[guest post by Dana]

Good news for Carly Fiorina supporters:

Public Policy Polling released a new national poll last week, which has Fiorina tied for sixth place with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX)a nd Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY).

The PPP listed the GOP candidates in the following ranking:

Donald Trump with 19%
Scott Walker with 17%
Jeb Bush with 12%
Dr. Ben Carson and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) with 10%
Mike Huckabee with 8%
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Carly Fiorina, and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) with 4%
Chris Christie and John Kasich with 3%
Bobby Jindal, Rick Perry, and Rick Santorum with 1%
Jim Gilmore, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and George Pataki with less than 1%

Fiorina is tied for seventh place in a national Economist/YouGov poll conducted July 18th to July 20th:

Donald Trump with 28%
Jeb Bush with 14%
Scott Walker with 13%
Ben Carson with 7%
Rand Paul (R-KY) with 5%
Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) tied with 4%
Chris Christie, Carly Fiorina, and Mike Huckabee with 3%
Lindsey Graham, Rick Perry, John Kasich with 2%
Bobby Jindal and Rick Santorum with 1%
George Pataki with 0%

If Fiorina can keep the momentum going, she’ll have a seat at the debates. Of course she still has to meet the criteria and place in the top 10 candidates based on the ranking from an average of five national polls. But it’s looking good for her right now.

Fiorina has been a tireless campaigner. She gives non-stop interviews and unlike her female rival, she is always available to the press and doesn’t shy away from questioning.

In a debate this weekend with Jess McIntosh of Emily’s List, Fiorina was nothing less than fierce as she eloquently destroyed her:

–Dana

[guest post by Dana]

Ross Douthat is very good:

And the problem these videos create for Planned Parenthood isn’t just a generalized queasiness at surgery and blood.

It’s a very specific disgust, informed by reason and experience — the reasoning that notes that it’s precisely a fetus’s humanity that makes its organs valuable, and the experience of recognizing one’s own children, on the ultrasound monitor and after, as something more than just “products of conception” or tissue for the knife.

That’s why Planned Parenthood’s apologists have fallen back on complaints about “deceptive editing” (though full videos were released in both cases), or else simply asked people to look away. And it’s why many of my colleagues in the press seem uncomfortable reporting on the actual content of the videos.

Because dwelling on that content gets you uncomfortably close to Selzer’s tipping point — that moment when you start pondering the possibility that an institution at the heart of respectable liberal society is dedicated to a practice that deserves to be called barbarism.

That’s a hard thing to accept. It’s part of why so many people hover in the conflicted borderlands of the pro-choice side. They don’t like abortion, they think its critics have a point … but to actively join our side would require passing too comprehensive a judgment on their coalition, their country, their friends, their very selves.

In the chop shop that is Planned Parenthood, Nucatola and Gattner did the unthinkable: they told the truth. And we all heard it. And we all saw it. And we all know it. And that is what Planned Parenthood and the left are so desperate to to undo. As is standard for the left, truth must be suppressed. So we live in a continual state of condemnation that the purest among us are worth more in death than in life, worth more in pieces than in whole.

In the house of humanity, we are watching a frantic effort to sweep away the devastating duo of reason and experience. The collective searing conscience must be stilled. With the promise of more videos to come, we can be assured of more mad scrambling: Cecile Richards will continue to spin and deflect, Democrats will cry foul, the MSM will give them support as they attack the Center for Medical progress, and movie stars and politicians will sanctimoniously demand governmental investigations into this grotesquerie of … editing. This as they studiously ignore the actual content of the videos because they cannot and must not look at truth. It cannot be allowed to touch them because it will cut them deep down beneath the bone. There is no room for reason and experience, let alone price negotiations for body parts. It’s almost as if they know that if they look, really look, they would see what we see. And then they would know. Just like the rest of us…

–Dana

[guest post by Dana]

…the Senate under Republican control is no different from when Democrats were in control.

Sean Davis ‏@seanmdav

All McConnell had to do was allow a vote on taxpayer funding for PP. That’s it. It’s all he had to do. And yet he couldn’t do it. B/c Ex-Im.

But when you have Senate leaders who fill the tree and file cloture to block amendments they don’t like, you don’t really have a Senate.