Posts

Lipstick on the Obamacare Pig

/1 Comment/in , /by

Photo Credit: SUZANNAH HOOVER

Photo Credit: SUZANNAH HOOVER

By Stephen F. Hayes. It’s been one year since the Supreme Court decision that allowed Obama administration officials to begin implementing the Affordable Care Act, and the frequency and volume of reports about the challenges facing those reforms—and the difficulties they are visiting on those who were supposed to benefit from them—are increasing dramatically.

Jeff Vernon, an employee of Scrambler Marie’s restaurant in Toledo, Ohio, told a local reporter that the owners were cutting his hours to avoid penalties under Obamacare. Businesses with more than 49 employees have to offer insurance to all “full-time” workers—defined as those who put in 30 hours or more each week. The result, for Vernon: $400 less in take-home pay every month. “That leaves me $27.50 for two weeks to live off of,” he explained. Vernon said the owners tried to avoid the cuts but didn’t have any other recourse. “They were real good about that,” he added. “The last thing they wanted to do was cut people. They don’t want to fire anybody.”

Other business owners haven’t been able to avoid eliminating jobs. A Gallup poll taken in June found that nearly one in five small businesses—19 percent of those surveyed—have cut workers “as a specific result of the Affordable Care Act.” The same poll, first reported by CNBC, found that 41 percent of those interviewed had suspended hiring because of Obamacare. The poll of 603 business owners with less than $20 million in annual sales also found that 55 percent believe Obamacare will lead to higher health care costs, while just 5 percent saw future cost savings.

The steady stream of negative stories in recent months is one reason the Obama administration is preparing a massive public relations campaign to promote the launch of health care exchanges on October 1, 2013—which is fewer than 100 days away. The administration is seeking to enlist high-profile athletes and celebrities to sell Obamacare and its alleged benefits. Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of health and human services, told reporters last week that HHS officials are working with major American sports leagues on the campaign. Read more from this story HERE.

_________________________________________________________________

Obamacare ‘is still unconstitutional’ one year after Supreme Court approval

By Rand Paul. One year ago, the Supreme Court upheld a law that radically transforms our health care system in a way that continues to frighten and beleaguer most Americans.

Friday is the one-year anniversary of the Supreme Court’s ruling upholding the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare. The 5-4 decision declared that the federal government could force Americans to buy health insurance — not just any insurance, but insurance covering procedures dictated by the federal government. Obamacare established a labyrinth of red tape and bureaucracy, colossal even by Washington standards, and most important — penalizes the uninsured through the individual mandate.

Writing the majority opinion, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. declared that the individual mandate could be considered a tax and that the power to tax was also the power to enforce the law. Dissenting Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Anthony Alito Jr. vehemently disagreed, writing in their dissent: “[W]e cannot rewrite the statute to be what it is not. [W]e have never — never — treated as a tax an exaction which faces up to the critical difference between a tax and a penalty, and explicitly denominates the exaction a ‘penalty.’”

I think that Obamacare is still unconstitutional. I still think that Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito got it right.

One year later, the federal health care law is even more concerning. In addition to potentially causing upward of 20 million Americans to lose their private health insurance policies, it could destroy an estimated 800,000 jobs. Read more from this story HERE.

_________________________________________________________________

NFL says no to promoting Obamacare

By Sandhya Somashekhar and Lenny Bernstein. The National Football League is used to big, bruising battles. But on Friday, it announced that it was likely staying out of one of the roughest fights in Washington: the war over Obamacare.

Earlier this week, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius disclosed that the administration was in talks with the sports organization to help promote the law, which enters a new phase as advocates prepare to begin enrolling millions of Americans in health insurance this fall.

On Friday, Republican leaders in the Senate issued a stern warning to sports organizations not to partner with the administration on an issue marked by such “divisiveness and persistent unpopularity.”

Asked about the congressional letter, NFL spokesman Greg Aiello said the league had not made any commitment to the administration. “We have responded to the letters we received from members of Congress to inform them we currently have no plans to engage in this area and have had no substantive contact with the administration about [the health-care law’s] implementation,” he said in an e-mail.

The NFL’s decision is the latest blow to the administration over the health-care law, which faces enormous hurdles as key portions go into effect in the coming months. Chief among the challenges is the political opposition to the law, which has persisted since its passage in 2010 despite hopes on the part of advocates that it would eventually be accepted as the law of the land. Read more from this story HERE.

Judicial Watch: Obama Admin Collecting Financial Data From Private Citizens Without Warrants

/1 Comment/in , /by

Photo Credit: ezola

Photo Credit: ezola

Well, we almost made it through a whole week without a new Obama Regime scandal, but the good folks at Judicial Watch never rest, and they announced today that they’ve obtained records from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) exposing that millions of dollars have been spent by the agency on the warrantless collection and analysis of Americans’ financial transactions.

The full extent of the CFPB personal financial data collection program is revealed in a document obtained by Judicial Watch entitled “INDEFINITE-DELIVERY INDEFINITY-QUANTITY (IDIQ) STATEMENT OF WORK.” According to the IDIQ document’s stated Objective: “The CFPB seeks to acquire and maintain a nationally representative panel of credit information on consumers for use in a wide range of policy research projects… The panel shall be a random sample of consumer credit files obtains from a national database of credit files.”

To accomplish this objective, the CFPB describes the scope of the program accordingly:

The panel shall include 5 million consumers, and joint borrowers, co-signers, and authorized users [emphasis added]. The initial panel shall contain 10 years of historical data on a quarterly basis [emphasis added]…

Read more from this story HERE.

Radical Muslim Preacher Whose Organization Supports Killing US Soldiers Met at White House this Month

/17 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Daily Caller

Photo Credit: Daily Caller

An Islamic scholar who serves as vice president of an organization that supports the terrorist group Hamas and whose president sanctioned the killing of American soldiers in Iraq met with senior Obama administration officials at the White House earlier this month.

In a posting on his website, brought to The Daily Caller’s attention by the Investigative Project on Terrorism, Shaykh Abdullah Bin Bayyah revealed that he met at the White House on June 13 with Gayle Smith, senior director of the National Security Council, and Rashad Hussain, President Obama’s special envoy Organization of the Islamic Conference, among other officials.

The posting also initially stated that the “national security adviser” was at the meeting, without naming him directly, though that part of the post was removed shortly after TheDC contacted the White House to see if National Security Adviser Tom Donilon was in fact at the meeting. According to the Investigative Project on Terrorism, the Arabic version of the post was also changed to say that the deputy national security adviser attended, not the national security adviser.

Among the topics the post says Bin Bayyah addressed at the meeting was how to “lift the injustices from vulnerable peoples such as the Syrian people, the Palestinians, and the Muslims in Myanmar” and for the U.S. to do more to aid the Syrian revolution.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Admin. Tells Egyptian Christians to not Protest Muslim Brotherhood

/4 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: FrontPagemag

Photo Credit: FrontPagemag

As Egyptians of all factions prepare to demonstrate in mass against the Muslim Brotherhood and President Morsi’s rule on June 30, the latter has been trying to reduce their numbers, which some predict will be in the millions and eclipse the Tahrir protests that earlier ousted Mubarak. Among other influential Egyptians, Morsi recently called on Coptic Christian Pope Tawadros II to urge his flock, Egypt’s millions of Christians, not to join the June 30 protests.

While that may be expected, more troubling is that the U.S. ambassador to Egypt is also trying to prevent Egyptians from protesting—including the Copts. The June 18th edition of Sadi al-Balad reports that lawyer Ramses Naggar, the Coptic Church’s legal counsel, said that during Patterson’s June 17 meeting with Pope Tawadros, she “asked him to urge the Copts not to participate” in the demonstrations against Morsi and the Brotherhood.

The Pope politely informed her that his spiritual authority over the Copts does not extend to political matters.

Regardless, many Egyptian activists are condemning Patterson for flagrantly behaving like the Muslim Brotherhood’s stooge. Leading opposition activist Shady el-Ghazali Harb said Patterson showed “blatant bias” in favor of Morsi and the Brotherhood, adding that her remarks had earned the U.S. administration “the enmity of the Egyptian people.” Coptic activists like George Ishaq openly told Patterson to “shut up and mind your own business.” And Christian business tycoon Naguib Sawiris—no stranger to Islamist hostility—posted a message on his Twitter account addressed to the ambassador saying “Bless us with your silence.”

Indeed, the U.S. ambassador’s position as the Brotherhood’s lackey is disturbing—and revealing—on several levels. First, all throughout the Middle East, the U.S. has been supporting anyone and everyone opposing their leaders—in Libya against Gaddafi, in Egypt itself against 30-year U.S. ally Mubarak, and now in Syria against Assad. In all these cases, the U.S. has presented its support in the name of the human rights and freedoms of the people against dictatorial leaders.

Read more from this story HERE.

From Benghazi to Nuclear Terrorism

/2 Comments/in , /by

iran_nukeFormer Director of Central Intelligence James Woolsey just published an article in the Wall Street Journal documenting how the U.S. has become so vulnerable to international terrorism that even the ridiculous government of North Korea could now detonate a small nuclear weapon above the American homeland.

“North Korea needs only one ICBM capable of delivering a single nuclear warhead in order to pose an existential threat to the U.S.,” wrote Woolsey, along with co-author Peter Pry, executive director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security. “The Congressional Electromagnetic Pulse Commission, the Congressional Strategic Posture Commission and several other U.S. government studies have established that detonating a nuclear weapon high above any part of the U.S. mainland would generate a catastrophic electromagnetic pulse.”

This one explosion – something North Korea is actually capable of causing – would constitute an EMP attack that would, in the words of our former CIA chief, “collapse the electric grid and other infrastructure that depends on it – communications, transportation, banking and finance, food and water – necessary to sustain modern civilization and the lives of 300 million Americans.”

Another well-informed analysis, just published in the Weekly Standard, confirms that by mid-2014, the fanatically anti-American terrorist government of Iran will likely be able to enrich uranium to weapons-grade plutonium too rapidly for the U.S. to stop it militarily. When an insane and metastatic regime – one obsessed with destruction of (first) the “Little Satan,” Israel, and (later) the “Great Satan,” America – has a nuclear arsenal, we will be living in a very different and dark world indeed.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Admin. Plan Guts Oil Shale Development, Reduces by Two-Thirds Federal Lands Previously Approved (+video)

/5 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Fox News

Photo Credit: Fox News

Controversy is heating up over an administration plan to drastically reduce the amount of federal lands available for oil shale development in the American West.

The Bush administration had set aside 1.3 million acres for oil shale and tar sands development in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. The new Bureau of Land Management plan cuts that amount by two-thirds, down to 700,000 acres, a decision that has prompted industry outrage.

“What they basically did was make it so that nobody is going to want to spend money going after oil shale on federal government lands,” said Dan Kish, Senior Vice President of Institute for Energy Research.

Read more from this story HERE.

Farm Bill Comes to Stunning Defeat in House

/2 Comments/in , , /by

Photo Credit: Breitbart

Photo Credit: Breitbart

While Americans have been understandably focused on important issues such as the Immigration Bill and the Obama administration scandals, on Thursday, by a vote of 195-234, the House defeated the nearly $1 trillion farm subsidy and food stamp bill–known collectively as “The Farm Bill,” in a searing rebuke to House leadership.

The Wall Street Journal refers to the shocking defeat of the farm legislation as a “revolt,” and describes how the House’s more conservative members who believed the bill spends too much money, including Paul Ryan and Jeb Hensarling, joined with Democrats who said the bill did not offer enough in entitlements to bring the legislation to its knees.

The WSJ states that the reason for the surprising defeat of the House farm bill was its “mind-boggling price tag–$740 billion for food stamps and $200 billion for farm payments” and other freebies. The taxpayer-funded farm payment subsidies have been shown to find their way into the pockets of wealthy farm owners, agribusiness lobbyists, and even members of Congress who vote on the bill.

While conservatives note that food stamps have grown to an $80 billion per year program, up by about 70% in less than five years, Democrats called the $2 billion in cuts and the addition of a work requirement in the legislation too severe.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Admin. Attempting to Ban as Racist Criminal Background Checks For New Hires

/16 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: brettneilson

Are criminal background checks racist? That’s the startling new legal theory that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission unveiled this week in lawsuits against employers. It’s another example of how President Obama’s appointees are using regulation to achieve policy goals they can’t get through Congress.

On Tuesday the EEOC accused retailer Dollar General DG -0.04% and a U.S. unit of German car maker BMW BMW.XE +1.26% of violating the 1964 Civil Rights Act by using criminal checks as part of their employment decisions. The logic? Blacks have higher conviction rates than whites, and therefore criminal checks discriminate against blacks.

The EEOC alleges that BMW discriminated against blacks because it screened contractors in South Carolina for convictions for “Murder, Assault & Battery, Rape, Child Abuse, Spousal Abuse (Domestic Violence), Manufacturing of Drugs, Distribution of Drugs, [and] Weapons Violations,” and more blacks than whites are convicted of those crimes.

The suit says 70 black BMW contractors and 18 non-black contractors had criminal convictions, and the company declined to hire them. The suit seeks redress, such as hiring the plaintiffs, back pay, legal costs and more, but only for the black contractors.

In its Dollar General suit, the agency says that 10% of blacks and 7% of non-black applicants failed the retailer’s criminal screening. The EEOC calls that three-percentage-point difference a “gross disparity” that is “statistically significant” enough to qualify as discrimination.

Read more from this story HERE.

Sarah Palin on Fertility and the Syrian Civil War

/4 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Reuters

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin criticized the Obama administration’s decision to supply weapons to the rebels in the civil war in Syria today, arguing that the U.S. should “Let Allah sort it out” until there is a stronger leader in the White House.

“Militarily, where is our commander in chief? We’re talking now more new interventions. I say until we know what we’re doing, until we have a commander in chief who knows what he’s doing, well, let these radical Islamic countries who aren’t even respecting basic human rights, where both sides are slaughtering each other as they scream over an arbitrary red line, ‘Allah Akbar,’ I say until we have someone who knows what they’re doing, I say let Allah sort it out,” Palin said at the Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference…

Palin, speaking at the conclusion of the three-day Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference, also took a swipe at another speaker at the conservative forum, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who argued Friday that one of the reasons to support the Senate’s immigration reform plan is because “Immigrants are more fertile.”

“I think it’s kind of dangerous territory, territory to want to debate this whole one race’s fertility rate over another, and I say this from someone who’s kind of fertile herself,” Palin said. “I don’t think that’s where we want to go in deciding how will we incentivize the hardworking responsible families who want to live in the light, follow the law, become Americans, versus those whose very first act on our soil is to break the law? There are different ways that we can debate this.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Hillary Clinton’s Legacy of Scandal (+video)

/9 Comments/in , /by

By Jeffrey T. Brown. In the midst of the eruption of near-daily scandals involving the Obama administration, let us not forget that until just a few months ago, Hillary Clinton was the most significant persona within that administration besides the president himself. Let us not also forget that notwithstanding the scandal-grenades going off all around us, Mrs. Clinton diligently plans her run for the presidency, even while several of those scandals are obviously and entirely her responsibility, exposing the State Department during her tenure as an utter sewer of corruption, cronyism, and fatal incompetence.

For as long as Hillary Clinton has been on the national scene, she has left a path of destruction and wreckage in her wake that is both impressive and terrible to behold. She is a testament to the extent of damage that can be done by one person determined to conquer everything before her in the quest for unlimited power and self-gratification. The only prize left to her in American politics is the presidency, which she has always felt is hers by right. Indeed, she would have attained it were it not for the upstart community organizer, a fellow admirer of Saul Alinsky, who spoke in volumes but said nothing.

While such determination comes at a staggering cost, we should remind ourselves that the bill is never paid by Mrs. Clinton or her equally arrogant husband. It is paid by the country. Before we ask yet again for the check, perhaps we should remind ourselves of exactly who this woman is who will soon attempt to seduce the country, and her history as the object of an absurd and undeserved degree of national affection.

Before accompanying her husband to the White House as our first co-president, Mrs. Clinton was working hard on becoming the person we now know her to be. As with her husband, the goal has always been the attainment of power masquerading as public service. Setting an example for the Obamas to emulate, the Clintons put self-absorption and personal victory before all else. The Clintons have always served themselves, and nothing else.

Do you recall the slime that was Whitewater, in which the Clintons dissembled and lied while their former business partners went to jail? Do you remember Mrs. Clinton earning $100,000 in profit in 1979 on a $1,000 investment over the course of only 9 months in volatile cattle futures, about which she knew nothing, thanks to help from a highly placed Tyson Foods connection? Tyson profited handsomely in Arkansas, with state loans and appointments. We are to believe that Clinton studied the Wall Street Journal to achieve a feat against which the odds were one in 250 million. Do you recall the Rose Law Firm billing records that magically appeared in Mrs. Clinton’s White House office, years after they had been subpoenaed? Or the death of Vince Foster under rather extraordinary and inexplicable circumstances, and the lies and cover-up that followed? Do you recall that while testifying before congressional investigators as first lady, she answered “I don’t know” or “I don’t remember” 250 times? Read more from this story HERE.

___________________________________________________________________

Chelsea Clinton endorses mom: We need a woman in the White House

By Paul Bedard. Former first daughter Chelsea Clinton says it’s time for a woman in the Oval Office, music to her mom Hillary Clinton’s ears.

In a wide-ranging interview on MSNBC’s “NOW with Alex Wagner” Clinton was asked about getting a woman elected president, as her mother tried to do in 2008 and is expected to in 2016.

Read more from this story HERE.