Hattip to Ed Morrissey at Hot Air. Secretary of State Clinton has been at war with Prime Minister Harper of Canada in regard to abortion and the G8 summit meeting, which just concluded yesterday, for months, as the above video from March indicates.
These efforts continued up to the G8 summit, as Clinton wanted to hold any aid hostage until woman’s health was defined as including a right to slay the unborn, as this post by Anna Halpine and Greg Pfundstein at National Review Online indicates:
On the agenda at the G8 summit in Canada is promoting maternal and infant health in the poorest parts of the globe. The high rates of maternal and infant mortality in many countries are an impediment to democracy and social development, to say nothing of a human tragedy for these communities. Commitments of resources from the G8 countries to address these problems should be welcomed and commended. Why, then, is the Obama delegation threatening to derail these agreements?
The numbers are shocking: In Sierra Leone, 16 percent of all infants perish, and 28 percent of all children die before they reach the age of five. In thirteen countries in sub-Saharan Africa, more than 1,000 women die in childbirth for every 100,000 live births. In Afghanistan, one in eight women will die as a result of bearing children. All in all, 99 percent of maternal deaths worldwide occur in developing countries.
There is good news: Much can be done, and much has been done, to bring these numbers down. This spring, The Lancet published a new study that demonstrated significant progress in reducing maternal deaths. The article announced that worldwide, maternal death figures are on the decline; rates have fallen from 526,300 in 1980 to 342,900 in 2008. The reasons for the reduction in maternal deaths are many, including lower pregnancy rates for some countries, greater access to education, improved access to nutrition and health care, and the increasing number of skilled birth attendants. Abortion has not been identified as a factor in the reduction of maternal deaths. A study on the question was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and at the recent Women Deliver conference, Melinda Gates pledged a further $1.5 billion for maternal health, specifying that no funding would be provided for abortion.
Globally, divergent groups and organizations have banded together to find ways to reduce maternal and infant deaths, and to call attention to this largely neglected issue. This coalition has recognized that women and children have often been a marginalized political constituency, and that the deaths of poor women have often not mattered enough to draw the attention necessary to leverage policy or funding commitments. This is now changing, and there is a growing amount of data that provides us with a blueprint for how to accelerate progress in the fight to reduce maternal deaths, as Egypt and other countries have now done. Significantly, the most current research, from the Lancet article to UNDP, identifies the same key factors as the critical elements in reducing maternal and infant death. These factors form the cornerstone of the Canadian prime minister’s G8 initiative for maternal and infant health.
Given this, one would expect there to be universal support for Canada’s leadership in taking on these problems and working to meet these critical needs. But the Obama administration is obstructing this positive consensus. Hillary Clinton, when asked about Canada’s G8 plan to address infant and maternal health in the developing world, said the following: “You cannot have maternal health without reproductive health. And reproductive health includes contraception and family planning and access to legal, safe abortion.”
It is surprising that Hillary Clinton would insist on funding for abortion and risk derailing an initiative that is poised to generate unprecedented commitments in both the private and public sectors. It is especially surprising considering the body of recent scientific evidence supporting the effectiveness of various straightforward, uncontroversial, and achievable means to reduce maternal and infant mortality.
When top U.S. officials change the subject away from important global policy and development work to push for favored hot-button political issues, it gives the appearance of using American taxpayer funding to promote social engineering, bypassing public debate about the best way to achieve development worldwide and address the very real unmet needs of the developing world. Does Hillary Clinton think it is more important to promote liberal Western ideologies than to address the critical needs of the women and children of Africa and Asia? Does she prefer to promote the tired, old eugenic orthodoxies of the largely discredited population-control movement? Is Hillary Clinton — and the Obama administration — willing to hold up funding for maternal and infant health because of a dogmatic commitment to a universal right to abortion on demand? What about the rights of countless women all over the world who want to bring children into the world safely, without risking their lives and the lives of their children?
Go here to read the rest. Clinton’s stance underlines that for the modern Democrat party, with certain honorable exceptions, abortion is not merely one issue among many. It is the defining concept of the party. Other issues come and go, but the “sacred” right of abortion is to be defended at all costs. Their attitude calls to mind that of the pro-slavery forces before the Civil War who were willing to destroy the nation rather than compromise an inch on the “sacred” right of one man to own another man as a chattel. Pro-lifers must take into account the deadly earnestness of politicians like Secretary of State Clinton, and the core of the Democrat party, who view the right of a mother to kill her unborn offspring as their summum bonum.
As it happens Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada was resolute, and the 5 billion in aid promised by the G8 countries for maternal aid will go not have the pro-abortion restrictions sought so fervently by Clinton.
This is FAR more that a “Democrat” issue. Its a Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, Council of the America’s etc issue mainly overseen by David Rockefeller and his stooges who populate BOTH parties.
Many people have no idea that population control of third world countries has been official US policy since 1974 with the expressed intent of taking advantage of their natural resources – all in the name of “National Security”. Don’t believe me ? See for yourself…
Kissinger Report 2004
How U.S. foreign policy uses population control to exploit third world economies.
http://www.lifeissues.net/writers/clo/clo_01kissingerreport.html
It should be noted that Dick Cheney, yes that Dick Cheney – the former VP has been a Rockefeller stooge for decades doing his bidding – particularly in Latin America
Jim,
Thank God Cheney’s replacement doesn’t work for Rockefeller!
He goes around calling taxpayers (job producers) smart @$$es!
Anyhow, for eight years VP Cheney’s duty was to inquire daily about the president’s health and attend state funerals. That’s probably when Cheney got Bush (I blame Bush gets you A+ on a paper in school?) to rescind the Mexico City thingy that provided US $$$funds for abortions the one that Obama immediately reinstated in January 2009.
However, NOW, Hillary, and the three stooges: Obama, Pelosi and Reid are running the country (into the freaking dirt) and are liberals who don’t work for the TLC. Do they work for George Soros or comintern in hiding?
Jim this thread is not going to go down the tin foil hat path. Dick Cheney throughout his career has been opposed to abortion:
http://www.lifenews.com/nat679.html
http://www.apostles.com/electionlife.html
Many RINOs did take a pro-abort position, but they are currently an endangered species in the GOP, without any influence, while the pro-aborts are the heart and soul of the Democrat party.
“Their attitude calls to mind that of the pro-slavery forces before the Civil War who were willing to destroy the nation rather than compromise an inch on the ‘sacred’ right of one man to own another man as a chattel.”
Rave on Don, your digression into liberal revisionist history just shows how deep collectivism has seeped into the mindset of modern day “alleged conservatives”. The federal government, a strong unitary executive, and complete disregard of the 10th Amendment and state’s rights are seen as good things so long as your guys are in power. Forget the fact that a federal government strong enough to force the individual states to permit abortion and gay marriage would also be strong enough to impose it also. As usual you statists are very short sighted.
In regard to your denigration of the Southern Cause see one of my favorite Simpson scenes.
Proctor: All right, here’s your last question. What was the cause of the Civil War?
Apu: Actually, there were numerous causes. Aside from the obvious schism between the abolitionists and the anti-abolitionists, there were economic factors, both domestic and inter–
Proctor: Wait, wait… just say slavery.
Apu: Slavery it is, sir.
— “Much Apu About Nothing”
Please don’t intimate that I’m racist or pro-slavery. Rather, I just believe that slavery would have ultimately been eliminated in the US just as it was in every other western nation at the time – without war. It was that the “American Stalin”, Abe Lincoln (who by the way was very much admired by Karl Marx) wanted to increase the power of the presidency and federal government and didn’t care how many constitutional rights he had to trample or people he had to kill to do it.
Melinda Gates pledged a further $1.5 billion for maternal health, specifying that no funding would be provided for abortion.
This seems like good news. She elaborated a little in an interview with NPR on June 7th.
NORRIS: Now, you didn’t talk specifically about abortion today, but the conference, Women Deliver, is calling for safe and legal abortions as one of the tools that would help combat maternal death. Do you agree for this push? Is that a good idea, this push for access to safe and legal abortions? Or is that getting into a big of a tricky area?
Ms. GATES: I understand in their case why they’re calling for that, and I think that makes sense, but the foundation specifically doesn’t take a stance on abortion for exactly this reason, is we don’t want to be part of the controversy or stem that controversy.
We’re much more trying to work upstream on reproductive health rights. If you work upstream on that, and you say to a woman today, you know, would you like to have an injection that you could come in once a month or an implant where you came in once every three years, and you give them the choices or the different tools, then you don’t even have to get into the issue of abortion downstream.
So we have 200 million women that can’t even get the tools they need to plan their family. We have that problem to solve first.
“Please don’t intimate that I’m racist or pro-slavery.”
Nah, but like most neo-cons (neo-Confederates that is) you simply do not take seriously what the founding fathers of the Confederacy had to say at the time:
Alexander Stephens, Vice-President of the Confederacy:
March 21, 1861: “But not to be tedious in enumerating the numerous changes for the better, allow me to allude to one other-though last, not least: the new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions-African slavery as it exists among us-the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson, in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the “rock upon which the old Union would split.” He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with; but the general opinion of the men of that day was, that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the Constitution, was the prevailing idea at the time. The Constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly used against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the idea of a Government built upon it-when the “storm came and the wind blew, it fell.”
“Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition. This, our new Government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science. It is so even amongst us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the North who still cling to these errors with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics.”
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1861stephens.html
Jefferson Davis in his message to the Confederate Congress of April 29, 1861 was quite clear on what the war was about:
“The climate and soil of the Northern States soon proved unpropitious to the continuance of slave labor, whilst the converse was the case at the South. Under the unrestricted free intercourse between the two sections, the Northern States consulted their own interests by selling their slaves to the South and prohibiting slavery within their limits. The South were willing purchasers of a property suitable to their wants, and paid the price of acquisition without harboring a suspicion that their quiet possession was to be disturbed by those who were inhibited not only by want of constitutional authority, but by good faith as vendors, from disquieting a title emanating from themselves. As soon, however, as the Northern States that prohibited African slavery within their limits had reached a number sufficient to give their representation a controlling voice in Congress, a persistent and organized system of hostile measures against the rights of the owners of slaves in the Southern States was inaugurated and gradually extended. A continuous series of measures was devised and prosecuted for the purpose of rendering insecure the tenure of property in slaves. Fanatical organizations, supplied with money by voluntary subscriptions, were assiduously engaged in exciting amongst the slaves a spirit of discontent and revolt; means were furnished for their escape from their owners, and agents secretly employed to entice them to abscond; the constitutional provisions for their rendition to their owners was first evaded, then openly denounced as a violation of conscientious obligation and religious duty; men were taught that it was a merit to elude, disobey, and violently oppose the execution of the laws enacted to secure the performance of the promise contained in the constitutional compact; owners of slaves were mobbed and even murdered in open day solely for applying to a magistrate for the arrest of a fugitive slave; the dogmas of these voluntary organizations soon obtained control of the Legislatures of many of the Northern States, and laws were passed providing for the punishment, by ruinous fines and long-continued imprisonment in jails and penitentiaries, of citizens of the Southern States who should dare to ask aid of the officers of the law for the recovery of their property. Emboldened by success, the theater of agitation and aggression against the clearly expressed constitutional rights of the Southern States was transferred to the Congress; Senators and Representatives were sent to the common councils of the nation, whose chief title to this distinction consisted in the display of a spirit of ultra fanaticism, and whose business was not “to promote the general welfare or insure domestic tranquillity,” but to awaken the bitterest hatred against the citizens of sister States by violent denunciation of their institutions; the transaction of public affairs was impeded by repeated efforts to usurp powers not delegated by the Constitution, for the purpose of impairing the security of property in slaves, and reducing those States which held slaves to a condition of inferiority. Finally a great party was organized for the purpose of obtaining the administration of the Government, with the avowed object of using its power for the total exclusion of the slave States from all participation in the benefits of the public domain acquired by all the States in common, whether by conquest or purchase; of surrounding them entirely by States in which slavery should be prohibited; of thus rendering the property in slaves so insecure as to be comparatively worthless, and thereby annihilating in effect property worth thousands of millions of dollars. This party, thus organized, succeeded in the month of November last in the election of its candidate for the Presidency of the United States.”
“In the meantime, under the mild and genial climate of the Southern States and the increasing care and attention for the well-being and comfort of the laboring class, dictated alike by interest and humanity, the African slaves had augmented in number from about 600,000, at the date of the adoption of the constitutional compact, to upward of 4,000,000. In moral and social condition they had been elevated from brutal savages into docile, intelligent, and civilized agricultural laborers, and supplied not only with bodily comforts but with careful religious instruction. Under the supervision of a superior race their labor had been so directed as not only to allow a gradual and marked amelioration of their own condition, but to convert hundreds of thousands of square miles of wilderness into cultivated lands covered with a prosperous people; towns and cities had sprung into existence, and had rapidly increased in wealth and population under the social system of the South; the white population of the Southern slaveholding States had augmented form about 1,250,000 at the date of the adoption of the Constitution to more than 8,500,000 in 1860; and the productions of the South in cotton, rice, sugar, and tobacco, for the full development and continuance of which the labor of African slaves was and is indispensable, had swollen to an amount which formed nearly three-fourths of the exports of the whole United States and had become absolutely necessary to the wants of civilized man. With interests of such overwhelming magnitude imperiled, the people of the Southern States were driven by the conduct of the North to the adoption of some course of action to avert the danger with which they were openly menaced. With this view the Legislatures of the several States invited the people to select delegates to conventions to be held for the purpose of determining for themselves what measures were best adapted to meet so alarming a crisis in their history. ”
http://sunsite.utk.edu/civil-war/jdmess.html
The Civil War was all about slavery from start to finish, neo-Confederate hogwash notwithstanding.
Donald – it’s not “tinfoil hat” when its in writing and published. You used the very same source to quote that I did – Lifeissues.net
The link below is the National Security Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200) aka “The Kissinger Report”. On page 10 it specifically lists thirteen countries as targets for population control:
30. The World Population Plan of Action is not self-enforcing and will require vigorous efforts by interested countries, U.N. agencies and other international bodies to make it effective. U.S. leadership is essential. The strategy must include the following elements and actions:
(a) Concentration on key countries.
Assistance for population moderation should give primary emphasis to the largest and fastest growing developing countries where there is special U.S. political and
strategic interest.
Assistance for population moderation should give primary emphasis to the largest and fastest growing developing countries where there is special U.S. political and
strategic interest. Those countries are: India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil, the Philippines, Thailand, Egypt, Turkey, Ethiopia and Columbia. Together, they account for 47 percent of the world’s current population increase.”
http://www.lifesitenews.com/waronfamily/nssm200/nssm200.pdf
This policy has never been repealed.
Jim here is a link to the National Security Study Memorandums prepared during the Nixon administration.
http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nssm-nixon/index.html
As you can see there are 206 of them. These type of papers are produced endlessly by agencies. Most of them are forgotten almost as soon as they are written. This one has been seized upon by the various loonie organizations who view Kissenger as a devil figure, as a google search of national security memorandum 200 quickly reveals. The actual impact of this document on US policy was negligible.
Don you do love your long insufferable quotes. Hoping, I’m sure that if you use enough long quotes people might think your arguments have merit. I’d hate to see the length of your legal briefs – they must be a bitch to wade through, but then length also equals billable hours.
Don, just read what Vladimir Lincoln wrote in his first inaugural speech:
“Apprehension seems to exist among the people of the Southern States that by the accession of a Republican Administration their property and their peace and personal security are to be endangered. There has never been any reasonable cause for such apprehension. Indeed, the most ample evidence to the contrary has all the while existed and been open to their inspection. It is found in nearly all the published speeches of him who now addresses you. I do but quote from one of those speeches when I declare that—
‘I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.'”
In short,Lincoln’s didn’t care whether slavery survived or not, rather his primary concern, maintaining the Union, was voiced later in the same speech:
I hold that in contemplation of universal law and of the Constitution the Union of these States is perpetual. Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments. It is safe to assert that no government proper ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination. Continue to execute all the express provisions of our National Constitution, and the Union will endure forever, it being impossible to destroy it except by some action not provided for in the instrument itself.
Such American Exceptionalist B***S***. No government ever contemplates its own end. All governments believe they will survive forever: Ancient Rome and Egypt, USSR, Nazi Germany (although Hitler realized it might last only 1000 years). However, all governments collapse in time and the US will be no exception. Can the rational behind this “perpetual” argument be found anywhere in the constitution. In deed, until this time most states, North and South, believed they had the right to succeed from the Union and threatened it many times. It was just another form of check & balance on the power of the federal government.
Your interpretation of the causes of the civil war represent the politically correct bull that passes for the study of history during the past 20 or 30 years. When I was in middle school and high school in the early and mid 70’s we spent weeks studying the under lying causes of the civil war – and this was in public schools in Northern Indiana.
History is written by the victors and this is just another case of the losing side in a war being demonized by the winner . . . just to show how just their cause was whether it was at the time or not.
Sorry, didn’t mean to high jack your discussion but you were the one to drag in the poor Confederates into a discussion on abortion
Getting back to the topic at hand. . . We the glorious American people provide aid to all the poor peoples of the world . . . contingent of course upon them molding their societies into our image . . . which is the image of perfection of course . . . abortion on demand, gay rights, perpetual Viagra and Extenze commercials . . . and then we wonder why they hate us. . . its because we are free . . . right.
FUJI like most neo-cons, (neo-Confederates), when you are brought face to face with evidence that your myth that the Civil War was not about slavery, is just that, a myth, you clumsily attempt to shift the argument.
As to your quotes from Lincoln, leaving aside your asinine comparisons of Lincoln to Soviet dictators, which I understand passes for wit in benighted neo-Confederate and paleo-Conservative circles, Lincoln was absolutely correct. He campaigned on a platform of no slavery in the territories and non-interference with slavery in the Southern states. Although Lincoln wished to see slavery abolished, he recognized that he had no authority to do so as President under the Constitution. It was the Confederates, ironically enough, who signed the death warrant of the Peculiar Institution, by precipitating a War they were bound to lose, thus allowing Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, and to have Congress pass the Thirteenth Amendment.
As to secession, Lincoln is correct that the Constitution is completely silent on the subject, something wiser Southerners realized at the time.
Robert E. Lee, January 23, 1861: “The South, in my opinion, has been aggrieved by the acts of the North, as you say. I feel the aggression and am willing to take every proper step for redress . It is the principle I contend for, not individual or private benefit. As an American citizen, I take great pride in my country, her prosperity and institutions, and would defend any state if her rights were invaded. But I can anticipate no greater calamity for the country than a dissolution of the Union. It would be an accumulation of all the evils we complain of, and I am willing to sacrifice everything but honor for its preservation. I hope, therefore, that all constitutional means will be exhausted before there is a resort to force. Secession is nothing but revolution. The framers of our Constitution never exhausted so much labor, wisdom, and forbearance in its formation, and surrounded it with so many guards and securities, if it was intended to be broken by every member of the Confederacy at will. It was intended for “perpetual union,” so expressed in the preamble, and for the establishment of a government, not a compact, which can only be dissolved by revolution or the consent of all the people in convention assembled. It is idle to talk of secession. Anarchy would have been established, and not a government, by Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, and the other patriots of the Revolution. . . . Still, a Union that can only be maintained by swords and bayonets, and in which strife and civil war are to take the place of brotherly love and kindness, has no charm for me. I shall mourn for my country and for the welfare and progress of mankind. If the Union is dissolved, and the government disrupted, I shall return to my native state and share the miseries of my people; and, save in defense, will draw my sword on none.”
http://almostchosenpeople.wordpress.com/2010/03/14/lee-on-secession/
FUJI, actually read some of the great histories of the War, rather than attempting to simply crib your information from neo-Confederate websites. Your feeble arguments simply embarrass you.
Yeah Don, how dare you cite evidence and the words of people who were actually alive during the Civil War. It’s like hard to read and stuff.
Is it me or is the quality of the neoCons posting here rapidly deteriorating?
This is an example of how those with an incomplete education can be confused when presented with partial information. Yes, Lincoln did say things that if they stood on their own with no additional context could lead one to reach incorrect conclusions about his opinion of slavery. However, it does the man’s legacy a great disservice to paint him with that brush. He was strongly opposed to slavery. However, he also understood the audience he was addressing. There was not a strong universal appetite in the northern states to fight and possibly die to end slavery. Lincoln understood that he would be more successful appealing to the patriotic spirit to preserve the union.
We have public libraries throughout this country. I would recommend anyone confused about the Civil War visit one of those libraries and read some books on that period. Heck, for easy reading just review the bio’s of our early presidents. Slavery in some way or another was political issue for nearly every president from John Q. Adams to Lincoln. One way to avoid being overly influenced by one author’s point of view is to read multiple books on the same subject. More books have been written about Lincoln than any other president so it should not be difficult getting the full picture of the man.