Planned Parenthood Sets ‘Abortion Quotas’, Rewards Clinics With Pizza Parties

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The latest video in Live Action’s new investigative series of Planned Parenthood reveals the company rewards its centers with pizza parties for meeting abortion sales quotas – and institutes a “corrective action plan” when they don’t.

“Every center had a goal for how many abortions were done,” Sue Thayer, a former Planned Parenthood manager, explains in the video. “And centers that didn’t do abortions like mine that were family planning clinics had a goal for the number of abortion referrals.

“And it was on this big grid, and if we hit our goal, our line was green. If we were five percent under, it was yellow. If we were 10 percent under, it was red. That’s when we needed to have a corrective action plan – why we didn’t hit the goal, what we’re gonna do differently next time.”

This video, “Planned Parenthood’s Abortion Quotas,” is the fourth in Live Action’s series “Abortion Corporation.” The series has shown Planned Parenthood employees admitting its name is “deceptive” because they don’t promote parenting.

“Ultrasounds for Killing, Not Care at Planned Parenthood” and the accompanying testimony “Planned Parenthood Managers: Ultrasounds for Abortions, Not Care” highlight how Planned Parenthood will only do ultrasounds as part of an abortion – not for women who want to keep their babies. “The Prenatal Care Deception” shows Planned Parenthoods nationwide denying women prenatal care because they “specialize” in abortions. (Read more from “Planned Parenthood Sets ‘Abortion Quotas’, Rewards Clinics With Pizza Parties” HERE)

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Majority of Democrats Consider Christianity as Violent as Islam

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Nearly 66 percent of Democrats believe that while Islam is dangerous, Christianity is just as bad.

This trusting attitude towards Islam is revealed in a new CBS poll. According to the poll of more than 1,000 adults, about seven in 10 Democrats believe that Christianity, Judaism, Mormonism, et al, encourage just as much violence as Islam . . .

Republicans, meanwhile, have a much chillier view of Islam–63 percent saying Islam is more violent than other religions and only two percent calling Islam less violent than other faiths.

This survey comes following 17 years of attacks on Americans inspired by Islamic ideology, including: the 9/11 attacks in 2001; the San Bernardino, California, shooting that left 14 dead, the Pulse Nightclub attack in Orlando that killed 50, as well as attacks in Paris and Nice, France in the last two years. (Read more from “Majority of Democrats Consider Christianity as Violent as Islam” HERE)

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Frank Gaffney Applauds Trump Administration for Moving Towards Terrorist Designation for Muslim Brotherhood

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Center for Security Policy President Frank Gaffney said it was an “incredibly important step” for the Trump administration to consider formally designating the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization.

“I hope he’ll do it, and I hope he’ll do it soon,” Gaffney said. “The reason simply being that the Muslim Brotherhood, in many ways, is the leading edge of the global jihad movement worldwide. It’s gotten a pass, in particular in American administrations of both Republican and Democratic stripes since 9/11, I’m sorry to say, by virtue of the fact that they putatively eschewed violence as a means of accomplishing the end-state they seek – which is the imposition of this barbaric totalitarian ideology or doctrine or program. Call it what you will; they call it sharia.”

Gaffney added that the Brotherhood seeks to impose sharia law “worldwide, not just on Muslims, but non-Muslims alike.”

“The truth of the matter is that they do not eschew violence,” he contended. “They use it where they believe they can effectively. One prime example, of course, is their Palestinian franchise known as Hamas. But the idea that we’re going to somehow get along with – let alone do what the Obama administration did in particular: empower, legitimate, fund, even arm the Muslim Brotherhood, in the case of its time and power in Egypt – is simply madness.”

“I’m very heartened that the president has seemingly taken stock of this outfit, recognizes that they are a sharia supremacist program that, in fact, has provided sort of the ideological impetus behind all of the other jihadist enterprises around the world, even of the Shiite stripe. They’ve been motivators and inspiration, and in some cases actually contributed materially to them. So the same objectives of al-Qaeda, of the Islamic State, of Boko Haram, and so on, are being practiced and espoused and sought by the Muslim Brotherhood. They’ll just use stealth and subversion, including in countries like ours, where they don’t feel they’re strong enough to use violence. They should be designated as a terrorist organization for all those reasons, and I hope will be,” he said. (Read more from “Frank Gaffney Applauds Trump Administration for Moving Towards Terrorist Designation for Muslim Brotherhood” HERE)

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Senate Confirms Jeff Sessions as Attorney General

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The Senate voted 52-47 Wednesday night to confirm Jeff Sessions, a longtime U.S. senator and former federal prosecutor, as the nation’s 84th attorney general.

Only one Democrat, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, joined Republicans in confirming Sessions, who voted “present.”

Sessions, a Republican representing Alabama in the Senate since 1997, will take over a Justice Department that conservatives see as tainted by political corruption during the Obama administration.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., lauded President Donald Trump’s choice:

Senate Democrats who opposed their colleague’s nomination succeeded in delaying a Judiciary Committee vote while continuing to attack his character. Their tactics ultimately failed to deter Sessions’ confirmation by the full Senate, where Republicans have 52 seats.

During debate Tuesday night, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., accused Sessions, 70, of trying to “chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens” when he was a U.S. attorney in Alabama.

The Senate subsequently voted to prohibit Warren from speaking for the remainder of the debate because she had broken a rule against “impugning” a fellow member of the Senate. Among her tweets after the vote:

During his legal career, supporters said, Sessions actually worked to desegregate schools in Alabama and brought criminal charges against Ku Klux Klan members. Blacks who worked with and for Sessions rallied to his defense and disputed 30-year-old allegations.

Before representing Alabama in the Senate, Sessions served as the state’s attorney general for two years and as a federal prosecutor there for 12 years. In 1986, the Senate rejected President Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Sessions to a federal judgeship after liberal opponents such as the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., accused him of racism.

Trump announced Sessions as his choice to lead the Department of Justice in November, stating: “It is an honor to nominate U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions to serve as attorney general of the United States. … He is a world-class legal mind and considered a truly great attorney general and U.S. attorney in the state of Alabama.”

Christian Adams, a former Justice Department lawyer who is president and general counsel of Public Interest Legal Foundation, a nonprofit law firm that works to protect the integrity of elections, told The Daily Signal that Sessions will fight for equal justice under the law.

“Finally, the United States will again have an attorney general that stands for all of the law—not just what he agrees with,” Adams said in a statement provided to The Daily Signal, adding:

Sessions has an immense task before him. He will inherit a department filled with employees that have dedicated their careers to prioritizing ideological advancement over equal enforcement of law. Despite this, I am wholly confident that Jeff Sessions is the right man for the job.

Jay Sekulow, chief counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice, a conservative legal and legislative organization, said he is excited about the fresh perspective Sessions will bring to the job. In a statement provided to The Daily Signal, Sekulow said:

After eight years of a Justice Department that was deeply politicized and incapable of doing its job, I am truly delighted that Attorney General Sessions will be at the helm of one of the most critical departments in our government.

In contrast to the one Senate Democrat who voted for Sessions, 10 Republicans voted to confirm his immediate predecessor, Loretta Lynch, and 19 voted to confirm President Barack Obama’s first attorney general, Eric Holder, in 2009.

Sessions long has supported enforcing and reforming immigration law, and he backed Trump’s proposal to build a wall at the border with Mexico.

During the Republican presidential primary, Sessions was the first senator and one of the only members of Congress to endorse Trump.

He was a member of major Senate committees, including Judiciary, Budget, and Armed Services.

(For more from the author of “Senate Confirms Jeff Sessions as Attorney General” please click HERE)

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Dakota Access Pipeline Easement Marks a New Day for US Energy

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The final easement granted on Wednesday by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to complete the Dakota Access pipeline project sent a clear signal to our nation: Infrastructure development is once again a priority.

Last November, America chose a president who campaigned on rebuilding America’s infrastructure, encouraging energy development, and championing job creation. Now, only weeks into his administration, President Donald Trump’s actions have matched his campaign promises.

Four days after his inauguration, the president signed an executive order for expedited approval of the Dakota Access pipeline easement. Two weeks later, the easement has been granted.

This stands in stark contrast to the actions of President Barack Obama, whose disregard for the rule of law last fall halted the completion of the legally permitted Dakota Access pipeline.

This sent a chilling message to the private industries that finance, develop, and complete all required regulatory reviews to build roads, bridges, transmission lines, pipelines, wind farms, and water lines.

The message was that when top government officials and lawless mobs decide to obstruct a legally permitted pipeline project that is more than 90 percent complete, no infrastructure project is safe.

Few people outside North Dakota can comprehend the chaos this conflict brought to my state. It became a cause célèbre, bringing thousands of political activists, anti-oil extremists, and movie stars to an area south of Bismarck where they illegally camped on federal land.

These protestors damaged bridges and construction equipment, burned tires, threatened law enforcement and area residents, and blocked progress on the pipeline’s construction.

Except for a few hundred still in the area, these protesters are mostly gone.

Yet today, the nearby Standing Rock Sioux members and state and county crews are feverishly cleaning up the mess of personal belongings, trash, and human waste they left behind—an estimated 250 truckloads that must be hauled to the Bismarck landfill.

They are hoping to beat next month’s spring thaw on the floodplain where they camped, so that the trash left behind by these “water protectors” doesn’t pollute the Missouri River.

There is a poignant and absurd irony about this situation. Those claiming to be the true protectors of land and water turned out to be the only threat to the environment.

With the easement to finish the Dakota Access pipeline now granted, it’s time to get to work and finish this $3.7 billion private project that will deliver as many as 570,000 barrels of oil a day from northwestern North Dakota through South Dakota and Iowa to connect to existing pipelines in Illinois.

This important piece of energy infrastructure will enhance America’s energy security and put Americans back to work.

I am grateful for the president’s commitment to projects like this that are so vital to our nation.

It sends a strong signal of a new era of cooperation between the federal government and private businesses that are committed to moving our nation forward with new critical infrastructure creating greater job opportunities for Americans. (For more from the author of “Dakota Access Pipeline Easement Marks a New Day for US Energy” please click HERE)

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Last-Minute Lawyer Faulted for ‘Poor Job’ Defending Trump’s Immigration Order

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The lawyer who argued the case for President Donald Trump’s executive order designed to bar terrorists from entering the country is the target of sharp criticism for his performance Tuesday night before a federal appeals court.

“I’m not sure I’m convincing the court,’’ August E. Flentje says.

Flentje, a career Justice Department lawyer, took the case after two top lawyers in the Trump administration recused themselves.

“I’m not sure I’m convincing the court,’’ Flentje said out loud at one point in arguing for the executive order temporarily restricting travel to the U.S. from seven terrorism-prone nations.

During the Obama administration, then-Attorney General Eric Holder honored Flentje for helping to draft the legal case for same-sex marriage and for terrorism suspects being held in the Guantanamo Bay detention center, which the administration sought to close.

When the three-judge panel from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals pressed Flentje for evidence connecting the seven countries to terrorism, he said, “These proceedings have been moving quite fast, and we’re doing the best we can.”

He said the government hadn’t included all the evidence yet. He cited some Somalis in the United States who he said were connected to the al-Shabab terrorist group.

Judge Michelle Friedland asked, “Can you point us to where in the record you are referring?”

Flentje responded: “It is not in the record.”

Flentje delivered a weak argument that likely could affect the outcome of the case, said Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation.

“It was a very poor job. It’s the worst presentation I can recall seeing by a Justice Department attorney,” von Spakovsky, a former Justice Department lawyer, told The Daily Signal.

Justice Department spokeswoman Nicole A. Navas said the department wanted to avoid any conflicts of interest after the former employer of two top Trump administration lawyers filed a brief on behalf of opponents in the suit against the president’s executive order.

The acting solicitor general and acting assistant attorney general “have refrained from signing this brief, out of an abundance of caution, in light of a last-minute filing of an amicus brief by their former law firm,” Navas told The Daily Signal in an emailed statement.

“The department has no additional comment than what was stated in the government’s brief,” she added on the question of why Flentje argued the case in one of the nation’s most liberal circuits.

A federal judge in Seattle on Friday placed a temporary restraining order, or TRO, on enforcement of the week-old executive order. It put a nationwide pause on carrying out the order.

Flentje’s job Tuesday night was to make the legal case for Trump’s order on vetting immigrants from seven Middle Eastern countries that have been terrorism hot spots.

“There was a lot of back and forth in that entire argument,” White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Wednesday in response to a question on Flentje’s presentation and whether Trump was concerned about it.

“I think he did what he had to do to, represent the president’s case and represent the administration’s case on the TRO,” Spicer said of Flentje before adding of Trump:

He feels very confident on the merits. That’s where his focus has been. So I’m not concerned.

I think the president’s main concern has been … making sure that an executive order that was lawfully executed and [went] through the entire process—remember, the DOJ’s Office of Legal Compliance vetted this order and deemed it was legal. So we can follow this entire process to be sure it was done correctly, constitutionally, legally.

Washington state, later joined by Minnesota, challenged Trump’s executive order, arguing it would harm their states’ tax bases and businesses.

A U.S. district judge in Seattle did not rule on the merits of the case, but determined Washington state had standing and issued the temporary restraining order on the executive order. Now, the appeals court is deciding only on the restraining order and not, for now, the actual executive order.

Flentje started work at the Justice Department about 19 years ago, under President Bill Clinton. He continued under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

Noel Francisco, the acting solicitor general, and Chad Readler, acting assistant attorney general, initially were going to represent the Trump administration.

Their decisions to remove their names from the most recent brief and from the case itself came after their former employer, the Jones Day law firm, filed an amicus brief against Trump’s executive order. Jones Day also filed a brief seeking to remove the two lawyers from the case, contending their involvement represented a conflict.

Flentje, the special counsel to the assistant attorney general, then became the highest-ranking Justice Department attorney to handle the case.

Interestingly, Jones Day was associated with both the Trump presidential campaign and the Trump transition team. The new president named a former Jones Day lawyer, Don McGahn, as White House counsel, the legal news site Above the Law noted.

The person filing the brief against Trump’s executive order now could pose ethical questions since the Jones Day firm has had such close ties to Trump in the past, von Spakovsky said.

“The opposing brief of the executive order is a very serious conflict,” von Spakovsky said.

In 2013, Holder issued the Attorney General’s Award for Distinguished Service to a team, including Flentje, that made the legal case that the Defense of Marriage Act, a Clinton-era law recognizing marriage as the union of a man and woman, was not constitutional.

In 2010, Holder’s Justice Department honored Flentje and other lawyers with the Attorney General’s Award for Excellence in Furthering the Interests of U.S. National Security. The award was for their work on 240 appeals involving detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison for terror suspects.

(For more from the author of “Last-Minute Lawyer Faulted for ‘Poor Job’ Defending Trump’s Immigration Order” please click HERE)

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Your Chicken Sandwich Costs More With a $15 Minimum Wage

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Progressives are touting a $15 minimum wage as a low-cost policy to reduce poverty and income inequality. However, the costs of a high minimum wage are higher than its proponents would like to believe.

In a recent Heritage Foundation backgrounder, James Sherk outlined the costs to consumers of a $15 minimum wage and took issue with methodological flaws in two studies that proponents of a higher minimum wage often cite.

Relying on peer-reviewed scholarship on the fast-food sector, Sherk estimates that increasing the minimum wage to $15 would raise fast-food prices 38 percent and reduce employment 36 percent. A chicken sandwich that currently sells for $3.05 would instead cost customers $4.21.

The logic is straightforward: With higher labor costs and already narrow profit margins, fast-food restaurants will have to raise prices. But with higher prices, consumers spend significantly less on fast food.

Sherk goes on to argue that two studies predicting little effect from a $15 minimum wage on fast-food business models include fatal flaws.

One study by Purdue’s School of Hospitality and Tourism Management found that a $15 minimum wage would increase a fast-food restaurant’s costs by only about 4 percent.

However, the authors made a major mistake: They added up median costs, rather than average costs, which made 8 percent of all restaurant costs disappear. Since restaurants in the real world can’t make costs vanish, the study has little relevance for them.

A more respectable effort, by the Political Economy Research Institute, likewise found low costs to fast food from a higher minimum wage. However, the institute’s model assumed that fixed costs were constant in the industry, and that the fast-food sector’s future growth would be relatively low cost. With low cost growth ahead of them, restaurants could afford to pay workers more without raising prices.

However, the assumption of constant fixed costs is inappropriate in a multiyear, industrywide projection, since it implies that the industry will be able to grow without building any new stores or buying any new kitchen equipment.

The Political Economy Research Institute also assumed a lower level of price sensitivity than the scholarly consensus indicates. Finally, the institute assumed that turnover costs in the fast-food sector are unrealistically high, generating unrealistic savings from higher wages.

Correcting these three assumptions brings the institute’s model largely in line with Sherk’s.

Advocates of higher minimum wages have laudable goals: helping poor Americans become self-sufficient and showing respect for often thankless jobs.

But a high minimum wage would do more harm than good. It would raise the cost of living for low-income households, including many that don’t include a minimum-wage worker.

A higher minimum wage also would make entry-level employment harder to find, putting the bottom rung of the wage ladder out of reach to those with the fewest marketable skills.

Those who sincerely care about fighting poverty and improving economic mobility will find less costly ways to meet those goals. (For more from the author of “Your Chicken Sandwich Costs More With a $15 Minimum Wage” please click HERE)

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Liberal MSM Stoops to New Low, Using Persecuted Syrian Christians as Political Props

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This week, a Syrian Christian family was united with its loved ones in New York City after initially being denied entry to the U.S. due to President Donald Trump’s travel moratorium.

Tuesday morning, mainstream media outlets and liberal social justice organizations reported on the heartfelt family reunion, gleefully and conveniently overlooking the sheer hypocrisy of their past failure to cover the plight of persecuted Christians in the Middle East.

According to CNN, members of the Asali family had been waiting nearly 15 years to join their relatives in America. But when they finally made it to their initial destination of Philadelphia, one day after Trump issued a completely legal executive order temporarily barring immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries, the Asalis were sent back to Doha, Qatar.

Sarmad Assali, a U.S. citizen (who spells her surname differently than her Syrian family members), filed a lawsuit with the American Civil Liberties Union in protest. And after a federal judge issued a temporary injunction against Trump’s executive order, the Asalis were able to return to the United States.

Now, the same media outlets and social justice groups that called Trump’s executive order a “Muslim ban,” and lamented the “discriminatory” nature of prioritizing persecuted religious minorities, are celebrating these Christian immigrants. Why, exactly, are they doing this now?

Not because they really care about the Asalis, but because the family serves as the perfect way for them to push their anti-Trump agenda.

See? This family got screwed over, too. And they’re Christians! Not the even anti-Muslim conservative bigots can support Trump now.

“The thrust is, the low influx of persecuted minorities facing genocide was one of the media’s best-kept secrets during the Obama administration,” said Conservative Review’s Nate Madden, who has written extensively on the plight of religious minorities in the Middle East. “Now that Trump has instituted a travel suspension that has provisions for them, they manage to find the compassion button.”

Indeed, religious leaders like Archbishop Bashar Warda, the Chaldean Catholic archbishop of Erbil in Iraq, have long begged the U.S. government and media to shed light and assist on the deadly struggles their people face.

In an interview with Crux magazine earlier this month, Archbishop Warda shared his thoughts on President Trump’s highly contested travel moratorium.

“Christians and other minorities have been largely ignored by the American government before now, so even if this step had a bumpy start and required clarification, we in Iraq appreciate that an American administration understands that we are here and wants to help the minorities here who have suffered so much,” Warda said.

“I do not understand why some Americans are now upset that the many minority communities that faced a horrible genocide will finally get a degree of priority in some manner,” he added.

For many Middle Eastern Christians, Trump’s executive order wasn’t a punishment imposed by a racist foreign tyrant, but a much-welcomed policy change that, in the long run, would benefit the truly destitute.

But of course, we have yet to hear this perspective from the liberal mainstream media, and we’re not likely to any time soon. (For more from the author of “Liberal MSM Stoops to New Low, Using Persecuted Syrian Christians as Political Props” please click HERE)

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DeVos Confirmed as Education Secretary, Pence Casts Historic Tie-Breaking Vote

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School choice advocate Betsy DeVos was narrowly confirmed Tuesday as the next education secretary despite deep opposition from teachers unions and other groups, after Vice President Pence intervened to cast a historic tie-breaking vote.

Pence’s vote marked the first time in American history a vice president has broken a tie on a Cabinet nominee’s Senate confirmation – and the first tie-breaking vote by a VP since 2008. Pence was compelled to cast the vote after two Republican senators – Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska – joined all 48 Senate Democrats in opposing DeVos.

“The Senate being equally divided, the vice president votes in the affirmative and the nomination is confirmed,” Pence said, stepping into his role as president of the Senate in a brief appearance on Capitol Hill.

With his support, DeVos was confirmed on a 51-50 vote.

Devos was sworn in later by Pence in a ceremony at the vice president’s ceremonial office, which he called “the easiest vote I ever cast.” (Read more from “DeVos Confirmed as Education Secretary, Pence Casts Historic Tie-Breaking Vote” HERE)

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‘The Future Is Female’: Hillary Clinton’s First Post-Election Statement Reminds Us Why She Lost

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On Tuesday, Hillary Clinton delivered one of her first public statements since losing the Nov. 8 presidential election. In a video addressed to those attending the MAKERS women’s conference in California, Clinton boldly declares, “The future is female.”

The former first lady praised the participants of last month’s anti-Trump Women’s March on Washington and encouraged women to “be bold” amid the fear and uncertainty that apparently plague women in America.

“Despite all the challenges we face, I remained convinced that, yes, the future is female,” Clinton asserts.

Really? This is how Hillary chooses to break the relative silence of her post-election pity party? By telling women to fight sexism with more sexism? Give us a break!

Conservatives on social media had similar reactions:

As Ben Shapiro so eloquently wrote Tuesday for The Daily Wire, “Women in America in 2017 are the luckiest women in world history, and are not at a systemic disadvantage to men. But Hillary continues to promulgate a victim narrative that does not align with the facts.”

He continued:

No, the future isn’t female. The future is free. And that distinction eluded Hillary during the campaign, which is why she lost. Identity politics can be lucrative business, but it isn’t the truth: the truth is that we all seek a future in which women around the globe have the same freedoms women in America do (although Hillary did little to forward that mission as Secretary of State). Labeling the future “female” is as benighted as labeling it “male” or “black” or “gay.” The future has yet to be decided, and we should all pray that the future isn’t owned by any particular social group.

Hillary, for the future, here’s a tip on how to win votes: Don’t isolate half of the population with contemptuous feminist mantras that needlessly stir dissension and deny reality. Remember, #LoveTrumpsHate. (For more from the author of “‘The Future Is Female’: Hillary Clinton’s First Post-Election Statement Reminds Us Why She Lost” please click HERE)

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