The BBC reports
US President Donald Trump has signed a new measure aimed at rolling back federal funding for the US women's health group Planned Parenthood.The legislation removes an Obama-era rule that prohibited states from withholding funding for family planning services that provide abortions.
A Republican-led Congress passed the measure last month with Vice President Mike Pence casting a tie-breaking vote.Republicans have long vowed to defund the group over the issue of abortions.
Planned Parenthood, a reproductive health organisation, provides birth control, STD testing, cancer screenings, breast examinations and pregnancy terminations.
Mr Trump signed the legislation privately without media present on Thursday, repealing a rule issued in the final days of Barack Obama's administration.He signed the resolution under the 1996 Congressional Review Act (CRA), which allows lawmakers to nullify regulations within 60 days of enactment as long as the president agrees.
Republicans have overturned several Obama-era rules using the CRA.
Mr Obama's regulation prevented states from withholding money from a provider for any other reason than an ability to provide family planning service.That rule was instituted after more than a dozen conservative states denied grants to Planned Parenthood through a Nixon-era family-planning programme known as Title X.
Charlie Pierce remarks
Women are going to get sick. Women are going to die. Many of them are going to live in states that gave the president* a whopping margin of victory last November. You want disgruntled Trump voters? Wait a few months and talk to their families.
If only that were the case. There is a puncher's chance, and only a puncher's chance, that Trump voters will become disgruntled if they learn that women have died because of the order President Trump will have signed months earlier.
But that will have been months earlier and unaccompanied by video. Contrast that with the dramatic pictures and video which accompanied both the missile attack upon a Syrian base and the detonation of the Massive Ordnance Air Blast upon ISIL militants in Afghanistan a few days later.
Simply mention Planned Parenthood, and the GOP and other right-wing organizations will fall back on Trump's argument in which he claims
As I said throughout the campaign, I am pro-life and I am deeply committed to investing in women’s health and plan to significantly increase federal funding in support of nonabortion services such as cancer screenings. Polling shows the majority of Americans oppose public funding for abortion, even those who identify as pro-choice. There is an opportunity for organizations to continue the important work they do in support of women’s health, while not providing abortion services.
Trump did not let on that there is not much of an "opportunity" if they don't have the funding, and the Administration and the GOP-controlled Congress will make sure they don't. And he maitained that organizations would do that work "while not providing abortion services," thereby falsely implying that the abortion services provided by Planned Parenthood are federally funded, which, of course, they are not.
Mythmaking is central to the conservative cause. So is cost, considered when cutting Planned Parenthood, energy assistance for poor people, affordable housing, science research, environmental health, and nutritional assistance to the needy.
There is one area, however, in which expense is to be virtually ignored. When President Trump ordered the missile attack upon a Syrian base, there was tingling up the leg of Brian Williams and Fareed Zakaria, but nary a word about the approximately $1 million replacement cost of a Tomahawk missile. When that was followed by the big bomb in Afghanistan, news anchors and pundits waxed excitedly about the "Mother of all Bombs" without mentioning that each costs approximately $16 million. No military action is to be subjected to any kind of cost-benefit analysis.
We hear from Donald Trump and endless conservatives about the scourge of "political correctness." However, there is little that is more politically correct than the assumption that no expense is to be spared when a bullet is fired, a missile launched, a bomb dropped, or a naval strike group deployed.
HAPPY EASTER
and a belated HAPPY PASSOVER
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