An unsigned article on CNN.com about Sarah Palin’s rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania on Saturday failed to mention the Alaska governor’s attack on Barack Obama’s votes against the Illinois Born-Alive Infant Protection Act, and quickly tried the change the subject to the recent "Troopergate" finding against her after its first sentence: "Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin charged into the culture wars Saturday in Pennsylvania, painting Sen. Barack Obama as a radical on abortion rights. The stop comes amid news that Palin violated Alaska ethics law by trying to get her former brother-in-law fired from the state police, a state investigator's report for the bipartisan Legislative Council concluded Friday."
The CNN article then continued about the apparent divisiveness of the abortion issue: "Ethics woes aside, Palin focused her attention on abortion -- an issue that rallies the conservative base but some say alienates independent and women voters." After quoting from some of the governor’s comments at the rally, the anonymous writer tried to spin the significance of her bringing up the issue: "Palin has mostly avoided raising her opposition to abortion rights on the campaign trail since she was tapped as Sen. John McCain's running mate, a fact she readily acknowledged in her remarks. But Palin said Obama's record on the matter is too extreme to be ignored, and she spent 10 minutes of her 30-minute speech discussing abortion."
Actually, the closest thing to Palin "readily" acknowledging that she "has mostly avoided raising her opposition to abortion rights on the campaign trail" is when she lamented how "[i]n times like these, with wars and a financial crisis, it’s easy to forget even as deep and abiding a concern as the right to life. And it seems our opponent [Obama] hopes that you will forget. Like so much else in his agenda, he hopes you won’t notice how radical his ideas and record are until it’s too late."
Palin did not mention the abortion issue when she was introduced as McCain’s running mate at the end of August, nor did she directly mention the issue in her Republican convention speech in early September. She was asked about her pro-life stance in her interviews with ABC’s Charlie Gibson and CBS’s Katie Couric in September and the issue didn’t come up in the only vice-presidential debate on October 2. Two days before her stop in Johnstown, Palin gave a bit of a preview of her remarks there by attacking Obama’s radical abortion position on Laura Ingraham’s talk radio show on October 9 (see Tim Graham’s item on this radio appearance as well).
The article then outlined the abortion stances of Obama, Palin, and McCain:
Obama opposes any constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade and disagreed with Supreme Court ruling to uphold the ‘Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act.’ He did not cast a vote on Prohibiting Funds for Groups that Perform Abortions amendment in 2007.
Palin opposes abortion in all cases, including rape and incest, except when a mother's life is in danger, and said she believes Roe v. Wade should be overturned and the decision given to the states.
McCain voted for the Prohibit Partial Birth Abortion bill in 2003 and ‘yes’ for Prohibiting Funds for Groups that Perform Abortions amendment in 2007. He believes Roe v. Wade is a flawed decision that must be overturned, and also supports the Supreme Court ruling upholding the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act.
Notice how in the outline of Obama’s position, there is no mention of Obama’s four votes (three against and one "present" vote) on the Illinois Born-Alive Infant Protections Act while he was a state senator. The article also failed to mention that Palin included Obama’s record on the Infant Protections Act in her outline of Obama’s abortion stance during her speech:
PALIN: Most troubling, as a state senator, Barack Obama wouldn’t even stand up for the rights of infants born alive during an abortion. These infants – often babies with special needs – are simply left to die.
In 2002, Congress unanimously passed a federal law to require medical care for those babies who survive an abortion. They’re living, breathing babies, but Senator Obama describes them as "pre-viable." This merciful law was called the Born Alive Infants Protection Act. Illinois had a version of the same law. Obama voted against it.
Asked about this vote, Senator Obama assured a reporter that he’d have voted "yes" on that bill if it had contained language similar to the federal version of the Born Alive Act. There’s just one little problem with that story: the language of both the state and federal bills was identical.
However, the article did mention how Palin earlier attacked Obama’s remarks that his daughters shouldn’t be "punished with a baby," which he made in the same Pennsylvania town on March 29, 2008.
Palin also talked about a remark Obama made about sex education while campaigning in Johnstown in March, when he told a voter he didn't want his daughters "punished with a baby" or "punished with an STD" if they were not educated about sex and made a mistake.
"So I listened when our opponent defended his unconditional support for unlimited abortions and he said he said that a woman shouldn't have to be 'Punished with a baby,’" Palin said as the audience jeered at Obama. "Ladies and gentlemen, he said that right here in Johnstown. ‘Punished with a baby.’ It's about time we called him on it."
—Matthew Balan is a news analyst at the Media Research Center.
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A good editorial cartoonist
October 13, 2008 - 12:18 ET by Hunter12A good editorial cartoonist needs to draw one along the theme of See No Evil, HearNo Evil, Speak No Evil with six-armed monkeys to cover their eyes, ears, and mouth simultaneously. They'll need to have more than three monkeys though. They need one for every news network in the tank for Obama. The man who took more money in a brief period of time from the manufacturers of the financial crisis is getting a boost in the polls as the savior and path out of the monetary collapse. His party did more to directly cause and profit from their roadblocks and we may end up with one-party control of the government, if the MSM has their way.
"An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last." - Sir Winston Churchill
WOW! CNN running interference for Obama.
October 13, 2008 - 13:27 ET by c5thenI'm SHOCKED! Imagine, CNN leaving out an important and germane part of a 'story' to aid a Democrat. It's almost as if they were biased, or something.
Oh...
October 13, 2008 - 14:10 ET by fauxsoupHere, let me clear it up for you:
The bill that passed through the Illinois senate contained language so vague that it could have been used as a means to block access to abortions altogether. The bills alleged purpose was to provide medical care to living fetuses born as a result of a botched abortion.
At the time the bill was moving through the state senate, state law already required doctors to give medical care to any fetus born as the result of a botched abortion where the fetus displayed "viability," which was defined by the law as a "reasonable likelihood of sustained survival of the fetus outside the womb, with or without artificial support."
The new laws would have changed Illinois state law so that a live birth would be defined as a fetus outside the womb which shows voluntary movement, breathing, a beating heart, OR a host of other attributes. Any live birth that occured as the result of a botched abortion was to be protected as a human person under law.
In addition to this, the legislation would have changed Illinois' state law so that if any "live birth" died after an abortion, the doctor would be liable for damages regardless of the viability of the fetus. How does this affect the legality of abortions? I'll tell you.
Basically it challenges the base of abortion rights. If a non-viable fetus is extended the same rights as a child which was carried to term, and the courts accepted this, abortions would no longer be legal. Period.
As Barack Obama himself put it on the Illinois' Senate floor:
"Whenever we define a previable fetus as a person that is protected by the equal-protection clause or the other elements in the Constitution, what we're really saying is, in fact, that they are persons that are entitled to the kinds of protections that would be provided to a child, a 9-month-old child that was delivered to term.
That determination then, essentially, if it was accepted by a court, would forbid abortions to take place. I mean, it would essentially bar abortions, because the equal-protection clause does not allow somebody to kill a child, and if this is a child, then this would be an antiabortion statute."
Alleging that Obama wouldn't stand up for the rights of a living, viable fetus is a flat-out lie. The federal bill did NOT have the exact same language, and so that too is a lie.
The whole "Punished with a baby" thing is just a semantic argument. If one made the mistake of engaging in unprotected sex as a teenager, the "punishment" for that mistake could most certainly be a baby or an STD. Or the teenager could be being punished for the failings of his/her teachers or parents for not teaching them the dangers of unprotected sex.
Most parents don't want their teens to have a baby. Most teens don't want to have babies. Thereby, an uninformed teen having a baby is a punishment for making a mistake and not a reward for the same mistake. SEMANTICS.
Sorry faux
October 13, 2008 - 14:18 ET by cocodrieWhen you murder a baby for, whatever reason, YOU HAVE MURDERED A BABY.
The bill that passed through
October 13, 2008 - 14:19 ET by Matthew BalanThe bill that passed through the Illinois senate contained language so vague that it could have been used as a means to block access to abortions altogether. The bills alleged purpose was to provide medical care to living fetuses born as a result of a botched abortion.
Democrats in the U.S. Senate didn't object to the federal Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, which contained the IDENTICAL neutrality clause that the Illinois legislation had. Obama voted for the addition of this clause as an amendment, but then voted against the bill as a whole despite the new neutrality language.
Alleging that Obama wouldn't stand up for the rights of a living, viable fetus is a flat-out lie.
Thank you, Obama spin-meister, but we have already demonstrated that he didn't stand up for the rights of a living, vitable fetus.
As I said in my item on Friday, "If Obama becomes the next president, passing state-level legislation related to abortion won’t matter much anyway, since, during a speech to Planned Parenthood in 2007, he said that the 'the first thing I'd do as president is sign the Freedom of Choice Act,' which would overturn most, if not all federal, state, and local laws which regulate abortions. That is the true extent of Obama’s support for abortion, and as they have done in the past, there has been little to no coverage of this radical abortion stance from the mainstream news media."
Bull.
October 13, 2008 - 15:48 ET by GrannyGrump42The problem wasn't that declaring born babies to be persons undermined Roe. The problem was that if the doctor sent them to the NICU, he'd be facing a massive lawsuit from the mother, who had paid for a dead fetus and now had a desperately ill baby who was gonna run up a half-million bucks in medical bills before he was discharged from the hospital. And it was THIS scenario -- abortionists getting sued -- that Obama must have feared. Getting sued would certainly make doctors a bit edgy about doing abortions that the baby might survive.
It's the ORIGINAL law, the one Obama claimed already protected those babies, that was vague enough that abortionists could claim that if a baby was ABORTED, not BORN, the law didn't apply. The BAIPA had to be passed, in order to clarify that yes, a baby who emerged as the result of an abortion was legally just as "born" as any other baby.
Calling him on it
October 13, 2008 - 15:47 ET by GrannyGrump42You can see Obama's attitude play out in the example of Ximena Renearts, who was born alive in a Canadian hospital after her mom had undergone an abortion in the US -- an abortion that had merely triggered labor without removing the offending fetus.
Ximena was stuck in a bedpan in the utility room. She suffered hypothermia and oxygen deprivation before a nurse finally rescued her.
But no charges were filed against anybody for denying this baby care, even though Canadian law supposedly protected "born" children. The BC Minister of Health explained that going after people for failing to provide care to Ximena would get in the way with "reproductive choices".
The law, you see, didn't specifically INCLUDE aborted babies who lived.
What Really Scares me?
October 13, 2008 - 16:18 ET by ChasvsObama is as dangerous to our Country as Hitler was to Germany!
The press and MAJORITY of the country now think he is their new GOD!
WAKE UP AMERICA!
STOP OBAMA NOW!