Category Archives: Odds & Ends

I found the following article this morning. Think it is worth saving and posting.

We don’t need to spend our tax dollars on Planned Parenthood

By Kristan Hawkins Published January 27, 2017 foxnews.com

There is no organization as near and dear to the hearts of abortion advocates as Planned Parenthood. President Obama almost shut down the government in 2011 over federal funding of the nation’s largest abortion vendor. Candidate Hillary Clinton often gushed about her love of the non-profit, which has revenues of over a billion dollars, during her presidential run.

But now Planned Parenthood is in the fight of their lives as they are likely to face a defunding battle in Congress. They are using every scare tactic in the book and throwing millions behind expensive public relations campaigns to drum up support and convince women that access to basic health care will be lost if they lose the half a billion dollars they get from taxpayers every year.

But the truth is: we don’t need Planned Parenthood.

According to their own annual report, Planned Parenthood saw 2.5 million clients in 2015, which is down from 3.1 million in 2006. While that number may seem high, it means that 98 percent of women of reproductive age will never step foot inside a Planned Parenthood in any given year for health care.

Planned Parenthood loves to talk about the services they provide — other than abortion — but it takes little effort to uncover the fact that while government funding to them has increased by millions, their preventative services have dropped off a cliff.

An investigation released this week into Planned Parenthood’s health care services showed that while they tout their prenatal services, in reality, these services hardly even exist.

According to their own annual reports, prenatal services at Planned Parenthood have been cut in half since 2009 and cancer screenings have been slashed since 2006. From 2009 to 2013, Planned Parenthood’s adoption-to-abortion ratio is 209-to-1.

Yet, in 2006, they committed one of every five abortions; in 2015, it’s up to one in every three abortions.

What are taxpayers getting for spending more money at Planned Parenthood? Fewer actual health care services and more abortions. This is a disgrace.

The money that currently goes to Planned Parenthood should be redirected to Federally Qualified Healthcare Centers (FHQCs), of which outnumber Planned Parenthood facilities 20-to-1. These centers are all over the country, in rural and urban areas, and serve all people.

No one is advocating that women’s health care be taken away by defunding Planned Parenthood. There are thousands of other healthcare facilities that provide the same services, sans abortion, that Planned Parenthood does.

Sorry, Planned Parenthood, but we just don’t need you. And from the looks of how Planned Parenthood was flush with cash to spend on the 2016 elections, it looks like they don’t need our taxpayer dollars anyway.

They spent over $30 million in during the 2016 cycle to elect their favored candidate, which didn’t turn out so well. But no matter, because celebrities have come to their rescue, donating hefty chunks of change and lending their star power to the cause.

Money is still flowing to the nation’s largest abortion provider. The organization bragged about how many donations were pouring in just in opposition to Vice President Mike Pence.

Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood, even admitted back in 2011 that the non-profit would survive federal funding cuts because after all, they do have a $1 billion budget.

The abortion giant has enjoyed many years swindling taxpayers of their hard-earned dollars. They are a shady organization at best, a criminal organization at worst. The laundry list of possible crimes is exhaustive: illegally profiting off of the sale of aborted baby body parts (the Select Panel on Infant Lives in the US House of Representatives as well as the Senate Judiciary Committee has recommended national Planned Parenthood and several affiliates for criminal prosecution), covering up rape and child abuse, aiding and abetting sex traffickers, overbilling taxpayers by millions of dollars, and betraying the trust of women by giving confidential medical information to vendors.

As taxpayers, we should not be paying an organization that engages in any of those things, much less all of them.

As women, we deserve better than a group that deems it necessary to sell out their clients for profit and then dare to use scare tactics to have them believe their health care will vanish if Planned Parenthood is stripped of their precious tax dollars.

We don’t need Planned Parenthood. It’s time to defund Planned Parenthood.

Kristan Hawkins is president of Students for Life of America.

Here’s an afghan and two pillows I made for my niece, Renee Yantko. She’s all about Halloween! They were really fun to make. The pattern is available at Red Heart.com. Pumpkin Face Throw (Came out too small, had to add a couple additional rounds.)Patterns for cobwebs and spiders are at various sites.

Took a mini-vacation to Las Vegas.  Stayed at the Orleans.  Had a really good time.  It’s good to get away for a few days now and again.  Makes coming home so sweet!

Must be nice to have a housekeeping department and a maintenance department.  Someone to dust and vacuum and make the beds every day and someone to call whenever you want a light bulb changed or whenever something needs to be fixed.  Oh, wait.  The former is me and the latter is hubby!  The pay isn’t much, but we make our own hours, work when we want, how we want, and if we want.

Home Sweet Home!  It’s not much but it’s ours and it’s paid for!

I wonder if everybody else has the same problem I have…when there’s a holiday in the middle of the week, I expect the day following the holiday to be a Sunday or a Monday. It throws me off for the entire week. Maybe that’s part of getting older or maybe it’s being retired. It really doesn’t matter if today is Monday or Thursday. (except when it’s time to take the garbage out!)

Of course, most of our holidays are now scheduled for Mondays so folks get long weekends. When I lived in Canada it was really strange to have Thanksgiving on a Monday!

Canadians also celebrated today as “Boxing Day”.  Observed in most Commonwealth countries. One tradition is that it is the day when servants and tradesmen would receive gifts from their bosses. Another is that it’s the day when you pack up the old (having received new on Christmas) into boxes and give them to the poor.

Just a few more days until New Year’s. Here’s something interesting about a custom in Scotland called First Foot Day:

The superstition goes back to the era of the Viking raiders when a fair-haired Norseman at a Scotsman’s door meant trouble.

If the first person to set foot in your house on the morning of January 1 is a dark-haired male, you will have good luck for the entire year. Ideally a first footer should bring gifts, such as:

• a lump of coal to symbolize warmth all year
• a silver coin for wealth and prosperity
• some bread so you’ll never be hungry

After greeting everyone in the house, the first footer must exit through a different door from the one he had entered. Nobody should leave the house before the first footer shows up because the first traffic across the threshold should be coming in, not going out.

Blonde and red-haired male first footers bring BAD LUCK.
A female first footer spells DISASTER on the entire household.

I guess some dark-haired males have to stay out all night long so they can enter houses and bring good luck. Doesn’t say that the dark-haired male can’t enter any number of houses. Wonder if the luck gets weaker in the second house than in the first?
Who said superstitions had to make sense?

This is my very own personal website!  What eventually appears here is totally up to me and that’s scary!  I’m faced with a blank canvas, an empty page, just waiting for me to add to it and make it valuable or beautiful or distinct or at least interesting.  Let’s get started.

Today is December 23, 2013.  We are skipping Xmas this year.  I’ve always loved the holidays – especially the lights, the tree, the music, the favorite old movies.  But, as we get older we find that the work of putting up the lights and the tree is getting more difficult.  We had a cold snap right after Thanksgiving this year so we put off decorating.  By the time it was warm enough to work outside, it was only a couple of weeks before Christmas and it hardly seemed worth the work for just a few weeks.  Hopefully we’ll make up for it next year.  I’ve seen some of the old movies on TV and I’ve listened to a lot of Christmas music so I have the spirit of Christmas in my heart.

We have lost a nephew this year; my good friend lost her son; my sister-in-law lost her brother.  These deaths have served as a good reminder that every day of the year, Christmas or not, someone is mourning, someone is grieving.

BUT, we also welcomed baby Lillie, our great-grand-niece.  The circle of life continues.  And life is good.