Life News has the story.
Excerpt:
Senate Democrats today defeated an effort to revoke taxpayer funding for the Planned Parenthood abortion business by filibustering the bill and preventing a vote on it. Republicans were unable to secure the 60 voted needed to invoke cloture and stop debate on the bill, allowing an up or down vote.
The legislation follows four shocking videos that have caught Planned Parenthood doctors discussing and arranging the sale of body parts of aborted babies.
The Senate voted 53-46 on the cloture motion — failing to get the 60 votes needed to stop the Democratic filibuster against the de-funding measure. had the cloture vote been approved and the bill passed, and should the House pass its own bill to de-fund Planned Parenthood, President Barack Obama said he would veto the measure. The vote was an improvement over a 2011 vote that saw the vote on the filibuster fail and technically the Senate is 5 votes away from overcoming a Democratic filibuster.
I am actually curious to hear how the videos where put to the Democrats, and how they responded, because who could really vote in favor of these practices?
The Republicans did a good job of showing the Democrats the evidence:
During the debate in the Senate, Republican lawmakers sought to highlight those shocking videos showing Planned Parenthood arranging for the sale of aborted babies.
Republican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa said, “The American taxpayer should not be asked to fund an organization like Planned Parenthood that has shown a sheer disdain for human dignity and complete disregard for women and their babies.”
“The barbaric practice of conducting abortions in a way that promotes harvesting fetal organs, or profiting from such practices, has no place in modern society,” said Sen. Dan Coats of Indiana. “Planned Parenthood’s disgusting practices should not receive a dime of taxpayer money.”
Here’s Joni Ernst making the case:
Basically, she summarized what was in the videos, and yet the Democrats still voted in favor of allowing the organ harvesting to occur. Atheists like to talk a lot about empathy, and here you can see the empathy of the secularists on display. If the roles were reversed, and they were the unborn child, you can bet that they would vote for their own lives. But, tough break for those kids. They are not powerful senators, so kill them all and sell their body parts. That’s what a Democrat is. Surprise! All this talk about being against slavery is just smokescreen – Democrats are in favor of slavery. It never ended, for them.
Well, it’s a loss. The right way to do this, of course, would have been to attach the defunding of Planned Parenthood to an essential bill, and shut down the government over it. But the Senate Republicans are not as conservative as the House leaders or the Governors.
Here’s what comes next:
With the Senate voting against de-funding, attention now turns to attempts to de-fund Planned Parenthood via the budget process. Already, 18 House Republicans have said they will not allow passage of any essential bills to fund the federal government if such bills do not include language de-funding Planned Parenthood.
Attention will also now turn to Congressional and state efforts to investigate Planned Parenthood’s sale of body parts from aborted babies and state-level efforts to de-fund Planned Parenthood further.
And in fact, my #1 choice for President, Governor Bobby Jindal, went ahead and did something about this in his home state of Louisiana:
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal canceled Planned Parenthood’s Medicaid contract with his state Monday, moving to strip the organization of funding in the wake of disturbing undercover videos that appeared to show employees haggling over selling fetal tissue obtained from abortions.
Mr. Jindal said the videos showed Planned Parenthood workers admitting they engaged in late-term abortions and did them to try to leave fetus body parts as intact as possible so they could be sold later.
He said his state health department believes Planned Parenthood’s local affiliates could be breaking laws that prohibit groups that take funding from encouraging women to have abortions.
“Planned Parenthood does not represent the values of the people of Louisiana and shows a fundamental disrespect for human life,” the governor said in a statement announcing the move. “It has become clear that this is not an organization that is worthy of receiving public assistance from the state.”
My #2 choice for President, Governor Scott Walker, had already de-funded Planned Parenthood in his state. Striking, since Wisconsin is a blue state. But then again, Scott Walker is not someone who runs from a fight.
I really hope we nominate someone conservative this time.
WINTERY KNIGHT 
Keep in mind that the funding for PP is intricate and complex. For example our Gov can claim that no taxpayer money goes to fund abortion, in fact there are laws on the books preventing that. Technically it’s true, but than we have all these loopholes and work arounds. Medicaid pays for PP and abortion in my state, but in theory we don’t use any Fed dollars, only state funds. Our state doesn’t really fund PP or abortion, they fund Health depts and education, instead. Those Health dept funds and “education” monies are then redirected to fund PP.
PP also does not provide any abortions. They provide a referral service to sub contractors who provide abortion serves. So PP technically can claim not to offer abortion services.
It’s an elaborate game that weaves around the law. You could defund PP, but I doubt that would lead to any actual lack of funds on their part.
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On issues like this, it’s important for Christians to be “wise as serpents and innocent as doves.” Specifically, I think we overeached to go for defunding at this point. I think it would have been wise, politically speaking, to vote instead for an investigation (whether by Congress, the Department of Justice, or both) of Planned Parenthood (PP) based on the prima facie case in the videos that PP is breaking the law regarding the sale of fetal tissue. (US law says “It shall be unlawful for any person to knowingly acquire, receive, or otherwise transfer any human fetal tissue for valuable consideration.”)
I’m told that the law allows for costs to be reimbursed but not profit to be paid. That’s not clear to me from the wording, but let’s use that view for discussion’s sake since it is the view most favorable to PP. PP’s rebuttal to the tapes is that it is only seeking to be reimbursed for items eligible for reimbursement. I’m not sure that’s true, but let’s, again for discussion’s sake, assume that’s true because it’s the view PP itself is taking. All that granted, the videos still provide a prima facie case for law breaking because there is negotiating, haggling, bargaining – pick whatever word you want – about the price. If PP were truly only seeking to be reimbursed for cost, they would state their cost and that would be the end of the discussion. A “buyer” would either accept that price or not; there would be nothing to discuss. A buyer cannot tell you what your costs are; you, and only you, know that. Thus the very fact that there’s a protracted discussion about price indicates that something more than cost reimbursement is being sought by PP.
If there were hearings on this issue, more Americans would see the videos. PP’s focus right now is to discourage everyone from looking at the videos – the same way they discourage pregnant women from viewing an ultrasound picture of their children. Distraction is their main hope. And when they tell people that the unedited two-hour video tells a different story, how many people are going to watch two hours of video to check their veracity. People just get weary and move on to whatever’s next in the news cycle (“Any animals been mistreated lately?”)
Regarding abortion, adults fall across a spectrum into three categories. On one end, there’s Christians: we are against abortion. On the other end, there’s PP and others who think there’s nothing with abortion. In the middle, there are those American’s who have not or will not make up their minds. Politically speaking, it’s the people in the middle we ought to be trying to win over right now. We can go after the die-hard abortion supporters (ugly pun unintended) after we’ve won the middle. But the middle is all we need to de-fund PP.
We cannot win the middle, however, if we go for complete, immediate conversion to our side of the issue. That’s not the way people usually change their position. They usually make such transitions gradually.
Spiritually, we should never compromise. But politically, half a loaf is always better than none.
We cannot expect people in the middle to vote according to our convictions. We must get them to our convictions…one step at a time. Right now, PP is all about burying the videos. We must be about keeping them in public view. Public hearings are the best way to do that.
All the videos provide is a prima facie case. PP deserves its day in court. We should be doing everything we can to be sure that they get it.
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PP should be seen as an arm of the Democratic party. It’s Fuhrer is Cecile Richard, daughter of Ann Richards, who has never been anything but a Democratic hack working for one Democratic politician after another. PP donates money to Democrats and in turn Democrats in office kick back millions in taxpayer funds.
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