COVID-19 & Healthcare

Fact checking GOP lies about Planned Parenthood

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GOP 2016 DebateCarly Fiorina set off fact-check alarm bells during the CNN GOP presidential primary debate when she dared Hillary Rodham Clinton and President Obama to watch a surreptitiously recorded undercover video by the Center for Medical Progress, an anti-abortion group out to destroy Planned Parenthood. “Watch a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain,” she said.

Factcheck.org found that the scene that Mrs. Fiorina urges others to watch is not present in any of the Planned Parenthood videos. Politifact called her statement “mostly false.” Sarah Kliff at Vox.com, who actually watched all 12 hours of footage and is in a position to know says Carly Fiorina is wrong about the Planned Parenthood tapes. I know because I watched them. The Washington Post’s Fact Checker says the same thing. Fact checking the second round of GOP debates: Fiorina might have trouble finding this video to show to Clinton. No video has surfaced showing the scene Fiorina describes taking place inside a Planned Parenthood facility.

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Contraception cases are likely headed to the U.S. Supreme Court

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The Eight Circuit Court of Appeals today became the first Court of Appeals to accept the view that an employer who provides an employee health insurance plan has a “religious liberty” not to be “complicit” in providing birth control and contraception to its employees by the simple act of filling out a form for an exemption that allows the employer not to have to pay for it. This is about paperwork. Contraception opt-out violates religious freedom: US appeals court:

ProtestorsA U.S. appeals court has ruled that President Barack Obama’s healthcare law violates the rights of religiously affiliated employers by forcing them to help provide contraceptive coverage even though they do not have to pay for it.

Parting ways with all other appeals courts that have considered the issue, the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis on Thursday issued a pair of decisions upholding orders by two lower courts barring the government from enforcing the law’s contraceptive provisions against a group of religiously affiliated employers.

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Why adding family leave to an anti-abortion bill is bogus

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Crossposted from DemocraticDiva.com

Charles Camosy
Photo: Catholic Star Herald

Anti-choicers are egregious in general but they are most frustrating to deal when they pretend to be seeking common ground while in reality pushing for the same bad forced birth policies under a thin veneer of caring about women. Some, like Democrats For Life and Secular Pro-Life, pretend to be liberal, all the better to lull reporters and the general public into believing that it’s possible to want to deny women basic bodily autonomy for non-reactionary ends (hint: it’s not). I honestly prefer Trent Franks sobbing about holocausts and the candor of the people in my Twitter feed screaming how I’m a murdering whore because I’ve had an abortion because at least they make it clear where they’re coming from.

A relentlessly self-promoting author and academic, Charles Camosy, “associate professor of Christian ethics at Fordham University and board member of Democrats for Life, author of Beyond the Abortion Wars: A Way Forward for a New Generation” has joined this dubious cohort. The title of his book (on several occasions Camosy has, annoyingly, shilled said book to me in response to specific questions I’ve asked him about policy positions he has stated publicly rather than simply answering them) seems to describe a worthy, and benign, goal.

Camosy provides an example of what he considers a “way forward” in a recent oped in the LA Times:

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The GOP’s ‘Planned’ government shutdown

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Our less-than-less-than-do-nothing Tea-Publican Congress has just a week of session days left to avoid a government shutdown on October 1. Here is the House Calendar for September (Congress is also scheduled to work on October 1 in anticipation of the fiscal deadline).

Screenshot from 2015-09-15 14:45:45

So what do Tea-Publicans plan to do with the few days that they are in session? Why, play to their far-right Tea-Publican base on Faux News, of course! Ahead of Planned Parenthood Battle, House to Vote on Abortion Bills:

As lawmakers return this week for some behind-the-scenes work on a continuing resolution — a measure that could be endangered by anti-abortion members insistent on defunding Planned Parenthood — House Republicans will put forward two bills to address the embattled group and potentially appease those conservatives.

The House is scheduled to vote on two abortion measures: one from Rep. Diane Black, R-Tenn., that would put a one-year moratorium on Planned Parenthood funding and one from Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., that would add criminal penalties for violating the Born Alive Infants Protection Act of 2002.

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Mutiny on the Boehner: Iran, Planned Parenthood, then government shutdown

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FreedomWorksPhase one of the Mutiny on the Boehner is now complete.

On Wednesday, the mutinous GOP House Freedom Caucus took Captain Queeg the TanMan hostage and forced him to pull the scheduled vote on the resolution of disapproval of the Iran agreement. They then forced the nominal Weeper of the House to accede to their hair-brained “Tortilla coast gambit” based on a debunked conspiracy theory about IAEA “secret side deals” with Iran. The GOP House Freedom Caucus ‘Tortilla Coast gambit’ to delay the Iran deal is a fraud.

On Thursday, the House voted on two resolutions claiming that the President had not given them all the information required to be reviewed by Congress under the Iran review law passed by Congress.  Not true: As Max Fischer wrote:

You can read, for yourself, the law that Congress passed articulating its authority to disapprove the Iran deal. Section 135 describes the congressional review period, and specifically articulates the documents that the Obama administration is required to give Congress. There is nothing in there about the text of IAEA safeguards agreements with Iran.

These two resolutions from the GOP’s Gimmicks-R-Us Shoppe were approved on a straight party-line vote without a single Democrat in support. Roll Call Vote 491 243-186 (straight party-line vote); Roll Call Vote 492 245-186 (straight party-line vote). This demonstrates that the TanMan is not in command of his mutinous ship.

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