Tag Archives: Money

Commentary

How much profit does the non-profit Planned Parenthood make?

6 Comments

This article from the American Spectator provides the answer.

Excerpt:

Left-wing activists are indignant at obscene oil company profits, hefty CEO bonuses, and sweet golden parachutes — but what about expansion of the No. 1 violator of human rights in the United States?

No, it’s not Dick Cheney and the CIA. It’s Planned Parenthood. The abortion giant took home $85 million in “excess of revenue over expenses” (a nifty way of saying profits) and had an operating budget of over $1 billion for the 2007-2008 fiscal year, according to its latest annual report. Included in that budget was $350 million in “government grants and contracts” (an equally nifty way of saying your tax dollars). An increase in the number of abortions performed helped fuel the profits.

Should government money be going to special interest groups that helped Obama to get elected?

Uncle Sam helps, too. The federal government has morphed into Planned Parenthood’s sugar daddy, and the co-dependency is only going to get worse in the age of Obama. Fully one-third of the organization’s revenue last year came from the government, compared with less than one-fourth from private contributions. If Planned Parenthood can’t get your money voluntarily, its advocates in Congress will coercively.

That’s why limited government advocates have a stake in the pro-life cause. On April 15, over one million Americans flocked to state capitals, public parks, and town halls to protest runaway government spending — and rightly so. Although most of the movement’s furor was directed at bailouts and stimulus packages, government’s love tryst with the abortion lobby should be exhibit A in the tea partiers’ future arsenal.

The first target should be Obama’s executive order rescinding the Mexico City Policy, which had ensured that American taxpayer funds would never be used for overseas abortions. The move didn’t get much ink because of the media’s preoccupation with the economic crisis, but it stands as an example of both Obama’s abortion radicalism and intention, even in a troubled economy, to throw public money at groups that helped him get elected.

Yet another reason why fiscal conservatives should be social conservatives.

Related posts

News

Rich trust-fund leftists caught spying for Cuba

4 Comments

Heritage Foundation has the story:

Move over, Bill Ayers, you’ve got company. The arrest of retired State Department intelligence analyst Walter Kendall Myers has apparently uncovered yet another overweened Social Register Rebel in our midst. Myers and his wife, Gwendolyn, were arrested on June 5 and charged with being espionage agents for Fidel Castro for 30 years.

…Kendall Myers got his PhD and later taught at Johns Hopkins/SAIS…

Myers’s mother’s pedigree (AT&T money and top-drawer National Geographic Society founders) even topped Ayers’s father’s Commonwealth Edison/Chicago fortune. Both of these bad boys seemingly felt so bad about living large off the sweat of their ancestors that they became hard-core leftists and turned on their fellow Americans.

A bit more in a subsequent post:

Cases like those of Defense Intelligence Agency analyst Ana Belen Montes, convicted in 2002 of spying for Cuba, or the five Cubans convicted in Miami in 2001 on 26 counts of spying for the regime, demonstrate the ability of the Cuban operatives to work in the U.S. to the detriment of U.S. national security and interests.

What about Barack Obama?

Barack Obama launched his presidential campaign from the house of his friend, Bill Ayers. He was raised by a rich grandmother and went to expensive private schools, where he took illegal drugs like cocaine. His mentor Frank Marshall Davis was a member of the Communist Party and a Soviet-sponsored activist. I’ve posted before about whether Obama is destroying the United States with his policies. He voted against missile defense, but he favors nuclear plants for Iran.

And we know that Obama is traipsing around with dictators in Venezuela and is even trying to normalize relations with Cuba. Who cares about the torture and unlawful imprisonment that goes on in Cuba and Iran? Obama’s response to North Korea hasn’t been inspiring.

Videos

What is intelligent design? What is capitalism?

Leave a comment

Two new books have just come out by two of my favorite people in the whole world:

  • Stephen C. Meyer (Ph.D from Cambridge University)
  • Jay W. Richards (Ph.D from Princeton University).

Meyer’s book is about intelligent design, and Richards’ book is about capitalism. Let’s take a look.

What is intelligent design?

To understand what intelligent design is, you can watch two DVDs that are now online at Youtube. Both videos are by Illustra Media.

Here are the 2 playlists:

I give these videos my highest recommendation. If you have not seen them, you must see them.

Stephen C. Meyer’s new book

The new book by Stephen C. Meyer is called “Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design”. It is being published by Harper-Collins.

Signature in the Cell
Signature in the Cell

Here is the blurb:

Meyer tells the story of the successive attempts to solve this mystery of DNA and argues that fundamental objections now exist to the adequacy of all purely naturalistic or materialistic theories. The book then proposes a radical alternative based upon developments in molecular biology and the information sciences: it proposes the design hypothesis as the best explanation for the origin of the information necessary to produce the first life.

SIGNATURE IN THE CELL will not merely provide a critique of evolutionary theories. It also shows that, based on our uniform and repeated experience-the basis of all scientific reasoning about the past-there is a strong positive case for intelligent design. From our experience we know that intelligence alone produces large amounts of information. Thus, the book shows that the argument for intelligent design from DNA is not based on ignorance or a desire to “give up on science,” but instead upon just the opposite: our growing scientific knowledge of the inner workings of the cell and our experience-based knowledge of the cause-and-effect structure of the world. For just this reason the argument for design can be formulated as a rigorous and positive scientific argument-specifically one called “an inference to the best explanation.” The book shows, ironically, that the argument for intelligent design from DNA is based on the same method of scientific reasoning that Darwin himself used.

I pre-ordered mine! You can see Stephen Meyer debating against Skeptic magazine’s editor Michael Shermer here.

Now let’s turn to Jay W. Richards’ book.

What is capitalism?

To understand what capitalism is, you can watch this lecture entitled “Money, Greed and God: Why Capitalism is the Solution and Not the Problem” by Jay W. Richards, delivered at the Heritage Foundation think tank, and televised by C-SPAN2. The book has the same title, and is published by Harper-Collins.

Money, Greed and God
Money, Greed and God

Here is the blurb:

Does capitalism promote greed? Can a person follow Jesus’s call to love others and also support capitalism? Was our recent economic crisis caused by flaws inherent to our free market system? Jay Richards presents a new approach to capitalism, revealing how it’s fully consistent with Jesus’s teachings and the Christian tradition, while also showing why this system is our best bet for renewed economic vigor.

The church is bombarded with two competing messages about money and capitalism:

  • wealth is bad and causes much of the world’s suffering
  • wealth is good and God wants you to prosper and be rich

Richards exposes these myths, and other common misconceptions about capitalism, and reveals the surprising ways that capitalism is, in fact, the best system to respond to the biblical mandates of alleviating poverty and protecting the environment. Money, Greed, and God equips readers to take practical steps in their own lives to conduct business, worship God, and serve others without falling into the “prosperity gospel” trap.

I can hardly wait to get my copy!

If you can’t see the Richards video, here is an audio lecture by Jay Richards on the “Myths Christians Believe about Wealth and Poverty“. Also, why not check out this series of 4 sermons by Wayne Grudem on the relationship between Christianity and economics? (a PDF outline is here)