News

Missouri down to just one abortion business after Planned Parenthood closes

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Good news from Life News.

But first, a pretty good introduction to the abortion business:

The abortion business can be very lucrative. Planned Parenthood alone brings in over $150 millionfrom abortion revenues – as much as half of its patient charges. Planned Parenthood destroys over 330,000 unborn children every year, an abortion every 95 seconds, at roughly $468 per abortion. The abortion giant has increased its market share of abortion commerce every year for over 3 decades.

But what has made abortion so profitable has been its constitutionally privileged status and the business model that status has enabled. Unlike virtually any other medical procedure, abortion has been deemed a protected right. This has allowed Planned Parenthood and its industry competitors to resist regulation that other medical services accept as the cost of safely doing business. And by calling on their political friends in high places ( and Planned Parenthood spends millions to keep them in those places) abortion sellers are able to secure political protection from rules that would protect their patients but undercut their bottom line.

Abortion businesses are thus rarely inspected and are often constructed such that women are endangered in an emergency situation. When they are inspected, the inspectors find gross health and safety violations. And as the Gosnell case demonstrates, even their shortcuts on construction can leave women endangered in an emergency situation. Planned Parenthood has also adopted a business plan that has doctors from another state (or country in some cases) fly in, perform dozens of abortions in one day, and then fly back home – leaving the woman with no relationship with the doctor and no opportunity for the doctor to assist in her care in case of complications.

Now the good news – Republicans have been busy passing regulations on this abortion clinics:

In Missouri, Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys Steven Aden and Dale Schowengerdt successfully defended the state’s health and safety regulations of abortion clinics in two challenges in state and federal court.  Our friends at 40 Days for Life and others continued to bear witness outside Missouri’s four abortion clinics.

These four were reduced to two over the next few years as providers found their abortion businesses were unprofitable and retired or closed their doors. Then, just last week we received word that, unable to comply with those reasonable health and safety standards, the Columbia, Missouri Planned Parenthood has now lost its license and closed its doors. This leaves only one licensed abortionist operating in Missouri, a Planned Parenthood franchise in St. Louis.

More good news from Alabama, this time:

In Alabama, ADF Allied Attorney Trenton Garmon successfully defended the rights of sidewalk counselors to peacefully pray outside a Birmingham abortion facility. As a result, those sidewalk counselors were there to witness an ambulance transporting an injured woman to a hospital. They reported this to the state health department which investigated and found numerous health and safety violations, resulting in the closure of that abortion facility. This week we learned that the abortionist who owns the facility has given up and placed the building up for sale.

Isn’t that interesting? Rather than comply with the regulations, they choose to shut down. It’s not about providing a service, is it? It’s about the money. And if complying with regulations costs money, then the abortionists just stop providing the service.

News

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker cuts taxes again, expects $1 billion surplus in 2015

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Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (Republican)

Walker has actually cut taxes three times in less than a year.

I know what you’re thinking, (if you’re a Democrat). You’re thinking “how can a governor cut taxes three times and have a surplus?”.

When the government cuts taxes, people in the private sector who either create jobs or work at jobs get to keep more of their own money. They either spend or invest their money. Spending money is OK, but the magic really happens when people invest money. Even something as simple as putting money into a savings account can achieve magic, because banks lend that money to job creating businesses. What is the magic? The magic is that when people invest or save their money, the money makes its way to job-creating individuals and businesses, so that they can develop new products and services. For example, if Samsung keeps more of it’s own money, it can hire more and better employees to to develop the S5 smartphone – a new product that performs better than the previous S4 model, even though it will probably cost less than the previous S4 model.

What happens when consumers can get more functionality for less money? It means that they can do more in their own lives using the better products and services, but also means that they have more money to save or spend somewhere else. So what really drives the economy is not government handing out food stamps or government giving money to companies linked to their campaign fundraisers (e.g. – Solyndra). What really drives the economy is the private sector. That’s where new innovative products and services are made. When you thinking of government, you should think of the people with degrees in Marxist studies and women’s studies who take money away from Samsung, so they have less money to innovate with. Government takes money from Samsung and gives it to Brigham and Women’s hospital to study why lesbians are often overweight. (It’s purely a coincidence that this is where Obama’s Surgeon General nominee Vivek Murphy works, and purely a coincidence that he founded “Doctors for America” to market Obamacare to the voters).

When you keep the money in the private sector, you get new products and services that people actually want to buy. The more money that businesses keep, the more they higher workers, and the more the state collects in payroll and income taxes. The more that consumers spend to buy better products and services, the more the state collects in sales tax. The key to economic growth is to have businesses produce better products for less money. When consumers can do more and have more money left over, there is economic growth, which boosts tax revenues. Government rarely spends money as efficiently and effectively as job creators and workers can.

With that in mind, let’s see what happened when Governor Scott Walker cut taxes and let job creators and workers keep more of their own money.

The ultra-leftist Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reluctantly reports.

Excerpt:

Senate Republicans Tuesday narrowly passed Gov. Scott Walker’s $541 million tax cut proposal in a vote that guaranteed the cuts will become law.

The tax decreases — the third round of cuts by Republicans in less than a year — passed 17-15 with GOP Sen. Dale Schultz of Richland Center joining all Democrats in voting against the proposal. The proposal now goes to the Assembly, which passed a different version of the tax cuts last month with two Democrats joining all Republicans in supporting it.

With growing tax collections now expected to give the state a $1billion budget surplus in June 2015, Walker’s bill will cut property and income taxes for families and businesses, and zero out all income taxes for manufacturers in the state.

GOP lawmakers and Walker will use the windfall for the state as an occasion to trim overall state spending slightly for the next three years rather than increase it.

[…]Also Tuesday, the Senate voted unanimously to pass a second bill to increase spending on worker training by $35.4 million through June 2015.

[…]Under Walker’s bill, the average income tax filer would receive a tax cut of $46 in April 2015 and the typical homeowner would save $131 over the existing law on this December’s bills, according to the Legislature’s nonpartisan budget office.

Also, the governor has separately had his administration alter income tax withholding rates so workers have less taken out of each paycheck — about $520 a year for a married couple making a total of $80,000 a year — starting in April.

“The more money that we give back to the taxpayers, the more money they can spend or save as they wish and the more our economy will grow,” said Sen. Alberta Darling (R-River Hills), co-chairwoman of the Legislature’s budget committee.

The bill would also lower income taxes for factory and farm owners by $36.8 million over the current two-year budget and $91.3 million over the following two years.

GOP supporters of this manufacturing tax cut in the bill see it as fuel for one of the state’s main economic engines.

Now the nice thing about Walker is that he is no Wall Street Republican. The man has been plowing money into worker re-training programs and manufacturing, which is exactly how you draw votes from working Democrats. Working Democrats tend to prefer working to collecting welfare, so Walker is out there competing for their votes by making sure that everyone who wants a job can get a job, and that those jobs pay well. Walker knows that if he can cut taxes on manufacturing, that it will cause manufacturers in his state to hire more people in order to develop cheaper and better products. That’s going to cause them to invest more in his state, and some manufacturers will even leave other Democrat-run states (e.g. – Illinois) to move to Wisconsin.

When Democrats were running Wisconsin, they created a huge $3.6 billion dollar deficit that Walker inherited. Everything has been turned around under Scott Walker, but neighboring states like Illinois continue to decline. What a resume this guy is going to have in 2016 when he runs for President. Walker bet the farm on his pro-growth policies in a blue state, and guess what? He is reaping the rewards. He knows what he is doing, and the left can’t stand him. All he does is win.

Polemics

Is there any science in the new “Cosmos” series, or is it all naturalistic religion?

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I noticed a couple of reviews of this television series, produced by an atheist producer of cartoons.

The first review comes from J. W. Wartick.

Multiverse:

The universe is actually so huge that we can’t actually observe the entire thing because there is more beyond what we can see. But “many… suspect” that our universe is but one in an extremely huge number of actual individual universes (here shown as little bubbles spreading out continually over the screen).

Origin of life:

The origin of life “evolved” through biochemical evolution.

J.W. comments:

The depiction of the multiverse with little-to-no qualification was alarming, for there is much debate over whether there even is such a multiverse, and if there is, to what extent it may be called a multiverse. The portrayal within this episode was essentially a fictitious account being passed off without qualification as something a lot of people believe. The wording used was that “many… suspect” there is such a universe. Well yes, that may be true, but to what extent can we test for these other universes? What models predict them and why? I am uninterested in how many people hold to a belief; I am interested in whether that belief is true.

[…][T]he brief snippet used to explore the origin of life: “biochemical evolution” was astonishingly insufficient. I’m sure we’ll get into that in the next episode, but the origin of life is one of the great unsolved mysteries within science and to just hand wave and say “biochemical evolution” is, well, notable to say the least.

I agree with Wartick. What I am looking for is the story of how scientists experimented, observed and tested in order to find out about the universe. I’m not interested in people working theoretical physics who presupposed naturalism at age 14 because their Sunday School teacher was mean to them. Presupposing a philosophy of naturalism is just religion. I want to see the science. Here are my responses to the multiverse speculation and the origin of life speculation.

The series quote Carl Sagan at the beginning, but he a person who let his religion of naturalism lead him away from the scientific evidence for a beginning. Instead of accepting the standard Big Bang model, which implies a transcendent Creator, Sagan chose to embrace a faith-based eternal oscillating model of the universe, which tries to avoid a Creator. I wrote about the problems with Sagan’s naturalistic speculative cosmology in this post.

Now let’s see Casey Luskin’s review on Evolution News.

Excerpt:

During the first episode, Tyson devotes lengthy segments to promoting the old tale that religion is at war science, and strongly promotes the idea that religion opposes intellectual advancement. He tells the story of the 16th-century astronomer cultist philosopher Giordano Bruno, who he says lived in a time without “freedom of speech” or “separation of church and state,” and thus fell into the clutches of the “thought police” of the Inquisition for disagreeing with the church’s geocentric views. Never mind that his show made it appear that President Obama endorsed Sagan-style materialism, but I digress… Of course the main religious authority of that time was the Catholic Church, and the program shows angry priests with evil-sounding British accents dressed in full religious garb throwing Bruno out on the street, and eventually burning him at the stake.

Just to make sure that other Christians who aren’t Catholic also understand their religions too hinder scientific progress, Tyson goes out of his way to point out that Bruno was opposed by “Calvinists in Switzerland,” and “Lutherans in Germany,” including the great protestant reformer Martin Luther himself. He never mentions that Protestants aren’t the ones who burned Bruno at the stake, nor does he ever mention that most of the founders of modern science were Christians. But I digress…

It’s a lengthy scene, all to highlight some of the darkest chapters of Christianity in Europe. But the entire retelling of Bruno’s fate lasts a good portion of the first episode’s hour. Why make the religious persecution of scientists some four hundred years ago a major focus of a widely publicized television series that is ostensibly about promoting science?

Luskin took issue with the idea that religious people hold science back. On the contrary, religious Christians were largely responsible for the birth of modern science. Luskin also reports on over a dozen cases where naturalists have suppressed critical thinking about whether science disproves the religion of naturalism.

Here’s are a few:

A congressional subcommittee staff investigation found that biologist Richard Sternberg experienced retaliation by his co-workers and superiors at the Smithsonian, including transfer to a hostile supervisor, removal of his name placard from his door, deprivation of workspace, subjection to work requirements not imposed on others, restriction of specimen access, and loss of his keys, because he allowed a pro-ID article to be published in a biology journal.

In 2005, over 120 faculty members at Iowa State University (ISU) signed a petition denouncing ID and calling on “all faculty members to … reject efforts to portray Intelligent Design as science.” These efforts were significant not just because they opposed academic freedom by demanding conformity among faculty to reject ID, but because they focused on creating a hostile environment for pro-ID astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, co-author of The Privileged Planet, who was denied tenure at ISU in 2006 due to his support for ID. Both public and private statements exposed through public records requests revealed that members of ISU’s department in physics and astronomy voted against Gonzalez’s tenure due to his support for ID.

In 1993, San Francisco State University biology professor Dean Kenyon was forced to stop teaching introductory biology because he was informing students that scientists had doubts about materialist theories of the origin of life.

In 2005, pro-ID adjunct biology professor Caroline Crocker lost her job at George Mason University after teaching students about both the evidence for and against evolution in the classroom, and mentioning ID as a possible alternative to Darwinism. While her former employer maintains that it simply chose not to renew her contract, she was specifically told she would be “disciplined” for teaching students about the scientific controversy over evolution.

In 2013, Ball State University (BSU) President Jo Ann Gora issued a speech codedeclaring that “intelligent design is not appropriate content for science courses” at BSU, after atheist activists from the Freedom from Religion Foundation charged that a “Boundaries of Science” course taught by a well-liked physics professor (Eric Hedin) was violating the Constitution by favorably discussing intelligent design.

You can read more about the problems with Carl Sagan’s religion-driven rejection of experimental science in this post by Phillip E. Johnson. For a better take on cosmology with more evidence and less religion, check out this lecture by particle physicist Michael Strauss. I think you’ll find that science is better when it’s done by a practicing experimental scientist, and not by the creator of cartoons like “Family Guy”.

UPDATE: On the Christian Apologetics Alliance blog, Dr. Tim McGrew wrote that the portrayal of Bruno had even more inaccuracies. Isn’t it amazing that that a cartoonist can get something filled with myths and misrepresentations to be televised? And many people will believe it, too, just like many people accepted the (now-discredited) oscillating model of Carl Sagan. I still have atheists proposing this to me when I present the standard model to them. That’s the hazard of having a TV-driven worldview, I guess. A worldview based on Star Trek.