Twelve Anti-Family Gifts from Congress

from The Heritage Foundation
Posted December 25th, 2009 at 4.00pm in Family and Religion.

As Congress wraps up its final business for the year, there are at least a dozen detrimental policies included in the omnibus spending bill recently signed into law by the President. Taken as a whole, these policies devalue human life, weaken civil society, and undermine the family. Unfortunately, these provisions have largely gone unnoticed by the general public.

The Dirty Dozen

The Fiscal Year 2010 Omnibus Appropriations bill passed by Congress includes a slew of offensive items:

1. Elimination of abstinence education. Despite polling showing the vast majority of parents want their children to be taught that abstinence is best, the omnibus defunds the abstinence-based education program. In its place Congress creates another condom-based sex education program.

2. Spreading the wealth. The omnibus bill, as well as the other appropriation measures that have passed this year, represent a fulfillment of President Obama’s promise to “spread the wealth.” His 2010 budget reflects a 30 percent increase over President Bush’s last year in office on means-tested welfare programs such as housing, food stamps, and health care. Unfortunately, these programs do little or nothing to help recipients move off of the welfare rolls and into jobs where they can achieve independence and provide for their families.

3. Needle exchange. Tucked into the health portion of the bill is an allowance of federal taxpayer funds to be used for needle exchange programs whereby drug addicts can get new needles for turning in used needles. Ostensibly to prevent the spread of infection, these programs settle for “harm reduction” rather than overcoming drug addiction. The provision does allow local health agencies and local law enforcement to “opt-out.”

4. Planned Parenthood funding. Despite the country’s towering deficit, the omnibus bill boosts Title X family planning funding by $10 million to $315.5 million. The largest recipient of Title X funds is Planned Parenthood.

5. United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). Despite its stated mission to “ensure that every pregnancy is wanted,” the UNFPA would receive $5 million more from U.S. taxpayers to, among other things, support China’s mandatory one-child policy, under which millions of wanted pregnancies have been ended.

6. International family planning. Shortly after his inauguration, President Obama rescinded the “Mexico City policy,” which banned funding to organizations that promote and/or perform abortion overseas. The omnibus bills would give these groups an additional $103 million.

7. Limiting free speech. The omnibus bill drops a ban on federal funds being used to enforce or implement the “Fairness Doctrine.” This policy would have the effect of shutting down conservative talk radio programs.

The section of the bill that funds the District of Columbia includes these disturbing provisions:

8. Ending the D.C. Scholarship Program. For five years, thousands of D.C. families have been able to send their children to safe and effective private schools. But the omnibus bill allows no new entrants into the program–despite a 2009 Department of Education report showing a statistically significant increase in reading scores for scholarship students.

9. Public funding of abortion. The bill lifts a ban on D.C. using local funds to promote and fund abortions for District residents.

10. Taxpayer-financed domestic partner benefits. The bill lifts a longstanding ban on the use of federal taxpayer funds to pay for health care benefits for domestic partners of D.C. employees. Federal funds would also now be used for domestic partnership registration.

11. Legalized medical marijuana. The bill gives D.C. the ability to use local funds to start and implement a medical marijuana program. This comes at a time when, according to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles is attempting to reel in its program. Medical marijuana dispensaries have become one of the fastest-growing industries in the city, with some 1,000 dispensaries cropping up since 2004.

12. Needle exchange for drug abusers. A decade-long ban is lifted in the bill to allow D.C. to use local funds to run a needle exchange program for drug addicts. Unfortunately, a provision keeping these programs from within 1,000 feet of any school, day care, or youth center was stripped out in the final bill.

Unwelcome Christmas Gifts

The Christmas season is a time when Americans celebrate life, family, and community. Unfortunately, the 12 unwelcome Christmas gifts in the omnibus bill, signed into law by President Obama last week, undermine these pillars of American civil society.

Author: Kiki Bradley

Just the facts

Listen up!

Healthcare Strategy Written in Federal Prison?

Written by Robert Creamer from his 'forced sabbatical' in Terre Haute's federal prison:

“We must create a national consensus that health care is a right, not a commodity; and that government must guarantee that right.”
“We must create a national consensus that the health care system is in crisis.”
“Our messaging program over the next two years should focus heavily on reducing the credibility of the health insurance industry and focusing on the failure of private health
insurance.”
“We need to systematically forge relationships with large sectors of the business/employer community.”
“We need to convince political leaders that they owe their elections, at least in part, to the groundswell of support of [sic] universal health care, and that they face political peril if
they fail to deliver on universal health care in 2009.”
“We need not agree in advance on the components of a plan, but we must foster a process that can ultimately yield consensus.”
“Over the next two years, we must design and organize a massive national field program.”
“We must focus especially on the mobilization of the labor movement and the faith community.”
“We must systematically leverage the connections and resources of a massive array of
institutions and organizations of all types.”
“To be successful, we must put in place commitments for hundreds of millions of dollars to be used to finance paid communications and mobilization once the battle is joined.”
Creamer adds:
“To win we must not just generate understanding, but emotion—fear, revulsion, anger, disgust.”
Sound familiar? Click here for the whole read and here to see the video of 'progressive' grass roots in action.

The Arabs Have Stopped Applauding Obama

'He talks too much," a Saudi academic in Jeddah, who had once been smitten with Barack Obama, recently observed to me of America's 44th president. He has wearied of Mr. Obama and now does not bother with the Obama oratory.

He is hardly alone, this academic. In the endless chatter of this region, and in the commentaries offered by the press, the theme is one of disappointment. In the Arab-Islamic world, Barack Obama has come down to earth.

He has not made the world anew, history did not bend to his will, the Indians and Pakistanis have been told that the matter of Kashmir is theirs to resolve, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the same intractable clash of two irreconcilable nationalisms, and the theocrats in Iran have not "unclenched their fist," nor have they abandoned their nuclear quest.

There is little Mr. Obama can do about this disenchantment. He can't journey to Turkey to tell its Islamist leaders and political class that a decade of anti-American scapegoating is all forgiven and was the product of American policies—he has already done that. He can't journey to Cairo to tell the fabled "Arab street" that the Iraq war was a wasted war of choice, and that America earned the malice that came its way from Arab lands—he has already done that as well. He can't tell Muslims that America is not at war with Islam—he, like his predecessor, has said that time and again.

By Fouad Ajami - Click here for the entire piece and more examples of Obama's diplomatic failures.

Climategate: Caught Green Handed

Cold facts about the hot topic of global temperature change after the Climategate scandal

by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley | November 30, 2009

THE WHISTLE BLOWS FOR TRUTH
The whistleblower deep in the basement of one of the ugly, modern tower-blocks of the dismal, windswept University of East Anglia could scarcely have timed it better.

In less than three weeks, the world’s governing class – its classe politique – would meet in Copenhagen, Denmark, to discuss a treaty to inflict an unelected and tyrannical global government on us, with vast and unprecedented powers to control all once-free world markets and to tax and regulate the world’s wealthier nations for its own enrichment: in short, to bring freedom, democracy, and prosperity to an instant end worldwide, at the stroke of a pen, on the pretext of addressing what is now known to be the non-problem of manmade “global warming”.

The unnamed hero of ‘Climategate’, after months of work gathering emails, computer code, and data, quietly sent a 61-megabyte compressed file from one of the university’s servers to an obscure public message-board on the internet, with a short covering note to the effect that the climate was too important to keep the material secret, and that the data from the University would be available for a short time only.

He had caught the world’s politico-scientific establishment green-handed. Yet his first attempts to reveal the highly-profitable fraud and systematic corruption at the very heart of the UN’s climate panel and among the scientists most prominent in influencing it’s prejudiced and absurdly doom-laden reports had failed. He had made the mistake of sending the data-file to the mainstream news media, which had also profited for decades by fostering the “global warming” scare, and by generally denying anyone who disagreed with the official viewpoint any platform.

The whistleblower’s data file revealed, for the first time, the innermost workings of the tiny international clique of climate scientists, centered on the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia, that has been the prime mover in telling the world that it is warming at an unprecedented rate, and that humankind is responsible.

REVEALED: THE ABJECT CORRUPTION OF CLIMATE SCIENCE
The gallant whistleblower now faces a police investigation at the instigation of the University authorities desperate to look after their own and to divert allegations of criminality elsewhere. His crime? He had revealed what many had long suspected:

A tiny clique of politicized scientists, paid by unscientific politicians with whom they were financially and politically linked, were responsible for gathering and reporting data on temperatures from the palaeoclimate to today’s climate. The “Team”, as they called themselves, were bending and distorting scientific data to fit a nakedly political story-line profitable to themselves and congenial to the governments that, these days, pay the bills for 99% of all scientific research.

-The Climate Research Unit at East Anglia had profited to the tune of at least $20 million in “research” grants from the Team’s activities.
-The Team had tampered with the complex, bureaucratic processes of the UN’s climate panel, the IPCC, so as to exclude inconvenient scientific results from its four Assessment Reports, and to influence the panel’s conclusions for political rather than scientific reasons.
-The Team had conspired in an attempt to redefine what is and is not peer-reviewed science for the sake of excluding results that did not fit what they and the politicians with whom they were closely linked wanted the UN’s climate panel to report.
-They had tampered with their own data so as to conceal inconsistencies and errors.
-They had emailed one another about using a “trick” for the sake of concealing a “decline” in temperatures in the paleoclimate.
-They had expressed dismay at the fact that, contrary to all of their predictions, global temperatures had not risen in any statistically-significant sense for 15 years, and had been falling for nine years. They had admitted that their inability to explain it was “a travesty”. This internal doubt was in contrast to their public statements that the present decade is the warmest ever, and that “global warming” science is settled.
-They had interfered with the process of peer-review itself by leaning on journals to get their friends rather than independent scientists to review their papers.
-They had successfully leaned on friendly journal editors to reject papers reporting results inconsistent with their political viewpoint.
-They had campaigned for the removal of a learned journal’s editor, solely because he did not share their willingness to debase and corrupt science for political purposes.
-They had mounted a venomous public campaign of disinformation and denigration of their scientific opponents via a website that they had expensively created.
-Contrary to all the rules of open, verifiable science, the Team had committed the criminal offense of conspiracy to conceal and then to destroy computer codes and data that had been legitimately requested by an external researcher who had very good reason to doubt that their “research” was either honest or competent.

THE NATURE ‘TRICK’ TO ‘HIDE THE DECLINE’ IN TEMPERATURES
Among the most revealing of the emails released to the world by the whistleblower was one dated November 1999. In that email, Professor “Phil” Jones of the CRU wrote to Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes, the authors of the infamous “hockey stick” graph that falsely abolished the medieval warm period:
Almost immediately after the news of Climategate broke, Professor Jones told Investigative Magazine’s TGIF Edition that he “had no idea” what he might have meant by the words “hide the decline”. He said:

“They’re talking about the instrumental data which is unaltered – but they’re talking about proxy data going further back in time, a thousand years, and it’s just about how you add on the last few years, because when you get proxy data you sample things like tree rings and ice cores, and they don’t always have the last few years. So one way is to add on the instrumental data for the last few years.”

A few hours later, the science hate-crime website created by the Team cobbled together a jumbled, snivelingly self-serving, and entirely different pretext:

“The paper in question is the Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) Nature paper on the original multiproxy temperature reconstruction [the ‘hockey-stick’ graph of pre-instrumental temperatures over the past 1000 years in the Northern Hemisphere], and the ‘trick’ is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear. Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to “a good way to deal with a problem”, rather than something that is “secret”, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all. As for the ‘decline’, it is well known that Keith Briffa’s [another prominent member of the Team] maximum latewood tree ring density proxy diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the “divergence problem” … and has been discussed in the literature since Briffa et al. in Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682). Those authors have always recommend not using the post-1960 part of their reconstruction, and so, while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens.”

Enter Steve McIntyre, the one who had first realized that the UN’s climate panel in 2001 had used a corrupt graph that had falsely abolished the medieval warm period with the aim of pretending that today’s global temperatures are unprecedented in at least 1000 years. Later that day his website, www.climateaudit.org, revealed the truth about the conspirators’ “trick”.
In order to smooth a data series over a given time period, one must pad it with artificial data beyond the endpoint of the real series. However, when Mann, Bradley, and Hughes plotted instrumental data against their reconstructions based on the varying widths of tree-rings from ancient trees, their favourite form of proxy or pre-instrumental reconstructed temperature, no smoothing method could conceal the fact that after 1960 the tree-ring data series trended downward, while the instrumental series trended upward. This was the Team’s “divergence”:

“So Mann’s solution [‘Mike’s Nature trick’] was to use the instrumental record for padding [both the proxy and the instrumental data series], which changes the smoothed series to point upwards.”

Accordingly, though the author of the original email had said that the “trick” was to add instrumental measurements for years beyond available proxy data, his conspirators at the science-hate website admitted it was actually a replacement of proxy data owing to a known but unexplained post-1960 “divergence” between the proxy data and the instrumental data. In fact, it was a fabrication.
The next day, in a statement issued by the University of East Anglia’s press office, Professor Jones fumblingly tried to recover the position:

“The word ‘trick’ was used here colloquially as in a clever thing to do. It is ludicrous to suggest that it refers to anything untoward.”

As we shall see, Professor Jones was not telling the truth.

BREAKING THE BROKEN CODE: DISSECTING THE DODGY DATA
The “Documents” folder in the enormous data-file released by the whistleblower contains many segments of computer program code used by Jones and the Team in contriving the Climate Research Unit’s global temperature series. The data-file also contained a 15,000-line commentary by programmers concerned that the code and the data used by the Team were suspect, were fabricated, and were not fit for their purpose.
Looking at the seldom-tidy code, the sheer number of programs which subject the raw data to various degrees of filtering, processing, and tampering is disconcerting. Some of these alterations were blatant and unacceptable, notably those which removed proxy data that correlate poorly with measured regional temperature, or even replaced proxy data altogether with measured data to conceal a discrepancy between what the proxy data actually showed and what the Team wanted it to show.

The Team’s programmers even admitted, in comments within the code, that they were artificially adjusting or “correcting” the proxy data from tree-rings. In Fortran, the high-level computer language long in use at universities for programming, a programmer’s comment is usually preceded by the statement “REM” for “remark”, indicating that the text on the line following the word “REM” should be ignored by the compiler program that translates the Fortran code that humans can understand into executable machine language that the computer can understand.
One of the commonest remarks included in the program fragments disclosed by the whistleblower is as follows:

“These will be artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures.”

There could scarcely be a plainer admission that the data are being regularly, routinely, materially tampered with, for the sake of making it appear that the proxy data are sufficiently reliable to appear close to the instrumental temperatures.

This is no mere debating point. The UN’s climate panel had issued specific warnings against using proxy data (MXD) from tree-rings, because warmer weather is not the only reason why tree-rings become wider in some years than in others. There are at least two other prominent reasons, both of which can – and do – distort the tree-ring data beyond the point where they are useful as indicators of (or proxies for) pre-instrumental temperatures. First, the tree-rings become wider whenever the weather becomes wetter. Secondly, and of still greater concern, the tree-rings widen when there is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And there is 40% more CO2 in the atmosphere today than there was in 1750.

Yet, as McIntyre and McKitrick had established originally in 2003, and had published in a leading journal in 2005, the majority of the data on the basis of which Mann, Bradley and Hughes, and later other members of the Team, had attempted to pretend that there had been no medieval warm period were tree-ring series. Take out the suspect tree-ring series, together with just one other rogue series, and all the remaining data series establish beyond reasonable doubt that the Middle Ages were truly, materially, and globally warmer than the present.

Scientists with programming knowledge have already begun to examine the computer code that Professor Jones and his colleagues had attempted to hide for so long. Here is Marc Sheppard’s selection of three examples of the tortuous sequences of deliberate data tampering that are evident within the program code.

Monckton's pdf here. Original blog here.