According to McConnell, Republicans lack votes to defund Planned Parenthood

[Statistikhengst]

Republicans lack votes to defund Planned Parenthood: McConnell

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell undercut threats by fellow Republicans to hold the budget process hostage in an effort to defund Planned Parenthood, saying conservatives do not have enough support in Congress to cut off the group now under fire from abortion opponents.

Instead, the Senate's top Republican said he is focused on funding the federal government when U.S. lawmakers return next week and will work with President Barack Obama to avert a shutdown, which last paralyzed the government in 2013.

On the possibility of tying measures that kill funding of the women's health group to federal spending bills, McConnell told Kentucky station WYMT: "We just don’t have the votes to get the outcome that we'd like."

"The president has made it very clear he's not going to sign any bill that includes defunding of Planned Parenthood, so that’s another issue that awaits a new president hopefully with a different point of view about Planned Parenthood."

I am a pro-life Democrat and am not happy about what I saw on the PP videos that were released, so I am conflicted about this. This is a hot issue all the way around.

FYI. FYD. Try to be civil to each other.

 

[CrusaderFrank]

McConnell needs to go

 

[Derideo_Te]

Independent forensic analysis has exposed even the "unedited videos" as being highly edited and falsified.

Timestamps show that what appear to be responses are out of sequence so they were deliberately and maliciously edited to make PP appear to be callous and "selling" off tissue.

'Sting' Videos Of Planned Parenthood Are Totally Manipulated, Forensic Analysis Finds

'Sting' Videos Of Planned Parenthood Are Totally Manipulated, Forensic Analysis Finds
Even the supposedly unedited "full" footage is misleadingly altered, experts say.

The undercover Planned Parenthood videos that spurred a congressional investigation were so severely manipulated that they wouldn't hold up in court, according to an analysis by three teams of forensic experts.

Planned Parenthood hired independent research firm Fusion GPS to investigate the validity of the first five "sting" videos released by the Center for Medical Progress, an anti-abortion group.

Glenn Simpson, a partner at the firm and a former Wall Street Journal reporter, assembled three teams of neutral experts to comb through the tapes using special video software. He said the teams found that all of the videos analyzed -- even the supposedly "full," unedited footage the CMP released -- were missing large sections of time and misleadingly altered so that separate conversations appeared to take place in an uninterrupted take. Moreover, the forensic team found that the transcripts CMS released with the videos were frequently erroneous.

"It appears they commit what I would call 'wishful thinking' about what was said," Simpson told reporters Thursday.

The videos show Planned Parenthood doctors discussing the donation of fetal tissue after abortions -- a legal practice. But the CMP edited the videos into episodes that make it look as though Planned Parenthood is selling fetal parts for profit and changing abortion methods to deliver intact specimens. The family planning provider strongly denies both charges, and five separate state investigations into Planned Parenthood have cleared the organization of any wrongdoing.

Simpson said his team of experts found that the subtitles in the videos do not correspond to the actual dialogue, and that the CMP may have simply invented parts of the conversation when the recordings were too low-quality to determine what was really being said. In one case, the video indicates that a technician said, "It's a baby." But those words cannot actually be heard in the video -- the segment consists of incomprehensible background chatter.

"In our view, CMP created the purported statement, 'It's a baby,' either through transcription error or intentional fabrication," Simpson wrote in the report.

Planned Parenthood sent the report to both chambers of Congress as Republicans escalate their attacks on the family planning provider. In addition to launching an investigation into Planned Parenthood, Republicans are using the videos to justify stripping the organization of federal funding -- and some GOP lawmakers are even threatening to shut down the federal government over the issue.

The Fusion GPS report warned that Congress cannot rely on any of the CMP's videos, including the so-called "full footage," in its investigation, because they are so distorted. "The manipulation of the videos does mean they have no evidentiary value in a legal context and cannot be relied upon for any official inquiries unless supplemented by CMP’s original material and forensic authentication that this material is supplied in unaltered form," Simpson wrote.​

So it is just as well that Congress cannot defund PP given that the basis for doing so is utterly bogus and fraudulent.

 

[David_42]

Look, another overhyped and spun right wing piece of garbage gets thrown to dust.

 

[Statistikhengst]

Look, another overhyped and spun right wing piece of garbage gets thrown to dust.

Yes, the move to defund PP seems destined to fail.

This however, does not excuse a great deal of what I saw on the PP videos, regardless of context, for a number of things that were said should never have been said under any context at all.

I personally have very strong reservations about PP.