ABOUT THOSE PLANNED PARENTHOOD VIDEOS GLENN BECK LIKES - THEY DISTORT REALITY #P2

ABOUT THOSE PLANNED PARENTHOOD VIDEOS - HuffPost Hill watched all of those James O'Keefe-inspired Planned Parenthood videos Glenn Beck likes to talk about so you don't have to -- both the full-length and edited versions. Turns out, in many cases, the edited version is a complete distortion of reality, and sometimes a reversal of it. For instance, in one edited video, a Planned Parenthood volunteer says: "Um, we don't ask anything about the boyfriend." In the spliced video, the next words out of the volunteer's mouth are: "We don't really care about who, what the age of the boyfriend is." In the unedited clip, the volunteer says she isn't concerned about the boyfriend because the decision belongs to the woman. "Um, we don't ask anything about the boyfriend. We ask about you. We ask if you're married, if you have other children, and so on and so forth." Lila Rose promoted the edited video as proof that Planned Parenthood knew that a 13-year-old child was impregnated by a 31-year-old man but continued to counsel the patient. But in the full-length video, it becomes clear that Rose, who is pretending to be pregnant, tells a volunteer that she is 13 and later tells a nurse that her boyfriend is 31. Each person has only one piece of the information, though in the edited tape it appears as though Rose is talking to the same person the entire time. Rose was in fact over 18 at the time of the video, so the nurse would have little reason to suspect statutory rape. [HuffPost]

Behind The Assault On Planned Parenthood

WASHINGTON -- The House Republican move to strip federal funds from the nation's most well-known reproductive health care provider as part of its budget last week was the culmination of a multi-year effort that involved parallel action by top Republicans and conservative media operatives playing up the work of a California college student who has been creating surreptitious videos of Planned Parenthood employees for years.

The student, Lila Rose, is the president of an organization called Live Action that pays actors to walk into Planned Parenthood offices with hidden cameras, much as James O'Keefe did to undermine the community-organizing group ACORN. The Live Action stars pretend to be a pimp and a prostitute engaged in human trafficking and looking for birth control, STD testing and abortions. The videos that the organization puts out can be convincing and disturbing -- and in at least two cases were found by Planned Parenthood to be legitimate cause for dismissals -- but thorough, frame-by-frame reviews of the full-length videos show that what is posted on YouTube often bears little relation to what happened in reality, due to heavy editing that alters the meaning of conversations.

Last Friday, the day the House moved to defund Planned Parenthood, Glenn Beck devoted the entirety of his hourlong Fox News show to the organization and brought Rose into the studio to narrate some of her videos -- clips that were spliced to create conversations that never happened. Along with Fox News, the conservative blog Big Government, which played a leading role in promoting the ACORN videos, has been pushing Rose's productions. In a column written for Big Government less than a week before the funding vote, Rep. Cliff Stearns, a Florida Republican, laid out the case against Planned Parenthood.

"Taxpayers deserve accountability, and recent undercover videos taken at Planned Parenthood centers demonstrate the egregious abuse of taxpayer funds. These videos show that Planned Parenthood is willing to use public funds to commit a federal crime," wrote Stearns, the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee's Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee. "Thanks to Live Action, a group of young people dedicated to strengthening the culture of life, we learn from undercover videos that Planned Parenthood is all too willing to ignore the law in promoting its services, among them abortion." (Planned Parenthood does not use federal money to pay for abortions, which make up a sliver of its operations; its opponents argue that money is fungible and that any tax dollars going to the organization indirectly subsidize abortions.)

The assault on Planned Parenthood is one part of the movement against abortion rights. House Republicans proposed banning federal funds that cover abortion in cases of rape if the attack was not "forcible," but backed down after a public outcry. In South Dakota, the GOP was pushing legislation that would appear to make it legal to murder an abortion provider; a Georgia law would make miscarriages illegal under certain circumstances; Iowa lawmakers would allow deadly force to protect a fetus; Nebraska, Virginia, Kansas and Pennsylvania lawmakers are all pushing similarly extreme legislation.

Defenders of abortion rights intend to make their stand in the Senate, where abortion rights have always had more allies than in the House. "We've already been talking to our allies in the Senate, both in the Republican party and the Democratic, and we're very hopeful that this horrible bill doesn't become law," Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, told HuffPost last Friday after the House vote.

Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana, a national Republican leader, cited Rose's videos as justification for an attempt to defund Planned Parenthood on Feb. 2, a day after she released new footage. "The recent release of an undercover video exposing duplicity and potential criminality by an employee of Planned Parenthood is an outrage. Every American should be shocked that an employee of the largest recipient of federal funds under Title X has been recorded aiding and abetting underage sex trafficking," Pence said. "The time to deny any and all funding to Planned Parenthood is now. In the wake of yet another scandal involving Planned Parenthood, I urge Congress to move the Title X Abortion Provider Prohibition Act to the floor for immediate consideration."

While the late ACORN and Planned Parenthood provide different services to the populations they serve, there is value to the conservative movement in eliminating both, because both offer a genuine, tangible service while also engaging directly in the political process. When people see firsthand what affordable health care or affordable housing mean in practice, they're more likely to support it in principle at the ballot box.

"I'm just telling you, I don't think they have any idea how far they have overreached," Richards said last week. "I think what you saw with Congresswoman [Jackie] Speier last night is very personal evidence of just how far these folks have overreached. And I think the women of America are expressing that, and will express it. This is not an academic, intellectual issue for them."

The same network and the same tactics are being put to use against Planned Parenthood that worked so effectively against ACORN, but the prospect for success is smaller for a variety of reasons. Perhaps most importantly, one in five women have visited a Planned Parenthood center at some point to receive health services, dwarfing ACORN's reach into the general population.

REST AT http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/24/planned-parenthood-funding_n_827886.html