is a metric on how your job is measured and if you don’t meet it, then you do not have your job.”

As her increased restroom use persisted, Rifkin’s supervisor asked her to get a doctor’s note saying she needed to fulfill a basic biological necessity.  “And my doctor thought I was crazy,” Rifkin writes. “She told me, ‘I’m sure one person going to the toilet wouldn’t mean the collapse of an entire T-Mobile customer service center!’” However crazy the idea, Rifkin got the note to satisfy her employer.

But that wasn’t enough for the bosses. Rifkin’s supervisors asked her to clock out everytime she used the restroom, effectively punishing a pregnant employee for being pregnant. Rifkin needed every penny, so she continued eating and drinking less, and even used vacation time to use the restroom. Seven weeks before she gave birth to baby boy on May 14, 2010, Rifkin went on the Family Medical Leave Act, which requires employers to provide up to twelve-weeks of unpaid leave to eligible employees.

A month and a half after she returned to work, Rifkin says she was fired, allegedly due to an uncharacteristic error that cost T-Mobile 12 cents. She received no severance and pays for all her medical expenses on her own.

H/T: AlterNet

The anti-choice Susan B. Anthony List made headlines in Virginia last week when it released the first paid advertisement in the gubernatorial battle between Democrat Terry McAuliffe and Republican Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli. The problem is that the centerpiece of the ad, the first in what SBA List promises will be a $1.5 million campaign to support Cuccinelli, is a blatant lie.

The SBA List ad discusses new “TRAP” regulations passed by the Virginia Department of Health and aggressively pushed by Cuccinelli, which burden abortion clinics with unneccessary restrictions in order to shut them down. The ad claims that McAuliffe, by opposing the new regulations, “refuses to require women’s health clinics to provide the same sanitary environment we expect of dental offices and hospitals.”

Politifact Virginia discovers that not only is this claim blatantly false, but Susan B. Anthony List doesn’t even try to back it up with evidence.

Not that this is a huge surprise coming from the Susan B. Anthony list, which has never bothered itself too much with the truth. After all, even the organization’s name is based on a gross distortion of American history.

h/t: Miranda Blue at Right Wing Watch

The anti-abortion rights group Live Action released today an undercover video claiming to reveal “illegal and inhuman practices” at an abortion clinic in New York City, and accused a doctor at the clinic of committing murder. The video reveals nothing of the sort, and actually undermines Live Action’s baseless allegations that the clinic is performing illegal procedures and endangering the lives of patients.

Live Action and its founder, Lila Rose, have a long, disreputable history of perpetrating hoaxes and concocting false allegations against abortion rights supporters, Planned Parenthood in particular. This latest “undercover video” project is timed to coincide with the trial of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, a Philadelphia abortion provider facing multiple murder charges resulting from the monstrous and horrific procedures he is alleged to have carried out under the guise of women’s reproductive health.

The Live Action video depicts a woman at Dr. Emily Woman’s Health Center in the Bronx inquiring after an abortion in the 23rd week of her pregnancy — a procedure that is legal in New York State. The woman speaks to both a clinician and a counselor at the facility, and the video is edited down to make it appear as though the clinician describes a procedure in which a baby that survives an abortion is killed using a toxic solution.

Based solely on this exchange, Live Action claimed that the doctor who performs abortions at the clinic “has violated” the state’s law against murder in the first degree and called on the state’s attorney general to launch a homicide investigation. But Live Action edited out from the video the portion in which the clinician makes clear that the situation they’re talking about has never happened in her experience and the discussion is hypothetical, and the video shows the counselor explaining to the woman that the doctor would have to resuscitate the baby if that situation did occur.

Despite these flaws, the Live Action video has already been written up by the the New York Post, the Daily Caller, and Michelle Malkin’s Hot Air. The story has spread to Fox News and will likely offer grist for other conservative outlets that have been using the Gosnell trial to attack legal abortion. 

While Live Action claims that clinic workers seek to “separate [the woman] from the humanity of her child” in order to “ensure the mother has an expensive abortion,” the full transcript reveals that the counselor urged the woman to be sure that she is comfortable having the abortion and told her to talk it over with a friend before making a final decision.

So despite the inflammatory claims in Live Action’s press release, what the video depicts is two employees at the same clinic reacting to a situation they both say doesn’t actually happen, and one of them accurately describing what would have to happen according to the law. What the video does not depict is any evidence whatsoever that the doctor at the clinic stands in violation of the New York murder statute or the federal Born Alive Infants Protection Act, as Live Action claims.

H/T: MMFA

Hours after President Barack Obama vowed to defend Planned Parenthood at the organization’s national conference on Friday, Sarah Palin wrote a lengthy missive on Facebook, tying the family planning organization to Dr. Kermit Gosnell, a provider of illegal abortions who is on trial for murder.

“Considering the role Planned Parenthood has played in looking the other way while the mass murdering abortion doctor Gosnell butchered babies born alive from his horrific infanticide procedures and abused his women patients, it’s perhaps not surprising that this same president sees nothing wrong with allowing his name to be so openly associated with this organization,” the former Alaska governor and ex-vice presidential candidate wrote on her Facebook page.

Gosnell, 72, ran an abortion clinic in Pennsylvania where he performed gruesome and illegal late-term abortions that endangered, and in some cases ended, the lives his patients. He faces four charges of first-degree murder and one of third-degree murder. He faces the death penalty if convicted.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Dayle Steinberg, president and chief executive of Planned Parenthood Southeastern Pennsylvania, said at a gathering for her organization last week that some women came to Planned Parenthood after visiting Gosnell’s clinic and complained. “We would always encourage them to report it to the Department of Health,” Steinberg said.

She added, “These are criminal, horrendous … acts and should be appropriately punished.”

Conservative anti-abortion groups, including the Susan B. Anthony List, have used the Gosnell trial to boost support for abortion restrictions and charge that Planned Parenthood should be held accountable for failing to report the conditions at Gosnell’s clinic.

“Planned Parenthood last week admitted to knowing about the conditions inside Kermit Gosnell’s Philadelphia clinic yet chose not to act to help end the killing of newborn babies and butchering of women,” Susan B. Anthony List president Marjorie Dannenfelser said in a statement on Friday.

“It seems that nothing – not even eyewitness accounts of Gosnell-style conditions in their own clinics – is enough to make President Obama reconsider his unyielding support for Planned Parenthood, which in a single year performed more than 333,000 abortions and received half a billion dollars in taxpayer money.”

Planned Parenthood receives federal grants through the Title X family planning program, which it uses to subsidize contraception, cancer screenings, sexually transmitted infection screenings and other health services for low-income women. Planned Parenthood patients pay separately for abortion services, because the Hyde Amendment prohibits using federal funds to pay for abortions.

Planned Parenthood contends that it cannot be compared to Gosnell’s clinic because it performs legal, safe abortions in well-regulated facilities. “We have consistently said that this is a horrifying and outrageous case, that Gosnell ran a criminal enterprise, not a health care facility, and that he should be punished to the fullest extent of the law,” said Eric Ferrero, vice president of communications for Planned Parenthood.

h/t: Huffington Post

Steve Kush, executive director of the Bernalillo County Republican Party in New Mexico, took to Twitter on Tuesday to verbally abuse a 19-year-old Working America volunteer who testified in favor of raising the minimum wage. Bernalillo County, the largest county in New Mexico, was considering a proposal to increase the county minimum wage from $7.50 to $8.50.

Rather than listen to the 19-year-old woman’s testimony, Kush mocked her on social media, calling her a “radical bitch”:

As other advocates spoke on Tuesday, Kush was on Facebook, deploying a variety of sexist and offensive insults. He joked that Chelsey Evans, director of the New Mexico branch, “was hot enough to almost make me register democrat.”

Bob Cornelius, the former executive director of the Bernalillo County GOP, replied that Evans was using the boots to “walk Central,” a local street known for prostitution. Cornelius later deleted the comment and apologized. According to Evans, Kush has not yet offered an apology.

ProgressNow New Mexico called for Kush’s resignation, pointing out that a state run by a prominent Republican woman, Gov. Susana Martinez, should not be tolerating “misogynistic statements towards working women time and again.”

Also during the meeting, Kush called the Democrats the “Gestapo” multiple times. Despite the slew of hateful comments made by Kush over social media, the county passed the proposal to raise the minimum wage from $7.50 to $8.50 by 3-2 on Tuesday night.

H/T: Think Progress