Phill Kline has a longtime ally in Bill O'Reilly, who aids and abets Kline's war on safe and legal abortion care in Kansas with tactics as underhanded as those of his favorite attorney general.

"For more than a year, The Factor has been investigating Dr. George Tiller of Kansas.
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"The Factor" has learned that in Kansas, a mental health exception can be just about anything. However, we needed to prove that. So we tried to get Tiller's records. We could not. He cited patient confidentiality. And month after month, we were frustrated. But now, "The Factor" has evidence that indicates Tiller killed late-term fetuses by citing temporary depression on the part of the mother. That was the reason Tiller performed scores, perhaps thousands of late-term abortions. In the state of Kansas, there is a doctor, George Tiller, who will execute babies for $5,000 if the mother is depressed. And there are rapists impregnating 10-year-olds who are being protected by abortion clinics. It doesn't get worse than that. This is the absolute shame of America."

O'Reilly takes Kline's nutball and runs with it, to keep the Kansas crusader's fairy tale in the headlines until election day  -- essentially promoting the absurdly conflated notion that depressed 10 year old children are showing up in Wichita with $5,000 in their piggybanks, and being allowed to have late abortions for illegal reasons ... while licensed and highly regulated health care practitioners cover up for rapists. Utter insanity.

And insanity such as this is no excuse for providing open access to confidential records containing sexual histories and other medical details that are the very personal business of 90 women -- for in spite of Kline's claim that he is acting from a duty to children, most of the records now in his possession belong to adults -- women whose right to medical privacy has been sacrificed to the tarnished ambitions of men like Phill Kline and Bill O'Reilly.

Another of Phill Kline's behind-the-scenes collaborators is Mark Crutcher, the notorious founder of Life Dynamics International whose fake "sting" operation against Planned Parenthood provided the pretext for Kline's anti-abortion witch hunt. LDI lists every abortion-providing clinic in the country on a luridly Gothic page titled "American Death Camps," and Crutcher compares legal abortion to the Nazi holocaust at every opportunity.

"On Jan. 22, 1973, the United States Supreme Court decreed that every child conceived in America could be legally butchered for any reason whatsoever, at any time until the moment of birth. With that ruling, the American holocaust began, and we were soon to learn that ours was going to make Hitler and his storm troopers look like a Girl Scout troop," he claims.
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"With virtually no exceptions, abortionists are the losers, rejects and washouts of the medical community who couldn't compete in, or were drummed out of, legitimate medicine. Over and over, we saw irrefutable proof that good physicians don't ascend into the practice of abortion, but instead bad ones descend into it."

Dr. George Tiller, the primary target of Kline's investigation, has an impressive and enviable list of medical and public service credentials. But that's not the point; despite decades of unrelenting threats and harassment from anti-choice activists, despite being shot twice by the Army of God's "Hero of the Faith" Shelley Shannon -- and despite Phill Kline -- Dr. Tiller continues to provide women with skilled and conscientious abortion care.

And it is that fact alone which keeps Dr. George Tiller in the crosshairs of Phill Kline, Mark Crutcher, Flip Benham of Operation Save America, Troy Newman of Operation Rescue . . .  and, of course, Bill O'Reilly.

It's no surprise that Kline is no more forthcoming about his motivations than he is about his associations, because playing hide-and-seek with the facts has been his pattern all along.

[W]hen asked whether his Kansas crusade against abortion providers was assisted by LDI, Kline hastened to deny that he was working in association with Crutcher's group. Kline's transparent attempt to distance himself is entirely understandable given the nature of the "investigation" that LDI conducted into a fantastic tale involving the alleged selling of fetal body parts by clinics, a news bombshell that fizzled out overnight when Crutcher's chief witness admitted that he had been paid $21,000 to lie. That allegation was followed by Crutcher's notorious claim that more than 800 Planned Parenthood clinics across the country are in active collaboration with pedophiles who rape female children and pay Planned Parenthood to cover up their crimes.

Even without $21,000 as an incentive, under questioning by Brancaccio Kline was quick to deny any connection with Life Dynamics. And at the time of the interview, that might have been, if not truthful, at least "truthy."  But an attorney for Life Dynamics earlier had been hired by Kline's office to defend his fancifully contortionistic interpretation of Kansas' statutory rape laws. It's just that after word got out, the LDI attorney was quickly un-hired. That Kline first hired an LDI attorney, and then misled PBS about it when asked, said more about what he was up to than any of his official pronouncements.

Although Kline told PBS, "I don't understand the problem with Life Dynamics" while denying his association, Mark Crutcher isn't nearly so bashful.

"We did this investigation -- the research and the sting operation -- we turned all that over to the attorney general in 11 states and now some of those states are reacting. I can't say what states I gave the information to, but it's not hard to make the connection."

And now it's just as easy to make the connection to O'Reilly's reckless disclosure of confidential information from sealed medical records held in the sole custody of Phill Kline, especially when the chief law enforcement officer for the state of Kansas displays not the slightest curiosity about the identity of O'Reilly's "source inside."

Kline's two-year effort to get his hands on women's private medical records has become a key issue in his current campaign for reelection. Many, including Kline's Democratic opponent, Johnson County District Attorney Paul Morrison, maintain that the seemingly endless investigation of Dr. Tiller is nothing but the lowest form of political self-promotion.

But who are we to question, when God Himself asked Kline to run for Attorney General?

When pressed on the subject of the leak to Bill O'Reilly, Kline's spokesperson, Sherriene Jones, was as incurious as her boss: "We don't know anything about Mr. O'Reilly's inside source. I assumed he was talking about somebody on the inside of the abortion clinics."

Yeah, sure he was. That's why Dr. Tiller is asking the Kansas Supreme Court to take immediate action by appointing a special prosecutor to investigate and take possession of the 90 records of patients from two clinics.

Two abortion clinics asked the state's highest court Monday to investigate Attorney General Phill Kline and Fox television's Bill O'Reilly over O'Reilly's statements that he had obtained information from Kansas abortion records.

The request to the Supreme Court for a special prosecutor came a day before voters decided whether Kline, a strong abortion opponent, received a second term.
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During a Wichita campaign stop, Kline called the request "frivolous."
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O'Reilly said during his daily radio program Monday that Tiller "wants the guy that's going to let him off the hook to win" the attorney general's race.

Maybe Dr. Tiller just wants the attorney general who swore to keep medical records private to explain why he has no objection whatever to their purported details being broadcast in his presence by Bill O'Reilly, who on Monday, for once, was keeping his mouth shut: "I'm not going to tell you when or anything else about how we got them."

The clinics' attorney, Pedro Irigonegaray, made a statement in which he called on Fox to fire O'Reilly.

"I think the attorney general's conduct has been shameful," he said after filing his documents with the court. "Mr. O'Reilly demonstrated callous disregard for women all over this country and his statements about the records were simply false."

Earlier this year, World Privacy Forum representative Pam Dixon told the Kansas City Star: "This is not a slippery slope we're going down. It's the opening of a Pandora's box."

Mr. Irigonegaray pronounced it "preposterous" that the illegally leaked information would come from the clinics themselves, since they have spent years fighting Kline's efforts to violate the medical privacy of their patients.

"This has been our concern from the beginning, that if he ended up with these records, that just this type of event would occur. Our worst nightmare has happened," Irigonegaray said. "Women in America deserve better than this."

It wasn't clear Saturday whether O'Reilly's source had broken state or federal laws by divulging patient information ...

At least one thing is very clear indeed. There's no doubt at all that women in America deserve better than Phill Kline.

During a GOP rally Sunday night in Topeka, Kline provoked laughter from thousands of Republicans when he said, "You know, it's great to see all of you in such good health, but, of course, I already knew that. I've seen all of your medical records."

Kline is pictured here receiving the Christian Statesmanship Award from Dick Bott, President of the Bott Radio Network. The Award reads: "Bott Radio Network, Christian Statesmanship Award, Presented to The Honorable Phill Kline, Attorney General for the Great State of Kansas, For Doing the RIGHT thing, for the RIGHT reason, at the RIGHT time, Christmas 2005."

Whatever . . . but it probably won't do Kline much good with the Kansas Supreme Court.