Watch Jason Chaffetz (Smarmy Slimeball, UT) introduce the hearings with Cecile Richards. See PZ Myers (Godless Atheist Biologist, MN) splutter with rage.
He went there. His whole argument is that we don’t spend enough on cancer (1500 deaths per day!), therefore…we should defund Planned Parenthood and make cuts in women’s reproductive health. He’s a lying liar trying to mislead everyone into being as stupid as he is.
I can go one better.
<voice catches; struggles manfully to go on>”I care so much for the health and well-being of the citizens of America. My father died <blinks back tears> of heart disease 22 years ago. 2200 people die each day — each day! — of cardiovascular disease. Yet we spend $5 billion every year on cancer. I would spend even more, maybe ten times more, on heart disease research if we could. But I have to question our priorities if we’re spending so much money on cancer, and these hearings have been called to discuss defunding the National Cancer Institute.”
Does that make any sense to anyone? It’s the same logic Jason Fucking Chaffetz is using.
So when’s the special hearing on defunding research and treatment of impotence in men, because we haven’t cured the common cold yet?
Dear Muslima: Women’s Healthcare Edition.
Fuck Chaffetz. I remember when this nitwit was elected here in Utah (overwhelmingly, of course, because it’s Utah and the districts were extremely gerry-mandered), and now I’ve been stuck in his district after the most recent form of gerrymandering. Oh, the joys of living in a Republican-dominated state . . .
How much does a Congressional hearing cost anyways? There are probably all sorts of researchers who could improve their work with the hundred grand or whatever this crap is going to cost.
If he’s looking for money, has he looked at your defense budget lately?
“Cancer is really terrible and awful and I have lost women close to me to cancer. Therefore, I propose defunding an organization that offers cancer screening to its 3 million yearly patients.” — Jason Chaffetz
A congressional hearing has a couple dozen people in it making on average $50/hour or so each. That adds up to single-digit thousands per hour. Not actually as expensive as I expected! I must be forgetting a big chunk of change somewhere.
tempting: reduce their salary to $1/yr + GDP based Bonds.
producing: redirect funds from what was previously salary into investment in healthcare etc.
backfire: makes graft more lucrative. (looking at Koch Bros)
Just watched that and the one of him repeatedly interrupting Richards and this guy just instantly became my least favorite politician. Woman-hating asshat.
Even if I agreed with his positions I’d be embarrassed by his assholishness.
If you have to ask, you can’t afford a Congresscritter.
Don’t forget to account for the support staff. Security, AV/IT, Janitorial, etc. come to mind. I’m sure there are others.
OTH, they would all be getting paid regardless of there being a hearing going on or not (including the Congresscritters).
Speaking of AV, wouldn’t it be fun if each person involved that had a mic also had a switch that would turn off all the other mics until they were finished speaking and released control. An electronic “speaking stick”, if you will.
Wow – just look at those crocodile tears flow. As if this woman hating jerk cares one whit about the well being of anyone without a penis (or indeed anyone other than himself). This is about punishing women for having sex in pursuit of a bigoted, religiously motivated agenda. The fact that he is prepared to cynically use the pain, suffering and deaths of cancer victims to advance that agenda just adds an extra layer of evil to the proceedings.
The biggest, most manipulative misogynistic arsehat in the world award (2015) goes to Jason Chaffetz. I would say that I hope that he gets to experience what it is like to be treated as he treats women, but I am not callous enough to wish that fate upon anyone, even him.
Consider that PP is also one of the few organizations that seriously treat STIs, and at least one of those STIs (i.e. HPV) is actually known to cause cancer, and couple others are capable of causing death if left untreated and it becomes even more nonsensical. I’ll bet that before this hearing is over, we’ll get to hear the often disproven, completely ridiculous lie about abortion causing breast cancer, if it hasn’t happened already.
This isn’t about the doctored video at all. The Republicans already knew they wanted to destroy Planned Parenthood, and this is just the pretext for attempting to do so. As an added benefit, it allows them to showboat in front of their constituents as election season starts approaching.
@11 YOB
I recommend a conch instead.
But then Piggy never gets to speak.
So this piece of shit bills himself as someone who is very very fiscally conservative, until it comes to something which affects him personally. Then it’s “help me Gummint, yer my only hope!”
Can’t say I’m surprised.
It’s always been a very Republican state, ever since its accession; I think God told the Mormons to be Republican in the same conclave where he told them to give up polygamy.
I remember he was being touted at the time as one of the rising stars, mostly because he’s not a Grover Norquist supply-sider and is more, uh, “economically populist.” The Tea Partiers that are moderate on economic issues are usually drooling psychopaths on social issues, this seems to be that pattern.
Note well that he may care very much about women’s health, with a few givens, namely:
– HPV and cervical cancer is God’s punishment for hussies
– Breast cancer may or may not be God’s punishment for abortion
– Only unmarried women get abortions or need birth control
– If married women need health care they should get their husband to pay for it
– Telling women where babies come from isn’t a doctor’s job
– Women’s health is solely concerned with breasts and birth, all other considerations are a liberal conspiracy
– Health is mostly about “responsibility” and disease processes are fundamentally caused by immorality and carelessness
We also should not leave the subject of the committee hearing without briefly mentioning one of the committee members, Scott Dejarlais, Republican (and Medical Doctor) of Tennessee, who has voted to defund Planned Parenthood, when he had previously told both his wife and mistress(es) at different times to get abortions. He passed on his chance to ask Richards any questions yesterday.
This man makes me question my values of non-violence.
So disgustingly fake…so fucking evil..and that sick little smile of his that betrays the fact that he absolutely knows what he is doing and he takes pleassure in being a dishonest, lying fuck. I’ll spend the next of my day fantasizing about people queuing to slap his stupid face.
I’d listen to Republicans if they actually had something to say.
BTW Am I the only one who’s feeling a bit funny about the moniker Grand Old Party? It sounds like an undeserved compliment.
NPR collected six audio tapes of the Planned Parenthood hearing.
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/09/29/444528541/6-clips-of-audio-you-should-hear-from-the-planned-parenthood-hearing
Here’s Elijah Cummings tearing it up at the hearing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxIYZuaY8KE&ebc=ANyPxKq19cdJtN6zsei3zh8OPmdhI2V-xpKggIvEuw83-nSaQk51XC5F-jDl0VfBwaQJTi-8GLEq Also, the Young Turks on the hearing … https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdd1HvwfmOc
Jim, I’m guessing that he thinks that cancer screening causes cancer.
“Cancer is really terrible and awful and I have lost women close to me to cancer. Therefore, I propose defunding an organization that offers cancer screening to its 3 million yearly patients.” — Jason Chaffetz
Jack @21: That’s nuts. Only an idiot … oh, wait. You may have something there.
The encouraging thing I see here is that, at least judging by the video I’ve seen of the hearing, Ms. Richards had pretty much turned her tormentors’ talking points into a smoking heap of rubble by the end of the day.
I had my ruptured ovarian cyst caught before it was cancer…by PP …and my breast cancer caught by PP. I’m still dealing with the second, but the first is the more immediately fatal. These fuckers can die in a million fires.
amandajane5
Wishing you the best of luck with your treatment!
Also, anybody who ever claims again that women are too emotional and that you can’t criticise them ‘Cause they’ll cry should be forced to watch all five hours of this…
@amandamjane: Have you had your BRCA mutational status checked yet? Best wishes for your treatment going well and the cancer never recurring!
Jack@21: That’s not an entirely bogus concern. Certain types of screening *cough* mammograms *cough* involve radiation exposure which does increase cancer risk. That’s one of the reasons for the modified guidelines for cancer screenings mentioned in the post about that bogus graph. A bigger concern is the infection risk from biopsies of benign masses that might be found by the screenings. The screening guidelines have to balance the risks from the screenings themselves vs. the risks of missing something malignant.
Ugh, I mean “modified guidelines mentioned in the comments of the thread about the bogus graph.” PZ didn’t actually say anything about that.
In a couple of days this incident will be forgotten. Eventually the hearing will release a finding that pleases the lobbyists who paid for it, and life for America’s hoi-poloi will continue to spiral ever so slightly downward.
Giliell beat me to it. $5 billion for cancer? That’s it? And he’d like to merely quadruple that amount, to a pitiful $20 billion?
That $5 billion is three days worth of the US “defense” budget. $20 billion would be less than two weeks worth. They’re worrying about the budget of planned parenthood versus the $619 billion fucking dollars we spend invading and occupying foreign countries and building death machines?
This is not unlike telling my kids I can’t afford to buy them chewing gum, while simultaneously buying myself a steak dinner at Ruth’s Chris.
@30 [piling on]:
hypocrisy = + pro-war
As in: the prolifers oppose letting women control their bodies and call their doctors “killers” for removing some cells from the woman’s body, while advocating building machines designed specifically to kill many adult humans with each use.
I sense inconsistency.
Shame this kind of person flips out when you do a “what is good for the goose is good for the gander”-type of reasoning.
Can’t fund PP since that would allow them to use privately raised money to use abortions.
That would also mean the U.S. can’t send ‘developmental aid’ money to Israel since that would allow the use of funds normally used for what ever that ‘aid’ money is now used for to build settlements in the occupied territories. And that is one of the few things that the U.S. is not allowing Israel to do.
I wonder how long it would have taken for that argument to be shouted down in outrage.
Could someone please remind this asshole that, as a US Congress member, it’s his fucking job to pull money out of everyone’s pockets and give it to someone else? If there’s not enough being done for cancer research and treatment, he should start by funding it, before publicly scolding others for not doing their share.
The asshole pictured at the top of this thread is now running to replace John Boehner. Representative Jason Chaffetz wants to be the Speaker of the House.
Chaffetz is a mormon from Utah. He is 48 years old and is the current head of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
For months now, other extremists have promoted the deceptive chart that Chaffetz used when questioning Cecile Richards. Now we know where Chaffetz gets his information. Sources he may have read:
National Review Online
The Daily Caller
The Daily Signal
Chaffetz is no stranger to extremism and to misinformation. He voted yea on every attempt to repeal Obamacare. He voted with other Republicans to shut down the government in 2013, and to sue President Obama. In 2013, after 16 days of shutdown, he voted nay on a proposal to end the shutdown. He wants to ban the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases.
This guy is worse than Boehner (hard to believe, I know). We do not want him to be House speaker.
Cross-posted from the Moments of Political Madness thread.
Oh, FFS. Not content with grilling Cecile Richards in a disrespectful manner, and not content with displaying bogus charts, Congress critters have decided to set up a Benghazi-like committee to further investigate Planned Parenthood.
Link