Previous debates have included gaffes, accusations and outright inaccuracies. We’ll be here, along with our colleagues nationwide at the American Independent News Network, to offer context and analysis.

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Though all of the current Republican presidential hopefuls have touted their pro-life stances in recent months, perhaps none have been as vocal as Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum. During an Iowa campaign stop yesterday, Bachmann took a tour of the Informed Choices Medical Clinic, a crisis pregnancy center founded by Pastor Brad Sherman in 2007. Santorum, meanwhile, spoke out against abortion during a brief appearance on Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer.

“We don’t have to settle when it comes to the defense of life. As a mother of five biological children and foster mother to 23, I have always been a strong and consistent supporter of pro-life issues from conception to natural death. The people who work at Informed Choices are true champions in the pro-life effort,” Bachmann said following her tour of Choices. “They prove every day that we don’t have to settle for the status quo and disastrous consequences of Roe v. Wade.”

Crisis pregnancy centers (or CPCS) are often criticized for falsely advertising that they perform medical services. In reality, most CPCs do little more than counsel women against undergoing abortion procedures. CPCs have in the past been found to distribute medically inaccurate information about abortion to women seeking help.

Speaking with Wolf Blitzer on CNN’s Situation Room, former Sen. Santorum said it is his hope that, should abortion be made illegal, there would be criminal penalties for all doctors and nurses involved in such procedures.

“If abortion is against the law … to abort a child and take a human life … then it should have some criminal penalties, of course,” said Santorum. “Laws are in place right now…that if you’re someone who would punch a woman in the stomach who has a child and cause that child to be miscarried, you can be charged with criminal activity. And so we say that you can charge someone with criminal activity and nobody gets offended by that. Why? Because the law protects that child.”

When asked whether the women undergoing abortion procedures should also face criminal charges, Santorum said no: “I see women, in this case, as much more the victim. … It’s penalty enough to go through an abortion and absolutely in no way would I support criminal penalties against the mother.”

Both Bachmann and Santorum took part in National Right to Life’s presidential forum, which took place in Jacksonville in June.

The ad, which is embedded below, mixes tea party rally, campaign and debate footage. Sponsored by Protect Your Health, a group that also operates the Let Him Die? website, the ad’s narrator wants to know: “Will Republican candidates listen to the extremes in their party on health care — or the American people?”

During the CNN/Tea Party Express debate in Florida last week, moderator Wolf Blitzer present a scenario involving a young, uninsured man who contracted a serious illness. Blitzer wanted to know if the man should be left to die if he couldn’t pay his medical bills for an intensive care unit.

U.S. Rep. Ron Paul said the larger community could step in to help with medical expenses. U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann opted to attack recent U.S. health reform instead of answering the question.

The audience, comprised largely of the tea party members as debate sponsors, however, clearly voiced their opinion, verbally and through a show of applause, that the man should be left to die.

Protect Your Care has scheduled the ad to run Thursday through Sunday in the Orlando media market, which coincides with the Thursday night debate sponsored by Fox News and Google. The group also plans to continue to draw support for their cause of protecting Medicare and Social Security in the Sunshine State.

“I was very pleased with this debate and very excited about the validation of the tea party movement,” Palin told Fox’s Greta VanSusten.

“The winner in this really, I believe, was the tea party movement and that validation of what it is that we’ve been talking about for two years now.”

Palin had high praise for former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich, noting that he was the only one to discuss going after government fraud, waste and “crony capitalism.”

“Hopefully what he talked about could help teach his colleagues up their on the stage,” she added, speculating that some of the 2012 candidates “don’t have a real strong record to stand on” when it comes to such discussions.

But “any of them” with their “pro-private sector” beliefs, she said, would be better than the failed policies of the Obama administration.

When it comes to her own potential presidential aspirations, however, Palin continues to be coy.

“I’m not going to let the media tell me or dictate when a drop-dead date should be,” Palin said.

“I still have that same old dopey, same old answer that I’m sure you guys are getting sick of hearing, and that is I’m still thinking about it, praying about it, contemplating, talking to my family. I’m sick of giving the same answer, believe me. I’m anxious to give an answer and get on with life one way or the other. But whichever direction life takes me, I’m going to continue to speak up for we the people and that tea Party movement and the mama grizzlies.”

Her present role, she said, is to keep raising issues that candidates should be talking about while on the stump because she believes those in the campaign are following her lead.

Watch the embedded clip below:

SBA List President Marjorie Dannenfelser went on CNN’s In the Arena on Thursday and said there was “vagueness” when it comes to the abortion-rights positions of Huntsman, as well as Mitt Romney and Herman Cain, who both also refused to sign SBA’s pledge.

“We don’t know what we don’t know,” Dannenfelser said in response to the host’s insistence that all three candidates had stated their commitment to “pro-life” agendas.

Despite his refusal to sign pledges in general, Huntsman was the first presidential hopeful to respond to a presidential “Family 2012″ challenge from the South Carolina Focus on the Family affiliate Palmetto Family Council, saying in a letter that he would make restricting abortion rights a prominent part of his campaign.

GOP presidential hopefuls Rep. Michele Bachmann (Minn.), Newt Gingrich, Rep. Ron Paul (Texas), Tim Pawlenty, Rick Santorum and Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (Mich.) have attached their names to a promise to nominate federal judges that do not “legislate from the bench” as the SBA List puts it; to appoint only “pro-life” cabinet members, particularly those who would head the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Justice and the Department of Health & Human Services; to advance “pro-life” legislation and defund Planned Parenthood; and to sign into federal law the “Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act.”

Asked if the pledge “marginalizes this as a wedge issue when so many people are focused on jobs and the economy,” Dannenfelser responded:

[W]hat this does is to put to rest to the extent that it needs to be where each of the Republican candidates, and any candidate, where they sit in terms of the pro-life position. Once we know — and the voters deserve to know what their position is — then it can be weaved into the context of all the other issues that America is talking about right now. When it is a problem is when there is vagueness.

During the brief interview, Dannenfelser also explained the SBA List’s legislative strategy behind the wording of the pledge, specifically in the insistence that candidates commit to appointing people with anti-abortion rights views to specific cabinet positions:

What anybody who is a pro-life president will do is advance pro-life legislation. Once that legislation is passed and signed into law, an attorney general, who is a team member’s job will be to defend that once it has been enjoined, which almost all of it will surely be enjoined by pro-choice activists and it is an attorney general’s job also to vet judges. And abortion comes as a central subject of conversation in almost every federal judge and Supreme Court judge nomination process, so an attorney general is vital in pursuing the pro-life agenda.

Watch the interview:

Paul raised $3 million in the first three months of 2011, assisted by a moneybomb on Washington’s Birthday that brought in more than $700,000, The Texas Independent previously reported.

As Slate’s David Weigel (a former reporter for our sister publication The Washington Independent) writes:

Paul, who starts the race with the biggest grassroots fundraising network, good poll numbers, and no pundit thinking he can win, veered between protecting his vulnerabilities and screwing with the moderators. He said Israel “didn’t need us telling it what to do,” meant to be a calming line for conservatives who fear his isolationism. He was also so bemused by a question about drug legalization that he ended his answer with a wacky impression of a heroin user. And why shouldn’t he be bemused? As he debated, a one-day moneybomb for his campaign was raising more than $1 million.

Paul had a couple of other reasons to be in a good mood, namely a CNN poll that identified him as the GOP’s best matchup against Pres. Barack Obama (trailing 45 percent to 52 percent), compared to Mike Huckabee being down 8 points to Obama and Romney down 11 points — as well as a Suffolk University poll showing the libertarian congressman from Texas in a three-way tie for second among GOP hopefuls, with Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani and Paul all receiving 8 percent in a survey of New Hampshire GOP primary voters.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney dominated the other 17 names in the survey, being favored by 35 percent of respondents to the Suffolk poll.

Giuliani, Romney and Trump did not participate in the Fox News debate last night; and neither did Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and other potential top GOP contenders.

The absence of those big names compelled Daily Beast columnist Matt Latimer to dub Fox News the biggest loser of the night. “The many, many voters who missed this clash of ‘Governor Tim Pawlenty and the also-rans’ can continue their lives without a care,” writes Latimer, a former speechwriter for Pres. George W. Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Former Minnesota Gov. Pawlenty was the biggest target among the field of candidates at the debate, which also included Paul, pizza magnate Herman Cain, former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson and former Pennsylvania U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum.

“If I’d been there to watch the governor walk onto the stage, I would have screamed at him, Admiral Ackbar-style: “‘It’s a trap!’” Latimer writes.

The Daily Beast‘s columnist Howard Kurtz writes, “Bottom line: Pawlenty took most of the flak but made no major mistake. And even if he had, who’s going to remember this debate a week from now?”

Meanwhile, our sister publication The Colorado Independent reports that Cain was the big winner of the debate, at least according to conservative RedState blogger Erick Erickson.

And the Wall Street Journal reports that Fox News terminated its contracts with Gingrich and Santorum after they started talking publicly about vying for the White House.

Read more about the debate in the Los Angeles Times.

Legal analyst Sunny Hostin noted that bills such as S.B. 1246, introduced by Sen. Jim Norman, R-Tampa, at the behest of one of the state’s largest industrial egg farmers and backed by agri-business organizations such as the Florida Farm Bureau, “probably isn’t constitutional,” based on its implications for rights afforded under the First Amendment.

A central argument offered by proponents of the bills in Florida, Iowa and Minnesota is that these laws are necessary to protect the agriculture industry from whistleblowers who secretly record farming operations and then edit the images together in such a way as to present an inaccurate and oftentimes more gruesome representation of the conditions of animals on factory farms. Hostin insisted that laws already exist to protect farmers from slander or defamation brought about by inappropriately edited video, and that “the premise[s] of these bills are really disingenuous.”

“There’s a lack of transparency here with this bill,” Hostin said.  “They’re saying even if what is being filmed is accurate, it would be illegal to do that. That is troubling.”

Norman’s bill was originally introduced with language that would have made undercover farm photography a first-degree felony, but that penalty was amended to a first-degree misdemeanor by the Senate Agriculture Committee last month. The bill is now awaiting review by the Criminal Justice Committee.

Animal advocacy groups such as PETA and the Humane Society of the United States, whose high-profile exposés have resulted in numerous food recalls and animal abuse convictions, argue that such legislation will lead to further abuse in an industry already lacking oversight. Further, they have raised concerns about the wide-ranging implications such a law could have on other seemingly unrelated industries fraught with issues relating to animal safety, such as puppy mills.

“The definition of agriculture in this bill is incredibly overbroad,” says Jennifer Hobgood, state director for the Humane Society of the United States. “So not only is this law unnecessary and overly defensive, it’s incredibly broad. I can’t imagine it would withstand constitutional scrutiny.”

“Puppy mills are another problem where it is extremely difficult to get on these properties,” she says. “Puppy mills are mass commercial dog-breeding operations, where dogs are kept for their entire lives in tiny cages for the sole purpose of churning out puppies for the pet trade. And so, like a factory farm, there are shabby, squalid, overcrowded conditions solely for profit. What happens is the puppies are taken away and sold elsewhere, but the parents are left in these conditions to suffer.

“In many instances, law enforcement can’t get on the property without a search warrant, and it’s difficult to get a search warrant without that evidence. Oftentimes we’ll be contacted by people who have been on the property and snapped a photo with their cell phone camera when the owner wasn’t looking, and that has led to them being able to get law enforcement to get a search warrant and investigate and help those animals.”

Another common argument among the bill’s backers is the notion of protecting agricultural operators from having their trade secrets exposed via undercover photography, a claim Norman himself offered in presenting the bill but was unable to qualify in an interview earlier this month.

“We haven’t heard from the bill’s proponents a single specific example of intellectual property having been put at risk from video or photography on a farm,” Hobgood says. “This bill aims to further hide from the public the industry’s intensive confinement practices and the risks these practices pose to animal welfare, the environment, and public health.”

This was reported in dozens of blogs and online publications as a chink in the tea party armor, an admission from Bachmann that she, despite being one of the more aggressive conservatives in Congress, was willing to scrap amendments like the one defunding Planned Parenthood if it meant averting a government shutdown. Here’s what Bachmann actually said, via a (partial) transcript:

That’s why, today, I voted no on the bill, because we heard from President Obama this morning, he was going to vote no on the Republican bill. Knowing that, I think it’s important that we do what I think 100 percent of Congress should be able to vote for, and that’s ensure full paycheck protection for all of the military.

We need to do that bill alone. That’s just a policy bill, it’s not even a continuing resolution. We should pass that bill and at least take the troops off the table. From there, we can go back and fight about all the other portions of this appropriations, but I think the troops should not be a political football. That should not be a game.

Bachmann, therefore, was saying the opposite of what’s reported: She’s all for upholding the budget impasse so that the policy riders can eventually get pushed through, but she wants an entirely separate bill that would fund only military salaries so that they’re not affected by the shutdown.

Other Republicans, however, have come out and said exactly what Bachmann was inaccurately quoted as saying. On MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Penn.) conceded:

I’d like to defund Planned Parenthood, but I understand that Republicans don’t have complete control of the elected government. I think what we should do is cut spending as much as we can, get the policy changes that we can, but move on, because there are other, bigger battles that we are fighting.

Meanwhile, the staunchly anti-abortion, avowedly conservative Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) said to MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan:

My recommendation to my friends in the House is, you know, it’s highly unlikely that many riders are going to get passed with a Democrat president and a Democrat Senate, so why don’t you take the spending and let’s get on to the budget?

Of course, all budget provisions must originate in the House, so no matter how conservative a given senator is, his or her words have little impact on what will actually happen with the continuing resolution. But as the shutdown looms, senators like Toomey and Coburn will need some allies in the House if the government is to run at full capacity after Friday night.

A spokesperson for Lamar Advertising (the company that owns the billboard) said the company decided to remove the billboard because of “concerns for public safety,” according to CNN.

The spokesperson told CNN that the company did not object to the content of the billboard — featuring a picture of a young African American girl and the message “The most dangerous place for an African American is in the womb.” Rather, the spokesperson said patrons were harassing wait staff at a restaurant in the building to which the billboard was attached, and a protest had been scheduled for today.

A Life Always spokesperson told CNN that more billboards will appear “across the country” in the next couple of months.

In December, Follett told the Texas Independent that he hoped to help groups establish crisis pregnancy resource centers in major urban areas such as Chicago and Washington, D.C. He also said he planned on expanding Heroic to places such as Houston, Connecticut and the Los Angeles area.

The Wall Street Journal reported the advertisement cost $20,000 and was expected to be up for a month, and that Life Always now does not expect to be charged.

Read the Texas Independent for previous reporting on the Follett family’s frozen food fortune and large-scale philanthropy, plus Heroic’s campaigns in Florida and Texas.

Read the Florida Independent for previous reporting on a prominent Florida Republican who said he “does not condone” Follett’s comparison of African American abortions to “genocide,” plus Mike Huckabee’s continuing support of Heroic Media despite criticism from a Democratic Florida congresswoman.

Tea Party Express Chairman Amy Kremer talked to CNN about what activists hope to hear from Republican presidential candidates. “We want to hear what their ideas are – what their thoughts are – on turning this economy back around and getting us on a sound economic footing, paying down some of our deficit, getting a balanced budget, and reining in the spending,” Kremer said.
Kremer added, “We’ve proven ourselves in this last campaign, election cycle of 2010, we’re the only Tea Party group that engaged in election activity. And we got involved because we simply believed that if we’re going to affect change we’re going to do it at the ballot box. And the tea party movement has proven how powerful it is.”

The Tea Party Express was founded by a GOP consultant and is much more focused on electioneering than the Tea Party Patriots, who accuse it of being an astroturf organization.

However, the Tea Party Express wasn’t that successful in 2010. Tea Party Express did make big independent expenditures against Lisa Murkowski and Mike Castle and for Joe Miller and Christine O’Donnell before they upset primaries in Alaska and Delaware. But neither candidate ended up winning. The organization spent over $600,000 on Sharron Angle in Nevada.

Another tea party organization, FreedomWorks, recently held a candidate’s forum for RNC Chair candidates, and all 42 Republicans threatened to filibuster the omnibus bill because of the earmarks that many Republicans included themselves; this debate is one more sign of the central role of tea party groups in the GOP.