Tag Archives: Democrat

News

Democrat platform supports subsidizing abortions with taxpayer dollars

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From the Weekly Standard.

Excerpt:

The 2012 Democratic party will officially adopt an extreme position on the issue of abortion on Tuesday. According to a copy of the party platform, which was released online just before midnight on Monday, “The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to make decisions regarding her pregnancy, including a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay.”

That last part–“regardless of ability to pay”–is an endorsement of taxpayer-funded abortions, a policy that President Obama has personally endorsed. Obama wants Medicaid to pay directly for elective abortions, and Obamacare will allow beneficiaries to use federal subsidies to purchase health care plans that cover elective abortions.

[…]The 2012 Democratic party also endorses an unrestricted right to abortion-on-demand. According to the platform, on the issue of abortion “there is no place for politicians or government to get in the way.” In 2003, Obama was asked if he was pro-choice on abortion “in all situations including the late-term thing.” Obama replied: “I’m pro-choice.”

In 1992, then-Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton tried to soften the party’s image on abortion by expressing his desire to make abortion “safe, legal, and rare.” Although the Democratic party platforms in 2000 and 2004 stated the party’s goal is to make abortion “rare,” the 2012 platform makes no such claim. “In 2000, the Democratic platform said the party’s goal was ‘to make abortion less necessary and more rare,'” Jeff Jacoby wrote in the Boston Globe last week. “The 2004 platform declared, ‘Abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.’ But even calling for abortion to be ‘rare’ is now too much for the Democrats’ platform committee, which deleted the word in 2008.” The word “rare” did not make a comeback in 2012.

Surprise! The Democrats want pro-life taxpayers to subsidize abortions. And what happens to the frequency of an action when people are paid to do it? You get more of it. The Democrats aren’t “pro-choice”, they’re pro-abortion. They want more abortion. And why not? The largest provider of abortions in America, Planned Parenthood, will be getting these taxpayer subsidies, and they’ll just turn around and give political contributions back to the Democrats. Everybody wins! Well, everybody except the babies and the taxpayers.

We are in a recession. Is this really the time to be sending women a message that if they are irresponsible with sex, that they will get a bailout from taxpayers who are already struggling to pay their own bills? How is that fair? People have to stop taking risks that are likely to incur costs – costs that may be passed on to their more responsible neighbors. We need to encourage people to take responsibility for their own actions and to make wise choices.

News

Paul Ryan fact check: Was the GM plant in Janesville closed in 2008 or 2009?

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CNS News sets the record straight.

Excerpt:

In his speech accepting the Republican nomination for vice president, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) told the story of a General Motors factory in his hometown of Janesville, Wisconsin, accusing President Obama of failing to keep a campaign promise to keep the plant open.

“My home state voted for President Obama. When he talked about change, many people liked the sound of it, especially in Janesville, where we were about to lose a major factory,” Ryan said Wednesday.

“Right there at that plant, candidate Obama said: ‘I believe that if our government is there to support you … this plant will be here for another hundred years.’ That’s what he said in 2008. Well, as it turned out, that plant didn’t last another year. It is locked up and empty to this day. And that’s how it is in so many towns today, where the recovery that was promised is nowhere in sight.”

Ryan’s claims received widespread criticism from the Obama campaign and many liberal media outlets.

“He even dishonestly attacked Barack Obama for the closing of a GM plant in his hometown of Janesville, Wisconsin — a plant that closed in December 2008 under George W. Bush,” Obama campaign manager Jim Messina said in an email to supporters Thursday.

The Washington Post official ‘fact-checker’ also attacked Ryan’s claims as false, using the same line about the plant closing in 2008:

“That’s not true. The plant was closed in December 2008, before Obama was sworn in,” Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler wrote Wednesday. “Obama gave his speech in February 2008, and he did say those words. But Ryan’s phrasing, referring to the fact the plant did not last another year, certainly suggests it closed in 2009, when Obama was president.”

But Ryan is in fact correct. The Janesville GM factory stopped production of SUVs in December 2008 and closed its doors for good in 2009 – less than one year after Obama promised to keep it open for another hundred years.

In his speech in Janesville, then-Sen. Obama said that if elected, he would support retooling the Janesville plant to make energy efficient vehicles. Despite his administration’s carefully shepherding of GM through bankruptcy, the Janesville plant has not been retooled to make anything.

[…]“Full-size sport utility vehicle production has ended at the local General Motors plant, but medium-duty truck production is continuing—not starting—in Janesville. And it likely will continue into May, when the lights finally go off in the facility that has been producing vehicles since 1923” the paper reported February 2, 2009.

In fact, a GM press release confirms that the automaker had placed the Janesville plant on “standby capacity” – an auto industry term for a factory no longer producing vehicles – in May of 2009.

“Janesville was placed on standby capacity in May 2009 and will remain in that status,” GM said in a June 26, 2009 press release.

In sum, the Janesville plant shut down the majority of its production in December 2008, laying off all but 50 of its approximately 1,200 employees. Those 50 employees remained at the plant making Isuzu trucks for several more months as the plant’s operations wound down.

As a candidate, President Obama promised to support re-tooling the factory to make more fuel-efficient vehicles and keep the plant open for a century. The plant, however, remains closed.

It’s amazing how the left-wing media just flat out lies in order to protect the incompetence of this community organizer President. Recall also that the economy started to decline when the massive spending started under the new Pelosi-Reid plan in January of 2007. Deficits went from $160 billion to about $600 billion as soon as the Democrats took over, and then well over a trillion in 2009 when Democrats controlled the House, Senate and Presidency.

More responses to criticisms of the speech at the liberal Washington Post.

Commentary

Mark Steyn: the Democrat debt war on children

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From National Review.

Excerpt:

China becoming the world’s biggest economy, another American downgrade, total U.S. liabilities equivalent to about three times the entire planet’s GDP. A “non-partisan” Pew Research study says the American middle class faces its “worst decade in modern history” — and the first bump down starts on January 1: The equally “non-partisan” Congressional Budget Office now says that the tax and budget changes due to take effect at the beginning of 2013 will put the country back in recession and increase unemployment. This is a revision of their prediction earlier this year that in 2013 the economy would contract by 1.3 percent. Now they say 2.9 percent. These days, CBO revisions only go one way — down. They’re gonna need steeper graph paper. In a global economy, atrophy goes around like syphilis in the Gay Nineties: A moribund U.S. economy further mires Europe, and both slow growth in China, which means fewer orders for resource-rich nations. . . . Four wheels spinning in the mud, and none with a firm-enough grip to pull the vehicle back on to solid ground.

[…]But don’t worry, Obamacare will “lower costs.” Since passage of the bill in 2010, the CBO has revised its estimate of Obamacare’s gross costs over ten years. Can you guess in which direction, boys and girls? Yes, up from $944 billion to $1.856 trillion. That’s some “revision.” I wonder where it’ll be in another two years.

Well, I’m not the CBO, but I’ll take a wild guess: Obamacare is going to be expensive on a scale unknown to European health systems. Look around you. Americans are not Swedes. Obesity rate in the United States: 36 percent; Sweden: 9.7 percent; Japan: 3.2 percent; China: 2.9 percent; India: 0.7 percent. Ours is a country where 78 million people (or about the entire population of Germany) are classified by the Centers for Disease Control as “obese” — including over 40 million women. If 40 million women have it, isn’t that a “women’s health” issue? Perhaps even a bigger “women’s health” issue than the right of thirtysomething students to free contraception? It’s the first thing the average American of, say, 1950 would notice if you catapulted him forward from his mid-century Main Street to today: not how amazing all these computer gizmos are, but how large and sick today’s Americans look.

[…]So we can’t fight a war in Afghanistan, but we can fight a “war on women” that only exists in upscale liberal feminists’ heads. We can’t do anything about exploding rates of childhood obesity, diabetes, and heart disease, but, if you define “health care” as forcing a Catholic institution to buy $8 contraception for the scions of wealth and privilege, we’re right on top of it. And above all, we’re doing it for the children, if by “doing it” you mean leaving them with a transgenerational bill unknown to human history — or engaging in what Boston University’s Larry Kotlikoff, speaking at the International Institute of Public Finance in Dresden last week, called “child fiscal abuse.”

If that sounds a trifle overheated, how about . . . hmm, “legitimate fiscal rape”? No? Then let’s call it a “war on children.” Unlike the “war on women,” it’s real.

Are you a young person living with your parents with student loans and no job? Are you worried about how you will have to pay for ballooning entitlements for the elderly out of your future earnings? Then stop voting for Democrats.