Remember when Rep. Bart Stupak sold his Obamacare vote for a promise from the president that Obamacare funds wouldn’t be used for abortions?
Sucker:
(CNSNews.com) – If you want proof that President Obama’s Executive Order on taxpayer-funded abortion was a sham, look no further than Pennsylvania, says House Republican Leader John Boehner (Ohio).
Boehner and other Republicans point to reports that the Health and Human Services Department is giving Pennsylvania $160 million to set up a new high-risk insurance pool that will cover any abortion that is legal in the state.
“The fact that the high-risk pool insurance program in Pennsylvania will use federal taxpayer dollars to fund abortions is unconscionable,” Boehner said in a statement on Tuesday.
“Just last month at the White House, I asked President Obama to provide the American people with a progress report on the implementation of his Executive Order, which purports to ban taxpayer-funding of abortions. Unfortunately, the President provided no information, and the American people are still waiting for answers.”
Funding abortions was the plan all along and any congressmen who voted for Obamacare based on Obama’s weak promise was just plain stupid.
A federal district court judge in Boston today struck down the 1996 federal law that defines marriage as a union exclusively between a man and a woman.
Judge Joseph L. Tauro ruled that the federal Defense of Marriage law violates the Constitutional right of married same-sex couples to equal protection under the law and upends the federal government’s long history of allowing states to set their own marriage laws.
“This court has determined that it is clearly within the authority of the Commonwealth to recognize same-sex marriages among its residents, and to afford those individuals in same-sex marriages any benefits, rights, and privileges to which they are entitled by virtue of their marital status,” Tauro wrote. “The federal government, by enacting and enforcing DOMA, plainly encroaches upon the firmly entrenched province of the state.”
I tend to agree with the court on this one that marriage should be defined by the states and not federalized. Using the same logic I also think abortion law should be the province of the states and not a federal matter at all. Perhaps some creative lawyer will be able to take this DOMA ruling and use it to return abortion to the states where it belongs.
A new report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) on federal tax money funneled into Planned Parenthood and similar organizations raises more questions than it answers about the nation’s largest abortion chain.
Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s (PPFA) audits show the organization spent just $657.1 million between 2002 and 2008 from federal government grants and programs, but the abortion behemoth’s own annual reports show that it took in $2.3 billion from government grants and programs during the same time period.
That’s not pocket change. Why the discrepancy?
The report (the first of its kind since 2002) was released in response to a request from 31 U.S. senators and representatives and in an atmosphere increasingly hostile to abortion. Not surprisingly. then, its findings are fueling an escalating outcry to defund Planned Parenthood.
Since 2009, at least five nationwide polls have confirmed that a majority of Americans consider themselves pro-life.
Someone, then, needs to explain to all those people why $2.3 billion in tax dollars have been doled out to an organization that admits to systematically having killed more than 1.8 million pre-born babies between 2002 and 2008 and then reports it only spent $657.1 million in federal dollars.
ACORN was defunded when it was shown how crooked the organization really was. If federal funds are not supposed to be spent on abortion, and given Planned Parenthood’s questionable accounting, it’s time to defund this murderous organization.
Research has revealed that 85 per cent of people agree with the statement that “Christmas should be called Christmas because we are still a Christian country”. But it also shows that only 12 per cent of adults know the facts of the Christmas story in any detail.
So if we Christians really want to keep Christmas focused on Christ, we must constantly re-tell the story of his birth in ways which engage positively with the public’s interest.
In the 21st century, proud parents-to-be proudly announce the coming birth by showing friends and family the scan of the baby. Our new Baby-Scan Jesus poster (pictured left) uses this convention to place the birth of Christ in an ultra-contemporary context.
It is highly impactful. It has a sense of immediacy. It creates anticipation. And theologically it speaks of both the humanity and divinity of Jesus Christ.
There is no doubt that it will capture people’s attention, generate headlines and create countless conversations about the true meaning of Christmas.
Church leaders across the denominations have welcomed the campaign and are urging churches all over the country to get involved.
There’s no question that the availability of ultrasound scans has decreased the incidence of abortion. When a “lump of tissue” becomes an actual tiny baby with a beating heart mom is much more reluctant to destroy it.
I don’t know if this campaign will be effective, but it is thought-provoking and that could have an impact.
The media would have you believe the Defense Authorization Bill is just about funding ongoing defense operations and doing away with Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, but there much more to it than that:
Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.) spoke with National Review Online this afternoon via telephone from Arizona. “Interesting times,” began McCain, the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. For him, it has been a rough week. He says he is frustrated with the “disgraceful” way Democrats are handling the defense authorization bill — specifically, their insistence in tying their attempt to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” to the measure. On Thursday, the committee approved an amendment repealing the policy on a 16-to-12 vote.
“Once people realize what else is in this, there will be a lot of questions on the Senate floor,” McCain predicts. “It has more than just [Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell]. They’ve put in a provision to allow abortions to be performed at military hospitals. They’ve also cut a billion dollars out of the authorization for the Iraqi military and stuffed in a billion dollars of earmarks.”
The bill will be taken up by the entire Senate in June.
Abortion opponents fought passage of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul to the bitter end, and now that it’s the law, they’re using it to limit coverage by private insurers.
An obscure part of the law allows states to restrict abortion coverage by private plans operating in new insurance markets. Capitalizing on that language, abortion foes have succeeded in passing bans that, in some cases, go beyond federal statutes.
“We don’t consider elective abortion to be health care, so we don’t think it’s a bad thing for fewer private insurance companies to cover it,” said Mary Harned, attorney for Americans United for Life, a national organization that wrote a model law for the states.
Abortion rights supporters are dismayed.
“Implementation of this reform should be about increasing access to health care and increasing choices, not taking them away,” said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., a member of the Senate leadership.
Since Obama signed the legislation law March 23, Arizona and Tennessee have enacted laws restricting abortion coverage by health plans in new insurance markets, called exchanges. About 30 million people will get their coverage through exchanges, which open in 2014 to serve individuals and small businesses.
In Florida, Mississippi and Missouri, lawmakers have passed bans and sent them to their governors. Most of the states allow exceptions in cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the mother. Insurers still could offer separate policies to specifically cover abortion.
Three other states may act this year — Louisiana, Ohio and Oklahoma. Overall, there are 29 states where lawmakers or public policy groups expressed serious interest, Harned said.
“You are going to see more actions like this,” said Tom McClusky, a lobbyist for the socially conservative Family Research Council.
If this effort gains traction it could actually help Republicans gain support to repeal Obamacare altogether.
Nancy Pelosi told us we’d have to pass it to find out what’s in it. Well, now it’s time to take what’s in it and use it to our advantage wherever possible.
Well, I attended my first official campaign rally featuring a statewide candidate and it wasn’t quite what I expected. It was the Orange County Kick-off for Steve Poizner for Governor. Keep in mind the primary election is only a month away, so it seemed a little late for a kick-off, but apparently that’s the campaign plan. Wait until the voters are starting to pay close attention and flood the zone.
I was expecting a large event in a big ballroom, but found the parking lot almost empty when I got there and maybe 20 or so people in a small ballroom. The crowd grew a bit, but was still surprisingly small for a county kick-off.
There were several local politicos who spoke before the candidate, including this Villa Park councilwoman who acted as the emcee.
Poizner spoke without notes for maybe 20 minutes including taking a few questions.
The crowd grew to about 100-125 in the relatively small area for the rally.
Poizner seemed to hit all the right conservative notes on issues like illegal immigration (he wants to cut off all State funding of benefits for illegals), taxes (10% cuts in personal income tax/50% cut in capital gains), 10th Amendment stuff (such as demanding the State have control over its own natural resources), Prop 13 (he said he is strongly in favor if it, including the 2/3rds voting requirement for raising taxes) and abortion (cutting off all government funding, though he didn’t make a blanket statement about banning the barbaric practice).
He took a few questions from the voters.
And took a little time to press the flesh as they set up a phone bank operation in the room.
I liked what I heard, but I’m still not ready to endorse anyone. Meg Whitman worries me in that she appears to be another Arnold Schwarzenegger, too squishy on conservative issues and more likely to side with Democrats in order to achieve “bipartisanship”, which we all know is defined these days as “going along with what Democrats want”.
More research is needed before I can really sort the two candidates out.
Organ donation has become a vital way to save lives around the world, but a vast shortage of donors continues to mean people are losing their lives while on waiting lists.
But there is a unique proposal that could change all that.
New York State Assemblyman Richard Brodsky nearly lost his daughter, Willie, at 4 years old when she needed a kidney transplant, and again 10 years later when her second kidney failed.
“We have 10,000 New Yorkers on the list today waiting for organs. We import half the organs we transplant. It is an unacceptable failed system,” Brodsky said.
To fix that, Brodsky introduced a new bill in Albany that would enroll all New Yorkers as an organ donor, unless they actually opt out of organ donation. It would be the first law of its kind in the United States.
“Overseas, 24 nations have it. Israel has it. Others have it. And it works without a lot of controversy,” Brodsky said.
Freedom means being free to decide what happens to your body and its parts after death too. While I would encourage people to sign up, there’s no way the state should be allowed to mandate it or make it the default position.
This could also raise some interesting issues as it relates to abortion. If it turns out the state can mandate that you donate your organs, couldn’t it also mandate that you have or not have an abortion? Or perhaps some other procedure that you may not want?
The Indiana Right to Life Political Action Committee announced this week that they have adopted a resolution denying endorsements to all Democrat candidates for office. The move is an expansion on an existing policy to refuse endorsements to Democrats running for the Indiana House of Representatives.
“Our leadership anguished over this decision,” notes IRTL-PAC chairman Mike Fichter. “Had Democrats like Brad Ellsworth held firm in opposing federal funding for abortion in the health care bill, we likely would have rewarded such action with a bipartisan endorsement policy. Ellsworth’s collapse under pressure from the White House and Speaker Pelosi, as well as the collapse of his colleagues Joe Donnelly and Baron Hill, leaves us with no alternative. Leadership matters, and the reality is that Democratic leaders are advancing an abortion agenda at an alarming rate that will only be checked by a Republican majority.” — CNW
The ObamaCare debate has finally proven when most of us knew all along – Democrats are Democrats first above all else. They will talk like a pro-lifer if it’s politically expedient, but when it comes time to vote, they’ll follow the party line. Democrats cannot be trusted on the issue of abortion.
