Jun 13

Obama administration scandals and public opinion polls

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Yet another ‘Breaking News!’ alert sounded on one of the several networks that resorts to them too frequently, and this time the breaking news was that ‘the public is losing trust in the Obama administration.’ Really? Really?

That could raise the debatable point about how much currency the administration still held in the public trust at any point you want to name post-election when apparently enough citizens trusted this president with the country to give his administration control of it for another four years. But that’s another discussion and one seriously outdated at the moment. We’ve moved into new territory in recent months, unchartered since the Revolution, as Senator Rand Paul frequently reminds reporters when he recalls that ‘soldiers went house to house for search and seizure’ but this government is scooping up private information about citizens’ lives without their awareness and therefore without their consent.

So about that ‘public trust’ business that broke into the news cycle, different news outlets and polling companies are continually taking the pulse of the public on everything that happens in American public life, and the results seemed to have reached a tipping point.

‘Most Americans disapprove of NSA phone-record collecting‘ reflected this set of polls. Here’s the CBS one:

Seventy-five percent of Americans approve of federal agencies collecting the phone records of people the government suspects of terrorist activity, but a 58 percent majority disapproves of this type of data collection in the case of ordinary Americans.

Majorities of Republicans and independents oppose the government collecting phone records of ordinary Americans; Democrats are divided.

A day later, polls changed again. If you’re wonkish, read the whole thing. It’s interesting to see how different polls ask questions.

Right — it doesn’t note the mind-boggling scope of the program or emphasize that millions of perfectly innocent Americans are having their data harvested. This question’s just vague enough, in fact, that some people might think it refers to collecting data specifically on terrorist suspects rather than the public at large. That’s why it shows mild approval of the program. Pollsters have to be more careful when asking about this. At a minimum, every question about it should note that the program’s (1) known to Congress and overseen by FISA judges yet also (2) incredibly vast and sophisticated, collecting digital fingerprints from virtually the entire population.

Get that? The entire population. And Obama first told Americans not to worry, it’s foreigners the program is after.

I got all exercised over the government trying to control and regulate property rights on the internet through  SOPA and PIPA. How silly, given the government’s control over that as a minimum.

As for Snowden himself, the picture’s mixed. Reuters finds 31 percent who say he’s a “patriot” and 23 percent who say he’s a “traitor,” with 46 percent following the Rand Paul path of prudence and reserving judgment for the time being. Thirty-five percent say he shouldn’t face charges while 25 percent say he should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Gallup has 44 percent saying Snowden did the right thing versus 42 percent who said he did wrong, with ye olde familiar partisan split: The GOP breaks 49/38 in favor of “right,” Democrats break 39/49 in favor of “wrong.” Time magazine’s numbers in favor of Snowden are more robust, but also more complicated: 54 percent say he did a “good thing,” but 53 percent want him prosecuted for leaking anyway.

Sufficiently confused? Yes. This doesn’t follow any lines, any prototype, people aren’t yet sure. But they – we – are certainly uneasy. We haven’t had a healthy trust of government for a long time. Less so now.

In the little that President Obama has said publicly about his administration’s recently exposed domestic surveillance programs he has returned to the overall motif of his presidency: warning against excessive distrust of the federal government.

Of course. Now he’s the government and controls most of it.

While hawks wait anxiously to see if Obama can summon the political courage to defend the programs he has expanded despite his onetime opposition, the president has so far used the occasion to preach against what he seems to believe is a virus of anti-government sentiment in the nation.

It’s not a virus. It’s a healthy immune system.

The end of human confidence in a zone of individual privacy from the government, plus the very real presence of a system that can harm, harass or invade the everyday liberties of Americans. This is a recipe for democratic disaster.

If—again, if—what Snowden says is substantially true, the surveillance state will in time encourage an air of subtle oppression, and encourage too a sense of paranoia that may in time—not next week, but in time, as the years unfold—loosen and disrupt the ties the people of America feel to our country. “They spy on you here and will abuse the information they get from spying on you here. I don’t like ‘here.’”

Trust in government, historically, ebbs and flows, and currently, because of the Internal Revenue Service, the Justice Department, Benghazi, etc.—and the growing evidence the executive agencies have been reduced to mere political tools—is at an ebb that may not be fully reversible anytime soon. It is a great irony, and history will marvel at it, that the president most committed to expanding the centrality, power, prerogatives and controls of the federal government is also the president who, through lack of care, arrogance, and an absence of any sense of prudential political boundaries, has done the most in our time to damage trust in government.

And don’t forget his promise of the most transparent government Americans have known, which Americans eagerly sought. We’re getting it now. Through serial leaks.

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Jun 10

Leaks and allegiances: The line between hero and traitor

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Identifying the ‘good guys’ and the ‘bad guys’ used to be a function of political alignment with the left or right back in the days of, oh, about a month or two ago. Then the leaks and scandals that had been building out of sight for months and years seemed to suddenly erupt. Practically all at once. Skipping past Benghazi, the IRS, the Justice Department and the initial NSA revelations, we’re now at a point where Edward Snowden and Julian Assange and Bradley Manning are being talked about in the same sentence with an odd sense of disorientation.

What the heck has happened in America lately?

That’s too difficult and tricky to answer, and it requires defining ‘lately’ and maybe even ‘happened’ and it’s not confined just to America, after all.

So, to reset. Bradley Manning was in the US military and smuggled secret national security documents to Julian Assange who posted them on WikiLeaks and has been holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for about a year, because public revelation of classified documents compromising national security is criminal.

Now, National Security Agency program details have been leaked by a contractor who believed they posed an abuse of power and a hazard to citizens’ privacy rights, and he has willingly identified himself through international media, accepted the consequences, and - though that action is illegal and therefore criminal – he is considered a hero by many people but a traitor by others. And this time, the lines have blurred, and both camps contain Democrats and Republicans, the left and the right, conservatives and liberals.

Edward Snowden revealed himself and what he did and why on Sunday, in an interview with the Guardian and exchanges with the Washington Post.

In an interview Sunday, Snowden said he is willing to face the consequences of exposure.

“I’m not going to hide,” Snowden told The Post from Hong Kong, where he has been staying. “Allowing the U.S. government to intimidate its people with threats of retaliation for revealing wrongdoing is contrary to the public interest.”

Asked whether he believes that his disclosures will change anything, he said: “I think they already have. Everyone everywhere now understands how bad things have gotten — and they’re talking about it. They have the power to decide for themselves whether they are willing to sacrifice their privacy to the surveillance state.”

At the same time many Americans were hailing him as a hero for standing up to a tyrant state power, Julian Assange joined them, in an odd day of reactions.

The WikiLeaks founder said the question of surveillance abuses by states and tech companies was “something that I and many other journalists and civil libertarians have been campaigning about for a long time. It is very pleasing to see such clear and concrete proof presented to the public.”

Assange told Sky News that Snowden was “in a very, very serious position, because we can see the kind of rhetoric that occurred against me and Bradley Manning back in 2010, 2011, applied to Snowden”.

Following the Cablegate exposures in 2010 there were calls from some US politicians for Assange to be tried for treason and even assassinated. Manning, who has admitted leaking classified US military secrets to WikiLeaks, is on trial facing 21 charges, including “aiding the enemy”.

Now, news talk shows are filled with analyses of what damage has been done, and what abuses exposed by all this. Like the existence of the Prism program and the facility in Utah to house all the data collection and storage. Der Spiegel says it has “implications for the world.”

South of Utah’s Great Salt Lake, the National Security Agency (NSA), a United States foreign intelligence service, keeps watch over one of its most expensive secrets. Here, on 100,000 square meters (1,100,000 square feet) near the US military’s Camp Williams, the NSA is constructing enormous buildings to house superfast computers. All together, the project will cost around $2 billion (€1.5 billion) and the computers will be capable of storing a gigantic volume of data, at least 5 billion gigabytes. The energy needed to power the cooling system for the servers alone will cost $40 million a year.

Former NSA employees Thomas Drake and Bill Binney told SPIEGEL in March that the facility would soon store personal data on people from all over the world and keep it for decades. This includes emails, Skype conversations, Google searches, YouTube videos, Facebook posts, bank transfers — electronic data of every kind.

(They told Spiegel this in March. This is June. Was there follow up? Anybody ask any questions? This may have just erupted, but clearly people knew a lot before now.)

“They have everything about you in Utah,” Drake says. “Who decides whether they look at that data? Who decides what they do with it?” Binney, a mathematician who was previously an influential analyst at the NSA, calculates that the servers are large enough to store the entirety of humanity’s electronic communications for the next 100 years — and that, of course, gives his former colleagues plenty of opportunity to read along and listen in.

This is only beginning to break open across the media. And they’ve grown sadly and notoriously slow to do their job of investigative journalism and asking the right questions and reporting details accurately and without bias.

For now, it’s interesting to see the hand-wringing consternation over what Snowden did and whether he’s a hero or traitor (a question which has already become cliche by Monday). More will come out, investigations will follow.

But for now, the good I take from this is that people are wrestling with the difference between right and wrong, and ends justifying means, and human rights deprived, and the abuse of power and authority and the rule of law. Those questions transcend politics. And ultimately pre-date the State. The sooner we work this out the better.

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Jun 06

Obama administration is losing credibility

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Or as the New York Times put it, at least briefly, “the administration has now lost all credibility.” Before they moderated their criticism. Though even moderated, it was still criticism of the obvious egregious abuse of power.

Here’s the report on the story on the abuse. Which was actually an editorial by the NYT board on ‘President Obama’s Dragnet,’ the text of which Frank Weathers provides in part.

Within hours of the disclosure that the federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights.

Those reassurances have never been persuasive — whether on secret warrants to scoop up a news agency’s phone records or secret orders to kill an American suspected of terrorism — especially coming from a president who once promised transparency and accountability. The administration has now lost all credibility. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it. That is one reason we have long argued that the Patriot Act, enacted in the heat of fear after the 9/11 attacks by members of Congress who mostly had not even read it, was reckless in its assignment of unnecessary and overbroad surveillance powers.

Based on an article in The Guardian published Wednesday night, we now know the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency used the Patriot Act to obtain a secret warrant to compel Verizon’s business services division to turn over data on every single call that went through its system. We know that this particular order was a routine extension of surveillance that has been going on for years, and it seems very likely that it extends beyond Verizon’s business division. There is every reason to believe the federal government has been collecting every bit of information about every American’s phone calls except the words actually exchanged in those calls.

A senior administration official quoted in The Times offered the lame observation that the information does not include the name of any caller, as though there would be the slightest difficulty in matching numbers to names. He said the information “has been a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats,” because it allows the government “to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities, particularly people located inside the United States.”

That is a vital goal, but how is it served by collecting everyone’s call data? The government can easily collect phone records (including the actual content of those calls) on “known or suspected terrorists” without logging every call made. In fact, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was expanded in 2008 for that very purpose. Essentially, the administration is saying that without any individual suspicion of wrongdoing, the government is allowed to know who Americans are calling every time they make a phone call, for how long they talk and from where.

This sort of tracking can reveal a lot of personal and intimate information about an individual. To casually permit this surveillance — with the American public having no idea that the executive branch is now exercising this power — fundamentally shifts power between the individual and the state, and repudiates constitutional principles governing search, seizure and privacy.

The defense of this practice offered by Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, who as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee is supposed to be preventing this sort of overreaching, was absurd. She said today that the authorities need this information in case someone might become a terrorist in the future. Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the vice chairman of the committee, said the surveillance has “proved meritorious, because we have gathered significant information on bad guys and only on bad guys over the years.”

But what assurance do we have of that, especially since Ms. Feinstein went on to say that she actually did not know how the data being collected was used? The senior administration official quoted in The Times said the executive branch internally reviews surveillance programs to ensure that they “comply with the Constitution and laws of the United States and appropriately protect privacy and civil liberties.”

That’s no longer good enough.

Frank’s Patheos blog post has the links and commentary, and it’s about time this is all said. That the Times is saying it is a sign of, well, the times. Daily Beast columnist and USA Today contributor Kirsten Powers has been a bellwether. She posted this on her Facebook page Thursday:

Why is it that it seems like almost every important thing we learn about the Most Transparent Administration in History is because of leaks?

Liberal commentators are now calling out the administration. It’s about time.

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May 23

What is ‘wrong’ at the IRS?

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It’s like asking congressional interrogators to define the meaning of ‘is’. In the growing IRS scandal under congressional investigation, the IRS chief who has the most to say refuses to say anything other than that she did nothing wrong.

Which made me wonder if she really believes that, in the increasingly hostile political climate in which, for some, the end justifies the means, and the end is to advance an agenda by means of targeting and crushing opponents of it. The question of what behaviors are ‘wrong’ in this culture is certainly treated with aggression because relativism prevails. But saying something is not wrong doesn’t make it right, it’s just a denial of a truth.

Congressional investigators are trying to get at the truth of the IRS targeting scandal, and they’re growing increasingly frustrated.

As the House Oversight Committee commenced its hearing on the IRS Scandal Wednesday, it was clear that Democrats, visibly angered by the decision of IRS Exempt Organizations director Lois Lerner to answer questions, turned on the agency. Lerner invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

In a fiery statement, Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-MA), cited the State Department’s annual human rights report, and the practice of tyrannical regimes that enact human rights on paper but fail to honor them in practice. He compared the conduct of the IRS in singling out Tea Party and conservative groups to those regimes.

The witnesses were then sworn in. Lerner read an opening statement in which she denied providing false information to the committee or any other body: “I have not done anything wrong,” she said defiantly.

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) demanded that Lerner be made to testify, arguing that she had waived her Fifth Amendment rights by telling her side of the story. In a courtroom, he said, she would have been regarded as having waived her rights–and, he pointed out, Ranking Member Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) had said he wished to conduct the hearings like court proceedings.

Actually, Lerner showed some of her sense of right and wrong by starting to tell her side of things in that opening statement, and then claiming the Fifth so as not to have to tell more. Which means she not only likely waived her Fifth Amendment rights as Gowdy and others claim, but she may have exposed herself to contempt charges, says noted legal expert Alan Dershowitz.

Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz said Wednesday that Lois Lerner, the IRS official who oversaw exempt organizations during the admitted targeting of conservative political groups, could be held in contempt and even go to jail after her appearance at a congressional hearing earlier in the day.

Lerner made a brief opening statement — insisting she had “done nothing wrong” — before invoking her Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate herself. Some legal scholars, including Dershowitz, have said that in giving the opening statement, Lerner may have waived her Fifth Amendment protections.

“She’s in trouble. She can be held in contempt,” Dershowitz told “the Steve Malzberg Show” on Newsmax TV. “Congress … can actually hold you in contempt and put you in the Congressional jail.”

Dershowitz, who helped advise O.J. Simpson’s defense team, said Lerner “should never have been allowed” to make her opening statement.

“You can’t simply make statements about a subject and then plead the Fifth in response to questions about the very same subject,” Dershowitz said. “Once you open the door to an area of inquiry, you have waived your Fifth Amendment right… you’ve waived your self-incrimination right on that subject matter.”

That’s clear to someone who knows right from wrong.

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May 20

“Obama’s campaign to silence”

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That, by the usually Obama friendly Christian Science Monitor, is a pretty apt description of what’s going on lately.

The article is about the Monday revelation that Fox News Washington correspondent James Rosen was targeted in a sinister way, a questionably legal one, for investigation by the Obama Justice Department. The same one that targeted the Associated Press for…what?…following a White House request to hold a scoop for a week before publishing it, only to add more time so the White House could get it out first. After complying with the request for the week’s wait, the AP wisely went with their instincts and published. Then the Justice Department seized their telephone records for a two-month period, in what the AP described as a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into news-gathering operations.

The latest revelation about Fox News correspondent Rosen just builds on suspicions that after last week’s outburst of scandals, more would come to light. It has. It is chilling, and I wonder why some headlines put that word in single or double quotes, as if to distance themselves a bit from the statement while still reporting it. Maybe it’s because the Fox News chief called it that. But who in the media can deny that it is that?

The Christian Science Monitor reports:

This time, it’s new details about a 2010 Justice Department investigation into a Fox News correspondent who reported government secrets on North Korea. The twist is that in the Fox News case, the government is suggesting that the reporter broke the law and criminal charges could result.

The news points to how the Obama administration is going to unprecedented lengths to defend secrets – prosecuting more government leakers under the 1917 Espionage Act than all prior administrations combined.

There is significance in that notation. First of all, the government suggested the reporter  is involved in a ‘criminal conspiracy’ in order to gain access to his phone and email records without having to notify him or his employer about the investigation. And second, note that Obama is not going to lengths unprecedented by the administration prior to his, or another particular administration, but “all prior administrations combined.” Consider the scope of that.

Administration operatives have been busy using the same talking points on many media outlets saying things that are finally as transparent as Obama claimed his administration would be in his 2008 campaign. It’s no coincidence that some of the assaults on basic freedoms started in that year, and these investigations go back to at least 2010. But it’s disingenuous at best to resort to claims that other administrations ‘did the same thing,’ or that the IRS chief involved was appointed by former president George W. Bush. I find that only slightly less reprehensible than Catholics who claim that charges about the abuse crisis also apply to clergy in other churches, or other heads of organizations where young people are involved. But still intolerable as a response to such abuse of authority.

I’m glad the outrage is bi-partisan. It should be. This is not American, nor just nor excusable. This is so far beyond the pale that it calls for special investigation. Look at what Nixon did and was impeached for, justly. This goes beyond breaking into the headquarters of the opposing political party to steal secrets. Without the qualifying quotation marks, this is chilling.

Anecdotal evidence suggests the crackdown is having an effect, with AP saying some of its sources are falling silent. But that success could come at the expense of the newsgathering and investigative-reporting process that the Founding Fathers saw as a crucial check on federal power.

The Fox News case, in particular, suggests the “criminalization of investigative journalism,” writes Glenn Greenwald in The Guardian, a British newspaper.

Okay, attribute it to a foreign newspaper if you want distance from the story. But shame on you if you do.

At least the most recent White House press conferences have shown some correspondents willing to, finally, ask tough questions. It only took them four plus years. At least this Yahoo news report doesn’t qualify the term chilling.

The Justice Department spied extensively on Fox News reporter James Rosen in 2010, collecting his telephone records, tracking his movements in and out of the State Department and seizing two days of Rosen’s personal emails, the Washington Post reported on Monday.

In a chilling move sure to rile defenders of civil liberties, an FBI agent also accused Rosen of breaking anti-espionage law with behavior that—as described in the agent’s own affidavit—falls well inside the bounds of traditional news reporting.

It’s a play on words, changing language to form people’s opinions. Only it’s not working this time.

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May 16

IRS targeting scandal grows, among others

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There is bi-partisan outrage over the widening scope of the revelation that the powerful Internal Revenue Service has been targeting groups said to be conservative for the past couple of years. But the IRS target list was much wider than that, and the agency’s treatment of these groups and citizens is both shocking and disturbing.

Even the president said so. That NBC News article asks five very good questions, most of which are as yet unanswered.

The president’s claims of not knowing what the IRS was doing until he heard it in the news was surreal, but so is this whole drama. By the time he addressed it, the president said “if this is true…” when it was actually admitted to by the IRS the previous Friday. He’s got some catching up to do. Like what the IRS was putting these groups through in information gathering, such as records of all direct and indirect communications that group had made.

“‘Direct and indirect communications’ is profoundly chilling of First Amendment rights, ” said David French, senior counsel for American Center for Law & Justice, which has been representing 27 conservative organizations met with IRS inquisitions. “It’s so vague as to be impossible to comply with.”

They wanted to know everything about all members of the organization, present and past employees and their relationships. They wanted documentation of any interaction with the press, any, whether interviews, press releases or letters to the editor, among others. Read the whole post itemizing only some of the unbelievable and harassing demands of the federal agency, with screen shots of their menacing forms.

At first, it was allegedly Tea Party and other conservative groups singled out for this harsh treatment. Then others started coming to light. This pro-life group claimed they were targeted.

Shinn launched Cherish Life Ministries, a separate organization, to offer help to a coalition of churches that supports mothers struggling with unexpected pregnancies, promotes abstinence and advocates for an end to abortion in the community, state and nation.

“Our goal is to assist churches, organize and support a life ministry in defense of life and help function as an outreach to people struggling with unwanted pregnancies in the local community,” the site states.

Education materials are offered.

But Shinn said the IRS contacted him regarding his application for nonprofit status, and was told he didn’t qualify.

“The representative was telling me I had to provide information on all aspects of abortion, I couldn’t just educate the church from the pro-life perspective,” he said. “Every time I pressed her on this issue and asked her to clarify her position, she would state that it wasn’t what she was saying, and then, she would repeat it almost the same way.”

And it went on.

On to a prominent Catholic professor who was afraid to share her experience publicly until now.

In the midst of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) scandal, individuals and groups, alike, are continuing to come forward with ever-startling allegations. On Wednesday, Dr. Anne Hendershott, a devout Catholic and a noted sociologist, professor and author, exclusively told TheBlaze that she believes she may have been one of the IRS’s targets.

According to Hendershott, the IRS audited her in 2010 and demanded to know who was paying her. While they did not ask directly it seemed as though the agent wanted to know about the leanings of these particular organizations.

It all started with a phone call she received at her home in May of that year — a call during which Hendershott was told she would be audited. A letter that followed on May 19, 2010 solidified the IRS’s request to meet her in person two months later in July. While IRS investigations are certainly not uncommon occurrences, the professor believes that the situation surrounding hers was more-than-curious.

“The IRS calls my house and says … ‘I just wanted to let you know that we’re going to be auditing your business’ and I said ‘My businesses?’ and he said, ‘You know the expenses you take off for writing,” the academic recalls.

Her story gets more and more bizarre as it goes, but that call should have been a flag. The IRS does not call to notify people of their scrutiny. It comes in a letter. But that’s a small detail in such an onslaught of information coming to light about what that agency has been doing to people for years.

This all came out, by the way, just after the congressional hearing on Benghazi, another growing scandal for this administration. Former senator Fred Thompson is one of many voices calling for a special committee to investigate. Attention on that hasn’t gone away, but it has certainly been diverted by that IRS revelation.

As this breaking news continued getting breaking updates, other breaking news broke in on it to reveal more scandals. Like the Justice Department seizing phone records from the Associated Press, without the AP knowing about it.

The Associated Press on Monday said the U.S. government secretly seized telephone records of AP offices and reporters for a two-month period in 2012, describing the acts as a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into news-gathering operations.

AP Chief Executive Gary Pruitt, in a letter posted on the agency’s website, said the AP was informed last Friday that the Justice Department gathered records for more than 20 phone lines assigned to the agency and its reporters.

“There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters,” Pruitt said in the letter, which was addressed to Attorney General Eric Holder.

And this has all continued to grow.

There’s so much to say about this breach of public trust, the breach of federal powers and authority and of constitutional rights. There’s much to say about responsibility and transparency, which the American people were promised in this administration. And about its odd habit of disclaiming any knowledge of these things until they hear it from the press.

But sometimes comedians find a pithier way to say things, like The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart did here.

And citizens who take to the Facebook forum to express their concerns. Like this man, after hearing enough about the abortionist’s ‘house of horrors’ and the government scandals rolling out on the heels of that abortion trial verdict.

I don’t want revenge, I want justice. Justice in the Benghazi case, justice for SEAL Team 6, justice in the IRS scandal, justice in the Gosnell case, justice for all the babies killed in their mother’s womb. I want the truth to prevail. I am so tired of the lying, cheating and stealing. What has happened to our humanity? I know who wins in the end, but how bad does the battle have to become before we get there?

It seems pretty bad right now to a lot of people. But the good news is, it’s coming to light.

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May 06

Gosnell uncovers what Roe wrought

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And undercover videos show Gosnell is no ‘aberration.’ Some honest advocates of ‘choice’ are seriously reconsidering their whole premise and belief system in light of recent news. While some ‘abortion rights’ activists are coming unglued over these revelations.

Here’s the latter case in point. Watch the video. Listen to the video exchange, and the studio exchange, which isn’t really an exchange at all. There’s no disputing what the Gosnell trial reveals about the logic of abortion. There’s no disputing what the Live Action video reveals. But Tamara Holder disputes alright, though not with reason and logic and the art of debate.

Over the past few years, I’ve seen Tamara Holder on television news shows many, many times engage in lively and sometimes heated panel discussions of politics and policy, and she tends to be very committed to liberal causes and positions. Which is fine. Let there be reasoned debate of each position.

But in this video with Lila Rose of Live Action, Holder comes undone in every way, visibly in her demeanor and body language  and verbally in the language she used to flail at the revelations coming out about abortion clinics and a more- widely-prevailing-than-we-knew attitude toward babies who survive abortion attempts as something less than human life worthy of rights and protection.

Even when Rose simplifies it to the fundamental question of whether they couldn’t find common ground agreement on protecting tiny infants who emerge still squirming and struggling for life, Holder devolves to the angry ad hominem attack on Rose and not her argument, nor on the content of her undercover video. It was ugly, and revealing.

That was after the second video was released. There’s a new one since then, and some call it more shocking. How can we measure such degrees of inhumanity?

For weeks now, during and after the Gosnell trial, ‘Democratic strategist’ and ‘liberal news contributor’ Kirsten Powers has been writing about the trial in USA Today and The Daily Beast agonizing over what we have allowed in social policy on abortion and facilitated by the language of choice, and covered up by a complicit media unwilling to report on any news story that runs counter to the narrative that abortion on demand at all times is what women want, need and deserve.

Thank God Kirsten Powers was noticed by some big media people who were willing to start paying attention earlier than the rest, and follow an idea through to its logical conclusions. Here’s her latest column.

Abortion rights advocates have argued that there is nothing to see here. Move along. This is what illegal abortion looks like, they say.

But Gosnell’s clinic was not illegal. It was a licensed medical facility. The state of his clinic was well known: there were repeated complaints to government officials and even the local Planned Parenthood. He wasn’t operating under the radar but in plain sight, and he received referrals from abortion clinics up and down the East Coast. Gosnell performed plenty of abortions within the 24-week limit in Pennsylvania and worked part time for a National Abortion Federation–accredited clinic in Delaware.

The woman Gosnell is on trial for allegedly killing, Karnamaya Mongar, perished during a legal abortion while she was 19 weeks pregnant. Gosnell was not forced to operate in the dark because of anti–abortion rights regulations. It’s the opposite: he was able to flourish—pulling in $1.8 million a year—because multiple abortion rights administrations decided that to inspect his clinic might mean limiting access to abortion. It’s all in the grand jury report, if you don’t believe me.

I’ve linked to that grand jury report multiple times, and hope people will confront it, especially people who consider themselves pro-choice.

One of the bodies discovered in the raid of the clinic was of a 22-week-old baby with a surgical incision on the back of her neck, which penetrated the first and second vertebrae. The only thing that would make her death illegal would be if Gosnell failed to finish her off in her mother’s womb.

Does that statement make you uncomfortable? Good.

What we need to learn from the Gosnell case is that late-term abortion is infanticide. Legal infanticide. That so many people in the media seem untroubled by the idea that 12 inches in one direction is a “private medical decision” and 12 inches in the other direction causes people to react in horror, should be troubling. Indeed, Gosnell’s defense attorney Jack J. McMahon has relied on the argument that Gosnell killed the babies prior to delivering them, therefore he is not guilty of murder. His exact words were: “Every one of those babies died in utero.”

Gosnell is accused of aborting infants past the 24-week limit in Pennsylvania. But those same deaths – if done in utero – would have been perfectly legal in many states with sometimes abused health exceptions, which can include the elastic category of “mental distress.

The New York Times reported that MacMahon argued: “Because the women were given injections of the drug digoxin, which causes ‘fetal demise,’ any postdelivery movements were involuntary spasms.” The Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney, who attended the trial, reported that McMahon argued: “The purpose of the shot…is to kill the baby so that it will not be a live birth.”

This is, finally, where the rubber meets the road. Keep going.

I cannot legitimately say I am a person who cherishes human rights and remain silent about our country legally endorsing infanticide.

Which, listeners of mine on radi have pointed out to me in emails, is too remote a name for what it is, the murder of an infant. True.

We live in a country where if a six-months-pregnant woman started downing shots of vodka in a bar or lit up a cigarette, people might want her arrested. But that same woman could walk into an abortion clinic, no questions asked, and be injected with a drug that would stop her baby’s heart.

Just watch those Live Action undercover videos to see what drugs are injected into a pregnant woman to stop her baby’s heart. And other ways they do procedures that assure ‘fetal demise.’

I’ll put my cards on the table: I think life begins at conception and would love to live in a world where no women ever felt she needed to get an abortion. However, I know enough people who are pro-abortion rights—indeed, I was one of them for most of my life—to know that reasonable and sincere people can disagree about when meaningful life begins.

I will, respectfully, take issue here with Kirsten Powers on the subject off “when meaningful life begins,” starting with ‘who decides?’ and ‘what do you mean by “meaningful life”, much less the question of when that begins.

They also can disagree about how to weigh that moral uncertainty against a woman’s right to control her body—and her own life.

I take exception to this as well, since the woman’s body is one thing, but when she is pregnant the doctor has two patients, and she is carrying within her womb a separate, unique, whole and complete human being with her or his own DNA, already fully in existence. So a woman can do with her body what she morally decides is best, but another human being is present by design of human procreaction, and her decision over her body affect the well-being of that other human body and her or his own life.

I have only ever voted for Democrats, so overturning Roe v. Wade is not one of my priorities. I never want to return to the days of gruesome back-alley abortions.

In case you missed this in an earlier post, Kermit Gosnell was a back-alley abortionist, who Roe ensconced in his own clinic. The clinic Pennsylvania authorities dubbed a ‘house of horrors.’

So this gets down to the anguish of reasoning through the obvious which forces confrontation with accepted beliefs.

But medical advances since Roe v. Wade have made it clear to me that late-term abortion is not a moral gray area, and we need to stop pretending it is. No six-months-pregnant woman is picking out names for her “fetus.” It’s a baby. Let’s stop playing Orwellian word games. We are talking about human beings here.

Finally. The awareness comes. Prof. Robert George helps focus that reasoning process.

I just finished watching the Fox News special “See No Evil” on abortionist Kermit Gosnell, who is on trial in Philadelphia for multiple murders and other crimes. Gosnell can’t understand how it can be that he is facing prison and possibly even the death penalty for killing the babies whose necks he snipped after they “precipitated” (i.e., emerged from the womb.) The women who came into his clinic came in to have the babies they were carrying killed. That was the point of the exercise. “Terminating” the babies’ lives was the service he offered and performed. Had he killed the babies while they were still in their mothers’ bodies (by, for example, inserting a needle to inject a poison into their tiny hearts) that would not have been a crime. He merely would have been assisting his patients in exercising what the Supreme Court deems a constitutional right. So why, he would like to know, is he being prosecuted for killing the same babies moments later after they precipitated?

I must admit that I am no less puzzled by that question than Gosnell is. How can it be that killing a baby inside the womb is perfectly acceptable while killing the very same baby (or even a baby that is a few days or even weeks younger) outside the womb is first degree murder? Of course, in my view we should not permit the killing of babies inside or outside the womb. A baby’s status as a precious member of the human family, possessing profound, inherent, and equal dignity, does not depend on something as morally arbitrary as his or her location. But if we permit the Gosnells of the world to kill babies inside the womb, it seems odd to charge them with murder for killing them outside the womb. This is especially true in view of the fact that inducing delivery and then killing babies marked for “termination” eliminates the risk to women involved in the common abortion practice of dismembering babies inside the womb and removing their severed body parts.

The whole state of abortion and reality of what Roe wrought becomes clearer with the Gosnell trial revelations, and those coming out of the Live Action video series from abortion clinics around the US.

We’re finally talking about abortion, what we’ve legalized, what we’ve accepted, what we’ve told ourselves and come to believe as a society. Let’s be honest, for crying out loud.

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May 01

Big Abortion gets exposed

Abortion, Culture, Law, Media, Politics, Society No Comments »

Revelations about the abortion industry are coming out at a new pace now and in greater detail than ever. It’s forcing a very public confrontation with the truth about abortion and getting people talking as some never have before. The cover-ups are getting uncovered, and Big Abortion is getting unprecedented exposure.

They got plenty of that at the Democratic National Convention last summer, which celebrated abortion as we’ve never seen in American politics. But that’s the kind of exposure the industry wants. What’s going on now is new for them and the American public and the connected global universe tuned in, and nearly 40 years after Roe, we’re finally talking about and looking at abortion in its raw reality.

It’s been sort of a perfect storm, what’s happened in the past few weeks to precipitate an unprecedented public and even media confrontation with the whole issue of abortion. The trial of infamous abortionist Kermit Gosnell finally made the news when Kirsten Powers, a “Democratic strategist” and liberal commentator started calling out the media on it, and savvy pro-life people launched a grassroots social networking campaign to shame the media into paying attention to crimes against humanity they’d known about for years now on full display in court.

This case took years to come to trial. To call that a travesty is a ridiculous understatement. The authorities in the state of Pennsylvania passed off on checking this and other abortion clinics for years and years. This Atlantic article details it all, from the grand jury report.

Members of Congress heard from their constituents about why Congress was doing nothing to address the abortion scandals and horrors, and a coalition of those members acted on it.

A Planned Parenthood lobbyist testified that the fate of a baby born alive after an abortion attempt is still at the mercy of the woman and doctor who started the process, which is admitting acceptance of de facto infanticide.

The president of the United States addressed Planned Parenthood’s national conference, promised them his fidelity, micharacterized women’s healthcare, and and ended by invoking God’s blessing on the abortion giant.

And then the amazing Live Action investigative team began releasing their new series of undercover videos showing the practice of late term abortion in some clinics, and their inhumane attitude towards what an abortion terminates and what happens if a baby survives still alive. We’re talking about abortion alright, and we need to keep talking about it.

One of the things the Live Action videos showed is that Gosnell is not the exception the abortion industry claimed when they finally couldn’t avoid addressing the horrors of his particular clinic. He’s not an outlier as Planned Parenthood claimed.

Abortion rights advocates have asserted that Gosnell was an “extreme outlier” and opposed legislation to increase regulation of Pennsylvania abortion clinics as they have in other states. But how could they possibly know that this is an aberration?

Last week, Ohio officials shut down an abortion clinic after inspectors found that a medical assistant administered narcotics to five patients, that narcotics and powerful sedatives weren’t properly accounted for, that pharmacy licenses had expired and that four staff members hadn’t been screened for a communicable disease.

This month, a Delaware TV station reported that two Planned Parenthood nurses resigned in protest over conditions at a clinic there. One nurse, Jayne Mitchell-Werbrich, said, “It was just unsafe. I couldn’t tell you how ridiculously unsafe it was.”…

Last month, Maryland officials shut down three abortion clinics, two for failings in their equipment and training to deal with life-threatening complications.

Last year, an Associated Press investigation found that Illinois hadn’t inspected some abortion clinics for 10 to 15 years. After state health officials reinvigorated their clinic inspections in the wake of Gosnell, inspectors closed two clinics, including one fined for “failure to perform CPR on a patient who died after a procedure,” according to AP.

Such problems wouldn’t be a shock to Pennsylvania state Rep. Margo Davidson, the only member of the Democratic black caucus to vote for the abortion-regulation bill passed there. She told me, “We don’t know how many (Gosnells) there are. I’m not trying to overturn Roe v. Wade, but if a woman makes this difficult choice, she should at least be afforded the highest level of care.” She said the choice community knew what was going on and did nothing.

Take note of that. The so-called “choice community knew what was going on and did nothing.” That shouldn’t slip by too easily.

Indeed, the grand jury found that the National Abortion Federation inspected Gosnell’s clinic, refused to certify him, but didn’t tell anyone. Pennsylvania Planned Parenthood representative Dayle Steinberg has admitted that its officials knew the clinic was unsafe after women complained. What did they do? “We would always encourage them to report it to the Department of Health.”

Davidson concluded that for the choice community, “the institution was more important than the individual lives.” Davidson knows firsthand what can happen when people choose to look the other way: Her 22-year-old cousin died after an abortion at Gosnell’s clinic. (emphasis added)

What can happen “when people choose to look the other way.” Choice has consequences. They have to be reckoned with at some point.

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Apr 29

Kermit Gosnell: the back-alley abortionist Roe ensconced

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But that’s giving away one of the punchlines of a very lengthy, gut-wrenching, soul-searching article in the Wall Street Journal the other day that, taken together with the commentaries and articles linked within it, is filled with punches to the gut. It may be the best handling of the worst abortion news we’ve heard publicly since the news that the Supreme Court made abortion legal with its Roe decision.

The headline on James Taranto’s article in the WSJ was succinct and apt: From Roe to Gosnell. There is a direct line if you follow the logic of abortion.

This pull quote pretty well sums up the article:

“The reductio ad absurdum of the pro-abortion side is Kermit Gosnell. That is why the Gosnell case has crystallized our view that the current regime of abortion on demand in America is a grave evil that ought to be abolished. It is murderous, if not categorically then at least in its extreme manifestations. Maintaining it requires an assault on language and logic that has taken on a totalitarian character. And it is politically poisonous.”

Don’t think this is some pro-life screed of triumphalism using the horrors committed by notorious Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell as a launching point to vent nearly 40 years worth of pent up angst over fighting the pro-abortion movement.

It’s an alarm bell set off by a former “pro-choice libertarian” journalist from what he himself calls “the mushy middle” on abortion issues. A journalist who’s been making the transition for many years from one position to another, although one who sees the full pro-life position as “a bridge too far” but found in the Gosnell case and subsequent trial the most damning evidence that Roe was really wrong all along.

Using the editorial ‘we’, he explains:

Our path was more cerebral and less visceral. It started with our education in constitutional law. Although we thought abortion on demand was a good policy, we knew how to read, and the Constitution had nothing to say about the matter. We came to view Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case that declared otherwise, as a gross abuse of power by the Supreme Court, notwithstanding that it was in the service of a cause we agreed with.

A funny thing happens when you dissent from Roe v. Wade: You come to see that there’s not much else by way of intellectual content to the case for abortion on demand. Roe predates our own political consciousness, so we have to assume there were once stronger arguments. But these days the appeal to the authority of Roe is pretty much all there is apart from sloganeering, name-calling, appeals to self-interest and an emphasis on difficult and unusual cases such as pregnancy due to rape.

Among other things to get from this is the point that a former pro-choice libertarian is writing it and wrestling with the logic of abortion and the truth of following that logic through to its consequences.

When you dissent from Roe v. Wade, you notice that people committed to the pro-abortion side almost never acknowledge that the question of abortion poses a conflict of rights or of legitimate interests. Try to pin them down as to where they’d draw the line–at what point in fetal development does abortion become unacceptable? It’s pretty much impossible.

Right. That is true time and again.

Now here’s an important line that shouldn’t be missed:

Our own moral intuition is that an early-term abortion, or the use of an abortifacient to prevent implantation, is different in kind from a late-term abortion or infanticide.

This is an opening to a good discussion or debate, though Taranto is already open to that. But virtually nobody who considers themselves ‘pro-choice’ will talk honestly about abortifacients at all, much less their role and goal in preventing the implantation of the de facto beginning of a new human life already present at fertilization. Different in ‘kind’ from abortion or infanticide gets into a debate over the difference space and time make in the life of that unique, separate, whole, living human being already present at the moment of conception. Justifying it at one end extends to justifying it at some other end along the human continuum depending on cognitive ability and vulnerability and dependence, etc.

Taranto said as much.

But we concede that intuition is irreconcilable with the scientific fact that the difference between a zygote and an infant–or, for that matter, an adult–is one of degree: All are the same human being at different stages of development…

Any line one could draw between acceptable abortion and homicide would be an arbitrary one.

In fact, he goes on later to say…

The most jaw-dropping example of pro-abortion Orwellianism is the one we cited last week: the fierce objection to the assertion that life begins at fertilization. As we noted, that is a simple statement of scientific fact–a tautology.

Look…

We live in a free society. People have an absolute right to form opinions about matters of public concern, and a nearly absolute right to express those opinions, individually or in concert with others of like mind. “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

The Supreme Court, by interpreting (or misinterpreting) the Constitution, has the capacity to impose vast and sweeping changes in the law, as it did when it decided Roe v. Wade. What it cannot do–what it lacks not only the authority but the slightest ability to do–is control people’s thoughts.

The media and politicians and the abortion movement have done that over the decades since Roe. But they are losing their grip. The truth has been coming out. The old arguments aren’t working anymore.

One of the strongest practical arguments in favor of the Roe regime is that abortion has been around since time immemorial and outlawing it only drove it underground, leading women to endanger themselves by seeking out the services of back-alley quacks. The Philadelphia grand jurors recounted a powerful example from their own city’s history.

Pay attention to this.

It was called the Mother’s Day Massacre. A young Philadelphia doctor “offered to perform abortions on 15 poor women who were bused to his clinic from Chicago on Mother’s Day 1972, in their second trimester of pregnancy.” The women didn’t know that the doctor “planned to use an experimental device called a ‘super coil’ developed by a California man named Harvey Karman.”

A colleague of Karman’s Philadelphia collaborator described the contraption as “basically plastic razors that were formed into a ball. . . . They were coated into a gel, so that they would remain closed. These would be inserted into the woman’s uterus. And after several hours of body temperature, . . . the gel would melt and these . . . things would spring open, supposedly cutting up the fetus.”

Nine of the 15 Chicago women suffered serious complications. One of them needed a hysterectomy. The following year, the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade. It would be 37 more years before the Philadelphia doctor who carried out the Mother’s Day Massacre would go out of business. His name is Kermit Gosnell.

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Apr 04

African-American Clergy Coalition speaks out on marriage

Church, Culture, Law, Media, Politics, Society No Comments »

Truth is, African American pastors have been engaged in the real civil rights battle for decades, fighting to end violence and respect human dignity in their communities, while largely ignored by the media. Now that their voices are speaking out on the hot button issue of marriage law, they’re getting attention. But some media seemed not to have noticed that the day they gave the story prominence was the anniversary of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Oh, the irony.

On Thursday April 4th, the Chicago Tribune ran a front page, above the fold story with the headline “Black lawmakers may hold key on gay marriage in Illinois.” It was revealing, in so many ways.

The Rev. James Meeks took to the pulpit of the enormous House of Hope at Salem Baptist Church of Chicago and exhorted his congregation to make its voice heard by lawmakers who will vote on whether to allow gay marriage in Illinois.

“We’re living in a time where, here in our own state … they are about to make the law of the land that a man can marry a man and a woman can marry a woman. I think it’s time for the church to wake up,” Meeks, a former state senator, said on a recent Sunday.

During Illinois’ lengthy and divisive debate on same-sex marriage, perhaps no group of lawmakers has been singled out for more intensive lobbying than African-American state representatives.

With the measure a dozen votes or less shy of the 60 required for final approval, advocates on either side of the issue consider the 20 black House members key swing votes in the spring session.

The traditionally liberal black caucus, however, has not uniformly lined up in favor of gay marriage, even as home-state President Barack Obama switched course and backed it. Only one of the 14 House co-sponsors is black.

Some African-American lawmakers are uncomfortable with characterizations of gay rights as the latest front in the civil rights movement.

Yes, for good reason. Bishop Lance Davis explained on my radio show Thursday. Here’s how the Tribune article introduced and cited him:

In mid-March, the African-American Clergy Coalition formed an independent-expenditure political action committee with $3,000 from supportive ministers.

“When I saw that the lawmakers were excited about passing legislation about same-sex marriage, it’s a slap in the face of the Bible,” said the PAC’s chairman, Lance Davis, bishop of New Zion Christian Fellowship Covenant Church in Dolton. “I didn’t see that kind of enthusiasm about stopping children from killing children in the streets.”

No kidding. The media, the president for crying out loud, have made big, momentous statements with great gravity about the killing of our children in the streets of Chicago, while supporting the termination of their lives in the womb in disproportionate numbers in African-American neighborhoods. But I’ll get back to what Bishop Davis told me in a moment.

The Tribune continues…

Rev. Davis said the same-sex marriage issue “has really galvanized us” and wants the PAC to address other issues of concern to the black community, rather than support or oppose political candidates.

And that’s where the Trib article ends its quotations and citations of Bishop Davis. The rest of the rather lengthy piece cites other figures on both sides of the marriage law battle, the lobbying efforts, the hand-wringing and moral claims and Black Caucus officials in the Illinois House, where the vote is waiting for enough supporters to bring it forward.

Rep. Ken Dunkin, the Chicago Democrat who heads the House side of the black caucus, acknowledged there is heavy pressure on African-American lawmakers from preachers to oppose the same-sex marriage bill, and there is a division among black lawmakers on the issue.

“A lot of them still say that they can’t vote” for gay marriage, said Dunkin, who supports the bill.

Some lawmakers in the black caucus don’t like th use of the term “civil right” to try to link the struggle of African-Americans to that of gays and lesbians.

“For me, and I know some wouldn’t agree, I do have trouble equating it to a civil right,” said Rep. Davis, the south suburban lawmaker who is undecided.

Then the Trib piece wraps up with this quote from Rep. Greg Harris, the House sponsor of the same-sex marriage bill:

“I think the good thing is, as people make arguments pro and con whether through lobbying or the media, public opinion is breaking…Let’s have the discussion and talk about the pros and cons and debunk the myths, and people will make the decision.”

If only that were true, that in the state of Illinois the people would make the decision. But the lawmakers of the state have taken it into their hands. So the people can only make the difference by expressing their will. Which gets back to Bishop Davis and our conversation on the air Thursday.

I referred to remarks he made in this press conference of the AACC, calling the marriage battle  a “cross culture, cross faith” issue about a “very credible and very precious institution,” and “we can ill afford to put the agenda of some, of a few, in the name of civil rights, ahead of the civil rights of our children. We are known as a place for murder among our children, and for joblessness, and hopelessness…And now our legislators are trying to redefine what marriage is. It is not government’s responsibility to define what marriage really is.”

He makes great points in the press conference, which I asked him to address. Especially from this snip:

“People often say that what’s wrong in the African American communities is their families. Their families are dysfunctional. Their families are broken up. Their families are messed up. Their husbands and fathers are not there. Then help us first, get our first work right. Help us first with all of your resources and the millions of dollars that are being spent in order to promote the same-sex marriage agenda, take that money and help us to correct our communities…our social ills.”

But don’t spend it on a campaign about marriage law as a “civil rights violation, because it’s not,” he continued. 

“What is a civil rights violation is to have children going to school with no books…to have unequal protection under the law… Breaking the rights of human beings has been the order of the day in the black community. And as a coalition, we are saying enough is enough. Let us make our first work our first work. Our first work is to improve the education of our children, not to approve same-sex legislation. Our first work is to make sure there are jobs and opportunities in hopeless and helpless communities. “

He elaborated on those points on my show and was eloquent in making an impassioned defense of the civil rights movement he’s fought for over the past 24 years, “dealing with the issue of poor education of our children that will lead to a life of violence.” But the media paid little or no attention. So on Friday morning, this coalition holds a press conference with Cardinal Francis George, the Archbishop of Chicago and other Catholic clergy to announce its staunch defense of marriage law and determined efforts to hold public officials accountable for their attention to priorities and civil rights in the most endangered communities.

Bishop Davis calls on the president, who came to political prominence in those same neighborhoods on the south side of Chicago, to listen to the voices of these communities and their pastors and put first things first.

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