Your Tax Dollars at Work

Today, sex education in the public schools is laughable. Perhaps even more laughable are the "facts" coming from abstinence "educators," gems like this:

"Many of the products left over from abortions, you girls wear them on your faces. Do you know they sell them to makeup companies? Did you know that, friends? The base of most of the lipstick sold in our stores comes from aborted babies."

To hear the quote and many more, check out the video here.

See You at the Carnival

It's always a bit like walking around a county carnival in Wichita, Kansas to see what the Anti-abortion group will do next; dress up like cockroaches, grandstand at Dr. Tiller's place of worship, to flooding a clinic in desperation to prevent women from their legal right to reproductive choices.

The real kick however, is reading the Letters to the Editor in the Wichita Eagle to see how this group of carnies tries to connect everything under the sun to the abomination of abortion. Below are just some of my all time favorite apple/oranges squeezed together to illustrate how abortions are the Alpha and Omega of all activity on earth:

* The Jewish Holocaust was due to abortion supporters
* The Slave Trade was not as horrible as abortions
* 9/11 was caused by hedonistic abortion loving U.S. women
* Katrina was God's wrath against Dr. Tiller's Clinic in Wichita
* Abortion in Wichita is due to the gambling industry trying to infiltrate the good community
* Iraq is the direct result of Roe v. Wade
* Darfur would never have happened if America did not kill the babies

In the spirit of being totally inaccurate and ridiculous like the Anti-abortion camp, I'd like to offer my own list:

* Global Warming is due to the baby killers across America
* Planting trees leads to abortions
* The Space Shuttle is a a flying abortionist clinic
* Texas is big because Americans support abortions
* Coal Miners lose their lives because women have abortions
* Bob Barker left the "Price is Right" due to abortions
* Airplane disasters happen for allowing abortion supporters to fly
* Bubblegum gets in my hair because I am prochoice
* Gun control leads to abortions
* The Bush Administration could not find the WMDs because the abortionists hid them
* Wild West World in Kansas is history due to those elitist, abortion loving, easterners

And, as the summer draws to a close, look for this new line in the Wichita Eagle: If the "Surge" in Iraq fails, it's Dr. Tiller's fault!


-Vickie Sandell Stangl

Anti-Choice Legislator = Anti-Choice Judge??????

That foul stench Wichitans awoke to this morning was the death of impartiality and justice for Dr. George Tiller.

Judge Tony Powell, the very judge assigned by Criminal Court Judge Greg Waller, to rule over the bogus law Dr. Tiller is now being charged with violating, wrote the law in 1998 when he was a Kansas State legislator! Talk about a kangaroo court!

Have the anti-abortion people risen up and declared this would be unfair to Dr. Tiller's case the same way they screamed and rolled around on the sidewalk in front of the Wichita Eagle about Nola Foulston and Attorney General Morrison as being bias in determining the law? That would be a big NO. High standards of conduct and impartiality of the law are expected of the other side, not of the anti-abortion camp.

The anti-abortion camp believes they do not have to follow the law the way ordinary mortals like Dr. Tiller are required to do but they can use the law to manipulate and harass people in order to achieve their ends.

The perfect storm has finally formed over Kansas: the anti-abortion proponents were able to slide their boys and girls into the Kansas State legislature and craft the most offensive, restrictive laws against a woman's access to reproductive choices in the state. The next step was to take over the judges of the land who were to determine the constitutionality of those bogus laws. They finally have a former representative in place who can serve like the biblical judges of the Old Testament to rule "impartially" against Dr. Tiller. God Bless America!

In Kansas, it is as if Roe v. Wade never existed under the law. What Supreme Court Justice Blackmun crafted so carefully and thoughtfully in 1973 has been nit-picked, stabbed and pulled more times than taffy so that today Roe is barely recognizable through the piles of state laws intentionally written to make reproductive choice rare and difficult.

Roe did not stipulate the cumbersome and foolish requirement that a doctor who performs late term abortions must have another doctor sign off on that abortion and better not have any connections to the other doctor such as breathing the same air.

Now, via Attorney General Morrison's attempt to follow "the letter of the bad laws" cooked up by former anti-abortion legislator Tony Powell-Dr. Tiller is in "violation" of said law. (Of course, lawyers and law makers do not seem too concerned about following the letter of the law when it comes to Roe.)

The rotting of justice and the killing of Roe can't be masked by the odor of leather chairs and polished furniture in a courtroom in Wichita. Dr Tiller better have good lawyers because the law has been written to sink him.

Vickie Sandell Stangl

Watch "Libertyville Anti-Choice Protesters"

Watch "Libertyville Anti-Choice Protesters"

Description: Anti-Choice protesters are asked if abortion should be illegal, and then if women obtaining them should be prosecuted.

Target: Reproductive Rights

The U.S. House approved a new initiative last week, which is a shift away from the common Democratic approach to reproductive rights. The new initiative is aimed at discouraging women from getting abortions by providing them with new sets of government support. This won’t make abortion illegal, but rather, is aimed at helping women with health, economic, and educational assistance. The new proposal will grant $647 million for these resources.

This initiative was composed using research done in Kansas during the years 2000 to 2004. The report, released by Catholics United for the Common Good, found a direct correlation between abortion rates and the availability of jobs, health insurance, and Head Start centers. It stated: “Increasing employment opportunities for families, access to education for children, and health insurance for working families can and will decrease the number of abortions.” The report also found that Kansas counties with abortion clinics were actually much less likely to use that healthcare alternative than those who live in counties without clinics, and said: “This suggests that restricting access to abortion clinics does not reduce the incidence of abortion.”

The proposal includes:
• Counseling young women on adoption.
• Launch an ad campaign to inform women that they can receive healthcare and other resources if they are “preparing for birth.”
• Expanding parenting education.
• Providing medical services for pregnant women, in some cases sending nurses to their homes.
• Offer day care services at federal job-training centers to help new mothers become self-sufficient.

These steps towards better equipping women with the necessities such as pre-natal care and birthing rights are just pure common sense. However, it’s important that this proposal doesn’t limit reproductive rights, but rather helps families in need. ProKanDo has been a long time supporter of these plans that aid families. This could be a great opportunity for women to gain assurance that they will not be thrown under the bus by the government, but given new opportunities not only to them, but also their children.

While these are great steps forward, we must remember to not sweep reproductive rights under the rug. This plan will work 100% of the time in an ideal world, but realistically, unintended pregnancies will occur, and we must be willing to provide women who need reproductive healthcare services the care that they need and deserve. We must work towards destigmatizing women’s reproductive health care. This initiative is something we must work into a system we’ve already created, not a substitution for women’s rights like many social-conservatives would like to see happen. This plan, unequivocally, cannot equate sacrificing reproductive rights.

This recent initiative is one that has been needed in our country for decades. It’s about time that this be adopted. It isn’t hard to see the broad range of positive effects of health care for women; providing children with a stronger education that is more accessible; and creating day-care at job training centers. This would help fuel the economy in multiple ways and provide a better future for all those involved.

Other ideas that have yet to be approved are funding maternity and day-care centers on college campuses to allow women an alternative to having to drop out in order to take care of their children. In addition, offering access to contraceptives and comprehensive sex education would be a substantial step forward in preventing unintended pregnancies.

Ensuring women’s equal rights has been overlooked far too long in this country. This could be a step towards gaining the equality women have long-fought to achieve. Let’s not forget along the way, however, to provide access to the full range of reproductive healthcare services, which is also a component of women’s equality.

Brownback Girl

"The Year they closed the courts"

The newly established Supreme Court has recently made a series of rulings that should make every pro-choice supporter shudder. While we all knew this would be a conservative Supreme Court, we didn’t know to what extent until recently. This should become a time when anyone who has ever cared about women’s reproductive rights should be up in arms fighting to make sure previous cases are not overturned. For years now, many have believed cases like Roe. Vs. Wade were untouchable. But now the Conservative revolution has begun in the United States.

States that already severely limit a woman’s right to choose will become battle grounds for the conservatives trying to force their morals and faiths unto others. “The court upheld the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act in a 5-to-4 decision that was a reversal of course and a reframing of the abortion issue. The decision in Gonzales v. Carhart, No. 05-380, was the first time the court had upheld a prohibition on a specific method of abortion. The law, enacted in 2003, subjects doctors to fines and prison terms.” We must also be there fighting to keep freedoms alive if we hope to never see Roe Vs. Wade overturned.
Justice Roberts has played his cards in a way to keep citizens unsuspecting of what may be to come by limiting what the Court did this last term. “Other precedents were left standing, at least for the time being, by decisions that avoided direct overrulings while providing a roadmap for future challenges. In several cases, a frustrated Justice Scalia prodded Chief Justice Roberts to move further and faster to overturn precedents that both men clearly dislike.” The court heard the fewest cases since 1953 this term, overturning three previous heard cases, trampling free speech rights and making businesses jump for joy.

In this time we must be aware of the take over of the Supreme Court, a court so conservative that only Texas federal and state courts remain to the right of it. Justice Breyer summed everything up when he declared: “It is not often in the law that so few have so quickly changed so much.” Rights that we have worked tirelessly for are now in danger of being overturned. This court has already upheld partial anti-abortion laws, which are the first anti-choice rulings since 1973. We must work to ensure that it does not persist. If you want to help the cause, click here.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/01/washington/01scotus.html?ei=5070&en=2838a521304bff85&ex=1184904000&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1184785932-FzR4Y5s27LETwIC3MRVX9g

Was Ronald Reagan pro-choice?

Fred Thompson was supposed to be the next great Republican politician; some even called him the “New Ronald Reagan.” This prompts the question: Was Ronald Reagan pro-choice? Republicans were led to believe that Thompson could be the next great leader of this country and mobilize citizens much like Reagan did. Until last week that is. News broke that Thompson started working as an abortion rights lobbyist in 1991, just years before becoming a Senator. If this is true, what could it mean for the GOP? If this has been kept under the rug for so long, how do we know Reagan wasn’t pro-choice? He never passed one act against abortion – so, how do we know? Maybe the GOP is a party built upon lies and cover-ups. Could it also be possible that this anti-choice stance Thompson has now is nothing more than poor acting, quite possibly the same poor acting we saw out of both Thompson and Reagan? While this may seem to be the makings of an episode of “Law and Order” we must keep it mind, this is our lives.

The most important question out of all of this still remains: Why would Fred Thompson do such a thing? Did he believe in women’s rights? Is this just a left-wing conspiracy? Is his anti-choice agenda a poor act?

Or maybe it was just for the money.

http://rawstory.com/news/2007/CNN_profiles_Fred_Thompsons_abortion_woes_0710.html

Pro-Choice Position Bad For Democrats?

Tell us what you think of this op-ed from The New York Times.

June 22, 2007

Op-Ed Contributor

Why Pro-Choice Is a Bad Choice for Democrats

By MELINDA HENNEBERGER

Washington

I KEEP reading about a universe in which social conservatives are warming to Rudy Giuliani. But this would have to be a place where his estranged children and three wives and multiple appearances in fishnets were irrelevant to the Republican base. Where the nice gay couple he moved in with between marriages would be asked to appear in the film montage at the nominating convention in St. Paul.

Even in the real world, a pro-choice Republican nominee would be a gift to the Democrats, because the Republican Party wins over so many swing voters on abortion alone. Which is why Fred Thompson, who is against abortion rights, is getting so much grateful attention from his party now. And why, despite wide opposition to the war in Iraq, Democrats must still win back such voters to take the White House next year.

Over 18 months, I traveled to 20 states listening to women of all ages, races, tax brackets and points of view speak at length on the issues they care about heading into ’08. They convinced me that the conventional wisdom was wrong about the last presidential contest, that Democrats did not lose support among women because “security moms” saw President Bush as the better protector against terrorism. What first-time defectors mentioned most often was abortion.

Why would that be, given that Roe v. Wade was decided almost 35 years ago? Opponents of abortion rights saw 2004 as the chance of a lifetime to overturn Roe, with a movement favorite already in the Oval Office and several spots on the Supreme Court likely to open up. A handful of Catholic bishops spoke out more plainly than in any previous election season and moved the Catholic swing vote that Al Gore had won in 2000 to Mr. Bush.

The standard response from Democratic leaders has been that anyone lost to them over this issue is not coming back — and that regrettable as that might be, there is nothing to be done. But that is not what I heard from these voters.

Many of them, Catholic women in particular, are liberal, deep-in-their-heart Democrats who support social spending, who opposed the war from the start and who cross their arms over their chests reflexively when they say the word “Republican.” Some could fairly be described as desperate to find a way home. And if the party they’d prefer doesn’t send a car for them, with a really polite driver, it will have only itself to blame.

What would it take to win them back? Respect, for starters — and not only on the night of the candidate forum on faith. As it turns out, you cannot call people extremists and expect them to vote for you. But real respect would require an understanding that what supporters of abortion rights genuinely see as a hard-earned freedom, opponents genuinely see as a self-inflicted wound and — though I can feel some of you tensing as you read this — a human rights issue comparable to slavery.

Again and again, these voters said Democrats are too unwilling to tolerate dissent on abortion. It is a point of orthodoxy no more open to debate within the party than the ordination of women is in Rome.

Democratic Party leaders should also stop pushing the perception that Republicans are natural defenders of the faithful. For years, they have done just that by tirelessly portraying our current president as this committed — indeed, obsessed — pro-lifer who would stop at nothing to see Roe overturned. Karl Rove couldn’t have said it better himself; this was better advertising than hard money could buy.

Today, in a similarly oblivious way, the leading Democratic presidential contenders are condemning the Supreme Court’s recent decision to uphold a ban on the procedure known as partial-birth abortion. An overwhelming majority of Americans, polls show, support a ban. Legal scholars have underscored the narrowness of the ruling in the partial-birth case, Gonzales v. Carhart, which does not even outlaw all late-term abortions. Yet the leading Democratic candidates, all of whom are lawyers, choose to overstate its impact.

Hillary Clinton called the decision “a dramatic departure from four decades of Supreme Court rulings that ... recognized the importance of women’s health.” Barack Obama echoed that it “dramatically departs from previous precedents safeguarding the health of pregnant women.” Though John Edwards was one of only two United States senators who did not cast a vote on the bill in 2003, he, too, found the decision to uphold that law “ill-considered and sweeping,” and “a stark reminder of why Democrats cannot afford to lose the 2008 election.”

Actually, it is a stark reminder of how fully capable they all are of losing it. A Democratic senator I spoke with recently did not see the disconnect between public opinion and the party’s position on Carhart as any reason to worry: “Make no mistake; this is a pro-choice country, period.”
But in a recent New York Times/CBS News poll, 41 percent of respondents favored stricter limits on abortion, with an additional 23 percent saying it should not be permitted at all.

What are we to make of all this? Surely at a minimum that our enduring reluctance to acknowledge the complexity of the abortion issue has only prolonged and hardened the debate.
Most Americans fall somewhere between the extremes of “never” and “no problem” when it comes to abortion.

What polling can’t capture and politicians won’t hear is the voice of the nun I interviewed who considers herself pro-choice — and has been disciplined by her diocese as a result — because she does not think abortion is wrong for rape victims. Or the voices of the many women I spoke to who hold far more expansive views yet call themselves pro-life. Most people differentiate between a fetus in the early weeks of development and at nearly full term, and draw the line at a procedure that Democratic Senator Pat Moynihan regarded as infanticide.

Would Democrats who hate Carhart really switch parties or stay home on Election Day if their leaders began to acknowledge such distinctions? After the last seven years, I don’t think so. Yes, the abortion-rights lobby has raised a lot of money since the ban, but the statements of the

Democratic candidates will cost them, too. This issue has been very, very good to the Republican Party — and there is plenty more where that came from.

Melinda Henneberger is the author of “If They Only Listened to Us: What Women Voters Want Politicians to Hear.”

In the News

Kansas, home on the range, the land of Oz, the sunflower state, and home-sweet-home to the most incompetent bumbler to ever seek and hold elected office and the most irritating columnist ever to lend word to thought. Two articles, one post, could your day get any better??

Like a creepy stalker, Phill Kline just never goes away. I give you, courtesy of The Pitch, “The Dimwit DA”, enjoy!

And perhaps not as enjoyable, here’s the latest in moral high horse-back riding from Wichita Eagle columnist, Brent Castillo. Go ahead and read it. Just like hitting yourself in the head with a hammer, it’ll feel really good when you stop.

They say the squeaky wheel gets the grease. If you’d like to help cut off the oil supply to these guys, stop by the ProKanDo website today and find out how you can help. www.prokando.org.