Some of you might be familiar with Cassy Fiano, a writer/blogger I’ve gotten to know over the years. Cassy’s husband is in the US Marine Corps and is currently serving in Afghanistan. It’s through them that I became aware of, and have taken part in, the Project Valour-IT fundraisers (which Michelle has also been involved with).

Recently Cassy and her husband got some troubling news: Their unborn son has been diagnosed with Down syndrome. Cassy has written about it in her latest column, Choosing Life and Beating the Odds: Accepting Down Syndrome.

My wife and I have friends who have a similar story. Their son was born a couple of years ago and all I can say is they’ve never once regretted their decision (like Cassy, the alternative was never an option for them), and they can’t imagine their lives without him.

If a society is indeed judged by how it treats its most helpless, people like Cassy, her husband, friends of my family and countless others out there who choose life are reasons to remain optimistic about our future.

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

With its unconstitutional, coercive, discriminatory Obamacare abortion mandate under fire, the White House announced…nothing today. A supposed “accommodation” to the policy will result in no compromise in the impact of the HHS edict forcing religiously affiliated health care providers and employers to provide insurance coverage for contraceptives, abortifacients, and related services that violate the religious principles and freedom of the mandate’s targets.

In fact, close observers say today’s announcement will make things worse.

The deets:

With the White House under fire for its new rule requiring employers including religious organizations to offer health insurance that fully covers birth control coverage, ABC News has learned that later today the White House — possibly President Obama himself — will likely announce an attempt to accommodate these religious groups. The move, based on state models, will almost certainly not satisfy bishops and other religious leaders since it will preserve the goal of women employees having their birth control fully covered by health insurance.

Sources say it will be respectful of religious beliefs but will not back off from that goal, which many religious leaders oppose since birth control is in violation of their religious beliefs.

White House officials are likening it to the so-called Hawaii compromise.

Phony baloney, say Catholic bishops:

It’s difficult to know what people may mean by the “Hawaii compromise.” But a central feature of the Hawaii law is that every religious organization that is eligible for the exemption has to instruct all employees in how they can access all methods of contraception and sterilization locally “in an expeditious manner.”

Just a few days ago the White House was saying that this is just about coverage, that no one has to be involved in getting people to the actual services they object to. It would be no improvement to say: “Sure, you don’t have to include the coverage, you just have to send all your lay employees and women religious to the local Planned Parenthood clinic.” The Administration’s press release of January 20 hinted at such a requirement.

That would not be a compromise. In some ways it would be worse.

As usual, this defiant administration keeps digging itself deeper.

***

The Hill calls Obama’s announcement a “retreat.”

The White House will announce a retreat from its controversial rule requiring religious organizations like charities and hospitals to include contraception in their healthcare plans.

President Obama has come under heavy criticism from the Catholic Church and other religious organizations, Republicans and even some Democrats over the issue, and Vice President Biden has suggested a compromise could be worked out.

A White House official on Friday confirmed an announcement on changing the rule would be made Friday. The White House is referring to the change as an accommodation.

It’s not a retreat. It’s a re-trick.

It’s not an accommodation. It’s an abomination.

***

Update 11am Weekly Standard reporter John McCormak is on a conference call with White House officials providing background on the policy head fake.

He tweets…

Sr. admin off.: “the insurance company, not the hospital, not the charity will be required to reach out” to women to provide contraception

To clarify, religious groups have to contract with INSURERS who do offer the pills, then the insurers offers free pills to women.

Update 12:26pm EST – From his brief press conference, Obama attacks “cynical” opponents of abortion mandate. He says “principle” of “access to free preventative care including contraceptive services” will stand.

“Religious liberty will be protected.” Translation: You’re still screwed.

***

Update: On Fox News, Kathleen The Shredder Sebelius attempts to defend the policy as a “no-cost strategy” by citing “actuaries” who claim that contraceptive coverage will actually “save money.”

You know who she’s citing? The pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute.

She repeatedly invokes “women’s health” to defend the edict.

Sanger’s grim reapers have the rhetoric down pat.

***

More from Steven Ertelt at Life News: Pro-Life Advocates Blast Revised Obama Pro-Abortion Mandate:

Jonathan Imbody, Vice President for Government Relations for the Christian Medical Association, called the revisions “offering a distinction without a difference to mute opposition.”

He said the revision fits a pattern of contempt for conscience that includes how Obama “has gutted the only federal regulation protecting the exercise of conscience in health care, denied of federal grant funds for aiding human trafficking victims because a faith-based organization refused to participate in abortion; lobbied the Supreme Court to restrict faith-based organizations’ hiring rights; and issued a coercive contraceptive mandate that imposes the government’s abortion ideology on every American.”

‘To Stop the Multiplication of the Unfit’
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2012

If you aren’t creeped out by the No Birth Control Left Behind rhetoric of the White House and Planned Parenthood, you aren’t listening closely enough. The anesthetic of progressive benevolence always dulls the senses. Wake up.

When a bunch of wealthy white women and elite Washington bureaucrats defend the trampling of religious liberties in the name of “increased access” to “reproductive services” for “poor” women, the ghost of Margaret Sanger is cackling.

As she wrote in her autobiography, Sanger founded Planned Parenthood in 1916 “to stop the multiplication of the unfit.” This, she boasted, would be “the most important and greatest step towards race betterment.” While she oversaw the mass murder of black babies, Sanger cynically recruited minority activists to front her death racket. She conspired with eugenics financier and businessman Clarence Gamble to “hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities” to sell their genocidal policies as community health and welfare services.

Outright murder wouldn’t sell. But wrapping it under the egalitarian cloak of “women’s health” — and adorning it with the moral authority of black churches — would. Sanger and Gamble called their deadly campaign “The Negro Project.”

In other writings, historian Mike Perry found, Sanger attacked programs that provided “medical and nursing facilities to slum mothers” because they “facilitate the function of maternity” when “the absolute necessity is to discourage it.” In an essay included in her writing collection held by the Library of Congress, Sanger urged her abortion clinic colleagues to “breed a race of thoroughbreds.” Nationwide “birth control bureaus” would propagate the proper “science of breeding” to stop impoverished, non-white women from “breeding like weeds.”

Speaking with CBS veteran journalist Mike Wallace in 1957, long after her racist views had supposedly mellowed, Sanger again revealed her true colors: “I think the greatest sin in the world is bringing children into the world — that have disease from their parents, that have no chance in the world to be a human being practically. Delinquents, prisoners, all sorts of things just marked when they’re born. That to me is the greatest sin — that people can — can commit.”

Sanger also elaborated on her anti-Catholic animus, telling one of Wallace’s reporters that New York Catholics had no right to protest the use of their tax dollars for birth city birth-control programs: “(I)t’s not only wrong, it should be made illegal for any religious group to prohibit dissemination of birth control — even among its own members.” When Wallace pressed her (“In other words, you would like to see the government legislate religious beliefs in a certain sense?”), Sanger laughed nervously and disavowed the remarks.

Fast forward: Five decades and 16 million aborted black babies later, Planned Parenthood’s insidious agenda has migrated from inner-city “birth control bureaus” to public school-based health clinics to the White House — forcibly funded with taxpayer dollars just as Sanger championed.

Several undercover stings by Live Action, pro-life documentarians, have exposed Planned Parenthood staff accepting donations over the years from callers posing as eugenics cheerleaders who wanted to earmark their contributions for the cause of aborting minority babies. “We can definitely designate it for an African-American,” a Tulsa, Okla., Planned Parenthood employee eagerly promised.

What has cheap, easy and unmonitored “choice” for poor women in inner cities wrought? Nightmares like the Philadelphia Horror, where serial baby-killer Dr. Kermit Gosnell and his abortion clinic death squad oversaw the systematic execution of hundreds of healthy, living, breathing, squirming, viable black and Hispanic babies over 4 decades — along with several minority mothers who may have lost their lives in his grimy birth control bureau.

City and state authorities looked the other way while jars of baby parts and reports of botched abortions and infanticides piled up. Beltway Democrats who now bray about their concern for “women’s health” were silent about the Gosnell massacre and countless others like it in America’s ghettos. Why?

The Obama administration is crawling with the modern-day heirs of the eugenics movement, from Planned Parenthood golden girl Kathleen Sebelius at the Department of Health and Human Services to the president’s prestigious science czar John Holdren — an outspoken proponent of forced abortions and mass sterilizations and a self-proclaimed protege of eugenics guru Harrison Brown, whom he credits with inspiring him to become a scientist.

Brown envisioned a government regime in which the “number of abortions and artificial inseminations permitted in a given year would be determined completely by the difference between the number of deaths and the number of births in the year previous.” He urged readers to “reconcile ourselves to the fact that artificial means must be applied to limit birth rates.” He likened the global population to a “pulsating mass of maggots.”

Listen carefully as this White House dresses its Obamacare abortion mandate in the white lab coat of “reproductive services” for all. The language of “access to birth control” is the duplicitous code of Sanger’s ideological grim reapers.

My latest column examines the Obama administration’s continuing war on religious health care professionals, which I spotlighted when the ACLU first launched its salvo against Catholic hospitals in 2010. What’s noteworthy now is the united front that Catholic bishops (who have traditionally taken big government positions) are now taking against the Obamacare abortion edict. Better late than never.

The Anchoress and LifeNews have excellent coverage of the controversy — see here, here, here, and here. As I mention below, the Becket Fund is representing two schools suing over the unconstitutional abortion mandate in federal court. Florida GOP Sen. Marco Rubio is sponsoring a bill to restore the conscience clause protections for health care providers of faith.

This outrageous power grab is one which both fiscal and social conservative can rally behind. Every one of the GOP presidential candidates should be raising it on the campaign trail, in debates, and media interviews. Send messages to @HHSGov and @WhiteHouse. The grass-roots revolt is growing. NCHLA has a petition and action alert info here.

Where’s the MSM? Mostly AWOL, as usual.

Related news: Susan G. Komen foundation for breast cancer research has finally halted grants to Planned Parenthood.

And: Pfizer recalls 28 lots of birth control pills
.

***

First, they came for the Catholics
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2012

President Obama and his radical feminist enforcers have had it in for Catholic medical providers from the get-go. It’s about time all people of faith fought back against this unprecedented encroachment on religious liberty. First, they came for the Catholics. Who’s next?

This weekend, Catholic bishops informed parishioners of the recent White House edict forcing religious hospitals, schools, charities, and other health and social service providers to provide “free” abortifacient pills, sterilizations, and contraception on demand in their insurance plans – even if it violates their moral consciences and teachings of their churches.

NARAL, NOW, Ms. Magazine, and the Feminist Majority Foundation all cheered the administration’s abuse of the Obamacare law to ram abortion down pro-life medical professionals’ throats. Femme dinosaur Eleanor Smeal gloated over the news that the administration had rejected church officials’ pleas for compromises: “At last,” she exulted, the Left’s goal of “no-cost birth control” for all had been achieved.

As always, tolerance is a one-way street in the Age of Obama. “Choice” is in the eye (and iron fist) of the First Amendment usurper.

Like the rising number of states who have revolted against the individual health care care mandate at the ballot box and in the courts, targeted Catholics have risen up against the Obamacare regime. Arlington (Va.) Bishop Paul Loverde didn’t mince words, calling the U.S. Department Health and Human Services order “a direct attack against religious liberty. This ill-considered policy comprises a truly radical break with the liberties that have underpinned our nation since its founding.” Several bishops vowed publicly to fight the mandate.

Bishop Alexander Sample of Marquette, Michigan asserted plainly: “We cannot—we will not—comply with this unjust law.”

It’s not just rabid right-wing politicos defying the Obama machine. Pro-life Democratic Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania denounced the “wrong decision.” Left-leaning Bishop Robert Lynch threatened “civil disobedience” in St. Petersburg, Florida, over the power grab. Lefty Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne wrote that Obama “botched” the controversy and “threw his progressive Catholic allies under the bus” by refusing to “balance the competing liberty interests here.”

White House press secretary Jay Carney blithely denied on Tuesday that “there are any constitutional rights issues” involved in the brewing battle. Yet, the Shut Up and Hand Out Abortion Pills order undermines a unanimous Supreme Court ruling issued just last week upholding a religious employer’s right to determine whom to hire and fire. And two private colleges have filed federal suits against the government to overturn the unconstitutional abortion coverage decree.

Hannah Smith, senior counsel at the non-profit law firm, the Becket Fund, which is representing the schools boiled it down for Bloomberg News: “This is not really about access to contraception. The mandate is about forcing these religious groups to pay for it against their beliefs.”

How did we get here? The first salvo came in December 2010, when the American Civil Liberties Union pushed HHS and its Planned Parenthood-championing secretary, Kathleen “The Shredder” Sebelius, to force Catholic hospitals to perform abortions in violation of their core moral commitment to protecting the lives of the unborn.

The ACLU called for a litigious fishing expedition against Catholic hospitals nationwide that refuse to provide “emergency” contraception and abortions to women. In their sights: Devout Phoenix Catholic Bishop Thomas Olmsted, who revoked the Catholic status of a rogue hospital that performed several direct abortions, provided birth control pills and presided over sterilizations against the church’s ethical and religious directives for health care.

ACLU and the feminists have joined with Obama to threaten and sabotage the First Amendment rights of religious-based health care entities. The agenda is not increased “access” to health care services. The ultimate goal is to shut down health care providers – Catholic health care institutions employ about 540,000 full-time workers and 240,000 part-time workers – whose religious views cannot be tolerated by secular zealots and radical social engineers.

Is it any surprise their counterparts in the “Occupy” movement have moved from protesting “Wall Street” to harassing pro-life marchers in Washington, D.C., and hurling condoms at Catholic school girls in Rhode Island?

Birds of a lawless, bigoted feather bully together.

Today marks the 39th annual March for Life in Washington, D.C. As I note every year, it has become an annual ritual to watch the national media and liberal commentariat strain to ignore or marginalize the burgeoning movement of increasingly young and minority activists taking to the street to stand up for the unborn.

If you’re in D.C., it’s not too late to join. Schedule of events and maps are here. March for Life rallies will also take place at state capitols across the country and thousands gathered this weekend.

You can also tune in online to the Pro Life Con gathering taking place all day.

House Speaker John Boehner will be a featured speaker this afternoon.

Danielle Bean explains why she marches:

The young people at the annual March for Life assert the unpopular truth that women deserve better than abortion, and instead offer women real choices: genuine alternatives to the harm that abortions cause.

When a woman decides that her best “choice” is the destruction of innocent human life growing within her, we have failed her. The government, the community, the church, and we – her friends, neighbors, co-workers, brothers, and sisters – have failed her.

Young pro-lifers are determined not to fail women.

They know that abortion is a “choice” that ends a human life, stops a heartbeat, and denies a defenseless human being the right to live. They know that the “pro-choice” idea that abortion has no moral, emotional, or psychological consequences is a lie – a lie that women pay for, and a lie that denies every one of us the right to make informed decisions about our own bodies.

Everywhere I look at this year’s March for Life, I see young people who reject the lies of previous generations, seek the truth, and stand up as a voice for women and the unborn. I am encouraged as I march alongside these young prolifers and proud that some of my own children are among them.

Legalized abortion is a tragic part of our nation’s history, but I see the future here in Washington, D.C. today. And you know what? The kids are all right.

Yalies march for life:

Over two dozen Yalies will march in Washington, D.C. today along with thousands of pro-life supporters in protest of the landmark Roe v. Wade decision which ruled that the Constitution protects abortion rights.

As part of the 39th annual March for Life, 15 undergraduate members of Choose Life at Yale and 11 members of the Yale Divinity School’s Right to Life Fellowship will march from the National Mall to the steps of the Supreme Court in an event that has drawn over 200,000 people in past years. Students attending the march said the annual event, which falls on the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, re-energizes them to promote their pro-life views, which are not widely held on Yale’s campus.

“It’s an uphill battle when you’re a smaller group and you’re unpopular on campus,” Eduardo Andino ’13, CLAY president, said. “When you have a conscience that tells you that you’re fighting for something as precious as human life, it makes it much easier to continue.”

Follow Jill Stanek and support Live Action Films today and every day.

***

Side note: Sen. Rand Paul tweeted this morning that he would be speaking to the March for Life rally in D.C.

Today I’ll speak to the March for Life in DC. A nation cannot long endure w/o respect for the right to Life. Our Liberty depends on it. #ky

But his press secretary tweeted this morning that Sen. Paul was detained by TSA in Nashville. Daily Caller reports:

“Just got a call from @senrandpaul,” Bagley tweeted at about 10 a.m. on Monday. “He’s currently being detained by TSA in Nashville.”

Bagley hasn’t immediately responded to The Daily Caller’s request for comment for more details.

Texas Congressman and current Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul – Sen. Rand Paul’s father – placed a post on Facebook about the news as well. “My son Rand is currently being detained by the TSA at the Nashville Airport,” Ron Paul posted. “I’ll share more details as the situation unfolds.”

Sen. Rand Paul’s Facebook page has a post about the incident too. “Senator Paul is being detained at the Nashville Airport by the TSA,” Sen. Rand Paul’s Facebook post reads. “We will update you as the situation develops.”

Here’s the follow-up on Sen. Paul’s detention.

***

Occupiers crashed a pro-life gathering this weekend. Classy as ever.

***

Boehner’s address to March for Life here courtesy of LifeNews.com.

Rick Santorum’s fight for life, WSJ op-ed today.

For the past four years, I’ve spotlighted the fight to bring Planned Parenthood’s predators to justice in Kansas. In October 2007, then-AG Phill Kline filed a 107-count criminal complaint against the PP racket, with counts ranging from falsifying documents to performing illegal late-term abortions. In February of this year, I noted the prolonged witch hunt against Kline — which blew up in the radical abortion lobby’s face. Today’s syndicated column scrutinizes the overseer role Obama HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has played throughout the PP/Kansas health bureaucracy’s stonewalling of the truth. See Life News and Planned Parenthood Corruption for background and documents.

***

Shredding Kathleen Sebelius
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2011

If a private health insurer had engaged in the kind of criminal obstruction that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has been tied to in her home state of Kansas, it would be a federal case. Instead, it’s a non-story in the Washington press. Nothing to see here. Move along.

On Monday, a district judge in the Sunflower State suspended court proceedings in a high-profile criminal case against the abortion racketeers of Planned Parenthood. World Magazine, a Christian news publication, reported on new bombshell court filings showing that Kansas health officials “shredded documents related to felony charges the abortion giant faces.” World Magazine reported: “The health department failed to disclose that fact for six years, until it was forced to do so in the current felony case over whether it manufactured client records.”

The records are at the heart of the fraud case against Planned Parenthood. Kansas health bureaucrats now shrug that the destruction of these key documents — which they sheepishly admitted had “certain idiosyncrasies” — was “routine.” Who oversaw the agency accused of destroying the evidence six years ago? Sebelius.

As governor of Kansas, Sebelius fought transparency motions in the proceedings tooth and nail for years. Prosecutors allege a long-running heinous cover-up to manufacture false records of patients who had late-term abortions — and to whitewash Planned Parenthood’s systemic failures to report child rape.

Former GOP state Attorney General Phill Kline’s investigation turned up massive discrepancies in reported child rape statistics compared to Planned Parenthood and the late late-term abortionist George Tiller’s bogus claims. Planned Parenthood of Overland Park and Tiller together performed abortions on 166 girls aged 14 and under and only reported one each to authorities. So, 164 cases of underage rape or statutory rape went unreported and were not investigated by authorities.

Where are Joe Biden to decry actual rape atrocities and Nancy Pelosi to decry dire hazards to women’s health when we need them?

A Kansas district judge found probable cause of criminality in the abortion providers’ records; another district judge found probable cause to believe Planned Parenthood committed 107 criminal acts. Sebelius’ response? A bloody ideological soul mate of Tiller’s, she launched a vengeful witch-hunt against Kline. The state ethics board accused him of lying. The left-wing state Supreme Court Sebelius appointed stymied Kline’s subpoenas and appeals.

Kline was cleared of all ethics violations. In fact, for 20 full months, the state’s disciplinary board for lawyers suppressed an internal investigative report concluding there was zero probable cause to justify the ethics complaints.

Where there’s obstructionist smoke, there’s corruption fire. Under Sebelius’ watch as governor, an inspector general also reported that her appointed health policy board had “applied pressure to alter an audit report, restricted access to legal advice and threatened to fire her for meeting independently with legislators,” according to the Topeka Capital-Journal.

Entirely fitting, of course. The war on whistleblowers and inspectors general has been a hallmark of the current White House. And the radically pro-abortion rights Sebelius has ruled ruthlessly from her Beltway perch: policing citizen critics of Obamacare through a taxpayer-funded Internet snitch brigade; threatening private companies and insurers who have increased rates to cope with Obamacare coverage mandates; lashing out at newspapers who dare report on the costly consequences of the federal law.

As she bullies private companies to meet discriminatory and arbitrary disclosure demands, Sebelius has yet to be held accountable for overseeing state government agencies that conspired to hide the deadly truth about the Big Government/Big Abortion alliance from taxpayers.

Like her boss in Washington, Sebelius’ political playbook has a single page: Destroy the messenger.

On Thursday, Republicans brought to the House floor a bill on prohibiting federal funds from being used to pay for any part of a health plan that covers abortions under the Obamacare law.

Predictably, Nancy Pelosi immediately flew into full-Pelosi mode:

At a press conference on Capitol Hill today, a reporter asked Pelosi, “Can you comment on the abortion [bill] the GOP is bringing to the House floor tonight?”

Pelosi said: “Under this [abortion] bill, when the Republicans vote for this bill today, they will be voting to say that women can die on the floor and health care providers do not have to intervene, if this bill is passed. It’s just appalling. It falls right into their — all, it’s a health issue.”

Pelosi might want to have a chat with some of her fellow Dems, because eleven of them voted along with Republicans to let women “die on the floor.” They are…

Jason Altmire (D-Pa.)
Dan Boren (D-Okla.)
Jerry F. Costello (D-Ill.)
Joe Donnelly (D-Ind.)
Dan Lipinski (D-Ill.)
Jim Matheson (D-Utah)
Mike McIntyre (D-N.C.)
Collin C. Peterson, (D-Minn.)
Nick Rahall (D-W.V.)
Mike Ross (D-Ark.)
Heath Shuler (D-N.C.)

President Obama has said he’ll veto the bill, and because of makeup of the Senate it probably won’t even get that far.

This take by David Freddoso via Charlie Spiering at the Washington Examiner sums up the Pelosi position:

If you fail to show sufficient enthusiasm for paying to kill someone else’s baby, it is a sign that you’re heartless.

No matter how many times she cites “the word,” I still shudder to imagine a country goverened solely according to Nancy Pelosi’s definition of compassion.

Roll the demagoguery:

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

What makes this even worse, if that’s possible, is that it sounds as if Biden’s contention with a policy that results in forced abortions, sterilizations and all manner or human rights abuses is that it doesn’t leave the country with enough young people to pay all the retirees.

From Kathryn Jean Lopez at NRO:

Yesterday, during remarks at Sichuan University yesterday, Joe Biden said:

Your policy has been one which I fully understand — I’m not second-guessing — of one child per family. The result being that you’re in a position where one wage earner will be taking care of four retired people. Not sustainable.

Mass forced abortions is an entitlement sustainability problem but climate change is a moral dilemma? Sure, put Joe in charge of our health care!

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

Meet some of the victims of nationalized health care ignored by Obamacare fantasizers stateside:

– Neglected elderly patients.

Health service executives and residential home managers are failing to ensure that elderly patients are seen by GPs, receive the therapy, out-of-hours care and specialist dementia treatments that they need, it said.

Doctors often simply tell staff that residents should go to straight to hospital, while some state-funded medics are reluctant to help privately-run care homes for ideological reasons, the report suggested.

The British Geriatrics Society, which conducted the inquiry, condemned the “betrayal” of elderly residents by an NHS that is “ageist” and treats patients in care homes as a “low priority”.

The report called on ministers to set clear national rules for doctors and hospitals on the services they must provide to care home residents.

The findings follow a series of highly critical reports from health inspectors at the Care Quality Commission into the neglect of the elderly in NHS hospitals. The watchdog found problems at a quarter of hospitals inspected, with dehydrated elderly patients being prescribed water and others left without being fed.

In a 50-page report, the British Geriatrics Society detailed evidence taken from care homes, academics, the NHS, and social services. It found that the health service was failing to guarantee adequate care to an estimated 400,000 older people in British care homes.

– Women and their unborn babies with Downs Syndrome or disabilities.

Shocking new statistics have been produced in England after a pro-life organization won its bid to make some abortion numbers public that the government had failed to disclose concerning abortions on disabled babies.

The numbers reveal, thousands of babies victimized by abortion merely because they were mentally or physically disabled — including 500 abortions done on unborn children who have Down syndrome. In total, 2,290 abortions were done on disabled babies with 147 done after 24 weeks of pregnancy.

The London Daily Mail indicates the statistics for England and Wales came after the Department of Health followed a Freedom of Information Request from the Pro Life Alliance, which won a 5-year battle to make the figures public and the figures are the first in over 10 years. The ways in which disabled babies are targeted by abortion makes it clear why the government was reluctant to make them available.

Julia Millington, spokeswoman for the ProLife Alliance, told the newspaper, “This is a great victory for transparency and freedom of speech and we are delighted that full information about the justification for late abortions is now being made available in the same detail as it was in 2001.”

The abortion numbers showed 482 babies aborted who had Down syndrome, including 10 aborted after 24 weeks; 123 babies who died in abortions with the nervous disorder spina bifida; abortions were done on 181 babies who had a club foot or other musculoskeletal problems, including 8 killed after 24 weeks of pregnancy. Seven babies who had cleft palates were victims of abortion.

– Pregnant young girls and teens.

More than a thousand girls a year aged under 15 have an abortion, figures revealed.

Terminations are being carried out on youngsters aged just 12 or 13 who have only just started secondary school.

And every year nearly 4,000 procedures are undertaken on girls who have not yet reached their 16th birthday, the legal age of consent.

Campaigners warned that the alarming figures, revealed by the Department of Health, were representative of a society where abortion was ‘on demand’ – even for very young girls who legally should not be having sex.

The official statistics show that since 2002 more than 35,262 abortions were carried out on girls under the age of 16.

Last year 3,718 procedures were carried out on girls aged 15 or under – including 1,042 on girls aged 14 or younger. Of these girls, 134 were just 13 and two just 12 years old.

– Christian medical providers.

Margaret Forrester discussed the booklet with family planning staff at the health centre where she worked because she felt that the NHS was failing to give patients information about the risks and other options to terminating a pregnancy.

But after a six-month disciplinary process, during which Ms Forrester had to fight her own case and became ill, she was found guilty of “gross professional misconduct” and fired.

She has spoken out over the “scandal” of the pro-abortion culture in the medical profession and claimed that Christians were “an easy target” for “politically correct” bureaucrats in the NHS.

“The NHS has a pro-abortion stance which comes from a secular religion. It is a belief system which is aggressively anti-Christian,” she said.

– Surgery patients.

Patients are being put at risk because faulty surgical equipment is routinely used in operations in NHS hospitals, an investigation has found.

Experts say as many as a fifth of the scalpels, forceps, clamps and other instruments used in surgery would fail basic safety checks.

In some cases surgeons’ gloves have been torn by sharp protrusions on implements, enabling bacteria to pass through and infect patients.

An investigation by BBC1’s Panorama programme, to be screened tonight, found just one hospital trust in England, Barts and the London, checks its equipment before allowing it to be used in surgery.

The technician who carries out these safety tests says that on average a fifth of the instruments sent to the hospital are faulty.

Tom Brophy, lead technologist at Barts and the London NHS Trust, also says that on occasions entire batches of equipment are not up to standard and have to be returned.

– Whistleblowers.

The Department of Health insists that it has “acted swiftly to deliver on this commitment” by consulting on changes to the NHS constitution and by introducing a new contractual right for NHS employees to raise public-interest concerns. However, patients and staff are unconvinced. Examples continue to emerge from hospitals and care homes for vulnerable patients where whistleblowers have been ignored.

Peter Walsh, the chief executive of patient-safety charity Action against Medical Accidents , said: “The Government’s approach to whistleblowers is totally inadequate. We have fine words and guidance in abundance but NHS organisations have shown a consistent ability to work outside the spirit of these well-intended measures, and regulators seem to stand by when organisations blatantly flout them.”

5/19 update…Vote expected at 2pm Eastern today…RedState targets…Alexander, Brown, Chambliss, Collins, Graham, Isakson, Kirk, McCain, Murkowski, Snowe, and Thune…202-224-3121

I’ll repeat what I said back in January:

President Obama just can’t let go of far Left San Francisco liberals out of touch with mainstream America — and the law.

After dropping two controversial Bay Area judicial nominees from his slate before Christmas, Obama has resurrected the bids of 9th Circuit nominee Goodwin Liu and US Magistrate and ethnic-card jurist Edward Chen and renominated several dozen other candidates.

Liu’s chronic amnesia and recklessly injudicious smearing of Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito are bad enough. But his expedient metamorphosis from radical judicial activist to cut-and-run cypher is baldly disqualifying.

Today, Harry Reid filed cloture on UC Berkeley Law prof Liu’s nomination.

The vote is expected on Thursday.

Steven Ertelt at Life News re-caps the stakes:

Obama picked Liu for the open federal appeals court seat a year ago, but Republican filibusters kept him from receiving approval in the full Senate — forcing Obama to renominate Liu this January. With Democrats controlling fewer seats now, at 53, they are seven short of the 60 votes needed to stop a filibuster assuming no Democrats peel off and side with Republicans, which may not be the case for some moderates or those facing tough election battles in 2012.

Liu is a liberal abortion supporter who conservative legal guru Ed Whelan observed was so left-wing that former “White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel initially vetoed” his candidacy for the Ninth Circuit “on the ground that Liu’s left-wing record made him too controversial.” But Whelan says new White House counsel Robert Bauer “eager to please the Left, successfully pushed back.”

In December, Democrats gave up on a vote on Liu as a deal brokered between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell with White House officials allowed votes on several less controversial nominees but not Liu.

Family Research Council legislative director Tom McClusky has commented on Liu, saying he is “a firm believer in the rule of international law and has shown nothing but disrespect for the Senate Judiciary Committee.”

Burn up those Senate phone lines…every call counts.

We had about ten updates and several hundred comments on the other budget/shutdown watch thread, so we’ll move to a weekend version for more discussion.

One of the greatest tragedies this nation has ever encountered was narrowly averted last night. I speak of course of the devastation a government shutdown would have wrought on the cherry blossom festival.

As you have probably heard, a temporary budget deal has been reached:

With little more than an hour to go before a midnight government shutdown, President Obama and congressional leaders said Friday night they struck a tentative deal to give themselves more breathing space as they finalize a long-term bill to cut $37.7 billion in spending.

Early Saturday morning, when the government technically had run out of money, Congress passed and sent a short-term spending bill to the White House that keeps the government open until the end of next week. During that reprieve, the House and Senate are expected to pass a broader bill that funds the government for the rest of fiscal year 2011, which ends Sept. 30.

The leaders said the cuts are “historic,” and congratulated each other for reaching a deal, but a small rebellion was brewing among conservative Republicans who said it does not make the kinds of deep reductions they were seeking and that the House passed earlier this year.

“Tomorrow, I’m pleased to announce that the Washington Monument as well as the entire federal government will be open for business,” Mr. Obama said at the White House late Friday, minutes after House Speaker John A. Boehner announced the deal at the Capitol.

Who “won” this thing? Opinions will vary. Harry Reid called it “historic,” which isn’t exactly a confidence booster. Yesterday Reid accused Republicans of wanting to kill women and today he made history with them? Did they find middle ground and decide to only make them slightly ill?

More:

Under the terms of the agreement, the six-month bill will slash $38.5 billion from current spending levels, which is $23 billion less than the reductions Republicans originally demanded but $30 billion more than what Democrats had initially offered to cut.

Here’s a little perspective: That’s some $38 billion in proposed cuts through the rest of the fiscal year ending in September. The federal debt has increased $54.1 billion in the past eight days.

Simply slowing the meteoric increase in deficit spending is like choosing between going to hell in a fast handbasket or slightly slower gas can, so to that degree my fellow conservatives might feel like the Republicans lost this round (you’ll notice that the debt clock is still going up, not down).

At the same time though, according to the Washington Times, there is $78.5 billion less spending than what the president had requested for 2011, and the Democrats agreed to it. As Ed Morrissey at Hot Air pointed out, that’s not bad for a party that only controls one chamber of Congress and doesn’t occupy the White House. Not bad for a flea either, eh, Chuck?

As for the Planned Parenthood sticking point, here’s what happened with that:

The bill does not include a Republican provision to de-fund Planned Parenthood, which provides health care services for women, including abortion. The Planned Parenthood provision was one of the main sticking points during the negotiations, with the GOP insisting it remain in the bill.

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, agreed to remove the Planned Parenthood provision in exchange for an agreement that would allow Congress to take up the funding issue separately. The Republicans also won inclusion of a provision that will require the Senate to vote on a bill to de-fund the health care reform law.

Much more will come of all this as the days go on.

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

The Left’s best and brightest have a new plan: Incorporate women’s uteruses (uterii?).

This morning, I re-tweeted Van Jones’s effusive reaction to the ACLU stunt (h/t the_zarf):

Here’s the story:

The American Civil Liberties Union of Florida has a message for women who want complete control over their reproductive health: Incorporate your uterus.

To help women who want to do this, the organization launched the website www.IncorporateMyUterus.com on Tuesday, which will issue a declaration of incorporation for women who would like one.

Head of ACLU of Florida Howard Simon says “The Florida Legislature – and extreme social conservatives across the country – are taking rules and regulation off of businesses and adding them to uteruses.”

Here’s the website.

So which union will represent the unborn babies who inhabit these incorporated uteruses?

John Carney asks: “Will stakeholders (like the unborn) get a say on pay? Proxy voting rights?”

Over to you, Van Jones.

Here’s a lesson on the Constitution that’s worthy of a Schoolhouse Rock parody if anybody can think of a word that rhymes with “Lautenberg.”

Sen. Frank Lautenberg was speaking at a Planned Parenthood demonstration and let loose with this (transcript by way of Hot Air):

The Republicans in Congress claim they’re concerned about the budget balance, but it’s a disguise! It’s not true! It’s a lie! That’s not what they want. They want — they want other people not to be able to have their own opinions. They don’t deserve the freedoms that are in the Constitution! But we’ll give it to them anyway.

Well that sure is nice of ya, Frank!

Lautenberg & company decide who’s given access to the freedoms in the Constitution? It’s not surprising that those words rolled so easily off Laut’s tongue, seeing as he was standing in front of a bus plastered with the logo of an organization dedicated to helping decide who does and doesn’t deserve the freedom to live.

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

For those of you keeping score at home, this amount of money is the equivalent of about 1.2 million packages of Ramen noodles.

Jim Geraghty at NRO:

In Mike Allen’s morning newsletter, we learn Planned Parenthood will spend $200,000 on television ads, urging Congress to not cut federal funding for Planned Parenthood.

You know, folks, if you can afford to spend $200,000 on television ads, maybe you don’t need all of that federal funding.

By way of Weasel Zippers, here’s the ad. They fail to mention one of their primary services though. See if you can guess which one:

“If it weren’t for Planned Parenthood, I wouldn’t be here today.”

Conversely, how many would be here today?

As with most stories about Planned Parenthood activities, I’m required to add the obligatory “poor and minority unborn hardest hit” tag at the end.

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

NRO’s Kathryn Lopez reports on the witch hunt:

He has been portrayed as a nutty prosecutor with an unrestrained interest in women’s medical records. He has been run out of his own state. He has to come up with hundreds of thousands of dollars he doesn’t have, to pay his legal fees. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow has accused him of domestic terrorism, intimidation, and abuse of office for doing his job — enforcing the law and protecting the innocent. Innocent children, as it happens. But that’s not humiliation enough. Not if you’re the enemy of Planned Parenthood.

Today in Topeka, Kansas, a man goes on trial for insisting Planned Parenthood be held accountable for what it claims to be about: women’s health care and safety.

Phill Kline is the former attorney general of Kansas and former Johnson County prosecutor there. He now lives and teaches in Virginia, at Liberty University’s Law School, but will be sitting before a three-lawyer panel today for supposed ethics violations. Stanton Hazlett, the Disciplinary Administrator appointed by the Kansas supreme court, found that his violation — his conflict of interest in investigating the nation’s largest abortion provider — was “strong personal anti abortion beliefs.”

At any time, this attack on Kline would be an outrage. In late February 2011, it should set off five-alarm sirens.

Before there was a House vote to potentially begin to end funding of Planned Parenthood, as there was Friday; before there was a 22-year-old girl named Lila Rose leading private investigations exposing Planned Parenthood as a safe haven for pimps of underage girls; before there was a Philadelphia prosecutor exposing a “house of horrors” too long protected by abortion politics, there was Phill Kline, a law-enforcement official doing his job.Today Kline remains the only prosecutor in the United States to have brought charges against Planned Parenthood. And for this, Planned Parenthood and its allies are determined to see him pay.

As a result of the ethics trial, we are learning more about the Kansas Horror — and how it was covered up.

Yesterday Kline testified under oath that Planned Parenthood of Overland Park and George Tiller together performed abortions on 166 girls 14 years and under and only reported one each to authorities. So 164 cases of underage rape or statutory rape went unreported and, therefore, not investigated by authorities. Jill Stanek has more.

Another bombshell: The Topeka Capital Journal reports that “the state’s disciplinary board for lawyers concealed for 20 months an internal investigative report concluding no probable cause existed to justify ethics complaints against former Attorney General Phill Kline tied to his criminal inquiries into abortion clinics.”

Planned Parenthood Corruption is following all the breaking developments.

Senate Democrats are united in defending the predators of Planned Parenthood.

How about your Republican senator?