Right to Opine

In his address to Congress Wednesday, President Obama asserted once again that his health care plan would not fund abortion. Let’s examine that claim using the most widely quoted current proposal.

HR3200 Subtitle B Section 2511 (p. 992) provides for “School-Based Health Clinics” (SBHC) to be funded with your tax dollars. This sounds great on the surface. Who doesn’t want to provide health care for our kids? The problem is that the language is, deliberately, overly broad and opens the door for groups such as Planned Parenthood, our top abortion provider, to open clinics in our schools.

(c) USE OF FUNDS.—Funds awarded under a grant under this section may be used for—

(1) providing training related to the provision of comprehensive primary health services and additional health services;

What, exactly, are the “additional health services” here? We don’t really know, as the bill does not specify. You can, however, connect the dots. Oversight of the clinics is left to the Secretary of Health & Human Services (SHSS), currently Kathleen Sebelius who is a radical pro-abortion advocate and supporter of late-term abortionists (e.g., the late George Tiller).

(d) CONSIDERATION OF NEED.—In determining the amount of a grant under this section, the Secretary shall take into consideration—

…

(3) other factors as determined appropriate by the Secretary.

This gives quite a bit of leeway to the SHSS. She could, for example, grant greater funding to SBHCs that provide “family planning” counseling of the sort she approves.

(l) DEFINITIONS.—In this section:

(1) COMPREHENSIVE PRIMARY HEALTH SERVICES.—The term ‘comprehensive primary health services’ means the core services offered by SBHCs, which shall include the following:

…

(C) OPTIONAL SERVICES.—Additional services, which may include oral health, social, and age-appropriate health education services, including nutritional counseling.

Sounds innocuous enough but what, exactly, are “age-appropriate health education services” under this definition? Would pro-abortion counseling qualify? Given the current SHSS you can count on it.

(3) SCHOOL-BASED HEALTH CLINIC.—The term ‘school-based health clinic’ means a health clinic that—

(A) is located in, or is adjacent to, a school facility of a local educational agency;

…

(4) SPONSORING FACILITY.—The term ‘sponsoring facility’ is—

…

(D) a nonprofit health care agency;

Bingo! Planned Parenthood qualifies. In fact, they wouldn’t even have to operate on school grounds. Any Planned Parenthood clinic near a school would qualify under this plan.

Now back to Obama’s claim that our tax dollars would not fund abortions. First note that nothing in this bill excludes abortion and great leeway is given to the SHSS to determine how funds are meted out. There is no guarantee here that funds would not be used directly for abortion. Assume, for the sake of argument, that none are. Even in that case Planned Parenthood clinics on or near school grounds would qualify for these funds. In practice every dollar they receive for even legitimate purposes frees up another dollar to fund the rest of their practice…being America’s number one provider of abortions.

Republican Congressman Charles Wilson may have been out of line concerning the venue of his outburst, but he was correct. Mr. Obama, you lie.

Why did we keep our daughter home from school today? So we could watch the President’s speech with her and provide corrections where necessary. You can be sure our public schools will not balance their adulation of The One with anything approaching reality.

After last week’s firestorm of protests over the supplemental materials provided to teachers, President Obama gave a rather bland and predictable speech to our nation’s students this morning. (The prepared text can be found here.) The problem with his speech wasn’t what he said, but that he didn’t mean it.

I’ve talked a lot about your government’s responsibility for setting high standards, supporting teachers and principals, and turning around schools that aren’t working where students aren’t getting the opportunities they deserve.

But you don’t really mean it. It’s one thing to claim to set high standards. It’s another entirely to enforce those standards. One of your biggest backers, the NEA, opposes enforcement of standards (i.e., failing students and denying graduation). As a state senator, U.S. senator, and now as president, you have done absolutely nothing to change that. Without enforcement standards are meaningless. Your record speaks for itself.

My father left my family when I was two years old, and I was raised by a single mother who struggled at times to pay the bills and wasn’t always able to give us things the other kids had.

But you know that’s only a half-truth. The fact is, you were largely raised by your maternal grandparents, one of whom was vice president of a bank. You didn’t grow up poor. You didn’t grow up disadvantaged. You grew up in a comfortable neighborhood in Hawaii and chose to waste your time hanging around a Marxist mentor and smoking dope. Puhlease.

Where you are right now doesn’t have to determine where you’ll end up. No one’s written your destiny for you. Here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future.

Ah, if only you really believed that. If you did, you’d support eliminating affirmative action and other racial quotas. You’d support reducing government expenditures on welfare and entitlement programs. You’d insist that college admissions and job opportunities be given to the best qualified candidate, not the most racially diverse candidate. But you don’t. Instead you support expanding entitlement programs, encouraging future generations to rely more and more on the government rather than themselves. You have put zero pressure on universities and corporations to give rewards to those who have earned them.

These people succeeded because they understand that you can’t let your failures define you – you have to let them teach you. You have to let them show you what to do differently next time.

But we’re not allowed to let kids fail, even when they don’t do their work at all, much less when they do it but poorly. Instead we pass them on from grade to grade and they never learn from their failure because they aren’t allowed to fail.

If you get in trouble, that doesn’t mean you’re a troublemaker, it means you need to try harder to behave.

Um, actually, I think that is a pretty obvious definition of a troublemaker. (From Merriam-Webster: trou-ble-mak-er, n., a person who consciously or unconsciously causes trouble.) Quit with the touchy-feely stuff, sir, and just tell them to shape up. Of course, there have to be consequences or they won’t, so never mind. Keep the feel-good slop flowing.

Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Don’t be afraid to ask for help when you need it. I do that every day.

Yes, but the group you ask for help includes Marxists, tax cheats, racists, etc. Hopefully our kids will choose wiser advisors.

The story of America isn’t about people who quit when things got tough. It’s about people who kept going, who tried harder, who loved their country too much to do anything less than their best.

It’s the story of students who sat where you sit 250 years ago, and went on to wage a revolution and found this nation.

And let’s all recall what that revolution was about…taxes! A sobering history lesson for you, Mr. President, as we host our TEA parties across the nation.

Thank you, God bless you, and God bless America.

Um, why isn’t the ACLU up in arms over this? A high school valedictorian can’t mention God in a graduation speech but you give your homeboy a pass? To quote our fearless leader, “Enough!”

Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology makes us illegally download digital content like movies and music. Or so says Cambridge professor Patricia Akester. Yes, and

• Bars on store windows make us break in and steal cash from the register
• Car alarms make us steal cars
• Home security systems force us to burglarize our neighbors
• Bank safes make us robbers

I could go on but you get the point. It’s amazing the lengths to which liberal academics will go to justify immorality.

This headline (from the NY Times, of course) is indicative of one significant problem in our left-dominated education system:

Test Results Show Persistent Racial Gap in School Achievement

The article goes on to explain that under No Child Left Behind, the test scores of minority children have increased since 2004, but so have the scores of white students. So NCLB is a failure because all of our kids’ scores are improving? We can’t have that, now, can we? We really must do something that improves minority scores without improving whites’.

And the left accuses us of being racist. You really have to be a liberal to understand that logic.

What should we do when the high school dropout rate is around 30% and many students aren’t meeting standards? Lower the standards, apparently. Failing grades appear to be somehow unfair and engender a culture of failure. Good Lord we’re raising a generation of namby pambies. As Michael Petrilli of Stanford University comments,

This is clearly about dumbing down expectations for our students. Some of these children are just a few years away from being in the workforce, in college or even in the military, and in none of those environment will they be coddled like they are in these programs.

Next time you’re in an elevator on the 50th floor or driving across a freeway bridge, ask yourself who you’d rather have designing that structure: the product of a “no fail” education system or an engineer who had to pass a rigorous exam with no regard for his self esteem? I’ll take the latter, thank you.

That may sound callous, but as we “celebrate” the ten-year anniversary of the murder of 12 students and a teacher at Columbine, make note that their deaths resulted in absolutely zero improvements in the safety of our children at school. Think about it for a moment then send a letter to your state representatives and school boards. What, exactly, have they done to make our kids safer?

I should note the single exception, at least as reported in the American media: Harrold Independent School District (Harrold, TX) has changed their policies to allow teachers who have a CCW and who have taken specialized courses to carry concealed weapons on campus. Sadly their lone example of clear thinking doesn’t appear to be contagious.

Make sure to hug/kiss your kids goodbye before school each morning. There are a couple dozen parents in Columbine who can’t enjoy that simple pleasure.

A disturbing number of teachers in the Washington, D.C., school district have been assaulted by students, including one who was held down on a desk and choked. Even a single such incident should be unacceptable, but administrators appear to be siding with the students, charging that the teachers are

distorting the situation to deflect attention from their own professional shortcomings.

…

Teachers who complain or eject too many students say they are tagged as weak in “classroom management” by administrators determined to keep a lid on behavior issues. Slade wrote in his guide to teachers that any instructor who refers students to his office every day “will risk placement on some type of improvement plan,” a probationary status such as the 90-day plan.

No mention is made of the consequences for students who are habitually disruptive. Teachers shouldn’t have to be child psychologists or trained juvenile behavior experts. So-called “classroom management” techniques are helpful in quashing chatter and minor misbehavior; they won’t help a teacher who’s having books thrown at them or being choked. Those acts are, legally, assault and should be prosecuted as such rather than swept under the rug.

Teachers wake up. The liberals you vote for are responsible for the conditions in which you work.

A student at a Connecticut college was called in to the police station for questioning after giving a classroom speech advocating concealed carry for students and staff. The cops were called by the class professor, who seems to believe the speech was somehow threatening. No surprise that neither the prof nor the university would comment on the situation, as moral cowardice runs rampant in our institutions of supposedly higher learning.

At too many of our universities free speech is only encouraged when it agrees with the schools’ liberal agendas.

A prof at LA City College shut down a class speech by a Christian student, calling him a “fascist bastard” when the student’s speech expressed an opinion critical of gay marriage. A couple students were purportedly offended by Lopez’s statements. This is the left’s idea of free speech. You can say anything whatsoever which is offensive to Christians, but they’re not allowed equal time. Isn’t college supposed to be the place for airing and discussing controversial opinions? Only if you buy the politically correct line.

Not too surprisingly, we have another debate regarding the presentation of Darwinism in public education. This time it’s in Texas, where the stakes are large because the state is one of the largest purchasers of textbooks and other curricular media.

What seems to be missing from both sides of the argument is rather obvious. If Darwinian evolution is true, it should not be afraid of challenge. All scientific theory should be open to challenge. If Darwin stands up to repeated, continuous scrutiny, who stands to lose? Only the folks defending intelligent design/creationism.

The truth is that Darwinism has a number of glaring holes. Do a Google search and you’ll find hundreds of sites with heated debates over the issue. It’s far from settled and, contrary to what the media and Darwinist scientists would have you believe, there are many well-credentialed scientists who fall in the ID camp. Further, concensus and majority opinion do not have any place in science. No real scientist will say something along the lines of, “Most <fill in scientific specialty here> agree that…” But that’s exactly what we too often hear. I’ve seen numerous debates about issues such as the Cambrian explosion or how humans and apes evolved from a common ancestor in a (geologically) short time, but haven’t seen any that convince me that random mutation is responsible.

Darwinism has, in fact, become a religion that simply must not be questioned. That’s sad, because if it’s true, then questioning it is exactly what will lead to resolving its (currently) inexplicable quandaries.