Quote du jour

When leftists say, "If you don't believe in abortion, don't have one", that's the equivalent of saying, "If you don't believe in slavery, don't own one."

- Mike B

Unplanned - A Movie Review, Sort Of

First, a little background. I went to see the movie "Unplanned" Monday. Seems rather apt, since I wasn't planning on seeing it, until I became aware of the coordinated efforts on the Left to keep this movie from being seen. There was an overall media blackout. I hadn't heard any buzz about it, and aside from an occasional ad on Fox (props to them, by the way), I'd heard nothing about it. Seems that they tried to buy ads on Lifetime, Hallmark and HGTV, who weren't accepting its ads. Twitter was playing Mickey Mouse games with the movie's Twitter account followers, unfollowing them, hiding the account.

And then, irony of ironies, the movie was given an "R" rating! Totally unjustified! I watched a program on broadcast TV a couple of nights ago, where a man was brutally stabbed to death, in a much more graphic display of violence than anything you will see in this movie. So imagine people who think that fifteen year olds should be able to get an abortion without their parents' permission, cannot watch a movie about abortion, without their parents' permission!

Why doesn't the Left want anyone to see this movie? Because it gives an honest portrayal of Planned Parenthood and their place in the abortion industry. Unplanned is the story of Abby Johnson, an idealistic young woman who went to work for PP, and in eight years, became their youngest clinic director in the nation. This story is, as they say in the vernacular, "ripped from the headlines", which provides fodder for countless TV shows and movies, but this movie shows an honest and unflattering peek behind Planned Parenthood's closed doors, which made it  radioactive to the usual media suspects.

But Abby Johnson is no plaster saint. She had one failed marriage and two abortions herself. The pro-life protesters are not air brushed. Some outside the clinics shout "Baby killer", one wears a Grim Reaper outfit. The movie flashes back to Abby's college days where she is recruited as a PP volunteer. The lead actress, Ashley Bratcher, does an excellent job of portraying this woman on her journey to enlightenment. The supporting cast is good, perhaps not as polished as they might be, but considering the size of the budget and the subject matter, the cast is solid. There's even a cameo by "That Pillow Guy", Mike Lindell, who helped finance the project.

The accompanying music was quite good, considering the fact that a number of people refused to license their music for use in the movie.

Unplanned is the 'Little Movie That Could', overcoming opposition and great odds to tell a story that every teenage child in the country should see, before they consider an abortion for themselves, or helping a friend to get one.



In spite of all the obstacles placed in its way, "Unplanned" finished in 5th place at the box office this weekend. It is heart tugging and heart breaking at times, but well worth the price of admission. I give it four out of five stars.

As Alexandra DeSanctis put it, "None of it is easy to watch. But none of it is a lie."

Gosnell - A Movie Review

Permit me, if you will, a brief aside before I begin my Gosnell movie review. As you will soon evidence for yourselves, I do not write movie reviews for living. In fact, I haven't written one in a little over a year. I just haven't been that excited about the Hollywood fare, and even if a movie pops up that I'm mildly interested in seeing, if it isn't playing at my local theater, four miles away, I'll wait for it to come out on Blu-Ray. There's another theater in town, newer and nicer, ten miles away, but there can be a hassle with parking so...I just pass.

But a couple nights ago, there was a movie I wanted to see, so I drove down to see it... 347 miles... one way! In the interest of full disclosure, I am one of the film's "angels". I contributed to the IndieGOGO crowd funding that put up the money to have this movie made. As such, I was invited to the Hollywood premiere of the film. It was worth the trip.

The picture starts with a stake out on a drug bust. Someone had been writing 'scrips for prescription drugs like oxycodone, which were being sold on the street. Turns out some of those illegal 'scrips were written out of the office of an abortion doctor, Dr. Kermit Gosnell. A raid of Dr. Gosnell's clinic turned up a number of disturbing things.

The movie is part cop show, part procedural, part courtroom drama. This movie, based on a true story, has "ripped from the headlines" written all over it. Although, in fact, there weren't that many headlines written about it. The movie touches on that. The story of the investigation, the arrest and the prosecution were all tinged by the "third rails" of race and abortion. The agencies charged with keeping abortion clinics safe, clean and hygienic were instructed not to inspect Gosnell's inner city abortion clinic "unless there was a complaint". And even though there were multiple complaints, officials managed to look the other way. During the grand jury hearing, we discover that nail clinics are inspected for cleanliness once a year, but Gosnell's clinic went for seventeen years without an inspection.

When the cops arrived looking for drugs, the conditions were appalling. There was filth and unsanitary conditions. The smells...were unspeakable. We discover through grand jury and court testimony that when the restrooms were full, pregnant women sometimes were forced to urinate in the halls. Which no one cleaned up. They had that in common with the cats that roamed the clinic.

Kermit Gosnell is a peculiar man, almost charming in an old fashioned southern gentleman way. He keeps endangered turtles in his office, which he apparently cared for more than any human life. His manner and affectation was of someone who did nothing wrong, even famously plying the piano as police searched his house.

As I said, the movie is part cop show, part procedural, part courtroom drama. It's a murder mystery that involved an abortionist. This is not an anti-abortion film per se. The only evidence of an anti-abortion position, was on the first day of the trial. Expecting a huge crowd of reporters, the prosecutors rolled up to the front steps of the courthouse, but there were only a half a dozen people on the steps. Two of them were guards or bailiffs, and way off to the side, there were two people setting up a card table, with some pro-life signs around them. Other than this fleeting glimpse, no one is preaching against abortion. It's not a preachy film at all.

Although the crimes were quite horrific, this is not a graphically violent film. It's rated PG-13. It shares a trait with the ancient Greek tragedies, where all of the violence occurred offstage. There are disturbing things described, including a powerfully moving photo taken by one of the clinic's amateur nurses (Gosnell had children as young as fifteen administering anesthesia), which is shown to the jury and the gallery at the trial, but not to the audience. Yet for all the seriousness of the subject, there are some genuinely funny moments in the film from the wit of screenwriter Andrew Klaven, and the deft direction of Nick Searcy.

The story is powerful and moving. Do not be surprised if certain moments move you to tears. Director Searcy, also playing the defense attorney, guides the story along nicely. Dean Cain plays the detective, whose drug raid lead to a murder investigation, who can't understand why there isn't a police report when a healthy woman enters an abortion clinic and ends up dead. Janine Turner, of Northern Exposure fame, portrays a legal abortionist who testifies as to what a clean clinic, with a properly trained staff should be. Ironically, her testimony scored points for both the defense and the prosecution. Sarah Jane Morris plays the pro-choice prosecutor walking the tightrope of prosecuting the abortionist but not attacking abortion. Earl Billings plays the title roll with a charming creepiness about him.

The acting and the production values are first rate. The story is compelling and the biggest question that may be in the mind of everyone leaving the theater is "Why didn't I hear more about this when it was happening?"

I highly recommend this movie. It's a crime that was overlooked, and a prosecution that nearly didn't happen, in a movie that the networks and big studios didn't want to make. While producers are doing reboots of '80s TV shows, Rocky XVII and Fast and Furious 27, here is an original movie, well done, factually based on a real story, with a large portion of the dialogue taken from the trial and grand jury reports, with an important story that needed to be told.

Last I heard, it was opening in 650 screens. Do yourself a favor and see it.









For another great review, see: WHY ‘GOSNELL’ COULD ROCK HOLLYWOOD, ABORTION DEBATE -BY CHRISTIAN TOTO

Soy Boy Kicks Pro Life Woman in the Head, Runs Away

Guys who don't want to take responsibility for their actions are the biggest supporters of abortion. Well, them and the ones profiting off them.

Update: The Human Defense Initiative has identified the assailant as Jordan Hunt, a hairdresser in Toronto, Canada.

Until today, he was employed at Noble Studio 101 Hair Studio. In screenshots provided to the Human Defense Initiative, when questioned about the assault, the shop replied "Was a sub contracter. Until today when I found out what happened today!!!! Not cool. He will never step foot in my studio again."

Don't Worry! We Can Still Sell the Parts!

Wizard of Odds

"Just One Child..."

Saw this cartoon over at Blonde Sagacity (ain't Gary Varvel great?), but it's not the only instance of liberal hypocrisy on this point. The CAFE standards, for example, making cars lighter and lighter, in order to achieve fuel economy at the expense of safety. Apply the "if it saved just one child's life" standard to making cars more survivable in a crash and tell me which side the liberals fall on?

Private Charity, Public Coercion

To say the Susan G. Komen Foundation, a private Charity, was embroiled in controversy this week, would be an understatement. What seemed at first blush to be a refocusing on the charity's primary goal of finding a cure for breast cancer, was to reduce or eliminate contributions to organizations that did not do any actual breast cancer screening. Logically, one would assume that this would free up those funds to go to organizations that do. Yea!

Not so fast! If one of the organizations that received this money in the past, but had no actual screening for breast cancer was Planned (Not) Parenthood, then this was a right wing "attack" on Planned Parenthood specifically and abortion in general.

If there is one thing the Obama economy has taught many of us, is that we have to make do with less. Spending patterns that may have made sense in times of prosperity (Are you listening, state and federal governments?) have to be sacrificed in failing and failed economic times.

But, as Rush Limbaugh is frequently heard to say, "Follow the money". Moving one's resources from one organization which claims to be helping in the fight against breast cancer to another which promises to be more effective is not an "attack" on abortion, other than the fact that money is fungible, and getting Komen to pay for "A" frees up money that can be used for "B".

And Planned Parenthood is all about the money!

In Planned Parenthood's annual report, it stated it received $500 million in tax dollars. According to documented stories, the salary of Planned Parenthood's president is $353,000. Its eight top executives received over $2 million. Salaries of the CEOs at their 81 facilities were over $12.8 million. The average salary for a CEO at a facility is over $158,000. These don't include expense accounts, etc.

So, Planned Parenthood, with their highly paid executives, receives a half a billion* in taxpayer dollars and squeals like a stuck pig when a smaller, private charity decides their money might have greater benefit to, say, poor women, if it were directed to an organization that actually screens for breast cancer? ? Got it!

And in all this, Planned Parenthood plays the victim. One thing this past week has once again demonstrated, what an excellent PR organization they have. Besides the MSM, I mean. How else could they have suckled at the teat of government (pun intended) for so many years and still manage to publicly coerce anyone who wishes to fund women's health, where they don't get a piece of the action?

Too bad they're liberals. I could see an #Occupy Planned Parenthood if they weren't.

*Figure adjusted for inflation, post morning coffee.

Cross posted at LCR, Say Anything.

How Much is a Human Life Worth?

A little over a thousand bucks, according to a chart provided by Marjorie Dannenfelser:



Christmas is a time of year when we typically think about a little baby coming into the world. But, the inclusion of Federal funding for Planned Parenthood in the pending Omnibus Spending bill that the lame duck Congress is trying to ram through, it may be a good time to think about how Congress spends our money on keeping little babies out of this world.

More at Red State

Hyde and Seek

There has been talk about President Obama signing an executive order that would reaffirm the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits the use of public funds for abortion, except in cases of rape, incest or to save the woman's life.

And if you give me the money for a hamburger today, I will gladly repay you on Tuesday!
Executive orders can be rescinded. At any time. For any reason.

They are frequently canceled out when a new administration wishes to undo the mischief (or the progress) of the last president. Obama himself could do a "mea culpa" before the end of his term and explain that he was forced to do it, or it was expedient to do so for "the greater good" of health care "reform", and in an (what's the word they like to use about this president? Oh, yeah!)unprecedented move, he could rescind his own executive order. See? He could make history yet again!

Don't expect Obama, who twice voted for laws that were infanticide in everything but name, to give more than lip service to Hyde. And that, only temporarily until he gets what he wants.

I would hope that pro-life Democrats would be sophisticated enough to see that, though I hold out little hope.

If Obama signs an executive order reaffirming the Hyde amendment, don't look for anyone to carve that in stone. It will be written with a finger in the frost of the windshield of Obama's stretch limo. I don't need to tell you which finger.

Cross posted at Say Anything

Amendment to Health Care Bill Would Force All Americans to Pay for Abortion

Michigan pro-life Democrat Bart Stupak on Obama's health care plan and some of its more odious positions.

Hat tip The Blog Prof
Cross posted at Say Anything

If They Lie About Stem Cells...

...they'll lie about other things, too!



Obama's "false choice" in moral values.

From tiny embryonic cells to the large-scale physics of global warming, President Barack Obama urged researchers on Monday to follow science and not ideology as he abolished contentious Bush-era restraints on stem-cell research. "Our government has forced what I believe is a false choice between sound science and moral values," Obama declared as he signed documents changing U.S. science policy and removing what some researchers have said were shackles on their work.

"It is about ensuring that scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda - and that we make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology," Obama said.

-Forbes

What's wrong with those statements? First, the less than objective AP reporter:
"he abolished contentious Bush-era restraints on stem-cell research". First of all, Bush levied no restraints on stem cell research, only on Federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, and then not ALL embryonic stem cell research! Very promising research has come out of adult stem cells. And there were no prohibitions from Bush on existing embryonic stem cell research, just a ban on Federal funding of new embryonic stem cell lines...lines that would require the destruction of embryos created specifically to be destroyed.
Had any private researcher wanted to pursue embryonic stem cell research, they were free to do so, so long as they received private funding.

But note that the press, when speaking of the Bush funding prohibitions, invariably spoke of "stem cells", without specifying what kind and implying a ban or prohibition on research rather than just a padlock on the Federal checkbook. (Rather like those who cry "Censorship" when they can't get public funding for their art!)

"Our government has forced what I believe is a false choice between sound science and moral values"

Science was always free to be sound. Science does not require Federal funding in order to be "sound".

"It is about ensuring that scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda - and that we make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology,"

Scientific data was never "distorted or concealed" in the decision not to fund embryonic stem cell research. A moral, life or death decision was made not to use tax dollars to fund something that many would find morally repugnant.

It seems to me that the only distortions to serve a political agenda were those made by Obama and the sycophantic press that swoons over his every teleprompted word.
It was never a "false choice between science and morality", it was a moral choice of how science is funded. A choice that illustrates a moral failing of the Left.

Cross posted at Say Anything

Speaking of serving a political aganda, bonus points if you can identify which ambulance chasing one term Senator and failed Vice-Presidential candidate said this:

"If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk, get up out of that wheelchair and walk again."

This was echoed in a comment at the signing ceremony:

"[President John F. Kennedy] was first to put man on [the] moon. Under President Obama the paralyzed will be the first to walk on Earth." -34-year-old Roman Reed, paralyzed from the waist down at 19, while playing college football.

As Krauthammer noted, hope is good, but giving people like Roman Reed false hope is despicable. There certainly is no "science" that would guarantee that embryonic stem cells will accomplish this any sooner, if at all as opposed to any other stem cell research.

Liberal Heads 'Splode While You Wait!

Listen for "We're going to get Bob a Valium" at the end!

I'm not a big fan of Hannity, but this piece of video (ironically posted by someone who thought that Colmes and Beckel came out the better on this exchange),
shows Beckel sputtering and fuming and lamenting "how low the Republicans would go", in actually telling the truth about Obama's voting record, is too funny!



Hat tip The Corner
Cross Posted at Say Anything

Obama - "Who are You Going to Believe? Me, Or Your Own Lying Eyes?"

Someone is lying.

Katherine Jean Lopez of The Corner points to a post forum interview last night, where Barack Obama pointedly "clarified" his vote on the "Born Alive Infant Protection Act". From the transcript:

Brody: Real quick, the Born Alive Infant Protection Act. I gotta tell you that's the one thing I get a lot of emails about and it's just not just from Evangelicals, it about Catholics, Protestants, main -- they're trying to understand it because there was some literature put out by the National Right to Life Committee. And they're basically saying they felt like you misrepresented your position on that bill.

Obama: Let me clarify this right now.

Brody: Because it's getting a lot of play.

Obama: Well and because they have not been telling the truth. And I hate to say that people are lying, but here's a situation where folks are lying. I have said repeatedly that I would have been completely in, fully in support of the federal bill that everybody supported - which was to say --that you should provide assistance to any infant that was born - even if it was as a consequence of an induced abortion. That was not the bill that was presented at the state level.

The NRLC says otherwise. NRLC spokesman Douglas Johnson:

"Newly obtained documents prove that in 2003, Barack Obama, as chairman of an Illinois state Senate committee, voted down a bill to protect live-born survivors of abortion -- even after the panel had amended the bill to contain verbatim language, copied from a federal bill passed by Congress without objection in 2002, explicitly foreclosing any impact on abortion. Obama's legislative actions in 2003 -- denying effective protection even to babies born alive during abortions -- were contrary to the position taken on the same language by even the most liberal members of Congress. The bill Obama killed was virtually identical to the federal bill that even NARAL ultimately did not oppose."

A side by side comparison of the state and federal bills can be found here.

The funny thing is, Obama voted in committee in favor of the "neutrality clause" that the federal bill had that the state bill was lacking, and then led the committee to kill the amended bill 6-4 so that it would never see the light of day. Shades of John Kerry's "I voted for it, before I voted against it!"

The documents prove that in March 2003, state Senator Obama, then the chairman of the Illinois state Senate Health and Human Services Committee, presided over a committee meeting in which the "neutrality clause" (copied verbatim from the federal bill) was added to the state BAIPA, with Obama voting in support of adding the revision. Yet, immediately afterwards, Obama led the committee Democrats in voting against the amended bill, and it was killed, 6-4.

So, you have the copiously footnoted and documented claims of the National Right to Life Committee against the bald faced assertion of a neophyte politician running for office. Someone is lying.

Or perhaps, lying twice, when he lies about other people lying?

Cross Posted at Say Anything

The Audacity of Drawing a Breath

Something Obama apparently opposed in the Illinois Senate!

A couple things worth noting. The bill sought to give protection to infants who, for whatever reason, survived an abortion. Infants who met every definition of a person under the law: viable, and breathing outside the womb. Obama, showing true leadership, voted "present" the first time the bill came up for a vote. (Profiles in Courage, anyone?). The second time he voted "No". Which puts him farther to the Left than Teddy Kennedy, who voted for the same Federal bill. Another thing worthy of note, is the lying scumbag James Carville. Note what he says about the bill's star witness:

..."the priest at the hospital saying this woman was not credible"

Rewind to 1:50 into the video. Here's what the hospital spokesman really said:

"She does not represent (their) hospital in a credible way."

See the difference? Not representing the hospital credibly is not the same as not being credible. Ol' Serpenthead didn't seem to catch the difference! (Or care whether his lies destroyed this woman's credibility) But then, as Bill Clinton's attack dog on Paula Jones, it didn't bother him to help destroy her credibility either! If Obama cannot support the audacity of an infant to draw his or her first breath and still be protected as a human being, what does he stand for? Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Cross posted at Say Anything

Planned Parenthood- "The Wal-Mart of Abortion"

A billion dollars in revenue. They don't pay taxes. They receive $330 million in tax dollars a year. They contribute millions to politicians (97% to Democrats). They had over $100 Million surplus last year.

Why are we giving them so much money?

US taxpayers…shouldn’t have to pay taxes to an organization that uses your money to politicize, yes in upcoming elections, candidates who’ll give them more of your tax money. This is unconscionable.

-Michele Bachmann (R-MN)

Oh, and Michele for VP!!

Hat tip Hot Air
Cross posted at Say Anything