Photo Credit: Life News
The IRS has been found to be targeting pro-life and conservative groups because of their positions and, this summer, a tape was released showing a disturbing phone call the Internal Revenue Service placed to a non-profit organization telling it to keep its Christian faith and views on abortion to itself.
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The first crisis, barely noticed here, is Ukraine’s sudden turn away from Europe and back to the Russian embrace.
After years of negotiations for a major trading agreement with the European Union, Ukraine succumbed to characteristically blunt and brutal economic threats from Russia and abruptly walked away. Ukraine is instead considering joining the Moscow-centered Customs Union with Russia’s fellow dictatorships Belarus and Kazakhstan.
This is no trivial matter. Ukraine is not just the largest European country, it’s the linchpin for Vladimir Putin’s dream of a renewed imperial Russia, hegemonic in its neighborhood and rolling back the quarter-century advancement of the “Europe whole and free” bequeathed by America’s victory in the Cold War.
The U.S. response? Almost imperceptible. As with Iran’s ruthlessly crushed Green Revolution of 2009, the hundreds of thousands of protesters who’ve turned out to reverse this betrayal of Ukrainian independence have found no voice in Washington. Can’t this administration even rhetorically support those seeking a democratic future, as we did during Ukraine’s Orange Revolution of 2004?
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Another glaring example of why the ‘if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor’ mantra President Obama and other ACA enthusiasts touted is simply false:
An estimated seven out of every 10 physicians in deep-blue California are rebelling against the state’s Obamacare health insurance exchange and won’t participate, the head of the state’s largest medical association said. “It doesn’t surprise me that there’s a high rate of nonparticipation,” said Dr. Richard Thorp, president of the California Medical Association.
Thorp has been a primary care doctor for 38 years in a small town 90 miles north of Sacramento. The CMA represents 38,000 of the roughly 104,000 doctors in California.
“We need some recognition that we’re doing a service to the community. But we can’t do it for free. And we can’t do it at a loss. No other business would do that,” he said.
California offers one of the lowest government reimbursement rates in the country — 30 percent lower than federal Medicare payments. And reimbursement rates for some procedures are even lower.
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One consequence of the botched launch of Obamacare is that it has, judging from his plummeting numbers with “Millennials,” diminished Barack Obama’s cool. It’s not merely that the website isn’t state-of-the-art but that the art it’s flailing to be state of is that of the mid-20th-century social program. The emperor has hipster garb, but underneath he’s just another Commissar Squaresville.
So, health care being an irredeemable downer for the foreseeable future, this week the president pivoted (as they say) to “economic inequality,” which will be, he assures us, his principal focus for the rest of his term. And what’s his big idea for this new priority? Stand well back: He wants to increase the minimum wage! Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos of Amazon (a non-government website) is musing about delivering his products to customers across the country (and the planet) within hours by using drones.
Drones! If there’s one thing Obama can do, it’s drones. He’s renowned across Yemen and Waziristan as the Domino’s of drones. If he’d thought to have your health-insurance-cancellation notices dropped by drone, Obamacare might have been a viable business model. Yet, even in Obama’s sole area of expertise and dominant market share, the private sector is already outpacing him.
Who has a greater grasp of the economic contours of the day after tomorrow — Bezos or Obama? My colleague Jonah Goldberg notes that the day before the president’s speech on “inequality,” Applebee’s announced that it was introducing computer “menu tablets” to its restaurants. Automated supermarket checkout, 3D printing, driverless vehicles . . . what has the “minimum wage” to do with any of that? To get your minimum wage increased, you first have to have a minimum-wage job.
In my book (which I shall forbear to plug, but is available at Amazon, and with which Jeff Bezos will be happy to drone your aunt this holiday season), I write: Once upon a time, millions of Americans worked on farms. Then, as agriculture declined, they moved into the factories. When manufacturing was outsourced, they settled into low-paying service jobs or better-paying cubicle jobs — so-called “professional services” often deriving from the ever swelling accounting and legal administration that now attends almost any activity in America. What comes next? Or, more to the point, what if there is no “next”?
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Photo Credit: Public domain/Library of Congress
The University of Washington’s email to alumni asked the question four separate times: “Is The Tea Party like the Ku Klux Klan?” Christopher Parker, a UW political science professor, argues in a new book that there are major similarities. The book is titled “Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in Contemporary America.”
“In this commentary from Professor Christopher Parker he argues that recent research shows racism is a strong indicator of Tea Party support,” said the email, which plugs Parker’s book.
Parker provided very specific examples in the commentary, according to Campus Reform.
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The hearing before the Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organizations is expected to investigate Iran’s human rights violations against the American pastor.
Responding to the news, Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., an outspoken advocate for religious freedom, told WND that the hearing is a move in the right direction.
“I am pleased that they’re having the hearing next week. The committee hearing is a positive step, and it’s hoped this will put adequate pressure on the Obama administration to speak out for the release of Pastor Abedini,” Wolf said.
American Center for Law and Justice Executive Director Jordan Sekulow said the hearing gives the U. S. a critical opportunity to raise the pastor’s case.
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In one of the August emails, HealthCare.gov project manager Henry Chao responded to a proposal to delay the launch by writing: “Can we sign this with blood?”
The details were included in a handful of emails released Friday by Republican lawmakers probing the troubled launch. The lawmakers charged that the communications offer more evidence that the administration kept quiet for months about urgent problems with the website.
“As the paper trail broadens, we see more and more evidence that the administration was fully aware its signature health care law was not ready for prime time,” House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., said. “The documents we are now reviewing tell a much, much different story than what officials testified to Congress.”
The emails pertained to the online SHOP Marketplace, which is meant for small businesses and has suffered a series of setbacks. The administration announced in late September that it was pushing off the launch until mid-November. But then one day before the Thanksgiving holiday, the Department of Health and Human Services announced it would push off online enrollment by another year.
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The county made the stunning move when Norina Mooney was chatting with a co-worker about the Affordable Care Act, according to the Pacific Justice Institute, which is representing the woman.
The organization has asked for a response by next week to its letter raising several issues with Lorie McKeown in the Santa Clara County Department of Child Support Services, where Mooney works.
Pacific Justice said Mooney was further informed that her comment had caused another co-worker — not the person to whom it was directed — to feel “stressed out.”
Her speech, therefore, was too political for the workplace, the county officials insisted.
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Carney said that it would be “terrible to tell more than a million families across the country just a few days after Christmas that they’re out of benefits,” but that the White House was agnostic on how the extension happened.
“The vehicle that they use to do that is less important than the fact that they do it,” Carney said.
The statement from Carney echoed House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who said Thursday that an extension of the jobless benefits did not have to be included in a budget deal to win Democratic support.
“Hopefully, it could be part of the budget, but it doesn’t have to be part of the budget,” Pelosi said. “It could be on its own vehicle, as it goes forward, but it’s something we must consider.”
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Photo Credit: REUTERS/KYODO
The veteran, Merrill E. Newman, flew to China from North Korea in the morning. Hours later he left on a United Airlines flight to San Francisco to be reunited with his family, sources at Beijing airport said.
North Korea’s official KCNA news agency earlier said he was being deported on humanitarian grounds and because he had admitted to his wrongdoing and apologized.
“I’m very glad to be on my way home,” Newman told Japanese reporters as he arrived at Beijing airport. “And I appreciate the tolerance the DPRK government has given to me to be on my way. I feel good, I feel good. I want to go home to see my wife.”
The DPRK – Democratic People’s Republic of Korea – is the official name of North Korea, one of the world’s most isolated and unpredictable states.
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