Obamacare’s Prescription for Disaster: $14 Billion Cost to Industry
By: David A. Patten
Major business groups want a provision of healthcare-reform repealed because it could cost American corporations up to $14 billion at a time when people desperately need jobs.
James A. Klein, president of the American Benefits Council, warns the same tax-law change that led AT&T to take a $1 billion charge last week represents “a serious mistake that is having negative and unintended consequences.”
On Wednesday, Boeing became the latest company to announce a write down of value due to healthcare reform, deducting $150 million from its first quarter earnings.
[...]
The announcements by the corporations — who were complying with SEC-enforced accounting rules that require sharing of information on the objective value of their corporations — has set off quick retaliation by Democrats.
House Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman declared the write-downs appear to “conflict with independent analyses.”
He ordered the CEO’s of major corporations to defend their write-offs during congressional hearings next month, asking them to provide “any analyses” that the companies had conducted on healthcare costs, “including e-mail messages, sent to or prepared or reviewed by senior company officials related to the projected impact of health care reform…”
House Minority Leader John Boehner shot back: “Instead of interrogating America’s private-sector job creators, Congress should be listening to them, heeding their warnings about the effects of this deeply flawed new law, and replacing it with reforms that will help them get back to creating jobs.”
[...]
U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Thomas J. Donahue blasted Waxman’s decision to haul the companies before Congress simply because they’ve complied with legal requirements to inform investors of how the changes enacted by Congress impact their viability.
“They’re searching for a way to blame these businesses for a mess that the lawmakers themselves have made,” Donohue wrote.
Ida’s Critics Demolish Claims That Fossil Is Human Evolutionary Link
Posted by Casey Luskin, ENV:
Remember Ida? The fossil hailed as the “eighth wonder of the world” whose “impact on the world of palaeontology” would be like “an asteroid falling down to Earth”? She was promised to be “the link that connects us directly with the rest of the animal kingdom.” She was touted on a History Channel / BBC documentary, but then there was the bust. Well, Ida’s critics have now gotten around to publishing technical articles critiquing the hyped view promoted to the public last year. A recent news release at the University of Texas, “Recently Analyzed Fossil Was Not Human Ancestor As Claimed, Anthropologists Say,” explains:
[...]
The big question now is, will BBC and The History Channel publish documentaries retracting their prior claims about Ida’s importance as a “human ancestor,” or will they leave the public with the impression that Ida is a “missing link”? Perhaps they might publish a documentary about the scientific community’s tendency to overhype fossils as part of a crusade for Darwin?
Golly, I’m sure those honest brokers of information who have absolutely no agenda whatsoever will get right on to that retraction project…
When It Comes To Hate-Speech And Violence, Liberals Rule
By Alicia Colon, IRISH EXAMINER:
For some strange reason liberals are identifying all contrary opinions as hateful regardless of the words actually used. I’m always surprised when I hear from my Democrat sister in California that she thinks I should tone down the anger in my columns. I’ve reread my pieces and see only the explanations of my viewpoint. I do not name-call or use derogatory language yet she reacts as if I do. Is it possible to erroneously read emotions that simply aren’t there if the reader is expecting them to be?
I found this same phenomenon when I received an e-mail from a New York literary agent commenting that he found my book proposal “a manifesto of innuendo, belief and hate for those you do not agree with.” He then added, “There is the Rush way and then there is the George Will way.”
After searching in vain for evidence of hate speech in my book proposal, I came to realize that the agent was projecting his own disdain for the “right wing” and assuming that I was therefore a Rush Limbaugh devotee.
I had written that I had observed the devastating impact of social programs that had destroyed the families in my neighborhood of Spanish Harlem by effectively removing the man from the households. I wrote from a personal perspective that this wealthy agent with a Hollywood background probably found hard to believe. I must, therefore, he concluded be a dittohead and an anti-intellectual unlike the revered Mr. Will.
[...]
Top doctor refuses orders, tells Obama to show birth certificate
By Joe Kovacs, WorldNetDaily:
Lt. Col. Terry Lakin is the highest-ranking and first active-duty officer to refuse to obey orders based on President Obama’s eligibility.
A top-ranking, highly decorated officer in the U.S. Army says he’s now refusing all orders until President Barack Obama finally releases his long-form, hospital-generated birth certificate to prove his eligibility to serve as commander in chief.
“I feel I have no choice but the distasteful one of inviting my own court martial,” said Lt. Col. Terry Lakin, an active-duty flight surgeon charged with caring for Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey’s pilots and air crew. “The Constitution matters. The truth matters.”
“For the first time in all my years of service to our great nation, and at great peril to my career and future, I am choosing to disobey what I believe are illegal orders, including an order to deploy to Afghanistan for my second tour of duty there. I will disobey my orders to deploy because I – and I believe all servicemen and women and the American people – deserve the truth about President Obama’s constitutional eligibility to the office
of the presidency and the commander in chief.“If he is ineligible, then my orders – and indeed all orders – are illegal because all orders have their origin with the commander in chief as handed down through the chain of command.”
[...]
Video: Remember when the media thought hateful political rhetoric was cool?
by Allahpundit, HOT AIR:
Hint: It wasn’t that long ago, although given the blackout on this sort of thing at the time, you can’t blame people like Gibbsy for thinking that it never happened. This trip down memory lane comes from Evan Coyne Maloney, not as an apology for recent threats against the Democrats, of course, but as an indictment of the insane double standard practiced by the establishment left in raising alarms about irresponsible rhetoric. How insane? Take two minutes and work your way through this post at Verum Serum. It’s worth it.
[...]
Free speech on the march
Ezra Levant:
I’ve never been busier in my “real life”, so please forgive me for not blogging as much as I’d like to.
Ann Coulter’s tour was a huge success. For a day or so, whatever media discussion there was centred on Coulter’s own views. But the moment that Francois Houle, the vice-president of the University of Ottawa, sent Coulter a threatening letter, the story changed. It wasn’t about Coulter and her views anymore — it was about Canada, and whether we were a free enough country to let her express her views. The University of Western Ontario and University of Calgary passed that test; Houle and his street thugs failed it. But the result was the most intense week of free speech discussions in Canada since the Western Standard published the Danish cartoons.
If you thought nothing could top last week in terms of free speech news, then you simply don’t know Canada’s human rights commissions well enough.
[...]
Fitzgerald: Do Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton know what’s going on in the Chittagong Hills? If they did, would they care?
Jihad Watch:
If you visit this site every day, you know that there are three kinds of news stories related to or about Islam. There are the stories that, within a day or a week, will make it to the New York Times, and NPR, albeit in less intelligible and often tendentious form. Then there are the stories that only appear months later, and you can’t quite figure out why it takes so long for the editors at The New York Times or the Washington Post to recognize the significance of such Jihad News. And finally, there is a third kind of story, the kind of story that you read here, that appeared in places quite obscure, and that you will never read again, unless the story put up here is publicized so that others who write online pick it up and force the major news organizations to start reporting about such things.
Here, for example, are two stories about what took place in the Chittagong Hills of Bangladesh recently.
[...]
Frustrating, Stubborn Facts
By Tony Blankley:
The late, splendid Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan once famously asserted, “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.” The senator was wrong. (Of course, for those of us who still believe that objectivity is objective, a fact is still a fact, though the heavens may fall.)
The key word here is “entitled.” In today’s entitlement-crazy Washington, not only do folks believe that about half the country is entitled to other people’s money and health insurance policies, they feel they are entitled to their own facts to support their claim to their own entitlement to other people’s money and health insurance policies.
Not only that, they believe they are entitled to their own facts to describe the character and conduct of their political opponents.
[...]
Killing Free Speech and Free Enterprise With One Stone
by Andrew Mellon, BG:
In modern day America, if you criticize the government you are now fair game to be called upon to explain yourself in front of it. As Byron York reported in a recent Washington Examiner column, Rep. Henry Waxman sent letters to executives of major corporations such as Verizon and Caterpillar, requesting their testimony at hearings of the Subcomittee on Oversight and Investigations of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, chaired by none other than Rep. Bart Stupak, as each of the companies “announced that provisions in the [healthcare] law could adversely affect” their “ability to provide health insurance.” AT&T for instance had disclosed in an SEC form that changes in the tax treatment of a Medicare subsidy would lead to a $1 billion write-off in earnings from the first quarter of 2010, and said it was considering changes to the health care benefits it provides for its employees.
[...]
CIA says ACLU-backed plan endangered Gitmo officers
By Bill Gertz, Washington Times:
A team of CIA counterintelligence officials recently visited the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and concluded that CIA interrogators face the risk of exposure to al Qaeda through inmates’ contacts with defense attorneys, according to U.S. officials.
The agency’s “tiger team” of security specialists was dispatched as part of an ongoing investigation conducted jointly with the Justice Department into a program backed by the American Civil Liberties Union. The program, called the John Adams Project, has photographed covert CIA interrogators and shown the pictures to some of the five senior al Qaeda terrorists held there in an effort to identify them further.
Details of the review could not be learned. However, the CIA team came away from the review, conducted the week of March 14, “very concerned” that agency personnel have been put in danger by military rules allowing interaction between the five inmates and defense attorneys, according to an intelligence source close to the review.
[...]
AQLU?
UNDER PERSECUTION: Gao Zhisheng
UNDER PERSECUTION: Gao Zhisheng
Location: China
Arrested: February 2009
Days Imprisoned: 210
On Feb. 4, Gao Zhisheng, was abducted by Chinese secret police from his hometown. Since 2005, Gao has been repeatedly arrested, imprisoned and severely tortured by Chinese authorities, mostly for his work defending Chinese Christians. In 2006, he and a group of prominent human rights lawyers created the Association of Human Rights Attorneys for Chinese Christians. In 2007, he was arrested and spent over 50 days behind bars where he was tortured. “I was beaten so badly that my whole body began shaking uncontrollably on the floor,” Gao writes of his torture in an open letter.The Chinese government does not acknowledge that Gao is in one of their prisons, as a result his letters of encouragement are being mailed to the Chinese embassy in Washington DC.
[...]
Welcome to the Real Revolution, Alinsky Fans: It Ain’t For Wimps Or Sissies
Posted by Kyle-Anne Shiver, BJ:
How far will Democrats go to ensure that their revolution against American liberty succeeds? As for me, I put nothing past them now.
Will Collier has just explained in exacting detail the most probable explanation for how Nancy Pelosi (along with Axelrod and Emanuel) could have staged their “confrontation” with Tea Partiers outside the capitol on March 20. Claims that the N-word and spit were employed as weapons by Tea Partiers have yet to be corroborated by a single witness or video recording. This in spite of Andrew Breitbart’s bold offer of a $10,000 reward – since upped to $100,000 – for the production of a single piece of corroborating evidence.
It is extremely doubtful that such evidence will be proffered as it is almost a certainty that none of the alleged events actually occurred.
Having studied the revolutionary manuals of Saul Alinsky as well as his biography for two years now, and having documented much of the Democrats’ – especially Obama’s – use of Alinsky tactics, I see nothing whatsoever amiss in Mr. Collier’s proposition that the Democrats made it all up and that it was fully orchestrated.
[...]
World Council of Churches: The KGB Connection
by Mark D. Tooley, FrontPage:
During the 1970’s and 1980’s the Geneva-based World Council of Churches (WCC), to which hundreds of Protestant and Orthodox communions belonged, routinely espoused pro-Soviet and anti-Western stances. It even funded Marxist guerrilla groups. Critics assumed that the WCC was simply naively captive to Liberation Theology, which tried to exchange salvation for class warfare and revolution.
But a new book by a Bulgarian author reveals that the KGB and its Bulgarian intelligence affiliate exploited the Bulgarian Orthodox Church for direct influence on the WCC and the Conference of European Churches. In “Between Faith and Compromise,” Bulgarian historian Momchil Metodiev chronicles how the Soviets and their Bulgarian proxies employed the Bulgarian Orthodox and WCC to promote Soviet strategic goals globally.
[...]
A piece of paper will not bring peace to the Middle East
BY Elliott Abrams:
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned, it seems, to direct the Middle East policy of the Obama administration.
Since the Oslo Accords of 1993, 17 years of efforts under three American presidents and six Israeli prime ministers have taught five clear lessons. Each of them is being ignored by President Obama, which is why his own particular “peace process” has so greatly harmed real efforts at peace. Today the only factor uniting Palestinian, Israeli, and Arab leaders is distrust of the quality, sagacity, and reliability of American leadership in the region.
The patching-up efforts of the last two weeks were impressive, but perversely: They showed how much damage had been done and how little the administration cares about reversing it. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, against whom Obama was said to be “boiling with rage” after the Jerusalem housing announcement, got the complete slate of Washington meetings: Clinton, Gates, Biden, Obama. But the meetings were virtually secret: The White House did not permit a single photo to be taken of the Oval Office session, an unprecedented snub. Same at State: no ceremony, no press conference.
For her part, Secretary Clinton told the giant AIPAC meeting, “Our credibility in this process depends in part on our willingness to praise both sides when they are courageous, and when we don’t agree, to say so, and say so unequivocally.” Several recent Palestinian actions, she said, were “provocations” that are “wrong and must be condemned.” That was nice, but saying it to a Jewish audience in a kiss-and-make-up session in Washington fools no one, not after her famous 43-minute telephone call to Netanyahu. These “provocations . . . that must be condemned” (note the passive voice) did not after all elicit a timely call to Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas condemning them, nor did she use the Quartet meeting in Moscow on March 19 for that purpose. And general administration protestations that the United States is committed to Israel’s security and that relations are “rock solid” now carry little persuasive power; they sound like Obama’s (and for that matter Clinton’s) campaign rhetoric, and everyone knows how useful a guide to administration policy all of that proved to be.
What are the lessons the Obama team is ignoring?
[...]
Judge Andrew Napolitano on The Alex Jones show 28 March 2010
DISCLAIMER: I think Alex Jones tends toward the paranoid conspiracy theorist but that being said this interview with Napolitano is insightful.
4 D Strategy: Clinton Redux and the War Against the Tea Party Part II
by Marinka Peschmann, BG:
[Note: This is Part II in an ongoing series about the Clinton Redux, the Obama Administration and their political wars against Americans. Click here for Part I]
With the passage of Obamacare, Democrats, assisted by the media, have been claiming that participants in the Tea Party Movement are behind a rash of harassment, racism, and violence against them. But their allegations are being debunked. See here, here and here.
Once again, Americans are being pitted against Americans, irrespective of the truth, at a level we have not since the Clinton era. The significant difference, however, is under the Obama Administration, instead of singling out individuals to target, smear and destroy; entire segments of Americans are under attack.
[...]
Obama’s Defining Lie
By Terence P. Jeffrey, CNS News:
History will remember how often and how adamantly President Barack Obama insisted that the socialized medicine law he signed last week would reduce the federal deficit. It will be his defining lie.
[...]
Confronting Obama’s Messiah complex
By ISI LEIBLER, J’POST:
Intoxicated by his health care victory, it seems the president has decided to take on Netanyahu with his outrageous demands.
Seemingly intoxicated by Congress’s endorsement of his health care legislation, President Barack Obama appears to have been overcome by a Messiah complex. His actions relating to the Middle East during recent weeks oblige us to face realities about our “unshakable” alliance with the United States.
Over the past year, Israel has made major concessions to the Palestinians with zero reciprocity. Yet the US president, who seeks to engage and appease tyrants like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Syrian President Bashar Assad, exploited a bureaucratic bungle over a building zoning permit (for which Israel immediately apologized) as a pretext to ignite a massive crisis. He publicly and repeatedly humiliated the head of the only democratic state in the Middle East.
Obama demonstrated that, far from being an honest broker, he is forsaking Israel and adopting the most extreme Palestinian demands.
[...]
Morning Bell: One Nation Under Arrest
Heritage Foundation – The Foundry:
Before President Barack Obama took over the White House, no United States citizen had ever been forced by the federal government to buy a product against their will. But now, thanks to the passage of Obamacare, Americans, by dint of their mere existence, are now required to purchase Obama administration approved health insurance or face a penalty assessed through the Internal Revenue Code. This is simply unprecedented. The income tax doesn’t kick in until an American earns income. Auto liability insurance doesn’t become mandated until an American chooses to drive (and even then it’s only by the state). And farmers must first grow food before they are subject to the regulations of the Department of Agriculture. But facing federal government sanction for simply breathing? That is a troubling assault on American liberty.
[...]
Radical Labor Law Changes After Becker’s Appointment?
by John Gizzi, Human Events:
To the surprise of just about nobody in official Washington, President Obama last week made a recess appointment of radical Service Employees International Union (SEIU) General Counsel Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board. Senate Democrats were unable to overcome a Republican-led filibuster that kept Becker’s nomination, which had been approved by the Senate Education and Committee, from coming up for a floor vote, so the recess appointment of the controversial nominee had long been expected.
[...]
Wonder where the next ‘crisis’ will be manufactured
David Coughlin, AT:
The Democrat political template is very predictable and depends on a complicit liberal Mainstream Media (MSM) to cover up and obfuscate for shortcomings in policy execution. The Democrat political strategy to inundate, exaggerate, obfuscate, and inoculate policies is evident in domestic policy initiatives as well as foreign policy efforts. The process begins with a classic Cloward-Piven strategy to overwhelm the public with “crisis” after “crisis” that only Democrats can successfully address.
[...]
The mail is not sacred
Lorne Gunter, National Post:
I probably should have written this column in January, when Canada Post raised the cost of a first-class stamp by three cents–the largest single increase in the government mail carrier’s 143-year history.
Failing that, I probably should have raised the issue of the Crown corporation’s monopoly three weeks ago when the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development suggested its privatization would help raise national productivity. If there were a variety of services competing for small businesses’ mail, entrepreneurs’ input costs would be lowered, thereby raising profits, investment and job creation.
But in a column about Canada’s mail service, late delivery is to be forgiven. I’ll just do what Canada Post itself does — redefine what constitutes “on time.” The acceptable standard for in-town letter delivery used to be one day, but that became too tough for the post office to live up to, so now it’s two.
For me, then, instead of one week being the acceptable standard for newsworthiness, I’ll simply declare it to be three weeks and then this column will be as fresh as if it had been published 21 days ago.
[...]
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