Planned Parenthood health centers that received Komen program funding provided nearly 170,000 clinical breast exams out of the more than 4 million clinical breast exams performed nationwide at Planned Parenthood health centers; clinicians under the grants wrote more than 6,400 mammogram referrals out of 70,000 mammogram referrals issued from Planned Parenthood clinics.

PP is the nation’s number one provider of sexual health services for women. If your organization exists to prevent and battle breast cancer, you’d probably want to go where the breasts are. That’s Planned Parenthood (and Cinemax, for different reasons).

The Komen foundation’s decision to pull its funding from PP can be described as a lot of things, but a principled objection to abortion isn’t one. Here’s its explanation:

Komen says the key reason is that Planned Parenthood is under investigation in Congress – a probe launched by a conservative Republican who was urged to act by anti-abortion groups. Komen spokeswoman Leslie Aun said the charity recently adopted criteria barring grants to organizations that are under investigation by local, state or federal authorities.

If Komen wanted to make a statement about abortion rights, it would have said that it pulled PP’s funding because of abortion. Instead, it caved to radical right wing pressure, made up a pretext, and didn’t even have the courage to take a stand one way or the other. Regardless, the effect will be that fewer breast exams are performed and therefore more women will have undetected cancer for longer. Not to understate the case, but that kind of outcome seems contrary to Komen’s previously stated goal of battling breast cancer. It isn’t very “pro-life,” either.

I debated the issue this morning on Scott Braddock’s News 92Fm show with conservative activist Kyleen Wright. Listen here:

If you live in that system — if, for example, you get your news from Fox (and are therefore likely to know less than people who read no news at all) — you live in a world in which “apocalyptic fear” constantly grips the American people. Barack Obama doesn’t just hold views contrary to yours, he’s evil and stupid, bent on destruction of the United States:

Outside this alternative reality, the United States is a country dominated by a strong Christian religiosity. Within it, Christians are a persecuted minority. Outside the system, President Obama—whatever his policy ­errors—is a figure of imposing intellect and dignity. Within the system, he’s a pitiful nothing, unable to speak without a teleprompter, an affirmative-action ­phony doomed to inevitable defeat.

* * * *

We used to say “You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts.” Now we are all entitled to our own facts, and conservative media use this right to immerse their audience in a total environment of pseudo-facts and pretend information.

At the heart of this mania is the fantasy that conservatives are persecuted. Rush Limbaugh has it:

Conservatism is an oppressed minority today [sic]. The Republican Party is an oppressed minority. . . If ever a civil rights movement was needed in America, it is for the Republican Party. If ever we needed to start marching for freedom and constitutional rights, it’s for the Republican Party. The Republican Party is today’s oppressed minority, and it knows how to behave as one. It shuts up. It doesn’t cross bridges; it doesn’t run into the Bull Connors of the Democrat [sic] Party; it is afraid of the fire hoses and the dogs, it’s compliant.

(Limbaugh’s contempt for black people and casual trivialization of their suffering during the actual civil rights movement by comparing it to the way mostly white, well-off Republicans are treated today really isn’t the point here, but you’ve still got to marvel at his ability to express it in so few words.)

Freshman Tea Party Republican Rep. Allen West of Florida really has it. Here he is last week solemnly declaring to tea partiers that “this is a battlefield that we must stand upon.” If you love your country, you, like he, will refuse to sit back and watch Barack Obama “take the United States of America and destroy it.” Brave of him to oppose something that isn’t happening.

What’s more, West doesn’t mind telling the President of the United States, Senate Majority Leader and House Minority Leader to take their ideology and “get the hell out of the United States of America.” Very patriotic.

He caps his remarks by pulling off a persecution twofer: Not only are Real Americans like him and the assembled fed-up patriots oppressed by traitorous liberals, but he, a United States Congressman, refuses to be silenced in this time of great oppression; if that makes him the “number one target of the Democrat [sic] National Party,” he says, “bring it on.” And cue the swelling Braveheart soundtrack…

This isn’t one of those things about which people can disagree in good faith. The entire premise of West’s speech is factually wrong; it’s a tour de force of unhinged paranoia and unmitigated stupidity. It’s the kind of thing that can only appeal to you if you live in the alternative knowledge system Frum denounces. It’s not good for the Republican Party and it’s not good for the country.

“The conservative shift to ever more extreme, ever more fantasy-based ideology has ominous real-world consequences for American society,” Frum writes, and the point is inarguable. How is progress of any kind going to be made when people in positions of power envision themselves as grand saviors of a nation right on the brink of complete annihilation simply because the candidate they didn’t vote for won an election? That kind of thing leaves principled conservatives like Frum, who quaintly confines himself to reality when dealing with opposition, with few choices.

If anything good comes of this hysterical right-wing pant-wetting, it’ll be the reelection of Barack Obama by people who understand that while he isn’t a perfect president and his record on a number of issues is certainly debatable, he hasbrought the economy back from the brink, delivered health care to 32 million people, saved the American auto industry, and ended the war in Iraq: All things that happened in actual reality, not the one created by hysterical right-wingers.

The first rule of public speaking is “know your audience.” As former Republican National Committee chairman Lee Atwater described it, knowing a white southern audience meant using code words like “food stamps” to ingratiate oneself:

Questioner: But the fact is, isn’t it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps?

Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

Another former RNC chairman, Ken Mehlman, said he felt kind of bad that his party had won elections by speaking in code to racists, so he actually apologized to African Americans in 2005:

Some Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong.

In 2010, RNC chair Michael Steele confirmed what everybody already knew:

For the last 40-plus years we had a “Southern Strategy” that alienated many minority voters by focusing on the white male vote in the South. Well, guess what happened in 1992, folks, “Bubba” went back home to the Democratic Party and voted for Bill Clinton.

Newt Gingrich faded a lot of heat during the South Carolina campaign for repeatedly calling the nation’s first African-American chief executive the country’s best “food stamp president.” (Gingrich defended himself by saying that it might be uncomfortable, but nevertheless a fact that more people have been put on food stamps by Barack Obama than any other president. Unfortunately for Newt, the claim is false; George W. Bush holds that distinction.)

So it was mighty white of Gingrich in the midst of such charged criticism to offer to attend the next NAACP convention in order to explain to black people why living off the largess of more industrious races was no way to go through life:

Times have changed, of course, and Republicans today object far more aggressively to the accusation of racism than to its actual existence. Recent polls for example — which use anti-conservative technology like “science” — have found that 46% of Mississippi Republicans think interracial marriage should be illegal and large numbers of Tea Partiershave a “low regard for immigrants and blacks.”

Nearly 28% of South Carolinians are African American. Though Gingrich was accused of using racial code words to achieve victory, it doesn’t seem to have hurt him among rank-and-file Republican voters, as he appears to have won the state’s primary across the party’s racial lines:

Know your audience.

But this week’s Newsweek’s cover story, which appears under the headline “Why Are Obama’s Critics so Dumb?” isn’t about Gohmert or his caucus of imbeciles. It is instead about mainstream Republican mythology: The conservative claim that the 2009 stimulus didn’t work, for example, which isn’t dumb as much as it is demonstrably false. (The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office found that the stimulus created up to 3.3 million jobs. But ask any leading Republican and they’ll tell you, contra reality, that it “failed.”)

Conservative Bryan Preston and I debated Newsweek’s purposefully provocative cover and the non-matching Sullivan essay on Scott Braddock’s News 92FM show this morning:

The First Amendment couldn’t be clearer:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

(Emphasis added, obviously.)

But Congress has made such laws. They deal with what the government describes as “obscenity:”

It is a violation of federal law to air obscene programming at any time. It is also a violation of federal law to broadcast indecent or profane programming during certain hours. Congress has given the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) the responsibility for administratively enforcing the law that governs these types of broadcasts. Among other things, the FCC has authority to issue civil monetary penalties, revoke a license, and deny a renewal application. In addition, a federal district court may impose fines and/or imprisonment for up to two years on those who are convicted of criminal violations of the law.

Since 1978, busybodies, prudes, and government bureaucrats who want to “protect” the rest of us from what they think is obscene have been permitted abridge the right to speak freely. So when morning DJs do a bit the FCC doesn’t like or NYPD gets really Blue (warning: perfectly-formed naked lady’s butt link), the federal government has levied fines for what it deems offensive speech.

But the Constitution prohibits the government from deciding matters of taste. It can’t decide what should offend or determine that its interest in protecting someone else’s delicate sensibilities outweighs others’ right to say what they want, even if that someone else is a child. The framers had children too, after all, but didn’t include in the Constitution any device to protect them from speech that might offend their parents. The “harm” that would befall them is hardly worth trading the right to speak freely.

Others disagree of course, and the Bush Administration took this nannystateism a step further, leading to the case pending before the Court today:

The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments Tuesday testing the constitutionality of a Bush-era regulation that allows the Federal Communications Commission to punish broadcasters with stiff fines for the fleeting use of vulgar language or nude images. The FCC’s rule applies only to radio and over-the-air TV networks — like Fox, ABC, NBC and PBS — but not to cable TV.

Ignoring the First Amendment, the Obama Administration has filed briefs supporting this plainly unconstitutional overreach.

I debated the issue with Karen Kristopher from the Houston Area Association for Decency on Fox 26:

The same people who cheered as George Bush and the Republican Congress turned the $236 billion surplus left to them by Bill Clinton into a nearly trillion-dollar deficit are this week up in arms because the Obamas spent money hosting a 2009 Halloween party for children of members of the military. The country was in the midst of a recession and the White House purposefully kept the opulent celebration quiet, they claim.

Right, except for…let’s see…the very quiet official White House YouTube Channel which posted video of the event at the time, the top-secret White House website which posted pictures and descriptions of the event at the time, the pool reporting, blogs and other media which reported the details of the event at the time, not to mention the contemporaneous accounts from people who were there.

Former Texas Republican Party Chair Cathie Adams and I discussed the right’s latest bout with hysterical Obama hatred on News 92FM this morning with host Scott Braddock:

On New Year’s Eve, Green performed the song in front of a television audience of over two million but changed the lyrics from “nothing to kill or die for / and no religion too,” to “nothing to kill or die for / and all religion is true.”

Since then, he’s has faced a wave of criticism from fans:

Mr Green swatted off those critical responses left and right on Twitter following, in sometimes similarly obscene rebuttals, but by late Sunday morning he had removed all of the postings.

‘Yo I meant no disrespect by changing the lyric guys! I was trying to say a world were u could believe what u wanted that’s all,’ Mr Green was seen as explaining in a tweet.

On my radio show this morning, Silverman responded. As chair of the March 24 Reason Rally in Washington DC (billed as the largest “atheist event in world history), Silverman invited the singer to attend and perform Imagine for the godless. If Green intended to communicate a message of tolerance as he claims, he can prove it by singing the song as written. Silverman promised to pay Green’s expenses — all he has to do is show up and sing “nothing to kill or die for / and no religion too.” Listen:

According to police in Lexington, North Carolina, Michael Anthony Fuller tried to buy $476 worth of merchandise at WalMart with what he claimed was an actual $1,000,000 bill. The largest denomination in circulation, by the way, is $100. Fuller apparently didn’t have access to Google. He nevertheless still managed to ball up a lot about what’s wrong with the country in one massively stupid (alleged) crime.

Fuller’s in his fifties, but what a great American teenager he would make. Someone who hatches a plan to make off with a vacuum cleaner, microwave and $999,524 in change by using a denomination of currency nobody’s ever heard of couldn’t be anything but a product of our school system. American kids consistently test well below their Chinese, Finnish and South Korean counterparts. Embarrassed Americans might head over to one of those places to find out what we’re doing wrong, but we don’t. Maybe that’s because we don’t have a clue where any of them are. Forget China, Finland and South Korea — 37% of Americans can’t find the United States on a map.

Since American schools are pumping out truckloads of Michael Fullers, you’d think politicians would prioritize things like education, but you’d be wrong. Visionary leaders like Governor Perry and the one-percent-firsters who run the legislature figure kids who can’t afford to go to private school know enough already, so they cut $4 billion from the state’s education budget, causing tens of thousands of school employees, including teachers, to be laid off and tripling the class size waiversovercrowded schools now need to operate.

Or maybe when he hungers for information (which is obviously often), Fuller watches America’s number one cable news channel: Fox. If he does, he fits right in. A Fairleigh Dickinson University survey released in November found that people who get their news from Fox know less about what’s going on in the world than people who watch no news at all.

It’s certainly not a surprise that Fuller chose to spend his million dollar bill at WalMart — he probably didn’t have a choice. When the chain moves into small towns like Lexington, it kills off everything else. A 2011 study by Hunter College found that “Wal-Mart’s arrival does not bring the increase in jobs and retail spending that the company promises. Instead, Wal-Mart captures spending from existing stores, driving them out of business and replacing existing retail jobs with lower-paying Wal-Mart jobs.”

Not that we’re going to do anything about it. Well, that’s not entirely true, we will do something about it — we’ll continue waving goodbye to the manufacturing jobs Americans used to do so we can keep buying cheap Chinese-prison-labor-made junk at discount prices. With million dollar bills.

Listen here.

It just wouldn’t be the Christmas season without a group of religious conservatives barricading themselves behind a creche on the grounds of a courthouse somewhere. This year, that courthouse is in Athens, Texas — seat of Henderson County — and the Athenians are in full martyr mode:

The hope for this is to bring together as many evangelical Christians as we can in our county to say, regardless of whether they take our plastic nativity scene, they can’t take what’s in us. We want to make a statement, not just to East Texas. . .literally to the nation, that we have a group of people willing to stand for what we believe in.

With all due respect to this WalMart William Wallace, these aren’t trampled subjects of a distant king. They’re citizens in a secular republic and members of its dominant religious group.

If the courthouse nativity-pushers were interested in celebrating Christmas, they’d put the decorations on private property. But they’re not. Knowing that the Constitution forbids government-sponsored religious displays, they’re interested instead in picking a fight with the law to exploit their perpetually outraged constituents and advance their agenda of destroying the wall of separation between church and state. When the Constitution prevails, they can rend their garments and enjoy Steve Doocy’s Fox & Friends celebration of them as the secular left’s latest innocent casualties in the War on Christmas. It’s a cynical act.

It doesn’t matter that most of Henderson County isn’t offended by the nativity scene. It wouldn’t matter if every single citizen of Henderson County speaks in tongues and anoints their children with oil before homeschool every day. Henderson County voters could approve the courthouse nativity scene by 99.9% and it still wouldn’t matter. Government advancement of religion violates the Constitution.

Attorney General Greg Abbott (who has “quietly made it known that he wants to run for governor“) sent a pandering letter to the county in which he advised that it “has no legal obligation to remove a nativity scene from the courthouse grounds during the Christmas season.”

Abbott’s clearly a better politician than lawyer since he doesn’t seem to be able to locate what attorneys like to refer to as “the law.” The Supreme Court doesn’t have that problem:

[G]overnment may not engage in a practice that has the effect of promoting or endorsing religious beliefs. The display of the creche in the county courthouse has this unconstitutional effect.

The Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation, apparently more aware of applicable law than our own Attorney General, wrote Abbott in response:

The imprimatur of the county of Henderson, and now the imprimatur of the Texas Attorney General’s Office, are being used to endorse Christianity. When the county allows this manger scene to be erected as the sole focus of a display dominating an entire corner of the County Courthouse Square, it conveys an unconstitutional endorsement of religion.

On Monday, Scott Braddock moderated a debate over Henderson County’s official depiction of Jesus’ birth between former Texas Republican Party Chair Cathie Adams and me on News 92FM: