Month: October 2015

New at Live Action: Liberal pro-lifer needs reminding that respect must be mutual

Calvin Freiburger Uncategorized , , , , , , , ,

It is a perennial oddity of abortion apologetics that a movement whose own reasoning is shallow and ethically bankrupt, to the point of vapidity, so unabashedly lectures its opponents on their alleged immorality and insensitivity.

That was surely xoJane’s goal in publishing Jennie Kuckertz’s claims that her past as a “former pro-life activist” in college gave her critical insight into how the broader pro-life movement made her “feel disempowered and voiceless,” though Kuckertz herself appears more nuanced than that:

My freshman year was one of growth and challenge regarding the dignity and value of human life. I learned about the biology of the developing human in utero, the unfathomable cost of capital punishment, the injustices of inaccessible healthcare, and the massive human costs of a broken immigration system. I was brought into the pro-life consciousness with a broad understanding of what it meant to be pro-life. Like so many freshman, I felt as though my window to understanding the world had been opened. It did not take me long to realize that this was my most naïve moment.

Interestingly, Kuckertz recounts a number of instances of pro-abortion leftists stereotyping her based on her opposition to abortion, including someone who actually said, “I’m surprised you hang out with the pro-life group, you seem like you care about human rights,” and even a talk with an adviser on the possibility of grad schools and employers blacklisting people for being pro-life.

Read the rest at Live Action News.

New at Live Action: Slate’s Will Saletan is desperate to dismiss Planned Parenthood hearings

Calvin Freiburger Uncategorized , , , , , , , , ,

Abortion defenders’ complaints about the Planned Parenthood investigation are getting more outlandish by the week. At Slate, Will Saletan objects that the latest committee hearing “went way beyond Planned Parenthood or late-term abortion. What was on trial was abortion itself”…

Four witnesses, three of them pro-life, had been summoned to testify. The first, Anthony Levatino, was an OB-GYN who used to terminate pregnancies. He described his methods in grisly detail and showed the committee a video in which clinic staffers offered women very late abortions. Under questioning, however, Levatino admitted that these weren’t Planned Parenthood clinics, that he had never worked with Planned Parenthood during his practice, and that he had no evidence of wrongdoing by anyone affiliated with the organization.

This is nonsense. Nobody claimed Levatino was there to recount experiences specific to Planned Parenthood, but to explain the broader subject of late-term abortion: the humanity of its victim, how it’s normally performed, and its lack of medical necessity. Unless Planned Parenthood stopped performing late-term abortions when nobody was looking, of course all this is representative of and applicable to the organization.

Read the rest at Live Action News.

How Awful Would Paul Ryan Be as House Speaker?

Calvin Freiburger Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Let us count the ways:

  1. His Heritage Action and Conservative Review scorecards are 55% and 58%, respectively. That’s far worse than “imperfect”—Ryan’s record of standing with conservatives doesn’t even rise to the level of “below average.” It’s in F territory. I know liberals believe in rewarding failing grades, but are conservatives ready to join them?
  2. Ryan is an open-borders fanatic of the worst order, from sabotaging efforts to control immigration early in his career to championing the most recent amnesty bill, without regard for how utterly its border and enforcement provisions were proven to be fraudulent. Indeed, his immigration zealotry overrides his other supposed conservative principles so fully that he openly supports “guest workers” for the express purpose of relieving employers of the burden of having to offer Americans higher wages.
  3. Pro-lifers and marriage defenders can’t count on Ryan to have our back when it counts. He has repeatedly voted for budget resolutions that include funding for Planned Parenthood, supports unprincipled and unworkable “truces” on social issues, and voted for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which threatened religious employers’ right to require adherence to a faith’s principles even when relevant to the position.
  4. The sole rationale for Ryan’s stature on the Right is his supposed fiscal seriousness, his reputation as the smartest adult in the room when it comes to getting spending under control. Thing is, even that is wildly overblown. For all the hysterics it inspired at the time, his 2012 budget plan would have actually increased spending by trillions over the next decade, left countless wasteful and destructive programs and agencies untouched, and wouldn’t have balanced the budget until 2040. Worse, a year later he joined forces with Democrat Patty Murray to sabotage one of Hill Republicans’ only substantive accomplishments in recent memory, the sequester budget caps.
  5. Apart from his budgets’ substantive deficiencies, Ryan has never been any good at selling his ideas to the public. The pattern is pretty simple: Ryan churns out a plan, does little to no work helping his fellow Republicans prepare a real campaign to make the case for it, leftists inevitably scream that it means the elderly dying and poor people thrown on the streets, and Ryan responds with wonkish technobabble that impresses political junkies who already know better but means nothing to the voters he needs to reassure. Shouldn’t the fact that he couldn’t even put away Joe Biden have been a red flag here?
  6. Ryan favors other terrible fiscal policies: TARP and the internet sales tax scheme known as the Marketplace Fairness Act.
  7. Here’s Ryan in 2013 saying “if we had a Clinton presidency […] I think we would have fixed this fiscal mess by now,” and here he is in 2014 saying Barack Obama’s repeated violations of federal law, separation of powers, and the Constitution “do not rise to the high crime and misdemeanor level”…just in case any part of you was still expecting Speaker Ryan to give the Left a real fight.

Straw-Manning: An Amnesty Shill’s Best Friend

Calvin Freiburger Uncategorized , , , , , , , ,

Oh look: Pew got Republican voters to look more liberal than they really are with intentionally-vague terminology — “certain requirements” — that induces respondents to project wildly different notions of what those requirements should be into a single category.

The poll does not say a majority of Republicans are content with the real bone of contention: sham bills that provide amnesty with citizenship but lie about security and enforcement. (It also shows that majorities of Republicans want to end birthright citizenship and build a border wall, and that only 37% favor citizenship for illegals.)

Contrary to the lying cheap-labor toadies who slander conservatives as “xenophobes” for not agreeing with them, very few of us opposed to the GOP’s amnesty-mania insist that every single illegal has to be gone no matter what.

Again, for the unprincipled simpletons who parrot whatever Republican leadership and the Wall Street Journal tell them to, it’s really not that complicated:

  1. Complete a manned and monitored border wall.
  2. Crack down on visa overstays.
  3. Fully implement e-Verify.
  4. Take legal action against sanctuary cities.
  5. Reverse President Obama’s illegal executive amnesty.
  6. Crack down on illegals’ use of public aid.
  7. After Congress has actually done it, rather than given us the umpteenth insincere promise to do it in the indeterminate future, and after the people have seen for themselves that we really have stopped the mass influx of new illegals and meaningfully reduced the number of current illegals, then we can look at how many are left and decide on some sort of regularization (provided it does not allow any possibility of citizenship without first leaving and re-entering legally).

New at Live Action: Cecile Richards Lectures Pro-Lifers on Civility. Yes, Really

Calvin Freiburger Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

In a glowing interview/profile for the Guardian, Emma Brockes paints Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards as the noble victim of a pack of crazies at last week’s congressional hearing, without a hint of interest about her heroine perjuring herself regarding Planned Parenthood’s post-viability abortions, increasing abortion numbers corresponding to decreasing cancer services, and past mammogram claims, or the multiple federal laws her organization has broken.

In other words, it’s a day ending in Y. “Journalists” giving the abortion lobby a pass to lie with impunity is just one of the constants of the universe. But this piece does have one nugget of twisted originality: Richards claims she was “stunned by the total lack of civility” of Republican representatives.

A woman who defends her blood-stained cause through lies, personal attacks, and fear-mongering is crying civility? Really? Let’s review just how much Ms. Richards really values a respectful exchange of ideas.

Read the rest at Live Action News.

New at Live Action: Pro-Abortion TPM Writer Lies About Prenatal/Abortion Images

Calvin Freiburger Uncategorized , , , , , , ,

Pro-aborts just can’t let go of Carly Fiorina’s challenge to watch the monstrous Planned Parenthood videos. Now, Talking Points Memo’s Sarah Erdreich tries to spin Fiorina’s flagrant act of honesty into “part of a long tradition of anti-abortion advocates who have no problem with lying about what abortion is and what it looks like to advance their agenda”:

Fiorina has refused to back down from her statement, even in the face of evidence that solidly refutes her assertion.

The “evidence” she cites is a report from PolitiFact, which is known to deceive when it comes to pro-life politicians, rating Fiorina’s claim “mostly false” because the baby onscreen was not the same one ex-StemExpress tech Holly O’Donnell witnessed, and because “We don’t know the circumstances behind this video: where it came from, under what conditions it was obtained, or even if this fetus was actually aborted (as opposed to a premature birth or miscarriage).”

Read the rest at Live Action News.

New at Live Action: Elizabeth Warren lies for Planned Parenthood, and Jake Tapper Lets Her

Calvin Freiburger Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , ,

In a media dominated by thinly veiled propagandists for Democrats and left-wing causes posing as impartial journalists, some conservatives used to say that Jake Tapper, former ABC News correspondent now with CNN, was one of the rare objective reporters not pushing an ideological agenda. If that was ever true, it sure isn’t anymore, judging by his interview this weekend with radical pro-abortion Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).

He started with a respectable question about the Center for Medical Progress undercover videos into Planned Parenthood’s —“Is there nothing on the videotapes that you saw that bothers you at all?” Warren answered (if you can call it that):

Look, let’s remember what we were debating on the floor of the United States Senate, and that was defunding Planned Parenthood. 2.7 million people get their healthcare from Planned Parenthood every year. One in every 5 women in America, sometime in her life, will get her healthcare from Planned Parenthood.

False—according to Planned Parenthood’s own material, the actual statistic merely claims that one in five women has entered a Planned Parenthood.

Read the rest at Live Action News.

New at Live Action: Don’t Let Iowa Gov. Branstad Chicken Out on Defunding Planned Parenthood

Calvin Freiburger Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , ,

In July, Iowa Republican Governor Terry Branstad responded to the news of Planned Parenthood’s organ harvesting side business by ordering a comprehensive review of state women’s health and family planning funding to ensure none of it was helping Planned Parenthood perform abortions. Alas, now he says he can’t defund Planned Parenthood after all:

“It appears to me, and the advice that we have received from the attorney general’s office, is that we cannot defund Planned Parenthood,” Branstad said last week, according to The Des Moines Register. “The attorney general’s office has notified us that we don’t have reasons; [Planned Parenthood hasn’t] violated their responsibilities under the grants that they have received from the state.”

The Iowa social conservative group The Family Leader is not impressed, and has been doing a lot of work to refute Branstad’s claims and pressure him into doing the right thing.

Read the rest at Live Action News.

Abysmal Kasich-Rubio ’16 Case Illustrates Why GOP Keeps Losing Elections

Calvin Freiburger Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The following article was originally written in August. Given the lack of responses at the time and that the subject of conservative publications giving platforms to disastrously unconservative political advice remains newsworthy, I am publishing it here.

In most fields, past failures to produce results tend to diminish one’s standing as an authority on future successes. So while it’s natural that alumni of John McCain’s presidential campaign would favor a 2016 nominee as centrist as John Kasich and a running mate as amnesty-minded as Marco Rubio, it’s also alarming to see their prescriptions disseminated in a leading conservative publication.

None of Myra Adams’s five points for Kasich-Rubio ’16 are persuasive. In fact, her August 14 National Review column making the case reads more like a catalogue of the Beltway myths, shallow assumptions, and unconservative priorities that have created countless Republican defeats. Continue reading →

When Will We Get Serious about Judicial Tyranny?

Calvin Freiburger Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

A Republican presidential field with over a dozen candidates splitting conservative voters may be a recipe for political disaster, but one of the silver linings is that with so many dueling personalities, some are bound to voice overlooked ideas to a wider audience than they’re used to.

So far, that’s been one of the only good things to come out of Mike Huckabee joining the fray. He’s made directly attacking the judiciary’s assumed constitutional monopoly a recurring theme over the past several months, from his January suggestion that we defy the Supreme Court if they impose same-sex marriage nationwide to his May campaign announcement blasting politicians for “surrender[ing] to the false god of judicial supremacy.”

His comments got a little debate among the commentariat and more than a little hysteria from the press, but nowhere near the conversation they should have sparked. Maybe it was the messenger—while Huck’s nanny-state, pro-amnesty, soft-on-crime, snake-oil record should absolutely keep him far, far away from the White House, conservatives can’t afford to let our rightful distaste for the Huckster distract us when he stumbles upon something important. Continue reading →