Political Hippo Circle Jerk - America, farg YEAH!

[MDS]

"Now you know why no birth certificate"

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/04/orange_co_goper_my_obama-as-chimp_pic_was_just_a_birther_joke_meant_for_my_friends.php?ref=fpblg

usa usa usa usa

[ice grillin you]

while it doesnt surprise me that an actual republican politician did that (after all the new leader of the birther movement is far and away the favorite for the republican nomination right now)...i was fully expecting to hit the link thinking it was some loser no name blogger...these people are evil racist xenophobic garbage

[PhillyGirl]

Oh come on, y'all...she said she didn't intend it that way. It was taken out of context.

You know...like goombah Christie making the "take a bat out on her" comment about the 76 year old NJ Congresswoman. You know, because its not real life government, its a farging episode of the Sopranos to this pig of a governor.

Disgusting people. I just don't get it.

[ice grillin you]

In Montana and elsewhere, Planned Parenthood serves broad function
By Sandhya Somashekhar, Monday, April 18, 8:53 PM
BILLINGS, Mont. — On Friday, the staff of a Planned Parenthood clinic in a quiet residential neighborhood here conducted four Pap smears, nine contraceptive appointments, two screenings for sexually transmitted diseases and three pregnancy tests. Of the 24 patients seen that day, two had abortions.

It was a typical workload for this health center and for Planned Parenthood, the organization that emerged as the final sticking point in the budget talks that nearly led to a government shutdown.

House Republicans were eager to cut off money to the organization, which is the nation's largest abortion provider and a political force in Washington. President Obama blocked the effort, but groups that oppose abortion rights have vowed to raise the issue again and, in the meantime, are pushing for congressional hearings.

Planned Parenthood and its backers say that it serves a broader function than performing abortions, particularly in rural and medically underserved communities where the group has most of its clinics.

In Montana, women — and a few men — cross lines of protesters to tend to their most intimate problems. They drive hours to get birth control pills they cannot buy closer to home. They are screened for depression, cervical cancer, osteoporosis and high cholesterol. Many lack health insurance.

Many also get abortions. In Planned Parenthood's more than 800 health centers in the United States, the group completed more than 300,000 abortions in 2009 — one out of every four in the country — the latest year for which data are available. Of the 15,000 people treated at Planned Parenthood of Montana last year, nearly 1,000 had the procedure.

Those abortion numbers have led some abortion opponents to call Planned Parenthood an "abortion mill." In a recent floor speech, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) said that abortions represent "well over 90 percent" of what Planned Parenthood does — a remark that his office later said was "not intended to be a factual statement." According to the national group's statistics, the proportion is closer to 3 percent.

Of the five clinics in Montana, one doesn't offer abortions. One performs them three days a week; the others, one to two days a week. Planned Parenthood also partners with four medical centers throughout the state.

"It's a small part of what we do," Stacy C. James, president of Planned Parenthood of Montana, said Friday afternoon at the Heights clinic in Billings, one of two Planned Parenthood centers in the city. As if on cue, a half-dozen giggling teenage girls tumbled into the lobby, slipped condoms into the pockets of their ripped jeans, and left.

"That said, I am so glad we do" abortions, James said. "It's not something I want to set aside. I am so proud that we provide this service, even though our primary goal is to prevent pregnancy."

The possibility that Planned Parenthood could lose its government subsidy sent ripples of anger and panic through the waiting room of the clinic. It sits amid a neighborhood of townhouses and low-slung apartment complexes, where herds of antelope sometimes traverse the parking lot.

But there are hints of the violence that has sometimes erupted at abortion clinics. The decorative boulders out front are reinforced with steel in case someone tries to ram a car through the front door. The intake window is made of bulletproof glass. On the sidewalk, a rotating group of activists participates in a subdued, perpetual protest.

On Friday, Amy Seymour, 46, huddled inside her "40 Days for Life" sweat shirt as the evening chill set in, the lone protester left as the clinic neared closing time. She acknowledged that Planned Parenthood provides some service to the community but said the abortion issue was a deal-breaker.

"All the other stuff they do is fine," she said. "But there's a whole segment of the population that is being murdered."

Money and politics

The question of whether Planned Parenthood should continue to receive $363 million in federal funding is the latest front in a long-running war between social conservatives and the 90-year-old organization. The sum, a combination of Medicaid dollars and money set aside for low-income women's health, makes up about one-third of the group's $1.1 billion budget. By law, none of the federal money can be used for abortions.

Foes contend that no matter the mix of Planned Parenthood's services, abortion is at the heart of its mission. They also say that many of the other services are designed to lead women to that decision, one they say is misguided. They say federal funding keeps the organization financially afloat.

The opponents got a boost this year when an activist released undercover video purporting to show abuses on the part of Planned Parenthood staff. Supporters of the group said the videos were highly edited. New Jersey's Planned Parenthood affiliate later fired an employee who was shown giving advice to a man posing as a pimp about ways to avoid laws on reporting child abuse.

"In the past, it was very difficult to overcome their PR operation," said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, an antiabortion lobbying group. "But given the enormous problems that were exposed in their corporate model, that really stirred up a lot of concern about what's going on in these clinics."

Also irksome to many conservatives is the work Planned Parenthood does outside its clinics. It has a political action committee that endorses pro-abortion-rights candidates — most of them Democrats — and backs controversial policy proposals, such as last year's health-care overhaul.

Planned Parenthood and a California affiliate together spent more than $700,000 on federal lobbying last year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Its political action committee contributed more than $148,000 to federal candidates during the last election cycle and recorded more than $900,000 in independent expenditures, the watchdog group said.

'Emotional stigma'

About 73 percent of Planned Parenthood's clinics are in rural or medically underserved communities, which is why many patients go for nonreproductive issues. In Montana, general practitioners are on staff because so many people go for primary care.

Many of the women and teens who show up, however, have decided to terminate pregnancies. About 75 percent of the abortions conducted here are induced with the abortion pill. The rest are done surgically. The group does not do what opponents call partial-birth abortions.

Because the state is so large, some Planned Parenthood clients drive hours to get to one of its clinics. Recently, the only pharmacist in Broadus, a remote town in southeastern Montana, stopped selling birth control pills for religious reasons. Women there must now obtain them through the mail or drive more than 150 miles round trip to Planned Parenthood.

Montana has less restrictive laws on abortion than some of its neighbors, so women and girls sometimes travel from North Dakota and Wyoming to terminate pregnancies.

Lillie Cannon, a 28-year-old graduate student, went in to the Billings clinic Friday for a birth control appointment. Her first visit to a Planned Parenthood was at age 18, she said, and she has come since.

"I do kind of think there is an emotional stigma that surrounds Planned Parenthood," she said. "It kind of feels like people see it as a place where people just go for abortions. In my situation, I was able to prevent it."

A 19-year-old woman with a 9-month-old on her hip was one of those who was not able to prevent it. She had gone by Friday for a follow-up visit. A longtime opponent of abortion, she said she rethought her position after finding herself with child again so soon after her first, complication-riddled pregnancy.

"I thought, 'Oh, no, not again. I can't go through this again,' " said the woman, who declined to give her name. "I already have a daughter. I was in and out of the hospital with her. For me and my fiance, to bring another child into the world was not the right decision."

[Munson]

Barack Obama is a monkey.

That is not intended to be a factual statement.

[Munson]

So Paul Ryan is doing Town Hall mettings in Wisconsin to sell his trash Road To Prosperity, and he's getting boo'd.....by old, silver fox Republicans

[rjs246]

The Onion.

[MDS]

is this whole thing a ploy to pump up trumps stature and get him to run or is it just me? obama is baiting him and baiting his people and wants nothing more than to either face him in 2012 or in the least have him ruin the republican primary.

[Diomedes]

Obama's delivery of the opening lines of at campaign fundraiser event yesterday:  "My name is Barack Obama," -- overwhelming cheers, laughter interrupt him.  "I was born in Hawaii."  Greater cheers and laughter.

He's co-opting this shtein faster than they can run away from it, handing it back to them covered in stick-um.

[Rome]

April 27, 2011  New Yorker Online

Trump, Birtherism, and Race-Baiting

Posted by David Remnick

Not long after the White House released the President's birth certificate this morning, Donald Trump stepped off a helicopter, ambled up to a bank of microphones, and declared, "Today, I'm very proud of myself." (One assumes this is a daily ritual for Trump, but today there were more cameras than usual.) Trump also declared himself relieved that "the press can stop asking me questions" about the birther issue and we can now move on to more important ones, such as "China ripping off this country." What is there to say anymore about Donald Trump? That he is an irrepressible jackass who thinks of himself as a sly fox? That he is a buffoon with bathroom fixtures of gold? Why bother, after so many decades? There is no insulting someone who lives in a self-reinforcing fantasy world.

No matter. What is truly disturbing is the game Trump has been participating in, the conspiracy thinking he was playing with. And here the polls—to the extent that they can be taken as hard fact—tell a disturbing story, in which no small part of the country has believed in a variety of tales about Barack Obama. There is the birther fantasy; the fantasy that Bill Ayers wrote "Dreams from My Father"; the fantasy that the President has some other father, and not Barack Obama, Sr.; the fantasy that Obama got into Harvard Law School with the help of a Saudi prince and the Nation of Islam. There is a veritable fantasy industry at work online and in the book-publishing industry; there are dollars to be made.

The cynicism of the purveyors of these fantasies is that they know very well what they are playing at, the prejudices they are fanning: that Obama is foreign, a fake, incapable of writing a book, incapable of intellectual achievement. Let's say what is plainly true (and what the President himself is reluctant to say): these rumors, this industry of fantasy, are designed to arouse a fear of the Other, of an African-American man with a white American mother and a black Kenyan father. Obama, as a politician, is clearly not a radical; he is a center-left pragmatist. If anything, he believes deeply in his capacity to lead with subtle diplomacy and political maneuvering, with a highly realistic sense of the possible; in fact, to many he is maddeningly pragmatic.

The one radical thing about Barack Obama is his race, his name. Of course, there is nothing innately radical about being black or having Hussein as middle name; what is radical is that he has those attributes and is sitting in the Oval Office. And even now, more than two years after the fact, this is deeply disturbing to many people, and, at the same time, the easiest way to arouse visceral opposition to him. Let's be even plainer: to do what Trump has done (and he is only the latest and loudest and most spectacularly hirsute) is a conscious form of race-baiting, of fear-mongering. And if that makes Donald Trump proud, then what does that say for him? Perhaps now he will go away, satisfied that this passage has sufficiently restored his fame quotient and television ratings. The shame is that there are still many more around who, in the name of truth-telling, are prepared to pump the atmosphere full of poison.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/04/trump-birtherism-and-race-baiting.html#ixzz1KpqxZX2n

[ice grillin you]

of course its all about race....him having to show his birth certificate is like a black man having to show id fifty years ago for no reason or the law in arizona forcing people to show their papers

what do you think these people mean when they say they need to take back their country?

[SD]

of course its all about race....him having to show his birth certificate is like a black man having to show id fifty years ago for no reason or the law in arizona forcing people to show their papers

what do you think these people mean when they say they need to take back their country?

Bingo

John Mccain was born in the Panama Canal for crying out loud. It's not even 'thinly veiled racism' at this point...it's more like blatant "you don't look like one of us so we're going to give you a hard time darky" racism.

[Sgt PSN]

If only he was high yellow.   

[Don Ho]

Obama's delivery of the opening lines of at campaign fundraiser event yesterday:  "My name is Barack Obama," -- overwhelming cheers, laughter interrupt him.  "I was born in Hawaii."  Greater cheers and laughter.

He's co-opting this shtein faster than they can run away from it, handing it back to them covered in stick-um.

My name is Don Ho.  I was born in Gladwyne.

[PhillyGirl]

CNN Breaking News: Federal appeals court lifts ban on federal funding for stem cell research.