Compromise on principle? Never.

When it comes to voting we only have a choice between two candidates between which we can either identify a difference still worth having compared to the worst of them, or not find a difference worth it all. Voting in such circumstances is not a compromise. The situation is forced on us.

Carson does have integrity -- for his own values, but when a "steely spine" is defending destruction through the wrong values it is not good. For all his admirable achievements he does not understand philosophy and much of the political situation.

Think a bit. Fedgov is a hammer. State and Local government best represent the will of their community. No excuse, this is exactly the way this country should operate. Disagree?

Abortion centers are not "death shops". You and the rest of the anti-abortion crusade are trying to smear and obliterate abortion rights everywhere you can at all levels of government. Claiming you want the states to do it is an evasion and is no defense of your "hogwash" non-response.

in·fan·ti·cide
inˈfan(t)əˌsīd/
noun
1.the crime of killing a child within a year of birth.
2.a person who kills an infant, especially their own child

The only thing that doesn't make it a crime is the letter of the law. "Anti-Rand"...another one.

I down voted you. I also flagged you for directly attacking me personally. Further, the down votes and the flagging was because you turned a political look at a presidential candidates response to a relevant topic into your own personal crusade against religion and those with faith.

Yes, it was me on a t least of few of your more vitriolic and accusatory statements.

Agree, without government involvement.

I consider a clump of cells from two human beings that have bound together to begin the formative stage of human development to be the start of life. You don't mix human sperm and human ego and ever get a duck.

There are more than enough birth control options before, during, and after intercourse to rid the world of abortion except in the case of the mothers life at risk. To use abortion as birth control, today, with what we have available, is irresponsible, sinister, and completely opposite of individual accountability.

Abortion is not infanticide. Take your anti Ayn Rand polemics somewhere else.

Watching the videos requires countless hours of videos, not the selections edited out to exploit ambiguities with "narratives" contradicting the rest of it.

1930s Sanger rhetoric on eugenics has nothing to do with the right of abortion. You know very well that this is a matter of individual rights, not eugencis. This has been refuted previously and your continued smears as an excuse to shut down abortion are dishonest and disgusting.

The systematic downvotes come from the militant, anti-Ayn Rand religionists trolling again.

The "cronyist empire" is the result of statist and collectivist philosophy making the corruption possible. The demolition begins with demolishing the statist ideology they live off. Very little can be done by going after the corruption itself. Some of it can be sometimes be derailed, but only temporarily in an otherwise zigzagging net downward spiral. But we do what we can.

Going after Planned Parenthood isn't even primarily a matter of corrupt cronyism. They are primarily cashing in on welfare statism. Shifting their funding in a hysterical attack on abortion is worse than a useless rearranging the deck chairs.

Please note that I wrote, "without government involvement." That means no funding via taxation. Nor any legal mandates, one way or another.

Do you define a child as a clump of cells? Or as a fully (or very nearly) fully-formed human being?

Logically, unless a fetus is capable of survival outside the womb, how can it be given human status? Please note that approximately 35% of pregnancies end in spontaneous abortion. Could that possibly be the "will" of "Nature"?

Yes, I absolutely reject Rand's philosophy regarding abortion. I do not ignore it, I choose to see the argument for what it is - a slippery slope of tremendous import. The position of support for abortion requires one to assign rights, consciousness, and everything associated at some arbitrary point down the development path - ignoring completely the fact that we all continue developing mentally until the day we die and physically well into our twenties.

If the assertion holds that consciousness is not present until some arbitrary point along that developmental path, it is up to you to prove when that "magic" moment happens. So far, even the best science has to offer can neither measure, detect, nor quantify consciousness. Even Rand declared it as a tautology: consciousness is. Without that ability to measure and define there is no way to objectively ascertain the reality of the matter. All we can do is view some of the outcomes of consciousness - but the very essence of consciousness is beyond our understanding. As such, it should be treated with the utmost care and respect, not blatantly ignored on a whim or justified due to inconvenience.

I agree... I love how they cry "poverty".. It's a $5.00 problem, and I thought Obamacare was supposed to fix that anyway. Even going on the pill without prescription drug coverage costs about $5.00 a month at Walmart or other cheap pharmacy... its not something that should be driving 4 million+ abortions a year.

Your inaccurate misrepresentation of Piekoff's and Rand's reasoning is a new low for you, 'blarman'. To say your logic is flawed is paying you a compliment. That you have tried to dot lines between Rand, Piekoff, and murder is dishonest and disgusting. If you disagree with someone, at least have a clue what you're disagreeing with.

Watch the videos and compare the actions described to Federal law. They are admitting that they are adjusting the abortion procedures to specifically target organs for sale. Those actions explicitly violate three separate portions of Federal law. The other one is in the notification to the woman about the disposition of the aborted fetus.

Is the goal to shut down Planned Parenthood as an abortion provider? Absolutely. If you want to decry some hidden agenda, go decry Margaret Sanger - the Founder - and her eugenicist policies! Go decry her open statements praising Hitler and the Ku Klux Klan! Go decry her open statements admitting that her goal was to eradicate blacks! Go decry her goals to see that every baby ever born was subject first to approval by the Federal government!

Again - if you haven't watched the videos, go do it. Until you have, you have no more standing in this conversation.

Except that is not whats happening. Tax dollar are being used to kill children (almost 57 million in 2013 - 1/6 of the population)...its legal infanticide paid for by tax dollars.

Without government involvement, each health care provider is free to perform--or not perform-- any specific procedure.

Duh. They wouldn't be anti-abortion if they weren't. Don't be infantile.

The real question is why one would support the infanticide of 40 million Americans and all of the productivity they could have given.

I wasn't the person who downvoted you, but you didn't answer the important question:

At what place do you think that the demolition of the cronyist empire should begin?

Actually, there is. Federal law specifically states that the abortion procedures can not be modified in any way so as to preserve tissue. There is clear evidence that this prohibition was ignored with intent.

Have you ever even watched the videos? If you have not, I urge you to do so - if you can stomach them. The fact that they are revolting and repugnant should be a direct clue as to their morality.

Not at all. In fact I'm in favor of getting the fedgov out of it completely and leaving it up to each state. Individual accountability should, with all the birth control options available today, remove the need for abortion and death-shops like planned parenthood. I 100% am in favor of not one tax cent being spent toward abortion. If you want it, feel you need it, pay for it yourself and live with the consequences.

The basic and fundamental shortcoming in the whole argument lies in the fallacy that one can "define" consciousness or life at all - either its definition, origin, or end. That is the crux of the argument. Rand's arguments place birth as the arbitrary point of acquisition of rights as if there is something magical or mystical about passage through the birth canal. The assertion is untenable when actual brainwave patterns are detectable at only day forty - scarcely six weeks in (most abortions are week 12-13). Fetuses have also been observed attempting to avoid abortion instruments, demonstrating a clear awareness of threats. The fact that they remain effectively as helpless as the proverbial fish in a barrel is a poor argument that they do not constitute human life.

Rand similarly ignores that the choice is not whether or not to abort, but whether or not to engage in sex. It is at THAT moment that any potential pregnancy arises - not the choice whether or not to abort the baby. The argument for abortion is a deflection from the true cause and effect.

The serious flaw in Piekoff's argument centers around "potentiality". If one arbitrarily asserts that life only acquires value according to certain criteria - that life is not intrinsically valuable - one has directly affirmed a slippery slope as one's basis for determining consciousness and rights. The problem with such is that it can be used as justification for eugenics, racial cleansing, or the killing of those with deformities just as easily as it can be used as justification for abortion. Margaret Sanger (founder of Planned Parenthood) brought this up and openly praised Adolf Hitler for his program of eugenics. She, too, made no attempt to hide the fact that she strictly favored the government control of all births according to their "suitability" - a subjective measurement if there ever was one. The assertion by both Rand and Piekoff is that somehow they claim the moral authority to ascertain the utility of life - a bold statement indeed given the fact that they have no control over death other than to administer it to others!

That isn't what the anti-abortion crusade is about. It is trying to destroy abortion rights and anyone who performs abortions.

The morass of subsidies of all kinds is a result of the usual pressure group warfare and will not be eliminated by "getting" Planned Parenthood. But ending subsidies isn't the point of this.

Wait... are we talking about Carson or Clinton? Umm...never mind; back on track.

Do you deny that the anti-abortion crusade is trying to ban abortion?

The real question IS about government welfare and cronyism. None of us in this forum is for cronyism.

At what place do you think that the demolition of the cronyist empire should begin? If not, are you going to wait for the collapse as those in AS did? When John and Dagny went back to the world after the collapse, do you not think that looters would pop up again like so many dandelions?

Planned Parenthood had revenues of $1.3 billion, of which > $500 million came from taxpayers in their 2013-2014 annual report. They had > 300,000 abortions (330,000 in their 2008-2009 report). Elsewhere, I found that as of 2008/2009, the average cost of an abortion is nominally $450-500. Hence, we are talking about approximately $150 million in abortion procedures annually. PP states that 3% of their procedures are abortions. That probably is correct. Nominally 12% of their revenue is from abortions, according to my rough calculations. It certainly is not very far off.

Now look near the bottom line. PP had $127.1 million of "excess of revenue over expenses", meaning that we all paid so that PP could take $500+ million from each of us and declare a $127 million profit.

http://plannedparenthood.org/files/67...

Getting rid of corporate welfare is something that should be an easy thing to get people to agree upon. It is not, because most people have their own benefits from the crony empires that keep them in support of the cronyists.

If you want to abort as many fetuses as you and your significant other can procreate, go right ahead, but do not use my money or expect my endorsement.