Sacramento CPS report in child death was altered

(SACRAMENTO, CA) – In the 16 days between the time 4-year-old Jahmaurae Allen was beaten to death and Sacramento Child Protective Services publicly released portions of its records, the case file was altered to change the original finding in the case, The Bee has learned.

One early version of the report from the social worker, who began handling an allegation of abuse involving the 4-year-old on June 19, described the allegation as “unfounded,” two sources who read the document told The Bee this week.

Another early version obtained by The Bee described the allegation of abuse of the little boy as “inconclusive.”

But the portions released by CPS to The Bee this week under a new public records law do not reflect either of those findings. Instead, those files indicate the allegation of abuse was “substantiated,” a finding listed as “effective 7/21/08″ – the day Jahmaurae was beaten to death, allegedly by his mother’s boyfriend.

A top county official said Friday she was unaware of the varying case files until The Bee raised questions.

“We’re pulling computer records right now to find out what’s happened,” said Lynn Frank, director of the Health and Human Services Department, which oversees CPS.

Late Friday, CPS Director Laura Coulthard issued the following statement:

“CPS policy and procedures requires supervisors to review social worker’s cases, and update or correct findings based on their independent assessment. In the Jahmuaure (sic) Allen matter, supervisors and management did such a review and made new findings that differed from the social worker’s original assessment …

“The county is reviewing allegations by The Sacramento Bee that original documents were altered. If it is established that those documents were altered, the county will take appropriate responses as warranted by this investigation.”

Children’s advocates outraged.

The existence of differing versions of the case file outraged children’s advocates who work with the agency. Some had been instrumental in pushing for the new law, which forces child welfare agencies to open files of children who die on their watch.

“This is unbelievable,” said Robert Fellmeth, a law professor and director of the San Diego-based Children’s Advocacy Institute.

“If you don’t take the kid (from the home), the only check you have is this: the record of what you did or did not do … ” he said. “If you start playing with that and altering that, you undermine the only check these kids have on failure to protect.”

Alarm over child welfare files being falsified or backdated has surfaced elsewhere.

Last week in Philadelphia, criminal charges were filed against two social workers in a case that led to the starvation death of a disabled 14-year-old girl. Workers were accused by the grand jury of falsifying documents after her death to make it appear they had performed their jobs properly.
Jahmaurae’s death has spawned a grand jury probe of CPS, and the agency said Tuesday it was planning to launch its own independent review.

CPS has conceded it should have done more to protect Jahmaurae, and suspended the social worker. At the time, the agency said the social worker “worked in isolation and did not follow established department procedures.”

Sources familiar with the case say the social worker’s entries and narrative about what happened were not accessible until after Jahmaurae was killed. It remains unclear who completed portions of the file.

CPS documents show the social worker evaluated the case after a doctor reported June 17 that Jahmaurae might be the victim of physical abuse. That doctor reported a painful swelling and bruise on the boy’s chest the size of an adult fist.

CPS documents indicate the social worker tried to contact the boy and his mother on June 19, going to their Foothill Farms apartment. The worker went to the wrong apartment at first, and when she found the right apartment, no one was home. She left her card on the door and returned June 21, the documents state, and left her card again.

She finally made contact when the mother called her June 23, according to one early version of the case file that was not released by CPS. The social worker went to see the family the next day, and Jahmaurae told her that the bruise on his chest had come from a fight with his 3-year-old brother. He “denied being hit by anyone else,” it said.

Initially, the social worker filed a report that the allegation of abuse was “unfounded,” sources said.
In CPS jargon, “unfounded” means the report is determined not to be true, according to agency literature.

But a subsequent report on the case obtained by The Bee – also not the one ultimately released by CPS – does not reflect that finding. Instead, that version reads:

“The allegation in regard to physical abuse was assessed by this reporter with a case disposition of inconclusive. This was evidenced by lack of disclosure from the minor that the mother’s boyfriend had hit him. Also, the minor’s (sic) were observed jumping off furniture and throwing things at each other.”

“Inconclusive” means there isn’t enough information to know either way, according to a CPS pamphlet.
The documents CPS eventually provided The Bee under the new law do not contain either the “unfounded” or “inconclusive” findings. Instead, those documents say: “Effective 7/21/08″ – the day Jahmaurae died – “a review of this case has deemed the conclusion to be substantiated.”

That finding means there is credible information to believe child abuse or neglect did occur, CPS materials show.

Had the doctor’s abuse allegation been deemed “substantiated” a month earlier, it would have set off a more detailed investigation that could have led to Jahmaurae being removed from the home. As it was, it appears CPS had no contact with the family after the social worker’s June 24 visit.

Altering record criminal offense.

The documents CPS provided also differ from an earlier version of the case file in other ways.
An entire passage in the document provided by a source does not appear in the documents released by CPS.

That passage, dated June 23, 2008, discusses what happened when the social worker finally heard from Jahmaurae’s mother:

“The mother stated she was afraid that this social worker was trying to take her children. The mother stated she is new here from the Bay Area.

“This social worker told her that I have to see her and the children and do an assessment and then we would talk further. This social worker told her not to be concerned about the article in The Bee Sunday (sic) CPS is supportive of families.”

That was a reference to an investigative series on CPS that began in The Bee that day.

William Grimm, a senior attorney at the Oakland-based National Center for Youth Law, said he was deeply disturbed by the initial “unfounded” report on Jahmaurae.

“If a physician sees a fist-sized bruise on a 4-year-old, the red flag automatically goes up,” he said. “I just don’t understand how any reasonable person could make a judgment other than ’substantiated’ – period.”

Jahmaurae was the seventh child to die since September whose family had had previous contact with CPS.

The suspect in the case is 26-year-old Jonathan Lamar Perry, a 6-foot-4-inch, 250-pound man who was in the apartment with Jahmaurae and the boy’s 18-month-old sister.

Perry is charged with murder and child endangerment. He is being held in the Sacramento County jail and has yet to enter a plea.

Robert Wilson, executive director of Sacramento Child Advocates, said Friday he “would sure be interested to see how CPS explains” the different versions of the case file. His office, whose attorneys represent children in dependency court, received the same version from CPS that The Bee was given this week.

Fellmeth, a former prosecutor, said the California government code makes it a criminal offense to alter a public record – even if that record won’t be given to the public. “You’re not supposed to be altering, period,” he said.

The proper way to make changes in public documents is to “overlay, or add the correction – not subtract or erase or alter.”

“You don’t create a new reality,” he said.

Safe sex ring tone sings ‘Condom, condom!’

NEW DELHI – A cell phone ring tone that sings “Condom, condom!” has been launched to promote safe sex in India, where condoms carry a strong social stigma and HIV and AIDS are growing problems, health experts said Tuesday.

The a cappella ring tone features a professional singer chanting the word condom more than 50 times, a playful approach that public health activists hope will spark discussion and make condoms more socially acceptable.

“We’ve made a conscious effort to move the concept of the condom away from negative association, like HIV and sex work,” said Yvonne MacPherson, country director of BBC World Service Trust India. “Condoms are actually health products and if you have a condom and you use it, you are seen to be smart and responsible.”

Nearly 2.5 million people in India are infected with HIV and the disease is still largely taboo.

The BBC group, which is funded by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, hopes the condom ring tone can make people in India more comfortable with safe sex issues.

More than 270 million people use mobile phones in India and ring tones, especially those featuring hit Bollywood songs, are extremely popular.

“A ring tone is a very public thing,” she said. “It’s a way to show you are a condom user and you don’t have any issues with it.”

The ring tone was launched Aug. 8 and has been downloaded 60,000 times, MacPherson said.

How about having a cell phone ring tone that sings “Abstinence, abstinence”?

Obama site: Jews must be ‘burned’

Anti-Semites congregate on candidate’s official presidential campaign blog.

JERUSALEM – Jews should be “burned” and “thrown in the oven.”

Israel murdered 6 million Arabs.

Jews control American politics and dictate decisions of war and peace.

The Jewish state is leading a “Holocaust” against the Palestinian people and was responsible for 9/11.
The above are just a sampling of a large volume of racist, anti-Semitic and anti-Israel propaganda that can be found on user-generated pages on Sen. Barack Obama’s official campaign website, which allows registered members to form groups and post content in online “community” blogs.

The Obama campaign does not monitor all blog material but says it removes offending posts brought to the attention of site administrators.

A search through the community blogs on Obama’s official site under such key words as “Zionists,” “Israel Lobby,” or “Jews” brings up thousands of entries, some containing what can easily be described as hate material.

In a blog posting on Obama’s site titled, “Are Israeli Zionists in Control of Our Democracy?” user “Stan” claims “Israeli elements” in the U.S. who possess both American and Israeli citizenship “dominate our political process so we cannot act as an honest broker in the Middle East.”

He said members of Congress “know that they must support the will of Israel or be subjected to the wrath of [pro-Israel groups].”

The posting goes on to urge a U.S. military boycott of Israel, lamenting that Hamas is labeled a terror group while the U.S. supplied Israel with “planes, rockets, cluster and phosphorus bombs for Israel to use at will.”

Another blog entry, simply titled “Palestinians,” concocts “Jewish genocide of six million Palis (Palestinians)” and urges Obama to “level the playing field for the suffering Palestinians.”

“Many non-militant Arabs and Muslims await some degree of fairness from you if you are elected,” noted the entry.

In a blog titled “Palestine vs. Israel,” MyObama user “Patti” complains she “cannot comprehend how many Jewish people can speak of the Holocaust as well as stating that Israel is the Holy Land and commit the atrocities they are committing against the Palestinian people.”

A blog labeled “The only way to free America” urges Americans to “throw the Jews in the oven.”
“Shed ourselves from the racist Zionists in America. They control everything. But they won’t keep us down any longer. Throw the Jews in the oven this November. Its the only way we can free America and make sure barack obama is elected!

One entry titled, “Stop the attacks on Muslim Nations to please Zionists,” announces “Israel has destroyed its own image in the world and is taking America down with its Zionist aggression.”

Anti-Semitic rhetoric is not limited to blog entries alone, but can also be found in user comments on some of the blog postings.

For example, a comment on a blog discussing energy, reads “Burn something else besides oil…start with the Zionists.”

Many of the “Israel Lobby” entries have comments accusing Jews of controlling the U.S.

If Barack can’t manage his own web site, how can we possibly think he can manage our country?

OBAMA’S BACKBONE DEFICIT

Last week raised important questions about whether Barack Obama is strong enough to be president. On the domestic political front, he showed incredible weakness in dealing with the Clintons, while on foreign and defense questions, he betrayed a lack of strength and resolve in standing up to Russia’s invasion of Georgia.

This two-dimensional portrait of weakness underscores fears that Obama might, indeed, be a latter-day Jimmy Carter.

Consider first the domestic and political. Bill and Hillary Clinton have no leverage over Obama. Hillary can’t win the nomination. She doesn’t control any committees. If she or her supporters tried to disrupt the convention or demonstrate outside, she would pay a huge price among the party faithful. If Obama lost – after Hillary made a fuss at the convention – they would blame her for all eternity (just like Democrats blame Ted Kennedy for Carter’s defeat).

But, without having any leverage or a decent hand to play, the Clintons bluffed Obama into amazing concessions. Hillary will speak on Tuesday night in prime time. Chelsea will introduce her. She will get to play a film extolling her virtues produced by Harry Bloodworth Thomason. Bill will speak on Wednesday night. Hillary’s name will be placed into nomination. She will get to have nominating and seconding speeches on her behalf. And, on Thursday night, the last night of the convention, the roll call will show how narrowly Obama prevailed.

So Obama gave away Tuesday night, Wednesday night and part of Thursday night to the Clintons. It will really be their convention. A stronger candidate would’ve called their bluff and confined the Clintons to one night on which both Hillary and Bill spoke (he would have outshone her). He would have blocked a roll call by allowing a voice vote to nominate by acclimation. He would have stood up to the Clintons and recaptured his own convention.

If Obama can’t stand up to the Clintons, after they have been defeated, how can he measure up to a resurgent Putin who has just achieved a military victory? When the Georgia invasion first began, Obama appealed for “restraint” on both sides. He treated the aggressive lion and the victimized lamb even-handedly. His performance was reminiscent of the worst of appeasement at Munich, where another dictator got away with seizing another breakaway province of another small neighboring country, leading to World War II.

After two days, Obama corrected himself, spoke of Russian aggression and condemned it. But his initial willingness to see things from the other point of view and to buy the line that Georgia provoked the invasion by occupying a part of its own country betrayed a world view characterized by undue deference to aggressors.

We know so little about Obama. His experience is so thin that it’s hard to tell what kind of a president he’d be. While he nominally has been in the Senate for four years, he really only served the first two and consumed the rest of his tenure running for president and disregarding his Senate duties.

So we have no choice but to scrutinize his current transactions and statements for some clue as to who he is and what he’d do. In that context, his reaction to the first real-time foreign-policy crisis he faced as a nominee leaves his strength in doubt. So does his palsied response to the Clintons’ attempt to make Denver a Clinton convention.

Is Obama an over-intellectualizing Hamlet who is incapable of decisive, strong action? With Iran on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons and Russia resurgent, there isn’t much room for on-the-job learning.

Obama meets Pickens to discuss alternative energy, deflects Swift Boat question

Democrat Barack Obama met Sunday with Texas oil baron and longtime conservative activist T. Boone Pickens to discuss strategies for developing alternative energy.
The presidential hopeful praised Pickens as a “legendary entrepreneur” and deflected a question about the billionaire’s role in helping to fund a television ad campaign that undermined John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic nominee.
“You know, he’s got a longer track record than that,” Obama told reporters when asked about Pickens’ association with the ads by a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. “One of the things I think we have to unify the country around is having an intelligent energy policy. … That’s what we’re going to be talking about.”
During the 2004 presidential campaign, Pickens spent $3 million to help bankroll the Swift Boat organization, a group tied to supporters of President Bush that ran television ads questioning Kerry’s record as a swift boat commander during the Vietnam War. The ads were believed to have damaged Kerry in several battleground states, contributing to his narrow loss to Bush.
Today, Pickens is bankrolling a much different kind of campaign. A critic of U.S. dependence on oil and a champion of wind power and other alternative energy forms, he has vowed to spend $58 million to promote his “Pickens Plan,” which calls for the U.S. to generate 22 percent of its electricity through wind and other sources.
The high cost of energy has emerged as a central campaign issue between Obama and his Republican rival John McCain. Pickens met with McCain in Colorado last week to discuss his plan and requested a similar meeting with Obama. The two men talked privately for about 45 minutes, campaign officials said Sunday.

Obama Releases List of Approved Jokes About Himself

Bid to Help Late Night Comics

Saying he is “sympathetic to late night comedians’ struggle to find jokes to make about me,” Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) today issued a list of official campaign-approved Barack Obama jokes.

The five jokes, which Sen. Obama said he is making available to all comedians free of charge, are as follows:

Barack Obama and a kangaroo pull up to a gas station. The gas station attendant takes one look at the kangaroo and says, “You know, we don’t get many kangaroos here.” Barack Obama replies, “At these prices, I’m not surprised. That’s why we need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.”

A traveling salesman knocks on the door of a farmhouse, and much to his surprise, Barack Obama answers the door. The salesman says, “I was expecting the farmer’s daughter.” Barack Obama replies, “She’s not here. The farm was foreclosed on because of subprime loans that are making a mockery of the American Dream.”

A horse walks into a bar. The bartender says, “Why the long face?” Barack Obama replies, “His jockey just lost his health insurance, which should be the right of all Americans.”

Q: What’s black and white and red all over? A: The Barack Obama issue of New Yorker magazine, which should be embarrassed after publishing such a tasteless and offensive cover, which I reject and denounce.

A Christian, a Jew and Barack Obama are in a rowboat in the middle of the ocean. Barack Obama says, “This joke isn’t going to work because there’s no Muslim in this boat.”

Obama Cover Up of his Infanticide Vote

Last week Doug Johnson of the National Right to Life Committee drew attention to a previously unnoticed January 2008 article by Terence Jeffrey stating Barack Obama actually did vote against a version of the IL Born Alive Infants Protection Act that was identical to the federal version, contrary to multiple public statements Obama or his surrogates have made to rationalize his opposition to the IL bill for the past 4 years.

Since then 2 separate documents have been found, proving Barack Obama has been misrepresenting facts.

In fact, Barack Obama is more liberal than any U.S. senator, voting against identical language of a bill that body passed unanimously, 98-0. In fact, Barack Obama condones infanticide if it would otherwise interfere with abortion.

Here is the statement with documentation released by NRLC this morning:

New documents just obtained by NRLC, and linked below, prove that Senator [Barack] Obama has for the past four years blatantly misrepresented his actions on the IL Born-Alive Infants Protection bill.

Summary and comment by NRLC spokesman Douglas Johnson:

Newly obtained documents prove that in 2003, Barack Obama, as chairman of an IL state Senate committee, voted down a bill to protect live-born survivors of abortion – even after the panel had amended the bill to contain verbatim language, copied from a federal bill passed by Congress without objection in 2002, explicitly foreclosing any impact on abortion. Obama’s legislative actions in 2003 – denying effective protection even to babies born alive during abortions – were contrary to the position taken on the same language by even the most liberal members of Congress. The bill Obama killed was virtually identical to the federal bill that even NARAL ultimately did not oppose.

In 2000, the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act was first introduced in Congress. This was a two-paragraph bill intended to clarify that any baby who is entirely expelled from his or her mother, and who shows any signs of life, is to be regarded as a legal “person” for all federal law purposes, whether or not the baby was born during an attempted abortion. (To view the original 2000 BAIPA, click here.)

In 2002, the bill was enacted, after a “neutrality clause” was added to explicitly state that the bill expressed no judgment, in either direction, about the legal status of a human prior to live birth.

(The “neutrality” clause read, “Nothing in this section shall be construed to affirm, deny, expand, or contract any legal status or legal right applicable to any member of the species homo sapiens at any point prior to being ‘born alive’ as defined in this section.”)

The bill passed without a dissenting vote in either house of Congress. (To view the final federal BAIPA as enacted, click here. To view a chronology of events pertaining to the federal BAIPA, click here.)

Meanwhile, Barack Obama, as a member of the IL State Senate, actively opposed a state version of the BAIPA during three successive regular legislative sessions. His opposition to the state legislation continued into 2003 – even after NARAL had withdrawn its initial opposition to the federal bill, and after the final federal bill had been enacted in August 2002.

When Obama was running for the U.S. Senate in 2004, his Republican opponent criticized him for supporting “infanticide.” Obama countered this charge by claiming that he had opposed the state BAIPA because it lacked the pre-birth neutrality clause that had been added to the federal bill.

As the Chicago Tribune reported on October 4, 2004:
Obama said that had he been in the U.S. Senate two years ago, he would have voted for the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, even though he voted against a state version of the proposal. The federal version was approved; the state version was not….

The difference between the state and federal versions, Obama explained, was that the state measure lacked the federal language clarifying that the act would not be used to undermine Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court opinion that legalized abortion.

During Obama’s 2008 run for President, his campaign and his defenders have asserted repeatedly and forcefully that it is a distortion, or even a smear, to suggest that Obama opposed a state born-alive bill that was the same as the federal bill. See, for example, this June 30, 2008 “factcheck” issued by the Obama campaign, in the form that it still appeared on the Obama website on August 7, 2008.

The Obama “cover story” has often been repeated as fact, or at least without challenge, in major organs of the news media.

(Two recent examples: CNN reported on June 30, 2008, “Senator Obama says if he had been in the U.S. Senate in 2002, he, too, would have voted in favor of the Born Alive Infant Protection Act because unlike the IL bill, it included language protecting Roe v. Wade.” The New York Times reported in a story on August 7, 2008, that Obama “said he had opposed the bill because it was poorly drafted and would have threatened the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade that established abortion as a constitutional right. He said he would have voted for a similar bill that passed the United States Senate because it did not have the same constitutional flaw as the IL bill.”)

NRLC and other pro-life observers have always regarded Obama’s “defense” as contrived, since the original two-paragraph BAIPA on its face applied only after a live birth; the “neutrality clause” added in 2001 merely made this explicit, and therefore the new clause did not change the substance of the original bill.

Moreover, the overwhelming majority of liberal, pro- abortion members of the U.S. House of Representatives did not embrace the initial NARAL position that the original bill was an attack on Roe v. Wade. The Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee, then as now, were a solidly liberal group, yet only one of them voted against the original BAIPA without the “neutrality clause,” and he cited a different reason.

Congressman Jerrold Nadler (D- NY), who supported the bill, and who described himself as “as pro-choice as anybody on Earth,” argued that under his understanding of Roe “if an abortion is performed, or a natural birth occurred, at any age, [even] three months, and the product of that was living outside the mother, and somebody came and shot him, I don’t think there’s any doubt that person would be prosecuted for murder.”

When the original bill – with no “neutrality clause” – came up on the House floor on September 26, 2000, it passed 380-15.

These facts should give pause to those who have unskeptically accepted Obama’s claim that the IL BAIPA bills that he opposed in 2001 and 2002, which were modeled on the original federal BAIPA, were crafted to attack Roe v. Wade.

For the moment we can set that debate aside, however, for this reason: Documents obtained by NRLC now demonstrate conclusively that Obama’s entire defense is based on a brazen factual misrepresentation.

The documents prove that in March 2003, state Senator Obama, then the chairman of the IL state Senate Health and Human Services Committee, presided over a committee meeting in which the “neutrality clause” (copied verbatim from the federal bill) was added to the state BAIPA, with Obama voting in support of adding the revision. Yet, immediately afterwards, Obama led the committee Democrats in voting against the amended bill, and it was killed, 6-4.

The bill that Chairman Obama killed, as amended, was virtually identical to the federal law; the only remaining differences were on minor points of bill- drafting style. To see the language of the two bills side by side, click here.

To see the official “Senate Committee Action Report” on this meeting, click on one of the links below. (The document is dated March 12, 2003, which is the day that the committee convened, but Chairman Obama recessed the meeting until March 13, which is the day that these votes actually occurred.)

Here are links to the official document that records these votes, in three different formats.

Senate Committee Action Report in HTML (web browser) format

Senate Committee Action Report in JPG (photo) format

Senate Committee Action Report in PDF (Adobe document) format

In this report, the left-hand column shows the roll call vote on adoption of “Senate Amendment No. 1,” which was verbatim the neutrality clause copied from the federal bill. The right hand column shows the roll call by which Obama and his Democratic colleagues then killed the amended bill – the bill that was virtually identical to the federal law that Obama, starting in 2004, claimed he would have supported if he’d had the opportunity.

To view the text of SB 1082 as it was originally introduced (without the neutrality clause), click here. To view the text of Senate Amendment No. 1 (the neutrality clause copied from the federal law), which Obama and his colleagues added to the bill at the March 13 meeting (before killing the bill), click here.

NRLC has also obtained two additional documents that report information on these events that is fully consistent with the Senate Committee Action Report.

To see the “Senate Republican Staff Analysis: Senate Bill No. 1082,” click here. (If this Word document requests a password, simply hit “cancel” and it will be displayed.) The first portion of this analysis was written before the March 12-13, 2003, meeting of the committee that Senator Obama chaired. The committee’s actions, amending the bill to exactly track the federal born-alive law, and then defeating the bill, are reported on the bottom half of the second page.)

Finally, to see an Associated Press dispatch dated March 13, 2003, reporting on the 6-4 committee vote that killed the bill, click here.

Less than two years after this meeting, Obama began to publicly claim that he opposed the state BAIPA because it lacked the “neutrality” clause, and that he would have supported the federal version (had he been a member of Congress) because it contained the “neutrality” clause.

His claim has been accepted on its face by various media outlets, producing stories that have in turn been quoted by the Obama campaign and Obama defenders in attacking anyone who asserts that Obama opposed born-alive legislation similar to the federal bill. It has also been forcefully repeated by advocacy groups such as NARAL (see, for example, this June 30, 2008 “alert” from NARAL).

It appears that as of August 7, 2008, only one writer – Terence Jeffrey, a contributing editor to HumanEvents.com – had correctly reported the essence of this story, in a column posted on January 16, 2008 (read it here), but his report was ignored by the Obama campaign and overlooked by others at the time.

Now, the uncovering of the Senate Committee Action Report and the contemporary Associated Press report shed new light on Senator Obama’s four-year effort to cover up his real record of refusing to protect live-born survivors of abortion.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:

“Index of Documents Regarding Obama Cover-up on Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Bill“

Timeline of important events in the history of the federal Born-Alive Infants Protection Act

NRLC archive on the federal Born-Alive Infants Protection Act

NARAL press release, July 20, 2000, expressing strong opposition to the original federal Born-Alive Infants Protection Act (H.R. 4292).

The official report of the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, explaining the intent of the federal Born-Alive Infants Protection Act (H.R. 2175), and explaining why such legislation was necessary (August 2, 2001)

Latest Leftist Found in Obama’s Closet: George Clooney

Barack Obama’s army of 300 foreign policy advisors includes at least one familiar face: the smug visage of perpetually smirking ultra-left movie star George Clooney.
Lately Loony’s Hollyweird career has suffered a slight setback, as he’s devoted his energies to making pretentious propaganda films that are only watched by masochistic moonbats out of ideological loyalty, in which Americans are always the villains, even in WWII. Amusingly, he recently blew $85,000 on a guffaw-inducing moonbatmobile so as to make a pageant of his environmental piousness.
Quotes that offer some insight into Obama’s friend and advisor can be found on Celiberal.
Clooney as a judge of other men:
Let’s face it: Bush is just dim.
Clooney as a humanitarian and defender of the Second Amendment:
Charlton Heston announced again today that he is suffering from Alzheimer’s. [...] I don’t care. Charlton Heston is the head of the National Rifle Association; he deserves whatever anyone says about him.
Clooney on combating terrorism:
I just want someone smart to stand up and shout, “Bullsh*t!” They tell us we’re going to war and no one’s saying “Bullsh*t” loud enough. And the language! Listen to the language! “Evil.” “Evil”? “Nexus of evil”? “Evil-doer”? That’s my favorite, “Evil-doer”!
Clooney the historian:
What did Bush do on 9/11? He ran away and hid. Even Reagan knew more about leadership than that, and he was as bad a symbol of America as I can think of, off-hand. But at least he’s been in enough cowboy movies to know he had to come out and stand on top of the rubble and be seen shaking his fist or something.
Clooney’s habit of poking his nose where it does not belong and acting like a liberal jackass is so pronounced that the UN’s Ban Ki-Moonbat named him a “Messenger of Peace,” and last year Time magazine listed him as one of the 100 people it wishes were most influential.
If the sky falls and the tasteless joke of Barack Obama’s candidacy becomes the Dadaist nightmare of an Obama Administration, Clooney really will be influential. According to the Daily Mail:
George Clooney once famously declared he could never run for public office because he’d “slept with too many women, done too many drugs and been to too many parties.”
But now the Hollywood heart-throb has entered the political arena at
the highest level — by becoming an unofficial adviser to US Presidential front-runner Barack Obama. […]
Sources say the actor has tried to hide the pair’s friendship for fear his Left-wing views and playboy image would hurt the Presidential hopeful’s bid for the White House.
Obama trying to hide his association with an anti-American screwball because of his extreme left-wing views? I could swear I’ve heard that somewhere before…
Loony is reportedly in constant contact with Obama, via emails, text messages, and twice weekly phone calls. Unsurprisingly, in light of his admitted terrorist sympathies, he is pushing the clueless Obama to side with Palestinians against our ally Israel. He also wants us to surrender unconditionally to the terrorists our troops have been fighting in Iraq.
It looks like John Edwards (aka, Love Lips) is out as Attorney General. But we might still get our share of narcissistic cheese with Clooney as Secretary of State.
A candidacy getting more alarming by the hour.

EVEN BY TRIAL LAWYER STANDARDS, EDWARDS A REAL SLEAZEBAG

The good news: DNA testing has confirmed that John Edwards is not the father of Rielle Hunter’s baby.

The bad news: The father is Bill Clinton.

Ha ha — just kidding! It’s almost impossible to get pregnant by having the type of sex Bill Clinton prefers.

Also, by now, everyone has heard the news that Edwards’ mistress, Rielle Hunter, has refused to grant a paternity test.

I wonder if Edwards knew that when he was making his chesty offer to take a paternity test? Edwards gushed to ABC’s Bob Woodruff: “I would welcome participating in a paternity test, be happy to participate in one … happy to take a paternity test and would love to see it happen.”

As Edwards knows, our paternity laws were written by Gloria Steinem, so if the mother doesn’t want a paternity test, it can’t happen. So when Woodruff asked if he was going to actually take the paternity test soon, Edwards quickly noted, “I’m only one side of the test.”

With Rielle in on the scam, Edwards could boldly demand a paternity test and then self-righteously defend his mistress’s decision to refuse a paternity test. How dare you gainsay this woman’s right to her privacy! Because if there’s one person who’s gone the extra mile to keep Hunter from becoming a public figure, it’s John Edwards.

Edwards is closely following the Kennedy model of responding to charges of misconduct. First, admit only as much as can be currently proved. Second, get the other party to block any further investigation. I guess he really is “Kennedy-esque”!

For example, when the cops found DNA on the murdered body of Martha Moxley in Greenwich, Conn., the Kennedy suspect, Michael Skakel, suddenly remembered he had been up in a tree that night masturbating! (Talk about a tree-hugger.) You can see how something like that could slip your mind.

After Teddy Kennedy plunged his car off the Chappaquiddick Bridge with Mary Jo Kopechne in it and then failed to report the accident for nine hours, Kennedy admitted he had driven off the bridge — but said he was in a state of shock for the next nine hours, preventing him from reporting the submerged car with a woman trapped in it.

Indeed, Kennedy was so disoriented he was barely able to dream up a highly unlikely alibi.

The historical parallel to Edwards’ pincer move with Rielle Hunter is that Kennedy ostentatiously demanded a full investigation –- while the Kopechne family stoutly objected to an autopsy of their daughter.

According to Senatorial Privilege: The Chappaquiddick Cover-up by Leo Damore, the evidence suggested that Kopechne died gasping for breath in the car while Teddy Kennedy was busy trying to convince various people to say that they were driving his car.

There were lots of houses nearby with lights on, but Kennedy avoided them after he escaped from the car, so he could sneak back to his hotel undetected and begin establishing an alibi. Evidently, Kennedy is better than Edwards at sneaking into and out of hotels.

If Mary Jo had suffocated, then she had been alive for hours after the car plunged into the water. But an autopsy was required to determine whether Kopechne had drowned or suffocated.

Both the coroner and the diver who retrieved Mary Jo’s body from the car believed Mary Jo had suffocated, not drowned. The diver found her body contorted in the back of the submerged car as if she had been trying to press her face into the last air pocket in the car. The coroner concluded there wasn’t enough water in Mary Jo’s body to indicate a drowning.

But for the first time in Massachusetts history, no autopsy was performed in a possible manslaughter case. Mary Jo was buried within about an hour of her body being pulled out of the channel under the Chappaquiddick Bridge.

Naturally, Kennedy wanted a thorough investigation — to clear his name! — but the Kopechnes absolutely refused to consent to an autopsy of their daughter. What more could he do? The Kopechnes’ lawyer, Joseph Flanagan, refused to say who was paying him to fight the autopsy.

Similarly, Edwards aggressively offered to take a paternity test, knowing that the New Age hippie chick who still thinks she’s going to marry him would not hurt him by allowing a paternity test. Edwards certainly is adept at reading stupid women, or as his campaign called them, “the base.”

Democrats are always claiming to have the Kennedy magic, but, once again, another Kennedy-wannabe falls short. To be a real Kennedy, John, you have to kill her.

In Rural New York, Windmills Can Bring Whiff of Corruption

BURKE, N.Y. — Everywhere that Janet and Ken Tacy looked, the wind companies had been there first.
Dozens of people in their small town had already signed lease options that would allow wind towers on their properties. Two Burke Town Board members had signed private leases even as they negotiated with the companies to establish a zoning law to permit the towers. A third board member, the Tacys said, bragged about the commissions he would earn by selling concrete to build tower bases. And, the Tacys said, when they showed up at a Town Board meeting to complain, they were told to get lost.
“There were a couple of times when they told us to just shut up,” recalled Mr. Tacy, sitting in his kitchen on a recent evening.
Lured by state subsidies and buoyed by high oil prices, the wind industry has arrived in force in upstate New York, promising to bring jobs, tax revenue and cutting-edge energy to the long-struggling region. But in town after town, some residents say, the companies have delivered something else: an epidemic of corruption and intimidation, as they rush to acquire enough land to make the wind farms a reality.
“It really is renewable energy gone wrong,” said the Franklin County district attorney, Derek P. Champagne, who began a criminal inquiry into the Burke Town Board last spring and was quickly inundated with complaints from all over the state about the wind companies. Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo agreed this year to take over the investigation.
“It’s a modern-day gold rush,” Mr. Champagne said.
Mr. Cuomo is investigating whether wind companies improperly influenced local officials to get permission to build wind towers, as well as whether different companies colluded to divide up territory and avoid bidding against one another for the same land.
The industry appears to be shying away from trying to erect the wind farms in more affluent areas downstate, even where the wind is plentiful, like Long Island.
But in the small towns near the Canadian border, families and friendships have been riven by feuds over the lease options, which can be worth tens of thousands of dollars a year in towns where the median household income may hover around $30,000. Rumors circulate about neighbors who can suddenly afford new tractors or trucks. Opponents of the wind towers even say they have received threats; one local activist said that on two occasions, she had found her windshield bashed in.
“My sisters and brothers won’t even talk to me anymore,” said Mr. Tacy, who with his wife has become active in recent years in a network of people who oppose the wind companies. “They tear communities apart.” Opponents of the farms say their scenic views are being marred by the hundreds of wind towers already in place, some of which stand nearly 400 feet tall. They also complain of the irritating hum of spinning turbines and what they say are wasteful public subsidies to wind companies.
But corruption is a major concern. In at least 12 counties, Mr. Champagne said, evidence has surfaced about possible conflicts of interest or improper influence.
In Prattsburgh, N.Y., a Finger Lakes community, the town supervisor cast the deciding vote allowing private land to be condemned to make way for a wind farm there, even after acknowledging that he had accepted real estate commissions on at least one land deal involving the farm’s developer.
A town official in Bellmont, near Burke, took a job with a wind company after helping shepherd through a zoning law to permit and regulate the towers, according to local residents. And in Brandon, N.Y., nearby, the town supervisor told Mr. Champagne that after a meeting during which he proposed a moratorium on wind towers, he had been invited to pick up a gift from the back seat of a wind company representative’s car.
When the supervisor, Michael R. Lawrence, looked inside, according to his complaint to Mr. Champagne, he saw two company polo shirts and a leather pouch that he suspected contained cash.
When Mr. Lawrence asked whether the pouch was part of the gift, the representative replied, “That’s up to you,” according to the complaint.
Last month, Mr. Cuomo subpoenaed two wind companies, Noble Environmental Power, based in Connecticut, and First Wind, based in Massachusetts, seeking a broad range of documents. Both companies say they are cooperating with the attorney general.
“We have no comment on specifics, but we want to be clear: Noble supports open and transparent development of wind projects in accordance with the highest ethical standards,” said Walt Howard, Noble’s chief executive.
The industry’s interest in New York’s North Country is driven by several factors. The area is mostly rural, with thousands of acres of farmland near existing energy transmission lines. Moreover, under a program begun in 2004, the state is entering into contracts to buy renewable energy credits, effectively subsidizing wind power until it can compete against power produced more cheaply from coal or natural gas.
Nine large-scale wind farms housing 451 towers, each with a turbine, are in operation in New York, with at least 840 more towers slated for construction, according to state officials. And in June, Iberdrola S.A., which is based in Spain and is one of the world’s largest energy producers, announced its proposal to invest $2 billion to build hundreds more towers here.
Every day in the North Country during the warm months, trucks pulling giant flatbed trailers rumble down the highways, carrying tower sections and turbine blades. Some residents see the trucks not as a disturbance, but as an omen of jobs, money and cleaner air.
“I feel as a mother, as a grandmother, that the country needs it — not just here,” said Susan Gerow, a Burke resident who has signed easements with Noble worth about $3,000 a year. Like others who have signed deals with the companies, Ms. Gerow and her family will also earn a portion of the revenue from the windmills if they are ever built.
The North Country is a chronically distressed region, and farming is increasingly a profitless enterprise here. The General Motors plant in Massena, for years a reliable source of good jobs, is closing in mid-2009. One of the few bright spots in the local economy in recent decades has been the construction of state prisons, of which there are now five in Franklin County alone.
“You’re talking about a poor farming community out here,” said Brent A. Trombly, a former town supervisor of Ellenburg, which approved a law to allow and establish regulations for the wind towers in 2003. “Our only natural resources are stone and wind.”
For some farmers, he said, the wind leases were their last chance to hold onto land that had been in the family for generations. Supporters also say that the wind towers bring in badly needed tax revenue.
“We see this industry coming, we see the payments coming in,” said William K. Wood, a former Burke Town Board member who also signed a lease option. The school board of Chateaugay, he pointed out, received $332,800 this year from Noble for payments in lieu of taxes, money that the district used to lower school taxes, upgrade its computers and provide a prekindergarten class for the first time.
The local debates over wind power are driven in a part by a vacuum at the state level. There is no state law governing where wind turbines can be built or how big they can be. That leaves it up to town officials, working part time and on advice from outside lawyers, some of whom may have conflicts of their own.
Two Franklin County towns, Brandon and Malone, have passed laws banning the wind turbines. But the issue remains unresolved in Burke, population 1,451, where two Town Board members recused themselves from the issue this year because they had leases with wind companies, leaving the board deadlocked.
At a meeting last month at Burke’s Town Hall, opponents and supporters sat on opposite sides of the aisle, arms crossed. The mood, as it has often been at such meetings, was quietly bitter.
“I’d like to hear what people think,” said Darrel Bushey, the town supervisor and a wind-tower opponent.
“We’ve listened to the people for two years,” responded Timothy Crippen, who sits on the town’s zoning board, which favors permitting the turbines. “It’s time to make a move.”
Some hands shot into the air from the audience, but were ignored.
“There is no decision you are going to make that is going to make everyone happy,” said Craig Dumas, another zoning board member, almost pleading for action.
But the meeting soon broke up, still with no decision made.
“This is a problem for these communities,” Mr. Dumas said as the room emptied. “There’s a lot of emotion on both sides.”