by Phyllis Schlafly 

Obama's "spread the wealth around" doesn't mean only higher taxes on taxpayers and more handouts to non-taxpayers; more especially, it means transfers of financial goodies to the President's political allies.

The American people were rightfully outraged when it became known that Senators Mary Landrieu and Ben Nelson were rewarded for voting for Obamacare with hundreds of millions of dollars of benefits given uniquely to their states, Louisiana and Nebraska. Now we find that President Obama is paying off the feminists big-time for their support of his election.

When Obama presented his multi-trillion dollar budget, he declared with great fanfare that he was calling for a freeze in discretionary spending. Feminists immediately had a tantrum to complain that the freeze exempted funding for the military, intelligence, and homeland security.

Now we learn that all feminist programs and organizations will also be exempted from the freeze. Instead, they will get what White House spokesman Kate Bedingfield admits are "significant funding increases."

A White House document entitled Opportunity and Progress for Women and Girls describes 15 federal programs that will receive increased funding to appease the feminists. Chief among them is the Violence Against Women project, which is targeted for a 22 percent increase, an extra $117 million more than current funding, which is already close to $1 billion a year.

That earmark is a Joe Biden project known as feminist pork because the money goes right into the hands of radical feminist centers where they teach their anti-male, anti-marriage ideology, counsel women to get a divorce, and urge criminal prosecution against a man no matter how slight or unverified the alleged offense.

The Women and Girls document reveals that Obama's budget would appropriate $50 million to give grants to incentivize the states to adopt paid family leave. That longtime feminist goal would be very costly to small business and result in a loss of jobs.

To please the feminists, other spending that will be exempted from Obama's freeze includes an additional $400 million for the discretionary nutrition program for low-income women, and an increase of $10 million for family planning.

Of course, Obama's budget will increase funding for daycare, one of the most favorite feminist objectives. Head Start, which already receives $9 billion a year, is scheduled for additional funding of nearly $1 billion, despite the fact that recent studies show that Head Start provides little or no beneficial results toward the stated goal of helping disadvantaged children catch up with other children.

Obama's budget also provides an additional $1.6 billion for the Child Care and Development Fund as part of the reauthorization of government spending for daycare. The feminists believe that child care should be taken over by government in order to overcome society's expectation that mothers should care for their own babies.

Obama's budget increases funding for a new program to recruit undergraduate students from underrepresented groups in science and technology careers. The budget also increases funding for a special program to give women (instead of men) more jobs in academic science and engineering careers.

Obama's State of the Union speech continued his pandering to the feminists. He said: "We are going to crack down on violations of equal-pay laws so that women get equal pay for an equal day's work." Equal pay for equal work has been U.S. law since 1963, so there's nothing new about the law or its enforcement. Isn't his Equal Employment Opportunity (EEOC) agency already cracking down against violations, and if not, why not?

Obama's statement was just a throw-away line to feed the feminist myth that women are victims of employment discrimination. It was also designed to try to validate the false feminist slogan that women are paid only 77 cents for work that earns a dollar for men. That's not true because equal pay ought to be paid for equal work, and most women don't work as many hours or in as dangerous or unpleasant jobs as men. Women prefer inside work in air-conditioned offices.

Obama hasn't yet gone as far as Norway, which passed a law requiring that women must comprise 40 percent of all companies' corporate boards. U.S. feminists probably would like that rule; they pretend to see no hypocrisy in touting gender-neutrality while demanding affirmative action for females.

Rush Limbaugh got it right when he commented on Obama's State of the Union speech as "from the 1970s . . . totally clichéd." Half of American women are in the workforce today, while male unemployment is setting new records.

by Jill Stanek 

On Nov. 20, the historic Manhattan Declaration was unveiled, just what my distraught spirit had been yearning. I became its 218,525th signer.

The Manhattan Declaration is a momentous 4,700-word manifesto authored by Chuck Colson, Dr. Robert George and Dr. Timothy George, with input from many Orthodox, Catholic and evangelical leaders. Colson calls it "one of the most important [documents] in my lifetime."

The Manhattan Declaration draws a line in the sand on the three paramount issues of our time: the sanctity of human life, the sanctity of marriage as the holy and conjugal union of husband and wife, and the rights of religious liberty and conscience.

Its bottom line is this, as the last paragraph states:

Because we honor justice and the common good, we will not comply with any edict that purports to compel our institutions to participate in abortions, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide and euthanasia, or any other anti-life act; nor will we bend to any rule purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual partnerships, treat them as marriages or the equivalent, or refrain from proclaiming the truth, as we know it, about morality and immorality and marriage and the family. We will fully and ungrudgingly render to Caesar what is Caesar's. But under no circumstances will we render to Caesar what is God's.

Manhattan Declaration drafters are inviting all like-minded believers to sign on, but the potential ramifications for doing so are sobering.

Continue reading Jill's column at WorldNetDaily.com.

by Phyllis Schlafly 

The Democrats' most recent answer to the question of how they will pay for their trillion-dollar health-care reform was just announced by Ways and Means Chairman Charles Rangel. He wants to impose a surtax on incomes over $280,000, which would be a staggering blow to small businesses that create most jobs.

Another option floated by the Democrats is to tax employer-sponsored health coverage. Obama-supporter and union boss James P. Hoffa calls this "a bitter, bitter pill for middle-class wage-earners," and has vowed to fight it.

The real purpose of Obama's health care "reform" is to seize control of another major industry (health care) and move us rapidly into Socialism. The Democrats' plan involves mandates to force individuals to buy insurance, employers to provide insurance, and private insurance to offer an expensive list of benefits.

Instead of allowing insurance to compete by offering different benefit packages, the Democrats are considering insurance mandates to cover exotic benefits that individuals may not want to buy such as in-vitro fertilization, hair transplants, rehab services, hearing aids, sex-change operations, prescription drugs, abortions, mental health, and substance abuse programs.

The Democrats intend to prohibit low-cost policies for catastrophic care. They want to bar you from buying cheaper insurance in other states.

The Democrats intend to impose community rating on a federal level, which means all customers will be offered the same rates regardless of age, obesity, smoking or other lifestyle differences. This forces young people to subsidize older patients.

The Democrats intend to launch a "public option" to compete with private insurance. Government subsidies for the public option would soon drive private insurance out of business and become the "single-payer" (government plan) that the liberals really want.

Obama promised that if you like your current insurance, you can keep it, but that option will soon be gone under Obama reform. Your employer could cancel his company-paid insurance (because it's cheaper to pay a fine instead), or your insurance (because it can't compete with government subsidized insurance) could cancel your company.

Obama's choice of White House Health Czar, Nancy-Ann DeParle, shows the conflicts of interests that surround many of his appointments. In the past three years, she pocketed $5.8 million from her work for major medical companies ($2.3 million from serving on the boards of six firms to be affected by the health-care bill, and $3.5 million from director's fees, stock sales and awards from health-care firms).

Czar DeParle was paid $471,000 as a member of the board of directors of Cerner, a leading developer of electronic medical records systems. Cerner has already boasted that it is well-positioned to take advantage of Obama's push to modernize medical records (for which $19 billion was allocated in the Stimulus law).

Modernizing health-care records means putting all your health-care information on computers where it will be accessible to government bureaucrats to help them decide the comparative effectiveness of proposed tests and treatments in relation to your age and health (a.k.a. rationing). Private information can leak out and be used against you by employers, prospective employers, health and life insurance, ex-spouses, or political opponents.

The elephant in the Obama health-care room may be abortion. Time Magazine is asking the explosive question: Will Obama's national health care cover abortions?

The majority of Americans do not want their tax dollars to pay for abortions. Because of the Supreme Court decision in Harris v. McRae upholding the Hyde Amendment, federally-paid health care (such as Medicaid) does not now cover abortions.

Hillary Clinton, the National Abortion Federation, Planned Parenthood, and NARAL are already bragging that nationalized health care will include abortion. Feminists believe that abortion should be covered just like an appendectomy.

Unless it is excluded, abortions will be covered by national health care, thus making the taxpayers pay for hundreds of thousands of abortions every year. That's why 19 pro-life Democrats, organized by Rep. David Boren (D-OK), sent a letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi warning that they "cannot support any health-care-reform proposal unless it explicitly excludes abortion from the scope of any government-defined or subsidized health-insurance plan."

The Obama plan will permanently put unaccountable bureaucrats (who have never treated a patient) in charge of decisions about if and when you can get the procedures and treatments you and your doctor believe are necessary.

Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) believes this is "a make-or-break moment for Americans" and a battle we can and must win. As a physician, he reminds us that we can't effectively treat a problem unless we get the diagnosis right, and the Democrats have misdiagnosed the problem as too little rather than too much government intervention.

 by Jill Stanek

This is finals week for students at the University of Notre Dame.

But a new kind of buzz may be getting in the way of scoring good grades, and it's not illegal (yet, anyway).

For the past 10 days the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform has been conducting an air and land campaign in, around and over the Notre Dame campus to educate students and faculty exactly what its intended May 17 commencement honoree, President Barack Obama, supports by being "pro-choice."

On the roads are CBR's "Reproductive 'Choice' Trucks," six-paneled moving billboards with large signs such as these plastered on them:




And in the air at least three hours a day (six during finals week) has been an airplane trailing a large photo banner behind it, also showing in vivid detail what Obama means when he says he's pro-choice.

Read the rest of Jill's article at WorldNetDaily.com.

by Jill Stanek 

A documentary about late-term abortions in Russia, seven years in the making, has just been released.

"Killing Girls" has already been nominated for best documentary film in three European film festivals and through the wonders of technology is available to download online for $14.99, which I did last weekend. (DVD is also available for $22.99.) Click Here to see the trailer.

The primary setting of "Killing Girls" is the Center for Family Planning and Reproduction in St Petersburg, a large, old hospital where babies are delivered on one floor and aborted on the next. Mothers recover together.

Late-term abortions are common in Russia. In a country where the film tells us 80 percent of women abort an average of two to 10 times, older girls tell younger girls to wait until after 20 weeks to abort because, they say, it is better for the female body to have an induced abortion than surgical abortion. The girls worry about becoming sterile. Very messed up. This despite the fact abortions are free up to 12 weeks.

Read the rest of Jill's article at WorldNetDaily.com.

By Jill Stanek

With increasing volume I've been trying to make the pro-life community understand that aborting babies alive and letting them die or outright killing them is a commonplace – rampant – occurrence in U.S. hospitals and abortion mills despite the 2002 passage of the federal Born Alive Infants Protection Act.

That we get this fact is imperative with the election of Barack Obama as president alongside a Congress now fully controlled by the abortion industry.

Obama is key. As most know, he took tremendous heat during his 2008 campaign for adamantly opposing Born Alive as Illinois state senator and was forced to protest loudly that, of course, he opposed infanticide of abortion survivors. Rest assured pro-abort congressional members were watching, glad it wasn't them on the hot seat. The pro-life community must now make Obama and a Senate and House that both voted overwhelmingly for Born Alive prove it.

How do we know post-abortion infanticide is widespread? The procedure resulting in live births – induced labor abortion – is now the late-term abortion procedure of choice. Read that last sentence again. Ask anyone who sidewalk counsels at late-term mills. A mother goes in one day to have her cervix dilated and the next to expel the baby.

Read the rest at WorldNetDaily.com

by Phyllis Schlafly 

Can you name the three branches of American government, legislative, executive, and judicial? If so, you are among the one-half of Americans who know this very basic fact about the U.S. government and Constitution.

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), which earlier has conducted in-depth studies of what American college students know, and don't know, about civics, now reports equally depressing facts about grown-ups. It appears that adults, too, lack the civic knowledge they need to be informed citizens and intelligent voters.

ISI administered a very basic test on American history, government and economics to 2,500 Americans age 25 and older. The multiple-choice test asked citizens to identify terms that everybody should know, such as the New Deal, the Electoral College, Sputnik, I Have a Dream, and progressive tax.

The 2,500 adults scored an average of 49 percent; that means they get a pitiful F. Those who had received a bachelor's degree averaged 57 percent on the test, compared to 44 percent for those with only a high school diploma and, worse still, 164 adults who had held elected office also scored an average of 44 percent.

Almost 40 percent of respondents said they thought the president (rather than Congress) has the power to declare war. Only 50 percent knew that Congress shares authority with the president over U.S. foreign policy, and almost one in four thought Congress shares authority over U.S. foreign policy with the United Nations.

Americans who lack knowledge of our country's history, Constitution, and institutions really have no frame of reference to judge current politics and policies. Federal law requires public schools to teach about the U.S. Constitution on Constitution Day, September 17, but it looks like American adults need those lessons, too.

The 2006 National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) Civics Test revealed that the majority of eighth graders could not explain the purpose of the Declaration of Independence. No wonder young voters are not shocked at those who talk about "interdependence," globalism, and becoming "citizens of the world."

It's not just that American citizens lack knowledge of historical and constitutional facts about our country, but they also show a declining appreciation of who we are. A survey by Harris Interactive reported that 84 percent of respondents believe we have a unique American identity, but 64 percent believe this identity is weakening, and 24 percent believe we are already so divided that a common national identity is impossible.

Political Correctness in colleges and public schools over the last decade has gone a long way toward replacing patriotism with the trendy dicta of multiculturalism, diversity and global citizenship. Are we losing our identity as Americans?

To address this question, the Bradley Foundation has started a national conversation on America's National Identity called "E Pluribus Unum." The question is, Is America still "from many, one" ("indivisible," as our Pledge of Allegiance affirms), or are we fast becoming "from one, many"?

A review of history textbooks used in public schools today reveals a big source of the problem. Textbooks now emphasize America's faults and mistakes rather than our incredible achievements.

History textbooks should tell the exciting story that the United States has produced nearly all the world's greatest inventions, and that these inventions have produced living standards that are the envy of the world. This exciting narrative is not based on Americans being smarter than other nationalities, or our having more natural resources than other countries, but on the wisdom of the Founding Fathers who gave us the superior political and economic system enshrined in our Constitution.

We should celebrate and honor our nation's heroes starting with George Washington. Federal law (5 U.S.C. 6103) clearly specifies that the name of the "legal public holiday" on the third Monday in February is "Washington's Birthday."

Americans should refuse to buy the calendars that wrongly label this February holiday as "President's Day." This calendar mischief is very offensive because there are quite a few Presidents who are not worthy of a special "Day."

Maintaining our national identity depends on keeping our Constitution safe from the supremacist judges who want to change it to comport with what they call "emerging standards." Our national identity depends on keeping English as our official, national language so we don't suffer the conflicts endured by nations with competing languages.

America was founded by men who shared a common inheritance in the British rule of law developed over centuries (beginning with the Magna Carta), the Christian religion, and the English language. They also shared the belief later expressed by Alexis de Toqueville that America is "quite exceptional" and by Ronald Reagan that America is "the shining city on the hill."

by Jill Stanek

Barack Obama was elected president despite the fact he supports abortion into the fourth trimester.

Either the 63 million people voting for him didn't know about his radical record, which includes abandoning abortion survivors to die, didn't care, or didn't believe it.

Meanwhile all three state pro-life initiatives failed Tuesday: the California Abortion Waiting Period and Parental Notification Initiative, the Colorado Equal Rights Amendment (defining personhood as beginning at conception) and the South Dakota Abortion Ban Initiative.

And both state anti-life initiatives passed: the Michigan Stem Cell Initiative (allowing human embryo experimentation) and the Washington Death with Dignity Initiative (allowing physician assisted suicide).

Altogether, this means we are fooling ourselves if we think the United States is still a Christian nation. Its people just elected a barbarian as president, authorized the killing of both its youngest and sickest, rejected scientific fact that human life begins at conception, blocked parental intervention of abortions of young girls, and voted down the wording of an abortion ban they said only two years ago they would support.

Continue reading Jill's article at WorldNetDaily.com

Jill Stanek fought to stop "live-birth abortion" after witnessing one as a registered nurse at Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, Ill. In 2002, President Bush asked Jill to attend his signing of the Born Alive Infants Protection Act. In January 2003, World Magazine named Jill one of the 30 most prominent pro-life leaders of the past 30 years. To learn more, visit Jill's blog, Pro-life Pulse.