Kirsten Powers Soundly Discusses Developments in Egypt, While Imus Makes Fun of Gaddafi

Everybody says Kirsten Powers’s name wrong—until today, that is. Though he could barely speak, Imus, who was still recovering from last week’s laser surgery on his throat, managed to pronounce her name “Kier-sten,” instead of the incorrect “Kerr-sten.”
 
“My mother appreciates it,” Powers, a Fox News political analyst and columnist for the New York Post, said. The Alaskan-born smarty-pants also informed Imus she cannot beat a fish to death, a la Sarah Palin. “My brother does that part.”
 
The news out of Libya over the last few days has been “horrific,” in Powers’s view, and she pointed out that Twitter has been pretty much the only way to get any information about the uprising in that country.
 
“They’ve been shooting them from the air, from helicopters,” she said, referring to the government’s crackdown on protesters. “There have been mercenaries hunting people down and killing them.”
 
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued a statement yesterday that “the world is watching the situation in Libya with alarm,” and condemning the violence longtime leader Muammar Gaddafi has perpetrated against the people. Though Clinton’s statement has been criticized as weak, Powers noted the U.S. is in a tight spot.
 
“This is very, very different from Egypt,” she said. “We had a close relationship with Mubarak…it’s not like Obama is going to call up Muammar Gaddafi and say, ‘Stop doing it,’ and he’s going to listen.”
 
In an attempt to prove he had not fled the country, Gaddafi appeared on state television last night holding an umbrella, and exiting a car, allegedly in the Libyan capital of Tripoli. Imus, naturally, took away from the stunt an entirely different impression.
 
“He looked like a cross between Michael Jackson’s grandfather, and Mary Poppins,” he said of Gaddafi.
 
Switching gears, Imus asked Powers about the controversy that emerged last week when the House of Representatives voted to de-fund Planned Parenthood on the basis that they perform abortions, even though doing so is only a tiny percentage of their work.
 
“They provide contraception, they do pap smears, they provide services to women who don’t have health insurance,” Powers explained. Despite claims that they don’t put money received from the federal government toward abortions, Planned Parenthood has been accused of doing so anyway. In its defense, the organization has argued that shutting them down would lead to more abortions, because it would difficult for women to obtain contraception.
 
“I’m a little skeptical about that,” Powers, who has been following this issue closely, said. “There have been a lot of different studies that have come out showing that access to contraception isn’t really what causes abortions to go down.”
 
Strangely, a reporter from Rolling Stone magazine asked teenage pop singer Justin Beiber his opinion on the issue, and Bieber said abortion was “like killing a baby,” even though the magazine made it seem like he was asking a question and not making a statement.
 
“I just don’t think there a lot of honesty when it comes to reporting this issue,” Powers said, speaking about abortion.
 
Either way, Bieber should probably heed Laura Ingraham’s advice: shut up and sing.
 
-Julie Kanfer