"Supreme Court allows states to cut off Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood."

WaPo reports.  Free-access link.

At issue for the justices was whether a provision of the federal Medicaid Act allows individual Medicaid patients to sue to obtain care from their provider of choice.... Several justices during oral argument seemed eager to provide clarity to help lower courts determine when a statute simply confers a benefit to an individual and when it goes further, empowering those individuals to sue to enforce that benefit or right. The Supreme Court has typically set a high bar for allowing lawsuits against the government, seeking to shield public officials from liability....

"The DOGE Plan to Reform Government" — by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.

Read it in The Wall Street Journal. Excerpts:

We are entrepreneurs, not politicians.... We'll cut costs.... We will focus particularly on driving change through executive action based on existing legislation rather than by passing new laws. Our North Star for reform will be the U.S. Constitution, with a focus on two critical Supreme Court rulings issued during President Biden's tenure.

This video is an on-theme placeholder so I can put something after the jump.

Look at this:

"Men really need to consider what losing access to safe and legal abortion means for them."

Said Joe Colon-Uvalles, an organizer at Planned Parenthood, quoted in "The Voices of Men Affected by Abortion/In light of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, advocates from all sides of the issue have called for men to be part of the conversation. The Times heard from hundreds who wanted to share their stories" (NYT).

The NYT solicited "stories" from "men who have grappled with abortion in their own lives." From the "hundreds" of responses, the Times made it's selections, and I'll just cut that down to various men's feelings without giving you the details of names, ages, and circumstances. Each quote is from a different man:

"[Margaret] Sanger still has defenders who say the decision to repudiate her lacks historical nuance."

"Ellen Chesler, a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, a think tank, and the author of a biography of Ms. Sanger and the birth control movement, said that while the country is undergoing vast social change and reconsidering prominent figures from the past, Ms. Sanger’s views have been misinterpreted. The eugenics movement had wide support at the time in both conservative and liberal circles, Ms. Chesler said, and Ms. Sanger was squarely in the latter camp. She rejected some eugenicists’ belief that white middle-class families should have more children than others, Ms. Chesler said. Instead, Ms. Sanger believed that the quality of all children’s lives could be improved if their parents had smaller families, Ms. Chesler said, adding that Ms. Sanger believed Black people and immigrants had a right to that better life. 'Her motives were the opposite of racism,' Ms. Chesler said, citing Ms. Sanger’s relationships with prominent Black leaders like W.E.B. Du Bois, a founder of the N.A.A.C.P....  As the story goes, Ms. Sanger treated a woman named 'Sadie Sachs,' who had given herself an abortion. Sadie asked a doctor how she could avoid having another baby, and the doctor recommended abstinence. A few months later, Ms. Sanger was called to treat Sadie again after she had given herself another abortion, and she died in Ms. Sanger’s arms. Ms. Sanger went on to start clinics, including one in Harlem. She pushed for reproductive rights, even after she was arrested and sent to jail for opening her first clinic, in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn."

From "Planned Parenthood in N.Y. Disavows Margaret Sanger Over Eugenics/Ms. Sanger, a feminist icon and reproductive-rights pioneer, supported a discredited belief in improving the human race through selective breeding" (NYT).

Kanye West is running for President as the candidate of "the Birthday Party," Elon Musk is advising him....

... and he's not for Trump anymore — "I am taking the red hat off, with this interview."

Here's the interview — in Forbes. Other high points:

... he’s ok with siphoning off Black votes from the Democratic nominee, thus helping Trump. “I’m not denying it, I just told you. To say that the Black vote is Democratic is a form of racism and white supremacy.”
... he’s never voted in his life.
... he was sick with Covid-19 in February.
... he’s suspicious of a coronavirus vaccine, terming vaccines “the mark of the beast.”
... he believes “Planned Parenthoods have been placed inside cities by white supremacists to do the Devil’s work.”
... he envisions a White House organizational model based on the secret country of Wakanda in Black Panther.

ADDED:

His running mate? Michelle Tidball, an obscure preacher from Wyoming. And why the Birthday Party? “Because when we win, it’s everybody’s birthday.”...

A few weeks after he ended two separate text chains with me with the message “Trump 2020” and a fist raised high, he insists he’s lost confidence in the president. “It looks like one big mess to me,” he says. “I don’t like that I caught wind that he hid in the bunker.”...

That said, he won’t say much more against Trump. He’s much less shy about criticizing Biden, which certainly won’t tamp down the idea that the Birthday Party is a ruse to help re-elect Trump. “I’m not saying Trump’s in my way, he may be a part of my way. And Joe Biden? Like come on man, please. You know? Obama’s special. Trump’s special. We say Kanye West is special. America needs special people that lead. Bill Clinton? Special. Joe Biden’s not special.”...

Kanye West is very good at saying interesting things. So's Trump. They're special.

The Washington Post fact-checker gives 4 Pinocchios to the Planned Parenthood assertion that, before Roe v. Wade, "thousands" of American women died every year from illegal abortions.

The repeated assertions come from Leana Wen, the president of Planned Parenthood:

“We face a real situation where Roe could be overturned. And we know what will happen, which is that women will die. Thousands of women died every year pre-Roe.”

“Before Roe v. Wade, thousands of women died every year — and because of extreme attacks on safe, legal abortion care, this could happen again right here in America.”

“We’re not going to go back in time to a time before Roe when thousands of women died every year because they didn’t have access to essential health care.”

Responding to "a reader" who asked for a fact check, Glenn Kessler writes:

Erica Sackin, a Planned Parenthood spokeswoman, directed us to a 2014 policy statement issued by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG): “It is estimated that before 1973, 1.2 million U.S. women resorted to illegal abortion each year and that unsafe abortions caused as many as 5,000 annual deaths.”...

Wen is a doctor, and the ACOG is made up of doctors. They should know better than to peddle statistics based on data that predates the advent of antibiotics. Even given the fuzzy nature of the data and estimates, there is no evidence that in the years immediately preceding the Supreme Court’s decision, thousands of women died every year in the United States from illegal abortions....

Unsafe abortion is certainly a serious issue, especially in countries with inadequate medical facilities. But advocates hurt their cause when they use figures that do not withstand scrutiny. These numbers were debunked in 1969 — 50 years ago — by a statistician celebrated by Planned Parenthood. There’s no reason to use them today.

The commenters at WaPo rebel. The most-liked comment is:

This is a revolting misuse of a "fact check" function. How can Kessler do a fair "fact check" on a formerly illegal activity that admittedly has only "fuzzy numbers?" If thousands of women died in the 1930s from illegal abortion, that is a recent enough statistic in my mind. If 39 died, that's too much. Kessler deserves four Pinocchios for picking the wrong target

And there's a poll at the bottom of Kessler's column inviting readers to do their own rating of the statement in question. You're probably not surprised to hear that 42% of those who voted judged the statement to be true. Only 35% agreed with the 4 Pinocchio rating Kessler chose. I think there are a LOT of people out there whose idea of truth is what they want to be true.

"I have been having conversations about Harvey Weinstein’s history of sexual harassment for more than 17 years."

Admits Rebecca Traister in "Why the Harvey Weinstein Sexual-Harassment Allegations Didn’t Come Out Until Now."

Back in 2000, in NYC, Weinstein called Traister "a cunt and declared that he was glad he was the 'fucking sheriff of this fucking lawless piece-of-shit town'" and knocked her boyfriend/colleague down "a set of stairs."

So why didn't she out him? And why didn't any of the other journalists who were there report anything? Photos were taken, but never published. Why did all you people shield him, and why should I listen to you now?

Back then, Harvey could spin — or suppress — anything; there were so many journalists on his payroll, working as consultants on movie projects, or as screenwriters, or for his magazine.

He could only do it because you were complicit. Were you all paid off?

I never really thought of trying to write the story myself. Back then, I didn’t write about feminism; there wasn’t a lot of journalism about feminism. 

There's been plenty of journalism about feminism for the last 50 years, but why did you need a foundation of plenteous journalism about feminism to write about such beastly behavior?

His behavior toward women was obviously understood to be a bad thing—this was a decade after Anita Hill’s accusations against Clarence Thomas had helped the country to understand that sexual harassment was not just a quirk of the modern workplace, but a professional and economic crime committed against women as a class. But...

The "but" should be, but we the liberal journalists helped everyone forget what we'd learned because it was so important to help Bill Clinton. But Traister's "but" is:

...  the story felt fuzzier, harder to tell about Harvey: the notion of the “casting couch” still had an almost romantic reverberation...

Oh, bullshit. Harvey was another liberal, like Bill Clinton, so you pushed the obvious principles to the side and protected him. The only fuzziness is the blur imposed by politics, and once you let that in, you have no principle.

But another reason that I never considered trying to report the story myself... I remembered what it was like to have the full force of Harvey Weinstein — back then a mountainous man — screaming vulgarities at me, his spit hitting my face. I had watched him haul my friend into the street and try to hurt him. That kind of force, that kind of power? I could not have won against that.

Ridiculous. You were afraid of him because of his physical size and strength in an in-person encounter? What the hell is writing for?! You got your distance. He wasn't around. From a distance, in writing, his "mountainous" physicality is one more thing that makes it easier to portray him as a brute — an ugly brute. The photographs of this man that accompany any article about him stir up only revulsion, not sympathy. Why would you not have won with words?

But Weinstein didn’t just exert physical power. He also employed legal and professional and economic power. He supposedly had every employee sign elaborate, binding nondisclosure agreements. He gave jobs to people who might otherwise work to bring him down, and gave gobs of money to other powerful people, who knows how much, but perhaps just enough to keep them from listening to ugly rumors that might circulate among young people, among less powerful people. For decades, the reporters who tried to tell the story of Harvey Weinstein butted up against the same wall of sheer force and immovable power that was leveraged against those ambitious actors, the vulnerable assistants, the executives whose careers, salaries, and reputations were in his hands.

That was even more material to use against him, and it's material that goes against all you reporters now. If you don't know how to get a story where a corrupt miscreant is using legal maneuverings and payoffs to suppress it, how are you a journalist?!

Something has changed. Sources have gone on the record. It’s worth it to wonder why. Perhaps because of shifts in how we understand these kinds of abuses. Recent years have seen scores of women, finding strength and some kind of power in numbers, come forward and tell their stories about Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, Donald Trump. 

So! Now, we get to the meat of it. When the targets were right wing (or perceived as right wing), like Clarence Thomas all those years ago in the pre-Clinton era, the journalists knew how to get at the story. But they did it so aggressively and brought down such big targets that the protection of Harvey Weinstein was too obvious. The wall of silence broke.

But now our consciousness has been raised. 

Oh, please. You had consciousness before. Take responsibility for the politically skewed reporting that has infected sexual harassment stories since the Clarence Thomas/Bill Clinton combination that shamed political liberals in the 1990s.

There's one more thing, according to Traister:

I saw Harvey Weinstein earlier this year, at a Planned Parenthood celebration. I was struck... by his physical diminishment; he seemed small and frail, and, when I caught sight of him in May, he appeared to be walking with a cane.

So what are you saying? You feel better about kicking a weak little guy? You really were holding back because of his erstwhile mountainousness?

He has also lost power in the movie industry....

This is a confession of the absence of courage in journalism. You should be going after the most powerful people and go after them when they are doing their damage, not tell us about it after age and bad fortune have done half the work of laying him low.

ADDED: "I saw Harvey Weinstein earlier this year, at a Planned Parenthood celebration. I was struck... by his physical diminishment; he seemed small and frail...." How awful to see the words "Planned Parenthood" come up when the subject is the author's comfort in going after someone who is weak and small! This is one more effect of the liberal cocoon. Traister must not have noticed the grisly irony. 

"The two antiabortion activists who mounted a hidden-camera investigation against Planned Parenthood officials have been charged with 15 felony counts..."

"... of violating the privacy of health-care providers by recording confidential information without their consent. In announcing the charges against David Robert Daleiden and Sandra Merritt on Tuesday, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra said the duo used manufactured identities and a fictitious bioresearch company to meet medical officials and covertly record the private discussions they initiated.... The secretly recorded conversations dropped during the politically tumultuous summer of 2015, amid a crowded field of Republican presidential contenders, and turned Daleiden into the biggest star of the antiabortion movement.... Daleiden’s lawyer, Steve Cooley, a former district attorney of Los Angeles, blamed the charges on Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), a former attorney general of California whose office initiated the investigation that produced Tuesday’s charges. He claims Harris corrupted the current attorney general’s office to 'pander to her constituents and her supporters.'"

Reports The Washington Post, which embeds the privacy-invading video.

"I’m guilty. There’s no trial. I’m a warrior for the babies. Let it all come out. The truth!"

The Planned Parenthood shooter, Robert L. Dear Jr., shouted in court today.

No, Robert Lewis Dear is not a "transgendered leftist activist," as some have speculated.

It was just a clerical error that got him listed as female on his voter registration.

Chuck Todd was heavily pushing the politicization of the Colorado Planned Parenthood shooting.

It permeated "Meet the Press" today. The worst part was in this segment of the interview with Ben Carson:

CHUCK TODD: There was this shooting in Colorado Springs. And overnight, there's now been reports that the shooter was yelling about baby parts. 

Yelling? I thought "no more baby parts" only appeared somewhere in the shooter's rambling, unfocused interview with the police. Todd is making it seem like an Allahu-Akbar-type battle cry.

CHUCK TODD: Planned Parenthood put out this statement, "We've seen an alarming increase in hateful rhetoric and smear campaigns against abortion providers and patients over the last few months. That environment breeds acts of violence. Americans reject the hatred and vitriol that fueled this tragedy." That was, again, from a Planned Parenthood Rocky Mountain spokesperson. Do you believe that the rhetoric got too heated on Planned Parenthood? And are you concerned that it may have motivated a mentally disturbed individual?

Carson handled the question by going utterly generic —  rejecting "any hateful rhetoric directed at anyone from any source" and recommending that we "stop trying to destroy each other" and "work constructively."

Earlier, Todd asked a similar question of Donald Trump, albeit without the inappropriate reference to "yelling."

CHUCK TODD: Now, a spokesperson for Planned Parenthood is concerned that the heated rhetoric around the Planned Parenthood debate could've had an adverse effect, basically, on this mentally disturbed individual. Do you think the rhetoric got out of hand on Planned Parenthood?

Trump stuck to his idea that the man (Robert Lewis Dear) is mentally ill. And that's when Todd brought up that "he was talking about baby parts and things like that... during his interview." Todd seemed to be trying to get Trump to back off on the political headway that anti-abortion forces have made with the undercover Planned Parenthood videos. Trump did not give him that (though he took a sideswipe at Republicans):

Dear in the headlights.

I look at the mugshots of Robert Lewis Dear — those eyes — and I think: mentally ill. A quote from a neighbor: "He was a very weird individual. It's hard to explain, but he had a weird look in his eye most of the time."

Another neighbor: "He complained about everything. He said he worked with the government, and everybody was out to get him, and he knew the secrets of the U.S.A. He said, 'Nobody touch me, because I've got enough information to put the whole U.S. of A in danger.' It was very crazy."

He'd been arrested 9 times, including twice for "personal intrusion" and twice for animal cruelty.

He had 2 homes, "a white trailer 'with a forest-green four-wheeler by the front door and a modest black cross painted on one end'" — photo here — and something in Black Mountain, N.C., that the neighbors said looked like a "moonshine shack" and the Washington Post called a "little yellow wooden hut, with overgrown weeds and no indoor plumbing, banged together" — photo here. In happier circumstances, the media might call a place like this a "tiny house."

Did those undercover Planned Parenthood videos inspire him, push him over the edge? The NYT quotes a law "senior law enforcement official," who's anonymous, because he shouldn't be speaking to the press. He says Dear "said a lot of things" including "no more baby parts." The NYT characterizes Dear's interview with the police as "rambling" and says it was "difficult for the authorities to pinpoint a specific motivation."

"We don’t yet know the full circumstances and motives behind this criminal action, and we don’t yet know if Planned Parenthood was in fact the target of this attack."

"We share the concerns of many Americans that extremists are creating a poisonous environment that feeds domestic terrorism in this country. We will never back away from providing care in a safe, supportive environment that millions of people rely on and trust."

Said the president of Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, quoted in "3 Are Dead in Colorado Springs Shootout at Planned Parenthood Center."

"If you think fetal-tissue research is wrong and should be banned, would you refuse to use any therapies that may come out of it?"

"I thought not. I’ve posed this question to abortion opponents before, but so far, no one has said, Yes, Katha, I would rather let Alzheimer’s turn my brain into cottage cheese and ketchup than benefit from this diabolical practice. If I get Parkinson’s, HIV, breast cancer, diabetes, or the flu; if I go blind from macular degeneration; if I have a miscarriage, so be it. Treatments for those conditions are still being developed, but surprise! If you have been vaccinated for polio, mumps, measles, chicken pox, hepatitis, or rabies, it may be too late for you to stand your ethical ground: You have already benefited from fetal-tissue research. This is, after all, a practice that’s been legal since the 1930s. In 1954, John Enders, Thomas Weller, and Frederick Robbins won the Nobel Prize for work on the polio virus that paved the way for the Salk and Sabin vaccines. They used fetal tissue, the monsters. Should their heirs return the medals?"

Writes Katha Pollitt in The Nation in a piece titled "Fetal-Tissue Bans Are All About Making Abortion Providers Look Like Monsters/Life-saving research is collateral damage in the war on Planned Parenthood."

Cecile Richards — Planned Parenthood President and the daughter of former Texas Governor Ann Richards — stood up to intense pressure from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

Here are some highlights:



Featured at a WaPo article titled: "In Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards, GOP faces formidable fan of ‘kick-butt’ politics." Excerpt:

Unlike past presidents, Richards didn’t have a background in women’s health. She was an organizer and a strategist. Her goal, she told the New York Times in 2008, was to turn Planned Parenthood into “the largest kick-butt political organization.”

Richard’s political tactics were targeted by Republicans at the hearing, who suggested that the federal funding received by the organization in effect subsidized the group’s political action committee, which raises funds primarily for Democratic candidates. “It’s the co-mingling [of the funds] that bothers us,” said Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), the committee chairman.

The coldness and the hotness — Hillary Clinton and Carly Fiorina on "Meet the Press."

On "Meet the Press" today (which began with an interview with Hillary). Brooks said:

Sometimes she's campaigning like she's in Napoleon's march on Moscow, just like a trudge through the winter. This was a little more upbeat, a little more fun...

A little more fun than this...



Brooks continues:

She's basically has a defensive posture. And that means she's erecting walls, not trusting people, and there's no romance. People, especially this year, they want a little romance, they want a lot of ideological action going outward. But she's on the defensive. And so that's the core problem. It's not the emails. Nobody's going to disqualify her as president because she used one server versus another. That's not a real scandal. It's her attitude.

Later, asked whether Hillary Clinton is "in tune with the mood of the electorate," Andrea Mitchell says she is not because...

She's not angry enough. She's not-- And it's hard for her to be angry because then you've got, you know, Donald Trump saying, "She's shrill," which is a sexist word, let's face it. But she has to get around that. But the anger, the passion is all on people going on the attack, whether it's, you know, whether it's Donald Trump, whether it's Carly Fiorina, or whether it's Bernie Sanders.

"Shrill," yeah, it is used to push women back, but Carly Fiorina is a woman, and she's not cowed at all. She, too, was interviewed earlier in the show, right after Hillary, and she was fierce, utterly on the attack, especially as Chuck Todd tried to get her to concede that she'd misstated what she thought she saw in that harvest-the-brain Planned Parenthood video. Watch it:



Why won't she concede that the fetus we see is stock footage, intercut to increase the emotional impact of the story that is related by a witness? I say it's a deliberate trap. The video makes us feel we saw the event. One could be wrong, and maybe eventually Carly will say she did look back and sees now that she was conflating the image with the spoken account. But until then, she's creating pressure on everyone to view the video for themselves, and once people do that, most will be horrified by the story and want to know if it's true, and those who want to say but Carly was wrong about seeing the incident in the video will seem morally unbalanced, perhaps monstrous. That's what you want to talk about?!

"The perfectly sensible reason why panda mothers and other creatures selectively abandon babies."

A piece in The Washington Post by Sarah Kaplan. The occasion seems to be the birth of twin pandas at the Washington D.C. zoo and the mother's rejection of the tinier baby, but is anything worthwhile said about human behavior?

Among bears, cats, dogs, primates and rodents, it’s common for mothers to eat a deformed or dying infant. Most of these animals are unable to hunt or forage while caring for their newborns, and like panda moms, are close to starving while their offspring nurse. A baby that is likely to die is an important source of protein and nutrients, one that can help her produce milk to feed her other young.

“They become a resource, one she can’t afford to waste,” said Tony Barthel, a mammal curator at the National Zoo’s Asia Trail....

We humans don't eat our unwanted babies, but we do sometimes regard them as "a resource" (as documented in the recent Planned Parenthood videos).

But Ms. Kaplan never says anything at all about human mothers, though clearly we are among the "other creatures" who "selectively abandon babies."

I was sure this was an anti-abortion illustration — a pretty peevish, nasty one — and I'm still finding it hard to believe the NYT used it for a pro-choice op-ed.

That's a snippet of the illustration — by Ruth Gwily — which you can see enlarged and in full here. The op-ed, by Katha Pollitt, is "How to Really Defend Planned Parenthood." Pollitt's op-ed is somewhat interesting, because she does seem to be struggling over what to think and how to talk about abortion in the wake of the disturbing Planned Parenthood videos. ("[T]he videos do cleverly evoke visceral feelings of disgust — graphic images, physicians using the words 'crush' and 'crunchy' — to activate the stereotype that abortion providers are money-grubbing baby killers.") Pollitt wants pro-choice people to speak up, loud and clear, rather than to keep their head down and only pipe up when there's something — like these videos — that needs a response. But in the end, I don't think Pollitt has said anything that will change the low-profile of the pro-choice crowd.

We need to say that women have sex, have abortions, are at peace with the decision and move on with their lives. We need to say that is their right, and, moreover, it’s good for everyone that they have this right: The whole society benefits when motherhood is voluntary. When we gloss over these truths we unintentionally promote the very stigma we’re trying to combat...

There are truths on both sides, pro-life and pro-choice, and the truths on the pro-life side lend themselves to loud, passionate assertion. On the pro-choice side, there's more reason to exercise restraint. These are hard truths. The whole society benefits when motherhood is voluntary can be paraphrased as That dead baby would have been a bad citizen anyway. And the pro-choice side got its passion extracted when abortion became a right. Rights are supposed to make you feel secure, and, feeling secure, why should you have to yell about what you want anymore?

But let's talk about that illustration. I thought some right-wing website was portraying feminists as creepy, ugly jerks! The rat teeth, the sneering nose, the greasy, stringy hair, the misshapen ear that seems twisted a few notches to the left. That's the pro-choice image of a pro-choice woman?! I don't get it. Why make her repulsive?

It also makes no sense to use a tiny megaphone to express the idea that her voice is not being heard. Pro-choicers can get all the social and mainstream amplification they want. They are choosing to be low-key. That's Pollitt's point!

I'm assuming that you immediately perceive the thing in the woman's hand as a megaphone. I called Meade over to look at the illustration, and at first glance, he "saw" a little baby about to be eaten by the woman.

I did a Google image search for a megaphone to get an idea of how accurate the illustration is and I came up with this Planned Parenthood image:



I strongly suspect that Ruth Gwily (the illustrator) used that photo as her reference. I think it explains the protruding teeth and the sneering nose. It seemed, I'm guessing, like a good idea to turn the pretty model into a "real" woman, and nobody with decision-making authority had the perspective to notice how awful she looked.

The NYT serves up a Hillary ad to go with its "Video Accuses Planned Parenthood of Crime."

Here's the screenshot from my iPhone:



I was just waking up, still lying in bed, catching up on the new news, checking to see how The New York Times covered the story I was reading in The Washington Post last night. I read the first few screens of the NYT story:

Abortion opponents on Tuesday renewed their campaign against Planned Parenthood... after the release of a video that surreptitiously captured an official from the group explaining how it provides fetal parts to medical researchers...

That's paragraph 1. Paragraph 4:

“This is not something with any revenue stream that affiliates are looking at,” the official, Deborah Nucatola, Planned Parenthood’s senior director of medical services, says in the video. “This is a way to offer patients the services they want and do good for the medical community and still maintain access.”

Paragraph 6:

“At several of our health centers, we help patients who want to donate tissue for scientific research, and we do this just like every other high-quality health care provider does — with full, appropriate consent from patients and under the highest ethical and legal standards,” a Planned Parenthood spokesman, Eric Ferrero, said in a statement. “There is no financial..."

Here's where I do the scroll that gets to the screen that is my screen shot above:

"... benefit for tissue donation for either the patient or for Planned Parenthood.”

Bright, smiley Hillary face!

This is the way advertising works these days, and I wonder, what comes first, the slanting of the article toward bolstering the morale of those who believe in abortion rights or the availability of money from a super-rich presidential campaign?

Ah, but there is no beginning. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? When does human life begin? It's in the mind of the beholder.

Pay no attention to that Planned Parenthood senior director behind the distorting reflections of that forest of wine glasses through which the sneaky camera shot the woman who explained that tissue is donated by willing patients who support science, and Planned Parenthood, covering its shipping and handling expenses, serves its patients and advances science, following the highest ethical and legal standards. How dare right-wingers take unflattering photographs of a woman who did not consent to appear in that movie! Don't look at that pornography! Look at this woman. Hillary! She's ready for her closeup. She's looking exactly the way she chooses to look, the way she needs you to see her look, the way that will help you continue to believe what you want to keep believing.

Don't stop believing!