At a luxury hotel in Maui, representatives from the 12 countries participating in the highly controversial and secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal are negotiating behind closed doors. Thanks to a secret letter from a 2013 meeting, released today by WikiLeaks, we now have a clearer idea of what they’re discussing.
Unsurprisingly, based on what we know about the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, so far, the letter is mostly about limiting the power of government in favor of private commercial development.
The TPP is a massive free trade deal that is set to impact everything from the cost of medicine in Australia, to milk production in Canada, to internet governance the world over. The letter was drafted for a ministerial meeting of the TPP countries in early December, 2013, and seeks guidance on key topics relating to the negotiations. Namely, how state-owned enterprises (SOEs) [like telecommunication services and public utilities], should be treated under the trade deal. . . [The letter contends TPP should] require SOEs to “act on the basis of commercial considerations” [and that] governments should regulate both state-owned businesses and private enterprises with impartiality. State-owned businesses would also not be allowed to discriminate against private companies when purchasing or selling goods. . .
A 2013 report from the European Center for Economic Policy Research found that, globally, SOEs included in the Forbes Global 2,000 list of companies had combined sales of $3.6 trillion, about the size of Germany’s GDP. That’s nothing to sniff at. (Read more from “New Leak Confirms the Secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership Is a Horror Show” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2015-08-01 03:53:102016-04-11 10:58:15New Leak Confirms the Secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership Is a Horror Show
After the end of each day’s business, an inconspicuous unmarked van pulls up to the back of the neighborhood abortion clinic. Carrying an orange plastic cooler, the driver enters through an unlocked back door and exits moments later, cooler full. Inside the ice chest are opaque, heavy-duty sealed plastic bags.
One bag contains the relatively intact body of a mid-term human fetus. The mother’s general health and statistics are noted on the bag along with the baby’s blood type. Several other bags hold the bloody slurry of early term abortion remains; some contain various body parts — brains, livers, kidneys, eyes, umbilical cords — and others have a random mix of tissue, detached limbs and heads.
These details are obtained from a physician who operated a late term abortion clinic in Maryland. I approached him in 2009 as a journalist doing an article on the life sciences industry. He was in the process of selling out to another doctor and leaving the abortion center. While he asked me not to use his name in my report, he was very forthcoming about the process for fetal tissue harvesting and transport. He made clear that what is described above is business as usual in the fetal body parts industry in America. Many a child is slaughtered in the womb and then rendered, packaged and brokered to a multitude of industries, whose products and projects comprise the aftermarket for the roughly 1.2 million U.S. abortions annually.
Big Business
It’s big business and getting bigger. To all indications it operates relatively free of regulatory oversight, and this not from a lack of scandal: Not long after I interviewed the unnamed doctor above, Dr. Leroy Carhart took over the clinics, and in 2013 a woman died from a 33-week abortion in the clinic described above.
Now, this month, the first videos in what the Center for Medical Progress promises will be a rolling barrage of undercover videos has put this dark business back into the public spotlight. In response to the first sting video, Planned Parenthood stated that “similar false accusations have been put forth by opponents of abortion services for decades” and “these groups have been widely discredited.” What Planned Parenthood does not mention is that many of the accusations they dismiss have come not from “opponents of abortion services” but from the abortion industry’s own employees and proponents.
Prior to 1993, use of fetal tissue for medical research or any other application was illegal, excepting if the tissue was derived from an ectopic pregnancy or spontaneous abortion (miscarriage). Then in 1993, President Bill Clinton ordered the end of the moratorium on federal funds for research using fetal tissue. Later in 1993, Congress passed the NIH Revitalization Act, which permits the use of fetal tissue from any type of abortion for biomedical research, with a stipulation limiting payment to “reasonable fees for obtaining and delivery of tissue.” And so began the abortion aftermarket industry, with fetal tissue retrieval companies delivering fetal material from abortion clinics to tissue repository banks, who in turn listed their wares with brokers who then sold baby body parts to laboratories and commercial concerns throughout the world. The industry was off and running.
By the late ’90s, the sale of “services” in the procuring and processing of aborted fetal body parts became a thriving, though somewhat primitive private industry. Tissue labs forged partnerships with public and private abortion clinics to provide baby body parts for both commercial business concerns and National Institute of Health-funded laboratories.
How profitable was this new industry? The consulting firm of Frost and Sullivan reported that “the worldwide market for cell lines and tissue cultures brought in nearly $428 million in corporate revenues in 1996. It (was) further predicted that between 1996 and 2003, the market would grow at an average annual rate of 13.5 percent and, by 2002, would be worth nearly $1 billion.”
Bad Publicity
This abortion aftermarket was in full swing by 1999 when Dean Alberty, Jr., an abortion tissue retrieval technician working for Anatomic Gift Foundation, a Maryland-based fetal tissue company, sparked a public outcry by speaking out about the atrocities he had witnessed on the job.
Alberty had grown disgusted with his involvement in what he called “the rendering of baby bodies for parts.” Missy Smith, founder of the watchdog organization WAKEUP in Washington, D.C., recalls what Alberty cited to her as the incident that drove him over the edge:
Dean was a simple man who had a rather gruesome job. At that time the tissue retrieval companies would rent space in the back rooms of abortion clinics so that they could process the fetal tissue while it was still as fresh as possible. One day in a D.C. metro area abortion clinic Dean was doing his job of dissecting a just-aborted fetus. The abortion doctor came in with a square metal tub. In the tub was a set of twins, about six or so months of gestation, still moving, still alive.
Dean refused to process the fetuses, telling the doctor, ‘I will not murder those babies!’ The doctor proceeded to fill the tub with water and drown the twins. He handed the tub back to Dean, telling him he could ‘get on with his job now.’”
Dean’s allegations came to the attention of Mark Crutcher, head of Life Dynamics, in Denton, Texas. Dean ultimately produced copies of over fifty orders for fetal body parts from laboratories throughout the U.S. and Canada, along with a price list from Open Lines, Inc., Dr. Jones’ human tissue processing company based in West Frankfort, Illinois. Crutcher sent the information he had gathered to all the members of Congress in late 1999.
The information was also leaked to media outlets such as ABC and CNN. The Orange County Register, The Washington Times and several Canadian publications began investigating and exposing macabre and inhumane practices in fetal tissue labs and abortion clinics. Soon ABC’s 20/20 produced a program about the baby body parts industry presented by journalist Connie Chung. The 20/20 exposé aired on March 8, 2000, focusing attention on a congressional hearing the following day before the Sub-Committee for Health and Environment. There Alberty gave emotional testimony about his involvement in the industry and its impact on his life:
Upon taking the job as a fetal tissue procurement tech, I was under the impression that what I was going to do would make life better for Parkinson’s patients, Alzheimer’s and cancer patients. Never was I led to believe that the tissue would be anything but helpful for those in need … What changed my mind was watching late-term abortions, seeing their eyes looking at me as I cut through their skull to extract their brain for Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s patients, cutting open their chest cavity, only to see a beating heart moving ever so slowly until it stopped … Night after night in my sleep, the (drowned) twins always were there. Hearts were beating … mothers screaming. The respect for myself was gone. How could the heroes of my life understand what I witnessed?
Congress Fails to Fix the Problem
Ultimately many in Congress concluded that the fetal tissue supply segment of the industry needed greater oversight, and HR3980 “Human Fetal Tissue Reporting and Disclosure Act of 2000” was proposed. Spearheaded by Oklahoma Rep. Tom Coburn, M.D., the bill called for an Amendment to the Public Health Service Act to require entities that distributed and received fetal tissue for any purpose, other than solely for purpose of pathological examination, to file a detailed disclosure statement with the Secretary of Health and Human Services enumerating everything from the type and condition of the fetal parts in a given transaction to the amount paid. Violation of the section would be punishable by a fine of not less than $10,000 per incident.
The hope was that the bill, if made into law, would make it next to impossible for the fetal industry in the United States to get rich off of aborted babies since the 1993 NIH Revitalization Act already appeared to stipulate that fees should be set no higher than was needed to cover preservation and shipping costs. The paper trail on the way to any financial funny business would simply be too easy to follow, and the potential financial penalty for failing to file accurate paperwork too steep to risk.
Many pro-lifers assumed the Congressional attention had taken down the baby body part brokering industry. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. The year 2000 was Rep. Coburn’s last year in the House (he voluntarily term-limited himself out, keeping a promise from his original run for the seat in 1994), and without his oversight the bill that would have regulated the activities of the maverick abortion aftermarket industry died in committee. Coburn returned to the Hill as a Senator in 2004, but by then the bill was ancient history.
Unfinished Business
A decade later in 2009, with the help of several pro-life organization watchdogs, I took a fresh look into the abortion aftermarket industry. The investigation reveled that a new, more sophisticated breed of tissue laboratories had evolved. The industry that had begun by supplying fetal tissue for NIH research had expanded to offering it for private biomedical laboratories in the United States and other countries. Many of the companies that brokered fetal tissue were global biomedical conglomerates that generate many billions of dollars in revenues annually. And my best estimate at the time was that the abortion aftermarket had grown into an $85 billion industry.
The raw material for this industry comes from only one place — abortion clinics such as Planned Parenthood. What is their cut in these enormous profits? Since there is precious little statutory oversight into the harvesting, processing, transporting, sale and end use of commercially brokered baby body parts, it’s hard to know.
What is known is that the fetal aftermarket industry has been with us now for at least 22 years and makes billions of dollars a year off the bodies of the unborn. All the attention at the moment is on the sting videos showing Planned Parenthood’s calloused and profitable involvement in this industry. What the public needs to recognize is that others have spoken out from inside the industry without the need of a sting video to draw out the truth. These include nurses who were made to let aborted babies born alive die alone in cold metal tubs.
What the public also needs to know is that a season of short-lived outrage is not enough. The public was outraged in 2000, and many people thought something was done about the baby body shop industry. But the industry’s lobbyists went to work, the politicians went on summer break, football season started, attentions wandered and now here we are, watching videos exposing what we should have known all along — there is a burgeoning and thriving baby body market here in the United States, where flesh is bought and sold and none of the people on the auction block get out alive. (Re-posted with permission from the author, “Big Business and Bad Government: Washington Has Known About the Selling of Baby Parts for Years, but Has Failed to Fix It”, originally appeared HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2015-07-31 02:35:172016-04-11 10:58:16Big Business and Bad Government: DC Has Known About the Buying and Selling of Baby Parts for Years, but Has Failed to Fix It
By WND. The polls may show Donald Trump is the front-runner in the Republican presidential race, but one of his fellow GOP candidates says the billionaire businessman and reality-TV star will never become the next president of the United States because “he’s a birther.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., doubled down on his criticism of Trump during an interview Thursday on Newsmax TV’s “The Steve Malzberg Show.”
Graham, who will not make it onto the main Fox News debate stage next Thursday night due to low poll numbers, argues Trump isn’t “marketable” and would be the end of the GOP’s chances in 2016.
“I don’t think you’re going to elect a man president of the United States who is a birther,” Graham said. “I don’t believe you’re going to elect a man president of the United States who spent thousands of his own dollars, he claims, trying to find out if Obama was born in Kenya. I don’t think you’re going to elect a man president of the United States who basically said most illegal immigrants are drug dealers and rapists (and) who slandered veterans like John McCain.”
As WND reported, Trump recently expressed doubts once again about the site of President Obama’s birth, while answering a question from CNN anchor Anderson Cooper.
“I don’t know. I really don’t know,” Trump said, when asked if he thought Obama had been born in America. “I don’t know why he wouldn’t release his records.” (Read more from “Trump Smacked: America Won’t Elect ‘Birther’ Prez” HERE)
Trump Just Scored Two Huge Wins in a Way That Could Redefine the Race
By Norvell Rose. When the home team suffers an unexpected and startling defeat on its own field, fans and commentators will most likely take notice. And that’s just what’s happening today as the GOP front-runner for the 2016 presidential nomination, Donald Trump, scores a big win in a state where a rival or two could certainly be considered favorite sons.
The website Florida Politics reports on what it calls the “shock poll” that finds Trump leading Jeb Bush by a significant margin in Florida, the state where George W.’s younger brother served as a very popular governor from 1999-2007.
According to the just-released St. Pete Polls survey of more than 1900 likely GOP primary voters in the Sunshine State:
And what about Marco Rubio’s standing in the newly released survey of GOP voters? The senator from Florida is also found to be trailing Trump. Rubio places fourth in the new poll with 10 percent of the respondents backing him. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker came in third with 12 percent.
What many observers and analysts of presidential politics might find equally if not more surprising are the results of a different voter poll — one conducted by the left-leaning Public Policy Polling (PPP). In this national survey, Donald Trump has a higher favorability rating than any of his GOP competitors among Latinos who were questioned July 20-21 about their candidate preferences. (Read more from this story HERE)
About 70 percent of the roughly 100,000 U.S. Boy Scout units are sponsored by religious institutions, and many said the Monday decision runs counter to the moral standards set by the 105-year-old youth organization.
“We express consummate sadness that this once vibrant organization continues to cave to social pressure, compromising its long-held, constitutionally protected tenets,” said Roger “Sing” Oldham, a spokesman for the Nashville-based Southern Baptist Convention.
Even though the decision permits religious organizations to exclude gay adults in keeping with their beliefs, other major conservative church groups also criticized the change, which took effect with the vote Monday by the National Executive Board.
The largest sponsor of Boy Scout units, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has said it was “deeply troubled” by the move, adding the Mormons’ “century-long association with Scouting will need to be examined.”
The church was unable to make a decision quickly on whether to remain with the Boy Scouts because its top leaders — including the president, his two counselors and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles — were off with their families in July, Dane O. Leavitt, a Mormon leader who serves as the liaison with the Boy Scouts, told The New York Times. (Read more from “Baptists, Mormons Both Slam Boy Scouts Over Gay Leadership” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2015-07-31 02:34:252016-04-11 10:58:16Baptists, Mormons Both Slam Boy Scouts Over Gay Leadership
Last fall we wrote about leaders of ISIS encouraging their followers and supporters to attack American servicemen here at home, and that it was imperative that a national concealed carry reciprocity bill be passed to allow members of the military and members public to carry concealed weapons legally from state to state.
“Do not ask for anyone’s advice and do not seek anyone’s verdict. Kill the disbeliever whether he is civilian or military, for they have the same ruling. Both of them are disbelievers. Both of them are considered to be waging war,” said the leader of ISIS in a radio speech.
Well, the recent attack that killed four Marines and a sailor in Chattanooga, Tenn. was unfortunate proof that we were right. At the time officials at the Department of Defense issued warnings to service members, veterans and their families that they might be targets and to be aware of potential dangers and practice situational awareness when off base, as well as monitor their social media accounts.
Unfortunately while DOD warned them, they didn’t give them a means to defend themselves. Military recruiters are never issued arms and even on base stateside only a limited number of service members carry weapons with ammunition and that is generally limited to military police and those on guard or security duties.
This is a long-standing policy going back many decades, though it has nothing to do with a Clinton era directive, as many have claimed. The policy is much older.
As a Marine in an infantry battalion on Camp Pendleton in the 1980s the only time we had our issue weapons was for training, inspections, cleaning, or guard duty and the only time we had ammunition was at the rifle range, live fire exercises or guard duty, and only a tiny percentage of Marines in the regimental area were on guard at any one time. I have spoken to Marines and soldiers who served in the 1970s and 1960s who confirmed the policy was the same then.
The same went for privately owned weapons. If you owned one it had to be kept off base or the unit armory, not in your barracks. Even married Marines living in on base houses couldn’t keep weapons at home. The policy also went back to at least the 1960s.
Regardless of when the policies started, it is time they were changed. They date back to the Cold War, when the homeland was comparatively safe, at least on an individual level. We may have been preparing for all-out war with the Soviet Union but we did not have to face terrorist attacks on our military here on our own soil. The situation we face today is more akin to what the Israelis have combatted for years, when an attack can come at any place or any time and soldiers are armed at all times—even off base and in urban areas.
There has to be a way to allow some of our recruiters at recruiting stations to be armed, to allow soldiers and Marines who wish to carry concealed to do so—especially going to and from base— and to expand the definition of who can be armed on base. The Israelis with a conscripted military manage it; it assumes that our all-volunteer, highly trained, and professional force cannot. If we trust our military with live weapons overseas, we should be able to trust them with them here.
There is a one small consolation that came out of the attack in Chattanooga and it is that is that two of those under attack were able to shoot back against their attacker, apparently with privately owned and not issue weapons. One of them, a Marine, was killed. His Glock was found near him. The other, a naval officer, Lt. Commander Timothy Smith, shot back and lived. Federal agents investigating the attack said these two men saved countless lives.
Of course the great fear now is that that Smith will be prosecuted by the military for his heroism because he may have violated federal law by having a weapon at all. Members of the military cannot pick and choose which orders to obey. He may be given a medal with one hand and a reprimand with the other.
If that happens it would ignite a public relations disaster for the administration. It would be better that this be recognized as a watershed moment and that Smith disobeyed a stupid and dangerous regulation and any necessary punishment be light and symbolic. Honor Smith for showing the way forward and find a way for members of the military to legally protect themselves. (Re-posted with permission, “The New Military: Guns Aren’t Welcome Here”, originally appeared HERE)
A growing body of science reveals an undisputable fact: unborn babies can feel pain by 20 weeks post-fertilization, and most likely even earlier. As the medical community continues to increase its understanding of fetal pain, there have also been increasing legislative efforts to protect the unborn child from cruel suffering.
Unborn babies 20 weeks post-fertilization not only have the anatomy to process pain but also the neurobiology to transmit painful sensations to the brain and perceive pain. Dr. Jean A. Wright, testifying at a Congressional subcommittee hearing summarized it best:
After 20 weeks of gestation [18 weeks post-fertilization], an unborn child has all the prerequisite anatomy, physiology, hormones, neurotransmitters, and electrical current to close the loop and create the conditions needed to perceive pain. The development of the perception of pain begins at the sixth week of life. By 20 weeks [18 weeks post-fertilization], and perhaps even earlier, all the essential components of anatomy, physiology, and neurobiology exist to transmit painful sensations from the skin to the spinal cord and to the brain.
[The author, Arina Grossu, discusses fetal pain in the second half of the below podcast; during the first half, she discusses the Planned Parenthood videos]
There is no question, biologically speaking, about whether an unborn child can feel pain by 20 weeks post-fertilization. By 18 weeks post-fertilization, nerves link pain receptors to the brain s thalamus (the pain processing center). By 18 weeks post-fertilization, the cerebral cortex (the region of the brain associated with higher mental functions) has acquired a full complement of neurons, meaning all of the neurons are present, though not all the connections in the cortex are fully developed until later. EEG activity, a recording of electrical activity in the brain, appears for the first time at 18 weeks post-fertilization, showing the integrity of the circuitries of the cortex and the thalamus.
Some scientists take an agnostic position on whether the unborn child consciously experiences pain by 20 weeks post-fertilization and they argue this based on a theory that a mature cerebral cortex is necessary for the conscious perception of pain. However, a mature cerebral cortex is not necessary in order for the unborn child to feel pain, as evidenced by scientific studies and observations that both children and adults who are born with no or minimal cerebral cortex, do in fact still perceive pain.
The instruction of medical textbooks and accepted common medical practice is to administer fetal anesthesia before an in-utero surgery on the unborn child around 20 weeks post-fertilization. The common practice is based on the science of fetal development and the observation that unborn children who are not given anesthesia elicit a hormonal stress response to painful stimuli, which is alleviated by the effects of anesthesia as it is in adults.
Legislation that addresses fetal pain must be based on the indisputable biology, scientific data, and physical evidence of fetal pain and not on political, religious, theoretical, or philosophical ideas about self-consciousness or self-awareness. The bottom line is that an unborn child can and does feel pain by 20 weeks post-fertilization. Fetal pain mechanisms are in place at that time.
Polling shows that the majority of Americans agree on setting abortion bans, such as the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, to protect the almost 13,000 American pain-capable unborn children who die from late abortion each year. (Re-posted with permission from the author, “What Science Reveals About Fetal Pain”, originally appeared HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2015-07-31 02:33:462016-04-11 10:58:17The Science is Conclusive: Fetal Pain is Real AND Extreme
The economic expansion—already the worst on record since World War II—is weaker than previously thought, according to newly revised data.
From 2012 through 2014, the economy grew at an all-too-familiar rate of 2% annually, according to three years of revised figures the Commerce Department released Thursday. That’s a 0.3 percentage point downgrade from prior estimates.
The revisions were released concurrently with the government’s first estimate of second-quarter output.
Since the recession ended in June 2009, the economy has advanced at a 2.2% annual pace through the end of last year. That’s more than a half-percentage point worse than the next-weakest expansion of the past 70 years, the one from 2001 through 2007. While there have been highs and lows in individual quarters, overall the economy has failed to break out of its roughly 2% pattern for six years . . .
The output reading for the first quarter of last year was recast to a 0.9% contraction instead of a 2.1% annualized drop. The prior figure represented the worst contraction on record outside of a recession. The new number isn’t even the worst quarterly contraction of the expansion. GDP declined at a 1.5% annual pace in the first quarter of 2011. (Read more from “The Worst Expansion Since World War II Was Even Weaker” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2015-07-31 02:30:492016-04-11 10:58:17The Worst Expansion Since World War II Was Even Weaker
By Daniel Horowitz. Yesterday, Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC), embarked on the most important mission any self-described conservative representative can undertake as a member of this Congress.
He filed a motion to vacate the chair, which commences the process through which a group of roughly 30 conservatives can remove John Boehner from the Speaker’s chair and restore some measure of deterrent against Obama’s impending transformational agenda during his last 18 months in office. In other words, Meadows pulled the trigger on the one thing that actually matters.
We live in an unprecedented time with a president that is hell-bent on dismantling our values, borders, economy, criminal justice system, and national security. At the same time, there has been absolutely no opposition to any of Obama’s policies from the GOP leadership. It is obvious Obama knows it. There’s a sense of desperation and hopelessness among Republicans across the nation. Mark Meadows has finally given those people a voice.
As long as both houses of Congress are controlled by those who are given to every whim of this imperial president, there will be no deterrent against his malfeasance – no matter how unlawful, no matter how toxic to the fabric of this nation. There is nothing stopping Obama from commuting sentences and pardoning criminals, essentially emptying the federal prisons in his final year. There is nothing stopping him from abusing his executive waiver authority to let in even more illegal immigrants. There is nothing to deter him from embracing even more of our nation’s enemies in his final months. Boehner and McConnell have ruled out using the one deterrent against such behavior – the power of the purse.
Conservatives have many good ideas to use Congress as both a check on Obama’s power and an effective messaging tool as it relates to Iran, illegal immigration, religious liberty, and a host of other fundamental issues. However, not a single one of those issues will be fought even half-heartedly until conservatives reassert a modicum of control over at least one house of Congress. And that will not happen as long as John Boehner is occupying the Speaker’s chair.
This is where Mark Meadows comes in, by introducing a resolution to vacate the chair.
According to House rules, any member can offer a motion to vacate the Speaker’s chair and force a de facto ‘vote of no confidence’ in the Speaker. Under normal circumstances, an individual member has no power to force a vote on any bill or resolution, but the motion to vacate is “privileged.” Meadows, however, filed his motion in a “non-privileged form,” which means the motion does not require immediate consideration. There is nothing Boehner can do to block the motion.
The genius of this strategy is that there is no pressure on the conservative side like there was in January when they had to muster the 30 votes at a specific date – the day of the Speaker’s election. Meadows intends for this resolution to hang over Boehner’s head for as long or as short as needed to gather the votes. This will place enormous pressure on members headed into the August recess to declare their support or opposition for John Boehner.
Remember the tens of thousands of phone calls that flooded the capitol switchboard in January? And that was before the series of great betrayals over the past few months.
Some members will attempt to weasel their way out of their responsibility by claiming that there is no alternative. But that is nonsense. As soon as Boehner is deposed, there will be plenty of options on the table. Last time, Rep. Daniel Webster (R-FL), tossed his hat into the ring for the Speaker nomination. While Webster is not necessarily a member who is well-established in the conservative movement, he respects regular order and would at least give conservatives a seat at the table in setting the agenda. There’s no reason that someone like him won’t toss his hat into the ring this time.
More importantly, Boehner must be removed from his position of power because he (along with McConnell) is seriously jeopardizing the chance to win back the White House. By obfuscating the party divide and ignoring every harmful and unpopular action of this president, Republican leaders are artificially inflating Obama’s popularity and depressing potential conservative turnout in the upcoming election.
Every GOP representative will go home this August to his or her district and extol the virtues of their service and how they oppose illegal immigration, the Iran alliance, Planned Parenthood, and are deeply concerned about the growing threats to religious liberty. They will also tout some legislation they have introduced to tackle these important issues. But none of this will matter if they fail to categorically commit to dethroning John Boehner. Unless he is removed from the Speaker’s office, not a single conservative priority will be championed nor will a single imperial act of Obama’s be countermanded in a meaningful way. Nothing else matters other than the Speaker’s vote.
Yesterday was Mark Meadows’s Moses moment, when Moses went to the gate of the camp and declared, “Whoever is for the Lord, [let him come] to me!” [Exodus 32:26].
It will soon become apparent who the Levites of our generation are, and we will be keeping track. (Re-posted with permission from the author, “Mark Meadows Stands up to Boehner”, originally appeared HERE)
Natalie Johnson of the Daily Signal provides some insight into Rep. Mark Meadows’ quality personality and unique experiences:
1. Meadows’ attempt to unseat Speaker Boehner is not the first time he has rebelled against Washington’s power players. Last month, Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, temporarily removed Meadows from his subcommittee chairmanship for voting against a motion to advance President Obama’s trade bill.
2. Meadows was a key player in the 2013 government shutdown, sending a letter to Boehner just eight months after taking office encouraging him to halt any appropriations bill including Obamacare funding. CNN went as far as to call Meadows the “architect” of and “man behind” the shutdown.
3. He has a cordial reputation on Capitol Hill. Both Democrats and Republicans call him one of the “nicest guys” in D.C., Politico reports, and The Washington Post dubbed him the “friendliest guy in the House.”
4. His affable personality shows in interviews. Just days after Chaffetz stripped his chairmanship, Meadows told The Washington Post, “I love people.” “Every single week, I try to find at least seven different people with something unique and admirable about them, and I share that with them. D.C. is not going to change me on that, even today.”
5. Meadows was first elected to Congress in 2012 following redistricting in North Carolina, which shifted his district from “slightly” Republican to solid.
6. His seat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee allowed him to play a lead role in pushing Congress to investigate the Internal Revenue Service for targeting conservative groups.
7. His position also launched him as central in forcing the resignation of Office of Personnel Management Director Katherine Archuleta in July following the department’s massive data breach exposing 21.5 million Social Security numbers.
8. He grew up in Tampa Bay, Florida, describing himself as a “fat nerd” during his early years. He decided to lose weight after he attempted to ask a girl out only to be shot down. “I went home and looked in the mirror and said, ‘You’re fat.’ So, I started almost immediately to run a mile to lose weight,” Meadows recalled.
9. He caught the attention of his wife, Debbie, in high school after he lost weight, becoming “unrecognizable” even to her—she thought he was a new student. They both graduated from the University of South Florida.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2015-07-30 14:35:072016-04-11 10:58:18Mark Meadows Stands up to Boehner
A new undercover video of Planned Parenthood was released this morning, and it brings home in brutal detail how the organization profits by carefully dismembering unborn children (many of them, we now know, in their second or third trimester) so they can sell them to bidders in the abortion aftermarket. The newest video goes into more depth with a new eyewitness source describing the gruesome body-parts industry from the inside.
The first, second and now third video from the Center for Medical Progress presents the Republican party with both a moral imperative and a unique opportunity: Claim the undisputed moral high ground in the run-up to the next election, touch America’s heartstrings, and appeal to all that is decent while doing what is unquestionably right. It can shine a surgical light on the dishonesty, bone-deep ghoulish cynicism and moral squalor defended by leading Democrats. And having done so, it can defund and cripple an abortion business founded on racism and eugenics, one that gobbles up half a billion in taxpayer dollars, billions more in tax-exempt donations, and is still not sated.
No, Planned Parenthood cannot rest at using taxpayer money to target the poor, the black, the disadvantaged unborn in America and simply leave it at that. Whatever spirits are guiding it, they goad it to go even further, and profit from the tiny dismembered bodies of its victims by taking them for parts. The sheer horror of the act makes us unwilling to face it, as Allied generals refused at first to believe what they saw when they liberated Nazi camps. But how else to explain those piles of carefully counted gold teeth, those shoes all neatly piled, lest anything go to waste?
My father served under General Patton in 1945, and he remembered how Patton reacted: He rounded up all the law-abiding, deferential German citizens of the nearest town, and forced them to walk through the camps, to see up close and personal what their Fuhrer had accomplished.
The Center for Medical Progress is emulating Patton, marching the flinching media through the medical waste bins and organ markets of America’s abortion industry. And Americans are following, tentatively, hoping that some rational explanation will be offered, so they don’t have to face the truth.
The Republican Senate leadership is actively trying to cover up the truth, to throw procedural roadblocks in the path of pro-life legislators such as Senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul who want to defund Planned Parenthood. Men like Mitch McConnell seem to hope this ugly issue will go away so they can get back to the real business of the Senate: passing empty symbolic votes opposing Obamacare, and greasing the tracks for that much beloved tool of government/corporate cronyism, the Export/Import Bank.
You can always count on Congress’s Republican leadership to recognize an opportunity. They spot it with eagle eyes, then plunge their heads straight into the sand.
But good men like Ted Cruz are grabbing the ostrich by the neck. He is holding his own party’s leadership accountable for the scandal of taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood, and the truth is on his side. Even better, the truth is leaking out slowly, one nightmarish video at a time, and will go on leaking out over the coming days and weeks. And there’s nothing that the Democrats, or Mitch McConnell, or the mainstream media, can do to silence it.
The truth about Planned Parenthood’s baby parts side business will lead to other truths, such as the truth about Margaret Sanger’s model eugenics laws, passed in 13 American states, which inflicted forced sterilization or castration on Americans who failed culturally-biased IQ tests. It sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it’s well-documented and regarded as settled fact among historians of the period, one conveniently left out of many high school and college American history textbooks.
Those eugenics laws were used by the Nazis to plan their own eugenics program — with the help of Margaret Sanger’s good friend Harry Laughlin, whom the Nazis consulted to learn about how Sanger and Laughlin had sold Americans on “racial hygiene.”
After the Nazi concentration camps were liberated, there was a war criminal, named Dr. Josef Mengele, who escaped justice at Nuremburg, fled to greener pastures and, as The New York Times has reported, prospered as an abortionist.
That’s called coming full circle.
Soon half of America will see Planned Parenthood not as a triage clinic for impoverished victims of the sexual revolution, but for what it really is: a spectacularly successful eugenics organization, one that has managed to camouflage itself for decades and now profiteers off the organs of our most vulnerable and innocent.
The question of the hour is whether Mitch McConnell, John Boehner and the U.S. Congress will respond with even the most modest of steps: merely ceasing to take dollars from the pockets of an outraged America and sending them to the abortion body shops of Sanger’s organizational descendants. (Posted with permission of the author, “The Third Undercover Video of Planned Parenthood: Outrage Is Insufficient”, originally appeared HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2015-07-30 03:58:382016-04-11 10:58:18The Third Undercover Video of Planned Parenthood: Outrage Is Insufficient [+videos]
Photo Credit: CNN By Chad Pergram. Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., sure knows how to party.
Meadows marked his 56th birthday Tuesday, by scheduling to move with his wife Debbie from one apartment to another in Washington, D.C. And somewhere in between packing dishes into corrugated boxes, Meadows filed an unprecedented resolution to oust House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio.
In a single stroke, the rebellious congressman has not only infuriated the GOP leadership but scrambled their plans of using the August recess to focus on the Iran deal and a web of other issues. Now, the House goes into recess with this debate churning, even if the push stands little chance of succeeding.
“We will be getting bogged down on who is speaker over the August recess,” seethed Rep. Pete King, R-N.Y. “We could end up like a European parliament. We should be talking about Iran. It’s terrible.”
Incidentally, the resolution also had to do with moving furniture. It seeks to compel Boehner to give up the speaker’s suite, with a parliamentary motion known as “vacating the chair.” (Read more from “‘People Are Stunned’: Resolution to Oust Boehner Scrambles Party’s August Recess Plans” HERE)
Boehner Brushes off Conservative Effort to Oust Him
By Deirdre Walsh. House Speaker John Boehner on Wednesday brushed off the effort by one House conservative to oust him as “no big deal.”
“This is one member. I’ve got broad support amongst my colleagues,” Boehner insisted at his weekly press conference.
Blindsiding fellow Republicans and House GOP leaders, conservative Rep. Mark Meadows, R-North Carolina, launched an effort on Tuesday to remove Boehner as speaker.
On Wednesday, Boehner downplayed the idea of a revolt by the right, evidenced by the resolution that would strip him of his speakership and Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz’s criticism of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell earlier this week.
“You’ve got a member here and a member there who are off the reservation — no big deal,” Boehner said. (Read more from this story HERE)
