Sequester and We’re Still Funding Planned Parenthood?!

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Photo Credit: Fibonacci Blue

When it comes to the latest round of budget cuts, there’s one big problem that should bother everyone: Washington’s continued funding of Planned Parenthood, America’s largest abortion chain.

First, the facts: Each year, Planned Parenthood receives hundreds of millions of dollars from you, the taxpayer — and the total is rising. This past year, Planned Parenthood got $542 million from the government (i.e., from you and me), which accounts for almost half (45%) of the abortion chain’s budget. Abortions at Planned Parenthood are rising, while other services are falling. And Planned Parenthood recently mandated that all of its affiliates perform abortions, causing at least one affiliate to sever ties with America’s abortion boss.

All this says nothing of the fact that Planned Parenthood is flush with cash, having reported excess revenue of $87.4 million and $1.2 billion in total assets last year. Cecile Richards, Planned Parenthood’s CEO, makes nearly $400,000 a year. And yet the biggest abortion provider in America somehow still calls itself a non-profit.

And what does Planned Parenthood do with this money? The spokespeople for Big Abortion will tell you that there’s no way for public money to go toward abortion, but this is an outright lie. We know that money is fungible; the rent, the staff, the utilities — all of which support abortion procedures, no matter how indirectly — are propped up with our money. Whether we want to or not, we’re all forced to fund the taking of innocent human lives for profit.

Just before the sequester passed, the White House released a document detailing exactly what would get cut. It’s a great resource, and we all should use it to ask some questions.

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Polygamy (and Much Worse) will Follow Gay Marriage

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With the Supreme Court set this week to hear two historic challenges to the traditional definition of marriage, pro-family advocates are charging that legalizing gay marriage would “inevitably” lead to the legalization of polygamy as well.

“No question about it,” Dr. Richard Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, told Newsmax.TV in an exclusive interview Monday afternoon. “If you make the ultimate value a person’s right to express their sexuality with another person and to have that identified as marriage, then how do you keep polygamy from happening?

“How do keep consensual adult siblings from getting married?” he added. “How do you keep a consensual father and adult daughter from getting married? Incest and polygamy will come right after it.”

Land’s conclusion: “You shatter the definition of marriage if you try to expand it to include same-sex marriage.” Land is far from the only social conservative making that argument. The Christian legal organization Liberty Counsel filed a brief with the Supreme Court that states: “Ultimately, there is no principled basis for recognizing a legality of same-sex marriage without simultaneously providing a basis for the legality of consensual polygamy or certain adult incestuous relationships.”

The remarks of Land, a leading social conservative, came in the context of what is expected to be one of the most important weeks in the history of the battle that pro-family forces are waging to preserve the traditional definition of marriage, as the Supreme Court holds two hearings on gay-marriage cases.

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Chinese Citizen Given 5 Years for Stealing, Taking to China Hundreds of Millions of Dollars of US High-Tech Military Data

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Measured in millimeters, the tiny device was designed to allow drones, missiles and rockets to hit targets without satellite guidance. An advanced version was being developed secretly for the U.S. military by a small company and L-3 Communications, a major defense contractor.

On Monday, Sixing Liu, a Chinese citizen who worked at L-3’s space and navigation division, was sentenced in federal court here to five years and 10 months for taking thousands of files about the device, called a disk resonator gyroscope, and other defense systems to China in violation of a U.S. arms embargo.

The case illustrates what the FBI calls a growing “insider threat” that hasn’t drawn as much attention as Chinese cyber operations. But U.S. authorities warned that this type of espionage can be just as damaging to national security and American business.

“The reason this technology is on the State Department munitions list, and controlled . . . is it can navigate, control and position missiles, aircraft, drones, bombs, lasers and targets very accurately,” said David Smukowski, president of Sensors in Motion, the small company in Bellvue, Wash., developing the technology with L-3. “While it saves lives, it can also be very strategic. It is rocket science.”

Smukowski estimated that the loss of this tiny piece of technology alone could ultimately cost the U.S. military hundreds of millions of dollars.

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Mortality Studies Suggest Obamacare’s Death Panels May Be Moving Forward

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Researchers are busy creating computer models and testing hypotheses to see if they can predict mortality accurately–as a way, I suspect, of justifying health care rationing.

My concern was heightened by a study just published as a letter in the March 6 Journal of the American Medical Association, in which the authors claim that they were able to predict likely mortality 10-years out. From “Predicting 10-Year Mortality for Older Adults”:

Extending the index from 4 to 10 years did not diminish the model discrimination (validation cohort,C statistics 0.817 vs 0.834; P= .35), suggesting that the risk factors important for 4-year mortality prediction are also important for 10-year mortality prediction. The model compares favorably with other mortality indexes that predict mortality beyond 7 years…Patients identified by this index as having a high risk of 10-year mortality may be more likely to be harmed by preventive interventions with long lag times to benefit, whereas patients identified as having a low risk of 10-year mortality may be good candidates for such interventions.

Thus, (say) if a colonoscopy is identified as not having a positive cost benefit for seven or more years (as the article indicates), such screening for those whom the computers predict are likely to die within ten years might not be covered.

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Obama’s Energy Nominee: We Need Carbon Tax To Double Or Triple Energy Cost (+video)

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President Obama’s Energy secretary nominee regards a carbon tax as one of the simplest ways to move the energy industry towards clean technologies, though he notes that government would have to come up with a plan to mitigate the burden this tax places on poor people, who would pay the most…

“Ultimately, it has to be cheaper to capture and store it than to release it and pay a price,” MIT professor and Energy nominee Ernest Moniz told the Switch Energy Project in an interview last year. “If we start really squeezing down on carbon dioxide over the next few decades, well, that could double; it could eventually triple. I think inevitably if we squeeze down on carbon, we squeeze up on the cost, it brings along with it a push toward efficiency; it brings along with it a push towards clean technologies in a conventional pollution sense; it brings along with it a push towards security. Because after all, the security issues revolve around carbon bearing fuels.”

Moniz position is not far from that of Energy Secretary Steven Chu before he took a job in the Obama administration. “We have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe,” Chu said in 2008. Last year, gas hit $9 a gallon in Greece.

Watch video here:

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Rush Limbaugh: Amnesty A “Death Sentence” For GOP

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On his March 19th show Rush Limbaugh declared that amnesty for illegal aliens would be “a death sentence for the Republicans.”

That’s because amnesty includes the ability to legally vote, Limbaugh reasoned. Citing poll data, Limbaugh said that 70 percent of Hispanics “say that they believe that government should be the primary source of prosperity.” Therefore, Rush says, “Let’s say you have ten million illegals, seven million of them are automatically gonna vote Democrat. Republican Party’s finished.”

“It’s a mathematics conclusion. It’s not any more complicated than that. And there’s nothing that the Republicans can do,” Rush continued.

Rush went on to point out a blatant contradiction in the arguments of those in the Republican Party who push for full amnesty:

“If you listen to the Republican proponents for immigration reform, amnesty, what have you, whatever you’re gonna call it, they always say that Hispanics are Republicans-in-waiting. That these are big family value, churchgoing, largely Catholic, I mean, they are Republicans-in-waiting, okay? Accept that.

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U.S. Border Patrol Uniforms Manufactured In Mexico

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Photo Credit: Gerald L. Nino

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has granted uniform contracts to VF Imagewear, Inc., an apparel company that relies on manufacturing sites in Mexico for a “significant percentage” of its occupational garments.

The latest contract with the company was awarded on Dec. 20, 2012, to make “uniform and insignia items” for the CBP at an estimated cost of $6,157,997.57, and a ceiling of $8 million.

The CBP, which is responsible for protecting America’s borders, told CNSNews.com that items from VF Imagewear, a subsidiary of VF Corporation, are manufactured in a number of locations, “including Mexico.”

“There are no domestic preference regulations or statutes applicable to DHS/CBP that would prohibit the manufacture of uniform items in Mexico,” the CBP said. “In fact, United States obligations under International Agreements require that the Agency accept items manufactured in Mexico.”

“Consistent with the foregoing, VF is permitted to provide items manufactured in Mexico under the current contract,” the agency said. According to the company’s 2012 annual report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), “VF operates manufacturing facilities in Mexico, Central and South America, the Caribbean, Europe and the Middle East.”

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Magic Johnson: Obamacare IS Working (+video)

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During a recent interview, Former NBA star “Magic” Johnson tells MSNBC host Alex Wagner ‘ObamaCare is working. I talk to a lot of CEOs of hospitals, it is working.’…

Johnson went on to say that he’s glad Florida’s Republican Governor Rick Scott decided to change his position and accept ObamaCare because once again, quote: ‘It will work.’

Watch video here:

Sequester Knocks the Navy’s Blue Angels Out of the Air

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Photo Credit: NY Times

A screaming comes across the sky. Again and again, all day long. Here at the 36th annual TiCo Warbird Airshow, fighter jets and vintage planes roar and rumble by as viewers ooh, aah, and then walk over to the line of food stands to buy funnel cakes and gyros, corn dogs and root beer floats.

The undisputed star, of course, is the Air Force Thunderbirds, whose six-plane precision flying team crisscrosses a perfect sky in ever-changing formations and gives an undiluted thrill to the crowd — at least those who brought earplugs.

But this is likely to be the last appearance by the Thunderbirds until the end of the federal government’s fiscal year on Sept. 30, if not longer. A performance this weekend by the Navy and Marine Corps’ Blue Angels near Key West, Fla., will also be their last for some time. The Army’s parachute demonstration team, the Golden Knights, is also suspending performances.

The failure of Congress to avoid the automatic spending cuts under what is known as sequestration is being felt in many ways, including the cancellation of White House tours and the loss of some 70,000 slots in Head Start early education programs. Along with less visible cuts, the Defense Department has suspended operation of the demonstration teams starting April 1.

(The Navy is hedging its bets, having simply announced its intent to cancel performances in April while waiting to see if financing problems are resolved, said Cmdr. Kevin Stephens, a Navy spokesman. “We want these cuts to be implemented at the last possible moment so they can be reversed where possible,” he said.)

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DC Continues Its Explosive Growth

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Photo Credit: 401(K) 2013

Adjusted for inflation, federal spending has gone up from an average of $882 billion every year in the 1980s to $1.48 trillion a year in the ’90s to $2.44 trillion a year in the first decade of the 21st century. It’s estimated that the government will have spent as much in the first four years of the new decade as it did in all of the 1990s.

Two crises — the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the so-called “great recession” — further propelled the growth of government in certain areas but without the commensurate cuts in other areas that earlier generations imposed in times of crisis.

“In the past when there were various crisis like World War II or the Korean War, non-defense spending was dramatically cut by 20 to 30 percent,” Schatz said. “That didn’t happen after 9/11, and it certainly didn’t happen after the financial crisis.”

Nothing typifies the expansion of government like the growing wealth of the Washington, D.C., area. The region has few natural resources and little manufacturing base to produce wealth, yet seven of the nation’s 10 richest counties surround Washington. The average government worker’s compensation now stands at over $126,000 a year. And the fact that Washington’s traffic congestion now ranks as the nation’s worst stands as more evidence of the region’s growth.

As the rest of the country suffered through the recession with layoffs and foreclosures, Washington’s work force and its home prices remained mostly stable.

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