“Economic and Social Conservatives Agree: Cut Planned Parenthood” by Grover Norquist and Marjorie Dannenfelser in National Review Online. “When the House of Representatives voted two weeks ago to end federal grants and contracts for Planned Parenthood…It was deciding that American taxpayers should not be saddled with even more outrageous debt to fund an extraordinarily wealthy nonprofit … President Obama has added $3 trillion to the federal debt over the past two years. The current fiscal year is nearly halfway gone. When it’s over another $1.6 trillion will be added to the tab our nation is running up for its children and grandchildren … To begin with, as Chuck Donovan at the Heritage Foundation has pointed out, Planned Parenthood is awash in net income. From 2002 to 2007, the national organization and its affiliates took in $388 million more than they spent on programs and services.”
From Jennifer Rubin at The Washington Post, ATR asserts that Senate Democrats came up with few cuts for the continuing resolution. “It took a while, but the Senate Democrats finally came up with some cuts for the continuing resolution. Not a lot of cuts, however, as Americans for Tax Reform points out: "[Friday], the Senate Appropriations Committee released its Continuing Resolution that would fund government through the end of the 2011 Fiscal Year, ending September 30. While Democrats have pledged to meet House Republicans 'halfway,' their version of a seven-month funding measure comes nowhere close. The House-passed CR cuts over $60 billion in spending — the Senate Democrat version cuts a paltry $10 billion, preserving the bloated spending status quo."
Calif. Gov. Jerry Brown attacks Grover Norquist; by Jack Chang at The Sacramento Bee. “Brown had some harsh words for conservative activist Grover Norquist, who has criticized Brown for asking voters to extend taxes. Norquist's group Americans for Tax Reform has warned Republican legislators who have signed its anti-tax pledge that putting the tax extensions on a ballot would be considered a violation of the pledge. ‘For Norquist, this fellow who lives over there in Washington, to say the people of California have to do what he wants or he'll feel bad, and he did put this on his feelings, I think is pathetic itself and it's highly undemocratic,’ Brown said.”
“Defence: A question of scale” by Richard McGregor and Daniel Dombey at the Financial Times (FT.com). “Any conservative who questioned defence spending might once have been labelled unpatriotic. But efforts by some Republicans to quarantine the Pentagon from budget cuts have been swept aside by the party’s increasingly ascendant fiscal hawks. ‘I think it is now a settled issue on the right. The defence budget should be on the table, as should the entire budget,’ says Grover Norquist, of Americans for Tax Reform. ‘There was an effort by a couple of people to say that that shouldn’t be the case but with hundreds of billions of dollars being spent, that’s just silly to say.’”