1. It’s Tuesday, August 4, 2015

2. It’s President Obama’s 54th birthday. I guess the Fox GOP debate isn’t today because this is a national day of mourning to those folks.

3. A nice birthday gift for the president would have been acceptance of his common sense proposals to combat climate change. Alas, the ignorant killjoys of the Republican right have other ideas. They’re giving the president a suit, and not the kind you get at Brooks Brothers.

According to The New York Times, they’ve been planning legal action since before the president even began considering what to do. Because to these knuckleheads, it isn’t about solving problems. It’s about making the most of them. 

4. Clearly, the putz making these videos aimed at demonizing Planned Parenthood is determined to increase the number of abortions in this country.

I know, he claims to be an anti-abortion activist.

But that’s just a ruse. He obviously believes abortion is a desirable procedure, because he’s going after the leading organization in reducing the number of terminated pregnancies. Through family planning and education, much of that provided by Planned Parenthood, this country has reduced the number of unintended pregnancies and abortions.

Those programs are so much more effective that telling kids in their hormone-racing years that, nah, hold that thought, you can wait. And if you just can’t, you have to accept the consequences.

So what do you think this guy’s game is? Is he invested in clothes hanger makers, whose business – sadly – will improve as abortions are harder to get for people of limited means? Or is he behind some kind of warped chemistry firm that will make something aimed at helping a woman abort a fetus by drinking it? Or does he represent a country that will be the abortion go-to place for women with the means to get it done?

Whatever it is, he and the self-sanctified creeps on this campaign to vaporize Planned Parenthood are more than happy to see the progress made in reducing abortions turned back. You, as a voter, need to ask them why.

As was proven all those years before Roe v. Wade, women who feel that they must have an abortion will have one. Whether it’s done legally and safely, or in those crude backroom ways that endanger the woman’s life, or by women with the means to pay an otherwise reluctant doctor or fly to some country that allows the procedure.

Stopping Planned Parenthood from the important work it does, keeping women healthy and informing women and men of the choices they have to make their lives happier, is idiocy. So far, the Senate has resisted the nonsense. Sadly, I’m not confident that will continue.