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News and Politics

How the Right Plans to Reverse Roe

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Liberals are convinced that the Supreme Court is on the brink of striking down Roe v. Wade and many pro-life figures hope that’s the case. However, recent rulings from the court have surprised both sides.

Last week, the justices upheld an Indiana law requiring the burial or cremation of fetal remains but refused to hear arguments on whether abortions based on sex, race, or disability ought to be legal. Indiana banned such abortions but a federal appeals court struck down the ban.

In this podcast, Roger Gannam of Liberty Counsel joins me to react to those decisions and to explain the delicate legal approach pro-life forces are charting – as they try to reverse Roe v. Wade without getting too aggressive and risking another legal precedent against their efforts.

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Are Adversity Scores the Answer?

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The College Board announced it is calculating an “adversity score” for the SAT in order to boost the chances for students living in the midst of great hardship to get accepted into college.

The adversity score takes 15 different factors into account, including the crime rate and poverty level in a students neighborhood and high school.

“There are a number of amazing students who may have scored less (on the SAT) but have accomplished more,” David Coleman, chief executive of the College Board, said, said according to the Wall Street Journal. “We can’t sit on our hands and ignore the disparities of wealth reflected in the SAT.”

The College Board insists this change does not take race into account.  However, Horace Cooper of the Project 21 National Advisory Board isn’t buying it.

“There’s an attempt being made by the SAT testing centers to hide better the utilization of race as a technique for making it easier for some people to be admitted while making it harder for others,” said Cooper, who says students from stable families and communities end up suffering.

“The so-called adversity scale – if it were even race-neutral – appears to say that the parents who work together and stay together in a relationship and it benefits their children are going to now be disadvantaged,” said Cooper.

Cooper believes the extra score for growing up in difficult circumstances provides lousy parents with an incentive to stay that way.

“Children that grow up in households where moms and dads stay together do better financially.  They do better academically.  They do better in terms of criminal interaction and law enforcement than those who do not.  We don’t want to create a situation, where we start at the end and work our way back, and then we end up incentivizing people not to (be concerned about these things,” said Cooper.

Listen to the full podcast to hear Cooper address concerns that disadvantaged students suffer because a chaotic home life causes their studies to suffer through no fault of their own.  He also reveals how he believes the college admissions system ought to work.

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Great First Quarter Growth, The Anita Hill Delusion, Libs Behaving Badly

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David French of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America celebrate stronger than expected economic growth of 3.2 percent in the first quarter of 2019.  They also pour cold water on the absurd notions that Anita Hill was treated unfairly by the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991 and that Clarence Thomas is somehow assumed guilty of doing what she accused him of doing.  And they react to a judge in Massachusetts and the mayor of Baltimore finding themselves in heaps of legal trouble.

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Why Is The Border Crisis Getting So Much Worse?

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Just a few weeks ago, a fierce debate raged over President Trump’s call for a national emergency to direct billions of taxpayer dollars to build a wall along strategic points of the U.S. Mexico border, and while the controversy over Trump’s action persists, all sides now agree there is a humanitarian urgency as the number of people attempting to enter the U.S. continues to swell.

According to government statistics, some 58,000 border apprehensions occurred in January.  There were 76,000 in February and the figures for March could reach 100,000.

And the surge is taxing the already stretched manpower and resources along our southern border.

“The system has broken down because it’s so overwhelmed by the number of people we see entering the United States illegally,” said Andrew Arthur of the Center for Immigration Studies.

“The border patrol just doesn’t have the facilities to process those individuals in a timely manner.  We lack the detention facilities to hold them and [Health and Human Services], which is supposed to take custody of unaccompanied alien children within 48 hours, is now out of space as well,” said Arthur.

Arthur says one of the reasons for so many people being allowed into the U.S. despite coming illegally is because the Obama administration loosened the terms by which the migrants can ask for protection based on claims of “credible fear” if they return to their home countries.

As a result, 97,000 people in the past year claim credible fear as opposed to 5,000 per year when Obama took office.  Those 97,000 claims are then processed by just a few hundred case officers and immigration judges.

Listen to the full podcast to learn about other factors triggering this wave of humanity across the southern border, what President Trump can do to address it and what actions have to come from Congress.

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Turner: Trump Ready to Move on Our Health Plan

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President Trump now says he will wait until after the 2020 election to pursue repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act again, but Galen Institute President Grace-Marie Turner says Trump is champing at the bit to get health reform done and he wants to do it with the plan she and other policy experts are championing.

Turner and her health policy consensus group have been urging lawmakers to take up the Health Care Choices Act.  Two weeks ago, while playing golf with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham detailed the proposal and Trump immediately embraced it.

“The president got excited, saying, ‘Oh my goodness, there’s another plan out there.  This is my plan to make America great again.’  And so he kind of said let’s go do this,” said Turner.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell immediately dumped cold water on the idea, saying the Senate did not have time to take up the issue in this Congress.  With Democrats controlling the House of Representatives, there is virtually no chance of a GOP bill making it to Trump’s desk.  Many on the right also see another fierce debate damaging their prospects in 2020.

Trump now says he will move forward on health care as soon as the next presidential race is over.  Turner thinks the future of health care policy will be a huge issue in this campaign.

“This is a huge decision for the American people.  What direction do you want your health care system to go in for the next generation?  Do you want to go toward even more government control of the system with a Medicare for all, which is really mandatory Medicaid with no choices or do you want to finally have a properly-functioning market so that you the consumer are in the driver’s seat,” said Turner.

Turner says the crux of the Health Care Choices Act is moving power out of Washington.

“The reason this plan is different is that it realizes the federal government is completely out of its element in regulating, overseeing, managing, micromanaging something as regional and personal as health care.

“We believe the states, which by the way have decades of experience in overseeing health insurance markets, can spend this money more wisely and will have incentives to give their citizens more choices,” said Turner.

In addition, Turner says this approach will protect Americans with pre-existing conditions while lowering premiums due to a provision in the existing law, known as Section 1332.

“It gives states the ability to say, ‘Let me take some of this money that is currently going to insurance companies, and instead re-purpose it to give additional support for people who have high health care costs, who have expensive chronic conditions, and use some of that money to separately subsidize them so that the people in the general pool don’t have to pay such high premiums to cross-subsidize them,” said Turner.

Listen to the full podcast to hear Turner’s extended explanation of the legislation, what the results have been in states where some of the main concepts have been tried, and why there will still need to be federal “guardrails” if the bill passes.

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Koppel Calls Out Media, Trump Keeps Bashing McCain, Biden-Abrams 2020?

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Jim Geraghty of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America applaud former ABC News anchor Ted Koppel’s critique of the media and appreciate that at least one veteran journalist has the courage to speak out on liberal bias in the news. They also take President Trump to task for attacking the late Sen. John McCain in a series of immature tweets and public statements. And they predict former Vice President Joe Biden won’t endear himself to progressives if reports are true that he’s planning to name former Georgia Rep. Stacey Abrams his running mate in 2020.

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NEA Helps Push Transgender Agenda on Kindergartners

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One of the most powerful forces in public education is actively promoting transgenderism to children as young as kindergartners.

Earlier this month, National Education Association President Lily Eskelsen Garcia joined Sarah McBride of the Human Right Campaign in reading “I Am Jazz” to a kindergarten class at Ashlawn Elementary School in Arlington, Virginia.  The  NEA is the largest teachers’ union in the nation.  The Human Right Campaign is the largest LGBT lobby in the U.S.

According to the Washington Post, he event took place in conjunction with the NEA’s Read Across America Day.

McBride, who was born a biological male but now identifies as female, read lines from the book, such as ““I have a girl brain but a boy body. This is called transgender. I was born this way.”

Cathy Ruse, director of the Center for Human Dignity at the Family Research Council, says it was “completely outrageous” to read such a book to a kindergarten class.  But she says there’s more than what the Washington Post reported.

“The parents were not fully notified and they were not asked permission to have their kids in this event,” said Ruse, noting that notice of the event only went to parents in English, whereas many of the families in that neighborhood do not speak English as their first language.

Listen to the full podcast to hear Ruse explain the significance of the National Education Association promoting this issue to young kids, why she believes activists are trying to smother any dissent on these issues, and what she sees as the proper way to approach any students struggling with their sex or gender.

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New Zealand Terrorism, AOC’s Illogical Response, Schultz vs. Washington Reality

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Jim Geraghty of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America recoil at the mass murder of 49 Muslims in New Zealand, the radical manifesto that came with it, and the aggravating tendency of politicians and activists to claim instantly that an attack vindicates their existing political positions.  They also slam Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for mocking the idea of “thoughts and prayers” in the wake of these horrible events and then claiming she really said it to attack the NRA for carnage in New Zealand. And they have fun with Howard Schultz suggesting he would not sign any legislation as president that did not have bipartisan support or nominate any Supreme Court justice who couldn’t get two-thirds support in the Senate.

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No Deal at Hanoi, Trump Weak on Warmbier, Beto’s Bid for 2020

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Daniel Foster of National Review Online and Greg Corombos of Radio America are pleased to see President Trump walk away with no deal with Kim Jong-Un rather than give in to Kim’s thoroughly unacceptable demands.  They also slam Trump for taking Kim “at his word” that he knew nothing about the horrific treatment of American Otto Warmbier in a North Korean prison and that Trump made some nuclear concessions even before beginning talks.  And they have fun with the news that media darling Beto O’Rourke is likely to run for president.

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