February 13, 2012


Oprah Apologizes For Asking Nielsen Box Owners To Tune Into OWN

Posted: 2/13/12  |  Updated: 2/13/12
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Oprah Winfrey
Oprah issued a public apology on Monday for sending a controversial tweet on Sunday night.
As the Grammys took many viewers over to CBS on Sunday, Oprah took to Twitter to ask people to tune into her cable network, OWN — "especially if you have a Nielsen box."
Oprah's tweet drew criticism from followers, many of whom claimed that Oprah was "desperate" and "begging" viewers to watch her cable network. The more problematic portion of the tweet, however, was Oprah's casual solicitation of Nielsen box owners.
Oprah apologized for her tweet and said she deleted the message "at the request of Nielsen." She added, "I intended no harm and apologize for the reference."
As Deadline Hollywood noted, Nielsen prohibits its clients from reaching out to homes with boxes in an attempt to change viewing habits and/or boost ratings. A Nielsen representative told Entertainment Weekly that the company was looking into the Sunday night incident.
"In accordance with our policies and procedures, Nielsen is reviewing this incident with our clients and we may withhold, breakout and/or make a note in the ratings...We take any violation of our policy seriously and will work with clients to resolve the situation," the Nielsen representative said.
Oprah's new show on OWN, "Oprah's Next Chapter," coincided with CBS' airing of the Grammy Awards. The Sunday night episode featured the talk show queen sitting down with a Hasidic Jewish family who has never before watched television.
View some of the backlash Oprah received for her tweet in the slideshow below: 
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February 12, 2012


An Open Letter on the “Compromise”


(The following is an open letter signed by several prominent intellectuals, in response to the Administration’s “compromise”.  It is an important and cogent summary of the significance of that proposal, so I offer it to you in its entirety.  It was originally postedhere.)


Today the Obama administration has offered what it has styled as an “accommodation” for religious institutions in the dispute over the HHS mandate for coverage (without cost sharing) of abortion-inducing drugs, sterilization, and contraception. The administration will now require that all insurance plans cover (“cost free”) these same products and services.  Once a religiously-affiliated (or believing individual) employer purchases insurance (as it must, by law), the insurance company will then contact the insured employees to advise them that the terms of the policy include coverage for these objectionable things.


This so-called “accommodation” changes nothing of moral substance and fails to remove the assault on religious liberty and the rights of conscience which gave rise to the controversy.  It is certainly no compromise.  The reason for the original bipartisan uproar was the administration’s insistence that religious employers, be they institutions or individuals, provide insurance that covered services they regard as gravely immoral and unjust.  Under the new rule, the government still coerces religious institutions and individuals to purchase insurance policies that include the very same services.


It is no answer to respond that the religious employers are not “paying” for this aspect of the insurance coverage.  For one thing, it is unrealistic to suggest that insurance companies will not pass the costs of these additional services on to the purchasers.  More importantly, abortion-drugs, sterilizations, and contraceptives are a necessary feature of the policy purchased by the religious institution or believing individual.  They will only be made available to those who are insured under such policy, by virtue of the terms of the policy.


It is morally obtuse for the administration to suggest (as it does) that this is a meaningful accommodation of religious liberty because the insurance company will be the one to inform the employee that she is entitled to the embryo-destroying “five day after pill” pursuant to the insurance contract purchased by the religious employer.  It does not matter who explains the terms of the policy purchased by the religiously affiliated or observant employer.  What matters is what services the policy covers.


The simple fact is that the Obama administration is compelling religious people and institutions who are employers to purchase a health insurance contract that provides abortion-inducing drugs, contraception, and sterilization.  This is a grave violation of religious freedom and cannot stand.  It is an insult to the intelligence of Catholics, Protestants, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Jews, Muslims, and other people of faith and conscience to imagine that they will accept as assault on their religious liberty if only it is covered up by a cheap accounting trick.


Finally, it bears noting that by sustaining the original narrow exemptions for churches, auxiliaries, and religious orders, the administration has effectively admitted that the new policy (like the old one) amounts to a grave infringement on religious liberty.  The administration still fails to understand that institutions that employ and serve others of different or no faith are still engaged in a religious mission and, as such, enjoy the protections of the First Amendment.


Signed:
John Garvey

President, The Catholic University of America
Mary Ann Glendon

Learned Hand Professor of Law, Harvard University
Robert P. George

McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, Princeton University
O. Carter Snead

Professor of Law, University of Notre Dame
Yuval Levin
Hertog Fellow, Ethics and Public Policy Center

Hawaii's contraception model has downsides, some say

Feb. 09, 2012
By Brian Roewe
While the possibility of mandatory contraception coverage in health plans could become a new reality for many Catholic institutions under the recent ruling by the Department of Health and Human Services, dioceses in nearly 30 states have already faced contraception rules, reacting in various ways.
Currently, 28 states have laws requiring contraceptive coverage as part of health plans. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 20 of those states offer some type of exemption, a list including Arizona, New York, Maryland, Missouri and California.
Whether exemptions exist or not, Catholic groups in all 28 states can avoid the contraceptive mandate in one of three ways, says the U.S. bishops' conference. These include self-insuring prescription drug coverage, dropping that coverage completely or opting into a federal law that preempts any state mandates. Critics say the narrowness of the recent federal ruling would block religious groups from taking any of these avenues.
In Hawaii, contraception coverage has been on the books since 1999. Offering more leniency for religious groups, its mandate has been mentioned as a compromise to the federal HHS ruling.
For religious groups in Hawaii, the option of a refusal clause exists for those with religious beliefs opposing contraception. As part of the refusal clause, the organization is required to inform employees in writing that such coverage will not be provided in their health plans, but also provide information to them regarding where such coverage can be obtained.
Employees who choose to buy contraception do so at a cost no higher than the pro-rata share of the rate the organization would have paid had they not opted out through the refusal clause. The Hawaiian law stipulates the refusal clause applies to contraceptive purposes, and cannot exclude coverage for non-contraceptive purposes, such as decreasing the risk of ovarian cancer or eliminating symptoms of menopause.
Walter Yoshimitsu, chancellor of the Honolulu diocese and executive director of the Hawaii Catholic Conference, said that in most cases the model works, but issues still remain. For instance, despite the presence of the refusal clause in state law, some insurance companies decline to honor it.
Yoshimitsu said that Kaiser Permanente includes contraception coverage in all of its plans, and doesn't provide an opt-out for anyone, even religious groups. Instead, the company provides the coverage at no cost to those who don't want it. According to Yoshimitsu, only a small portion of people with Catholic organizations are enrolled with Kaiser, but such a policy still presents a problem because of a lack of distance between the church and the coverage.

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While most members receive health coverage through the Hawaii Medical Service Association, the fact that the diocese, though not intentionally, issues contraception coverage through Kaiser remains an issue.
For Bishop William Lori, chair of the U.S. bishops' Ad Hoc Committee on Religious Liberty, the Hawaii model fails to present the compromise many paint it as. Opt out or not, Lori said that the plan's requirement that Catholic organizations refer enrollees to where they can obtain contraception presents an obstacle for the church.
"The more we're forced into a corner, the more we are forced to make accommodations, the more our witness value goes down," he said, adding that the United States has "always been a country where everybody gets to participate according to their own likes" and where religious freedom included tolerance at the minimum.
"All the Founding Fathers saw that, and how far are we removed when we're sitting around talking about, well, maybe the Catholic church could make a referral to a service that it regards as intrinsically immoral," Lori said.
"We're pretty far way from the genius that inspired the founding of this country."

February 11, 2012


SAMUEL L. JACKSON: ‘I VOTED FOR BARACK BECAUSE HE WAS BLACK’

Samuel L. Jackson: I Voted for Barack Because He Was BlackSamuel L. Jackson only voted for President Barack Obama because of the color of his skin, the Hollywood actor revealed in a profanity-laced interview in the March issue of Ebony magazine.
“I voted for Barack because he was black. ’Cuz that’s why other folks vote for other people — because they look like them,” Jackson said. “That’s American politics, pure and simple. [Obama’s] message didn’t mean sh-t to me. In the end, he’s a politician. I just hoped he would do some of what he said he was gonna do.
According to the New York Post, the “Pulp Fiction” legend repeatedly dropped the N-word during his cover story interview.
“When it comes down to it, they wouldn’t have elected a [bleep],” Jackson said. “Because, what’s a [bleep]? A [bleep] is scary. Obama ain’t scary at all. [Bleeps] don’t have beers at the White House. [Bleeps] don’t let some white dude, while you in the middle of a speech, call [him] a liar” — an apparent reference to Rep. Joe Wilson’s “You lie!” outburst during Obama’s health care address to a joint session of Congress in 2009.
Jackson continued, “A [bleep] would have stopped the meeting right there and said, ‘Who the [bleep] said that?’ I hope Obama gets scary in the next four years, ’cuz he ain’t gotta worry about getting re-elected.”
Defending his repeated use of the racial epithet, Jackson said it “became a part of my vocabulary when I was born.”
“Because it was used on me in my house, often . . . I know the word [bleep] as an admonishment, an endearment, a criticism and an invective. So I use it; I don’t run from it. I don’t have an issue with it or who says it. I always put it in the context of how it was used on me,” he said.
Jackson previously made political headlines in October, when he agreed with fellow actor Morgan Freeman’s assessment that the Tea Party was “racist.”
“It’s pretty obvious what they are,” Jackson said in an interview with New York Magazine. “The division of the country is not about the government having too much power. I think everything right now is geared toward getting that guy out of office, whatever that means.”
Jackson continued, “It’s not politics. It is not economics. It all boils down to pretty much to race. It is a shame.”

February 9, 2012


Catholic TV network sues US over birth control mandate

The measure would require religious-based employers to provide insurance coverage for birth control that church teaching forbids. NBC's Kelly O'Donnell reports.
By msnbc.com staff and NBC News
The Obama administration's rule requiring religious employers to cover birth control services is going to court after a Catholic TV network sued Thursday to block the mandate.
The order, which the Department of Health and Human Services finalized last month, eliminates a federal exemption that allows religion-affiliated institutions to opt out of the law requiring employers to cover contraceptive services in their health insurance packages. 
Churches themselves would remain exempt, but when it goes into effect Aug. 1, the rule will require church-affiliated universities, hospitals, clubs and the like to cover "all [federally] approved forms of contraception."
The Roman Catholic Church bans artificial methods of contraception, and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has fiercely opposed the new rule, which it said "forces religious employers and schools to sponsor and subsidize coverage that violates their beliefs" and "forces religious employees and students to purchase coverage that violates their beliefs."
Thursday, EWTN — a Catholic television network carried on thousands of cable systems in more than 100 countries — filed suit in U.S. District Court in Birmingham, Ala.
"We had no other option," said Michael Warsaw, president of EWTN, which stands for Eternal Word Television Network. 
"Under the HHS mandate, EWTN is being forced by the government to make a choice: Either we provide employees coverage for contraception, sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs and violate our conscience or offer our employees and their families no health insurance coverage at all. Neither of those choices is acceptable," Warsaw said.
On at least one point, Warsaw is wrong, said Erin Shields, HHS's top spokeswoman.
While the rule covers "emergency contraceptives" like Plan B and Next Choice, it doesn't cover drugs that cause abortion, Shields told NBC station WYFF of Greenville, S.C.
The HHS rule is also being challenged in Congress, where Sens. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., have sponsored legislation that would restore the option for religious organizations to opt out of coverage.
"This is about whether the government of the United States should have the power to go in and tell a faith-based organization they have to pay for something that they teach their members shouldn't be doing. It`s that simple," Rubio said. 
Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., detail their bill to let organizations opt out of the contraception rule.
But advocates say the measure is an advance for women's reproductive rights, pointing to a study by the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit group that studies sexual and reproductive issues, which reported last year that nearly all sexually active U.S. women had used birth control. That includes 98 percent of Catholic women, the study reported.
"I am dumbfounded that in the year 2012, we still are fighting about birth control," said Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y. "Our opponents will look for any excuse to impose their ideology on women's rights."
David Axelrod, a senior adviser to President Barack Obama, said the administration is willing to work with Catholic universities and hospitals to find a way for them to cover contraception without abridging "anyone's religious freedom," NBCLatino reported.
So far, the administration hasn't said how it plans to do that.

February 8, 2012


Gary Bauer

The Plague of Planned Parenthood

by Gary Bauer
03/21/2008
We all mourn the deaths in Iraq, now approaching 4,000th Americans, in the five-year-old fight for freedom and justice in that nation.  But sadly we seem oblivious to the fact that we lose approximately the same number of our fellow citizens everyday to abortion. The plague of abortion takes one American life about every 30 seconds.  But here’s a little good news on this Good Friday:  Soon Congress will have the chance to limit severely the ability of this plague’s principal purveyor, Planned Parenthood, to force you to pay for its deadly deeds.

Planned Parenthood spends millions annually to maintain its reputation as the foremost champion of “responsible” sexuality and child-bearing, with, among other things, ads featuring hip, healthy-looking young people and cute, cuddly babies.

But Planned Parenthood’s record refutes its well-honed reputation.  In recent years, its affiliates have ignored numerous cases of statutory rape and sexual abuse of minors.  Last fall, Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri was handed a 107-count grand jury indictment, with allegations ranging from illegal late-term abortions, “making false information” and “unlawful failure to maintain records,” among other violations.  In California, meanwhile, several Planned Parenthood affiliates are under investigation for overcharging the state hundreds of millions (I repeat:  hundreds of millions) of dollars on birth control.

Perhaps worst of all, last summer, The Advocate, a magazine published by students at UCLA, conducted an investigation in which an actor posing as a donor called Planned Parenthood centers in seven states and asked if his donation could be used for the abortion of black babies, or as he said,  “to lower the number of black people.”  All seven Planned Parenthood centers agreed to process the donations, and none seemed concerned at the racist motivations behind the donations.

In fact, during one call, the vice president of marketing for Planned Parenthood of Idaho responded “understandable, understandable” when the caller said, “The less black kids out there the better.”  The Advocate later published the transcript of the conversation, which so horrified UCLA students that many are calling for the university to cut all ties with the abortion business.  Though Planned Parenthood apologized for this blatant racism, calling it a “serious mistake,” this episode highlighted something Planned Parenthood would perhaps like to forget:  its racist origins.

Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger, is revered by many on the Left as “the mother of the birth control movement.”  But she was also a devout eugenicist who believed America needed to “cut down on the rapid multiplication of the unfit and undesirable at home.”  One of Planned Parenthood’s earliest initiatives, called the Negro Project, was designed to control the birth of minority babies, or “human weeds,” as Sanger called them.   She once wrote in a letter, “We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population…”

Today, Planned Parenthood has learned to distance itself from its racist founder with a carefulness that even Barack Obama can appreciate.  But the fact remains that blacks are disproportionately affected by Planned Parenthood’s “services.”

Four out of every five Planned Parenthood centers are located in minority neighborhoods, and about one-third of its abortions are performed on blacks, who constitute just 13 percent of the population.  Overall, nearly as many black babies are aborted as are born.
Planned Parenthood is the behemoth of the “reproductive rights” industry.  In 2006, it raked in record amounts of taxpayer-funded subsidies (over $305 million) and record high revenues ($900 million).  And while Planned Parenthood’s media campaigns typically focus on its other services -- contraceptives, STD testing, cancer screening and prevention etc.-- as Charlotte Allen has noted in the Weekly Standard, its abortion services “accounted for at least one-third, probably more, of Planned Parenthood’s $345.1 million in clinic income reported the last fiscal year.”  In 2005, Planned Parenthood performed more than 260,000 abortions in its 287 chemical and surgical abortion sites (out of 860 total centers) across the country.

Planned Parenthood’s revenue gains are curious given that its own research organization, the Alan Guttmacher Institute, recently released data showing a 25 percent decline in number of abortions since 1990, to the lowest point in 30 years.  Clearly, with the help of lavish government subsidies, Planned Parenthood is increasing its own market share.  Which explains why Planned Parenthood recently embarked upon the “One Million Strong” campaign, during which its political arm will spend $10 million to try to persuade one million people to vote for pro-abortion candidates in 2008.

But there’s hope for pro-lifers.  Congressman Mike Pence (R-Ind.) has proposed an amendment to the appropriations legislation that funds the Departments of Labor and Health and Human Services to bar federal funding for Planned Parenthood.  H.R. 4133 prohibits any organization that promotes or practices abortions from receiving federal funds.

I understand that the last time Pence offered this amendment it was met with stern opposition not just by House Democrats but also by some Republican colleagues who seem to have fallen for Planned Parenthood’s savvy marketing strategies. Congressman Pence plans to bring his amendment to the House floor for a vote this summer.   I hope the Pence Amendment gets a vote.  Our elected representatives need to be on record as either supporting or opposing giving hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to a racist, deceptive and corrupt organization that believes pregnancy is a disease for which abortion is the cure. 
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