Campaigning in South Carolina, Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann said a “devastating” miscarriage helped shape her pro-life views on abortion. The compelling personal story ties in to her rationale for becoming a foster care mom.
While on the campaign trail in Rock Hill, South Carolina, the Minnesota congresswoman revealed she had a miscarriage decades ago and that the event led her to solidify her pro-life views and prompted her and her husband to become a foster home to 23 children over the years.
“After our second child was born, we became pregnant with a third baby,” Bachmann said, according to a Politico report. “And it was an unexpected baby, but of course we were delighted to have this child. And the child was coming along, and we ended up losing that child. And it was devastating for both of us, as you can imagine if any of you have lost a child.”
She said the miscarriage also prompted Bachmann and her husband Marcus to re-evaluate their personal and professional life goals.
“At that moment we didn’t think of ourselves as overly career minded or overly materialistic,” she said, according to Politico. “When we lost that child, it changed us. And it changed us forever.”
“We made a commitment that no matter how many children were brought into our life, we would receive them because we are committed to life,” she added.
Reporters at the event say Bachmann shared it about halfway through her town hall at Winthrop University on Wednesday night. The miscarriage story is not one that Bachmann has shared much and Peter Hamby from CNN reports that “Even some of Bachmann’s staffers were caught by surprise when she talked about the miscarriage and had not heard [the] story before.”
You can see pictures and videos of the event at Right Wing News, courtesy of John Hawkins. I really appreciate that John has been broadly supportive of Michele, because he is a major figure in the conservative blogosphere.
The Ohio state legislature today passed a state budget which includes multiple pro-life amendments ensuring the state is not involved in abortion funding with taxpayer money.
The state budget, House Bill 153, now advances to pro-life Governor John Kasich. Among other things, the state budget contains Ohio Right to Life amendments that will protect taxpayer dollars from paying for abortion.
The first amendment bans abortions from being performed in public hospitals. The second amendment prohibits abortion coverage in insurance plans of local public employees.
“These two pro-life amendments will ensure that Ohio taxpayer dollars are not funding abortion,” said Mike Gonidakis, executive director of Ohio Right to Life. “It is crystal clear that a vast majority of Ohioans oppose all forms of taxpayer funding of abortion.”
Additional pro-life amendments were also included. One measure requires the Ohio Department of Health to apply for federal abstinence education grants to reduce the number of unplanned pregnancies. The final pro-life amendment preserves the right of student groups to use and benefit from school funds and facilities, therefore protecting the rights of pro-life groups on college campuses.
“Abstinence education taught by our pro-life educators reduces teen pregnancy. These efforts have resulted in a decrease in teen abortions in Ohio, having a dramatic impact,” Gonidakis said.
“I am pleased that the Ohio House budget bill once again places a priority on abstinence education,” added Valerie Huber, Executive Director for the National Abstinence Education Association. “Passage of this measure assures that students in Ohio will again receive the benefits of this important risk avoidance message. We appreciate Ohio Right to Life’s support for this measure that returns a state priority on abstinence education in Ohio.”
House Bill 153 will be signed into law on June 30th by pro-life Governor John Kasich, who Ohio Right to Life fully expects to support each of these life-saving measures.
For conservatives, it’s a recession-era dream budget. “It balances the budget, preserves our tax cuts, and sets the stage for renewing the ability of Ohio to create jobs,” Ohio governor John Kasich tells National Review Online.
The $55.5 billion budget, which covers the next two fiscal years and fills an $8.6 billion shortfall, cuts $1.4 billion from Medicaid funding, sells five prisons to private operators, and slashes the money sent to local governments by 25 percent next year and an additional 25 percent in the following year. That last decision has proven to be controversial already, with critics charging that Kasich is passing the deficit problems to local governments, forcing them to raise taxes or severely restrict services. Kasich sees the cuts as an opportunity — and says it would be a “huge mistake” for local government to raise taxes, thus “providing disincentives for companies to locate in their communities.”
[…]On education, over the next two years, Kasich is expanding school choice by quadrupling the numbers of vouchers available and rescinding a statewide cap on charter schools. He is capping higher-education tuition hikes at 3.5 percent, requiring that all university professors teach an extra class, and asking universities to look into ways of offering three-year bachelor’s degrees.
On the jobs front, he’s adamant about the need to forgo tax hikes, even preserving an $800 million tax cut implemented in January. “States with lower levels of taxation have faster economic growth,” Kasich observes. He’s also setting aside $100 million — the profits from the state’s liquor monopoly — to fund JobsOhio, a new initiative dedicated to attracting and retaining businesses in Ohio. With an unemployment rate of 9.2 percent and a loss of over 600,000 jobs in the last decade, Ohio could use the boost.
Both the state house and senate are Republican-controlled, and Kasich is “very optimistic” that the budget will pass. “I’ve told [state lawmakers] that if they have some better policy ideas, that’s fine — but we will not negotiate the numbers. We will have a balanced budget, and we will preserve the tax cut,” he says.
[…]But if the budget succeeds in bringing about an economic resurgence, look for Kasich to reap the benefits. In a piece headlined “Kasich’s beliefs at heart of plan,” Columbus Dispatch writer Joe Hallett commented that the “plan is as much a social budget as a fiscal one, built on ideology as much as practicality,” and said that “Ohio, at least in modern times, has never seen a state budget like [this].”
Kasich is ready to be judged on the results. “Budgets are just a means to an end. They’re not an end in themselves,” he observes. “This budget can set the stage in our state for recovery.”
Some 1,100 Ohioans swarmed the grounds of the Statehouse Tuesday to demonstrate support for Gov. John Kasich’s plan to quadruple the number of school vouchers, even as overall aid for public schools is cut.
The governor’s $55.5 billion, two-year budget proposed last week also would lift the cap on the creation of charter schools, which operate with more regulatory freedom than their traditional public K-12 counterparts.
“School choice is not about doing away with public schools,” Lt. Gov. Mary Taylor told the crowd. “It’s about making them better. … Ohio’s future depends on our children being the best and the brightest in the world.”
Mr. Kasich’s spending plan would more than quad- ruple the number of vouchers to 60,000 by 2013 from roughly 14,000 now.
Suzanne Donahue of Toledo sends her 13 and 11-year-old daughters to St. Catherine of Siena School. She’s never received an Ohio EdChoice scholarship, and she’s not sure that her children would qualify under the proposed expansion. But she attended Tuesday’s rally to support that option for other children.
“We pay out of our pockets for it, and I vote for every tax situation that’s on the ballot for the kids because I hate to see the children suffer,” she said. “However, it would be nice to have some of those funds come to my own family. … I believe healthy competition will equal better schools and that better schools will survive.”
[…]The state runs two voucher programs — the statewide Ohio EdChoice Program, which caps the number of scholarships at 14,000, and a smaller, less generous program only for students in Cleveland city schools.
The EdChoice program targets students who attend a school that has been in academic emergency or watch for two out of the last three years. The grants are $4,250 for K-8 students and $5,000 for high school students, or the amount of the participating school’s tuition, whichever is less.
The budget also would lift the cap on how many bricks-and-mortar and on-line charter schools may be sponsored by one organization. The cap was imposed to slow the proliferation of such schools after a number of highly publicized failures. More than 300 charter schools in Ohio serve nearly 88,000 students.
Good news for fiscal and social conservatives. Well done, John Kasich!
Solyndra, Inc. was supposed to have showcased the effectiveness of the Obama administration’s stimulus and green jobs initiatives, but instead it has become the center of congressional attention for waste, fraud and abuse of such programs.
According to a Feb. 17 letter signed by Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton, Michigan Republican, and Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Cliff Stearns, Florida Republican, to Energy Secretary Steven Chu, the Fremont, Calif.-based solar panel manufacturer should never have received a $535 million loan guarantee from the stimulus.*
The company became the first recipient of an Energy Department loan guarantee under the stimulus in March 2009, which was intended to “finance construction of the first phase of the company’s new manufacturing facility” for photovoltaic solar panels.
The Energy Department estimated in a March 20, 2009 press release that the loan guarantee would create 3,000 construction jobs and a further 1,000 jobs after the plant opened.
And President Barack Obama and Vice President Joseph Biden each personally showcased Solyndra as an example of how stimulus dollars were at work creating jobs, during appearances at the company over the course of the following year.
Biden personally announced the closure of Solyndra’s $535 million loan guarantee in a Sept. 9, 2009 speech, delivered via closed-circuit television, on the occasion of the groundbreaking of the plant.
The vice president justified the federal government’s investment in Solyndra in front of employees and other dignitaries, including Secretary Chu and former Calif. Gov. Arnold Schwartzenegger, saying the jobs the company intended to create would “serve as a foundation for a stronger American economy.”
“These jobs are the jobs that are going to define the 21st century that will allow America to compete and to lead like we did in the 20th century,” Biden said.
According to Biden’s speech, the $535 million loan guarantee was a smaller part of the $30 billion of stimulus money the administration planned to spend as part of its Green Jobs Initiative.
Obama made similar claims in a May 26, 2010 speech at the plant, but the 1,000 jobs he and Biden touted in their respective speeches failed to materialize.
Instead, Solyndra announced on Nov. 3 it planned to postpone expanding the plant, which put the taxpayers on the hook to the tune of $390.5 million taxpayers**, or 73 percent of the total loan guarantee, according to the Wall Street Journal.
It also announced that it no longer planned to hire the 1,000 workers that Obama and Biden had touted in their speeches and that it planned to close one of its older factories and planned to lay-off 135 temporary or contract workers and 40 full-time employees.
A closer look at the company shows it has never turned a profit since it was founded in 2005, according to its Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings.
And Solyndra’s auditor declared that “the company has suffered recurring losses, negative cash flows since inception and has a net stockholders’ deficit that, among other factors, [that] raise substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a growing concern” in a March 2010 amendment to its SEC registration statement.
“While we understand the purpose of the Loan Guarantee Program is to help private companies engaging in clean energy products to obtain financing by providing loan guarantees, subsequent events raise questions about Solyndra was the right candidate to receive a loan guarantee in excess of half a billion dollars,” Upton and Stearns wrote.
A June 2010 Wall Street Journal report indicating that Solyndra’s majority owner, Oklahoma billionaire George Kaiser, was a major fundraiser for the 2008 Obama-Biden campaign has stimulus opponents such as Citizens Against Government Waste crying foul.
What did we get for spending nearly a trillion dollars on stimulus? We got 9% unemployment. But Obama’s political cronies got a big raise.
Economics in One Lesson
Perhaps it is time to review Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson, chapter 4, entitled “Public Works Mean Taxes”.
Excerpt:
Therefore, for every public job created by the bridge project a private job has been destroyed somewhere else. We can see the men employed on the bridge. We can watch them at work. The employment argument of the government spenders becomes vivid, and probably for most people convincing. But there are other things that we do not see, because, alas, they have never been permitted to come into existence. They are the jobs destroyed by the $10 million taken from the taxpayers. All that has happened, at best, is that there has been a diversion of jobs because of the project. More bridge builders; fewer automobile workers, television technicians, clothing workers, farmers.
And consider Chapter 5 as well, entitled “Taxes Discourage Production”.
In our modern world there is never the same percentage of income tax levied on everybody. The great burden of income taxes is imposed on a minor percentage of the nation’s income; and these income taxes have to be supplemented by taxes of other kinds. These taxes inevitably affect the actions and incentives of those from whom they are taken. When a corporation loses a hundred cents of every dollar it loses, and is permitted to keep only fifty-two cents of every dollar it gains, and when it cannot adequately offset its years of losses against its years of gains, its policies are affected. It does not expand its operations, or it expands only those attended with a minimum of risk. People who recognize this situation are deterred from starting new enterprises. Thus old employers do not give more employment, or not as much more as they might have; and others decide not to become employers at all. Improved machinery and better-equipped factories come into existence much more slowly than they otherwise would. The result in the long run is that consumers are prevented from getting better and cheaper products to the extent that they otherwise would, and that real wages are held down, compared with what they might have been.
There is a similar effect when personal incomes are taxed 50, 60 or 70 percent. People begin to ask themselves why they should work six, eight or nine months of the entire year for the government, and only six, four or three months for themselves and their families. If they lose the whole dollar when they lose, but can keep only a fraction of it when they win, they decide that it is foolish to take risks with their capital. In addition, the capital available for risk-taking itself shrinks enormously. It is being taxed away before it can be accumulated. In brief, capital to provide new private jobs is first prevented from coming into existence, and the part that does come into existence is then discouraged from starting new enterprises. The government spenders create the very problem of unemployment that they profess to solve.
George W. Bush cut taxes in his first term and created 1 million NEW JOBS. Obama transfered BILLIONS from the private sector to the public sector, where government waste is rampant. Government spending is a job killer. Obama might be a nice man, but he is just wrong on economics and business. What we should have done is elected someone who doesn’t repeat the mistakes made in other countries, like in Japan where massive government spending failed to stimulate the economy. And we shouldn’t enact single-payer health care, because it’s not working in Canada. The wait times to see doctors in Canada are increasing. We should only imitate the successes of other countries, like the free trade agreements in Chile or the flat tax in Lithuania or the private retirement accounts in Chile or the low tax rates of Hong Kong. We have to decide, as a nation, whether we want jobs and prosperity, or rhetoric and feelings.
WINTERY KNIGHT 