Jerome R. Corsi's Blog, page 341
January 8, 2014
Study: Extending benefits hikes jobless rate
Amid the feel-good passage of a 13th extension of the Emergency Unemployment Compensation bill, providing nearly two years of unemployment benefit in most states, conservative consultants have begun circulating on Capitol Hill studies that indicate extending unemployment insurance, or UI, encourages people not to go back to work.
On Tuesday, six Republicans joined Senate Democrats to provide the 60 votes necessary to proceed on extending the benefits for an additional three months at a cost of $6.5 billion.
Dogging the Obama administration is the annoying, persistent reality that unemployment remains a serious problem affecting millions of American workers and families.
Available data suggests the job market is continuing to suffer, with unemployment continuing to hover in the 11 to 12 percent range, if the long-term unemployed and the underemployed are included in the calculation. The labor participation rate, meanwhile, remained in the 60 percent range throughout 2013, with part-time employment staying stubbornly at the 20 percent level to which it spiked in 2009 at the height of the economic downturn.
Circulating among Republican lawmakers this week in Congress is a National Bureau of Economic Research study published by economists Henry S. Farber and Robert G. Valleta. The study demonstrates that extending unemployment insurance benefits to 99 weeks in many U.S. states in the 2009-2012 period resulted in a statistically significant increase in the duration of unemployment.
In effect, increasing the time period UI benefits are paid to nearly two years encourages workers to remain unemployed.
Conservative consultants on Capitol Hill have begun making sure Republican lawmakers and their staffs are aware of studies conducted in Germany demonstrating that reforms introduced in 2006 limiting the duration of UI benefits caused the unemployment rate among workers aged 57 to 64 to drop some 20 percent.
The obvious conclusion is that reducing the duration of UI benefits encourages unemployed workers to find jobs.
Republican staff members from the office of Rep. Dave Camp, R-Mich, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, passed out on Wednesday a “real world” study conducted in North Carolina.
The North Carolina study found that while extended unemployment benefit checks were paid, 44,270 more North Carolina workers became unemployed. But after extended unemployment benefit checks were suspended in the state in July 2013, employment increased by 38,235.
Camp’s office points out that the unemployment rate in North Carolina has fallen from 8.9 percent in July to 7.4 percent in November.
Camp points out the 12 previous EUC extensions have cost U.S. taxpayers some $265 billion and added $200 billion to the national debt.
Even without EUC, states are projected to spend $40 billion on unemployment checks in 2014.
“It is time to focus on policies that will actually lead to real economic opportunities for families who are trying to get back on their feet and back into the workplace,” a fact sheet circulated by Case’s staff argued. “EUC kept employers from creating jobs.”
Case is joined by Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., who argues that instead of extending unemployment insurance benefits, it is time to fix the problem by implementing policies that make it easier for employers to hire employees long-term.
As the measure to extend unemployment insurance a 13th time nears a final votes, it’s unclear whether Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will allow Republicans to submit amendments.
So far, Reid appears reluctant to allow amendments, a decision that could force Senate Republicans to vote against the measure, with potentially harmful political consequences.
Even if the measure passes the Senate, opposition forming among Republicans in the House suggests it will face stiff Republican resistance.
January 2, 2014
Pedophilia the next 'sexual-rights' revolution?
NEW YORK – The underlying assumption that has led to the increasing legitimization of same-sex marriage is now fueling a growing effort in academic circles to mainstream pedophilia.
Once considered taboo, psychologists are beginning to walk down the same path LGBT activists established more than 50 years ago, insisting that pedophilia is an inborn “sexual orientation,” not a learned sexual behavior.
If people are born with a sexual attraction to minors, the argument goes, their “orientation” should be accepted as normative and not stigmatized.
James Cantor, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist in the Law and Mental Health Program at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, a large mental health and teaching hospital in Canada and an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto, is regarded internationally as a leading “sexologist” studying pedophilia.
Cantor says his research concludes pedophiles share distinct characteristics of “brain wiring.” He contends some 1 to 5 percent of all men are predisposed to be primarily sexually attracted to children.
In a New York Times report on Cantor’s work Dec. 22, reporter Laura Kane noted pedophilia “has been widely viewed as a psychological disorder triggered by early childhood trauma.”
However, many experts now, she wrote, “see it as a biologically rooted condition that does not change – like a sexual orientation – thanks largely to a decade of research by Dr. James Cantor at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.”
Last fall, the American Psychological Association caused an uproar when the latest edition of its vaunted Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders called pedophilia a “sexual orientation.”
After inquiries from news organizations, the APA issued a “correction” stating “sexual orientation” is not a term “used in the diagnostic criteria for pedophilic disorder.”
Discover how “radicals, elitists and pseudo-experts sell us corruption disguised as freedom”
in David Kupelian’s classic bestseller, “The Marketing of Evil.”
In a speech at a meeting of the Association for the Treatment of Sex Abusers, Cantor traced the idea that pedophilia is a characteristic of the brain to the work of Richard von Krafft-Ebing, an Austro-German psychiatrist.
Krafft-Ebing’s defining book, “Psychopathia Sexualis,” first published in 1886, defined various sexual practices, including homosexuality, bisexuality and pedophilia, as pathologies determined by a mental state that ultimately traced to a brain disorder.
Cantor rejects Krafft-Ebing’s moral judgment and defines various “paraphilia” behaviors as sexual inclinations caused by observable differences in brain structures and functioning, which he calls “brain wiring.”
Cantor’s research team at the Kurt Freund Phallometric Lab conducts experiments with convicted sex offenders. The men are shown nude images of children and adults of various sexes, while a device measures blood flow to their penises, the Times report said.
The method, called phallometry, was invented by Freund in the 1950s. Cantor said it accurately measures sexual interests in 90 percent of men.
Cantor has found pedophiles are shorter, on average, and are three times more likely to be left-handed or ambidextrous. Their IQs are about 10 to 15 points lower, and they are more prone to childhood head injuries, a characteristic Cantor attributes to an inborn clumsiness.
Cantor finds that pedophiles are overwhelmingly men, about one-third of whom prefer boys, about one-third prefer girls and one-third are attracted to both.
In an interview with the Canadian show “The Agenda” on the channel TVO, Cantor said pedophilia is not a psychological disorder of something “that went wrong in their parenting,” but a biological disorder such that “there’s something in the brain of a pedophile that is different from what’s in the brain of a non-pedophile.”
In the interview, Cantor declared: “No one chooses to be attracted to adults, no one chooses to be attracted to children, affirming “you either are wired that way or you are not.”
He also notes that people attracted to minors aren’t all necessarily molesters.
Cantor argued: “We will be able to make much more contact with these people (pedophiles) when we indicate to them that we know they didn’t choose this, we know they had no opportunity to select what they are going to be attracted to, the best we can do in therapy is to manage their sexual interests.”
He asserted: “Nobody has ever developed a therapy that’s capable of changing somebody’s sexual interests.”
Normalizing immorality
Normalizing what traditional psychology had regarded as a sexual pathology was a key strategy driving the research of Alfred Kinsey and the Kinsey Institute into “sexual variations,” WND commentator Judith Reisman wrote in her 2010 book “Sexual Sabotage”.
“Our laws are no longer based on Judeo-Christian mortality, but on Kinsey’s immoral ‘morality’: an adulterous, fornicating, aborting, pornography-addicted, masturbating, impotent, sadistic, masochistic, bisexual, homosexual, exhibitionist, voyeuristic, and child-sexual-abusive world,” she wrote.
“These truths are difficult to accept, yet crucial. Americans must come to understand what has gone wrong and how we changed from a family-oriented and flawed but honorable country to a sex-obsessed and violent one.”
WND Managing Editor David Kupelian, in his 2005 bestseller “The Marketing of Evil,” warned that pedophilia was the next sexual behavior the political left would try to normalize.
Alfred Kinsey interviewing a research subject (Kinsey Institute)
“Believe it or not, even child sexual abuse, rape, and incest (which its apologists euphemistically now call ‘adult-child-sex’ and ‘intergenerational sex’) are slowly but surely gaining respectability,” Kupelian wrote.
Kupelian noted that many people “think having sex with children is a good thing,” pointing to 100,000 websites at the time offering illegal child pornography. Worldwide, at the time, child porn generated $3 billion in annual revenues.
As WND reported, a book published in 2005 featured multiple Ph.D. “experts” claiming that sex with children “can benefit” boys and even serve a “mentoring function.”
Two days after WND exclusively reported on the new book, the publishing company announced it was canceling the book in light of the public outcry the story prompted.
The book, “Same-Sex Desire and Love in Greco-Roman Antiquity and in the Classical Tradition of the West” featured “scholarly” treatises by mostly Ph.D. academics who praised earlier civilizations – particularly Greece and Rome – for the role homosexuality played in their cultures.
In a chapter titled “Pederasty: An Integration of Cross-Cultural, Cross-Species, and Empirical Data,” Bruce Rind, Ph.D., lauded the rampant child molestation that reportedly occurred in those societies, at one point citing evolution as supporting a pro-pedophilia worldview.
APA reversal
Rind brought unfavorable publicity to the American Psychological Association in 1999 when the organization published in its official peer-reviewed journal, APA Bulletin, a report disputing the harmfulness of child molestation.
Titled “A Meta-Analytic Examination of Assumed Properties of Child Sexual Abuse Using College Samples,” the report by Rind and others claimed child sexual abuse could be harmless and beneficial.
When, last fall, the APA reversed its controversial designation of pedophilia as a “sexual orientation” after fierce opposition, it said the text of its new manual should read “sexual interest,” instead.
“In fact,” the statement said, “APA considers pedophilic disorder a ‘paraphilia,’ not a ‘sexual orientation.’”
It added: “APA stands firmly behind efforts to criminally prosecute those who sexually abuse and exploit children and adolescents. We also support continued efforts to develop treatments for those with pedophilic disorder with the goal of preventing future acts of abuse.”
In October, WND columnist Matt Barber wrote about efforts by progressives to roll back laws against pedophilia.
He featured the case of Kaitlyn Hunt, a 19-year-old convicted of sexually assaulting a minor, a 14-year-old girl, who, nevertheless, became a cause célèbre among “gay rights” activists.
Barber recalled that two years earlier, he attended a conference by the pedophile group B4U-ACT.
Dr. Fred Berlin of Johns Hopkins University gave the keynote address, opening with: “I want to completely support the goal of B4U-ACT.”
Among the assertions made at the conference were that pedophiles are “unfairly stigmatized and demonized” by society, children “are not inherently unable to consent” to sex with an adult and an adult’s desire to have sex with children is “normative.”
Barber said a consensus belief by both speakers and pedophiles in attendance was that, because it vilifies “minor-attracted persons,” pedophilia should be removed as a mental disorder from the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in the same manner homosexuality was removed in 1973.
January 1, 2014
Uprising as Obama plans to skirt Congress on 'New World Order'
NEW YORK – Can ordinary citizens protesting on the Internet block the Obama administration’s plan to ram through Congress one of the most ambitious globalist, “free-trade agreements” ever negotiated?
Very quietly, opposition is building on the Internet to oppose legislation that may be introduced as soon as Jan. 8. The measure would grant President Obama what is known as “fast track authority” to ram through Congress the Trans-Pacific Partnership with limited debate and no opportunity to propose amendments. The international trade agreement, negotiated largely in secret by the Obama administration, is regarded by globalist free traders as a cornerstone of the emerging “New World Order.”
A Facebook page has been created to call for a “Anti-TPP Twitter Storm” on New Year’s Day beginning at 7 p.m. Eastern Time.
“Anti-TPP Twitter Storm Wednesday 1/1/14 @ 4 p.m. PST/7 p.m. EST, the whole world will tweet and post an ANTI-TPP hashtag (to be announced) with posts about why people should stop the Trans Pacific Partnership,” the Facebook page reads.
“The goal of this ‘hashtag storm’ is to get this hashtag trending on both Twitter and Facebook, so we can inform the public about the dangers of the Trans Pacific Partnership and agitate people to ACT to stop the TPP. Join us and help expose the corporate coup known as the Trans Pacific Partnership.”
Obama’s ‘two –ocean’ free-trade agenda
As WND previously reported, Obama, in his State of the Union address Feb. 12, announced a two-ocean globalist free-trade agenda:
“To boost American exports, support American jobs, and level the playing field in the growing markets of Asia, we intend to complete negotiations on a Trans-Pacific Partnership,” he said. “And tonight, I am announcing that we will launch talks on a comprehensive Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with the European Union – because trade that is free and fair across the Atlantic supports millions of good-paying American jobs.”
For the first time, a decision by the U.S. Trade Representative within the Executive Office of the President was made public to expand the ongoing negotiations for a free-trade zone with Pacific Rim countries to include a a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with European Union countries.
Now there is no doubt the Obama administration has decided in the second term to double-up on a globalist agenda to develop massive new free-trade agreements across both the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans, adding a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or TAP, to what is being developed as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP.
Fast-track authority
WND has reported Obama administration plans in development for the past two years are ready be implemented as Democrats in Congress plan to pass the massive Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade agreement with a simple majority vote that would skirt the two-thirds vote in the Senate that the U.S. Constitution requires to ratify a treaty.
The strategy centers on what is known as “fast track authority,” a provision under the Trade Promotion Authority that requires Congress to review a free-trade agreement, or FTA, under limited debate, in an accelerated time frame that is subject to a yes-or-no vote by Congress without any provision for Congress to modify the agreement by submitting amendments. Fast-track authority is also intended to reassure foreign partners that the FTA negotiated by the executive branch will not be altered by Congress during the legislative process.
A report released Jan. 24 by the Congressional Research Service, “The Trans-Pacific Partnership Negotiations and Issues for Congress,” makes clear the Obama administration does not have fast-track authority to negotiate the TPP, even though the office of the U.S. Trade Representative is acting as if it were in place:
The present negotiations are not being conducted under the auspices of formal trade promotion authority (TPA) – the latest TPA expired on July 1, 2007 – although the Administration informally is following the procedures of the former TPA. If TPP implementing legislation is brought to Congress, TPA may need to be considered if the legislation is not to be subject to potentially debilitating amendments or rejection. Finally, Congress may seek to weigh in on the addition of new members to the negotiations, before or after the negotiations conclude.
The CRS report states that the TPP is being negotiated as a regional free-trade agreement that U.S. negotiators describe as a “comprehensive and high-standard” FTA that they hope “will liberalize trade in nearly all goods and services and include commitments beyond those currently established in the World Trade Organization (WTO.)”
That the Obama administration is treating the TPP like a TPA and not a formal treaty obligation strongly suggests the Obama majority will seek passage of the TPP by a simple majority vote in Congress.
Still, the impact of the TPP will be equivalent to a formal treaty obligation in that agreements made within the TPP will be designed to supersede U.S. law with the regional authorities as specified within the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement.
So, the last hurdle the Obama administration faces in making the TPP law is to get Congress to vote fast-track authority as the terms under which the TPP will be introduced to Congress.
As a consequence, one of the few remaining strategies left to opponents of the TPP is to urge Congress to vote against giving the Obama administration fast-track authority when the issue comes up for debate, possibly as early as next week.
Advancing the NWO agenda
The globalists advising the Obama administration appear to have learned from the adverse public reaction to the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America, or SPP, during the administration of President George W. Bush. Obama has avoided the leader summit meetings that exposed to a critical alternative news media the international “working group” coordination needed to create international free-trade agreements.
Globalists have learned from the adverse reaction that such internationalist adventures as the Trans-Texas Highway, known as the NAFTA Super-Highway, will only succeed if such initiatives are pursued covertly with a determination to ridicule anyone who dares contemplate its larger purpose of increasing global sovereignty.
The Obama administration has shut down the Security and Prosperity Partnership website, SPP.gov. The last joint statement issued by the newly formed North American Leaders Summit, operating as the rebranded SPP, was issued April 2, 2012, at the conclusion of the last tri-lateral head-of-state meeting held between the U.S., Mexico and Canada in Washington, D.C.
Now, with the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Obama administration appears to have leap-frogged SPP ambitions to create a North American Union by including Mexico and Canada in the TPP configuration.
The 10 nations involved in the TPP include Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam.
A graph presented in the CRS report on the first page shows the reach of the agreement across the Pacific, including Peru and Chile in South America; Australia and New Zealand; Malaysia and Vietnam in Southeast Asia; Singapore; and Japan.
As seen in the North American detail below, trade from Canada extends down into roughly Oklahoma in the United States, and trade from Mexico extends north roughly to Colorado.
At the same time, trade from Mexico is seen both as extending up into the United States, reaching across the Pacific Ocean to the Asian and Pacific Rim nations involved in the FTA.
International tribunal dispute resolution
A leaked copy of the TPP draft makes clear in Chapter 15, “Dispute Settlement,” that the Obama administration intends to surrender U.S. sovereignty to adjudicate disputes arising under the TPP to the processes of an international tribunal.
Disputes involving interpretation and application of the TPP agreement, according to Article 15.7, will be adjudicated by an “arbitral tribunal” composed of three TPP members whose purpose under Article 15.8 will be “to make an objective assessment of the dispute before it, including an examination of the facts of the case and the applicability of and conformity with this Agreement, and make such other findings and rulings necessary for the resolution of the dispute referred to it as it thinks fits.”
The TPP draft agreement does not specify that these arbitral tribunals must render decisions in compliance with U.S. law or that the decisions of the arbitral tribunals are invalid should they violate or otherwise contravene U.S. law.
, an international authority created by 158 nations that are signatories to the ICSID Convention created under the auspices of the World Bank.
The TPP draft agreement specifies that foreign firms from Trans-Pacific signatory countries that seek to do business in the U.S. can apply to the arbitral tribunals to obtain relief under the trade pact from complying with onerous U.S. laws and regulations, including environmental regulations and financial disclosure rules.
Because the TPP agreement places arbitral tribunals created under TPP above U.S. law, the Obama administration appears to be intent on creating a judicial authority higher than the U.S. Supreme Court. The tribunal could overrule decisions U.S. federal courts make to apply U.S. laws and regulations to foreign corporations doing business within the U.S.
Nun: Slain Christians' blood drained and sold
NEW YORK – Atrocities by Syrian jihadist rebels have reached sensational new levels, according to a revered nun working with persecuted Christians and an explosive new video report.
Sister Hatune Dogan told WND in a Skype interview that members of the Syrian opposition are draining the blood of Christians they behead and selling vials to Islamic radicals for $100,000 a piece.
The Syrian Orthodox nun explained that the blood is used in a ritual washing of hands in the belief the act atones for sins and provides privileged access to heaven.
The Christians, she said, are beheaded in ceremonies in which they are forced to kneel, with their hands and feet bound, as the Muslim radicals read a death sentence imposed because the victim refuses to renounce Christianity and embrace Islam.
She detailed how the head of the victim is brutally severed with knives. The blood spurting from their necks is captured in basins and then bottled.
“The Muslims sever the necks and collect the blood in vessels to sell the blood. The Muslims believe that if they kill a Christian and wash their hands in the blood of the Christian, they will go to heaven,” she explained.
She said the sale of the Christian blood “is a big business.”
“With this money, the Muslim terrorists can buy more weapons,” she explained.
Walid Shoebat, a native Arabic-speaking Christian who was a member of the PLO, has called Hatune a Mother Teresa figure in an article that featured her presenting the results of an independent investigation of Christians in Syria under the rule of Muslim fundamentalists.
A video posted on YouTube shows Hatune presenting the results of the investigation in which she discusses how women held captive by Muslims for ransom have been raped and mutilated. She also presents evidence for her claim Muslims are beheading Christians and selling their blood.
See Sister Hatune’s presentation of her findings:
“Hatune’s willingness to help the persecuted is so immense that it surpasses what anyone is doing today in the Middle East,” Shoebat has written on his blog.
“Her righteous deeds, of course, receive the vociferous wrath of the jihadists,” Shoebat said.
The nun says she gets “18 death threats in seven languages.”
“But Sister Hatune is no pacifist,” Shoebat writes. “As she ardently believes in denying one’s self, helping the oppressed and turning the other cheek, like a true warrior, she as well zealously believes in taking up a whip and driving out the wicked.”
Independently, Shoebat has published a video of Sunni Muslims playing soccer with the heads of the people they murdered.
WND Middle East correspondent Michael Maloof, a former senior security policy analyst in the office of the secretary of defense, said the “vociferous wrath” from jihadists that Hatune is receiving because of her vigorous effort to protect Christians has made her a prime target of al-Qaida and its affiliate, the Jabhat al-Nusra.
“Al-Nusra, which wants to establish caliphates in Syria and throughout the Middle East, has amply demonstrated that it will kill any ‘infidel,’ even Muslims, who do not subscribe to a strict form of Shariah,” Maloof said. “This places all Christians and other minorities in peril which, in turn, puts Sister Hatune and her companions in al-Nusra’s crosshairs.”
Hatune explained to WND that she was born into a Christian family in Zaz, a village in Turabdeen, Northern Mesopotamia in Turkey, at a time when Christians were being persecuted by both by Turkish and Kurdish Muslims.
According to a biography, her family migrated from Turkey to Germany in 1985 to escape persecution.
She completed her education in Germany. In 1988, she joined the Morephrem Monastery in Losser, Holland, where she entered the sisterhood under the leadership of the Mother Superior Seyde Atto.
In Germany, she completed her degree in practical theology at the Theological Seminar in Mienz, Germany, in 1996. Later, she worked as a psychotherapist in Kathekese Psychotherapy Institute in Augustburg, Germany.
She has visited 38 countries and worked in the Ministry of Charitable and Social Service in Turkey, Africa, India and the Middle East.
She is a member of the Universal Syrian Orthodox Church under the Holy See of Antioch.
Hatune is the founder of the Sister Hatune Foundation, registered in the United States in New York. The foundation has a Facebook page. Her various country-specific Internet websites are frequently hacked and often inoperable.
Shoebat has begun accepting contributions through a foundation he created for Hatune, RescueChristians.org.
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December 31, 2013
Pope draws fire from left and right
NEW YORK – The Catholic Church is catching flak from conservative believers after Pope Francis’ controversial views offended investors set to help fund the restoration of a major New York cathedral.
But the pope is also coming to learn that when he appears to withdraw a compassionate message to apply the dictates of Church doctrine, ideologues on the political left are equally quick to object.
This week, Francis found himself at the center of two controversies, one involving a wealthy Catholic donor and another over a rebuke he issued a Catholic bishop on an issue of morals.
Can the rich attain heaven?
The dust-up over money involved Ken Langone, a wealthy Catholic self-made man and billionaire investor that Forbes pegs with a $2.1 billion net worth, perhaps best known for having founded Home Depot.
Langone took umbrage at the 84-page apostolic exhortation titled “Evangelii Gaudium,” or in English, “The Joy of the Gospel,” which Pope Francis published in November.
As WND reported, Francis urged income redistribution with an enthusiasm that critics contend would make most socialists proud.
This message turns out to be inconvenient for Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who is currently counting on Langone to spearhead the effort to raise $180 million for the restoration of St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue in New York City.
Last week, Langone told CNBC that at least one potential seven-figure donor expressed concern about statements from the pope criticizing market economies as “exclusionary” while suggesting “a culture of prosperity” leads some wealthy individuals to become “incapable of feeling compassion for the poor.”
Langone told CNBC he brought the issue up with Cardinal Dolan at a breakfast earlier this month.
“I told the cardinal, ‘Your Eminence, this is one more hurdle I hope we don’t have to deal with,’” Langone explained. “You want to be careful about generalities. Rich people in one country don’t act the same as rich people in another country.”
Dolan went on camera with CNBC apparently in an attempt to smooth the waters.
In a televised interview, Dolan said he talked with Langone and conveyed the following: “‘Well, Ken, that would be a misunderstanding of the Holy Father’s message. The pope loves poor people. He also loves rich people.’ … So I said, ‘Ken, thanks for bringing it to my attention. We’ve gotta correct to make sure this gentleman understands the Holy Father’s message properly.’ And then I think he’s gonna say, ‘Oh, OK. If that’s the case, count me in for St. Patrick’s Cathedral.’”
Neither Dolan nor Langone revealed the identity of the donor involved.
The problem traces back to language in the apostolic exhortation in which Pope Francis castigates unfettered capitalism as an ideology that worships “the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation,” leading to “a new tyranny” that results in the earnings of the already rich “growing exponentially” while the poor suffer an income gap “separating the majority form the prosperity enjoyed by the happy few.”
Urging Christians to say “no,” to what he characterizes as “the new idolatry of money,” Pope Francis believes income redistribution is essential to a moral theory of economics.
“I encourage financial experts and political leaders to ponder the words of one of the sages of antiquity: ‘Not to share one’s wealth with the poor is to steal from them and to take away their livelihood. It is not our own goods which we hold, but theirs,’” Pope Francis wrote.
WND has also reported that in an exchange aimed at refuting criticism from radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, Pope Francis insisted, “I am not a Marxist,” a denial the pope wouldn’t have felt compelled to make had not the language of “The Joy of the Gospel” not contained what many perceived as a direct attack on free-market capitalism.”
‘Shocked’ by same-sex adoption?
The second story emerged from a meeting at the Vatican between Pope Francis and Auxiliary Bishop Charles Scicluna and from a news story in the Sunday Times of Malta in which the bishop explained that Francis was “shocked” by Malta’s civil unions bill allowing same-sex couples to adopt children.
When pushed by reporters to defend his decision to use his Christmas homily to teach that a family must be centered around a man and a woman, Scicluna explained he had aired these concerns with the pope during their Dec. 12 meeting in the Vatican.
“We discussed many aspects,” Bishop Scicluna explained to the newspaper. “And when I raised the issue that’s worrying me as a bishop [the right for same-sex couples to adopt], he encouraged me to speak out.”
As WND previously reported, the shock to traditional Catholic thinking began when Pope Francis decided to go to the back of the airplane and give an interview to news reporters on the return home from Brazil during his first international trip as pope.
Instead of saying homosexuality is “an intrinsic moral evil,” as did his predecessor Benedict XVI, Francis responded to a reporter’s question by saying: “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?”
Almost immediately, questions were raised as to whether the pope’s rejection of same-sex marriage would cause Time magazine to withdraw its decision to name Francis its “Person of the Year 2013.”
In reporting the controversy, Time noted that in 2010, Pope Francis, then-Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, said homosexual adoption is a form of discrimination against children, according to a profile published by the National Catholic Reporter.
The Time article concluded by suggesting Pope Francis may yet end up being more sympathetic to adoption by same-sex unions than Bishop Scicluna’s account of his meeting with the pope might have suggested.
In naming the current pope its “Person of the Year,” Time wrote: “‘Francis signals great changes while giving the same answers to uncomfortable questions.”
Get “The Last Pope?” on DVD now! And watch the trailer below:
December 30, 2013
Sources: Salem set to acquire Eagle Publishing
NEW YORK – In a move certain to shake up the world of conservative media, Salem Communications, one of the nation’s leading conservative and Christian radio-broadcasting networks, is completing a bid to acquire Washington-based Eagle Publishing, which owns one of the nation’s oldest conservative book publishers, Regnery Publishing, reliable insiders have confirmed to WND.
The acquisition would expand the reach of the Salem Radio Network – currently syndicating talk, news and music programing to some 2,400 affiliates nationwide – to book publishing along with a wide-ranged of Internet newspapers, newsletters and sites featuring leading columnists and commentators.
Salem owns the popular conservative blogs Townhall.com and Hotair.com.
Founded in 1947, Regnery established itself by publishing conservative classics such as William F. Buckley’s “God and Man at Yale” in 1951 followed by Whittaker Chambers’ “Witness” in 1952.
Regnery’s publications include the blog Red State with Erick Erickson and HumanEvents.com, the conservative weekly newspaper that was discontinued in its printed format in February.
Choosing to publish a select number of books each year, Regnery bestsellers in recent years have included “Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry,” co-authored by John O’Neill and Jerome Corsi (the author of this report) in 2004; Michelle Malkin’s “Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies” in 2009; and David Limbaugh’s “The Great Destroyer: Barack Obama’s War on the Republic,” in 2012.
Human Events, often touted as President Reagan’s favorite newspaper, has been a conservative stalwart since the publication, billed as “the nation’s first conservative weekly,” was established in 1944.
Eagle Publishing, a private company, was established by Tom Philips in 1993. Phillips entered publishing in 1974, founding Phillips Publishing in the garage of his home in Chevy Chase, Md., with a small staff and a view to expand into the then-thriving independent newsletter business.
Run by Ed Atsinger, chief executive officer, and Stu Epperson, chairman of the board, Salem Communications is a public company, traded on NASDAQ (Symbol: SALM). Since the company’s initial public offering in July 1999, Salem Communications has grown from 46 to a total of 99 radio stations, with 61 stations in the nation’s top 25 markets – and 29 in the top 10.
In December 2011, the American Arbitration Association released a ruling in the arbitration case involving a dispute over royalties brought by three Regnery authors (including Corsi, the author of this article), ruling in favor of Regnery on all counts.
December 29, 2013
National ID headed for your wallet, purse
NEW YORK – Shades of Big Brother.
Just as you were wrapping your mind around the idea that under Obamacare and the accompanying changes in the health-care system, your medical records will be floating around in some online repository, available to far too many people, you’re being told you’ll soon have a National Identity Card and a Western Hemisphere-compliant travel document whether you want it or not, if you plan to drive in the United States.
The federal government says it soon will be enforcing its demands that state-issued driver’s licenses and ID cards comply with Department of Homeland Security standards.
DHS announced just before Christmas a final schedule for the full enforcement of the REAL ID Act of 2005.
That was set for a phased implementation beginning in January 2014 and full-scale enforcement planned no later than May 2017, at which time the federal government will no longer accept state-issued driver’s licenses and ID cards that do not meet the minimum security standards set by DHS.
For many Americans, the full implementation of the REAL ID act is certain to trigger unfortunate memories of World War II and the modus operandi of fascist, totalitarian states, where travelers and ordinary citizens on the street are stopped by authorities and demanded, “Your papers, please!”
In the U.S., the justification for the REAL ID Act of 2005 was the concern for enhanced travel security after the 9/11 Commission documented several of the 9/11 terrorists had valid state-issued driver’s licenses and were able to freely board airplanes even though they were terrorists who had entered the U.S. illegally.
Among the DHS requirements for a state-issued driver’s license to be DHS-compliant will be the presentation by the applicant of a valid birth certificate, verification of the applicant’s Social Security Number or documentation the person is not eligible for Social Security, and proof the applicant is either a U.S. citizen or lawfully admitted to the U.S. as a permanent or temporary resident.
Further, driver’s license and IDs issued by the states will have to meet stringent requirements as set by the federal government.
To qualify as DHS-compliant, state-issued driver’s licenses and ID cards must have built-in security features to prevent tampering, counterfeiting, and duplication of the documents for a fraudulent purpose.
They also must have features that establish the individual’s identity, including but not limited to full facial digital photographs, plus machine readable coded information in the form of a bar code that captures the key printed information on the card, such as name of the applicant, address, gender, unique driver’s license or card-identification number, state of issuance, date of application, and date of expiration.
Such state-issued enhanced drivers licenses, or EDLs, must be issued in state facilities in which all employees undergo background checks, including federal and state criminal record searches, as well as with technology that permit the state-issued cards to comply fully with travel rules issued under the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, or WHTI, such that the EDLs meet valid passport minimums for travel within the United States, Canada, and Mexico, as well as with Central and South America, the Caribbean, and Bermuda.
With this announcement, DHS is putting state governments on notice that by May 2017, states not complying with REAL ID requirements will find that their state-issued driver’s licenses and ID cards will not be considered valid by the federal government, such that individuals with non-compliant identification may be prohibited from passing through Transportation Security Administration security to travel on airlines on trains within the United States or internationally.
“States have made considerable progress in meeting the need identified by the 9/11 Commission to make driver’s licenses and other identification more secure,” said David Heyman, DHS assistant secretary for policy. “DHS will continue to support their efforts to enhance the security in an achievable way that will make all of our communities safer.”
In the agency’s Dec. 20 announcement, DHS commended the 21 states that already meet the act’s minimum standards for their leadership in improving security for state-issued driver’s licenses and identification cards: Alabama, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Iowa, Indiana, Kansas, Maryland, Mississippi, Nebraska, Ohio, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Wisconsin, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
DHS also announced extensions for 20 states and territories that have provided information demonstrating that they are on the pathway toward achieving full compliance, including Arkansas, California, District of Columbia, Guam, Idaho, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, New Hampshire, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, U.S. Virgin Islands, and Virginia.
DHS made clear 75 percent of all U.S. drivers currently hold licenses from state jurisdictions deemed to meet the REAL ID standards, or from states that have received extensions.
As of Dec. 20, 2013, DHS listed the following states/territories as not yet REAL ID compliant: Alaska, American Samoa, Arizona, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Marianas, Oklahoma, and Washington State.
DHS said TSA will continue to accept driver’s licenses and state-issued identification cards from all jurisdictions until at least 2016, meaning that enforcement for boarding aircraft will not begin until then.
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December 28, 2013
Obamacare used to elevate 'gay' lifestyle
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the third article in the series on the Obama administration’s campaign to enroll lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender citizens in Obamacare, which forces private insurers to cover the high-risk population by distributing the burden to other citizens and away from government. The first story reported the indications the White House has an unspoken agenda of lifting the financial burden from a demographic that overwhelmingly votes Democrat. The second story documented how the disproportionate costs for LGBT health care are being moved to the backs of healthy citizens.
NEW YORK – Obama administration arguments for the Affordable Care Act as well as the exact language of the legislation suggest the Obamacare law advances a political agenda designed to convey equal protection under U.S. law for LGBT lifestyle choices.
In implementing the Obamacare legislation, LGBT political activists in conjunction with the Obama administration advance the theme that LGBT individuals are victims who receive inferior health care and are denied access to adequate health insurance because of prejudice and discrimination.
The solution, then, is specific language crafted within the law to establish the LGBT lifestyle as a constitutional “right” fully protected by the 14th Amendment, in order to provide community members with access to health care and health insurance adequate to pay for the medical care required.
LGBT portrayed as ‘victims’
Lambda Legal, a tax-exempt 501(c)3 organization claiming to be the nation’s oldest and largest legal organization working for the rights of the LGBT community, including those infected with HIV/AIDS, published in 2010 the results of an admittedly non-scientific study in a final report entitled “When Health Care Isn’t Caring.”
Claiming the survey conducted in the spring of 2009 was “the first to examine refusal of care and barriers to health care among LGBT and HIV communities on a national scale,” Lambda Legal came to two major conclusions:
LGBT people and people living with HIV are too often denied the care they need because of their sexual orientation, gender identity and/or HIV status.
LGBT people and people living with HIV are frequently treated in a discriminatory manner while trying to obtain care, including providers using harsh language, refusing to touch patients and blaming them for their health status.
In defining “health care fairness,” Lambda Legal identified the following as key components:
Privacy and confidentiality for all, including LGBT people and those living with HIV;
Recognition and respect for all families including same-sex couples and their children;
Equal access to affordable health care insurance for same-sex spouses, partners and their children, and elimination of discriminatory insurance policy exclusions for transgender care, reproductive health care or care based on HIV status;
Fair and comprehensive health care services for LGBT youth and adults in custody as well as those living with HIV;
Informed consent for HIV testing;
Protection of the rights of LGBT patients and those living with HIV to seek and obtain all medically appropriate care without restrictions based on the personal or religious views of providers;
Equal access to mental health and substance abuse treatment and services for LGBT people and people with living with HIV; and
Fair and compassionate services for LGBT seniors and older people living with HIV.
The Lambda Legal report concluded by calling for the establishment of U.S. federal policies that “prohibit bias and discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identify and expression and HIV status including refusal of care, disrespectful or abusive treatment, the use of excessive precautions and blaming patients for their health conditions.”
A Center for American Progress 2009 report entitled “How to Close the LGBT Health Disparities Gap” concluded “members of the LGBT population continue to experience worse health outcomes than their heterosexual counterparts. Due to factors like low rates of health insurance coverage, high rates of stress due to systematic harassment and discrimination, and a lack of cultural competency in the health care system, LGBT people are at a higher risk for cancer, mental illnesses, and other diseases, and are more likely to smoke, drink alcohol, use drugs, and engage in other risky behaviors.”
LGBT accusations of health insurance discrimination
LGBT political advocacy groups typically have charged the health insurance industry with discrimination because risk-based health underwriting excludes HIV/AIDS infected individuals from coverage and calls for higher premiums from those known to be participating in a high-risk LGBT lifestyle.
Health insurance industry executives traditionally argue actuaries determining pricing must take into consideration the higher heath risks incurred by the LGBT community, including the continuing link established by Centers for Disease Control research that the principle cause of HIV/AIDS infection in the United States continues to be men having sex with men.
The federal government website AIDS.gov documents that “currently, fewer than one in five (17 percent) of people living with HIV has private insurance and nearly 30 percent do not have any coverage.”
Most HIV/AIDS infected people in the United States, according to AIDs.gov, rely upon Medicaid to pay the cost of health care for low-income HIV/AIDS infected individuals, while Medicare provides for seniors and those with disabilities, and the Ryan White HIV/AIDS program provides funding for the health and social services required by the HIV/AIDS affected population.
Because federal government surveys traditionally have not included questions asking respondents to identify their sexual orientation or gender identity, researchers do not have a precise or reliable estimate of the percentage of the LGBT community that lacks private health insurance.
The clearest denial of private health insurance that has been documented involves transgender people.
“Due to the way that most health insurance contracts are written, transgender people can be denied health insurance coverage, often irrespective of whether those needs are related to transitioning,” notes the Human Rights Campaign, which is a private tax-exempt 501(c)4 organization founded in 1980 that claims to be the largest civil rights organization working to achieve equality for the LGBT community.
“Not all transgender people have the same medical needs – they may have already transitioned, or they may not transition at all. Transgender people may even be denied medical treatment as fundamental as mental health counseling, which can lead to stress, depression, suicide attempts, poor work performance and over-utilization of unrelated services and benefits that do not address the root causes of a person’s health status.”
The Human Rights Campaign identifies the following issues of alleged discrimination in health insurance coverage for transgender individuals:
Denial of health insurance coverage, where someone is denied any health insurance on the basis of gender identity. The Transgender Law Center has documented cases in which health insurance companies and medical providers have denied coverage to transgender people when they became aware of an applicant’s transgender status or prior treatment and medical history related to gender transition. In 2007, the American Medical Association declared its opposition to this practice.
Denial of coverage for claims related to gender transition, including claims arising from complications from medical treatment for gender transition.
Denial of coverage for claims for gender-specific care based on the person’s gender marker on insurance. For example, a male-to-female person who develops prostate cancer, or a female-to-male person who develops ovarian cancer.
Denial of coverage for claims unrelated to gender transition. For example, an insurer argues that a medical concern is the direct or indirect result of transgender-related treatment such as hormone therapy.
Another common complaint in the LGBT community is that the federal government traditionally has not allowed same-sex couples as dependents in order to get employer-sponsored health care coverage extended to LGBT same-sex spouses on terms equal to the ability of employees in heterosexual marriages to name their spouses as covered in employee-sponsored health insurance.
ACA Section 1557
The LGBT “right” to equal protection in health care is established in the language of Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act.
“Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act prohibits discrimination in health care programs on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, sex stereotypes, gender identity, age, or disability,” notes the National Women’s Law Center, a Washington-based private corporation organized “to advance and protect women’s legal rights.”
“This is the first time that federal law has prohibited sex discrimination in health care. Health insurers, hospitals, the health insurance exchanges, and any other entities that receive federal funds are covered by this law. It became effective upon passage of the ACA. Section 1557 gives the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights the authority and obligation to investigate potential violations of the law and enforce this new civil rights guarantee.”
Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act reads as follows:
Except as otherwise provided for in this title (or an amendment made by this title), an individual shall not, on the ground prohibited under title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (42 U.S.C. 2000d et seq.), title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 (20 U.S.C. 1681 et seq.), the Age Discrimination Act of 1975 (42 U.S.C. 6101 et seq.), or section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (29 U.S.C. 794), be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under, any health program or activity, any part of which is receiving Federal financial assistance, including credits, subsidies, or contracts of insurance, or under any program or activity that is administered by an Executive Agency or any entity established under this title (or amendments). The enforcement mechanisms provided for and available under such title VI, title IX, section 504, or such Age Discrimination Act shall apply for Age Discrimination Act shall apply for purposes of violation of this section.
Clearly, the language of Section 1557 places LGBT discrimination within the context of Title VI of the Civil Rights Law of 1964, a law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin in programs and activities receiving federal funding assistance.
In a slide presentation entitled “Out2Enroll: The Affordable Care Act and the LGBT Communities,” prepared for the White House briefing on Obamacare and the LGBT community held on Sept. 12, 2013, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health stressed the matrix of legislation that places Section 1557 front and center in defining LBGT health care under the Affordable Care Act. It places HIV/AIDS health coverage within the umbrella of legislatively conferred civil rights that arguably will derive Fourteenth Amendment protection.
“Discrimination,” Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, ‘Out2Enroll: The Affordable Care Act and the LGBT Communities,’ White House briefing, Sept. 12, 2013
A subsequent slide in the Johns Hopkins White House presentation proclaims the United States is in a “Post-DOMA” [Defense of Marriage Act] environment in which same-sex marriages “must” be treated under the Affordable Care Act identical to heterosexual married couples, despite the fact same-sex marriages are not legally recognized today in all states.
“Nondiscrimination and Same-Sex Couples,” Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, “Out2Enroll: The Affordable Care Act and the LGBT Communities,” White House briefing, Sept. 12, 2013
A subsequent slide in the Johns Hopkins White House presentation makes clear that “equal coverage” will apply to transgender people, as well as to same-sex couples, under the Affordable Care Act.
“Equal Coverage for Transgender People,” Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, “Out2Enroll: The Affordable Care Act and the LGBT Communities,” White House briefing, Sept. 12, 2013
Fenway Health, a Boston-based 501(c)3 organized to promote issues of LGBT health, makes clear the current battlefield for getting LBGT health a protected civil right involves HHS rule-making under the Affordable Care Act.
On Sept. 30, 2013, noting that 29 states do not have a sexual orientation nondiscrimination law and 34 states do not have a gender identity nondiscrimination law, the Fenway Institute submitted public comment to HHS urging the department “to issue a nondiscrimination provision to ensure LGBT Americans’ access [to] nondiscriminatory health care in all settings, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.”
This followed a HHS request published in the Federal Register on Aug. 1, 2013, requesting comments regarding rulemaking under Section 1557 of the ACA.
While HHS has yet to promulgate ACA nondiscrimination rules, most observers expect the final language to move another step toward codifying LGBT heath rights under the ACA as constitutionally protected rights.
“In addition, Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act gives HHS a key tool to make sure that all people receive equal access to health care. It is one of the many sections of the Affordable Care Act intended to reduce disparities in the health care system, and is an integral part of the law’s overall goal to expand access to health care for all Americans,” wrote Leon Rodriguez, J.D., director, Office for Civil rights, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, on the U.S. government’s AIDS.gov website at Blog.AIDS.gov, on Sept. 25, 2013
“This landmark civil rights provision makes it illegal to discriminate against people because of their race, color, national origin, sex (this includes discrimination based on gender identity or the failure to conform to sex stereotypes), age, or disability in most health care settings (such as hospitals or clinics). Section 1557 also applies to the newly created Health Insurance Marketplaces established under the Affordable Care Act. Section 1557 will help ensure that newly eligible individuals have equal access to health care benefits, including health insurance, made possible through the Affordable Care Act.”
December 27, 2013
U.N. calls summit on global warming
UNITED NATIONS – Despite record cold around the globe, increasing ice sheets at the poles and vast snow fields covering large swaths of North America, the United Nations has announced its next global warming international meeting for New York City on Sept. 23, 2014, under the banner, “Climate Summit 2014: Catalyzing Action.”
The 2014 UN global warming summit is being billed as a prelude to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, UNFCCC, Conference in 2015, at which UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon hopes to advance the UN agenda to get a final international agreement signed in Paris to replace the expiring Kyoto Protocol carbon emission reduction agreement dating back to 2008.
“I challenge you to bring to the summit bold pledges,” Ban Ki-Moon said in a UN statement. “Innovate, scale-up, cooperate and deliver concrete action that will close the emissions gap and put us on track for an ambitious legal agreement through the UNFCC process.”
The UN is pressing ahead with a global warming agenda despite increasing scientific evidence the earth has entered a new cooling period and amidst continued fallout from what has become known as “Climategate,” the release in November 2009 of thousands of emails circulated among members of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] following the hacking of a server at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom.
“Climategate” simply documented the falsification of scientific data to “prove” key global warming theories.
Global warming critic Marc Morano, in a debate televised on UN television during the UN’s 2013 climate summit in Warsaw, Poland, on Nov. 19, 2013, challenged a UN interviewer in a heated exchange that scientific evidence no longer validates the UN assumption the earth is warming.
In a sometimes contentious interview, Morano charged the UN IPCC reports are political, not scientific, arguing the most recent report, issued in September 2013, “was essentially written by a handful of UN scientists that they are fulfilling a narrative on man-made global warming.”
Morano cited various scientific studies that he asserts undermine the UN IPCC’s allegation that a scientific consensus has “settled the global warming thesis.”
“The settled science which the UN IPCC claims, seems to be changing by the week,” Morano countered. “We had two contrary studies in one week.”
The UN interviewer asked Morano what it would take for him to be convinced their exists a man-made global warming threat.
“You would have to see unprecedented climate and weather and we have neither,” Morano answered. “Multiple studies, in fact hundreds of scientists have shown the medieval warm period was as warm or warmer than current temperatures.”
2013: Least extreme U.S. weather ever
As the UN was announcing the 2014 Climate Summit in New York City, Morano’s website, ClimateDepot.com, was publicizing a study issued this week by the National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center documenting that U.S. weather in 2013 was the least extreme ever, with the number of tornadoes the lowest in several decades, the fewest U.S. forest fires since 1984, and the number of days of 100-degree Fahrenheit heat turning out to be the lowest in the past 100 years of available records.
“Whether you are talking about tornadoes, wildfires, extreme heat or hurricanes, the good news is that weather-related disasters in the United States are all way down this year compared to recent years and, in some cases, down to historically low levels,” Morano notes, citing National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, data.
Among the “Top 10 Stories of 2013,” as reported by German Magazine Der Spiegel, was listed a 16-year global warming pause as documented by credible climate scientists worldwide.
“An unexpected development has been occupying the attention of climate scientists,” Der Speigel noted in the sub-heading to a story on “the mysterious” temperature development of the past years. “The air appears not to have warmed up in the last 16 years. Obviously natural phenomena are covering the increasing impact of greenhouse gases.”
Still, as suggested by Der Spiegel’s comment, “global warmers” appear reluctant to abandon an ideological commitment to the theory human-produced, or “anthropogenic,” causes have created a “greenhouse effect” in which carbon dioxide emitted in the burning of hydro-carbon fuels including oil, coal, and natural gas, have caused temperatures on earth to rise.
Global warming skeptics, in addition to Morano, have argued in print the evidence global warming has halted means UN theories of anthropogenic global warming should be abandon.
“It’s time to completely revamp the models so that they start to resemble reality,” wrote climate skeptic P. Gosselin this week in response to the Der Spiegel article. “It’s also time for the media to rethink their position ion the issue rather than trying to hopelessly prop it up.”
WND recently reported that within the span of a week, Cairo saw its first snow in 100 years. Oregon, like several other states, reached its coldest temperature in 40 years. Chicago saw its coldest days ever, and – as if to add finality to the trend – Antarctica reached the coldest temperature ever recorded anywhere on earth.
Ironically, just a few years ago, believers in anthropogenic (man-caused) global warming – since renamed “climate change” – claimed cold weather and snow would soon be just a memory.
“Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past,” announced the headline in Britain’s newspaper the Independent at the turn of the millennium. The report quoted David Viner, senior research scientist at the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, long considered an authoritative resource for global warming research, as saying snow would soon be “a very rare and exciting event” in Britain.
“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said.
The rhetoric and predictions of global warming acolytes have been every bit as confusing in the United States, with former vice president and carbon-credit entrepreneur Al Gore telling an audience in a 2009 speech that “the entire north polar ice cap during some of the summer months could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years.” And of course his 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” famously predicted increasing temperatures would cause earth’s oceans to rise by 20 feet, a claim many scientists say is utterly without rational basis.
How such predictions square with current weather reality – multiple reports of the coldest weather in a generation – is unclear.
Fact: The earth has not warmed for the last 15 years. This now-widely-known truth was confirmed in September in a leaked report, the result of six years’ work by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, touted as the world authority on climate change and its supposed causes.
Indeed, researchers were so flummoxed at the utter lack of evidence supporting anthropogenic global warming that, as the London Daily Mail reported, the “world’s top climate scientists were told to ‘cover up’ the fact that the earth’s temperature hasn’t risen for the last 15 years.”
“Climategate” exposes the global warming scam. Get it now at the WND Superstore.
Well-known scientist Art Robinson has spearheaded The Petition Project, which to date has gathered the signatures of 31,487 scientists who agree that there is “no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.”
Among the scientists signing the petition are 9,029 who hold doctorate degrees in their field of study.
“We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December 1997, and any other similar proposals,” the petition continues. “The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.”
Robinson, who has a Ph.D. in chemistry from Cal Tech, where he served on the faculty, co-founded the Linus Pauling Institute with Nobel-recipient Linus Pauling, where he was president and research professor. He later founded the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine.
He told WND, very simply, that weather does change over time and that the global system goes through cycles, some slightly warmer and some slightly cooler than others.
Right now it’s cool. While it was snowing in Cairo for the first time in a century, Jerusalem received up to 20 inches.
Robinson also told WND it’s interesting to be living in a period when carbon dioxide is rising, yet temperatures are flat or going down.
“We just have to get used to fluctuations,” he said. “Earth does go through cycles.”
What, then, is behind the widespread obsession – with so little evidence – with global warming, and the resulting desire to implement massive new governmental policies? The answer, says Robinson, is not complicated: “Power and money.”
Power is obtained through laws and rules created in response to supposed global warming that limit what people can do with their own lives and property. Through carbon credits and “green” energy projects, which have made Al Gore enormously wealthy, massive amounts of money change hands.
Just weeks ago, the United Nations and World Bank lobbied for spending $600 billion to $800 billion a year on “sustainable energy” to replace oil and gas.
The U.S. has already given tens of millions of dollars to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
December 26, 2013
The stats don't lie: 'Gay' health costs coming your way
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second article in the series on the Obama administration’s campaign to enroll lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender citizens in Obamacare, which force private insurers to cover the high-risk population by distributing the burden to other citizens and away from government. The first story reported the indications the White House has an unspoken agenda of lifting the financial burden from a demographic that overwhelmingly votes Democrat.
NEW YORK – The government’s own statistics affirm that LGBT citizens are responsible for an enormously disproportionate share of health care costs, which now will be placed on the backs of healthy citizens under the Affordable Health Care Act, known commonly as Obamacare.
As WND reported, the Obama administration’s emphasis on enrolling the LGBT community in Obamacare strongly suggests it has an unspoken agenda of lifting the financial burden from a demographic that overwhelmingly votes Democrat.
Medical research has demonstrated the LGBT community is disproportionately susceptible to a wide variety of health problems aside from HIV/AIDS, including mental illness and suicide, alcoholism, drug addiction and substance abuse.
In a slide presentation titled “Out2Enroll: The Affordable Care Act and the LGBT Communities,” prepared for a Sept. 12 White House briefing on Obamacare and the LGBT community, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health counted 8 million Americans as gay, lesbian or bisexual. With another 700,000 regarded as transgender, Johns Hopkins estimates about 2.84 percent of the U.S. population is LGBT.
Since the rise of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, Centers for Disease Control studies have shown that more than 60 percent of all HIV/AIDS infections – 63 percent in 2010 – are caused by homosexual acts between men.
The second most frequent cause of HIV/AIDS infection is the sharing of hypodermic needles among drug addicts.
The CDC estimates that currently there are about 1.1 million people in the U.S. living with HIV/AIDS. About 1 in 6 who are afflicted is unaware of it.
The statistics indicate the disease is disproportionately prevalent among African-Americans, with more African-American heterosexual women being infected by their bisexual male partners than in the white community.
“Gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (MSM), particularly young black/African American MSM, are most seriously affected by HIV,” the CDC concluded in a study of new HIV infections in 2010. “By race, blacks/African Americans face the most severe burden of HIV.”
The CDC noted the estimated incidence of HIV has remained stable in recent years, leveling off at a rate of 50,000 new HIV infections per year.
“In 2011, an estimated 49,237 people were diagnosed with HIV infection in the United States,” the CDC reported. “In that same year, an estimated 32,052 were diagnosed with AIDS. Overall, an estimated 1,155,792 people in the United States have been diagnosed with AIDS.”
The cost of treating HIV/AIDS
The CDC estimates the cost of HIV/AIDS health care treatment in terms of the cost per quality-adjusted life year, QALY, gained by the treatment.
“The QALY is based on the number of years of life added by the intervention. Each year in perfect health is assigned the value of 1.0. Each year of less-than-perfect health is assigned a value less than 1.0 down to a value of 0.0 for death. If the extra years would not be lived in full health, for example if the patient would lose a limb, be blind or suffer from worse mental health, then the extra life-years may be given a value of less than 1 to account for this.”
The CDC points out a cost-effectiveness ratio of $50,000 to $100,000 per QALY gained has long been cited as a conservative threshold for intervention. That benchmark has increased over time, reflecting advances in modern health care. In 2010 dollars, the plausible range for a cost-effectiveness decision rule has risen to $143,000 to $388,000.
The CDC points out that treatment costs can vary widely and the cost-effectiveness of the treatment may not be a function solely of the annual program cost.
In the following example, the CDC points out that both programs A and B have the same measure of cost-effectiveness in terms of cost per QALY gained. However, Program B is more costly to implement than A. Investment in Program B, the CDC argues, “may nevertheless be justified depending on budgetary constraints and the ability to implement for the program in the population and setting considered.”
Source: CDC
The CDC says the most recent published estimate of lifetime HIV treatment costs was $367,134, translated to $379,688 in 2010 dollars. The cost is on track to exceed $450,000 in 2014, assuming a straight-line 105 percent decrease in the value of the dollar over the entire period of analysis, 2010-2014.
The CDC estimated the annual average cost of HIV care was $23,000 in 2010 dollars, translated into approximately $30,000 in estimated 2014 dollars.
The CDC further notes the use of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) since 1996 has significantly improved survival for persons infected with HIV. The most current estimated life expectancy from the time of infection to death is 32.1 years for a large dataset of persons in routine outpatient care in the current treatment era.
Using U.S. national HIV surveillance data, the CDC reports, studies have estimated the average life expectancy after an HIV diagnosis has increased from 10.5 to 22.5 years from 1996 to 2005.
Other estimates have placed estimates of life expectancy and the cost for health care treatment even higher for those infected by HIV/AIDS.
“An American diagnosed with the AIDS virus can expect to live for about 24 years on the average, and the cost of health care over those two-plus decades is more than $600,000, new research indicates,” the Associated Press reported in 2006. “The research found that the average annual cost of care is about $25,200 – nearly 40 percent higher than a commonly cited cost estimate from the late 1990s.”
With 1 million people in the U.S. currently estimated to be infected with HIV according to CDC estimates – anticipating a $500,000 lifetime heath care cost measured in 2014 dollars per HIV case – the U.S. can anticipate $500 billion in health care costs to treat HIV over approximately the next 20 years. The cost is expected to increase as more expensive HAART therapies are provided to increasing proportions of the HIV-infected population.
The estimates focus only on the cost of medications to treat HIV-affected individuals, not expenditures for additional health care services required. Other related costs, given the psychological stress of HIV/AIDS, include treatment of alcohol and substance abuse and mental illness. There are also reimbursable costs for case managers, adherence counselors, nutritionists, expanded access nurses and other social service providers who may intervene to help an HIV/AIDS patient cope with life.
By comparison, the federal government Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services at CMS.gov estimates that U.S. health care spending in 2011 was about $8,680 per person, a total of $2.7 trillion.
“Delivery of HIV-related health care in the U.S. is expensive,” states one of the more credible analyses of the health care costs of treating HIV/AIDS, published in a peer-reviewed medical journal. “Given the potential increases in costs of therapeutic agents, toxicities and comorbidities due to HAART, and aging-related comorbidities, it is likely that the aggregate of HIV care will continue to increase for the foreseeable future.”
Health problems incident to LGBT
The slide presentation titled “Out2Enroll: The Affordable Care Act and the LGBT Communities,” prepared for the White House briefing on Obamacare and the LGBT community illustrated the degree to which HIV/AIDS infection correlates with a increased incidence of other health care needs.
Source: Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
The Institute of Medicine’s 2011 report “Leading Health Indicators for Healthy People 2020,” from which the above graphic was derived, listed on page 53 “disparities” in LGBT health, also described on the HHS “Healthy People 2020” website:
LGBT youth are two to three times more likely to attempt suicide;
LGBT youth are more likely to be homeless;
Lesbians are less likely to get preventive services for cancer;
Gay men are at a higher risk of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, especially Hispanic and African American men;
Lesbians and bisexual females are more likely to be overweight or obese;
Transgender individuals have a high prevalence of HIV/STDs, victimization, mental health concerns, suicide and are less likely to have health insurance than heterosexual or LGBT individual;
Elderly LGBT individuals face additional barriers to health because of isolation and a lack of social services and culturally competent providers;
LGBT populations have the highest rates of tobacco use, alcohol use, and illicit drug use of all other specific populations.
A 2013 report titled “Optimizing LGBT health Under the Affordable Care Act: Strategies for Health Centers,” co-authored by the Center for American Progress and the National LGBT Health Education Center at the Fenway Institute, a private Boston-based health education center with expertise in LGBT health research and care, linked the HHS “disparity” report and the efforts of Obamacare to address the health care needs of the LGBT community.
“To begin to overcome these disparities, HHS included advancing LGBT health as a goal in Healthy People 2020 and has funded The Fenway Institute’s National LGBT Health Education Center to provide federally qualified health centers with training and technical assistance around LGBT health care,” the report noted on pages 2-3.
“Now, with the operation of the state-based health insurance marketplaces and the introduction of new provisions for ensuring that insurance plans are comprehensive and of high quality, the Affordable Care Act is providing an unprecedented opportunity to improve the health of many LGBT Americans.”
A national HIV/AIDS strategy
On July 13, 2010, soon after the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the White House released the first comprehensive National HIV/AIDS Strategy for the United States. It had three stated goals: 1) reduce the number of new HIV/AIDS infections; 2) increase access to the full spectrum of available HIV/AIDS health care treatments for those affected; and 3) reduce HIV/AIDS related health “disparities” occurring disproportionately in the LGBT community.
A YouTube video, co-posted on the government website Aids.gov, explains President Obama’s commitment to the National HIV/AIDS Strategy.
“The United States will become a place where new HIV infections are rare and when they do occur, every person regardless of age, gender, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity or socio-economic circumstance, will have unfettered access to high quality, life-extending care, free from stigma and discrimination,” the AID.gov website proclaims
A second YouTube video, also posted on the AID.gov website, articulates National HIV/AIDS Strategy’s “vision statement” in the voices of people of various races, ages, “gender identities and sexual identities.”
To the extent to which the Obama administration succeeds in enrolling LGBT citizens in guarantee-issue insurance offered by private companies, it achieves a largely unarticulated public policy goal of shifting the cost of providing expensive LGBT health care from Medicaid and other government-funded efforts such as the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program.
The improvement in HIV/AIDS health care envisioned by the national HIV/AIDS strategy, therefore, is to be paid for not by redistribution from higher-income Americans to lower-income Americans, but from healthy Americans who will pay higher premiums to subsidize the cost of enhanced HIV/AIDS medical care to the infected community.
Yet, as simple as the idea may seem, the economic reality is complex.
“In addition to expanding Medicaid, the ACA prevents insurance companies – whether they are on the exchanges or not – from dropping or denying coverage or charging higher rates for people with pre-existing conditions such as HIV/AIDS,” noted a recent Pew Charitable Trust analysis of how the Affordable Care Act will impact people infected with HIV/AIDs.
“Currently, at least 30 percent of HIV-infected people are uninsured. That compares to 15 percent in the general population,” according to a study from the Kaiser Family Foundation. “Until the ACA was enacted, private insurers often dropped people diagnosed with HIV, and it was difficult for people with the virus to purchase health insurance at an affordable price.”
Clearly, with private health insurers no longer able to exclude LGBT applicants from coverage or to charge higher rates, having a sufficiently disproportionate number of healthy non-LGBT individuals enroll in Obamacare is a pre-requisite if participating private health insurers are to be profitable.
The income-redistribution strategy confronts participating private health insurers with two possibilities of incurring catastrophic losses. Too many LGBT and/or HIV/AIDS-infected individuals might buy insurance on the exchanges, or too few who are not infected may be willing to pay the higher health insurance premiums that will now be required.
The same risk of catastrophic loss does not apply to the Affordable Care Act requirement that private insurers provide health-care coverage to lower-income Americans without risking underwriting.
Under Obamacare, low-income Americans will simply self-select out of participation in the private insurance offerings on the government-operated health exchanges, precisely because the only requirement to be covered by an Obamacare health insurer is the willingness and ability to pay the premiums quoted.
Despite the protestation of Democrats in Congress, the Obama administration did not design the Affordable Care Act with the goal of getting private insurance to a larger proportion of the uninsured poor, despite the subsidies touted in the law.
Unless government-provided subsidies paid virtually all the cost of private health insurance for the uninsured poor, the default for lower-income Americans under the Affordable Care Act remains Medicaid, an assumption the preliminary Obamacare enrollment numbers appear to be validating.
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