Stryker Corporation, a Michigan-based medical device company with operations around the world, is laying off five percent of its employees in order to offset the cost of a tax passed as part of Obamacare in 2009 and scheduled to take effect in 2013.

“The targeted [employee] reductions and other restructuring activities are being initiated to provide efficiencies and realign resources in advance of the new Medical Device Excise Tax scheduled to begin in 2013,” Stryker announced in a November 10 press release, “as well as to allow for continued investment in strategic areas and drive growth despite the ongoing challenging economic environment and market slowdown in elective procedures.”

Industry executives believe that the 2.3 percent tax will cost $20 billion in revenue over ten years. “If this tax is implemented in 2013, it will undermine our industry’s ability to create and maintain good jobs in the U.S., and worse, will lead to higher costs for patients, undercutting one of the primary goals of health care reform,” the head of a major medical device industry trade group warned in July.

Stryker CEO Stephen MacMillan hinted at such a response to the Obamacare provision in September. “There is no doubt that we’re already starting to think about actions that offset that additional tax,” he said at a conference, according to MassDevice.com. “”Here we are, one of the greatest industries in the country, and we’re staring down on January 1st, 2013 and the addition of a 2.3 percent excise tax, while meanwhile on the other side all the discussion in Washington is about creating jobs,” he added.

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 Read More at The Washington Examiner By Joel Gehrke, The Washington Examiner

Last summer, when all of the pundits had pretty much written off Newt Gingrich’s presidential candidacy, my niece, a college sophomore whom I always believed to be apolitical, remarked, “My friends and I like Newt – he tweets a lot on Twitter.”

I should have remembered that.

Two years earlier, I had heard Gingrich speak at the National Rural Health Association’s Annual Conference. At the beginning of his remarks, he took out his new mobile phone, and thus began a 30 minute dissertation on social media as the new paradigm in communications, and challenged us all to learn it, understand it and implement it.

Gingrich, ever the student of history, grasped early on the significance of President Obama’s use of social media as an effective tool for communications in the 2008 campaign.

Unlike Obama, Gingrich has had scarce resources and hasn’t had a cadre of aides, handlers and public relation firms to devise his social media campaign strategy. Instead, the 68 year-old former Speaker of the House from Georgia, whose campaign up until now has been just about a “one man band,” learned everything he could about social media and how to effectively employ it. As a result, he is now the one Republican presidential candidate who has mastered its use, and the results speak for themselves.

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Read More at Fox News By Van Hipp, Fox News

JERUSALEM – In response to any future Israeli military strike on its nuclear sites, Iran has been training al-Qaida elements in the Egyptian Sinai desert on how to coordinate retaliatory attacks, a senior Egyptian security official told WND.

The al-Qaida attacks are meant to target both Israeli and Egyptian installations, the security official said, as part of an Iranian plot to widen any Israeli-Iranian conflict to involve other countries.

The Egyptian official said there is also information Iran has been working with Islamic Salafist groups in Jordan that are allied with al-Qaida.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guards helped to train al-Qaida elements in the Sinai and Gaza Strip to carry out large-scale attacks, including missile attacks, cross-border incursions, suicide bombings and explosions targeting infrastructure, such as oil and gas pipelines, the official said.

Any Iranian cooperation with al-Qaida would underscore the dangers of Tehran obtaining nuclear weapons. The country has a history of using terrorist proxies, most notably Hezbollah in Lebanon, to carry out its bidding.

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Read More at WND By Aaron Klein, WorldNetDaily

The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing.

The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.

Saved by the bailout, bankers lobbied against government regulations, a job made easier by the Fed, which never disclosed the details of the rescue to lawmakers even as Congress doled out more money and debated new rules aimed at preventing the next collapse.

A fresh narrative of the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 emerges from 29,000 pages of Fed documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and central bank records of more than 21,000 transactions. While Fed officials say that almost all of the loans were repaid and there have been no losses, details suggest taxpayers paid a price beyond dollars as the secret funding helped preserve a broken status quo and enabled the biggest banks to grow even bigger.

‘Change Their Votes’

“When you see the dollars the banks got, it’s hard to make the case these were successful institutions,” says Sherrod Brown, a Democratic Senator from Ohio who in 2010 introduced an unsuccessful bill to limit bank size. “This is an issue that can unite the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. There are lawmakers in both parties who would change their votes now.”

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 Read More at bloomberg.com By Bob Ivry, Bradley Keuon, and Phil Kuntz, Bloomberg

Now that the Supreme Court has officially taken up the question of Obamacare, we are in store for even more legal analyses attempting to predict which way the justices will rule, or argue which way they ought to rule.

A quick prediction of my own: Few, if any, of these analyses will be as worthless as the one Einer Elhauge offers in today’s New York Times.

Elhauge, a law professor at Harvard University and founding director of Harvard’s Petrie-Flom Center in Health Law Policy, makes one point that is patently — inane? specious? vacuous? let’s go with specious — and one point that unintentionally undercuts his own argument. Let’s look at each.

First, the patently specious point:

For decades, Americans have been subject to a mandate to buy a health insurance plan — Medicare. Check your paystub, and you will see where your contributions have been deducted, whether or not you wanted Medicare health insurance.

Many opponents dismiss this argument because Medicare (unlike the new mandate) requires the purchase of health insurance as a condition of entering into a voluntary commercial relationship, namely employment, which Congress can regulate under the commerce clause. Thus, they say, the Medicare requirement regulates a commercial activity, whereas the new mandate regulates inactivity.

Now, I have followed the Obamacare debate pretty closely, including attending the oral arguments at the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals this summer, and I have never heard or read even a single person offering the rationale that Elhauge claims “many opponents” of the law make. However, I am willing to stipulate that the director of a center on health law policy may have been privy to more arguments than I have been, and that there may in fact have been some Obamacare opponents who have concocted such a line of reasoning.

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Read More at ajc.com By Kyle Wingfield, ajc.com