THE OTHER SHOE DROPS:
 A current events round-up for conservatives

Turning back the tide of information overload with a digest of the latest developments in news conservatives need to pay attention to:

† Look Before You Leap: Part II (related article, fourth article on the page): As part of its “Protect Our Girls” project, Live Action shot new undercover videos at several Planned Parenthood clinics nationwide that show the supposedly pro-woman group’s willingness to abort a girl baby merely because a pregnant woman wants a boy, Human Events reports:

Live Action’s actress frankly informs Planned Parenthood staffer “Rebecca” that she wants to abort her baby if it’s a girl, because she’s really got her heart set on having a boy. Rebecca helpfully suggests waiting until five months into the pregnancy, when the sex of the baby can be reliably detected. She concedes that doctors and clinicians frequently express horror at the notion of performing a late-term abortion for sex-selection purposes, because “the brain is already developed, a lot … pretty much everything is already developed.”

She therefore advises keeping the whole “gendercide” angle a private matter between the pregnant mother and the entirely non-judgmental Planned Parenthood staff. Rebecca claims Planned Parenthood “usually” tells mothers who want sex-selection abortions, “you don’t actually have to say what you’re gonna go do.” She’s got a list of OB/GYNs who don’t ask too many questions ready to go.

Once her regrettably penis-deficient unviable tissue mass has been disposed of, the actress tells Rebecca that she wants to get pregnant again as quickly as possible, leading to either a baby boy, or another abortion. Wash, rinse, repeat as necessary! Of course, Medicaid frowns on such elective abortions, but Planned Parenthood will happily keep them in the dark, too. “Good luck, and I hope that you do get your boy!” the PP staffer chirps.

In a second video shot at the Margaret Sanger Planned Parenthood clinic in NYC, social worker Randi Coun assures the Live Action actor that, “I can tell you, here at Planned Parenthood we believe it’s not up to us to decide what is a good or bad reason for somebody to decide to terminate a pregnancy.”

Live Action had hoped their evidence that a gendercide is occurring here in the U.S. bolsters the chances of the Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act (HR 3541) because “The United States is one of the few industrialized democracies where it is still legal to abort a baby girl just because of her gender,” Live Action president Lila Rose said in a statement. Just Four states – AZ, IL, OK and PA –- have laws on the books that ban sex-selection abortions.

The House bill would have made it illegal to coerce, fund or transport a pregnant woman to have a gender-based abortion, though a woman who knowingly aborts a girl would not face prosecution, The Washington Times reports:

PRENDA is being brought to the House floor … under a fast-track procedure known as a suspension of the rules, and thus would require a two-thirds majority to pass - a tall order for the current body, which is split 242 Republicans to 190 Democrats, with three vacancies.

The measure would face even longer odds in the Democrat-controlled Senate, where most give it no chance of passage.

Unfortunately, the 246-168 vote fell short of the two-thirds majority threshold needed to pass the bill. Seven Republicans crossed party lines to vote againt PRENDA; 20 Democrats joined their Republical colleagues in voting for the bill.

By the way, Planned Parenthood fired the TX employee in the Live Action video because she "did not follow our protocol" for dealing with "a highly unusual patient scenario," said the group’s spokesperson Leslie Kantor.

Worldwide, an estimated 100 million girls are "missing," and a study by University of Texas economics professor Jason Abrevaya found for the first time that gender-based abortions occur in this country as well. According to his data, more than 2,000 girls were "missing" among Asian women who gave birth in CA between 1991 and 2004.

† Don’t Know Much About History, Don’t Know Much Foreign Policy: Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk and his nation are outraged that President Barack Hussein Obama referred to a “Polish death camp” instead of a “German death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland” in his remarks during an East Room ceremony honoring recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, one of whom was Jan Karski, a Polish resistance fighter during World War II.

Why was Karski posthumously honored? As The Wall Street Journal’s Matt Kaminski cynically puts it: “Important constituencies were satisfied with the award. Poles and Polish-Americans (a key voting bloc in Pennsylvania, Illinois and Wisconsin) were delighted.”

But getting back to what Obama said that got the Poles’ kielbasa in a kink:

“[Karski] served as a courier for the Polish resistance during the darkest days of World War II. Before one trip across enemy lines, resistance fighters told him that Jews were being murdered on a massive scale and smuggled him into the Warsaw Ghetto and a Polish death camp to see for himself. Jan took that information to President Franklin Roosevelt, giving one of the first accounts of the Holocaust and imploring to the world to take action.”

Tusk accused Obama of “ignorance, lack of knowledge, bad intentions,” The New York Times reports:

The White House seemed blindsided by the sulfurous reaction of Mr. Tusk, as well as that of Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, who said in a Twitter message that the White House should “apologize for this outrageous error.” The United States has had a close relationship with Poland, though the Polish government was irked when Mr. Obama decided to scale back the Bush administration’s missile defense system in Eastern Europe.

For many Poles, Mr. Obama’s statement was more than an innocent gaffe: it was a grave distortion of the darkest chapter in Polish history. “When someone says ‘Polish death camps,’ it’s as if there were no Nazis, no German responsibility, as if there was no Hitler,” Mr. Tusk said. “That is why our Polish sensitivity in these situations is so much more than just simply a feeling of national pride.”

The White House expressed “regret” that the president “misspoke,” but Tusk is demanding that the administration offer a more "explicit reaction" to the incident":

"I am certain that our American friends are capable of a more explicit reaction than issuing a correction and the spokesperson of the White House expressing regret, and that maybe they will once and for all eliminate such errors. It is an issue to which we cannot be indifferent, for the sake of Poland, our country and our fellow countrymen.

“We can’t accept such words in Poland, even if they are spoken by a leader of an allied country. When somebody says ‘Polish death camps’ it is as if there were no Nazis, no German responsibility, no Hitler.”

Agence France-Presse reports that the White House is disinclined to appease a close ally:

"We regret the misstatement, but that is what it was," said Obama spokesman Jay Carney, reiterating that the president "misspoke" during a ceremony awarding the highest US civilian honor to late Holocaust hero Jan Karski.

"He was referring to Nazi death camps in German-occupied Poland." …

Poland's Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich has also issued a statement calling on Obama to “personally correct his words.”

† License to kill (jobs): The motto of St. Joseph’s Abbey is “Ora et labora” (“prayer and work”) and the Benedictine monks sustain themselves economically by running a seminary, a retreat and a gift shop that sells Monk Soap that they make themselves. But the abbey was looking to replace income lost when Hurricane Katrina destroyed stands of pine on land the abbey owned that it used to harvest and sell. Abbot Justin Brown and the monks decided to sell the handcrafted wooden caskets that the monks made for themselves, and invested $200,000 in equipment to establish St. Joseph Woodworks. But before the abbey sold a single coffin, the state of LA ordered the monks to cease-and-desist and threatened thousands of dollars in fines and possible criminal prosecution, The Washington Post reports:

Brown, a soft-spoken man who is only the fifth leader of a monastery that dates to 1889, said he had not known that in Louisiana only licensed funeral directors are allowed to sell “funeral merchandise.”

That means that St. Joseph Abbey must either give up the casket-selling business or become a licensed funeral establishment, which would require a layout parlor for 30 people, a display area for the coffins, the employment of a licensed funeral director and an embalming room.

“Really,” Brown said. “It’s just a big box.”

And so, after much prayer and two failed attempts to get the Louisiana legislature to change the law, the monks went to federal court.

The monks won round one in July, when U.S. District Judge Stanwood R. Duval Jr. ruled Louisiana’s restrictions unconstitutional, saying “the sole reason for these laws is the economic protection of the funeral industry.”

The Louisiana State Board of Embalmers and Funeral Directors, which has argued that the law protects consumers, has appealed, and the circuit court in New Orleans will hear the case in early June.

The monks are represented by the Arlington County-based Institute for Justice, which has a knack for picking empathetic, working-class parties – hair braiders, flower arrangers, city tour guides – to personify what it says is its battle against government regulation that strangles free enterprise.

Federal appeals courts have split in evaluating similar laws. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit upheld a similar law in OK, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit struck down such a law in TN.

† Multiculturalism: Jihad By Other Means (The U.S. Military Edition): A federal jury convicted Pfc. Naser Jason Abdo – a Muslim soldier who had gone AWOL from Fort Campbell, KY, to wage jihad against America –  on six charges stemming from his plot to blow up a restaurant in Killeeen, TX, frequented by soldiers stationed at Fort Hood, The Associated Press reports:

Abdo was convicted of attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction, attempted murder of U.S. officers or employees, and four counts of possessing a weapon in furtherance of a federal crime of violence. He faces up to life in prison. U.S. District Judge Walter Smith is set to sentence Abdo in July. …

When authorities detained Abdo at a Killeen motel July 27, they found bomb-making components, a loaded gun, 143 rounds of ammunition, a stun gun and magazine article on how to make an explosive device.

In a recorded police interview, Abdo said he was planning an attack in the Fort Hood area "because I don't appreciate what my unit did in Afghanistan."

He told authorities he planned to put the bomb in a busy restaurant filled with soldiers, wait outside and shoot anyone who survived – and become a martyr after police killed him. Abdo told an investigator that he didn't plan an attack inside Fort Hood because he didn't believe he would be able to get through security at the gates, according to testimony.

In a recorded jail conversation played during the trial, Abdo told his mother his religion motivated him (“[T]he reason is religion. There is no other reason.") and that he wanted "justice" for the people of Iraq and Afghanistan because “their suffering is my suffering” and he sought to “make things as right as possible” for them.