Archives for October 2013

The pro-life candidate in the Virginia governor’s race is being badly maligned through deliberate falsehoods and a major money disadvantage, according to Susan B. Anthony List President and Chairman Marjorie Dannenfelser.

She is also blasting the decision of a federal district judge in Texas that struck down two provisions of the hotly debate Texas law mandating greater safety in abortion clinics and for no abortions to be performed after 20 weeks of pregnancy unless extraordinary circumstances exist.

Only Virginia and New Jersey have gubernatorial campaigns this year and with Chris Christie expected to be a runaway winner in the Garden State, most of the political heat centers on Virginia, where GOP Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli faces former Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe.  McAuliffe leads by varying margins in recent polls and his most prominent campaign tactic has been relentless allegations that Cuccinelli would ban birth control.

Dannenfelser says the “mythical war on women theme” worked for President Obama in 2012 so McAuliffe is running the same strategy even though it’s baseless.

“In the minds of voters, they do wonder, ‘Does he really believe in outlawing contraception?’  It’s an emphatic no.  It’s simply not true,” said Dannenfelser.  “No matter how many times McAuliffe says it, it’s simply not true.  They keep running the ads.  All the fact-checkers say Ken’s right but it doesn’t really seem to make that much of a difference.  Especially near the end, it’s very difficult to clear up misconceptions.”

“Money can do a lot to obfuscate and to muddy what your personal position is and what the other guy’s position is,” she said.

So what is Cuccinelli’s record on abortion?

“The banner issue for him (on abortion) is trying to apply basic safety standards and accepted medical standards to abortion facilities across the state.  That just means cleanliness, making sure that there is emergency equipment to help women in distress,” said Dannenfelser, who says there are dozens of reports of ghastly conditions at abortion clinics around the country, particularly where late-term abortions are done that risk the health of women.

“Cuccinelli did a very good job of ushering in this legislation to get those places cleaned up, to provide some standards that are at least up to a dental office standard.  That would be the thing that most people know about his record, and it’s one of integrity,” said Dannenfelser, who says the real extremist on abortion in this race is McAuliffe.

“He has very unpopular views when it comes to abortion, and that is taxpayer funding all the way up to the end of pregnancy and won’t oppose sex-selection abortions.  He really is the man of the Democratic party who embraces the platform,” she said.  “I don’t think people know exactly what McAuliffe’s views are because he’s done a really good job of obfuscating what those views are.”

The highest-profile abortion fight of the year took place in Texas as Democrats filibustered an attempt to pass legislation designed to improve conditions in abortion clinics and ban almost all abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy due to the pain that can be felt by the unborn child.

Earlier this week, Federal District Court Judge Lee Yeakel, a George W. Bush appointee, struck down two parts of the law.  Specifically, Yeakel ruled that abortion doctors did not need to have admitting privileges at a medical facility within 30 miles of the clinic because it force too many clinics to close.  He also nixed a provision forcing doctors to follow strict FDA guidelines on administering drugs in a medication-induced abortion, saying doctors should have the flexibility to do what’s best for the patient.

“When it comes to abortion, the institution of abortion is elevated over the real medical interests of the women many times.  So deviating from FDA standards, where if a woman is truly in trouble that she have access to the full complement of medical help that she really must have.  This is not just some random reason that this is happening.  It’s because of what’s happening in clinics all over America,” said Dannenfelser, who notes the 20-week rule wasn’t even challenged and says the whole bill will eventually get to the Supreme Court.

She also says no elected politician can argue that a late-term abortion restriction is bad for babies or mothers.  And she asserts that the vast majority of late-term abortions are not emergencies.

“It’s usually elective, despite what they say.  They say it’s all these extreme cases.  It’s usually elective.  That’s what the data shows,” she said.

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Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review offer three scary martinis on Halloween.  They start by slamming President Obama for doubling down on his palpable lies in defending his new health laws.  They recoil as the Obama administration’s own numbers suggest 93 million people will lose their health coverage once the employer mandate is implemented.  And they’re horrified as 15 state health care exchanges cost more than $1.1 billion.

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America’s energy infrastructure is aging and vulnerable to devastation from countries that wish to do us harm as well as from our own sun, but Washington politicians and bureaucrats refuse to take simple, relatively inexpensive steps to solve the problem.

The most devastating threat is posed by an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) and a former member of the congressional EMP commission says both the North Korean and Iranian nuclear programs are focused on taking out our nation’s power grids.

“It is why Iran wants the bomb.  We know that from the EMP commission because in their open source military writings, they describe using a nuclear weapon to eliminate the United States as an actor from the world stage by means of an EMP attack,” said Dr. Peter Pry, who is also executive director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security.

“Let’s not forget that earlier this year North Korea, which has the bomb and in fact we assess they probably have what are called super EMP nuclear weapons, which is a nuclear weapon specifically designed to make the EMP effect.  That’s why all three of their nuclear tests have been so low yield.  They’re designed to produce gamma rays, not a big explosion.  It’s the gamma rays that make the EMP effect.  North Korea, in April, threatened to destroy the United States.  The evidence is right there in the headlines if people would only pay attention to them,” said Pry.

The EMP debate has attracted skeptics who consider the threat to be little more than a conspiracy theory, but Dr. Pry says nature may pose an even greater threat than the nukes.

“If you’re not worried about Iran or North Korea, one does have to be worried about the sun, which cannot be deterred.  The sun can cause a catastrophic natural EMP event by means of a solar flare that would strike the magnetosphere,” said Pry.  “In some ways it would be even worse than a nuclear EMP attack because something like the 1859 Carrington event, if it happened again today would be a worldwide phenomenon and collapse electric grids all across the planet and put billions of lives at risk.”

The Carrington event was a massive solar flare.  It is considered to be the greatest explosion on the sun ever to be observed on earth.  And Pry says we are way overdue for the next one.

“They’re supposed to happen about once a century so we’re about 50 years overdue and we enter the solar maximum in December.  The likelihood goes up of something like a Carrington happening during a solar maximum, which lasts a year.  Over the next year, we’ll be passing through this period where the sun puts out more coronal mass ejections and solar flares.  It’s a game of Russian roulette.  It’s just a matter of time before one of these big Carrington-class solar flares from the sun hits the earth,” warned Pry.

In addition, Pry contends there are plenty of other conventional threats that could also cripple our nation’s energy grid.

“If you protect the grid against EMP, you’re also protecting it against all lesser threats, the kinds of things that hurricanes or tornadoes can do, sabotage and cyber attacks as well,” said Pry, who says terrorists in Mexico successfully blacked out an entire Mexican province this past weekend, leaving well over 420,000 people in the dark and 13 people dead.

Pry says the vulnerability of the nation’s power grid is not alarmist or hypothetical.  He says proof of that was seen in the massive 2003 blackout that extended throughout the northeast to parts of the midwest and Canada.

“The reason the 2003 blackout happened was because of a falling tree branch.  Our grid is so fragile that a falling tree branch, if it hits in the wrong place, can cause a multi-state blackout,” he said.  “The bad guys see that, by the way.  They see that obviously if a falling tree branch can cause the 2003 northeast blackout, just imagine what a nuclear EMP attack could do.”

So how complicated and expensive will it be to successfully protect our energy infrastructure from these threats, regardless of their likelihood?  Pry says the solutions are readily available and relatively cheap.

“The technology has been around for 50 years because the Department of Defense developed technologies like Faraday cages, surge arresters and blocking devices to protect military systems from EMP.  They’re not very expensive.  The commission estimated that for a one-time investment of two billion dollar, we could protect the whole national grid from EMP,” said Pry, noting that’s the same amount the nation gives to Pakistan each year in foreign aid.

So why haven’t steps already been taken after all sorts of promises were by government officials after the blackout?  Pry says it’s a result of foot dragging by both parties in Washington and the stubbornness of an organization that doesn’t answer of anybody.

“It brings us to the bad guy…It’s called the North American Electric Reliability Corporation or NERC.  They were the ones who were supposed to do something about that,” said Pry.  “NERC took 10 years.  It wasn’t until last year that they actually introduced a plan to improve their vegetation plan, to protect the power lines from tree branches.  NERC doesn’t answer to anybody.  There’s no government oversight over it.  It answers to the industry and has an extremely bad track record about doing anything.  And there is no legal authority among any part of the government to compel them to do anything.

Because of that procrastination, Pry and his allies are urging states to address this issue on their own.  Maine already has, and Pry says there are many advantages of this approach.

“The solutions don’t have to come from Washington.  States can launch their own state initiatives.  You can island the state grid so that it would be protected from EMP.  This would not prevent the state from receiving power or exporting power to any other state.  It would help neighboring states if one state were able to survive because nothing’s harder than a black start.  If you have one state with the lights still on, it can help bring everybody else back,” said Pry.

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Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review are pleased to see The Washington Post give President Obama four “pinocchios” for his lie assuring Americans they could keep their health plans.  They also groan as most House Democrats ignore the obvious exchange debacle and slam Republicans for trying to delay Obamacare.  And they’re almost left speechless when HHS Sec. Kathleen Sebelius says healthcare.gov has never crashed.

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A national effort to unify education standards across America and help American children compete more effectively with students in better-performing nations is actually a dumbing down of America’s schools, takes away local control, handcuffs good teachers and opens the door for ideological manipulation of our kids.

Common Core was developed in recent years as a means of establishing nationwide learning standards, and the vast majority of states signed on, even before the standards were spelled out.  And critics of the plan say that the emerging reality of Common Core is far different from what was promised.

“It was sold to the states and the federal government on a series of slogans.  The slogans were that it would be state-led, that the standards would be evidence-based, internationally benchmarked, that is on par with what other high-performing countries teach and that the standards would be rigorous,” said Emmett McGroarty, education director at the Preserve Innocence Project.

“All these governors of both parties and school chiefs signed on to this idea.  The problem is they signed on to the idea before the standards were written and before the assessments were developed.  The assessments, by the way, still haven’t been developed.  The ultimate product did not match up with the promise.”

Common Core will also mean even more standardized tests and an increased push to teach for the test since performance rates will carry all sorts of financial and other implications.  McGroarty says educators have had enough of the standardized tests because they are taking good, creative teachers and forcing them to focus on one thing.

“The anecdotal evidence that we’ve come across and we’ve heard is that teachers are really saddened and really feel alienated from the process.  They feel like they’re being made into administrators, not teachers.  The passion of teaching is being squeezed out of the profession,” he said.

Despite being just two years away from its scheduled implementation, Common Core standards have only been established in math and in English language arts.  But even those areas are raising red flags.  McGroarty says the standards are shelving Euclidian geometry in favor of “transformational” geometry.  He says students need to know Euclidian geometry to understand the transformational approach and embracing transformational geometry in K-12 is a proven failure in every foreign nation it’s been tried.

In English language arts, students will be steered away from the classics in favor of easier to read material, with Common Core examples including EPA papers, Federal Reserve statements and the Constitution.  McGroarty and other experts believe this sort of approach in English, reading and possibly in history and government opens the door to pushing a liberal ideological agenda.

Ultimately, McGroarty sees two fatal flaws with this program, one with the ultimate goals and one with how they were pursued.  He says parents and their elected representatives were largely shut out of this process, leaving it up to bureaucrats and private interest groups to chart the course forward.  He says the ultimate goal might even be more alarming.

“From the get-go, the idea is that we really need to switch to a European philosophy of education, whereby people are educated for a predetermined slot in the economic machinery.  This feeds into a managed economy.  The administration has talked about in terms of needing to track people from cradle through the end of their careers through the educational system and the labor system,” said McGroarty.

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Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review cheer multiple media outlets for getting the administration to admit some people will lose their coverage and that officials knew this would happen three years ago.  They rip Obama for either throwing the intelligence community under the bus for the latest NSA controversy or being thoroughly detached from his job.  And they discuss reports that the British Navy is successfully deterring African pirates by blaring Britney Spears music.

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Recent estimates that Iran may be just one month away from producing enough enriched uranium to facilitate a nuclear weapon are likely on target, and the likelihood of Iran achieving success is enhanced by an insincere charm offensive by new Iranian President Hassan Rouhani.

Rouhani was touted as a surprise winner in Iran’s recent presidential elections.  Since then, he has projected a desire to soften the tone with the United States and open a new dialogue between the two nations.  But the man who first warned the world of Iran’s latest quest for nuclear weapons says this public relations campaign by Iran is just a giant smokescreen.

“President Rouhani is actually more dangerous than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad because he creates the perception as though he’s going to be someone different, as though he’s willing to talk to the West and come into some kind of an agreement meaning that he would abandon some aspects of the Iranian nuclear program  and that he would come clean,” said Alireza Jafarzadeh, deputy director of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), which the formal name for the Iranian parliament in exile.

“If we look at the whole structure of the Iranian regime, Rouhani is just the player that only carries out the mission of the supreme leader.  All the issue related to national security, particularly the nuclear file, are totally in the control of the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei,” said Jafarzadeh, who also says Rouhani is no innocent newcomer to the international chess game over Iranian nukes.

Rouhani was one of the first Iran negotiators once the NCRI exposed the nuclear program in 2002.  Jafarzadeh says Rouhani’s duplicity has been evident since the start of this impasse,

“He later boasted about having the ability to basically beguile the West and cheat them by saying that they have actually frozen their program when in fact they hadn’t,” he said.  “The issue is not whether he speaks over the phone with a western country leader or not.  The issue is does the Iranian regime comply with a series of UN Security Council resolutions that has been in place since several years ago.”

Just last week the independent Institute for Science and International Security reported that Iran is on pace to produce enough enriched uranium to produce a nuclear weapon within the next month.  Jafarzadeh finds that estimate wholly credible because the group had access to data from the International Atomic Energy Agency and had solid estimates on the number of active centrifuges and the number of centrifuges operating at specific enrichment levels.  Jafarzadeh says the reality is sobering.

“It’s a scary situation because you never want to be in a situation that Iran, by any estimates, would be only months away from having the ability to build the bomb,” said Jafarzadeh.

He says there’s not much time for the rest of the world to act, especially since the most effective measures of tighter economic sanctions and supporting internal opposition would be tough to ramp up fast enough to make a difference.  Jafarzadeh is also not sure the U.S. is willing to do what’s necessary to stop Iran from going nuclear.

“We saw in 2009, when hundreds of thousands of thousands of people came to the streets, but unfortunately, the outside world was not prepared to stand with them.  That’s the kind of leverage that I think the United States can use.  I don’t know whether this administration is prepared to do that.  I don’t think that signs indicate that they will,” said Jafarzadeh.

Jafarzadeh and the NCRI is also imploring President Obama to get tough on Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki when the two meet in Washington this week.  Iranian exiles are outraged that Maliki authorized the murder of 52 Iranian dissidents at Camp Ashraf and the government took seven more activists hostage, six of whom are women.  Maliki is know for his very close ties with Tehran and Jafarzadah says it’s time for Obama to lay down the law.

“He cannot be invited to the White House when he is a hostage-taker.  He’s a kidnapper.  That sends the wrong message to all the allies in the region,” said Jafarzadeh.

The NCRI will lead a protest at the White House on Friday which will feature speakers ranging from Newt Gingrich to Tom Ridge to former Rep. Patrick Kennedy.

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Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review applaud 60 Minutes for a thorough and devastating report on what happened in Benghazi, who was involved and the lack of any help from our own government for it’s people.  They also try to figure out why Libertarians are stiff-arming Ken Cuccinelli in Virginia.  And they roll their eyes as President Obama claims to know nothing about NSA surveillance on other foreign leaders.

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Obamacare is so deeply flawed that it cannot be salvaged, the White House is engaging in “smoke and mirrors” and the taxpayers are getting fleeced, according to Ohio Rep. Bill Johnson.

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As the Obamacare rollout continues to flop, President Obama is trying to shift the focus back to immigration reform.  The Capitol Steps comply, rolling out their immigration medley, featuring Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.  Our guest is Steps star and co-founder Elaina Newport.

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