The Patriots

by Robert Oscar Lopez

{An excellent 2014 article that exposes the insipidness of gay adoption:  Lopez considers himself a “children’s advocate” in rejecting gay marriage and gay adoption.  In the process he is also addressing one of the greatest threats to the survival of the family in recent history, especially with the global explosion of gay surrogacy and gay adoption.  Some of the dark “underworld” agendas he hints at need more attention -- publicly.  Read his own story at:  http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/08/6065. -- DNI]

S.E. Cupp is one of the latest media figures to make a pitch on gay marriage and adoption.  As is often the case, she throws out so many canards in this cocktail of insipidness, one scarcely knows where to begin. 

I will say conservatives have got to move on gay marriage....[and] on gay adoption. If abortion is the abhorrent option – and I believe it is – then adoption by any two loving people has got to be the better option. 

First of all, the latest estimates indicate that somewhere between 12-15% of heterosexual couples struggle with infertility.  Currently many of these viable homes, rather than adopting, are being steered to the artificial reproduction market and contributing to the 1.5% (and rising) of live American births tied to in vitro technology.  The alternative to abortion is obviously to get more of these viable straight couples to avoid sperm-banking or surrogacy, and to consider adopting instead.

Anyone who’s lost a birth parent to death, divorce, or a tragedy knows that a kid feels the absence of a father or mother.  This is square one for adoptees, orphans, children of divorce, or children of same-sex couples – someone was there when you were born, and now he or she is not there.  That person is a very real human being, tied to you by flesh and blood.  A kid mourns the missing person, thinks about him, longs to reconnect with him.  It hurts to be cut off from a mother or father.  I was cut off from my dad because he divorced my lesbian mother; I was reared by two women.

It’s not a small thing to make a kid grow up without a father because a bunch of self-centered adults can’t get their acts together.  I’ve had enough of pundits like S.E. Cupp being so glib about things that are incredibly painful for people who are actually in these situations, and powerless about it to boot.  If you haven’t been raised by a gay couple and you haven’t been adopted, it might be hard to understand how offensive it is to hear people on TV talk about fraught transactions like adoption and same-sex parenting with such confident nonchalance.

One of the unnoticed ironies in the debate on gay adoption has to do with David Brock, the chieftain at Media Matters, whose subdivision Equality Matters has gone after me more than once for my views on a child’s right to his mother and father.  Brock spent much of his 2002 memoirs, Blinded by the Right, on the pain he felt about being adopted.  In fact, his adoption weighed on him and complicated his relationship with his father much more than did his gayness. You would think that Brock would understand why it’s not such a simple thing to yank kids from a birth family and toss him into a home with one or two adults unrelated to him.  Ironic self-awareness is apparently lacking on the left.  {And with Child Protective Services who often remove children from their true parents with out sufficient justification. - ED}

The truth is that adoption in the United States is too expensive, and many heterosexual couples find the costs prohibitive, so they are priced out of the market by gay couples, who have much higher incomes and are, 100% of the time, forced to take babies from other people since they cannot conceive them on their own.  In fact, gay adopters have such an insatiable desire to parlay their high incomes into cash-for-kids that they waged a war against Catholic Charities adoption centers, going as far as forcing many such agencies to shut down as punishment for not giving gay couples other people’s abandoned children.

The dirty secret about gay adoption is that most often when homosexual couples adopt, one of their pair is the biological parent.  Usually the child comes from a former heterosexual relationship that broke down.  So when they “adopt,” they typically have to put a bunch of people through the mud fight that my dear friend Janna endured: they have to drag the opposite-sex parent to family court, strip him or her of custody, and then force the poor little kid to submit to the parental authority of a new, sometimes creepy, person who’s sleeping with a biological parent and very likely caused the breakup of that child's original family.

That’s the real-life adoption story that doesn’t make for great gay headlines.  Gay adoption has unfortunate but ineluctable ties to divorce.  In fact, by encouraging gay adoption so much, we are encouraging a whole new generation of homewreckers – gays who want to be parents and figure out that the cheapest way to do it is to seduce someone of the same sex who is currently in a rocky marriage with children.

You will hear, from time to time, about hundreds of thousands of children in foster care who can’t find families to adopt them.  This is a favorite statistic for gay marriage gurus to throw out as a kind of emotional Shock and Awe, a debate-stopper of the first order, especially if you can cough up an example of special-needs children being raised by adorable lesbians in Michigan.  There has never been a backlog of infants, so these holdouts are typically older children who landed in the child protective services system because of a crisis.  Many of them are kids who don’t want to placed with gay couples, or kids whom gay couples don’t want, either.  What people don’t tell you – because they don’t want to and don’t have to, until you push them on it – is that most of those children have living parents, or living kin networks, and the foster care system has to work on reuniting them with their struggling birth families.  Otherwise, the government would merely be an oppressive police state taking people’s kids away and signing them over to rich folks in exchange for cash, as happened in dictatorships like the kind that governed Argentina in the 1970s.

Most people don’t have the time to work through the nuances of foster care versus adoption.  Fewer still are aware of how many people in “Adoption Land” – the community of adoptees and adoptive families – are calling for massive reform in both foster care and adoption.  What gay activists are asking for, on both fronts, would actually be moving in the precisely wrong direction; gay lobbyists want agencies to speed up the process by which foster kids are cut off from their birth mothers and fathers and subordinated permanently to same-sex couples eager to acquire them.  On the international adoption front, even gay adoptive father Frank Ligtvoet has faced the painful reality that adoption systems are overemphasizing the desire of wealthy childless families rather than the needs of impoverished communities that are struggling to provide for their children (in the Huffington Post, no less).

It took a while for brave activists like Claudia Corrigan D’Arcy to apply the same critiques on the domestic fronts, but now, too, people are scrutinizing domestic adoptions and finding much to improve.  (The film Philomena, ironically, humanizes the pain of a birth mother who is pressured to give up her infant who turns out to be gay; despite the film’s sympathy for homosexuals, the gay movement is pushing to create more Philomenas nowadays so they can build their rainbow families.)

Foster care costs the public money, whereas adoption is a huge moneymaker for certain attorneys and even, in the United Kingdom and here, for social service agencies (see this article on the blowback that resulted from rewarding people too handsomely for placing foster kids in adoptive homes).  So the mentality that it’s always best to get kids out of foster care and into adoption is a mixed bag.  On the one hand, we have ample evidence that life in foster care is hard, and we know that many adoptive homes are great places to save suffering children from such instability.

(I should confess: when I was fifteen, there were problems in my home, and my father did not want to take me in, so he drove me to a “boarding school” in Maine, where I stayed while my home situation might improve.  It was very hard to feel abandoned, essentially, at the moment that my dad dropped me off at the main office with a check, but would it have made sense for some couple to adopt me at that point?  In the end I returned to my mothers’ home and finished high school early, going to college as a de facto emancipated minor.)

On the other hand, we have much to worry about when we envision rushing kids out of foster care into gay adoption.  Gay adoptive parents have proved just as capable as straight foster parents of kidnapping, murder, abuse, rape, child pornography, and neglect involving the children they acquire.  So everything that’s painful about foster care with straight people is also painful about gay adoption; the difference is that in a gay adoption, the child loses forever his chance at having a mom and dad.  Whether adopters are gay or straight, it’s not a good idea to incentivize social services agencies’ power to remove children from troubled homes and transfer all parental equivalence to a new home without making a good-faith effort to repair problems with the birth family.

It sounds ominous to be in the position of “aging out” of foster care without having been adopted.  But it’s not necessarily as bad as it sounds.  You can still maintain contact with foster parents, but once you are emancipated, it is your choice to do that (not something forced on you by law), and you also have the choice to rebuild your relationship with your birth kin network, the way I rebuilt a relationship with my father as an adult.  My mother’s lesbian partner never adopted me, and that was probably the right decision.

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Robert Oscar Lopez edits English Manif.  [See also his own “bio”: http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/08/6065/ The article first appeared here.

By Jack Davis

An attorney who served as White House counsel in the Obama administration is under investigation for his role in dealings linked to the case against Paul Manafort, according to a report from CNN, citing sources “familiar with the matter.”

Manafort, who briefly served as Donald Trump’s campaign manager, was the target of an investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller.

Manafort pleaded guilty on Friday to conspiring to defraud the United States and conspiring to obstruct justice, both having to do with dealings in Ukraine that took place years before his involvement with the Trump campaign.

CNN reported Friday that attorney Greg Craig, who was White House counsel from 2009 to 2010, is under scrutiny over whether he lobbied for Ukrainian leaders without registering as a foreign agent.

The investigation also touches on the firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, where Craig was a partner at the time.

Craig’s actions were taken after he left the White House, according to the report.

Connections between Manafort, the firm and Craig were revealed in filings in the Manafort case.

Craig’s attorney William Taylor III said his client did nothing wrong.

“Greg Craig was not required to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act,” Taylor said in a statement, Law.com reported.

Craig himself would not comment on the investigation.

This is not the first controversial case for Taylor, who represented Fusion GPS, the firm involved in the production of a dossier of discredited claims against Trump.

NBC News reported that Craig was the supervisor of Alex van der Zwaan, a Skadden lawyer who has pleaded guilty to lying to prosecutors and about communications concerning the Ukrainian politician for whom Manafort was also working.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office and Justice Department have not yet decided if they will file charges against either Craig or the law firm, CNN reported.

The law firm was paid more than $4.6 million, which Manafort sought to hide, the court filing said.

Bloomberg reported that the law firm is also facing questions of conflict of interest in the issues surrounding former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko.

Skadden lawyers, which would have included Craig,  may have violated their ethical responsibilities through their actions, said Rebecca Roiphe, who provides instruction on legal ethics at New York Law School.

“Skadden could face some problems with disciplinary authorities in D.C., assuming this is as bad and as baseless as described,” she said.

Wrong Number

This week in Money & Crisis, we’ve been investigating a bombshell report that claims almost 50% of all phone calls in 2019 will be scam phone calls.  That means that every time you pick up the phone, there’s a 50/50 chance the person on the other end of the line will try to scam you out of your money.

Derek fell for one of the most prevalent scam techniques known as the “back taxes” scam.

“When I was explaining it to my wife, it was obvious it was a scam,” says Derek. “I mean, of course the Treasury Department doesn’t call you up and force you to wire money to them on the spot!  “But they put so much pressure on you, you don’t have time to think. It was like an action movie. ‘Do this NOW and the bomb won’t go off.’ That’s why they keep you on the phone. So you don’t have time to think.”

This is a common thread in reports of phone scams. The thieves will use the fear of jail time or financial ruin to manipulate their marks. But today, their attacks and techniques have become so varied, that it’s getting harder and harder to tell scams apart from legitimate phone calls. Sometimes, even saying one word is enough to get you into heaps of trouble.

Today, we’re going to delve the most common scams people fall for and some strategies for beating them.

One of the most common types of scams is known as a robocaller. This is a pre-recorded message — usually that of a pleasant sounding woman — that will try to get you to fork over your credit card information.

They’ll hide their scam behind the pretense of collecting money for emergency relief, local charities and even political parties.

When you hear that pleasant sounding robot’s voice, hang up.

WARNING: Some of these robocallers will give you the “option” to unsubscribe by hitting nine on your keypad. Don’t do it. This just tells the scammers that this is an active phone line to be targeted for more scams.

The Silent Caller

Some scammers have found the best moneymaking strategy is…

Complete silence.

They simply call you up… say nothing… and record anything you say while you’re on the line. The goal is try and get you to say “yes” or anything else that could be used as a verbal contract. They’ll try and use this recording of you saying “yes” to sign you up to expensive subscriptions services.

There are variations on this strategy, where callers will ask you questions to trick you into saying yes, such as “can you hear me?” or “are you a homeowner?”

If you get caught by one of these scammers, know that your “yes” isn’t a valid contract. They will try and intimidate you and manipulate you psychologically into paying up. But you don’t owe these thugs jack.

Too Good to Be True

As a rule, if a stranger calls you to tell you “good news” they’re after your money.

Callers will make wild claims of extravagant prizes and free products. But in reality, these “awesome prizes” are nothing more than bait.

Scammers are just buttering you up to get you to listen to a sales pitch or to trick you into forking over your credit card details.

Common claims to watch out for are:

Foreign Lotteries: The winning ticket was purchased in your name or as a gift. All we need is a “small fee” to transfer the funds.

Free or Low Cost Travel Packages: These travel packages often have sky-high hidden fees. While others don’t exist at all. The scammer just takes your money and disappears.

Credit and Loans: These loans might look good up front. But hidden costs and sky-high interest means you’ll end up paying back far more than you bargained for.

Extended Car Warranties: Scammers will find out what car you drive and try to sell you overpriced, worthless warranties.

Scam Beating Strategies

1. Don’t answer calls you don’t recognize. If it’s important they’ll leave a message. Some scammers will leave a message. But this will give you time to think and google the phone number. Scam numbers will often be listed online.
2. If you pick up the phone and suspect someone is impersonating a government employee or legitimate business, say you will call them back and hang up. Instead of using the number they called you from, look up their number online and ask for the person by name. If they protest, it’s a scam.
3. Download a scam blocker app. Nomorobo catalogues all the scam numbers and blocks them from connecting to your phone. True Caller is a similar app that uses its database of 2 billion numbers to identify incoming calls. True Caller won’t actually block any calls but it will give you the information you need to screen the calls yourself. Both apps are available on Apple and Google Play.
   

And with that, I’ll leave you with a piece of wisdom from Laissez Faire’s Editorial Director Justin Fritz.

“I knew it wasn’t a scam, because they sent me a letter!”

What about you? Have you had any close calls with a scam caller? What was the lie they told you? When did you realize they weren’t legit?

All the best,

by H. Sterling Burnett

A direct challenge to the hardcore enviros who heretofore controlled and corrupted the agency.

President Donald Trump committed to fundamentally transforming the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from an agency producing politicized science to one instilling sound scientific standards for research. By doing so, Americans should expect improved environmental and health outcomes.

Currently, regulatory costs top $1.9 trillion annually, which amounts to $14,842 per U.S. household. That’s nearly $15,000 less for Americans to pay for health insurance, medical bills, education expenses, groceries, gasoline, or entertainment. Because the economic and social implications of regulations are profound, the science they are built upon must be impeccable.

Over the last few decades — under Republican and Democratic administrations — EPA formed a cozy relationship with radical environmental activists and liberal academic researchers. With the support of environmental lobbyists who despise capitalism (expressed by consumers’ free choices in the marketplace) EPA bureaucrats, in pursuit of more power and expanded budgets for the agency, funded researchers who, because they were largely dependent on government grants for the majority of their funding, were only too happy to produce results claiming industry was destroying the earth.

Of course, the only way to prevent environmental collapse was more government control of the economy. However, these reports were produced despite the fact poverty and hunger have steadily declined and people are living longer and more productive lives than ever before.

As Jay Lehr, a colleague and science director at the Heartland Institute told me once, “For decades, EPA has been a wholly owned subsidiary of the environmental left. Together, radical environmentalists and EPA bureaucrats, including the members of all their advisory panels, have used their considerable power to thwart American business at every turn.”

Under Trump, EPA changed how it pursues science to pay greater fealty to the scientific method and remove temptations for scientific self-aggrandizement and corruption.

Not surprisingly, researchers, environmentalists, and bureaucrats, seeing their power curtailed and their gravy train ending, are crying foul saying the Trump administration is undermining science. However, in reality this is simply not true.

EPA’s scientific advisory panels are tasked with ensuring the research the agency uses to develop and justify regulations is rigorous, has integrity, and is based on the best available science.

To better ensure this, EPA ceased automatically renewing the terms of board members on various panels. EPA is now filling its scientific panels and boards on a competitive basis as each board member’s term expires.

This should improve the science EPA uses to inform its decisions, by expanding diversity — diversity of interests, diversity of scientific disciplines, and diversity of backgrounds — thus bringing in a wider array of viewpoints to EPA decision-making.

In addition, to reduce opportunities for corruption, EPA ceased allowing members of its federal advisory committees to apply for EPA research grants and instituted policies to ensure advisory panel members and grant recipients have no other conflicts of interest. It was always a foolish practice to allow those recommending, often determining, who gets EPA grants to also be in the running for those grants. However, this was business as usual at EPA, where grant makers awarded themselves, research teams they were members of, or their friends billions of taxpayer dollars over the years.

In April, then EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt declared “The era of secret science at EPA is coming to an end.” Pruitt proposed requiring the data underlying scientific studies used by EPA to craft regulations be available for public inspection, criticism, and independent verification.

For years, EPA bureaucrats have used the results of studies by researchers who would not disclose the data underlying their results to be examined and retested for confirmation or falsification. Fortunately, EPA is finally ending this unjustifiable practice.

Many scientists have objected to EPA’s new secret science policy because they claim the studies EPA uses have undergone “peer review.” However, the peer review process is often nothing more than other researchers, often hand-picked by the scientists whose research is being reviewed, sitting around in their ivory towers reading the reports and saying, “this looks okay or reasonable to me.”

Unless the reviewers are able examine the underlying data and assumptions, and attempt to replicate the results, peer review is unable to ensure the validity of studies used to underpin regulations. Absent transparency and replicability, peer review is hollow.

Another long overdue EPA regulatory reform was the decision to end exclusive use of the “Linearity No Threshold” (LNT) model when assessing the dangers of radiation, carcinogens, and other toxic substances in the environment. Going forward, EPA will incorporate uncertainty into its risk assessments using a variety of other, more realistic models.

The LNT model assumes there is no safe dose of ionizing radiation or exposure to various other chemicals or toxins. Relying on flawed studies from the effect of ionizing radiation on fruit flies from the 1950s, EPA and other regulatory agencies have used LNT as a basis for regulation of environmental clean-ups, setting safety standards for nuclear plants, and limiting low dose radiation treatments for medical patients, a policy that has cost lives and billions of taxpayer dollars.

Although science has progressed phenomenally since the 1950s, with copious amounts of research showing the LNT model is seriously flawed, EPA and other agencies never questioned the LNT standard. That is, until now.

In fact, adverse effects from low dose exposures to radiation and most other chemicals and potential toxins are often non-existent. Indeed, substances that may be harmful in large quantities can be beneficial in small amounts, a process known as hormesis.

In the commonly paraphrased words of Swiss physician and astronomer Paracelsus, “the dose makes the poison.” Vitamins, which are valuable in small quantities, and even water, which is literally necessary for life, can become deadly if too much of either is taken over a short period of time. Or consider sun exposure. While exposure to too much sunlight can contribute to skin cancer, sunlight is required to catalyze the final synthesis of Vitamin D, which strengthens the bones, helping prevent osteoporosis and rickets. There is also ample evidence sunlight can help fight depression and several skin and inflammatory ailments.

Replacing reliance on the untenable LNT model with other models of exposure and response will result in better safety and health protocols, potentially saving billions of dollars and thousands of lives each year.

In service of the American people and the pursuit of continued American greatness, science practices at EPA are improving under President Trump. One can only hope equivalent changes are adopted at other executive agencies so the regulations they produce are grounded in the best available science, free of political corruption and bureaucratic incentives for agency mission creep and growth.

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The article first appeared here.