The American Crossroads super-PAC, cofounded by Karl Rove, announced today it will spend $11.1 million on an anti-Obama ad campaign that reaches out to women in battleground states….

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NFDKgXRb1U[/youtube]

The ad, with the great title, “Sack it,” will run in “Colorado, Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio and Virginia… [and] will also air on stations airing Big 10 and SEC college football games,” according to CNN.

While, of course, I wish American Crossroads were spending $11.1 million for an ad campaign targeting Obama on his radical abortion/infanticide views and votes, I understand the realities of politics and also that women voters are “increasingly concerned about the deficit and debt issues that favor Romney.”

And I’m grateful American Crossroads is filling a void left by all the “war on women” ads that demean women as no more than their “lady parts.”

by Hans Johnson

Jill Stanek’s experience with a baby who briefly survived an abortion was not the first nor, sadly, will it be the last. A new documentary will be released on November 4th featuring the story of another nurse, Maryann Lawhon, who was reprimanded for her concern for a “born alive” aborted baby. Nevertheless she baptized him, named him John, and cradled him for his last few moments of life.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izaqRRFadLg[/youtube]

Email dailyvid@jillstanek.com with your video suggestions.
[HT: Jill]

Click to enlarge…

[via American Life League]

The headline on Drudge this morning…

All the polls I’ve read since Democrats started the “war on women” meme back in February have shown it’s a loser.

The new USA Today/Gallup poll linked today on Drudge agrees:

As the presidential campaign heads into its final weeks, the survey of voters in 12 crucial swing states finds female voters much more engaged in the election and increasingly concerned about the deficit and debt issues that favor Romney. The Republican nominee has pulled within one point of the president among women who are likely voters, 48%-49%, and leads by 8 points among men.

That said, at least one other poll I’ve missed has given Obama a huge lead among women in the past, but that lead, Pew agrees, is gone.

But don’t get comfortable. There are three weeks left before the election. Abortion groups can do a lot of damage in that time. Their backs are against the wall. If they lose Obama, they lose A LOT. If they lose Obama they potentially lose contraception funding, funding for International abortion groups, and funding for Planned Parenthood on both the federal level and in states Obama has overruled. There’s also that ongoing federal investigation Obama won’t be able to meddle with.

Expect abortion groups to move now to desperation mode, when who knows what they will do. That said, all the money they promised to spend on tv ads and mailings should just about be spent.

When Joe Biden was asked about abortion in the vice-presidential debate last Thursday, he replied with what, in part, has become boilerplate. “I accept my church’s position on abortion…” he said. “Life begins at conception; that’s the church’s judgment. I accept it in my personal life; I just refuse to impose that on others, unlike my friend here, the congressman [Paul Ryan].”…

[T]he fallacy of the PONVI (personally-opposed, no-values-imposed) position is revealed when we apply it to other things. “Personally, I’m opposed to rape, but I understand the world is shades of gray; “Personally, I’m opposed to slavery; I just refuse to impose that on others, unlike my friend here….”

Some will now say that rape and slavery are very different from abortion, in that they directly hurt another person. To thus contend, however, is to depart from the PONVI argument and delve into the nature of the act in question. It then follows that if abortion also directly hurts another person, it may warrant prohibition as well.

And this is the problem with PONVI: it is a dodge… [which] doesn’t actually tackle the nature of what’s being discussed. Instead, its only moral component is the implication that it’s noble to not impose values on others. Yet we do this all the time: a law, by definition, is the imposition of a value….

Any law is the imposition of a “value,” but a just law is more specific: it imposes morality….

[B]ut what is morality? Who determines it? There are only two possibilities: man or something outside of man does….

[H]ow can we rightly claim that murder, rape, or slavery is “immoral” if the only reason we’re doing so is that the vast majority of us don’t happen to like it? If the only argument we can hang our hat on is consensus preference, then it falls into the same category as flavors: taste.

Some will now point out that the aforementioned acts hurt others, but who is to say that’s wrong?…

This is why the Founding Fathers took pains to emphasize that our rights are endowed by our Creator. They knew that for a principle to have credibility, it has to reflect more than merely consensus preference. It has to reflect morality, which, incidentally, is never “personal,” but universal and eternal.

~ Selwyn Duke, “Biden’s Abortion Blarney,” American Thinker, October 15

Huffington Post is out with an article this afternoon claiming that Live Action has attempted to infiltrate four abortion advocacy groups: EMILY’s List, NARAL, Planned Parenthood, and Priorities USA.

As it has done other times it realized it had been stung, Planned Parenthood is attemptiing to get ahead of the story by reporting it itself – after the fact.

In other words, if Live Action actually did conduct an undercover investigation, it already has the evidence.

According to HuffPo:

The woman called herself “Wendy Reed,” presented a business card with that name on it, and promised to make a “substantial donation” to each organization if they agreed to meet with her and answer her questions….

The woman asked each organization a similar pattern of questions having to do with President Barack Obama’s plans for abortion policy in his second term. She asked whether the groups expected him to repeal the long-standing Hyde Amendment, which prevents the use of federal funds to pay for abortions, and whether they or the president supports late-term abortions, or so-called partial birth abortions. She also inquired about the groups’ political strategies and pressed for information about how closely the groups worked with the Obama campaign.

All of the organizations said they immediately suspected that the woman was not a legitimate donor.

Really? More from HuffPo

None of the organizations are worried that the people with whom Wilmowski met on their donor teams said anything that could be used against them, but they did express concern that Live Action would heavily edit the videos before releasing them to the public as it has done in the past….

Jen Bluestein, communications director for EMILY’s List [said]…. “[T]hese people have proven again and again that the truth is not where their commitments lie. I fully expect they’ll try to turn everything that was said against our candidates and against our president, because reporting the truth and campaigning on their own agenda to roll back women’s access to health care would not be a winning approach.”

Yadda yadda. Live Action always releases the full, unedited videotapes. Lila Rose gave me a statement via email:

If these pro-abortion groups were as “on to us” as they claim, they should have filmed the encounters themselves. And if Planned Parenthood and their pro-abortion allies stand by everything they said, they should proudly release the tapes and educate the public.

I don’t think PP is prepared for such counter-espionage. It was proud of itself for setting up a second interview with “Wendy” to get her on tape but the security camera is too far away to get a view of her face…

The October 22 issue of The Weekly Standard magazine features a lengthy article about pro-life activist Randall Terry.

Writer Matt Labash spent a week with Terry, his family, and Terry’s band of pro-life renegades at Terry’s “bunkhouse” in West Virginia (formerly a Catholic group home for adults with Down syndrome).

The result was a well-written piece that keeps one engaged to the end. Labash captured Terry’s eccentricities without dismissing him as a nut and left open the door that Terry just may be a pro-life savant.

The impetus for Labash’s article was Terry’s latest project, which is to air his uniquely produced pro-life ads in strategic areas across the U.S., with a simple goal of suppressing Obama supporters from voting and losing Obama the election.

Before the explanation, here are the ads. The first is entitled, “Uncle Tom Jackson: Carrying water for racists,” taking on actor Samuel Jackson for his “WAKE THE F*** UP” pro-Obama ad…

Get more details at uncletomjackson.com.

The next ad is called, “Abortion Nightmare: I can’t vote for Obama again,” which I think is one of Terry’s best…

From the article, here is how Terry thinks he can sink Obama with his ads:

Astute political observers could be forgiven for wondering how Terry’s ragtag outfit could, as Terry puts it, “bring down a sitting president with dead babies.” If I were a betting man, my money would be on “not especially likely.” But that doesn’t mean Terry doesn’t have an elaborate strategy. He’s been market-testing it for years. He challenged Obama in Democratic primaries to force the FCC to allow his dead-baby ads to run during the Super Bowl in states where he could get on the ballot. Earlier this year, he did, in fact, beat Obama outright in 14 counties in Oklahoma…. Terry’s efforts were good for 18 percent of the vote….

But Terry’s machinations in the general election aren’t entirely fanciful. He points to a recent poll conducted by the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List in four big swing states (including Florida and Ohio), which indicates that abortion is an unexploited avenue of attack. By a 2-1 margin, undecideds said they were less likely to vote for Obama after learning about his inclusion of taxpayer-funding for abortions in Obamacare. Sixty-six percent of swing voters were less likely to vote for candidates supporting the HHS mandate that forces faith-based institutions to provide health coverage for abortion-inducing drugs. Even 49% of voters leaning toward Obama are less likely to do so after learning of his opposition to a law that prevented babies from being left to die after a failed abortion….

Terry’s slate isn’t big – there are only six candidates including Terry. But he counts four times since he’s on the presidential ballot in Nebraska, West Virginia, and Kentucky, and is running against Rep. Alcee Hastings in Florida as well. Hastings’s district can reach the core of Obama’s support in South Florida, which encompasses nearly a third of the population of the state. Terry’s internal Florida polling shows that hardcore “anti-baby-killing ads” can suppress Obama’s vote by 4 percent if people see them (Obama won the state by 2.8 percentage points in 2008). But what is important to Terry isn’t how many candidates are running, it’s how many swing-state television markets can be reached. For example, depending on where Terry buys ads in West Virginia, those ads can also hit Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia, and Pennsylvania.

Terry’s plan, then, is to wage what he baldly calls a “voter suppression campaign.” He knows full well his ads will turn off large swaths of voters. But he’s only playing for a segment of the electorate – the 54% of Catholics and the 26% of evangelicals who voted for “the quintessential child killer in the Western Hemisphere” in 2008. His ads are designed to drown those voters in shame and the blood of dead babies. They can vote for Mitt Romney or not. He doesn’t really care. “They can vote for Mickey Mouse, they can vote for their mothers,” Terry says. “Just don’t vote for Obama.”

The Jackson ad is currently running through October 16 on these tv stations.

Terry has paid $90,000 for “Abortion Nightmare” ad buys in Washington, D.C., and Miami to run beginning on the 22nd on various network shows like Ben & Kate, CSI, Dancing with the Stars, House, Law & Order, NFL Sunday Night Football, Person of Interest, Private Practice, Revenge, Supernatural, SUV, Revenge, 30 Rock, Without a Trace, and late night comedy shows. A focus will be news shows, where Terry thinks independents will be tuning in to pay attention to the election for the first time.

Terry has another $100,000 set aside for more ad buys but, of course, would like to move that marker up as high as he can. Donate at TerryforPresident.com.

by JivinJ, host of the blog, JivinJehoshaphat

• Another sad development for Democrats for Life of America. They’ve endorsed Tim Kaine in the U.S. Senate race in Virginia and Steve Pestka in the Congressional race in a district in Michigan. Neither of these candidates call themselves pro-life. In fact, Kaine’s web site says this:
  

  I strongly support the right of women to make their own health and reproductive decisions and, for that reason, will oppose efforts to weaken or subvert the basic holding of Roe v. Wade.Pestka spent a inordinate amount of money in the primary noting his love for Planned Parenthood because his opponent highlighted an old funding vote which Pestka has now disavowed:

  I am personally opposed to abortion and I would never counsel anyone to have an abortion…. I oppose late-term abortion, but at the end of the day, I don’t support making abortion illegal.

  Does Democrats for Life have any kind of standard on who they endorse?

• Forbes notes how the FDA has approved a clinical trial which will use umbilical cord blood in an attempt to treat autism:
  

  The 30 children that will participate in the placebo controlled trial, ages 2-7, had umbilical cord blood banked at birth, as part of the Cord Blood Registry, a highly organized and well known stem cell bank. The goal of the trial will be to evaluate whether stem cell therapy has any effect on behavior and language difficulties commonly experienced by children with autism.

• Heikal Badrulhisham, a student at the University of Wisconsin, provides probably the worst argument ever against using graphic images as part of an effort to educate people about abortion:
  

  The problem with the use of gruesome images in anti-abortion campaigns is the messages delivered by such images are distinct from the proclaimed rationales of the campaigns. Pictures of aborted fetuses have nothing to do with the moral arguments frequently used against abortion. If the purpose of a campaign is to convince people abortion is disgusting, by all means use the pictures. If not, tear down those repellant posters for the sake of reasonable dialogue.Huh? How do the images have nothing to do with the moral arguments used by pro-lifers? What a ridiculously absurd assertion. Maybe Badrulhisham makes this assertion because of an unfamiliarity with pro-life arguments as the piece also states, “I am not concerned about the arguments made by these campaigns.”