It seems that the conservatives have done another one of the undercover videos that we so love from James O’Keefe. And here we have the same thing with questionable edits. But the main thing is that it shows Deborah Nucatola of Planned Parenthood talking about selling fetal body parts from abortions.

Snopes gives the claim a rating of “undetermined” because they are careful and lack much of a backbone. But the article is pretty damning. To begin with, it notes that even in the full length video, it isn’t clear what Nucatola is talking about. But this should tell you everything you need to know, “Nucatola states a price of ‘$30 to $100’…” For body parts?! No wonder Planned Parenthood is in so much trouble: they clearly aren’t good at business if they are going to sell off body parts at this price.

Planned Parenthood has made clear what’s going on in a statement:

So what’s with the money? Healthcare providers charge for the storage and transportation of the material. That’s why Nucatola said, “It has to do with space issues, are you sending someone there who is doing everything, or is their staff, what exactly are they going to do, is there shipping involved or are you coming to pick it up.” And certainly the people who have produced this undercover “sting” know this. Back in 2003, Planned Parenthood went through the same thing — being accused of selling body parts.

After Planned Parenthood pointed this out, the group (laughably calling itself “Center for Medical Progress”) responded more or less triumphantly. They claimed that the reproductive healthcare group had admitted to this heinous act of selling body parts. This is pretty typical of conservatives. Accuse an enemy of doing something that is completely standard and ethical, and pretend that it is a big deal. And it is: to conservative outlets. The Federalist reported, BLACKOUT: Media Go Dark on Planned Parenthood Organ Trafficking. Yes, if only the mainstream press would credulously repeat every conservative hoax, the world would be so much better! (Note: the mainstream press has on many occasions done exactly that.)

So what is this Center for Medical Progress? Well, it seems to have only been in existence for about two months. It is the brainchild of David Daleiden, an anti-choice activist. And Daleiden is — Wait for it! — a college buddy of James O’Keefe. So it’s the same old thing. Throw a bunch of tape together and hope that you can make the nation far worse off before anyone notices that it was a total scam. Will it work in this case? I don’t know. I thought International Business Times did a good job with the subject, Who Is Deborah Nucatola? 5 Things To Know After Planned Parenthood Director Is Accused Of Selling Baby Body Parts. But I’m a bit concerned about just how seriously The Washington Post took it, Undercover Video Shows Planned Parenthood Official Discussing Fetal Organs Used for Research. The fact that anyone is even talking about it is pretty bad. How long will these chicanery artists be given a fair hearing?

H/T: Paul Bibeau is a comedic genius with a bit of a political bent. He is, for example, the guy who brought us the hilarious Ayn Rand and L Ron Hubbard short stories. I don’t go to him for politics, however. But the other day he brought my attention to this, Snopes Thinks That Planned Parenthood Black-Market-Baby-Parts-Story Might Be Bullshit.

I am so done with the Confederate flag. As you all should know, I’ve been complaining about it for years. It is not just because it was retrieved from the dustbin of history for specifically racist reasons. It was the flag of treason. Yet we did not punish the south for this horrible act of treason. We looked forward, but there are certain people in the south who have done nothing but look back. So I’m glad that there is a more concerted effort to get rid of it. But I hadn’t figured that I would be writing about it again — at least not so soon.

But this is just too amazing a story not to pass along. David Edwards over at Raw Story wrote, Man Calls Cops After Mostly Black Town “Hurts” His Feelings by Disrespecting Confederate Flag Parade. The man in question is Chris Oliver. He, his wife Angela, and about 100 other people in Virginia took part in a Confederate flag “parade.” Basically, they outfitted their cars with big Confederate flags and drove around. The problem is that they drove through Petersburg, a majority African American town. And not surprisingly, the people of Petersburg did not appreciate this display of “southern pride.”

According to Oliver, “There was people protesting, throwing bottles, hit my truck, hit numerous other vehicles, people yelling, yelling racial slurs.” His wife noted that they had brought their Confederate flags to Petersburg as a “peaceful ride.” And the result? “People throwing bottles at our vehicles, our property that we worked for.” Apparently, the local police weren’t too keen to help when Oliver went to the police. After all, a few plastic bottles thrown and some unkind words? The Olivers come off as pathetic. But I suspect in their minds, this is just what “those people” are always doing. So it makes sense.

But that’s not the worst of it. Oliver said, “The racial slurs are really what hurt me. You know, it’s uncalled for. There’s no need for that in today’s society.” Yes, can’t we all just get along? I mean, there these people were just minding their own business. Just taking a flag with a long history of racial oppression, and parading it through a town that is overwhelmingly populated with African Americans. What’s the big deal? Haven’t the people of Petersburg heard of a little thing called southern hospitality?

I can only assume that the Olivers are in earnest — that they really don’t see that they’ve done anything offensive. If that’s the case, this is an amazing example of white privilege. If the situation were reversed, certainly they could see it. It really doesn’t matter what the Confederate flag represents to fans of The Dukes of Hazard, to the people of Petersburg, it represents a long history of slavery, lynching, and oppression. But okay, maybe the Olivers didn’t know that when they started their parade. But they certainly should have known it afterward. And they should be ashamed.

Hillary Clinton has announced some of her economic policies, and I have to admit that I find them compelling. I’m sure I will write more about it later. But for now, I want to focus on some of her family friendly policies. Yes, of course, we should make it easier for workers to have families. I’ve always found this very interesting that social conservatives don’t get on the liberal economic bandwagon. Instead, they seem to think that family values are something that only the rich should be able to afford. Similarly, they want to outlaw abortion, while both making access to birth control difficult and then not providing for mothers after the children are born. So great: let’s make work better for young mothers.

But Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig has an even better idea, Liberate Women From Full-Time Work. She noted that it would be good if new mothers were not pushed out of the work place. So Clinton’s ideas are certainly welcome. But maybe we should also create a system where new mothers don’t feel that they have to work. Bruenig pointed out that in the very happy Netherlands, 76% of women work only part-time. In the US, it it is more or less reversed: 80% of prime age women work full-time. And that is not what they would prefer.

I find it constantly amazing that the liberty caucus is not the least bit interested in actual liberty. To them, liberty is something that the government takes away from rich people. If a poor woman works 70 hours a week and has to have her children raised by institutions, well that’s not a lack of liberty. That’s just the laws of economics and there is nothing that can be done about that! Of course, that is nonsense. We are at a curious point in social evolution, where we actually have a lot of choices, but we are denied them because the rich are afraid they might lose a couple of pennies.

The great American lie is that things are pretty much the way they must be. And the only way forward is to take more rights away from workers — to make the whole of civilization more like the law of the jungle. Even if that made sense — and it makes absolutely none — in the jungle, everyone is born more or less equal. No chimpanzee is born owner of a whole section of jungle with a police force and judicial system dedicated to protecting those property rights.

We really need to start thinking differently than we have been in the past. We live in a society in which liberty is not a right of all humans. Liberty is a right inherited from one’s parents. The children of the rich have happy childhoods filled with exposure to all the greatest things that humans have accomplished. The children of the poor have unhappy childhoods filled with standardized testing and inconsistent nutrition. When the children of the rich grow up, they do whatever they want. When the children of the poor grow up, they will be lucky to get a soul crushing job and become technologically unemployable by the time they reach 50.

I’m for doing anything that will help. Clinton’s proposals are mostly great. But Bruenig is right: we can do a lot more. The least we can ethically do is make sure that all children have happy childhoods filled with exposure to all the greatest things that humans have accomplished. Doing quite a lot less than that would be to allow mothers to actually raise their children. And the least we could possible do is what we are doing: nothing. Because: liberty!

I recently had a conversation with my father. Or rather, I was driving my father somewhere and for no apparent reason, he mentioned that a lot of people just live on welfare their whole lives. I brushed it aside, saying that wasn’t true. But he pushed it, no doubt thinking that it was just my liberal way to think that everyone is basically good. He really should know better than to push a political point with me. It would be one thing if it caused me to yell at him. But it’s much worse than that: I use it as an excuse to educate him.

I explained that there was this president named William Jefferson Clinton. And he ended “welfare as we know it.” And as a result, there are great limits on how long any person in the country can get welfare — just a few years. So the idea of some guy getting on welfare out of high school and riding it out for the rest of his life is just not true. It might have been true in the 1970s, but it hasn’t been true for about two decades. The whole thing made me really angry, but I didn’t let it show.

Here’s why it made me so angry: no conservative change in policy ever matters. Clinton savaged welfare in this country. In so doing, he made us a much worse and un-humane country. He made us a far more conservative country. I don’t like any of that. But okay: he did it and America doesn’t seem to care. But conservatives never change. Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act on 22 August 1996. But conservatives made the same complaints in the decades before that as they have after that. But I’m not so much mad at people like my father as I am people like Bill Clinton. Because he really should have known it would turn out like this.

But after I got done with my lecture, I felt a bit bad about it. Even with all the facts on my side, I could tell that he wasn’t buying it. Like conservatives everywhere, he just “knew” what the truth was. This is because for the conservative, the fantasies created inside their minds (think: welfare queen) are far more vivid than anything in the real world. And it isn’t surprising. Most conservatives have no real experience with people on welfare. It’s always easy to vilify people who you don’t know.

One thing I admitted to not knowing much about was disability. My father took this as explaining it all. Obviously, all those lazy welfare recipients have just transferred over to disability! Note to self: never admit ignorance to a conservative because they will assume if something isn’t known, it must prove what they “know.” But Paul Krugman provided some great data on this issue in an article over the weekend, Jeb and the Nation of Takers. It turns out that the number of people on disability are increasing. But there are two reasons for that. First, our population is increasing. Second, our population is aging. The older a worker is, the more likely she is to be disabled. That hasn’t changed. So if you take both of those factors into account, what you find is that the number of people on disability has actually been falling modestly over the last two decades.

But I’m not planning to run to my father with this information. Krugman was exactly right, “But none of this will, of course, make any dent in the right-wing narrative: they just know that the rising number of bums on welfare is a problem, even though there basically isn’t any welfare and there are no more bums than there ever were.” Anyway, my father is well into his 80s now. And I think he was having a bad day.