Planned Parenthood gets ACORNed

In the James O'Keefe tradition, ultraconservative extremists again dress up as pimps and hoes in order to try to smear another organization helping poor people.

Anti-abortion activist Lila Rose, a photogenic young activist who Religious Right leaders hope to make the new face of the anti-abortion movement, claims that the video Religious Right groups are circulating “proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Planned Parenthood intentionally breaks state and federal laws and covers up the abuse of young girls it claims to serve.”  False.  In fact, far from proving a pattern of illegal activity, the Live Action project demonstrated that Planned Parenthood has strong institutional procedures in place to protect young women.  When Live Action activists appeared at numerous facilities presenting themselves as seeking help with a child sex trafficking ring, Planned Parenthood wrote to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder requesting an FBI investigation.  Live Action attempted its “sting” across the country; the one Planned Parenthood staffer who violated those procedures and is featured in Live Action’s video was fired.

Political groups that are intent on denying women the ability to have an abortion under any circumstances have long targeted Planned Parenthood and the public funds it receives to provide health care and sexuality education to low-income women.

The current campaign heated up in 2008, when

“…more than 50 leaders from anti-abortion organizations banded together to form the National Coalition to Defeat Planned Parenthood. The coalition, spearheaded by Chicago-based Pro-Life Action League, met for the first time in September and quickly issued its plan to cripple Planned Parenthood Federation of America, a major provider of reproductive health services for poor and uninsured women, by ending any federal, state, or local government funding to the group.”

These people are on the same old mission from God. And that means they can justify anything they can think of doing, even terrorist acts like assassinating a physician in his own church.

They are the extreme of the most extreme. Judge them by their words ...

"... there’s got to be a concerted effort that we take Planned Parenthood out. They’ve put out a hit on all children, but they’ve set themselves up to put out a hit on black and Hispanic babies especially. It’s time that we take them out."

And judge them by their actions.

Now their allies in Congress have tried -- and failed, for now -- to redefine the word 'rape' in their never-ending crusade to further restrict women's reproductive choices. A skit this week on the Daily Show may have influenced the result.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Rape Victim Abortion Funding
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog</a> The Daily Show on Facebook

It's time to stand up against these lunatics, and stand up for the good work Planned Parenthood has done for 90 years. Sign this petition and then call your representatives in Washington and Austin.

Call them even if he or she is a turd-eating conservative, like mine.

Some call BS on yesterday's rolling blackouts across Texas

McBlogger has an interesting conspiracy theory:

(F)actor in the most recent capacity report which showed the state with adequate generation capacity through 2014. Suddenly, because of weather conditions which we’ve known about for days, there is an issue? How many generators have been effected? Given our excess of capacity and the massive increase in wind generation, it’s gotta be one hell of an outage to cause us to have to suffer rolling blackouts. Such an outage could realistically only be intentional ...

Think I’m crazy? Remember that CA’s problem in 2001 was caused by engineered capacity constraints, which created an artificial demand/ supply imbalance that enriched energy traders. Can anyone honestly look me in the eye and tell me my theory is crap?

Didn’t think so. No, it looks like Perry has found a very nice way to pay back campaign contributors without too many questions.

UPDATE – We’ve also received word that not long after Perry’s press release, ERCOT terminated rolling blackout activity in Houston metro. Wanna bet the generators suddenly jumped up capacity?

UPDATE TWO – Dewhurst says it’s all about a broken pipe (sure) and low gas pressure (whatev). That gas pressure one I find particularly funny since the compressors at the feed can be adjusted.

He's got more there that I left out of the above excerpt on the TCEQ authorization to exclude facilities from penalty for exceeding clean air standards during the "emergency".

Houston media picks up the scent from another angle ...

"It particularly troubled me because both ERCOT and generators had so much advance notice,” said PUC commissioner Ken Anderson. “It's not as if this weather was a particular surprise."

So it was a surprise that 50 power generating units statewide went down. The last time Texans encountered rolling blackouts (April 2006) only seven generators were lost.

"The number is unprecedented, and that is one of the questions that the commission is going to need to look at," Anderson said.

Another question the Public Utility Commission will tackle: Why ERCOT didn't follow protocol in sending out that electricity reserves were running critically low.

The PUC received one advisory at 3:20 a.m. Wednesday, but the next update it got from ERCOT came at 6:05 a.m. -- nearly three hours later, when the rolling blackouts were already underway.

Steps in the middle were missing --like alerting the media – 11 News was not forewarned as required, and 11 News viewers were not either.

"We need to know why, and if the reasons aren't good, and if they don't deal, relate to reliability, then it's not acceptable," Anderson said.

While a formal investigation won't likely begin until the bad weather has cleared ERCOT may face some tough initial question as early as Thursday morning at regularly scheduled meeting of the PUC.

Is this another benefit of deregulation? In a privatize-everything environment, is the invisible hand of the free market fingering us? Is it credible that the generating plants in North Texas actually have uninsulated water pipes, causing equipment to be shut down? It's possible that maintenance has suffered because they've laid off a bunch of laborers, I suppose. For want of a shoe, the horse was lost ...

Mexico came to our rescue, thank goodness. Cue the "illegal electricity" snark.

So is this just smoke or is there a fire here? Many Texans who shivered yesterday would crave having the heat no matter which it happens to be.

Texas Vox has more.

Update: Fort Worth state rep. Lon Burnham wonders if the market was manipulated (a la Enron in California, as McBlogger speculated in the top link above).