Thursday, March 30, 2017
California’s Moral Atrocity
The state’s attorney general is going after, not people who confessed on camera to murders, but the investigative reporters who uncovered the crimes.
AG Who Charged Activists For Exposing Planned Parenthood Received Thousands In Donations From Planned Parenthood. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
In a parade of horrors exposed by the Center for Medical Progress, one episode stands out. In the seventh video released by undercover journalists David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt, former StemExpress technician Holly O’Donnell describes an experience at Planned Parenthood Mar Monte’s Alameda Clinic in San Jose, Calif.:
“I want you to see something kinda cool. This is kinda neat,” [says O’Donnell’s coworker]. So I’m over here, and . . . the moment I see it, I’m just flabbergasted. This is the most gestated fetus and the closest thing to a baby I’ve seen. And she is, like, “Okay, I want to show you something.” So she has one of her instruments, and she just taps the heart, and it starts beating. And I’m sitting here, and I’m looking at this fetus, and its heart is beating, and I don’t know what to think.
O’Donnell is then told to “harvest” the child’s brain: “[She] gave me the scissors and told me that I had to cut down the middle of the face.” O’Donnell did as asked.
It’s not often that someone confesses to murder on camera, but that is what O’Donnell did, assuming her account was accurate. The California Penal Code defines murder as the “unlawful killing of a human being, or a fetus, with malice aforethought.” Not only did Planned Parenthood refuse to render care to a born-alive infant, as required by California law; it acted affirmatively to cause the child’s death.
Yet this revelation occasioned no interest. Major newspapers ignored it. Mainstream websites overlooked it. Nothing appeared on the nightly news. These were, apparently, not the crimes anyone was looking for.
Now, California attorney general Xavier Becerra has filed 15 felony charges against Daleiden and Merritt, the journalists who exposed the brutality and profiteering of Planned Parenthood and its affiliates, on the grounds that ostensibly business-related conversations among strangers held in restaurants and at conferences were in fact “confidential,” and so recording them without every participant’s consent violated California eavesdropping laws. You can read all about this news at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN.
Becerra, a Democrat, recently decamped from the U.S. House to replace Kamala Harris, now California’s junior senator, as state attorney general. (Last spring, Harris’s investigators raided Daleiden’s apartment, seizing a laptop and multiple hard drives.) Both have 100 percent legislative ratings from prominent pro-abortion groups. Both have received financial support from Planned Parenthood. At the time she ordered the raid, Harris was helping Planned Parenthood’s chief legal counsel draft legislation to restrict reporting on “health-care providers.”
There is much that ought to be said about California’s transparently partisan abuse of the state’s prosecutorial power. (In recent years, undercover videos have prompted California’s Justice Department to investigate claims of animal cruelty on chicken farms. This, as opposed to homicide at abortion clinics, is enough to prompt the curiosity of California’s law-enforcement officials.) There is much, too, that ought to be said about the hypocrisy of the media types who are suddenly silent about this unconcealed assault on reporters’ freedoms, after spending the days since Donald Trump’s election propounding the importance of a vigorous press. (“Like firefighters who run into a fire, journalists run toward a story,” MSNBC’s Katy Tur boasted last month.)
But what links media hypocrisy with partisan hypocrisy, and what is at the heart of this shameful affair, is conscience twisted beyond recognition. The Center for Medical Progress revealed Planned Parenthood’s trade in fetal parts and its winking attitude toward the law. But it also revealed the sheer moral rot that consumes the abortion industry from top to bottom. Hidden from everyday view are those who, over appetizers and wine, talk about “crushing” babies to death, or joke about how an abortionist worth her salt will “hit the gym” because it requires “biceps” to dismember a baby! And there are others, such as Becerra and Harris, who may not handle the scissors, but who agree that snuffing out the life of a child on a table should be celebrated, and that those who would expose those activities should be locked up. This is the barbarism of “progressive” consensus.
On Wednesday morning, undeterred by the California Department of Justice, the Center for Medical Progress released a new video, in which an undercover Daleiden discusses abortion procedures with Dr. DeShawn Taylor, former medical director of Planned Parenthood Arizona, and the founder of her own abortion clinic in Phoenix. Taylor notes: “In Arizona, if the fetus comes out with any signs of life, we’re supposed to transport it. To the hospital.” Asked if there is any standard procedure for “verifying life,” she replies: “Well, the thing is, I mean the key is, you need to pay attention to who’s in the room, right?”
There is a famous line in Solzhenitsyn: “Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.” The lie has come into the world, but not through David Daleiden.
— Ian Tuttle is the Thomas L. Rhodes Fellow at the National Review Institute.
A HEALTH CARE PLAN SO SIMPLE, EVEN A REPUBLICAN CAN UNDERSTAND!
By Ann Coulter
http://www.anncoulter.com/
March 29, 2017
It's always impossible to repeal laws that require Ann to pay for greedy people, because the greedy run out on the streets wailing that the Republicans are murdering them.
Obamacare is uniquely awful because the free stuff isn't paid for through income taxes: It's paid for through MY health insurance premiums. This is unfortunate because I wanted to buy health insurance.
Perhaps you're not aware -- SINCE YOU EXEMPTED YOURSELVES FROM OBAMACARE, CONGRESS -- but buying or selling health insurance is illegal in America.
Right now, there's no free market because insurance is insanely regulated not only by Obamacare, but also by the most corrupt organizations in America: state insurance commissions. (I'm talking to you, New York!)
Federal and state laws make it illegal to sell health insurance that doesn't cover a laughable array of supposedly vital services based on bureaucrats' medical opinions of which providers have the best lobbyists.
As a result, it's illegal to sell health insurance that covers any of the medical problems I'd like to insure against. Why can't the GOP keep Obamacare for the greedy -- but make it legal for Ann to buy health insurance?
This is how it works today:
ME: I'm perfectly healthy, but I'd like to buy health insurance for heart disease, broken bones, cancer, and everything else that a normal person would ever need, but no more.
INSURANCE COMPANY: That will be $700 a month, the deductible is $35,000, no decent hospital will take it, and you have to pay for doctor's visits yourself. But your plan covers shrinks, infertility treatments, sex change operations, autism spectrum disorder treatment,drug rehab and 67 other things you will never need.
INSURANCE COMPANY UNDER ANN'S PLAN: That will be $50 a month, the deductible is $1,000, you can see any doctor you'd like, and you have full coverage for any important medical problems you could conceivably have in a million years.
Mine is a two-step plan (and you don't have to do the second step, so it's really a one-step plan).
STEP 1: Congress doesn't repeal Obamacare! Instead, Congress passes a law, pursuant to its constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce, that says: "In America, it shall be legal to sell health insurance on the free market. This law supersedes all other laws, taxes, mandates, coverage requirements, regulations or prohibitions, state or federal.”
The end. Love, Ann.
There will be no whining single mothers storming Congress with their pre-printed placards. People who want to stay on Obamacare can. No one is taking away anything. They can still have health insurance with free pony rides. It just won't be paid for with Ann's premiums anymore, because Ann will now be allowed to buy health insurance on the free market.
Americans will be free to choose among a variety of health insurance plans offered by willing sellers, competing with one another to provide the best plans at the lowest price. A nationwide market in health insurance will drive down costs and improve access -- just like everything else we buy here in America!
Within a year, most Americans will be buying health insurance on the free market (and half of the rest will be illegal aliens). We'll have TV ads with cute little geckos hawking amazing plans and young couples bragging about their broad coverage and great prices from this or that insurance company.
The Obamacare plans will still have the "essential benefits" (free pony rides) that are so important to NPR's Mara Liasson, but the free market plans will have whatever plans consumers agree to buy and insurance companies agree to sell -- again, just like every other product we buy here in America.
Some free market plans will offer all the "essential benefits" mandated by Obamacare, but the difference will be: Instead of forcing me to pay a premium that covers Mara Liasson's special needs, she'll have to pay for that coverage herself.
I won't be compelled to buy health insurance that covers everyone else's gambling addiction, drug rehab, pregnancies, marital counseling, social workers, contact lenses and rotten kids -- simply to have insurance for what doctors call "serious medical problems.”
Then, we'll see how many people really need free health care.
Until the welfare program is decoupled from the insurance market, nothing will work. Otherwise, it's like forcing grocery stores to pay for everyone to have a house. A carton of milk would suddenly cost $10,000.
That's what Obamacare did to health insurance. Paul Ryan's solution was to cut taxes on businesses -- and make the milk watery. But he still wouldn't allow milk to be sold on the free market.
Democrats will be in the position of blocking American companies from selling a product that people want to buy. How will they explain that to voters?
Perhaps Democrats will come out and admit that they need to fund health insurance for the poor by forcing middle-class Americans to pay for it through their insurance premiums -- because otherwise, they'd have to raise taxes, and they want to keep their Wall Street buddies' income taxes low.
Good luck with that!
STEP 2: Next year, Congress formulates a better way of delivering health care to the welfare cases, which will be much easier since there will be a LOT fewer of them.
No actual money-making business is going to survive by taking the welfare cases -- the ones that will cover illegal aliens and Mara Liasson's talk therapy -- so the greedy will get government plans.
But by then, only a minority of Americans will be on the "free" plans. (Incidentally, this will be a huge money-saver -- if anyone cares about the federal budget.) Eighty percent of Americans will already have good health plans sold to them by insurance companies competing for their business.
With cheap plans available, a lot of the greedy will go ahead and buy a free market plan. Who wants to stand in line at the DMV to see a doctor when your neighbors have great health care plans for $50 a month?
We will have separated the truly unfortunate from the loudmouthed bullies who simply enjoy forcing other people to pay for their shrinks and aromatherapy.
And if the Democrats vote against a sane method of delivering health care to the welfare cases, who cares? We have lots of wasteful government programs -- take it out of Lockheed Martin's contract. But at least the government won't be depriving the rest of us of a crucial product just because we are middle class and the Democrats hate us.
There's your health care bill, GOP!
COPYRIGHT 2017 ANN COULTER
Tuesday, March 28, 2017
How Serious Is the Terrorist Threat?
The numbers don’t tell the story.
March 26, 2017
A police officer stands on duty as the union flag flies over Parliament at half-mast, London, England, March 23, 2017. (Photo: Reuters/Neil Hall)
Statistically speaking, I am much more at risk of being killed when I get into my car than when I walk in the streets of the capital cities that I visit. Yet this fact, no matter how often I repeat it, does not reassure me much; the truth is that one terrorist attack affects a society more deeply than a thousand road accidents.
The man responsible for the latest attack in London, the so-called Khaled Masood, lived in the area in which I worked for many years, and through which I walked daily. So did several of his presumed accomplices who have since been arrested. The area is high in crime and there does seems to be an elective affinity between Islamism and criminality.
The day after the attack in London I was interviewed by some Flemish journalists from Antwerp, or very near Antwerp, a city in which a terrorist attack was aborted while we talked. A Tunisian resident of French nationality was stopped before he could mow down shoppers in Antwerp’s main shopping street, an attack that was “unsuccessful,” apparently, only because the would-be victims had the previous day’s attack in mind and jumped out of the way of the car in a pedestrianized street.
Two days before I flew from Paris Orly Airport to Montpelier, a man of Tunisian descent was shot dead at the airport while attacking a female soldier with a knife. Earlier, he had opened fire on a policeman in the north of Paris and moved on to Orly.
That night after the Orly attack, I dined in 20th Arrondissement of Paris, and as I left the restaurant in a quiet street, three soldiers in full military gear passed me on patrol. I am not sure how much the presence of soldiers on the streets in peacetime actually adds to civilian security, and it occurred to me that had I been a terrorist, I might have produced a dramatic incident there and then, for there was little doubt that the soldiers would have been vulnerable to attack. If they had attracted such an attack, I would have been more endangered than protected by them.
My nephew was in the Stade de France (the national stadium) on the night of the ISIS terrorist attacks in November 2015. Three suicide bombers tried to enter the stadium in a coordinated assault during a football match between France and Germany, at which both the French president and the German chancellor were present, but were prevented by a security check; otherwise, there might have been many victims, including my nephew.
It’s difficult to assess the true meaning or real significance of this apparent closeness to terrorism at one, two, or more (but not many) removes. Statistics tell me that I am still safe from it, as are all my fellow citizens, individually considered. But it is precisely the object of terrorism to create fear, dismay, and reaction out of all proportion to its volume and frequency, to change everyone’s way of thinking and behavior. Little by little, it is succeeding.