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From this Wednesday evening's Democratic National Convention, activist Sandra Fluke laid out the stark choices we face when it comes to women's reproductive rights in the upcoming election.

Some of you may remember that earlier this year, Republicans shut me out of a hearing on contraception. In fact, on that panel, they didn't hear from a single woman, even though they were debating an issue that affects nearly every woman. Because it happened in Congress, people noticed. But it happens all the time. Many women are shut out and silenced. So while I'm honored to be standing at this podium, it easily could have been any one of you. I'm here because I spoke out, and this November, each of us must do the same.

During this campaign, we've heard about the two profoundly different futures that could await women—and how one of those futures looks like an offensive, obsolete relic of our past. Warnings of that future are not distractions. They're not imagined. That future could be real.

In that America, your new president could be a man who stands by when a public figure tries to silence a private citizen with hateful slurs. Who won't stand up to the slurs, or to any of the extreme, bigoted voices in his own party. It would be an America in which you have a new vice president who co-sponsored a bill that would allow pregnant women to die preventable deaths in our emergency rooms. An America in which states humiliate women by forcing us to endure invasive ultrasounds we don't want and our doctors say we don't need. An America in which access to birth control is controlled by people who will never use it; in which politicians redefine rape so survivors are victimized all over again; in which someone decides which domestic violence victims deserve help, and which don't. We know what this America would look like. In a few short months, it's the America we could be. But it's not the America we should be. It's not who we are.

We've also seen another future we could choose. First of all, we'd have the right to choose. It's an America in which no one can charge us more than men for the exact same health insurance; in which no one can deny us affordable access to the cancer screenings that could save our lives; in which we decide when to start our families. An America in which our president, when he hears a young woman has been verbally attacked, thinks of his daughters—not his delegates or donors—and stands with all women. And strangers come together, reach out and lift her up. And then, instead of trying to silence her, you invite me here—and give me a microphone—to amplify our voice. That's the difference.

Over the last six months, I've seen what these two futures look like. And six months from now, we'll all be living in one, or the other. But only one. A country where our president either has our back or turns his back; a country that honors our foremothers by moving us forward, or one that forces our generation to re-fight the battles they already won; a country where we mean it when we talk about personal freedom, or one where that freedom doesn't apply to our bodies and our voices.

We talk often about choice. Well, ladies and gentlemen, it's time to choose.

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Here we go again with one of these right-wing activists making another undercover video attacking Planned Parenthood and the next thing you know, Republicans are pushing another anti-abortion bill for a non-existent problem on the floor of the House.

As TPM noted, the bill just failed: Gender-Based Abortion Ban Fails In House:

GOP-backed legislation aimed at criminalizing abortions on the basis of the unborn child’s gender failed to pass in the House today by 246-168, having needed two-thirds majority under a suspension of the rules provision.

Here's more from Media Matters on anti-choice activist Lila Rose's appearance on this Tuesday's The O'Reilly Factor: O'Reilly And Lila Rose Team Up To Spread More Lies About Planned Parenthood:

Discredited anti-choice activist Lila Rose went on The O'Reilly Factor to push her latest hoax video attacking Planned Parenthood. Rose and host Bill O'Reilly want people to think that, in the words of Rose's group, Planned Parenthood is complicit in "widespread sex-selection by means of abortion." In fact, Planned Parenthood has stated that it "finds the concept of sex selection deeply unsettling" and the organization "does not offer sex determination services; our ultrasound services are limited to medical purposes."

Furthermore, Huffington Post reported that Planned Parenthood "condemns seeking abortions on the basis of gender, but its policy is to provide 'high quality, confidential, nonjudgmental care to all who come into' its health centers."

O'Reilly and Rose mentioned none of this. Instead, they aired footage from Rose's hoax video of a person walking into a Planned Parenthood office and pretending to be a patient. O'Reilly and Rose pretended that the actions of the employee were representative of the organization. O'Reilly even asked "Are we now China in this country? If Planned Parenthood is advising woman to abort because of gender choice, then we are China. And you should remember that the next time a politician or famous person endorses Planned Parenthood." Read on...

You can read more in their latest article on Rose's effort to manufacture evidence that Planned Parenthood facilitates gender-based abortion here: Hoax Du Jour: Live Action Brings Bogus "Sex Selection" Attack To New York.

The media coverage on this has been terrible from other networks as well, with discussions on this latest vote in the House, but no mention of the fake controversy being drummed up by Rose and organization. As to O'Reilly continuing to assault Planned Parenthood and a woman's reproductive rights, it seems nothing's changed since O'Reilly got his wish with the assassination of Dr. George Tiller.

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John Fugelsang, filling in for Eliot Spitzer on Current TV this Thursday, had similar issues with a recent Gallup poll on those self-identifying with the term pro-life as Slate's Amanda Marcotte who wrote about that same poll in her column here: The Problem With Polling About Moral Beliefs:

Another year, another Gallup poll on abortion for anti-choicers to misleadingly represent in a bid to deceive the country into believing they're winning in the court of public opinion. Of course, Gallup shares the blame for this travesty, since it publishes its polling results with a lead about the poll that asks if people identify as pro-choice or pro-life. Inevitably, "pro-life" polls well, much better than it would if it were more accurately phrased as "anti-choice" or "anti-abortion," because it's a fuzzy-wuzzy term that deliberately distracts from the legal and sexual freedom issues at the heart of the abortion debate. This year, the poll found that 50 percent of Americans relate to the empty term "pro-life," and only 41 percent to the term "pro-choice."

But if you actually bother to read on, you'll find that Americans are still majority pro-choice, which is why the direct abortion ban in South Dakota and the personhood law in Mississippi went down when put to an actual vote. Scrolling down, you find that only 20 percent of Americans support the anti-choice movement's goal in banning abortion, with 25 percent of Americans supporting abortion rights in all cases, and 52 percent of Americans wanting abortion legal with some restrictions. (Most people imagine a legal regime that will somehow allow abortion for themselves and their friends, but disallow it for those dirty sluts they hear about so much.) This means that only two out of five people who identify as "pro-life" actually align themselves with the so-called pro-life view, demonstrating neatly how useless that term is and why it needs to be replaced with a more accurate term like "anti-abortion," or my preferred term "anti-choice," which encompasses their anti-contraception activism alongside their anti-abortion activism.

Polling Americans on vague beliefs and self-identity doesn't really tell us much in general beyond highlighting how delusional and/or hypocritical our nation is. The reality is that there's a huge gulf between what people claim to believe—even when speaking anonymously to a pollster—and what they actually believe, which is easier to measure when looking at behavior or what kind of policy choices they support. Read on...

John Fugelsang's take below the fold.

Continue reading »

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Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain said Wednesday that he believes abortion should be allowed "under no circumstances," but added that it "gets down to a choice that that family or that mother has to make."

"I believe that life begins at conception," Cain told CNN's Piers Morgan. "And abortion under no circumstances."

"If one of your female children, grand children was raped, you would honestly want her to bring up that baby as her own?" Morgan asked.

"You're mixing two things here, Piers," Cain objected. "It comes down to it's not the government's role or anybody else's role to make that decision. Secondly, if you look at the statistical incidents, you're not talking about that big a number. So what I'm saying is it ultimately gets down to a choice that that family or that mother has to make."

"By expressing the view that you expressed, you are effectively -- you might be president," Morgan noted. "You can't hide behind now the mask, if you don't mind me saying, of being the pizza guy. You might be the president of United States of America. So your views on these things become exponentially massively more important. They become a directive to the nation."

"No they don't," Cain disagreed. "I can have an opinion on an issue without it being a directive on the nation. The government shouldn't be trying to tell people everything to do, especially when it comes to social decisions that they need to make."

The former Godfather's Pizza CEO also reiterated that he believes homosexuality is a sin and a choice.

"I think it's a sin because of my biblical beliefs and although people don't agree with me, I happen to think that it is a choice," he said.

"You genuinely believe millions of Americans wake up in their late teens normally and go, you know what, I quite fancy being a homosexual?" Morgan wondered. "You don't believe that."

"OK, so it's your gut instinct against my gut instinct. It's a wash. It's a push," Cain insisted. "That being said, I respect their right to make that choice. You don't see me bashing them or anything like that. I respect their right to make that choice. I don't have to agree with it. That's all I'm saying."

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After Bill O'Reilly only shows the portion of The Daily Show clip where Jon Stewart curses at Bernard Goldberg rather than Stewart's entire response to Goldberg saying that "liberals don't have five kids--one of them has Down Syndrome--liberals certainly don't allow that to happen". Goldberg responded:

Who do you think is more likely to willingly and knowingly have a baby with Down Syndrome, a pro-choice woman or a pro-life woman; a woman for whom religion isn't terribly important or a woman for whom religion is important; a liberal woman or a conservative woman? The odds are that it's the pro-life, religious conservative woman that would make such a compassionate decision and the reason, the reason he's so upset is because he like most liberals think they have a monopoly on compassion and she shows that they don't.

Oh yeah, that’s entirely different Bernie. And nice hatchet job on editing the Daily Show segment O’Reilly or your audience would have known Stewart actually had a substantive response to Goldberg that made what he said tonight look just as stupid--not that it was really any different from what he said in the previous show.

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Peggy Noonan thinks she knows what's good for Democrats and that this Stupak-Pitts abortion amendment is somehow good for the party—but only in a “funny, little political way”. How quaint of you Peggy to be so completely dismissive of what the real life impact of that amendment passing would actually mean to the lives of women, especially those with low incomes that are the least capable of doing anything to fight back against what’s happening but most likely to be impacted by it.

Noonan had this bit of condescending wisdom to share with all of us on this weekend’s edition of The Chris Matthews Show.

Matthews: Peggy every four years the Democrats meet and write a platform and it says pro-choice, abortion rights, but you know a third of the Democratic people in this country, who vote Democrat are pro-life. Did they ever, ever have a plan here to bring them all together?—because that’s what they have to do.

Noonan: I don’t know if they had a plan but I’ll tell you in a purely political sense, for the Democratic Party to shake off for the first time in like 35 years the general understanding that they are the pro-choice and you cannot be pro-life and be in this party—it hurts the Democratic Party—everybody always said it hurt the Republicans to be pro-life. It hurt the Democrats to be rigidly pro-choice—to not let pro-life people speak at their conventions etc. In a funny, little political way this is a benefit to the Democratic Party that, that pro-life people have a serious place at the table at this moment. It’s good for them.

What’s pathetic is that religion is allowed to be used at all to get working people to vote against their own economic interests and that people don’t have the sense to see past that. And if Peggy Noonan thinks that it is acceptable to call any aspect of this debate “funny” or “little”, she needs to go read Digby’s post from last week-Goldilocks Was Betrayed:

In case you are wondering about the real life effects of playing cheap politics with pregnancy, read this. And this. Contra McGaskill and Tweety, who are misinformed about just about everything, this is actually a big deal. This amendment doesn't just punish Lord Saletan's little sluts. All women will be losing coverage for necessary abortions when a wanted pregnancy goes wrong. It only has an exemption for the life of the mother, but not for her her health, nor for severe and fatal fetal abnormalities. Click those links for what that means in real life.

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Michael Steele, the new chairman of the Republican National Committee wants the GOP to reach out to candidates who support gay marriage and are pro-choice. Steele told Fox's Chris Wallace that it was "important" to reach out to those voters.

WALLACE: You are one of the co-founders of something called the Republican Leadership Council which supports candidates who favor abortion and gay rights.

STEELE: Yes.

WALLACE: Does the GOP needs to do a better job of reaching out to people who hold those views?

STEELE: I think -- I think that's an important opportunity for us, absolutely. Within our party we do have those who have that view as well as outside and my partnership with Christy Todd Whittman was an effort to build a bridge between moderates and conservatives.