Tag: Planned Parenthood

“A political hit job – or what is this?”

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

Of course, since what follows comes to us via Fox News, a segment of Garvan Hill readers may say, “They would say that, wouldn’t they?” Does that mean it shouldn’t be listened to? No. A true liberal will rejoice in the very existence of Fox News – even though they may disagree with everything they hear and see on it. What a dire totalitarian media world America would have without it. If you want to know what it is like to live in that kind of world, come to Ireland.

Courtesy of the pro-life website LifeSite News’ feature, The Pulse, we have this report:

January 28, 2016 (NewsBusters) — Reacting to the news that the filmmakers related to the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) would be indicted on criminal charges in the Planned Parenthood baby parts scandal, Monday’s Kelly File concluded with host Megyn Kelly and senior judicial analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano excoriating the liberal Harris County, TX prosecutor for enacting “a political hit job” on the pro-life figures that exposed the massive scandal.

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Megyn Kelly

Kelly began with a summary of what transpired late Monday and Napolitano first commented that what people should take away from the development was simply “that a political prosecutor has injected herself in a very serious issue about whether or not Planned Parenthood was profiting from the abortion of babies by selling body parts.”

After explaining how the investigation was originally called for by pro-life Republican Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, the Harris County prosecutor was supposed “to investigate whether or not these tapes were real” and “[w]as Planned Parenthood really offering to sell body parts and did they, in fact, reference parts they sold the body parts?”

While he maintained that those who watch any of the CMP videos are free to make their own conclusions: 

I submit that if you watch them, you will conclude that they did sell parts and were willing to sell them in the future. So the prosecutor investigates this and she decides to present a case to a grand jury. We haven’t see the grand jury transcript yet but we will. Not charging Planned Parenthood with selling body parts but charging the journalists who were testing Planned Parenthood with participating in an actual conspiracy to sell body parts. 

The FNC analyst added that the indictment made little sense to him since the charges brought are “crimes of intent” and “[y]ou have to intend to commit this crime.”

Kelly wondered if it “sound[ed] like a political hit job” and Napolitano shot back: 

Absolutely this is a political hit job. You used to practice law. I used to be on the bench. We both know a skilled prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict anything. The favorite phrase is you can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich if you want. There’s no judge. There’s nobody there on the other side. We won’t know what this prosecutor told the grand jury unless and until there’s an actual criminal trial. 

The transcript of the segment from FNC’s The Kelly File on January 25 can be found below.

FNC’s The Kelly File
January 25, 2016
9:53 p.m. Eastern

MEYGN KELLY: Developing tonight, a Texas grand jury bringing criminal charges recommending them against the filmmaker who shot a series of hidden camera videos targeting Planned Parenthood. David Daleiden — that’s a name I can never pronounce that — the founder of the Ceeter for Medical Progress was indicted on charges of tampering with a government record and purchase and sale of human organs, he was the undercover guy making the videos. Another colleague of his was also charged, Planned Parenthood was not charged. Joining me now, Fox News senior judicial analyst, Judge Andrew Napolitano. Judge, what does this mean? 

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: This means that a political prosecutor has injected herself in very serious issue about whether or not Planned Parenthood was profiting from the abortion of babies by selling body parts. Here’s the back story. The lieutenant governor, the new lieutenant governor of Texas, Dan Patrick is a very, very serious pro-life advocate, was before he was lieutenant governor, is now. He asked this prosecutor to investigate whether or not these tapes were real. Was Planned Parenthood really offering to sell body parts and did they, in fact, reference parts they sold the body parts?

KELLY: Which they deny. 

NAPOLITANO: Which they deny and anybody that watches the tapes can come to their own conclusion. I submit that if you watch them, you will conclude that they did sell parts and were willing to sell them in the future. So the prosecutor investigates this and she decides to present a case to a grand jury. We haven’t see the grand jury transcript yet but we will. Not charging Planned Parenthood with selling body parts but charging the journalists who were testing Planned Parenthood with participating in an actual conspiracy to sell body parts. 

KELLY: Meanwhile, they didn’t actually want to buy any body parts at all. It was a sting.

NAPOLITANO: No, of course not and these are what we call crimes of intent. You have to intend to commit this crime. You can’t just utter the words, so if a journalist says to Planned Parenthood, are interested in selling body parts? That journalist now has to worry about being indicted for suggesting a crime. 

KELLY: So, does this sound like a political hit job or what is this. 

NAPOLITANO: Absolutely this is a political hit job. You used to practice law. I used to be on the bench. We both know a skilled prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict anything. The favorite phrase is you can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich if you want. There’s no judge. There’s nobody there on the other side. We won’t know what this prosecutor told the grand jury unless and until there’s an actual criminal trial. 

KELLY: This is fascinating. Looking forward to getting a look at this complaint. Judge, great to see you.

Reprinted with permission from News Busters.

 

Winners and losers in American justice system

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters2 Comments
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Indicted: David R. Daleiden

A grand jury in Houston, Texas, that was investigating accusations against Planned Parenthood related to the sale of human organs and body parts of aborted babies has instead indicted two abortion opponents who made undercover videos of the organization.

All this sounds ominously reminiscent of the legal system which America and the world have been watching in operation over he past two months in Netflix’s Making a Murderer. As nearly everyone in the world now knows, Steven Avery spent 18 years in jail fro a crime he did not commit. Then, when he tried to get compensation for this miscarriage of justice from those responsible he found himself charged and convicted for murder by the same agencies which put him away in the first case.

The haunting thought at the back of the mind of anyone with a sense of justice and respect for due process who watched that series was “If it happened in Wisconsin, why would we think that it might not happen elsewhere.”

Well, maybe here it is again. David R. Daleiden will need a very good lawyer the escape the clutches of this system about which Bob Dylan sang over 40 years ago in outrage about what he saw as the fitted-out conviction of the boxer, Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter.

Couldn’t help but make me feel ashamed to live in a land
Where justice is a game.

The New York Times reports on the indictment today:

Prosecutors in Harris County said one of the leaders of the Center for Medical Progress — an anti-abortion group that made secretly recorded videos purporting to show Planned Parenthood officials trying to illegally profit from the sale of fetal tissue — had been indicted on a charge of tampering with a governmental record, a felony, and on a misdemeanor charge related to purchasing human organs.

That leader, David R. Daleiden, 27, the director of the center, had posed as a biotechnology representative to infiltrate Planned Parenthood affiliates and surreptitiously record his efforts to procure tissue for research. Another center employee, Sandra S. Merritt, 62, was indicted on a felony charge of tampering with a governmental record.

The record-tampering charges accused Mr. Daleiden and Ms. Merritt of making and presenting fake California driver’s licenses, with the intent to defraud, for their April meeting at Planned Parenthood in Houston.

Abortion opponents claimed that the videos, which were released starting in July, revealed that Planned Parenthood was engaged in the illegal sale of body parts — a charge that the organization has denied and that has not been supported in numerous congressional and state investigations triggered by the release of the videos.

The district attorney, Ms. Devon Anderson, said in a statement yesterday that grand jurors had cleared Planned Parenthood of any wrongdoing. She declined to provide details about the case against Mr. Daleiden and Ms. Merritt, including any documents or evidence presented to the grand jury, citing state law on the secrecy of grand jury proceedings.

“As I stated at the outset of this investigation, we must go where the evidence leads us,” Ms. Anderson said. Which is more or less exactly what the prosecutors in the case of Steven Avery said in Making a Murderer.

But, no more than Steven Avery did, Mr. Daleiden is not taking this lying down. He issued a statement on Monday night, pointing out that the organization which exposed the practices of Planned Parenthood, the Center for Medical Progress, “uses the same undercover techniques that investigative journalists have used for decades in exercising our First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and of the press, and follows all applicable laws. We respect the processes of the Harris County district attorney, and note that buying fetal tissue requires a seller as well. Planned Parenthood still cannot deny the admissions from their leadership about fetal organ sales captured on video for all the world to see.”

Nor are the pro-life politicians and officials of the State of Texas wilting either. The Times report tells us that Republican Gov. Greg Abbott said on Monday that the inspector general of the state’s Health and Human Services Commission and the Texas attorney general’s office will continue investigating Planned Parenthood’s actions.

“Nothing about today’s announcement in Harris County impacts the state’s ongoing investigation,” Mr. Abbott said in a statement. “The State of Texas will continue to protect life, and I will continue to support legislation prohibiting the sale or transfer of fetal tissue.”

The state attorney general, Ken Paxton, said in a statement: “The fact remains that the videos exposed the horrific nature of abortion and the shameful disregard for human life of the abortion industry. The state’s investigation of Planned Parenthood is ongoing.”

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, in a statement on Monday, played down the significance of the indictment, saying the recent anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision was “a solid reminder of the over 50 million innocent lives that have been lost to abortions.”
He added, “I will never be deterred from standing up to fight to protect the unborn.”

For the pro-life activists in America and further afield the situation will to some extent be viewed as a win-win scenario. The aberration of selling the body parts of human beings killed in their mothers wombs in a manner confessed here will be in the public eye even more than it has been. The American justice system will also remain in the spotlight as will anyone who tries to play it like a game, fast and loose.

The ranking of evil

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

Dr. Mary Gatter, council president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s Medical Directors – in the business of trading body parts

Here’s a simple exercise in basic reasoning. On a spectrum of bad things to do, theft is bad, assault is worse and murder is worst. There’s a similar texture of ill will connecting all three crimes, but only a very confused conscience would equate thieving and homicide. Both are serious matters. But there is no equivalence. The deliberate killing of innocent life is a uniquely wicked act. No amount of contextualizing or deflecting our attention to other issues can obscure that.

These are the words of Archbishop Charles Chaput in his diocesan website this week. They are help-ful, very helpful. With a bit of luck they will help clear the muddled minds of those who see something evil but fail to recognise it as such because a politically correct world’s group think has clouded their vision.

Archbishop Chaput is asking Catholics to reaffirm their commitment to their Church’s social teaching, “a seamless garment of respect for human life, from conception to natural death”. It makes no sense, he says, to champion the cause of unborn children if we ignore their basic needs once they’re born. Thus it’s no surprise that – year in and year out – nearly all Catholic dioceses in the United States… devote far more time, personnel and material resources to providing social services to the poor and education to young people than to opposing abortion.

But that does not mean that objectively and on the scale of personal wilfulness there is not a ranking of evil which every person has to attend to. “Children need to survive the womb before they can have needs like food, shelter, immigration counselling and good health care. Humanity’s priority right – the one that undergirds all other rights – is the right to life.” He quotes the American bishops of 1998:

“Opposition to abortion and euthanasia does not excuse indifference to those who suffer from poverty, violence and injustice. Any politics of human life must work to resist the violence of war and the scandal of capital punishment. Any politics of human dignity must seriously address issues of racism, poverty, hunger, employment, education, housing, and health care . . . But being ‘right’ in such matters can never excuse a wrong choice regarding direct attacks on innocent human life.

“Indeed, the failure to protect and defend life in its most vulnerable stages renders suspect any claims to the ‘rightness’ of positions in other matters affecting the poorest and least powerful of the human community. If we understand the human person as the ‘temple of the Holy Spirit’ — the living house of God — then these latter issues fall logically into place as the crossbeams and walls of that house.

“All direct attacks on innocent human life, such as abortion and euthanasia, strike at the house’s foundation. These directly and immediately violate the human person’s most fundamental right — the right to life. Neglect of these issues is the equivalent of building our house on sand.”

Chaput attacks the double-thing of those who say that abortion is mainly a cultural and moral issue, and politics is a poor solution to the problem. He finds it curious that some of the same voices that argue against political action on the abortion issue seem quite comfortable urging vigorous political engagement on issues like health care, homelessness and the environment. He defines politics in practice, as the application of moral conviction to public discourse and the process of lawmaking.

“Law not only constrains and defends; it also teaches and forms. Law not only reflects culture; it shapes and reshapes it. That’s why Christians can’t avoid political engagement. Politics is never the main content of Christian faith. It can never provide perfect solutions. But no Christian can avoid the duty to work for more justice and charity in our life as a nation, a task that inescapably involves politics. Thus the recent Senate vote to defund Planned Parenthood was not only right and timely, but necessary. And the failure of that measure involves a public failure of character by every Catholic senator who voted against it.”

He closes with a word of thanks to Ruben Navarette, Jr. Navarette is a veteran “pro-choice” voice, but in his August 10 column at the Daily Beast he expresses his revulsion at the whole, ugly, system-wide barbarism of Planned Parenthood’s fetal trafficking. Chaput thinks his column’s best lines come in quoting his prolife wife:

Those are babies that are being killed. Millions of them. And you need to use your voice to protect them. That’s what a man does. He protects children – his own children, and other children. That’s what it means to be a man.

Here is the latest video released by the Center For Medical Progress after after its 3-year investigation into Planned Parenthood:

The moment when the wheels come off the tumbril?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

As the horror of the Planned Parenthood’s exposure in the USA gathers momentum we wonder if this might not be the Harriet Beecher Stowe / Frederick Douglass moment which will lead to the end of the mass killing of human beings which our civilization has not only condoned but has also massively funded for the past few generations.

The wheels seem to be well and truly coming  the tumbrils of this reign of chilling slaughter. This is nowhere more evident than in the total lack of moral coherence – not to mention logical coherence – in the scramble to defend this extraordinarily  callous organisation by its liberal camp followers in recent weeks. “Care no matter what” is the organizations mantra. We now know that a great deal of things matter to Planned Parenthood, and that they have nothing to do with care for anyone. It’s big business.

In his superb post in the New York Times over the past few days Ross Douthat does not mince his words in calling them to order, even shaming them for their little better than infantile efforts to defend the indefensible.

He concludes with these words:

So let’s be clear about what’s really going on here. It is not the pro-life movement that’s forced Planned Parenthood to unite actual family planning and mass feticide under one institutional umbrella. It is not the Catholic Church or the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles or the Southern Baptist Convention or the Republican Party that have bundled pap smears and pregnancy tests and HPV vaccines with the kind of grisly business being conducted on those videos. This is Planned Parenthood’s choice; it is liberalism’s choice; it is the respectable center-left of Dana Milbank and Ruth Marcus and Will Saletan that’s telling pro-life and pro-choice Americans alike that contraceptive access and fetal dismemberment are just a package deal, that if you want to fund an institution that makes contraception widely available then you just have to live with those “it’s another boy!” fetal corpses in said institution’s freezer, that’s just the price of women’s health care and contraceptive access, and who are you to complain about paying it, since after all the abortion arm of Planned Parenthood is actually pretty profitable and doesn’t need your tax dollars?

This is a frankly terrible argument, rooted in a form of self-deception that would be recognized as such in any other context. Tell me anything but this, liberals: Tell me that you aren’t just pro-choice but pro-abortion, tell me that abortion is morally necessary and praiseworthy, tell me that it’s as morally neutral as snuffing out a rabbit, tell me that a fetus is just a clump of cells and that pro-lifers are all unhinged zealots. Those arguments, as much as I disagree with them, have a real consistency, a moral logic that actually makes sense and actually justifies the continued funding of Planned Parenthood.

But to concede that pro-lifers might be somewhat right to be troubled by abortion, to shudder along with us just a little bit at the crushing of the unborn human body, and then turn around and still demand the funding of an institution that actually does the quease-inducing killing on the grounds that what’s being funded will help stop that organization from having to crush quite so often, kill quite so prolifically – no, spare me. Spare me. Tell the allegedly “pro-life” institution you support to set down the forceps, put away the vacuum, and then we’ll talk about what kind of family planning programs deserve funding. But don’t bring your worldview’s bloody hands to me and demand my dollars to pay for soap enough to maybe wash a few flecks off.

Read the full column here.

Unfounded or well-founded suspicions about the latest pro-abortion narrative?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters4 Comments

Would we be unfairly or unreasonably suspicious – given what we know about the ethical universe inhabited by the Irish Family Planning Association, and its parent organisation, International Planned Parenthood – to surmise the following as part of the scenario for the latest human tragedy emanating from the battle over abortion in that country.

Would it be fair to suspect that we are not been given the full story – even given the restrictions on reporting for legal reasons – in Ireland’s ultra pro-abortion media?

The mainstream media tells us that concerns for the psychological welfare of the young woman at the centre of the tragedy were brought to the HSE at the end of May. By that time she was 16 weeks pregnant. She maintains that she was pregnant as a result of rape before she came to the country and first asked for an abortion when she was eight weeks and four days pregnant, at the beginning of April. She was referred to the Irish Family Planning Association (IFPA) for counselling.

When told that the cost of travelling for an abortion could be as high as €1,500 at an IFPA counselling session in late May, she said she would rather die than continue with the pregnancy. She was then referred to the HSE.

She says she was suicidal after she was refused a termination under Ireland’s new abortion legislation. She told a reporter that she attempted to take her own life but was interrupted when she was making the attempt.

This begs a lot of questions. What went on in the conversation between the woman and the IFPA in the several weeks prior to her presentation to the HSE? What was the advice given by the IFPA? The IFPA is an organisation whose main activity is to organise facilities for people to prevent birth – either by providing contraceptive services or to facilitate abortion. The latter task has until now been mainly concerned with giving advice on how to procure abortions in Britain. Ireland’s new legislation has now opened the door to them to advise on procuring abortion within the country’s borders. But what advice can they give – under the terms of this legislation? The legislation allows for an abortion up to term for a woman whose live is at risk from suicide. Therefore the “best” advice that the IFPA could give to a woman looking for an abortion is to feign suicidal thoughts – and even better, to feign an attempt at suicide.

If this was the advice of the IFPA, happily it did not work in this case. Because the legislation is muddled the medical people involved could not agree and the woman’s child was delivered by Caesarean section earlier this month, at 25 weeks gestation. If this was not the advice given by the IPFA they can allay our suspicions by publishing a transcript of the conversations in question.

These are horrible thoughts – but we live in horrible times. This is not evidence. It is a strong suspicion about what went on in those conversations over those weeks between people who have no scruples about taking the life of an unborn child. It is founded, reasonably, on a perception of the cultural and ethical norms which are clearly dominant in the universe of a segment of the dramatis personae of this tragedy.

Investigative videos from pro-life organization Live Action show Planned Parenthood facilities in Denver, Colorado offer evidence of disturbing and dangerous advice given to what staffers think are underage girls.

The counsellors lay out in graphic detail a spectrum of sadistic sexual behaviours to the investigators, including “whipping,” “tying up,” and “asphyxiation.”

An example of the kind of thing all this can lead to is the police discovery, in January last, of 16-year-old Jessica Burlew with the corpse of 43-year-old Jason Ash, whom Burlew had strangled to death and mutilated with razor blades in the midst of “a sex game.” More of this organisation’s nefarious activities can be seen here.

Planned Parenthood is an organisation which regularly get plaudits from the current leader of the Western World, Barak Obama. The IFPA occupies the same space. There is no deception, no hypocrisy – their self-proclaimed cause is “women’s health” when in fact the end result of their work is women’s enslavement – to which they will not stoop. Wake-up, world.

The fifth horseman of the apocalypse

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

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Mark Ruffalo

If these ‘Top Stories’ on LifeNews.com don’t tell us that our civilization is deep in the mire of the culture of death, what do they tell us? It is hard not to think that we are in the age of an apocalypse. The barefaced aggressiveness of the advocates of this slaughter is increasing by the hour. What is it going to take to bring mankind to its senses?

Top Stories
• Actor Mark Ruffalo Proud of His Mother for Aborting His Sibling
• Neighbor Tells Mom: Kill Your Autistic Teen Because He’s Annoying Me
• Police: Letter Asking Mom to Kill Her Autistic Son Not a Hate Crime
• $1 Million in Obamacare Funding to Planned Parenthood Just the Beginning.

But, thankfully there are other voices. Today’s Irish Independent reports one of them: Daniel Day Lewis speaking movingly about his latest project. No, not a film project this time.

Day Lewis (56), who won his third Oscar for historical drama ‘Lincoln’, told the Irish Independent: “There are many ways of measuring the evolution of a society but one of them is the way we treat the most vulnerable in a community.

“Newborns, children, the sick, the disabled, the dying…  if we do not make them a priority we have not right to respect ourselves as a society.

“As much as it is personal for us to have these facilities in Wicklow it is also important for us to be doing things of value in this country when we are so often led to believe that the doldrum will finish us all off.”

The most lethal euphemism of all?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

Is this the most lethal euphemism of all? We have had ethnic “cleansing”, a clinical-sounding term for numerous and variously bloody instances of forced migration. We have had “cultural revolution” for mindless communist barbarities. We have even the benign-sounding term “re-education” veiling the gulags of soviet Russia. There was, of course – until now – the daddy of them all: the “final solution” covering the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jewish people.

But how about “planned parenthood”? We are fast reaching a stage where that very term, suggesting an acute sense of responsibility and connected with the most elemental and sublime of all human experiences, must send a shiver through us. But despite the horrendous evidence from the Gosnell trial in Philadephia, illustrating just the tip of the iceberg of human depravity which the abortion industry represents, and industry which is itself the very flagship of Planned Parenthood, we have the leader of the “free” world championing this “cause”.

This industrial health-service complex – which has nothing to do with health and less to do with service –  has accounted for the deaths of millions and millions of human beings, children and women, across the world in the past 50 years. You can take any approach to statistics you like and the figures will still come out showing that this is the single greatest human disaster that the world has ever seen. Don’t get distracted by the statistics but just for the record, one source cites

approximately 42 million abortions occurring every year worldwide. The same source calculates that abortion killed 73 times more Americans than died in battle in their last 12 wars combined.

There seems to be little doubt that the local Planned Parenthood group had been aware of complaints about what Dr. Gosnell was up to but did not intervene. The Philadelphia Daily News quoted the local group’s leader as saying that women had complained to the group about conditions at Dr. Gosnell’s clinic, and that the group would encourage them to report their complaints to the health department. That’s responsibility?

In the context of Obama’s shameless support for Planned Parenthood, show most recently by his going out of his way to celebrate with them last week, Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of the Susan B. Anthony List, an antiabortion group said: “President Obama blatantly ignored this inconvenient truth about the abortion industry’s horrific lack of oversight and disparaged the pro-life advocates who wake up each morning with the goal of saving the lives of unborn children and women from the pain of abortion,” said.

Mr. Obama at the dinner last week ignored the Gosnell case but condemned lawmakers who have targeted Planned Parenthood. “When politicians try to turn Planned Parenthood into a punching bag, they’re not just talking about you, they’re talking about the millions of women who you serve,” he told the group’s gathering, at a Washington hotel. “And when they talk about cutting off your funding, let’s be clear they’re talking about telling many of those women you’re on your own.”

He pledged his loyalty to the group. “You’ve also got a president,” he said, “who’s going to be right here with you fighting every step of the way.” Now they are chilling words.

Matt Barber in his TownHall.com column pulls no punches when he confronts these horrors.

 I mean, why are we surprised that an abortionist and his staff would, behind the walls of an always-lethal abortion clinic, commit one of the most horrific serial killings in American history? What did you think abortionists do, heal people?

 Why are we taken aback that there was no oversight, no regulation, or that Planned Parenthood, though privy to the clinic’s filthy, medieval conditions, refused to report it to the Department of Health? After all, Planned Parenthood, Barack Obama and the DNC have vehemently opposed all laws – such as those in Virginia, Mississippi and elsewhere – designed to prevent exactly the same kind of squalid conditions found in Gosnell’s clinic (and others), laws that simply direct abortion mills to meet the same minimal safety standards required of all other medical facilities.

 You didn’t really buy that whole “women’s health” nonsense, did you?

 We live in bewildering times. The President of the United States won his second term by a slender enough margin of the popular vote. But he is not just the President of the United States. He is the most powerful man in the world and for the old West he is effectively the unelected primus inter not-so-pares. As we were reminded during his last election campaign, had the peoples of Europe had a vote in  that election he would have won by a landslide.  Frightening.