Veteran Affairs Sued for Harassing Christian Chaplains

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Photo Credit: WND Two military chaplains are suing Eric Shinseki, secretary of the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs, or VA, for allegedly being harassed and drummed out of a training and placement program because of their Christian faith.

Chaplains Major Steven Firtko, U.S. Army (Retired) and Lieutenant Commander Dan Klender, U.S. Navy, claim they were mocked, scolded and threatened for their faith while enrolled in the San Diego VA-DOD Clinical Pastoral Education Center program, which trains and distributes chaplains to military and VA medical centers in the San Diego area.

According to their lawsuit, Firtko and Klender allege the Center’s supervisor, Ms. Nancy Dietsch, a VA employee, derided them in classrooms and even had one of them dismissed for failing to renounce his Christian beliefs.

For example, on Sept. 24, 2012, the lawsuit claims, during a classroom discussion, Dietsch asked Firtko what he “believed faith was.”

Firtko responded by quoting Hebrews 11:1 – “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

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Obamacare Is Running Out of Bullets

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Photo Credit: Andrew Harrer/BloombergBy Megan McArdle.

There are two key signs that the administration of President Barack Obama is having trouble coping with the events of the last month.

The first is what it hasn’t done: attacked insurance companies. For the past four years, insurers have been a punching bag of the administration and the Democratic Party. Whenever insurers did something the administration didn’t like as a result of the new health-care law, Democrats punched back, hard, with complaints about greedy insurers who were blaming the White House for their own failures.

Not this time. Left-leaning columnists and policy wonks have been suggesting that the cancellation letters were part of an insurance company scam to enroll their customers in expensive policies, but the administration itself has been remarkably oblique. It needs the insurers, especially with the exchanges in so much trouble. Their cooperation is essential to avoiding another round of nasty premium shocks next year.

It reminds me of a late-Soviet joke: A man stands in line all day for bread, only to have the baker come out and say there is none. He loses it, and begins ranting about the government. Eventually, a man in a trench coat puts a hand on his shoulder.

“Be careful, comrade. You know, in the old days, it would have been …” and he mimes a gun pointed at the head.

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Beyond HealthCare.gov, Obamacare’s other challenges

By Jon Kingsdale.

Jon Kingsdale, who oversaw the Massachusetts health insurance exchange from 2006 to 2010, is a managing director of the Wakely Consulting Group. Wakely has provided actuarial and other technical assistance for the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act.

“The Affordable Care Act is not just a Web site. It’s much more,” President Obama said last month. This focus beyond short-term technical problems is meant to bolster the faith of those, like me, who support the Affordable Care Act. However, it will succeed only if the administration does much more than fix the Web site.

As HealthCare.gov — the main door to insurance shopping for 13 million of the 17 million uninsured who are eligible for subsidies — gets patched up in the coming weeks, the government must also prepare the world’s largest insurance store to meet two equally daunting challenges.

The first is to get enrollment, billing and premium collections working smoothly. In 2006, when we launched the Massachusetts Health Connector, which became the prototype for insurance exchanges under the ACA, my team encountered start-up problems. Tracking billing and collections was a much bigger challenge than getting our Web site to work.

Here’s why: Enrollees are not covered until their first month’s premium is received. In the individual insurance market, premium billing and collection is difficult to track. Folks frequently pay late or in weekly installments, or send too little or even too much. And when they stop paying, they often do not notify the insurer; the company must determine whether it is an intentional termination, an oversight, or a lost or late payment. Unlike most of today’s 15 million direct enrollees, who pay premiums on their own, an estimated 27 percent of those who will be eligible for tax credits under the ACA do not have checking accounts. So they must use cash, money orders or prepaid debit cards to pay their share of monthly premiums.

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Tom Cruise: My Work as an Actor is as Hard as Fighting in Afghanistan

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Photo Credit: GettyTom Cruise not only thinks he trains harder than Olympic athletes, he believes his job as a professional actor is as grueling as fighting the war in Afghanistan — this according to legal docs obtained by TMZ.

As we reported, Cruise recently sat for a deposition in his $50 million libel suit against a magazine publisher that claimed he abandoned daughter Suri — and his quotes are GOLD.

First, the Middle East — Tom says his location shoots are just like serving a tour in Afghanistan, “That’s what it feels like. And certainly on this last movie, it was brutal. It was brutal.”

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Everything You Know about Matthew Shepard is Wrong

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Photo Credit: Weekly Standard Stephen Jimenez sounds remarkably chipper on the phone when he calls in from Portland, his thirteenth city on a seemingly endless book tour. He’s plugging The Book of Matt, and the reason he’s chipper is that he hasn’t been burned in effigy, yet, or heckled mercilessly, yet, or denounced, at least by anybody that really matters, as a traitor to the cause. Yet.

The “cause” in this case would be gay rights, in all of its astounding exfoliations. Jimenez’s book threatens to uproot a foundational myth of the movement: that the murder of a University of Wyoming student named Matthew Shepard, in 1998, was a “hate crime.”

The approved account, received for 15 years now as both a horror and an inspiration, tells us that Shepard was approached in a bar one night by two strangers, who drove him to the outskirts of Laramie and then beat him nearly to death with the butt of a .357 Magnum pistol, for the simple reason that he was homosexual. One of the blows fell so hard it pushed Shepard’s brain into his brain stem, cracking it. He was found the next morning tied to a rail fence crucifixion-style, after 18 hours in near-freezing temperatures, comatose.

Even before his death five days later, Shepard had been made a symbol, thanks to quick work by mainchancers from national gay rights organizations and by compliant reporters from back East, who found in the story a ready-made example of the intolerance, cruelty, violence, and raging homophobia of America’s flyover country, Western States Division.

Well, no, says Stephen Jimenez. Beginning as a self-described amateur journalist (the best kind), he studied Shepard’s murder off and on for 13 years, conducted hundreds of interviews with sources on and off the record, and pored over a public record many thousands of pages long. His comprehensive account corrects the approved version in small matters and large. Shepard was not tied to the rail fence as if crucified, for example, and it’s still not clear, even after Jimenez’s exhaustive reporting, how this piece of misinformation became common knowledge—beyond the obvious explanation that reporters thought the detail was, as the saying goes, too good to check.

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Berkeley Bans Term ‘Illegal Immigrant’

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Photo Credit: thecollegefix.comThe UC Berkeley student government has banned the term “illegal immigrant” from its discourse, deeming the phrase racist, offensive, unfair and derogatory.

In an unanimous vote, student senators passed a resolution that stated the word “illegal” is “racially charged,” “dehumanizes” people, and contributes to “punitive and discriminatory actions aimed primarily at immigrants and communities of color.”

The “resolution in support of drop the I-word campaign” was approved 18 to 0 with one abstention on Oct. 30, according to a copy of the meeting’s minutes obtained by The College Fix.

Its approval marks at least the second time this semester that a public university’s student government has voted to eradicate the phrase. UCLA passed a nearly identical measure in late August.

There are an estimated 900 students in the country illegally who are currently enrolled in the 10-campus, University of California system, according to UC officials. These students live in “fear” because former Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano is now president of the UC system, according to the resolution, which aims to “create a safe campus environment for all students.”

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Executions Stall as States Seek Different Drugs

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Photo Credit: wootomFlorida ran out of its primary lethal-injection drug last month and relied on a new drug that no state had ever used for an execution. At Ohio’s next scheduled execution, the state is planning to use a two-drug combination for the first time. Last month in Texas, Michael Yowell became that state’s first inmate executed using a drug made by a lightly regulated pharmacy that usually produces customized medications for individual patients.

The decision by manufacturers to cut off supplies of drugs, some of which had been widely used in executions for decades, has left many of the nation’s 32 death penalty states scrambling to come up with new drugs and protocols. Some states have already changed their laws to keep the names of lethal-drug suppliers private as a way to encourage them to provide drugs.

The uncertainty is leading to delays in executions because of legal challenges, raising concerns that condemned inmates are being inadequately anesthetized before being executed and leading the often-macabre process of state-sanctioned executions into a continually shifting legal, bureaucratic and procedural terrain.

In the Florida execution, which used the new drug midazolam as part of a three-drug mix, The Associated Press reported that the inmate, William Happ, appeared to remain conscious longer and made more body movements after losing consciousness than those executed with the old formula.

“We have seen more changes in lethal injection protocols in the last five years than we have seen in the last three decades,” said Deborah W. Denno, a professor at Fordham Law School and a death penalty expert. “These states are just scrambling for drugs, and they’re changing their protocols rapidly and carelessly.”

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DMV Employee Pleads Guilty to Giving At Least 300 Illegals State ID’s or Licenses

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Photo Credit: APThree people in Virginia, including a DMV employee, pleaded guilty this week to conspiring to get state IDs or driver’s licenses for at least 300 illegal immigrants.

Noemi Barboza pleaded guilty on Thursday to “a bribery conspiracy charge, admitting that she often drove illegal immigrants to the Fairfax DMV location where an employee would approve their applications for driver’s licenses, learner’s permits, and identification cards knowing they could not prove legal presence in the United States.” Four people engaged in the scheme from 2007 to 2011. The fourth person has not yet been charged.

The illegal immigrants paid Barboza’s husband or another person, who then reportedly “split the money with” Maria Cavallaro, a 45-year-old DMV employee…

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Analysis: Over 40 Million May Lose Their Employer Based Health Plans

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Photo Credit: LOUIS DELUCA — Dallas Morning News/MCTEven as President Barack Obama sold a new health care law in part by assuring Americans they would be able to keep their insurance plans, his administration knew that tens of millions of people actually could lose those their policies.

“If you like your private health insurance plan, you can keep your plan. Period,” Obama said as he pitched the plan, the unqualified promise he made repeatedly.

Yet advisers did say in 2010 that there were large caveats and that anyone whose insurance plan changed would lose the promised protection of being able to keep existing plans. And a report in 2010 said that as many as 69 percent of certain employer-based insurance plans would lose that protection, meaning as many as 41 million people could lose their plans even if they wanted to keep them and would be forced into other plans. Another 11 million who bought their own insurance also could lose their plans. Combined, as many as 52 million Americans could lose or have lost old insurance plans.

Some or much of that loss of favored insurance is driven by normal year-to-year changes such as employers changing plans to save money. And many people could end up with better plans. But it is not what the president pledged.

Caught in the firestorm of his broken promise, Obama on Thursday apologized.

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CNN Blames Christians for Obamacare Problems

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Photo Credit: Breitbart CNN has blamed Christians for the problem of Americans without health insurance, calling it “The Obamacare ‘scandal’ you haven’t heard about.” In an article on CNN.com’s Belief Blog, CNN writer John Blake says that, while famous pastors “preach in states where crosses and church steeples dot the skyline,” they do nothing about “the poor who can’t get the health insurance they would receive if they lived elsewhere.”

That refers, in turn, to the decision of twenty-five states not to participate in Obamacare’s expanded Medicaid funding. The states were allowed to opt out following last year’s controversial Supreme Court decision on Obamacare, which upheld the law as a whole but struck down the mandatory state participation in Medicaid expansion, citing the protection provided to state powers under the Tenth Amendment.

Some Republican states took the funding anyway, which provides health insurance subsidies for households with incomes up to 138% of the poverty level. Though the federal government will initially cover almost all of the cost, many Republican governors are wary of potential future costs, and are also worried about the effect on the federal budget itself. Many are also opposed to participating in the Obamacare program on principle.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Camp Views 20-Week Abortion Ban as ‘Pretty Scary’ Pro-Life Tactic

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Photo Credit: AP/Susan WalshPresident Obama’s old campaign operation rallied the troops today, warning of a “pretty scary” ban on abortions in the sixth month of pregnancy that voters in Albuquerque, N.M., might pass.

“Something pretty scary is happening in Albuquerque right now,” Kaili Lambe, who manages women’s issues campaigns for Organizing for Action, wrote in an email to Obama’s 2012 campaign volunteers and grassroots donors.

“This is a serious attack on women — and it’s a deliberate attempt by extreme interest groups to test their latest anti-women strategy,” she said.

The Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Ordinance had 54 percent support among the city’s likely voters, even though “Albuquerque generally is a progressive city and New Mexico is generally a progressive state,” as ProgressNow New Mexico spokesman Patrick Davis said.

Read more from this story HERE.