Supporters of Mississippi’s “personhood” bill have long argued that it would only outlaw abortion, but many critics say that the vague wording of Amendment 26 (which would give fertilized human eggs legal status) would likely outlaw birth control pills. Speaking with NPR’s Diane Rehm yesterday, Personhood spokesperson Walter Hoye stated that if birth control ends the life of a “human being,” it would indeed be impacted by the measure.

When asked if there were any restrictions on birth control included in the amendment, Hoye said “no… well, yes,” but added that some forms of birth control (including the morning-after pill) would be outlawed.

From NPR’s Diane Rehm Show:

Hoye: Any birth control that ends the life of a human being will be impacted by this measure.

Rehm: So that would then include the IUD [intra-uterine device]. What about the birth control pill?

Hoye: If that falls into the same category, yes.

Rehm: So you’re saying that the birth control pill could be considered as taking the life of a human being?

Hoye: I’m saying that once the egg and the oocyte come together and you have that single-celled embryo, at that point you have human life, you’ve got a human being and we’re taking the life of a human being with some forms of birth control and if birth control falls into that category, yes I am.

Hoye, who is the president of the Issues4Life Foundation (a group that has erected anti-abortion billboards aimed specifically at African-Americans) also told Rehm that in vitro fertilization would not be affected by the passage of the bill, despite objections to the contrary.

Later during the show, Suzanne Novak, senior staff attorney for the Center for Reproductive Rights, argued that the passage of Amendment 26 would put women at risk for criminal prosecution if they suffered a miscarriage.

“If a woman, let’s say, has exercised too much, or gotten in a car accident, if her fertilized egg is considered a person and, for any reason, she was at fault, she could be prosecuted for initiating that miscarriage,” she said, citing a recent case in Iowa where a woman fell down a flight of stairs while pregnant, and was arrested and threatened with prosecution following a comment she made to medical personnel that led police to believe she had fallen intentionally.

On Thursday, the House GOP unveiled what Politico referred to as “the most controversial of spending bills” — a $153.4 billion measure that proposes to cut $4 billion in spending from the 2011 budget. House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies Chairman Denny Rehberg (R-Mont.) authored and introduced the bill (PDF), which presents controversial cuts to education, labor and health services, particularly to women’s reproductive-health services: It would eliminate the Title X family-planning program, ban federal funding to Planned Parenthood Federation of America (unless the organization ends its abortion services), redirect teen-pregnancy-prevention programming funds to abstinence-only sex-education programs and ban private insurance companies from covering abortion.

“We believe in protecting a woman’s ability to make personal, private decisions with her doctor, and Speaker [John] Boehner’s budget violates these fundamental American values in several ways,” said NARAL Pro-Choice America President Nancy Keenan in a statement Thursday. “How will taking away women’s freedom and privacy lead to the job creation he promised voters?”

Controversial still is how the spending bill was crafted.

After Rep. Rehberg posted the legislation online, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), who sits on the subcommittee, issued a statement censuring the chairman for posting the draft before public debate and accusing the Republican majority of violating its pledge to follow regular legislative order in dealing with appropriations.

“I am very concerned by reports that the Chairman has no plans to convene a meeting of our subcommittee to consider and mark up this legislation,” DeLauro said. “While this posting of the Chairman’s proposals is interesting, it is by no means an acceptable substitute for public debate and amendment. The Chairman, by himself, is not the subcommittee. … If no House markup is held, this would be the first time in nearly a decade that our subcommittee has failed to report out a bill.”

DeLauro criticized Rehberg’s proposed spending cuts, which she said injects “40 brand new legislative provisions and riders, many of them highly controversial, and most dealing with complicated subjects well outside the expertise of the Appropriations Committees.”

She said that Rehberg’s bill prohibits use of federal funds to implement any part of the Affordable Care Act; nearly eliminates the Corporation for National and Community Services, which administers Americorps and related programs; cuts the nation’s job-training program by 75 percent (but protects reemployment programs for veterans); and prohibits public radio stations from using any federal funds to acquire programming from National Public Radio.

DeLauro warned of potential consequences of defunding Planned Parenthood.

“The main effect would probably be to prohibit Medicaid patients from choosing to receive services such as contraception and cancer screenings from Planned Parenthood clinics,” she said.

DeLauro noted that eliminating family-planning funding would likely impact about 5 million people annually.

“There’s a long tradition of people who don’t like a particular message turning to attack the person delivering the message,” he said on NPR’s Talk of the Nation today. “I view it as an honor, really. The message is an important one and I will continue doing my best delivering it the best I can.”

The man who won both a Nobel Peace Prize and an Oscar for standing up for the environment set off a firestorm of controversy in the conservative blogosphere after he referenced the book “Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming” by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, while speaking at the Aspen Institute on Aug. 4. In his interview with NPR, he duplicated the message he delivered in Aspen, sans the swear words.

Gore said “carbon polluters” are “doing exactly the same thing that the tobacco industry did after the Surgeon General’s report came out” linking smoking to cancer.

“They hired actors and dressed them up as doctors and gave them scripts saying that smoking isn’t harmful,” Gore told NPR. “Some of the same people and same organizations who took money from the tobacco companies to lie about the science of cigarette smoking are now taking money from the large carbon polluters and the oil and gas industry to mislead people about climate science.”

The one-time presidential candidate pointed to the extreme drought that has gripped Texas, flooding in Vermont and other states, millions of people displaced in Pakistan, flooding in Australia, and fires and drought in Russia as evidence that the earth’s changing climate is no joke. “These are the events that scientists have been warning us about,” Gore said. “And now they’re saying if we keep putting all of this global warming pollution up there, these events will become worse and more frequent.”

Acknowledging the vitriol that sometimes surrounds climate change discussions, Gore praised Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman’s “willingness to take big risks in the Republican primary by saying that he believes that the climate scientists are telling the truth. The deniers have accused him of all kinds of things. It’s interesting, you know, 97-98 percent of all the climate scientists in the world are in agreement on this. Every national academy of science in every major country in the world is in agreement. So do you believe them or do you believe the Koch brothers and ExxonMobil and Rush Limbaugh? That’s an easy choice for me. For some evidently it’s not. Eventually reality has its day.”

Gore was on the program to promote The Climate Reality Project, which beginning at 6 p.m. MDT tonight will stream “24 hours of reality” about the earth’s climate crisis and extreme weather. It will be streamed in every time zone, in 13 languages, and feature top scientists and other experts.

Earlier this week, he appeared on The Colbert Report where he also made the case for climate change.

“One of the reasons the economy is in trouble is because we keep going to war in the Middle East in the place where most of the oil is located and we keep borrowing money from China to buy oil from a market dominated by Saudi Arabia and then burn it in ways that destroy the future of the planet,” Gore said. “All of that has got to change. We can put people to work and strengthen the economy by building solar and wind facilities, refurbishing inefficient buildings, and building smart grids and fast trains and putting people to work instead of continuing this addiction to very expensive dirty oil and coal.”

Meanwhile, extreme skier Chris Davenport of Old Snowmass, Olympic snowboarder Gretchen Bleiler of Aspen, and snowboard star Jeremy Jones of Truckee, Calif., were on Capitol Hill today where they made their view clear: “There is no debate. Climate change is already happening and we’re seeing it every day. … In our work, we’ve witnessed first-hand climate impacts on our mountains, from reduced snowpack and melting glaciers to dying alpine forests and shorter winter seasons,” they told Congress.

The Cronkite prize panel of judges selected the Newshour for its “thorough and balanced” coverage of key midterm electoral races. The judges praised PBS newspeople Ifill and Judy Woodruff for “focusing on the issues, talking with real voters and letting the candidates explain themselves.”

“At this point in my career, I’ve worked for newspapers, at a commercial network and now at Public Broadcasting, where like clockwork, we are accused by those on the right and those on the left of bias,” said Ifill. “Too many of these critics don’t actually watch or listen to what we do.” She added that PBS more than earns its pay, partly for seeding the news industry with a baseline of reliable material to work from.

“We are justifiably proud of the work we do and are convinced that even in a drastically shifting media environment there is a hunger for the work we do.

“When I visit college campuses, students tell me ‘I only watch Jon Stewart’ and I tell them: ‘Jon Stewart watches me.’

“Not to worry. Walter Cronkite once told me he watched the PBS Newshour every night, too.

“That’s because journalism, and even faux journalism, can only flourish with a firm foundation.”

The four award winning PBS pieces were produced by Mary Jo Brooks, Terence Burlij, and Sarah Clune.

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Sure, they like a little Rush once in awhile, even a little Glenn, but at the end of the day it’s just not enough. They also want their crop reports, their state legislative coverage and, yes, their CarTalk.

Writing in today’s New York Times, Timothy Egan says the conservative attack on NPR is misguided at best and counterproductive at worst.

POCATELLO, Idaho – It gets pretty lonely out here on the lava beds of the Snake River Plain if you’re looking for something other than a right-wing rant for company on the car radio. From Twin Falls to Idaho Falls, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and Glenn Beck rule the airwaves. Beck is on two stations in Pocatello, case you missed one of his conspiracy theories.

The public airwaves that brush over this beautiful piece of high country carry a monopoly of thought — that is, until you pick up the first scratchy sounds of KISU-FM. It’s run by a proud conservative, Jerry Miller, but he serves up something different for Eastern Idaho.

You get a music program called “Potato Head Blues,” maybe some city hall news — up to 30 hours a week of home-grown programming. On top of that, KISU-FM delivers “Morning Edition,” “All Things Considered,” “Car Talk,” “A Prairie Home Companion” and “Fresh Air with Terry Gross” from the stellar lineup of NPR. Late at night, the crisp, authoritative tones of the BBC can be heard in the Idaho Rockies.

It seems illogical that when the Republican Congress took aim at public radio, they were going after an audio lifeline much loved by their own constituents in Red State America.

…

The amount of money at stake in targeting small stations — about $430 million — would have zero effect on the budget deficit, the Congressional Budget Office reported.

By comparison, the state of Idaho got $2.7 billion in taxpayer-funded farm subsidies from 1995 to 2009, according to the excellent data system compiled by the Environmental Working Group. This at a time when crop prices are at near-record highs and big corporate farms are flush.

So why go after such a meager sum for public radio, when it means so much to the least-populated areas of America?

Spite. Ideology. Choose your poison, it’s there. Some conservatives just hate public radio. They think it’s elitist, snooty pants, full of borrrrrrrring civil discussions and, OMG — that 20-minute piece on chanterelle mushrooms! Surely no one in Idaho Falls cares what the BBC World Service has to say about Ivory Coast.

He notes that urban public radio stations would survive without the federal subsidy, but that the rural stations, one of which serves an area the size of Ohio in the heart of Republican Alaska, would be off the air without federal money.

So, the people the attacks on public radio will hurt most are those who tend to vote Republican, while listening to the best radio friend of Red State America — and see nothing inconsistent about it.

In Colorado, Rep. Doug Lamborn has been one of the most vociferous members of Congress in attacking NPR, but the rest of the Republican delegation has followed along. Meanwhile, urbanite Dianne DeGette has said enough is enough and stood squarely with rural conservatives who want a little news and culture in between blasts of bombast.

Reporter Jim Williams made a disclaimer that KUNM receives around $242,000 a year, or 13 percent of its funding, from the federal government through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB).

The House voted to defund the CPB earlier this month. Pearce voted along with the majority, while Reps Martin Heinrich and Ben Ray Luján, both Democrats, voted against the defunding.

“There’s no constitutional authority for our government to be in the radio business,” Pearce said.

Rep. Steve Pearce

Pearce mentioned that advertising could help the programming.

“Much of the programming is highly popular programming and advertisers would love to get in and pay for it, it would be, in my mind, the right way to go,” Pearce said.

Pearce mentioned other examples of areas he feels the government shouldn’t be getting into: health insurance, banking, auto manufacturing.

“At some point, we don’t have a free market at all,” Pearce said.

The total funding for public broadcasting in New Mexico from fiscal year 2009 is available on the CPB website.

Pearce was talking to NPR about cutting spending in the federal government when the discussion turned to the funding of public broadcasting.

“Right now the Senate is just ignoring the problem,” Pearce said, referring to cutting spending. “They’re content to kick this can down the road every two weeks because it ignores the need to cut more significant amounts from the budget.”

Pearce also discussed a plan he has to allow logging in Southeast New Mexico.

“We’ve got the wood in the forest, our forests are burning down. I’m saying that we have false choices in the past 30 years, choices that we have to choose a species over jobs is a false choice. We can keep the spotted owl alive and create a lot of timber jobs at the same time,” Pearce told KUNM.

Pearce’s law would exempt national forest timber cutting from environmental laws.

Todd Schulke, a forest policy analyst at the Center for Biological Diversity said in a statement, “This bill would sweep away decades of environmental protection, including the Endangered Species Act, as well as force the Mexican spotted owl into internment camps that Pearce calls sanctuaries.”

The full transcript of DeGette’s comments:

M. Speaker I rise today to express the voices of the hundreds of people flooding my offices with calls and emails to plead for us to do the right thing and vote down this misguided legislation.

H.R. 1076 would cripple the public radio system in this country that currently provides vital news and information to over 27 million Americans each week.

I would first like to set the record straight – this bill will not save a single taxpayer dollar. Not one. And it will not reduce our federal deficit by one dime. Not one.

My colleague from Colorado and his leadership have tried to portray this bill as a savings to taxpayers – and with all due respect, that is simply untrue.

This bill is no more than a punitive measure reflecting an extreme agenda.

It would devastate 900 public radio stations across the country unfairly targeting smaller stations in rural and regional areas where there are fewer news outlets and where broadband is insufficient.

The bill threatens almost 9,000 jobs in the broadcasting community and, frankly is an unwarranted attack on the content of public radio.

And the ultimate agenda of my Republican colleagues is laid bare when one considers that the Leadership rushed this bill through, ignoring promises to take legislation through regular order, and in short, breaking all their own professed rules to get this legislation to the Floor.

M. Speaker, we’ve now been in session for 11 weeks, and the Republican leadership has not yet introduced a single bill to create jobs.

They’ve instead focused on advancing an extreme agenda that does nothing to get Americans back to work.

And today, rather than coming together to create jobs for the American people and address the fiscal situation squarely before us, we are spending our time debating and voting on a bill that is nothing more than social commentary in action to impugn one of our nation’s most vital news sources.

When we began our session, we all proudly read from the Constitution, and in that process were reminded of our core values as a nation and a government.

One of those values is reflected in the First Amendment which supports the ability of Americans to access news and information through a free press.

Sadly M. Speaker, this bill would ultimately limit vital news coverage millions of Americans so desperately need.

So I urge my colleagues to vote no on this damaging and unwarranted bill.

Lamborn has said his bill would in the end save taxpayers up to $64 million when teamed with an appropriations bill. Although in rallying support for the bill in the past he has harshly criticized NPR as liberal and biased, he has more recently said he is simply looking to cut spending and that NPR would be better off with a new business model that would help it thrive as a free-market product.

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“NPR can survive on its own. It has quality programming and I know that in the free market, should they decide to do that with a new business model, they could survive and even thrive,” Lamborn told CBS. “So let’s let them loose from taxpayer subsidies.”

Lamborn has introduced several bills targeting public broadcasting over the last two years. He has said he’s merely seeking to cut back on spending and he repeated that refrain yesterday to interviewers at CBS and Fox, who questioned whether the bill was just partisan maneuvering and whether it had any chance of moving beyond the Republican-controlled House.

“Do you think it is going to get a vet in the Senate?” asked Fox host Greta Van Susteren.

Two-thirds of the Senate did not face the voters in the last election and they have not seen, I don’t think, the righteous anger of the American people. We in the House all got it. We faced the vote. We came through the other side. They don’t understand this is a serious matter, spending in general. This is one of a bunch of things,” Lamborn said.

“Is this a political vendetta or spending issue?” Van Susteren asked.

“This to me is a spending issue,” said Lamborn.

Although he has been less coy in the past about the fact that he thinks NPR is “a friend and protector of liberal issues and political correctness at the expense of free speech and balanced news reporting,” he expanded on the fiscal discipline motives guiding the bill for CBS, arguing that the American people believe that NPR doesn’t need the funding.

“I can’t predict what the Senate will do. If they want to take ownership of continuing to fund things that have outlived their usefulness, and in this day and age, if they want to keep spending money on things that the American people think do not need the funding if we’re gonna get our spending under control, they can make that choice. I think it’s a mistake and I think voters will remember that, but [senators] have that right.”

Surveys suggest a majority of Americans support federal funding for NPR. Supporters point to the popularity of the network and the vital role it plays in the increasingly partisan advertising-driven corporate media environment.

Critics of Lamborn’s bill point out the fact that the bill cuts nothing from the federal budget. As the bill stands, it won’t save taxpayers a dime. Lamborn concedes that fact but said that it would cut roughly $64 million when teamed with an appropriations bill.

Fans of NPR and Democrats in Congress said that amount of money is crucial to NPR and its rural affiliates but means very little in the enormous federal government’s budget. More meaningful substantial cuts should be made elsewhere, they said.

Lamborn, whose district houses military bases, has repeatedly voted for outsize defense spending. His earmark votes alone over the last three years for defense projects amount to well more than half of the $64 million he says taxpayers would save by defunding NPR. He also voted to spend $485 million last year on the Joint Strike Fighter Alternate Engine program, which the Department of Defense, Pentagon leaders and Presidents Bush and Obama have tried to end as overly expensive and redundant.

ABC News called the engine program a “$3 billion government boondoggle” and government-spending watchdogs have railed against the project as one of the biggest pork projects of the last fifty years. Yet Lamborn told the Colorado Independent he was committed to the project. He said paying for the alternate engine project ramps up competition among Pentagon contractors, ensuring a better product. He said a crusial defense project meant to keep the nation safe can’t be compared to broadcast funding at a time when Americans are saturated in media.

“We have to be serious about making spending decisions,” Lamborn told CBS about the NPR bill. “We have to start somewhere. To reach one and a half trillion dollars, there’s no one program that’s going to do that. It’s going to be a combination of many steps. So we have to take a lot of steps to get to the goal of getting our spending under control.”

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MPR’s Bob Collins put together a handy then-and-now Pawlenty accent comparison tool to let listeners judge for themselves:

The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank noticed the same thing, parsing Pawlenty’s March 7 speech to the Iowa Faith & Freedom Coalition in an editorial:

“This ain’t about easy; this is about rolling up our sleeves and plowing ahead and getting the job done,” he said, pronouncing “getting” as “git-ing.” “We, the people of the United States, will rise up again.” “United” became “yew-nah-ted” and “again” became “a-gin.” Perhaps he thought he was in South Carolina (Pawlenty pronounced it “care-lahna”) as he spoke about the other “kinds (kahns) of things” he’s done.

Video of the portion of Pawlenty’s speech that Milbank cites can be seen below:

The bill passed 228 to 192 down partisan lines. It will very likely fail in the Senate. The White House has already issued a statement opposing the measure.

As has been widely noted in the press, including by the Colorado Independent, Lamborn’s bill saves no tax money. It comes as right-wing media outlets have ramped up a campaign to brand public broadcasting as liberal and biased.

In a statement last year Lamborn described public broadcasting as a “friend and protector of liberal issues and political correctness at the expense of free speech and balanced news reporting.” Lamborn said much the same without a trace of irony in several appearances on Fox News.

Republican Speaker John Boehner today waived House rules that require bills be posted 72 hours in advance to allow for review before they are brought to the floor for a vote. The conservative media attack on NPR has suffered setbacks in the last few days as more evidence emerges that a hidden-video made by James O’Keefe targeting NPR was dubiously edited for effect.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor defended Lamborn’s bill. He also sees NPR as a leftist ideological news outlet.

What [NPR local stations ] are going to be told is: you are not going to be using those taxpayer dollars for programming because we’ve seen how NPR has used that funding and the kind of funding that’s been involved. We are trying to find commonality. Our country is made up of much diversity, with people of a lot of differing opinions. Why should we allow taxpayer dollars to be used to advocate one ideology? Why should we? We shouldn’t. We should insist that our taxpayer dollars are prioritized and the interests of the people of this country are honored. That’s why I urge my colleagues to support this bill, and I yield back.

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