Morning Briefing: Not all politics

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I'll be on Fox & Friends at 6:45am ET this morning and then on Morning Joe on MSNBC at 7:20am ET. The topic is the RedState Gathering, which happens this week. -- Erick

Even In Politics Not Everything Is Political I have seen a number of Republicans and even some Christian evangelicals in the past seventy-two hours make the case that the Republican Party should avoid a government shutdown to stop Planned Parenthood. In fact, a few have said the fight against Planned Parenthood is just another ideological fight and government does so much more and depriving Planned Parenthood of any money will not stop abortion. Therefore, they should keep getting money for two more years until Republicans can win the White House, keep the Congress, and defund them. There is merit to the political argument. But it is a political argument. It is an argument willing to turn away from what Planned Parenthood is doing, subsidized by tax payer dollars. Some fights, even in politics, are not fights of politics, but fights of conscience. People get into office because they perceive government is failing in some way and they want to make the country better or fix something. People do not get into politics because of politics, but because of their conscience, their morals, and their sense of justice. Planned Parenthood, subsidized by taxpayers, is killing children and harvesting their organs. Full stop. Read More

How to Stop Planned Parenthood The U.S. Senate will vote today on a bill to defund Planned Parenthood and to stop forcing taxpayers to fund abortions and the barbaric sale of baby organs. Unfortunately, this bill won't be signed into law. Even if enough Democrats support it to overcome a filibuster, President Obama will veto it. That is why the new Republican Congress must refuse to fund Planned Parenthood this year, even if the President and the Democrats choose to defeat the bill and cause a temporary government shutdown. This is the only way to win this fight. Read More

Handling Hillary's Email Fiasco: 'Containment First, Then A Damage Assessment' "Containment first, then a damage assessment is how this must be handled." That's what a U.S. official directly familiar with the notification of top lawmakers on the House and Senate intelligence committee about the extent of classified information on Hillary Clinton's private email server told the Washington Times. Read More Sponsored

PA Democrat with links to former Gov. Ed Rendell one of the four indicted on corruption charges People may want to keep track of the Chaka Fattah corruption story, because this is a really interesting tidbit: "One of four people indicted with U.S. Rep. Chaka Fattah (D-PA) is known to Democrats statewide and politicians at the state Capitol: Herbert Vederman was a major contributor and fundraiser for former Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell." Most of the Pennsylvania Democrats involved in scandals of this type – and there are a large number of Pennsylvania Democrats that get involved in scandals; I'd say that there's something in the water, except that I don't want to listen to people start ranting about fracking – are generally limited in the scope of their chicanery. But somebody with ties to Eddie Rendell? …Well, that's a different story. Read More

The Cringing, Servile Search for Head Pats from Liberals There is a piece that is making the rounds on the liberal side of the Internet today that concerns the Planned Parenthood videos. I am not going to link the piece here because I view it as either a transparent attempt to curry head pats from liberals and/or the media, or a dangerously naive missive that is tremendously damaging to the pro-life cause. Either way, I will not give it more traffic than it has already gotten in spite of the fact that I respect the website where it currently sits and its proprietors tremendously, and count them among my personal friends. Suffice to say that if you don't know the piece I'm referring to, then please go on about your day without reading the rest of what I am about to say, and thank me later for not raising your blood pressure unnecessarily. The central thesis of the piece is that, as conservatives, we should basically follow the Golden Rule and extend to the various executives – of Planned Parenthood – the same charitable reading of their comments that we would hope would be afforded to us. Let me just say this – there's a place for the attitude that you should always be unrelentingly gracious towards our opponents and always assume they are acting with the best motives, even when they do not extend the same courtesy to you, and even when decades of unbroken experience would suggest that your opponents operate exclusively with both intellectual and moral bad faith. That place is in the seminary and in the pulpit. Read More

Sponsored Would you believe it? The judge who blocked the @PPact videos is an Obama guy! "Orrick was nominated to his position by hardline abortion supporter President Barack Obama. He was also a major donor to and bundler for President Obama's presidential campaign. He raised at least $200,000 for Obama and donated $30,800 to committees supporting him, according to Public Citizen." Read More

The Stammering Non-Defense of Planned Parenthood Because they are the favored ideology of the American legacy media, liberals are not often called upon to mount a strenuous intellectual defense of their institutions and beliefs. As a result, they are spectacularly bad at doing so, on the rare occasion that one of their institutions actually faces a grave threat. Never has that been more apparent than during the current Planned Parenthood scandal. Liberals are used to defending the idea that Planned Parenthood is deserving of taxpayer funding, in an absolute sense, at least according to their own warped worldview of what "deserving of taxpayer funding" means. So they have a nice set of pat arguments about how women need birth control, plus they perform cancer screenings (for the most part they have dropped the lie that Planned Parenthood performs mammograms), plus a smattering of anecdotal stories about all the great things Planned Parenthood has allegedly done (carefully skirting any mention that Planned Parenthood performs abortions, of course. Read More

Pro-Lifers, Be Wary of Mitch McConnell on Planned Parenthood I saw Al Mohler of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary tweet out this link earlier today. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is calling on Planned Parenthood being defunded. I hope McConnell will stick with this, even at the risk of President Obama shutting down the government in the fight. But we should remember that we are at this point because of legislation McConnell supported. Read More

Don't Fear The Shutdown… well, it *kind* of scans First off: yes, very little that happens with a shutdown in Congress this year will have any effect on the national elections next year. This is, of course, broadly similar to what happened in 2013: everybody who wasn't part of the Republican grassroots (and a few of them, too) was convinced that the shutdown would do permanent damage to the GOP brand, right up to the point where Obamacare blew up in the missile silo. Technically, something equivalent has not yet happened this year. But something will. Something always will. You can't subject the populace to a year-plus-long rant about the inequities of the Republican party without said populace eventually tuning it out. Read More Sponsored

Sincerely yours, Erick Erickson Editor-in-Chief, RedState