Tag Archives: Topic: Socialism

Phyllis Schlafly at Townhall: Child support formulas are based on the ridiculous notion that a father would make those same sacrifices for an ex-wife who is living with her new husband or boyfriend and for children he never or seldom sees. Many fathers would happily do more to support their children if they got to see their kids more and were more engaged in their lives. But current child support laws have reverse incentives: The more the mother prevents such contact, the more child support she receives. Child support is not even really child support, because the mother has no obligation to spend the money on the kids, and faithful payment of child support does not buy the father time with his kids. The purpose of child support is to allow the mother to maintain a household and standard of living comparable to the father’s.

LifeSiteNews: Almost three-quarters-of-a-million Croatian citizens have said they want to decide for themselves whether to change the nation’s definition of marriage, but the left-leaning coalition government is trying to move the democratic goal posts.

LifeSiteNews: A report by the Italian government has found that more than 80 per cent of gynecologists – in some areas it is believed to be as much as 91 per cent – and over 50 per cent of anesthesiologists and nurses refuse to participate in abortions, and the number is growing. In response, a group of parliamentarians on the left from various parties have attacked the right to conscientious objection, saying that the government must put quotas into place for recruiting doctors willing to abort babies.

Atlanta J. Constitution: The state Supreme Court on Monday declined to dismiss criminal charges against an Atlanta doctor charged with defrauding Medicaid for medical tests and services associated with abortions.

LifeNews: Two Glasgow midwives, who won a landmark legal battle to avoid taking any part in abortion procedures, may now have to return to court. Last April appeal judges ruled that the right of Mary Doogan and Concepta Wood (pictured) to conscientious objection meant they could refuse to delegate, supervise or support staff involved in abortions.

The Hill: rizona’s state legislature approved ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion in two closely watched votes on Thursday, handing a victory to Republican Gov. Jan Brewer and a defeat to conservative lawmakers.

Ken Connor at Townhall: When we gaze across the pond at our European cousins, the general assumption is that we’re looking at our future. From food and fashion to politics and culture, Europe is on the cutting edge – the avant garde. Depending on your ideological sympathies, this is either seen as a good thing or a bad thing.

Christian Institute: A French mayor is facing up to five years in prison and fine of up to £63,000 for declining to carry out a same-sex marriage. Jean-Michel Colo, a mayor in South West France, rejected a wedding application from two men and says he stands by his decision. But under French law, discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation can be punishable by up to half a decade in prison and up to a €75,000 fine.

AP: The Arizona Senate has passed an $8.8 billion state budget Thursday that includes the Medicaid expansion sought by Republican Gov. Jan Brewer as she embraces a signature part of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul law over the opposition of most GOP legislators.

San Francisco Chronicle: House Republicans on Monday are slated to debate a proposed ban on public dollars for abortion providers that could significantly limit health care access for Arizonans and would go much further than an existing federal mandate against abortion funding.

NCPA Policy Digest: The central provisions of the Affordable Care Act require younger and healthier Americans to buy insurance policies that will, in essence, subsidize the health care of older and sicker Americans. But one of ObamaCare’s hidden taxes (a new limit on contributions to flexible spending accounts, or FSAs) will hit older and chronically ill individuals hardest, says Tom Miller, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

LifeNews: A federal judge has intervened to give hope to a young girl who needs a lung transplant as doctors have only given her weeks to live. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius received national condemnation after she refused to get involved to help the girl.

CNSNews: The Social Security program faces $9.6 trillion in unfunded liabilities over the next 75 years, which is up $1 trillion from last year’s projection of $8.6 trillion, according to the latest report from Social Security’s board of trustees.

Robert Oscar Lopez at Public Discourse: After the French protests against same-sex marriage, we can no longer speak of redefined marriage as inevitable or enlightened.

IONA Institute: Every child in Scotland is set to have their own state-appointed overseer under new legislation designed to promote their welfare. Critics have described the move as “dystopian” and an invasion of family privacy. Under the Children and Young People Bill, the Government is required to provide each child with a “named person” from birth, such as a health worker, to ‘promote, support or safeguard the wellbeing of the child or young person’.

CNSNews: In a final regulation issued Wednesday, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) assumed that under Obamacare the cheapest health insurance plan available in 2016 for a family will cost $20,000 for the year.

CNBC: Nearly two-thirds of Americans who currently lack health insurance don’t know yet if they will purchase that coverage by the Jan. 1 deadline set by the ACA, a new survey revealed Monday.

CNSNews: A pre-existing condition health insurance program established by Obamacare is already straining its own budget and, to control costs, the administration’s Health and Human Services Department (HHS) has stopped enrolling any new people in the program, according to an audit by the General Accountability Office (GAO).

John W. Whitehead at the Rutherford Institute: We have indeed reached a crossroads. History may show that from this point forward, we will have left behind any semblance of constitutional government and entered into a militaristic state where all citizens are suspects and security trumps freedom. Certainly, this is a time when government officials operate off their own inscrutable, self-serving playbook with little in the way of checks and balances, while American citizens are subjected to all manner of indignities and violations with little hope of defending themselves. We have moved beyond the era of representative government and entered a new age, let’s call it the age of authoritarianism.

Forbes: One of the most serious flaws with Obamacare is that its blizzard of regulations and mandates drives up the cost of insurance for people who buy it on their own. This problem will be especially acute when the law’s main provisions kick in on January 1, 2014, leading many to worry about health insurance “rate shock.”

The Hill: Health insurance premiums could rise by as much as 40 percent as a result of President Obama’s healthcare law, according to a new study.

Walter Williams at Human Events: The bottom line is that members of Congress need such a ruthless tax collection agency as the IRS because of the charge we Americans have given them. We want what the IRS does — namely, to take the earnings of one American so Congress can create a benefit for some other American. Don’t get angry with IRS agents. They are just following orders.

The Hill: The rules allow employer health plans to offer rewards to workers who meet certain fitness goals — some as broad as joining a gym, others pegged to specific outcomes, such as losing weight or quitting smoking.

Catholic Culture: Today, watching from this side of the Atlantic as hundreds of thousands of French citizens march in defense of marriage, I can’t help thinking that now they are building a movement, the like of which we haven’t seen here in the US.

The Independent: Earlier about 400,000 people, including many children, had defied warnings of possible far-right violence and marched in peaceful protest against France’s newly enacted law permitting same-sex marriage.

France24.com: French Interior Minister Manuel Valls said Thursday he is considering banning French Spring – a radical far right group opposed to the country’s legalisation of gay marriage. A major anti-gay marriage protest is set to take place in Paris on Sunday.

CNSNews: The purpose of this study is to develop and evaluate the benefits of culturally targeted smoking cessation intervention for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender smokers,” the NIH grant description said.

David Brooks at NY Times: About two years ago, the folks at Google released a database of 5.2 million books published between 1500 and 2008. You can type a search word into the database and find out how frequently different words were used at different epochs. The database doesn’t tell you how the words were used; it just tells you how frequently they were used. Still, results can reveal interesting cultural shifts.

WorldNetDaily: The riots in Stockholm this week follow much larger and more devastating unrest in recent years seen in major European cities like London and Paris. In London, a horrific case developed Wednesday where two knife-wielding attackers allegedly beheaded a soldier. Both areas saw raging violence as immigrant youth, primarily Muslim, marauded through the streets wreaking havoc.

AP: The Socialists, who finished second in Bulgaria’s election this month, were asked to form a new government Thursday, after the front-running party was unable to.

The Hill: Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius urged college graduates Wednesday to remember the insurance benefits available to them through ObamaCare.

NCPA Policy Digest: Two provisions in particular will require thousands of new IRS agents, and billions in funding, to enforce: the law’s individual mandate, forcing most Americans to buy government-approved health insurance; and its employer mandate, forcing most employers to take money out of workers’ paychecks to purchase costly health insurance on their behalf.

The Hill: “He thought the opposition to it would lessen after the [2010] election. I said, ‘It’s just the beginning.’ I said, ‘It’s going to grow because I can tell you it’s not going to go away and it’s going to get worse,’” Snowe said in a radio interview moderated by Julie Mason, host of SiriusXM’s Press Pool.

Wall Street Journal: Despite the growing evidence that colleges and universities cost too much, deliver too little and push too many young people into a lifetime of debt, the idea of going to college remains a key part of the American Dream. Now William Bennett, a former secretary of education and the author of “The Book of Virtues” (1996)—along with his co-author, David Wilezol—takes on a question that parents and teens are starting to ask: Is college worth the ever-increasing price tag? The authors’ answer is a hesitant “yes,” but with plenty of provisos and warnings about bigger problems ahead.

Global Post (Reuters): The IRS is charged with distributing health insurance tax credits through the state exchanges. But the complaint argues that the federally created exchanges cannot deliver the tax credits because the law does not say explicitly that they can. The challengers are asking for a federal court order barring administration and enforcement of the healthcare law in these 33 states . . . At least six other lawsuits against the healthcare law are pending in court’s around the country. The case, No. 13-623 Halbig et al v. Sebelius et al, was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

CNSNews: While the White House claims its stimulus package “supported as many as 3.5 million jobs,” none were yielded from a $152,000 project to ready lesbians for “adoptive parenthood.”

Simon Lazarus at the New Republic: But the bottom-line is not hard to grasp: If the case makes its way to the Supreme Court, and all five members of the Supreme Court’s conservative bloc buy Carvin’s rationale, the result would, in rejectionist states, subvert the ACA’s central purpose and stiff the very population the law was enacted to benefit.

Christian Institute: The Government thinks supporters of traditional marriage are just “dinosaurs” who should be “frogmarched” towards a new concept of wedlock, Lord Carey says.

Kristan Hawkins at Townhall: The bottom-line is this: Kermit Gosnell is not unique. He is a product of the culture of death that Planned Parenthood’s hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars cultivates and encourages, beginning with our youth. While Students for Life’s Planned Parenthood Project will soon expose Planned Parenthood’s corrupt, dirty, and deadly practices on campuses nationwide, it’s time for Washington, starting with Republican House Leadership, to investigate and defund the abortion Goliath once and for all.

Joel J. Miller at Patheos: The book is The Humane Economy: The Social Framework of the Free Market, and I think it warrants quoting at length, particularly from the first chapter, which helps explain the crisis in modern Western social and economic systems and explains where Röpke was coming from in addressing the problem: People may be led by Christian and humane convictions to declare themselves in sympathy with socialism and may actually believe that this is the best safeguard of man’s spiritual personality against the encroachments of power, but they fail to see that this means favoring a social and economic order which threatens to destroy their ideal of man and human freedom. . . .

CNS News: And, as the poll suggests, young people share this belief: 66 percent of the students polled had a positive opinion of “entrepreneurship,” 44 percent found “free markets” positive, and 42 percent believe the federal government is an opponent rather than a partner in the pursuit of the American Dream.

Washington Times: The U.S. Department of Education announced Thursday that beginning with the 2014-2015 federal student aid form, the Department will — for the first time — collect income “from a dependent student’s legal parents regardless of the parents’ marital status or gender, if those parents live together.”

Norbert Blum at WorldCrunch: In a society designed around individual liberty, has marriage become little more than a temporary link-up of working people choosing to spend some free time together? And the kids?

LifeSiteNews: Last weekend a number of major French cities held new rallies against same-sex ‘marriage’ that, despite the Spring vacation, attracted many thousands of participants. Organizers of “La Manif pour tous” (Demonstration for all) claim 35,000 demonstrators in Paris, 20,000 in Lyons, 20,000 in Rennes, and thousands more in Lille, Toulouse, Strasbourg, Dijon and many smaller towns . . . Rumours suggest that the Court will announce it’s decision supporting the legislation on May 16th – the International Day against Homophobia.

HSLDA: Last week, HSLDA sent a nationwide alert asking you to call your U.S. senators and urge them to sign a letter from Senator Chuck Grassley exhorting Congress to defund the federal government’s role in the Common Core Standards and Curriculum.

CNBC: Get ready for the Internal Revenue Service to play a dominant role in health care. When Obamacare takes full effect next year, the agency will enforce most of the laws involved in the reform—even deciding who gets included in the health-care mandate.

Matthew Schmitz at First Things: Heterosexual exchange and reproduction has always been the very “grammar” of social relating as such. The abandonment of this grammar would thus imply a society no longer primarily constituted by extended kinship, but rather by state control and merely monetary exchange and reproduction.

Lee Hieb at WND: The big picture is: This is a three-step shell game to bring about the death of private practice medicine in America. Here is how it will work.

Volokh Conspiracy: Last week, several small business owners and individuals filed suit challenging the legality of an IRS rule purporting to authorize tax credits for the purchase of qualifying health insurance policies in federal exchanges.

NCPA Policy Digest: Twenty states and the District of Columbia have signed on to the expansion, and 14 are planning to decline. But 16 remain in limbo as lawmakers clash in the final days and weeks of the legislative calendar, when many must come to a decision in time for the provision to kick in next year.

Rasmussen: A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 59% of Likely U.S. Voters think free market competition would do more to reduce health care costs than more government regulation.

Americans for Tax Reform: sked about Senator Max Baucus’s (D-Mont.) recent “train wreck” comments, President Obama today said, “A huge chunk of it [Obamacare] has already been implemented.” Unmentioned was the wave of destructive Obamacare tax increases that will begin to hit Americans during the next tax filing season and beyond . . .

CNSNews: Miami’s Catholic archbishop, Thomas Wenski, said establishing “gay marriage” would corrupt the natural setting for rearing children by a mother and a father, and further spread “moral relativism,” one of the signs that democracy is “on its way to totalitarianism.”

Washington Post: This comes from the Kaiser Family Foundation, which is out with a poll Tuesday morning looking at how much Americans know about the health-care overhaul—before a deluge of public outreach, set to begin this summer, kicks off.

Breitbart (also on the Drudge Report) : A woman in Spain recently gave birth to the first child born in the village of Los Giles in 45 years, causing a stir in the village.

Catholic Culture: Health officials in Australia have recommended a heavy government subsidy for the abortifacient drug RU-486.

Blog of the Legal Times: If you give money to the Socialist Workers Party, your name won’t show up in Federal Election Commission records.

Forbes: Michigan’s Republican governor, Rick Snyder, was among the many GOP state executives who made national headlines this winter by endorsing Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid, America’s government-run health insurance program for the poor. But what isn’t making headlines is that Michigan’s legislature, like its counterparts in Florida, Ohio, and Arizona, is not going along.

Appellate Daily: The Benedictine monks of St. Joseph Abbey in southern Louisiana make and sell wooden caskets to support their monastery. State regulators are not happy about it, though, because they say the monks need a license.

Times of London: Police fought running battles with protesters in central Paris last night after the French parliament approved legislation authorising same-sex couples to marry and to adopt children.

Christian Institute: Same-sex marriage has been legalised in France, under the most unpopular president since the 1950s according to a new poll. Yesterday the socialist-majority National Assembly voted 331-225 in favour of gay marriage and adoption, despite massive public unrest about the issue.

Baptist Press: A German family should be granted asylum in the U.S. because their s native government is denying a fundamental human right by preventing them from homeschooling their children, attorney Michael Farris told a three-judge panel of the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals Tuesday (April 23) in Cincinnati.

Turtle Bay and Beyond: French parents who wish to pass on certain values to their children will clash in the coming months over the Republic’s education system, which the current Government wishes to reform, particularly in relation to the complementary …

NY Times: On Tuesday afternoon, France is expected to become the 14th country to legalize marriage for all couples, regardless of gender or sexual orientation.

CBC.ca: Some of the schools receiving federal infrastructure funds prohibit things like homosexual relationships, based on the educational institution’s moral code or religious teachings. A new analysis by Radio-Canada finds that out of the $2 billion allocated in the Harper government’s 2009 Economic Action Plan to support infrastructure improvements at universities and colleges, $20 million went to 13 Christian schools, including:

France24: French papers react to demonstrations yesterday for and against same-sex marriage. Left-leaning Libération says the anti-gay marriage camp is becoming more and more homophobic.

Doug McNeil at International Socialist Organization of NZ: The International Socialist Organization supported the campaign for equal marriage rights from the very beginning and, in a very modest way, we have done what we can, along with hundreds of other groups and individuals, to win this battle. We are proud of this. We will be all the prouder joining in the struggles to come. Working-class LGBTI people still have a world to win. I hope this victory so far away will give new energy and determination to everyone involved in the fight for equal marriage rights in the USA. Your fight is our fight. Our victory is your victory.

AP: Rejecting the Medicaid expansion in the federal health care law could have unexpected consequences for states where Republican lawmakers remain steadfastly opposed to what they scorn as “Obamacare.”

CNA: A group of at least 14,900 French mayors has said it will not perform “gay marriages,” even if the government moves ahead with plans to legalize the practice.

Reuters: Chanting “We don’t want your law, Hollande!”, some 50,000 protesters massed behind a banner reading: “All born of a Mum and a Dad” and said it was undemocratic to bring about such a fundamental social change without holding a …

Independent: Scuffles broke out in the French parliament in the early hours of as right-wing opposition to a gay marriage law becomes increasingly strident and ill-tempered.

Christian Institute: People feel forced to say they agree with gay marriage because campaigners have created a society where disagreement is “abnormal” according to an atheist commentator.

LifeSiteNews: Since last Friday, public demonstrations against same-sex “marriage” and adoption in France have been escalating, not only in Paris but also in remote provincial towns and even abroad among French expatriates. The Senate’s approval of the gay marriage bill (known as the “loi Taubira,” after the Justice Minister that proposed the text to the legislature) has sparked off a wave of anger, and groups of determined young people all over the country have decided to make their presence felt.

CitizenLink is proud to work with the Michigan Family Forum and other organizations across the country to stand for marriage, life and religious freedom. Summary: A woman’s marital status at the time of her pregnancy is a significant factor in putting her child at risk. Nearly two-thirds of out-of-wedlock births and many of the subsequent health problems are paid for with public funds. Furthermore, unmarried mothers are more likely to depend on public assistance years after the child is born. While most out-of-wedlock pregnancies are unintended and to young women, a surprising number are intentionally conceived.

Reuters on Yahoo News: Cardinal Andre Vingt-Trois told a meeting of French bishops the planned marriage reform, which the government has speeded up amid mounting pressure from opponents, was a sign that society had lost its capacity to integrate different views.