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"Obamacare cuts $716 billion from Medicare to help pay for its $1.9 trillion expansion of coverage to low-income Americans. So why is it that the group that purports to speak for seniors so strongly supports a law that most seniors oppose? [B]ecause those very same Medicare cuts will give AARP a windfall of $1 billion in insurance profits... AARP isn't your every-day citizens' advocacy group. [It] is also one of the largest private health insurers in America. In 2011, AARP generated $458 million in royalty fees from so-called Medigap plans, nearly twice the $266 million the lobby receives in membership dues..."

Oct 23, 2012:

"Fix Your Bayonets -- Again!"

More on the lying liars: Reuters-- White House told of militant claim two hours after Libya attack. "Officials at the White House and State Department were advised two hours after attackers assaulted the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11 that an Islamic militant group had claimed credit for the attack... The emails... specifically mention that the Libyan group called Ansar al-Sharia had asserted responsibility for the attacks. [O]ne of the addresses to which the message was sent was the White House Situation Room..." "Al-Qaida's on the run -- running right into our consulates, apparently." -- John Bolton. Obama refused to call in troops from Italy, one hour away. More on the hearings at Independent Sentinel.

Second one this week alone. Satcon Technology Corp. Another bankruptcy. Never mind all the stimulus money that ended up with foreign companies and overseas. In these cases, the taxpayer stimulus money ended up going to... Obama's crony campaign supporters' salaries? Obama's crony campaign supporters' contractor friends' and subcontractor friends' companies posing as suppliers and service providers for "green" companies? Yeah, there's "green" all right. And the stimulus-funded $300 million Chevy Volt battery factory has never shipped a battery. Here's the astonishing list of corporate failures.

Meanwhile, lies about the unemployment picture. Jammie says "Well knock me over with a feather. Bogus unemployment figures reported and who's behind it? Why, an Obama donor..." in the U.S. Dept. of Labor.

       
DEFEND THE CONSTITUTION QUICKMEME

UPDATE: On September 11, 2012, as U.S. embassies were being attacked in Cairo and Benghazi, Barack Hussein Obama addressed the Arab Forum. The video is currently on the Whitehouse's Youtube page. Obama began by verbally bowing to the government of Qatar and an Islamic sheik referring to him as 'his Highness'... While Obama was praising the Arab Spring and promising billions of dollars to Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, the Arab Spring was burning American flags, chanting death to America, and raping and killing an American ambassador and three other Americans in those same exact countries. Two days later, as Muslims continued rioting, burning and killing, the State Department and Hillary Clinton wasted taxpayer dollars to throw a Muslim party to celebrate the end of Ramadan... More at creepingsharia.wordpress.com. Whitehouse lies. This was a terrorist attack.

The comments are going nuts in response to the NYTimes piece by Boise State biology professor Greg Hampikian, pointing out that male and female contributions to reproduction are not close to equal or equivalent. PDF Here is the answer to his question "does 'mankind' really need men?":

From a species standpoint, it is precisely because males are not needed for (and are not time-and-energy preoccupied with) the immediate activities of reproduction -- but instead both compete to mix up the gene pool and also de-select less healthy and attractive females for reproduction and protection from competition for scarce resources -- that: (1) at the very top of the species, the smartest, most talented, and most beautiful will always be male, and (2) evolution and civilization would stagnate and then regress without them.

The airlines should maintain their policy of not seating men next to unaccompanied minors. "Discrimination against men" is not the issue. Neither, necessarily, is the "fear of pedophilia", or concern that a male passenger might view porn enflight, be a convicted felon, be a boisterous 19-year-old using bad language, be incompetent to assist a child in the event of an emergency, or be a hijacker (although these possibilities remain astronomically more likely in the case of any given male than female.) The most important consideration is the comfort and safety of the children, who already may be nervous about flying alone.

Plucked from the grapevine today...

Statement of NOW President Terry O'Neill

Contrary to recent media reports, the National Organization for Women (NOW) has not have taken an official position on the New Jersey Gestational Carrier Act (S-1599). A member of NOW's board (Kathy Sloan) has spoken out in opposition to this legislation as a concerned activist, not as a representative of NOW. Sloan was voicing her opinion only and not that of the organization.

NOW requests that all media outlets refrain from listing NOW as one of the advocacy organizations opposing S-1599. We also ask that those outlets that reported this incorrectly issue timely corrections to clarify this matter.

Because this was an issue of New Jersey state legislation, Bonnie Grabenhofer also reached out to NOW-NJ about the issue. Her voice mail message was not returned. We heard no more about it.

Fast forward to this weekend. Gov. Chris Christie vetoed the New Jersey surrogacy bill, and Kathy wrote an op-ed laying out why she supports his veto. Her article is posted on the New Jersey Star-Ledger's website. Kathy's op-ed is wonderfully written and entirely appropriate. It is abundantly clear (to me, anyway) that Kathy is not claiming to speak for NOW -- she merely identifies her association with three different organizations. Nonetheless, a media consultant for the American Academy of Adoption Attorneys, which supported the bill, posted our June statement in the comment section to Kathy's op-ed. No one in the National NOW office sent our June statement to anyone in response to Kathy's op-ed.

We understand that the AAAA media consultant has also contacted the Star-Ledger directly and is claiming that National NOW disagrees with Kathy. But it is obvious from our statement that NOW neither agrees nor disagrees with Kathy about the New Jersey bill. That is what it means to not have a position.

NOW doesn't have policy on the New Jersey bill because surrogacy is a complicated issue on which dedicated feminists can and do disagree. Three years ago, National NOW collaborated with the Center for Responsible Genetics in seeking grant funding for a project to raise awareness about surrogacy practices in the U.S. We hoped to get a national dialogue going on how current practices should be regulated, if they should be regulated. I was grateful to Kathy and her employer (CRG) for including us in their outreach for funding on this issue. However, seeking that grant for the purpose of raising awareness and holding a national dialogue did not establish NOW national policy. Unfortunately, grant funding for the project never materialized.

I hope this information is helpful to you. I want to take this opportunity to thank each of you for all the work you are doing for NOW and for women's equality.

In sisterhood,
Terry

Plaudits to Kathy Sloan. NOW should stop pussyfooting this issue lest they offend gay men who want to make babies, and come out against surrogacy, which should be banned. Diversity feminism fails women.

UPDATE Aug 21, 2012: SurrogateParenting.wma or SurrogateParenting.mp3 - Attorney Elizabeth Kates discusses the lesbian in-vitro custody case scheduled to go before the Florida Supreme Court in October 2012. This unique case involves two lesbian partners who used in-vitro fertilization to have a child and later separated. The fertilized egg of one woman was implanted in her then-partner, who gave birth. A legal battle over parental rights began when the woman who gave birth stopped allowing her girlfriend to have contact with the child. The 5th District Court of Appeal last year ruled that the woman who provided the fertilized egg should have parental rights, which led to the dispute going to the Supreme Court.

Jul 22, 2012:

Specious psych research speculations taken even further by idiotic media.

Jul 20, 2012:

The Colorado "Joker" murderer...

Is not a Tea Party member, but an Occupy Wall Street groupist. Is not from a "broken home", but from an intact middle class San Diego family. Is not into violent video games, or, apparently, on-line social media. A straight-A student, and a neuroscience major. Not a Muslim. (So which psych "meds" did it this time?) [UPDATE: Jul 29, 2012: Lynne Fenton. A-Duh.

Jul 15, 2012:

Psychology is not science.

In the last 100 years of medicine, has the overall health and longevity of the population improved? Without question. Have many diseases been cured? Absolutely. In the last 100 years of psychology, and the extraordinary burgeoning of applied psychology, permeating virtually every aspect of modern life, has the overall mental health of the population improved? No -- not on any definition we might concoct for what constitutes "mental health". Have any mental "diseases" been cured? No. "Nuff said.

Jul 13, 2012:

The Marsha Kleinman case.

The panoply of court-ordered psychological and psychiatric "therapies" must stop. Anger management. Play therapy. Reunification therapy. Parental alienation therapy. Kid boot camps. Trauma therapies. Grief "counseling". Drug abuse prevention (DARE). Art therapy. Coping therapies (change the bad situation.) "Dissociative Identity Disorder" therapies. Cognitive behavioral therapies (try exercise). Co-parenting counseling. Tapping therapies (but head banging, rocking, and thumb sucking are signs of disturbance). And on and on. All bogus. Ditto psychiatric (drug) therapies poisoning children with dubious "diagnoses" such as ADHD. This isn't about lining up on self-interested ideological sides. The "skeptic" scientists and anti-"attachment therapy" crowd nevertheless inexplicably embrace parental alienation and false memory syndrome crap; the anti-dv advocates believe in therapies for children and other syndromes and nonsense; and the drug versus non-drug "therapy" debaters endlessly push their own theologies.

No child, abused or not (and no protective parent's case) benefits from quackery. Here, the Kleinman decision. (If when my children were little I had caught any adult asking one of them to "imagine Daddy's penis in your mouth" that person would have needed a face transplant.)

Jul 08, 2012:

The Rorschach, psychological testing in child custody cases, and questions about "expertise" in clinical and forensic psychology.

Part two in the series, following up A Grammatical Analysis of the MMPI-2 "I can't say", new webpage is The Rorschach Psychological Test and Other Forensic Musings Just Say No. And WALK OUT! I'm tired of reading otherwise excellent trade critiques that nevertheless feel compelled to give lipservice to the vague presumption that somewhere there is value in child custody evaluations. I haven't seen this imagined value. And I'm sad to be continually contacted by desperate litigants whose cases have spun out of control into an unnecessary "therapeutic jurisprudence" mess.

Jun 28, 2012:

The ACA "Obamacare" decision.

The law is an economically disastrous bureaucratic atrocity, a crony corporate dungheap lobbied by the insurance, pharmaceutical and mental health industries and other special interests. Four Justices were wrong on the Commerce Clause. The Chief Justice delivered a nice lecture on it (dicta). As a "tax" (offensively burdening mostly the young, the middleclass, and the self-employed), the mandate could still be unconstitutional (waivers? religious exemptions?) as applied (versus constitutionally within Congress's power to enact), but that will have to wait for the individual challenge years from now. The country would do far better with single payer universal catastrophic health care coverage, i.e. with high means-tested co-pays and deductibles. That is the only way to curb frivolous use of the system, waste and fraud. Most of the sickest, poorest, and oldest already are covered by Medicaid and Medicare (which needs similar reform), and it is insanity that access to medical care for the rest should be provided through employers and a medical insurance industry that profits from illness and injury.

Jun 24, 2012:

Research on harm from inability to obtain an abortion?

I'm looking for research or statistics or even anecdotal information collected on North American women demonstrating that not having had access to an abortion has harmed women's lives. I'm not looking for theoretical sociological stuff, or evidence about how having children interferes with women's careers (we know that), but evidence with regard to the effects on and regrets of individual women of not having been able to have an abortion they thought they might have wanted. This claim is implicit, and sometimes explicit, in the pro-choice argument, but I've never seen any actual research backing it up. Have you?

Jun 20, 2012:

Judy Wallerstein, you will be missed. :-(

Original articles on this website by Judith S. Wallerstein include, among others: Critique of the Braver Relocation Study and The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce -- What She Really Said. We also have her 2003 LaMusga Relocation Brief.