The Other McCain

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Elena Kagan Confirmation Hearings Resume; Media Failure Continues; UPDATE: Yoest Calls for Investigation UPDATE II: Yoest Video Added

Posted on | July 1, 2010 | 18 Comments

UPDATE 8:55 p.m.: Video of Charmaine Yoest’s testimony:

She was introduced — and subsequently cut off at the 5-minute mark — by Sen. Charles Schumer (D-EadBabies).

UPDATE 7:45 p.m.: From the testimony of Charmaine Yoest, president of Americans United for Life:

First, I urge this Committee to officially investigate the discrepancies that have arisen this week between Ms. Kagan’s testimony and the written record about her actions related to lobbying the American Medical Association and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists during her tenure in the Clinton White House. The questions surrounding this period are troubling and call into question Ms. Kagan’s ability to adopt an impartial judicial temperament. . . .
We are asking this committee to investigate Ms. Kagan’s record related to her interaction with both the AMA and ACOG during her tenure as a policy advisor to President Clinton.
I’d like to focus attention tonight on her apparent efforts to influence and distort the record on the medical science related to partial-birth abortion. In a December 14, 1996 memo, Kagan addressed the pending release of a proposed statement by ACOG that partial-birth abortion is never medically necessary. The release of such a statement, she argued, “. . .would be a disaster . . .”
In response, White House documents show that Kagan drafted an amendment to ACOG’s statement, dramatically altering their language, which stated that partial-birth abortion: “may be the best or most appropriate in a particular circumstance to save the life or preserve the health of a woman.” ACOG subsequently adopted Ms. Kagan’s handwritten change into their final statement.
Kagan claimed before this Committee that she was simply a scribe for changes coming from ACOG. But Kagan’s response raises more questions than it answers.
And this was not an isolated case. We have further evidence that she pursued this same strategy with the AMA.
Similar to ACOG’s original position, the AMA issued a policy stating that no situations had been identified where partial-birth abortion was the only appropriate method of abortion and that ethical concerns surrounded it.
In a White House email dated June 1, 1997, Ms. Kagan wrote that she just came from a meeting which focused on “whether the AMA policy can be reversed at its convention on June 23.”
Kagan then concluded: “We agreed to do a bit of thinking about whether we …could contribute to that effort.”
Elena Kagan was so opposed to the passage of a ban on partial-birth abortion that she appears to have advocated for ACOG and the AMA to suppress or modify their view. She made a deliberate decision to advocate for partial-birth abortion, even to the point of working to deceive the American public about the medical science related to the procedure.

Whole thing here. Earlier today, Yoest sent an e-mail to a quarter-million pro-lifers asking them to contact their senators and call for an investigation.

PREVIOUSLY: Senate Judiciary Committee hearings for Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan resumed today at 4 p.m. ET, but unless you’ve got C-SPAN 3, you can’t watch the testimony from witnesses. PBS, which covered the first three days of hearings live, won’t be carrying today’s testimony. And if you’re relying on network news . . . well, let’s let Scott Whitlock of Newsbusters explain:

Wednesday’s evening news shows and Thursday’s morning programs continued to minimize or leave out important moments of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan’s confirmation hearings. . . .
The New York Times on July 1 reported the intense questioning by Senator Orrin Hatch on an abortion memo written by then-Clinton White House Counsel Kagan.
Hatch demanded, “Did you write that memo?…But did you write it? Is it your memo?”
Kagan’s memo worried that a American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) report on abortion could be a “disaster” for the Clinton administration.
None of the morning shows on Thursday mentioned the exchange between Hatch and Kagan. On Wednesday, only CBS’s Evening News raised the subject.

It’s pretty sad when the New York Times does a better job of reporting than any of the Big Three networks, which lost a combined 1 million viewers in the past three months. Maybe these two phenomena are related?

UPDATE: More on the MSM failure:

What was the big story in Wednesday’s confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan? According to the New York Times, it was “Republicans Press Kagan on Social Issues,” while the Washington Post focused on how Kagan “charmed her critics.”

And look: Democrats use Kagan hearings for fund-raising!

Category: Abortion, Media Bias, Supreme Court

Comments

18 Responses to “Elena Kagan Confirmation Hearings Resume; Media Failure Continues; UPDATE: Yoest Calls for Investigation UPDATE II: Yoest Video Added”

  1. Dandapani
    July 1st, 2010 @ 7:54 pm

    I cannot look at a picture of Kagan without thinking its a picture of a man in drag. Google Image search the actor Kevin James. Could be birth twins.

  2. Roxeanne de Luca
    July 2nd, 2010 @ 10:54 am

    Mrs. Roxeanne de Luca

    Holy crap, when did I get married??! I know that Stacy tried to marry me off to some Southern military guy when he was up in Boston, but I didn’t think that we actually got hitched.

  3. Roxeanne de Luca
    July 2nd, 2010 @ 10:54 am

    By the way, gg, the “Unicorns doing the Macarena” was not to Kagan’s confirmation, but to Obama’s reelection. Obviously.

  4. Roxeanne de Luca
    July 2nd, 2010 @ 11:38 am

    Um, gg, with all due respect… what the fuck are you talking about?

    I joked about you masturbating on the keyboard, but this is just insane. Literally, “get thee to a psychiatric unit” insane.

    why don’t you put money on an Obama loss when he is now favored by 60%?

    Three words: net present value.

    If Obama’s election were ten days from now, I could take those odds. If, in ten days, someone’s crystal ball would tell us what would happen in November 2012, I would put money on it. But, being an unmarried lady with student loans, I have zero desire to tie up my cash for twenty-nine months.

    But expecting a liberal to understand economics is like asking my iced coffee to do calculus, so I expect that I’m still going to have to deal with your incoherent rantings.

  5. Roxeanne de Luca
    July 2nd, 2010 @ 12:34 pm

    That might probably teach you a valuable lesson two years down the line.

    1. Then do the same yourself, on an Obama victory.

    2. It really fucking pisses me off when snot-nosed, small-dicked men in the blogosphere talk to me like I’m a child. I do not need to be “taught a valuable lesson”; I’m an adult. (I’m also amused that men who meet me face-to-face rarely say such things, or, if they do, end up being thrown out of parties or in tears, or both.)

  6. Roxeanne de Luca
    July 2nd, 2010 @ 1:52 pm

    ???

    Dude, what is WRONG with you?

    You started this by calling me stupid because I have a firm opinion on what will happen in 2012 – an opinion that is shared by conservatives and liberals alike. An opinion that is grounded on having spent my life in this country, and having spent the last several years working in think tanks, on campaigns, and in public policy groups. When you reiterated the “stupid” thing, I bitch-slapped you with my credentials.

    You, gg, have an equally strong opinion, but one that is utterly unfounded. By your own admission, you aren’t from this country, have little ability with our language, and probably know little about how politics work here. Oddly, even your so-called degrees (let’s be honest, you C-ed your way through high school) give you little reason to have any expertise in this area – even if we were to believe that you hold them.

    You told me to donate money, but failed to mention, until I called you onto the carpet, that you “had done so” (scare quotes because that’s how liars operate). Same thing with your degrees – you mocked me but refused to bring anything to the table until I called you out on the carpet, again. Then you brought up what happened when you were 15, which is only acceptable when you are 16.

    People who are the real deal don’t behave like that. Next time you play dress-up as a smart person the internet, remember that.

    Yet your totally unfounded, uninformed, strident opinions are supposed to make me cower and cry?

    I’m done debating with you; I have to wrap up at work, move, unpack, and work on a First Amendment case sometime before tomorrow morning, and, being a pro-lifer, I try to avoid interacting with people who make me re-think my positions on euthanasia and ninetieth-trimester abortion.

  7. Steve in TN
    July 2nd, 2010 @ 3:27 pm

    Linked at Pax.
    Kagan Lied. Babies Died.
    http://www.paxparabellum.com/2010/07/kagan-lied-babies-died.html

  8. Bob Belvedere
    July 2nd, 2010 @ 5:13 pm

    gg, you’ve become a bore.

  9. Y'know what happens when you AssUme
    July 2nd, 2010 @ 7:34 pm

    “Mrs. Roxeanne de Luca- Holy crap, when did I get married??!”

    I had always assumed that you and Belvedere were married? 🙂

    On the other hand, I assume that gg reproduces asexually, presumably by dividing into two individual g’s.