From News Hounds -- Mike Huckabee Pimps Lila Rose's Radical Anti-Choice Agenda:
Lila Rose, is a pal of James O'Keefe and darling of the anti-choice movement and its media mouthpiece Fox "News" which was more than happy to provide her bogus Planned Parenthood "sting" videos with supportive coverage. As Rose's videos, which purport to show Planned Parenthood assisting sex traffickers, and their subsequent validation occurred at the time that the radical anti-choice GOP Congress were trying to defund Planned Parenthood (whatever happened to job creation?!) there was clearly an anti-choice agenda on the part of "America's newsroom." It's no secret that Mike Huckabee is part of the radical, anti-choice efforts to recriminalize abortion and birth control. As such, it's no surprise that he would have interviewed Lila Rose whose James O'Keefe type of videos are part and parcel of the attempt to bring back the bad old days of back alley abortions or as the teabaggers would say, "taking back America." And while reality based politicians are concerned about the economy, Huckabee says that abortion is the most important issue. Nice to see that he's using his platform (or is it "pulpit?") at Fox to advance the GOP war on women of which sweet, virginal Lila is a commanding general. And in addition to promoting radical anti-choice memes, Huckabee was able to work in the name of George Soros - along with Planned Parenthood, another nemesis for Fox News.
As they went onto note, here's how Huckabee opened up his show.
HUCKABEE: Well look out Planned Parenthood, because Lila Rose is back. Lila is the twenty two year old president of LiveAction.org. That's the group that shot an undercover video where a couple posing as a pimp and a prostitute talked to a Planned Parenthood staffer about bringing in some underage sex workers for a checkup.
Except of course that's not true. From Media Matters -- Why Is Live Action Doctoring Its Planned Parenthood Audio?:
When the anti-abortion rights propagandists at Live Action began releasing their Planned Parenthood smear videos earlier this week, we explained that their claim that Planned Parenthood was covering-up "child sex trafficking" was clearly a lie.
That's because way back on January 18, Planned Parenthood's president wrote to Attorney General Eric Holder about the incidents and requested an FBI investigation into the possibility that "an individual or individuals are engaged in activities that violate several federal criminal statutes relating to sex trafficking involving minors."
So Planned Parenthood obviously wasn't covering up anything; they were fulfilling their obligation to keep children safe.
We also warned that media should be skeptical about the heavily edited video footage released by Live Action.
As it turns out, we were right to raise concerns.
More there so go read the rest. Now back to Huckabee.
HUCKABEE: Well, that video had Planned Parenthood so up in arms that George Soros actually held a conference call about what he could do to take down Lila Rose and her group.
Actually, no, it didn't.
As News Hounds explained in their article linked above:
The allegation that Soros participated in a conference call to "bring down Planned Parenthood" is a lie based on a conference call, sponsored by Media Matters, between Planned Parenthood and bloggers, about how to counter the anti-choice agitprop videos. The article, sourced by anti-choice blogs including Breitbart's, sources from a "Life News" article which doesn't say that Soros actually participated in the call that discussed investigating Rose's funding. Planned Parenthood head, Cecile Richards, rather than talking about taking Rose down, "told the callers that the strategy to defuse the criticism is essentially to ignore it and focus on rebuilding Planned Parenthood’s reputation as a provider of non-abortion services for women."
And Huckabee continued with his fact-free opening with this statement.
HUCKABEE: This week Live Action is going to release an explosive new video. It was shot in Indiana where a state law has just passed, disqualifying Planned Parenthood from the Medicaid program because it performs abortions.
Which as the News Hounds post also pointed out are still legal in the United States despite the best efforts of Huckabee and his fellow anti-abortion zealots and are only about 3% of the services provided by Planned Parenthood. And as they noted, Huckabee conveniently forgot to mention that there's an injunction on the law right now -- Judge rules state cannot block funding for Planned Parenthood.
Huckabee went on to play the recording of his interview with Lila Rose who Huckabee did his best to paint as just some kid who became an activist all on her own with no mention of the kind of money behind Live Action, which is just right-wing astroturf front group for the usual suspects.
Huckabee also didn't bother to inform his audience about her associations with James O'Keefe and his long history of highly edited videos and ambush "journalism" which is no doubt what we're going to get to look forward to again with the release of this new video of theirs.
