Latest Court Decision Blocking Texas’ Attempt to Defund Planned Parenthood Shows Need for Congressional Action

A U.S. district judge has blocked the state of Texas from cutting off Planned Parenthood’s Medicaid funding. This is the sixth instance in which a court has prevented a state from denying Medicaid funds to Planned Parenthood: Arkansas, Alabama, Kansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana have also attempted to make Planned Parenthood ineligible for funds.

On Dec. 20, 2016, the Office of Inspector General at the Texas Health and Human Services Commission sent a final notice informing Planned Parenthood that its participation in the state’s Medicaid program would be discontinued.

Referencing Center for Medical Progress videos released by pro-life activists in 2015, the notice informed Planned Parenthood that the inspector general “finds you are not qualified to provide medical services in a professionally competent, safe, legal and ethical manner under … state and federal law pertaining to Medicaid providers.”

According to Judge Sam Sparks’ ruling, the notice outlined specific alleged violations of accepted standards of medical practice by Planned Parenthood:

1. “A history of deviating from accepted standards to procure samples that meet researcher’s needs.”

2. “A history of permitting staff physicians to alter procedures to obtain targeted tissue samples needed for their specific outside research.”

3. “A willingness to convert normal pregnancies to the breech position to ensure researchers receive intact specimens.”

4. “An admission that ‘we get what we need to do to alter the standard of care where we are still maintaining patient safety, still maintaining efficiency in clinic operations, but we integrate research into it.’”

5. “An admission that Planned Parenthood gets requests for ‘information from our study sponsor on what data they need that is not our standard of care,’ and that [Planned Parenthood] provides what is needed by creating a separate research protocol or template that can include medically unnecessary testing.”

6. “A willingness to charge more than the costs incurred for procuring fetal tissue.”
Planned Parenthood sought a preliminary injunction claiming that Texas violated a federal statute commonly referred to as the Medicaid “free choice of provider” provision, which says that beneficiaries may obtain medical services “from any institution, agency, community pharmacy, or person qualified to perform the service or services required … who undertakes to provide him such services … ”

On Tuesday, Sparks sided with Planned Parenthood and issued the requested injunction.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton immediately announced plans to appeal the decision, sharply criticizing the judge’s decision to rule that “willingness to violate state and federal law on manipulating abortion procedures and profiting from the sale of fetal tissue, making false statements to law enforcement, and misleading multiple courts were insufficient grounds for Texas to exclude Planned Parenthood” from the state’s program. Planned Parenthood has denied any illegal activity.

In a press release, Texas Right to Life expressed disappointment in the decision, but added that it “hopes Texas will soon prevail in the decision to award Medicaid contracts to ethical providers that offer health services to Texas women and families”

Congress should follow Texas’ lead and end federal funding to Planned Parenthood affiliates and other abortion providers.

Disqualifying Planned Parenthood affiliates and other abortion providers from receiving Title X family planning grants, Medicaid reimbursements, and other grants and contracts does not reduce the overall funding for women’s health care.

The funds currently flowing to abortion providers can instead be distributed to health centers that offer comprehensive health care without entanglement with abortion on demand.

Congress should take this step in the context of the upcoming budget reconciliation bill to repeal Obamacare, ensuring that package includes a provision (just as the 2015 version of the bill did) that would make Planned Parenthood affiliates ineligible from receiving Medicaid reimbursements for one year after the enactment of the bill.

Ultimately, Congress should send the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, which passed in the House of Representatives in January, to the president’s desk for signature. (For more from the author of “Latest Court Decision Blocking Texas’ Attempt to Defund Planned Parenthood Shows Need for Congressional Action” please click HERE)

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Watch How One Congressman Handles a Rowdy Town Hall Meeting

Rep. Dave Brat shocked the political establishment in 2014 when he defeated then-Majority Leader Eric Cantor in the GOP primary for Virginia’s 7th Congressional District. On Tuesday, Brat was back in the spotlight at a town hall meeting in rural Blackstone, Virginia.

During the lively and occasionally boisterous meeting, Brat was peppered with questions from constituents on a range of policy issues and current events. Despite frequent interruptions—some cheers and other jeers—Brat kept his cool and responded to nearly three dozen questions.

The Daily Signal traveled to Blackstone for Brat’s meeting, and aired footage Wednesday along with interviews with some attendees and the congressman. The Daily Signal’s Genevieve Wood also interviewed Sondra Clark of Heritage Action for America, a sister organization of The Heritage Foundation, about political activism at town hall meetings.

(For more from the author of “Watch How One Congressman Handles a Rowdy Town Hall Meeting” please click HERE)

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7 New Earth-Like Exoplanets Discovered, NASA Announces

Talk about lucky number seven. Astronomers have discovered not one, not two, but seven Earth-sized planets orbiting a star called TRAPPIST-1.

What’s more, three of them are in the habitable zone— the happy place where liquid water can exist on the surface of rocky planets, as it’s not too hot or cold. (Although liquid water could potentially exist on any of the seven, NASA said, it likes the odds on those three best.) The space agency calls the discovery of the fascinating solar system record-breaking.

“The discovery gives us a hint that finding a second Earth is not just a matter of if, but when,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters, said at a news conference announcing the discovery.

Zurbuchen called it a “major step forward” towards the goal of answering the very big question: Is there life on other worlds?

The discovery “is very promising for the search for life beyond our solar system,” Michael Gillon, astronomer at the University of Liege in Belgium, added during the press conference. (Read more from “7 New Earth-Like Exoplanets Discovered, NASA Announces” HERE)

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U.S. Army Document: Hillary Clinton ‘Careless or Disgruntled Employee’ — Potential Insider Threat?

A U.S. Army OpSec (Operational Security) PowerPoint presentation obtained by Judicial Watch lists former Secretary of State and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and former CIA Director General David Petraeus as examples of ‘insider threats’ and ‘careless or disgruntled employees’ who may be guilty of ‘critical information compromises.’

Source: Judicial Watch

Source: Judicial Watch

The presentation, produced as part of a cybersecurity lecture, also includes terrorists Nidal Hasan and Aaron Alexis, and classified information leakers Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning and Edward Snowden.

The presentation warns against “Critical Information Compromises,” including material such as itineraries of “VIPs,” which could result in “attack” or “kidnapping” by a “domestic terrorist or protestors.”

It also lists “unsecure email” as an issue that can lead to an enemy being able to “kill, counter, or clone.” (Read more from “U.S. Army Document: Hillary Clinton ‘Careless or Disgruntled Employee’ — Potential Insider Threat?” HERE)

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House Democrat Aides Got $100K From Mysterious Iraqi While Overseeing Hill IT

Rogue congressional staffers took $100,000 from an Iraqi politician while they had administrator-level access to the House of Representatives’ computer network, according to court documents examined by The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group.

The money was a loan from Dr. Ali al-Attar, an Iraqi political figure, and was funneled through a company with “impossible”-to-decipher financial transactions that the congressional information technology staffers controlled.

Imran Awan, ringleader of the group that includes his brothers Abid and Jamal, has provided IT services since 2005 for Florida Democrat Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the former Democratic National Committee chairwoman. The brothers are from Pakistan.

The trio also worked for dozens of other House Democrats, including members of the intelligence, foreign affairs, and homeland security committees. Those positions likely gave them access to congressional emails and other sensitive documents.

The brothers, whose access to House IT networks has been terminated, are under criminal investigation by the U.S. Capitol Police. (Read more from “House Democrat Aides Got $100K From Mysterious Iraqi While Overseeing Hill IT” HERE)

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ISIS Has ‘People in Place’ to Conduct ‘Steady’ Attacks

The Islamic State of Iraq and al Sham (ISIS) terror group is under heavy global pressure from militaries and law enforcement organizations, but military and counterterrorism officials forecast no letup in the current wave of international terrorism.

“We think that transnational terrorist attacks, in the near term, will probably remain steady. The group has been able to build a robust and redundant apparatus for conducting transnational terrorist attacks,” said a U.S. defense official.

ISIS will likely continue to employ a less-centralized approach to attacks, the official said — one driven by slick, incendiary online messages.

“They have a lot of people in place already that are sympathizers around the world. … We think they will be able to continue to be able to produce at least a constant level of propaganda, which underpins a lot of the ideology in Europe and elsewhere,” the official said.

Currently in Europe, the terror threat, which is high, is driven by ISIS, Al Qaida and other mostly Salafist groups. (Read more from “ISIS Has ‘People in Place’ to Conduct ‘Steady’ Attacks” HERE)

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The CIA vs. The Presidency: This Is Not the First Time

In 1947, the president of the United States, Harry Truman, decided: I’m going to create a snake and call it the CIA. Its watchword will be secrecy. It will collect secrets of our enemies and hold them secret and report the secrets to the president, who will decide what to do. Of course, the snake will remain under the president’s control. Its entire personality will be based on deception, but it will remain loyal to the president. No problem. Sure.

I’m thankful for Charles Hollander’s challenging piece on Thomas Pynchon’s novel, The Crying of Lot 49: “Pynchon, JFK and the CIA: Magic Eye Views of The Crying of Lot 49.”

Hollander offers vital reminders of the war between two parts of the Executive Branch: the presidency and the CIA.

“Implicit in Pynchon’s fiction is the view that events in recent American history have led to a virtual constitutional crisis, a challenge to the supremacy of the presidency by the intelligence community.”

“When Eisenhower made his ‘open skies’ proposal, in July 21, 1955, at a Geneva summit conference, calling for unrestricted but monitored overflight of national territories on both sides of the Iron Curtain, many observers felts its acceptance would have gone a long way toward thawing the Cold War. To make a gesture of good faith toward Soviet Premier Khrushchev, the president ordered the CIA (under Allen Dulles) to halt its U–2 photo–reconnaissance flights. But Dulles secretly arranged for the flights to continue. When Francis Gary Powers’s U–2 spy plane was shot down in the Ural mountains on May 1, 1960, and Khrushchev announced the facts to the world media, the embarrassed Eisenhower lied to cover up. To many it appeared that the CIA chief had disobeyed a direct order from the Commander–in–Chief. The St. Louis Post–Dispatch asked the next day, ‘Do our intelligence operatives enjoy so much freewheeling authority that they can touch off an incident of grave international import by low–level decisions unchecked by responsible policy–making power’?”

“Later, when Lee Harvey Oswald’s possible role in the U–2 affair became known, some observers felt Dulles’s action implied that the director of the CIA was above the president and that the military–industrial complex could do what it pleased, independent of the will of the people as expressed by the popularly elected and duly constituted chief executive. No wonder Ike [Eisenhower] was peeved: the CIA was running the U.S. the way it ran Latin America. The U–2 affair was no mere personality squabble, Ike vs. Dulles; it was two institutions of the executive branch vying for supremacy, the presidency vs. the CIA, hence the democratic process vs. a form of totalitarism.”

“The CIA had already planned the April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion before Kennedy took office in January, and when the invasion failed, Kennedy felt that the CIA had set him up. He let it be known he intended to dismantle the CIA and assign its functions to the other intelligence units within the government. He reportedly vowed ‘to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds’… Kennedy, a Democrat, forced the Republican Allen Dulles to resign, along with other senior CIA officers. But the CIA was too deeply involved just then in operations around the world to be disassembled. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, in a way that implicated the CIA…critics of the Warren Commission Report, maybe even J. Edgar Hoover—believed the CIA had some hand in Kennedy’s assassination and the coverup. If it had, the CIA was again demonstrating that the presidency was subordinate to the CIA.”

“In a very short time, two presidents, a Republican and a Democrat, ran afoul of the CIA. The result amounted to a constitutional crisis, a change in our actual form of government without benefit of a duly ratified constitutional amendment. The crisis is reminiscent of that period in Roman history when the Praetorian Guard could sell the office of Emperor to the highest bidder and then, after a time, assassinate him and have a new auction. To this day, the president has never again challenged the CIA, though the agency has made its share of egregious errors. With the selection of former CIA director George H.W. Bush, the presidency and the CIA effectively merged…”

These days, President Trump is in his own war against the CIA and other parts of the intelligence community (IC).

In his case, he has overtly criticized the IC and called them disseminators of fake news and lies. He claims he’s putting an end to foreign wars of conquest. He’s already canceled a major Globalist trade treaty, the TPP.

But the IC believes it owns the Presidency and sets his agenda.

This is not a recent assumption. It goes all the way back to the early days of the CIA; Eisenhower, Kennedy.

In 2016, the IC leadership decided Trump would be a threat to their power, so they leaked/invented information about the Russians influencing the election on behalf of Trump. This effort was aimed at corroding his right to claim that he was the legitimate president.

The war continues.

The IC doesn’t want presidents with independent ideas.

They’re the bosses, and they intend to keep it that way.

—The snake slithers in the sun and the shade. It moves deftly and collects information and decides what to do with it. It compiles its own private list of enemies and allies. It senses its own power. Why should it honor its mandate? There is an Empire to be gained. (For more from the author of “The CIA vs. The Presidency: This Is Not the First Time” please click HERE)

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Trump Denounces ‘Bigotry and Hatred’ at African American Museum. The Left Didn’t Get the Memo

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump denounced bigotry and racism in a short speech given at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. The reaction to his speech on Twitter was, ironically, full of bigotry and racism.

“Today and every day of my presidency I pledge to do everything I can to continue that promise of freedom for African-Americans and for every American,” Trump said. He called his first visit to the museum “a meaningful reminder of why we have to fight bigotry and hatred and intolerance.”

Many on Twitter were vocally intolerant of Trump’s presence at the museum.

Dr. Ben Carson, the president’s nominee to lead the Department of Housing and Urban Development, was in attendance of Trump’s visit to the museum. The reaction to Carson’s presence was also hateful.

What was it that Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said? “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

It’s a shame these folks won’t listen. (For more from the author of “Trump Denounces ‘Bigotry and Hatred’ at African American Museum. The Left Didn’t Get the Memo” please click HERE)

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Why Is the GOP Just Sitting Around on Repealing Obamacare After Winning the Impossible?

In other news, Congress has said it plans to debate repealing Obamacare, maybe sometime end of February, and “hopes” to have a bill end of March. Maybe not … the GOP could just keep stalling.

How many times have Republicans voted to repeal Obamacare in the last six years? Twenty, 30, 40 times? MSNBC claims it’s around 62. In 2015, Congress actually put a repeal bill on President Obama’s desk.
And now that Republicans control every lever of power in the legislative process, suddenly the task to repeal has become monumental. Not so when the GOP was in the minority.

It is not easy to name a member of Congress — or any GOP elected official — who has not run on repealing Obamacare. Certainly every House Republican worth his or her salt is already on record voting for a full repeal — that is, back when there was no danger of those bills seeing daylight. As one member recently phrased it: “We’re playing with live rounds this time.”

The prospect of making a difference has resulted in schoolboy stage fright. The chance to win has made our guys terrified of facing the other team’s fans in the parking lot.

Campaign pledges to do away with the Affordable Care Act were not always, nor even often, married to specific replacement plans. It was widely acknowledged from the start that repealing the law would leave room for debate over the best market-based solutions. Well, Republicans got their chance. Voters believed them. And within five weeks, the repeal movement has smashed up against barriers erected by the very members who ran and won on the promise of ACTION.

A repeal bill would not pit the country against the party — that is only what the opposition wants us to believe. What is certain to damage the party, perhaps irreparably, is a stalled Congress, an impotent executive, and a surviving health care law that continues to wreak havoc on a country that has stridently rejected it. Leave the law where it is, and the GOP flushes its mandate. There are too many other things to accomplish — and such little time to see them through — for this party to squander its credibility on the one issue it can wipe out with a two-page bill.

In the age of Trevor Noah, Lena Dunham, and John Oliver, elected Republicans have my sympathies. Liberal elites control the levers of culture, and as such, it is hard not to believe that after the non-stop bombardment from liberal media, even when in power, that one is governing in direct opposition to the wishes of a hostile electorate. But it is an illusion. Trump won because he saw the illusion for what it was. He ignored the ache of bad press, shaking off the weight on his shoulders intensified by a media-biased bubble. He proved that if you simply press on and do what you told the voters you would do, the voters will keep up their end. They will show their appreciation by showing up for you.

Republicans must learn this lesson, if no other. (For more from the author of “Why Is the GOP Just Sitting Around on Repealing Obamacare After Winning the Impossible?” please click HERE)

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Top 10 Signs the Conservative Movement May Be in Trouble

10. The Republican president tweets about the loss of his daughter’s department store clothing line, but tweets nothing about a state Supreme Court unanimously declaring itself above the First Amendment to the Constitution.

9. Almost no big names in the conservative movement/media call upon that same Republican president to address the issue altogether. Despite the fact evangelicals like Barronelle Stutzman are one of the main reasons there’s a Republican president in the White House in the first place.

8. One of your movement’s signature events decides to make a self-admitted moral reprobate — human click bait — its keynote speaker. Then when video comes to light showing him advocating for the disgusting practice of pederasty, the event’s head honcho doubles down to defend his awful decision. And only after a public outrage is the decision finally reversed, which means it wasn’t reversed on moral grounds but in response to a PR backlash. Begging the question: Why did the people running an event that Reagan once urged its attendees to “serve selflessly a vision of man with God,” invite such a reprobate in the first place?

7. The self-appointed gatekeepers of your movement determine the credibility of a Supreme Court nominee via Chevron and not Roe v. Wade.

6. The same conservative leaders who issued multi-page white papers warning about the danger of Obama’s executive order promoting the Rainbow Jihad, say virtually nothing in public when his Republican successor leaves it in place.

5. Most of the biggest megaphones in the movement spent more time cheering an unhinged press conference then urging Republicans to repeal Obamacare.

4. Your moral outrage is dialed up to 11 at fake news, but then it’s nothing but crickets when fake news provocateurs and discredited conspiracists representing your side get White House press credentials.

3. A headline beginning with the words “This will make Nancy Pelosi mad” is trending every day that ends in y.

2. You actually believe Trump shill Roger Stone was poisoned by Trump’s political opponents.

1. Most of your day is spent pointing out the hypocrisy of the other side. That they’re now supporting and saying things they criticized when their guy was in the White House. All the while neglecting the reverse is also true, and now many of you are doing the exact same thing. (For more from the author of “Top 10 Signs the Conservative Movement May Be in Trouble” please click HERE)

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