It was funny last week when the pro-lifers’ evil scheme to bring down Planned Parenthood came back to bite them right on their asses. All they ever wanted was to undermine American women’s access to affordable healthcare so they do not die from lady kinds of cancer. They tried so hard. They stole photographs of stillborn babies. They used stock footage of miscarried fetuses and pretended they were from Planned Parenthood when they weren’t. They made this silly videos – confirming the goriest fantasies of “pro-lifers” of how the worse-than-Hitler baby butchers were tricking stupid pregnant ladies into not wanting their bouncing joy bundles, carving out babies from unsuspecting wombs, and then chop-shopping them on the black market, for fun and profit and fancy sportscars and drugs – and shopped them all around, even to their bffs in Congress. All for the explicit purpose of trying to stop providing women’s healthcare because ladyparts are gross.
Harris County District Attorney Devon Anderson (a Republican appointed by former indicted Gov. Rick Perry), was given the order – an unbiased, non-agenda order – by Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (a virulently anti-choice cretin), to git’ them fetus slayers at Planned Parenthood. In a delicious plot twist, instead of doing that, she turned around and refused to find Planned Parenthood guilty, then stunned the court and America but uncovering evidence of all the crimes by the “pro-life” activists. WHA? But but but, didn’t she even watch those videos??
Meanwhile, Texas governor and human shitstain Greg Abbott says the state will continue to investigate because investigating Planned Parenthood it’s the state’s favorite pastimes, after executing innocent folks and guns guns guns guns guns and more guns.
Dickwad ass rash David R. Daleiden is the 27 year old James O’Keefe wannabe director of the weirdly named Center for Medical Progress. How you can get that music hate and stupid by 27 is beyond me. Anyway, he was indicted on a charge of tampering with a governmental record, a felony, and on a misdemeanor charge related to purchasing human organs. Another center employee, Sandra S. Merritt, 62, was indicted on a felony charge of tampering with a governmental record. Enjoy prison, Daleiden and Susan, enjoy decades of rotting in prison, for committing actual crimes, with very serious consequences. And after that? Enjoy hell. I just found out there is one.
Meanwhile, former New Jersey judge/Eddie Munster lookalike and Wingnutty Expert on Everything Andrew Napolitano hit all the Fox shows to make sure everyone understands the political hit job ordered by the state’s most powerful elected anti-choicers is the kind of political hit job they do not like:
I’m beginning to think that it is a political hit job on the people who did the investigating. So you have bonafide journalists assuming identities, pretending to be medical ethicists or people in the business of dealing with body parts going to Planned Parenthood saying, all these abortions, are you really selling the body parts? Well, yeah, we are.
Sure, except that none of those Center for Medical Progress asshats are “bonafide journalists,” and also except that no one from Planned Parenthood ever said they sell body parts, because of how they don’t. But go on….
Now, what does investigate mean? You empanel a grand jury of 23 people. You tell them who your target is.
Right, that’s how the justice system works. The prosecutor tells a grand jury, “We’re trying to go git Planned Parenthood, so do that,” but oh no, the Republican “political prosecutor” didn’t do her job right, did she? Nor did the grand jury:
The grand jury does not turn around and indict your witnesses, the people who brought you the case, without the prosecutor wanting this to happen. So why would this prosecutor appointed by Governor Perry, a former judge, a Republican woman, why would this prosecutor want to do this, other than to send a message like, I might be a Republican, but leave Planned Parenthood alone? Leave it alone — they’re using tax dollars to kill babies and sell their body parts.
“they’re using tax dollars to kill babies and sell their body parts.” Three proven lies in a twelve- word sentence, Libel suit, please.
This reminds me of a favorite Comeuppance story from the Reagan-era Culture Wars.
In 1990, the nice little Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center decided to show an exhibition of photos by the great photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Out of 200 pictures, 5 were explicit homoerotic and violent images, and 2 were nude children as well as several of various private parts. The exhibit room had all the expected signage, and minors were not allowed in, and so on. When the show, titled The Perfect Moment, opened, among the first people through the door of the Contemporary Arts Center were nine members of a grand jury who viewed the photos and deemed 7 of them to be not just offensive, but criminal.
By that afternoon, the grand jury had handed down criminal indictments against the Contemporary Arts Center and its director, Dennis Barrie. They actually arrested the director of the museum and put him on trial for obscenity – which could have led to a serious jail term. The museum itself was also charged under some dubious criminal statute. The indictments were the first time in the history of the country that a museum and director were charged criminally for obscenity because of a public exhibit.
Under pressure from the bozos at the American Family Association, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington DC canceled the Mappelthorpe show. The police arrived and cleared the museum and and padlocked the show. Officers photographed the photographs. Protestors on the street held up their arms in Nazi salutes and yelled “Sieg Heil.” Men rolled on the street kissing each other in protest. Reagan-era Washington sucked for the arts, Jesse Helms was trying to completely defund the NEA and NEH, and there was lots of hyperbole and nonsense and carrying-on. The collection of challenging photographs raised a lot of really difficult questions about sex and sacrilege, art and obscenity, politics and polemics. At that moment, the city became a national stage for lawyers and free speech proponents and gay rights activists and family values supporters.
Eventually, the question of what is free speech and what is too much would be heard in a Municipal Court room that usually passed judgment on things like shoplifting and bar fights. The jurors were a prosecutor’s dream: only one had a college degree; none of them had never been inside the CAC. The judge was totally biased and ruled that the jury could only be shown the 7 most explicit and evocative photos, not the rest of Mapplethorpe’s work. The CAC was described as “not a museum” but a mere art center. There were months of taxpayer funded drama and grandstanding “expert” testimony.
When the jury went into its room to deliberate, it was expected to be a long haul, and a certain outcome.
The jurors came out an hour later and acquitted the director and the museum. It was a great moment. The jurors were deeply offended by the prosecution who treated them like they were stupid illiterates who needed to be told what real “art” was. The verdict absolutely wrecked Helms’s efforts to destroy federal funding of the arts. Several of the “stupid illiterate” jurors became members of the CAC afterward.
Cincinnati, a small, conservative city in the part of the Midwest that is more South than not, made a courageous decision.
I would really like for Nancy Pelosi to request contempt of Congress charges on the Planned Parenthood attacking bozos for lying to a Congressional committee. Either the Republicans piss off the base by saying yes or provide some lovely material for attack adds about refusing to go after criminals who lied to Congress. And punish the Congressweasels who wasted tax dollars “investigating” these lies.
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Maybe she could put impeachment of G.W. back on the table, while she’s at it.