Things just keep getting worse for Mitt Romney on the lady voters front.
As Markos wrote, that pesky gender gap just won't go away—despite the laughably sad attempt, at the Republican National Convention, to assure lady voters that Republicans totally love women. No, really, they do!
But lady voters aren't buying it:
As the ad above shows, Planned Parenthood is doing its part to spread the word on just how devastating a Romney presidency would be. This ad is the latest in a series of brutal, and
highly effective, ads targeting voters in battleground states. Planned Parenthood is spending
$3.2 million to run this ad in Ohio and Virginia, and if it works half as well as similar ads in Florida and Iowa, Romney may as well start working on his concession speech right now.
Romney has only himself to blame, of course. He chose to join the Republican war on women by supporting the Blunt amendment (after being really confused about it) because birth control makes Catholic bishops sad. He vowed to support a constitutional amendment defining an egg as a person. He promised to get rid of Planned Parenthood. He picked the poster boy of anti-woman extremism as his vice presidential running mate.
No matter how many times his wife says she loves women and Mitt loves women and women are stupid if they don't vote for Mitt, it's not going to work. Because Romney and the Republican Party are bad for women. And women voters know it. And in November, they're going to send that message, loud and clear.
Now let's make sure the rest of the Republican Party gets the message. It's time to end the War on Women. Donate $3 to each of our Daily Kos-endorsed women running for the House and Senate so they can go to Washington to stand up for women and end this damned war.
This week's good, bad and ugly below the fold.
- These people are evil:
Under pressure from Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) and Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, the Virginia Board of Health voted on Friday to pass a set of building regulations that could force many abortion clinics in the state to shut down.
- These people are so pathetic:
A men's rights activist group says it's simply "opposing the marginalization and vilification of men and boys" by plastering misogynistic posters and leading coffee shop discussions in a liberal east Vancouver neighborhood that, for the most part, is resistant to the cause. [...]
September has been a busy month for the Vancouver branch of the Men's Rights Movement (MRM), which launched this year, according to its website. The group first gained local notoriety when it started plastering Commercial Drive with snarky, nonsensical posters featuring slogans such as "Stop Violence Against Women, but not against men, because men do not matter, and despite being more often the victims of violence, male victims are no good for fund raising, so screw them." (Good use of sarcasm AND grammar, guys!)
- These people are just plain sick:
Conservative Christians have long joined hands to oppose abortion, often following the lead of the Roman Catholic Church. But evangelicals are leading the charge in adopting embryos, and encouraging people who have stockpiles of frozen embryos to make them available for adoption.
They could, of course, adopt actual children who need actual families and actual homes. If they actually cared about children. But it's so much easier to make an empty, symbolic point about the sacredness of test tubes, isn't it?
- These people are flat-out lying:
An anti-abortion group claimed Monday that a Lafayette clinic that offers RU-486, the so-called abortion pill, is violating Indiana law by performing abortions without a license. [...]
Planned Parenthood of Indiana President Betty Cockrum said in a statement that all of the organization's clinics comply with state law.
"While we're not shocked that these extremists would stoop to these tactics, we are disappointed that they would flat-out lie," Cockrum said. "The fact is that our health center in Lafayette, like our other 27 health centers across the state, provides its services in accordance with Indiana law, without fail."
- These people are a joke:
[U.S. Rep. Gwen] Moore said House Republicans "tried to change the definition of rape."
Her statement contains an element of truth, in that GOP members sought to change when federal money for abortions could be used in cases of rape, by using the term "forcible rape."
But the claim ignores critical facts that would give a different impression -- the House Republicans’ effort was not to change the definition of rape, per se, but rather to restrict the use of federal funds in abortions.
We rate Moore’s statement Mostly False.
You catch that? Yes, House Republicans did try to change the definition of rape, but since that was all to serve the larger purpose of restricting the already-restricted use of federal funds for abortion, Rep. Moore is mostly lying. Per se.
- These people got it right:
An Idaho law that bans the use of medication to induce abortion cannot be used to prosecute a woman who took the pills to abort her pregnancy, a U.S. appeals court decided on Tuesday. [...]
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday that the law is likely unconstitutional because the burden of having to adhere to criminal abortion statutes should fall on the physician rather than the pregnant woman.
Here's your contextual flashback:
An eastern Idaho woman faces a felony after she told authorities she took pills to terminate her pregnancy on Christmas Eve and kept the fetus in a box on her back porch for several days, according to a police report that was unsealed Tuesday.
Why did she try to terminate the pregnancy herself?
According to a police report obtained by The Associated Press, McCormack told authorities her sister ordered pills for her online and she took them to terminate her pregnancy because she did not have enough money to have the procedure done by a licensed professional.
That's what happens when the forced birthers make abortion inaccessible and unaffordable. Because women in desperate situations don't become less desperate just because it's against the law. And the $5,000 fine and five-year prison sentence she's now facing isn't going to help. Not that it matters to the "concerned" acquaintance, Brenda Carnahan, who just had to speak up for the fetus:
"I'm a grandmother myself. And the love and the compassion I have for my grandkids? They're my life. And I felt that if somebody didn't speak up for this baby, who would? It doesn't have a voice anymore," Carnahan said.
And thanks to Grandma Carnahan, three actual living children, ages 2, 11 and 17, could lose their mother for the next five years. Because that's what being "pro-life" really means: save the fetus, screw the children.
- These people are just ... ugh.