I think we’re all pretty well agreed that if the charges against Kermit Gosnell are true, then dude is a criminal and needs to go to jail. Killing a baby after it’s born and has taken breaths? Is not abortion. It should be, and is, a crime punishable by law. And Kermit Gosnell is being criminally prosecuted.
Fortunately, there is no need for me to refute Filipovic’s counterfactual insistence that the Gosnell case has nothing to do with the legality of abortion, because her late-term fisking has already been accomplished:
So, um… very glib, very semantic, but, even granting the Humpty Dumpty power to just say “these were not abortions” despite the fact that the women showed up for abortions at a place known for late-term illegal abortions and the doctor performed what he called an abortion, in fact 33 counts are about illegal abortions. The eight murder charges are just about the babies he decided it would be easier to deliver and kill. . . .
“I’ve scooped brains out of buckets, I’ve counted dendrites in slices cut from the brains of dead babies. You want to make me back down by trying to inspire revulsion with dead baby pictures? I look at them unflinchingly and see meat. And meat does not frighten me.”
— Paul Z. Myers, University of Minnesota biology professor
[T]he grand jury itself pointed out that loosened oversight of abortion clinics enacted under pro-choice former GOP governor Tom Ridge enabled Gosnell’s criminal enterprise – and led to the heartless execution of hundreds of babies. Mass murder got a pass in the name of expanding “access” and appeasing abortion lobbyists. As the report made clear: “With the change of administration from [pro-life Democrat] Governor Casey to Governor Ridge,” government health officials “concluded that inspections would be ‘putting a barrier up to women’ seeking abortions. Better to leave clinics to do as they pleased, even though, as Gosnell proved, that meant both women and babies would pay.”
Read the rest of that. As for Professor Myers and other academic propagandists of the Culture of Death, I remind you of Abraham Lincoln’s remark that “the philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.” And godlessness has been the official philosophy of American schools for more than one generation.
This is the naked face of atheism, ladies and gentlemen. Look on it well and remember it, because it usually doesn’t dare to show its disgusting and anti-human nature so openly.
Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden called on France to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan in exchange for releasing French hostages being held by affiliates of the extremist group, according to a new audio message broadcast on an Arabic news channel Friday. “The exit of your hostages out of the hands of our brothers depends on the exit of your troops from Afghanistan,” bin Laden said in the message broadcast by al-Jazeera.
Bin Laden reminded the French people of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s refusal in November to withdraw the French troops from Afghanistan and to negotiate with al-Qaeda over the hostages.
“Your president’s rejection is a result of being a hireling to America and a green light to kill the hostages … his stand will cost you a high price on different aspects inside or outside France,” he said.
Gov. Jerry Brown on Thursday called education funding a civil rights issue, defending his plan to eliminate redevelopment agencies as necessary to reduce California’s yawning budget deficit and to push more tax revenue to schools and public safety. “We take from redevelopment and we put $1 billion into schools – that’s a good thing,” Brown said at a Sacramento breakfast celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “We’ve got to make sure whatever we do, we give a chance to those who are coming along in the next generation. And that is a civil rights issue.”
Of course, that $1 billion will go to pay inflated salaries for the teachers-union goons who control the Democratic Party in California, but if you point out that Brown is just using tax dollars to pay back his party’s political special interests, you’re raaaaacist!
“Bags and bottles holding aborted fetuses were scattered throughout the building. . . . A row of jars containing severed feet lined a shelf. . . . Untrained, unsupervised workers injected dangerous drugs into women undergoing illegal late-term abortions.”
— Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams
“The left has made abortion the highest good that trumps every other concern, and the resulting real-world policies border on the surreal.”
— Shannon Love, Chicago Boyz
Indeed: Where is the outrage? What Dr. Kermit Gosnell did in Philadelphia is, as the district attorney said, “barbaric.” However, it’s something that’s been happening every day in America — legally, protected by those “penumbras formed by emanations” discerned by the Supreme Court — for more than 30 years. It’s happening today, and will happen tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, and it ought to make us sick with grief for the heartless cruelty it represents.
“As long as we’re discussing the conditions that lead to murderous behavior, let’s talk about million-dollar industries which profit from a process they won’t describe as death, with targets they refuse to identify as human beings. Freshly minted presidential candidate Herman Cain has been calling for the government to defund Planned Parenthood, which he regards as a holding a ‘racist agenda,’ since ‘75% of their clinics are located in black neighborhoods.’ Why should anyone be surprised that we get more of what we subsidize?”
— John Hayward, Human Events
The No Tax-Payer Funding for Abortion Act, introduced Thursday as H.R. 3, aims to codify the Hyde Amendment, which has long barred federal funding for abortion and must currently be renewed every year. The legislation was introduced in tandem with the Protect Life Act, sponsored by Energy & Commerce Health Subcommittee Chair Joseph Pitts (R-Pa.), that would specifically bar any federal funding for abortion under the health reform law.
“This common sense legislation reflects the will of the people and deserves the support of the House,” House Speaker John Boehner said at a Thursday morning press conference. “It’s one of highest legislative priorities and as such I’ve directed it receive the designation of H.R. 3.”
“I was such a small fish at the time. I realized I was basically committing blog suicide by going against him. But he was wrong.”
— Pamela Geller, January 2010
It’s interesting how easy it has become to ignore Charles Johnson and Little Green Footballs. A couple weeks ago, Diary of Daedalus or the Blogmocracy had a post with a graphic showing the decline in LGF’s traffic since Johnson began his mad purge of commenters who didn’t cooperate with his site’s leftward shift. And I would have blogged about that, but why bother? Nobody cares about LGF anymore.
You’ve been using them? They believe in communism. They believe and have called for a revolution. You’re going to have to shoot them in the head. But warning, they may shoot you.
They are dangerous because they believe. Karl Marx is their George Washington. You will never change their mind. And if they feel you have lied to them — they’re revolutionaries. Nancy Pelosi, those are the people you should be worried about.
You will recall that after the 9/12 March on Washington in 2009, Nancy Pelosi gave a press conference warning about rhetoric that “created a climate in which violence took place” in San Francisco in the late 1970s:
And what Beck was trying to say on his June 2010 program was that Democratic leaders, who believed they could co-opt and use the radicalism of the Left for their political advantage, should worry more about extremism from their own allies than from the conservative opposition. You don’t have to believe that assertion — or be a Beck fan — to see that what the LGF post did was to twist Beck’s meaning into the exact opposite of what Beck intended.
What’s stunning is how easily Johnson — or rather one of his second-banana henchpeople, “Conservative Moonbat” — was gulled into that error. The Beck transcript was available online the whole time. The transcript was located by the third commenter on the LGF post and the fourth commenter observed:
So he says that Dems will have to shoot left-wing radicals “in the head”
So even LGF’ers quickly discovered that the headline on the post and the context-free video clip were misleading. What remains to be learned is whether “Conservative Moonbat” got this video from Raw Story, or vice versa. But it appears that Johnson’s second bananas are increasingly third-rate. What this episode highlights is the cause of LGF’s decline. At some point in 2007, Charles Johnson decided that his conservative allies were unworthy of his allegiance and needed to be destroyed. His war against Pamela Geller was the opening salvo in that campaign. But as Da Tech Guy once advised Joe Scarborough, “Sooner or later you have to join the side you’re on.”
In coalition politics we often find ourselves allied with people with whom we disagree, with people we don’t like, with people who we find in some way embarrassing or obnoxious. It may even be the case that prominent leaders and spokesmen of “our side” appear to be exactly the sort of people with whom we normally can’t stand to associate. We may feel that these leaders and spokesmen are in some way discrediting the cause we support. Nevertheless, when push comes to shove, these people are contending for the same cause and are therefore not our political enemies.
Charles Johnson has cut himself off from conservatives and made them his enemies, without actually bothering to declare himself a liberal. Liberals were happy to celebrate Johnson’s defection from the Right, but the one-time dividend of a New York Times profile hasn’t yielded any lasting benefit.
No blog is an island. If you aren’t linked by other blogs, you can’t increase your readership. That which does not grow will eventually begin to die. When Johnson decided to make war on erstwhile blog allies, he also cut himself off from their readers, and without a readership — beyond the dwindling cult of sycophants — he has become irrelevant.
And Pamela Geller “was such a small fish,” y’know? It’s amazing what a “small fish” can accomplish.
