On Thursday, the Texas Senate passed a bill (for the third consecutive session) that would require physicians to have sonograms performed on women seeking abortions. The physician would have to describe sonogram images to the women, and also amplify the sound of the fetal heartbeat if present. Bill author state Sen. Dan Patrick (R-Houston) says women can choose not to look or hear if they wish.

Though the sonogram bill has attracted criticism from doctors for invading the physician-patient relationship, it is expected to have an even easier path to approval in the heavily GOP-dominated Texas House. Gov. Rick Perry has designated pre-abortion sonograms as priority ‘emergency’ legislation.

Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., the new Republican majority in the U.S. House is leading debate on an amendment that would bar Planned Parenthood from receiving Title X funds, a $327 million program for family planning and reproductive health services (but not abortions). A vote on the amendment is expected today, the Washington Post reports.

Back in Texas, Texas AG Greg Abbott issued a pair of legal opinions that are, according to the Texas Tribune‘s Emily Ramshaw, “expected to force Planned Parenthood out of the state’s Women’s Health Program, which provides family planning, but not abortions, to Medicaid patients.”

Forty Planned Parenthood clinics have received $17.6 million total from the Women’s Health Program since 2007, according to the Tribune. Those clinics receiving the funds do not perform abortions, though other Planned Parenthood clinics do.

In a nutshell, Abbott’s opinions determined that: 1) the Health and Human Services Commission may not contract with ‘affiliates’ of abortion providers; and 2) HHSC has the power to define what an ‘affiliate’ is.

According to the Tribune: “With such strong Republican leadership at the helm, it’s likely HHSC will define affiliate in a way that excludes Planned Parenthood.”

Planned Parenthood officials told the Tribune that about half of the Women’s Health Program participants — who must be Medicaid patients — obtained services from Planned Parenthood clinics.

In both the congressional debate and the AG’s opinions, the funding at stake for Planned Parenthood is not used for abortions, but rather for family planning and reproductive health services.

The Associated Press has produced a chart — using figures from Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s annual report for 2008-2009 — breaking down services provided and sources of revenue for Planned Parenthood at the national level.

According to AP, about 35 percent of Planned Parenthood’s services expenditures goes toward contraception; 34 percent goes to testing/treatment of diseases/infections; 17 percent goes to cancer prevention/screening; and 10 percent to other women’s health services. Abortions account for three percent of Planned Parenthood’s expenditures on services.

Planned Parenthood receives 37 percent of its income from health center income, 33 percent from government grants and 28 percent from private contributions, according to AP.

Khan is one of fewer than two dozen “high-value” detainees at the prison camp, believed to be a senior member of al-Qaeda or an insider in its terror network. He is a legal U.S. resident who lived in Baltimore before moving to Pakistan. The government is considering bringing him to trial in a civilian court in Brooklyn.

Although it’s not clear why his case in particular would be brought to New York, the AP reports that it may be because Khan allegedly met with a man in 2001 who later pleaded guilty to plotting to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge.

Military officials also say Khan funneled money to al-Qaeda and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and helped fund an attack on a Marriott Hotel in Indonesia in 2003. That attack killed 12 people and injured 144 more, including two U.S. citizens, the AP reports.

Khan was captured in 2003.

Even Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, is giving hints, albeit privately, about a possible endgame.

Rep. Mike Coffman, a Republican congressman from Colorado, said this week that during his visit to Kabul, he asked McChrystal: “If you get these troops that you are requesting, the 40,000, where’s the tipping point? At what point will we begin to draw down?” According to Coffman, McChrystal responded: “Sometime before 2013.”

Watching the GOP try to use McChrystal as a wedge against Obama next week in his congressional testimony is going to be awesome.

Yoo, of course, is the author of the infamous “torture memos” that justified the abuse and torture of terror suspects held abroad in U.S. custody, and authorized the suspension of the Bill of Rights on U.S. soil.

The Associated Press reports that campus police arrested at least four people who refused to leave the university’s law school building.

Yoo reportedly ignored the demonstrators and. after police removed them from his classroom, began teaching.

Yoo returned to UC Berkeley yesterday after spending the spring semester at Chapman University School of Law in Orange County, where his friend John Eastman is the dean.

According to the AP, Berkeley law students are divided over Yoo: while some think he’s a war criminal who should be fired, his classes are still among the most popular at the law school.

The Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility is expected to release a report any day now analyzing the conduct of Yoo and his colleagues at the Office of Legal Counsel under the Bush administration, and determining whether he violated ethical rules.  The report has been delayed for months while its subjects and the Department of Justice review and amend its contents.

The AP’s examination of the remaining challenges found:

- Fewer than half of the challenges left-about 1,640-are in genuine doubt. Still, that’s eight times more than the current margin between the two men.

- In ballots that could easily be assigned, Franken netted 200 more votes than Coleman. But that number was essentially meaningless because Coleman has withdrawn significantly fewer challenges than Franken-that is, the pool of challenges that can be awarded to Franken at this stage is notably larger.

- Nearly 300 challenges wouldn’t benefit either man because the voter clearly favored a third-party candidate or skipped the race.

- Of the challenges that can’t be reliably awarded to either candidate now, more than 400 possible Franken votes are being held up because on grounds that those voters identified their ballots through write-ins, initials, signatures, phone numbers or some other distinctive marking. At least 300 possible Coleman votes are in limbo for the same reasons.

- The next biggest class of ballot that can’t easily be awarded falls in the category of unclear voter intent. Nearly 600 involve cases where a voter filled in two ovals but crossed out one, put an X above or below their darkened oval or put differently sized partial marks in more than one. There are slightly more potential Franken ballots in that pile as well.

Now, as the AP explained, these numbers are subject to significant change and mean little on their own. This analysis included over 5,000 challenged ballots, but the Franken and Norm Coleman campaigns have withdrawn thousands of frivolous challenges, and the number of challenged ballots now stands at 3,497, down from its peak of 6,655. Over the weekend, the Franken campaign announced that it would reduce its challenges to fewer than 500 by Tuesday, and the Coleman camp followed suit and pledged to bring its number under 1,000. The state will begin reviewing these ballots on Tuesday.

So what’s the significance here? On December 3, the Franken campaign claimed the lead (by 22 votes, later revised to four) in the recount, while the official tally favored Coleman by a margin of 295 votes. The difference was in the methodology: while the official number excluded all challenged ballots, the Franken team’s number included the predicted outcome of the challenges, based on the election officials’ initial judgment.

As far as I’ve seen, the AP report is the first extensive third-party study of the challenged ballots, and even if the numbers change, it lends credence to the Franken camp’s expectation of significant gain when the challenges are resolved.

The Minnesota Secretary of State website now shows Coleman with a 188-vote lead. If the AP’s 200-vote-swing prediction is at all accurate, the challenged ballots could easily be the difference-maker in the race. And then of course there are all those absentee ballots that were improperly rejected but now seem likely to be counted. The Franken campaign is confident that it stands to gain from these ballots; that’s why it pushed so hard to have them included. In other words, everything that happens between now and the end of this process is likely to chip away at — and quite possibly reverse — Coleman’s small lead.

Let me put this whole jumble in more concrete terms: I just bet on Franken with the CEO of TWI’s publisher and gave him 2-1 odds. Donuts are on the line.

As Josh Micah Marshall at Talking Points Memo reported Saturday, Rep John Conyers (D-Mich), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee wrote an angry letter to Michael Chertoff, secretary of the Dept. of Homeland Security, saying the disclosure, by at least one “federal law enforcement official,” according to The AP, was “very disturbing” and warrants an investigation.

In fact, the disclosure wasn’t just disturbing –- it was either illegal, or it was approved directly by the U.S. attorney general. And, it endangered Onyango and any of her family that continue to live in Kenya.

According to the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations, 8 CFR 208.6, it is illegal to disclose that a noncitizen has applied for political asylum, without her explicit consent “or at the discretion of the attorney general.”

The Supreme Court, in United States v. Ray, explained the reason: because the applicant or her family could be subject to retaliation in their home country.

As an immigration authority fact sheet, cited by the court, explains: “Public disclosure of asylum-related information may subject the claimant to retaliatory measures by government authorities or non-state actors in the event that the claimant is repatriated, or endanger the security of the claimant’s family members who may still be residing in the country of origin.”

According to Amnesty International, the last year in Kenya has seen a crisis of deadly political violence and grave human rights violations.

In other words, this leak wasn’t just a typical ugly attack against the Democratic presidential nominee — it may have been an unusually dangerous one.

Palin, however, tried to claim this is not a new stand for her. She insisted: “Show me where I have ever said that there’s absolute proof that nothing that man has ever conducted or engaged in has had any effect or no effect on climate change.”

The Associated Press is on it. Here we go:

She has told the Internet news site Newsmax, “A changing environment will affect Alaska more than any other state, because of our location. … I’m not one, though, who would attribute it to being man-made.”

And again, here:

In an interview with a Fairbanks newspaper within the last year, Palin said: “I’m not an Al Gore, doom-and-gloom environmentalist blaming the changes in our climate on human activity.”

Clearly the GOP memo hadn’t made it all the way up to Alaska on this. Even President George W. Bush has given up questioning the science on this one. Though, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency is doing everything he can to drag his feet on the issue.