Couldn’t Help But Notice (031708)

I find it more than a little annoying that leading African-American ministers — and this would, from all appearances, include the currently controversial Jeremiah Wright, who has been/was the minister at the church frequently attended by the candidate I refer to as BOOHOO (Barack O-bomba Overseas Hussein “Obambi” Obama) — support, or at least condone, abortion rights.

So it would be interesting to get the Rev. Wright’s reax to this:

Planned Parenthood of Idaho officials apologized Wednesday for what they called an employee’s “serious mistake” in encouraging a donation aimed at aborting black babies.

They also criticized The Advocate, a right-to-life student magazine at the University of California-Los Angeles, for trying to discredit Planned Parenthood employees in seven states in a series of tape-recorded phone calls last summer.

The whining about entrapment rings very hollow.

It would appear that Planned Parenthood has not completely escaped its eugenics-oriented past. Even if it thinks it has, the real-world result of abortion on demand in the US is that a disproportionate number of babies aborted is African-American:

Black women were 4.8 times more likely than non-Hispanic white women to have abortions in 2005, according to a January report by the Guttmacher Institute. African Americans made up 12.3 percent of the United States population, according to the 2000 census, but black women had 36.3 percent of the abortions that same year, the Centers for Disease Control reported.

Based on this reality, no wonder Alveda King, niece of the late civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., says that “Abortion is a racist, genocidal act.”

Where’s the Rev. Wright’s outrage against the white-dominated Planned Parenthood (yes, I know about her; PP is still white-dominated)? Their accomplishment of preventing the birth of roughly 12-15 million African-American babies since Roe v. Wade is something Planned Parenthood Founder Margaret “Negro Project” Sanger could only dream of. In fact, if the Rev. Wright is looking for the “KKK of A,” he should begin his search at Planned Parenthood’s national headquarters.

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This story is not getting the attention it deserves:

….. The government now counts more than 700 reports of serious side effects among Heparin users, and perhaps as many as 21 deaths. A leading American maker, Baxter International Inc., has recalled virtually all of its Heparin products in the United States, and companies in Germany and Japan have recalled their Heparin products.

A major focus of Heparin investigators is why the recalled products contained a contaminant that mimicked the drug’s key ingredient. Investigators are also exploring whether the possible counterfeit was responsible for the bad reactions.

Since the key ingredient came from China, the scare has rekindled fears about the integrity of exports from China and the adequacy of inspections by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, prompting congressional hearings.

“I don’t think the pharmaceutical industry knows what it’s doing in China, and I don’t think the U.S. government knows what it’s doing in China,” said Michael Santoro, a Rutgers University business professor who has written about the drug industry’s business in China.

It so happens that over 20 years ago I was on the annual audit of a small company that, among other things, produced this drug. The FDA was a frequent onsite visitor, as was the company’s principal customer. I find it hard to imagine that accidental or deliberate product imperfections would not have been caught by one of the three parties (company, FDA, or customer) well before any product was shipped to hospitals. So I’m more than a little perturbed that the Chinese-produced product is not acceptable.

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“You Don’t Say” items of the day:

• “Saddam supported at least two al-Qaeda groups: Pentagon” (the primary coverage is at the Weekly Standard; Headline is from Hot Air, whose new arrival “Captain Ed” Morrissey also pitches in) — of course Old Media reported the opposite.
• “Harvard economists’ study: Media’s anti-war rhetoric emboldens Iraqi insurgents” (Coverage is at US News; headline and analysis at Hot Air, to which Captain Ed has brought additional gravitas; original study abstract is here). It was during Vietnam when the Left starting claiming, contrary to thousands of years of human history, that antiwar protests and rhetoric didn’t matter. Of course it did, and still does. If the enemy is emboldened, it increases the dangers for our soldiers, and the likelihood that our soldiers will be injured or die. It is not a stretch to say that the Left, and the Old Media outlets that carry its water, have blood on their hands.