World News Service

Former Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline — the only prosecutor in the U.S. who has ever brought charges against Planned Parenthood—is in the midst of a two-week hearing before the state ethics panel in Topeka.

Disciplinary Administrator Stanton Hazlett is looking to remove Kline’s law license, claiming he mishandled evidence against the nation’s largest abortion seller.

“This week’s hearing amounts to the tormenting of a man for doing his job,” columnist Kathryn Jean Lopez wrote at NationalReview.com. “And, God help him, for doing it while daring to believe that … the whole culture of death is a corrosive evil.”

This February marks the birth centennial of Ronald Reagan. As a Reagan biographer, I’m often asked how Reagan was different from his predecessors, Republican and Democrat, and especially in the area of foreign policy. There were many ways, but here are two of the most fundamental:

First, Reagan actually believed he could win the Cold War. He committed himself to that goal early and unequivocally. To cite just one example, Richard V. Allen, his first national security adviser, recalls a discussion in January 1977, four years before the presidency, when Reagan told him flatly: “Dick, my idea of American policy toward the Soviet Union is simple, and some would say simplistic. It is this: We win and they lose.” 

 In this, Reagan stood apart from not only Democrats like Jimmy Carter but Republicans like Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and their chief foreign-policy adviser, Henry Kissinger. 

But there’s another way Reagan was so different from the likes of Nixon and Kissinger in particular. It’s a poignant example involving long-persecuted Soviet Jews. It was recently driven home to me, yet again, when I heard newly released comments by Nixon and Kissinger.

Only after a drug raid in February 2010 revealed horrific conditions at a Philadelphia abortion clinic did the Pennsylvania State Health Department decide to inspect all of the state’s 22 clinics — for the first time in more than 15 years.

Fourteen of the clinics were ordered to fix problems, The Associated Press reported. The most common deficiencies were failures to properly report medical conditions that qualify as “serious events” and not keeping resuscitation equipment readily available, according to records obtained by The AP. Also cited were issues related to checking on patients after their abortions and practices that raised patient confidentiality concerns.

Two bills that were introduced today in the U.S. House of Representatives would keep abortion from being funded by taxpayers or under the health care law.

Reps. Chris Smith, R-N.J., and Dan Lipinski, D-Ill., introduced the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, which would convert several pro-life policies—also known as riders—into law. Under current law, funding for abortion is prohibited through a patchwork of policies that must be approved annually. 

Rep. Joe Pitts, R-Pa., introduced the Protect Life Act, which would resurrect the Stupak amendment and remove abortion funding from the Obama health care law. Both bills would codify conscience protections for health care workers who object to abortion.