RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/359861/print

In a few days, Obamacare’s October 1 launch date finally will have arrived. Ever since its passage, supporters of the law have made countless attempts to convince the American people of its viability, dismissing predictions of lost jobs, decreased hours, and rising costs, among others.

Yet from major corporations to local mom-and-pop shops, from entire states to tiny school districts, a wide range of companies and institutions have seen Obamacare’s negative impact on their workers, budgets, and production. Here are 100 examples of how Obamacare is falling short of what was promised.

(Note: Some items on this list came via Investor’s Business Daily and the Heritage Foundation.)

Corporations

1. IBM
Earlier this month, the computer giant, once famed for its paternalism, announced it would remove 110,000 of its Medicare-eligible retirees from the company’s health insurance and give them subsidies to purchase coverage through the Obamacare exchanges. Retirees fear that they will not get the level of coverage they are used to, and that the options will be bewildering.

2. Delta Air Lines
In a letter to employees, Delta Air Lines revealed that the Affordable Care Act will cost the company about $100 million next year alone. The airline said that in addition to several other changes, it would have to drop its specially crafted insurance plans for pilots because the “Cadillac tax” on luxurious health plans has made them too expensive.

3. UPS
Fifteen thousand employees’ spouses will no longer be able to use UPS’s health-care plan because they have access to coverage elsewhere. The “costs associated with the Affordable Care Act have made it increasingly difficult to continue providing the same level of health care benefits to our employees at an affordable cost,” the delivery giant said in a company memo. The move is expected to save the company $60 million next year.

4. Caterpillar Inc.
In the law’s first year, the machinery manufacturer estimated before its passage, Obamacare would add more than $100 million in health-care costs. “We can ill afford cost increases that place us at a disadvantage versus our global competitors,” a Caterpillar executive wrote lawmakers, saying that the law would not meet the goal of providing good, inexpensive health care for all Americans.

5. SeaWorld
SeaWorld used to let part-time employees work up to 32 hours per week, but the company is dropping the limit to 28 hours to keep them under the 30-hour threshold at which it would be required to provide health insurance under Obamacare. More than 80 percent of the company’s thousands of employees are part-time and/or seasonal.

Medical-Device Tax

6. Stryker Corp.
Stryker Corp., a Michigan medical-device manufacturer, laid off about 1,000 employees earlier this year due to the Affordable Care Act’s 2.3 percent excise tax on medical devices. The company estimated that the tax would cost it approximately $100 million next year. “Stryker remains significantly concerned with the upcoming medical device excise tax and its negative impact on jobs and innovation and will continue to work with Congress to try to repeal the tax,” said the company’s CEO.

7. Welch Allyn
The manufacturer announced that it will have to cut approximately 10 percent of its 2,750 employees, 275 in all, because of the medical-device tax. The company also plans to consolidate manufacturing centers, moving some operations from Beaverton, Ore., to its facility in Skaneateles Falls, N.Y.

8. Smith & Nephew
The British company informed nearly 100 employees at its Massachusetts and Tennessee facilities that they would be laid off “in order to absorb [the] cost burden” of the tax on medical devices.

Hospitals, Nonprofits

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3998/german-elections

Because of the “5% hurdle,” Germany’s new coalition will be to the left of the previous coalition, while voters had clearly indicated they wanted German to turn to the right.

The German elections had two important consequences, one predicted, the other one unpredicted. As expected, the number of Islamic members of the Bundestag, the German Parliament, has increased.

The Christian-Democrat CDU of Chancellor Angela Merkel now has its first Muslim parliamentarian. Cemile Giousouf, the 35-year old daughter of a Turkish immigrant, was elected in Hagen, a city in the industrial Ruhr area with a foreign population of 40%.

Germany has 800,000 Turkish voters. The Turks make up the largest ethnic group within Germany’s Muslim population of some 4 million people, Previously, the Turks had five parliamentarians out of 630 Bundestag members; in the 22 September general elections, this number more than doubled to eleven. Ten of them belong to the left or far-left – five are members of the Social-Democrat SPD, three of the Green Party, and two of the Communist Die Linke (Left Party) — and one is with the center-right CDU.

The number of Bundestag members with an immigrant background rose from 21 to 34, with Die Linke having the highest percentage of immigrant politicians in their ranks followed by the Greens.

Ms. Giousouf’s Islamic convictions — her “religious otherness” as she calls it — did not pose problems for a party that claims to be founded on Christian-Democrat principles. Her candidacy was challenged, however, by another female candidate on grounds of seniority. Despite the other candidate having been active in the party for three decades, the CDU leadership preferred to give the prominent position on the party list to Giousouf because of her ethnic background. Ms. Giousouf defended this decision by stating, “If we immigrants are forced to put up campaign posters for the next 30 years, there won’t be any [immigrant] representatives in the Bundestag.”

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/sep/30/editorial-words-arent-enough/

Muslim persecution of everyone who is not a Muslim that simmered for centuries in the Middle East now has come to a full boil in certain places. Religious thugs looking for justification for their evil cannot be allowed to hide within the pages of the Koran to excuse or justify murder. The West must realize that the outrage of decency won’t be appeased by soft words.

The Sept. 21 terrorist attack on the Westgate mall in Nairobi, Kenya, put brutality on open display. Scores of armed jihadists surprised shoppers in the upscale retail complex favored by Westerners, spraying gunfire and throwing grenades. Trapped families were questioned to determine whether they were Muslim; if not, they were tortured, and 72 of them were killed. Sixty are still missing.

The massacre was carried out by al-Shabab, a radical Muslim youth organization that swears allegiance to al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri. The group is rooted in Somalia, and where they can they impose Shariah law; women accused of adultery — accused, not convicted — are stoned to death. The hands of suspected thieves are hacked off.

The day after the Nairobi massacre, the Taliban attacked a 130-year-old Christian church in Peshawar, Pakistan. Two suicide bombers detonated bombs amid 400 congregants of All Saints Church as the Sunday service ended, killing 83 and wounding 150 others. It was the deadliest attack on Christians in the faith’s long history in Pakistan. “[Christians] are the enemies of Islam,” a Taliban spokesman told Reuters, “therefore, we target them. We will continue our attacks on non-Muslims on Pakistani land.”

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/sep/30/pruden-a-president-as-clueless-as-ever/ Barack Obama is no Bill Clinton in the pantheon of romancers and boudoir bandits, but he is the president, after all, and his vain search for love in all the wrong places is enough to break a heart of stone. He just can’t believe that Hasan Rouhani, the new president of Iran, is just […]

Steven Emerson on The Sordid World of CAIR — on The Glazov Gang

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/steven-emerson-on-his-face-off-with-jihad-on-the-glazov-gang/print/

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Steven Emerson, the Executive Director of The Investigative Project on Terrorism.

In this blockbuster episode, he unveiled The Sordid World of CAIR:

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/edward-alexander/anti-zionism-arrives-in-disguise-at-indiana-u/print/

Competition for the most licentious definition of the term “criticism of Israel” conceived by the mind of man has for many years been intense. Given the number of academic scribblers with febrile imaginations who are profoundly troubled by having to share the globe with the state of Israel, this should come as no surprise.

Intifada II, during which Palestinian Arab suicide bombers, pogromists, and lynch mobs slaughtered over a thousand people (most of them Israeli Jews) and wounded thousands more, was euphemistically described (in Judaism Magazine, no less) by a Vassar professor of Jewish Studies as “a critique of Zionism.”

A Panglossian sociologist writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education assured readers that “calls to destroy Israel, or to throw it into the Mediterranean Sea…are not evidence of hatred of Jews,” but merely “reflect a quarrel with the State of Israel.”

When questions were raised in November 2003 about the indecency of Harvard and Columbia honoring and playing host to Oxford poetaster Tom Paulin after he had urged that Jews living in Judea/Samaria “should be shot dead” and announced that he “never believed that Israel had the right to exist at all,” his apologists in Cambridge and Morningside Heights defended his right “to criticize Israeli policy.”

The learned Swedish Chancellor of Justice (Goran Lambertz) in 2006 ruled that repeated calls from the Grand Mosque of Stockholm to “kill the Jews” by dispatching suicide bombers to Israel were not unlawful racial incitement to murder. Rather, ruled this Swedish Solomon, they

should be judged differently and therefore be regarded as permissible because, although highly critical of the Jews, they were used by one side in an ongoing…conflict where calls to arms and insults are part of the everyday climate in the rhetoric that surrounds it.

But Shaul Magid of Indiana University has beaten all these redefiners of “criticism” to mean the advocacy of politicide (for Israel): he is ahead of the pack, and has no second in this race for obfuscation. Here is the official description of a course that this “chaired” professor of Jewish Studies and Religion is at the moment planning to offer in Bloomington. In happier times this great university was called “the Athens of Monroe County”; if Magid, a tribune of “post-Judaism,” makes further headway there, it may be renamed New Chelm:

Jewish Critics of Zionism (3 cr.)
Shaul Magid

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/rich-arrogant-and-stupid/print/

The modern West demonstrates a phenomenon unknown in history––unprecedented wealth, technology, and access to information combined with abject stupidity. Wisdom once known by every village explainer and cracker-barrel crank has been discarded and replaced with phony “sciences” making claims about human nature and behavior that are based on nothing other than false assumptions, political ideology, and wishful thinking. Whether it’s foreign policy, managing the economy, or teaching the young, our leaders institute policies that violate the traditional wisdom accumulated by generations of human experience.

The debacle unfolding in Syria is not a consequence of a failure of complex knowledge known by “experts,” or of mismanagement of abstruse technical diplomatic procedures. It’s a failure to understand human nature as well as illiterates did in the past. Common sense tells us that any negotiation with an adversary depends on a credible threat of serious force. Sometimes violence must be used just to demonstrate a willingness to back up words with deeds and convince skeptics you mean what you say. Likewise a treaty is only as good as the commitment to enforce its provisions with violence. A serial failure to do so, particularly when those failures are accompanied by empty bluster or passive-aggressive diplo-speak, invites more aggression and violations. History is full of examples of this simple truth. The 20’s and 30’s of the last century illustrate aggressor after aggressor brushing aside treaty obligations and the bluster of the League of Nations while pursuing their aggression––Japan in China, Italy in Ethiopia, and of course Germany in the Rhineland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia.

More recently, North Korea, a failed thugocracy surviving only by dint of Chinese life-support, brilliantly exploited the unwillingness of the West to back up its threats with force. Just peruse the timeline of the West’s attempts to stop North Korea’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, and the serial failure of diplomacy unsupported by credible force becomes obvious. Yet despite that glaring example of the wages of ignoring common sense, Obama––hard on his humiliating appeasement of Syria camouflaged by U.N. “inspections”––is now playing diplomatic footsie with Iran’s alleged “moderate” President Hassan Rouhani. This would be the same Rouhani who a few years ago publicly bragged about using diplomatic gabfests to buy time for advancing Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Obama and other foreign policy naïfs think that his threat of an “unbelievably small” cruise-missile fireworks show frightened the Iranian regime––the same terrorist gang with American blood up to its elbows––into this charm offensive. The truth is Obama’s patent willingness to perfume his failure of nerve with “negotiations” convinced the Iranians that he will not use force to stop their nuclear program, and that throwing him a few diplomatic bones might win them a relaxation of sanctions for very little cost.

Why do we do ignore traditional wisdom the way we do? Because we can afford to indulge the internationalist fantasy that war is an anomaly from our uncivilized past, and that all peoples want what we want––peace, leisure, and prosperity––and are eager to avoid conflict with diplomatic words in order to avoid military deeds. Common sense and a knowledge of history show that in reality, many peoples want something else––honor, fidelity to their gods, domination of others––and are willing, if not eager to use violence to achieve these goals.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/why-terrorists-kill/
Guns don’t kill people. Ideas do. Islam, like Nazism or Communism, is a set of weaponized ideas.

The Westgate attack in Kenya with its accompanying butchery of every man, woman and child in a shopping mall who couldn’t name Mohammed’s mother is being met with baffled mutterings about “senseless violence.”

But there’s nothing senseless about the violence that took place.

Terrorists kill because it’s what they do. Plumbers unclog toilets. Computer companies sell you software. Terrorist organizations kill people.

Al-Shabaab’s real audience wasn’t the Americans watching CNN and trying to make sense of the violence. It was the millionaires and billionaires in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar who can turn any terrorist group from wannabes into RPG toting superstars racing through the desert on last year’s model Toyota pickup trucks with crates full of night vision equipment.

You may think of the news as a collection of tragedies. To the dozens of Al-Qaeda franchises and assorted Islamist terrorist groups; it’s American Idol. The CNN coverage of their attack is their audition on a worldwide reality show that shows off their skills and makes them famous.

Not every terrorist group is lucky enough to have its own Bin Laden; its Saudi sugar daddy with the cash and the cachet to get them the money they need in exchange for being the one to appear on camera and proclaim “Death to America”. And the Jihadists in Afghanistan fighting over Osama at times nearly killed each other over access to their effete money man.

Terrorists kill people “senselessly” because a spectacular terrorist attack gets them noticed. It sets them apart from every other Islamist terrorist group that throws together a name and waves a flag with a bunch of swords on it while vowing to drive out all the infidels. The 12 PM CNN audience may not applaud, but the Al Jazeera audience does. And it’s the one that matters.

Muslim terrorist organizations fight to impose Islamic law. But what does that really mean, aside from the little girls wearing Burkas and the demolished churches?

http://spectator.org/archives/2013/09/30/win-or-go-home Three cheers for the crazies. You know who they are. They’re Republicans in Congress who understand what Brent Bozell said about Obamacare: if you fund it, you own it. These are the same people who led Washington Post columnist David Ignatius to cry crocodile tears for John Boehner because he’s unable to lead them […]

http://www.algemeiner.com/2013/09/30/is-a-house-a-home-in-hebron/

Amid a week of Middle East turbulence, with the roller coaster ride of Syrian disintegration momentarily offset by a telephone conversation between the Iranian and American presidents, the fate of a house in Hebron may seem inconsequential.

But Hebron is no ordinary place. Abraham’s purchase of the Machpelah cave as the burial site for Sarah was the first parcel of land owned by the Jewish people in their promised homeland. The most ancient Jewish city in the world, long antedating Jerusalem as a sacred site for Jews and preceding it as the capital of David’s kingdom, Hebron has a unique place in Jewish history. It has remained a revered holy site, and a place of Jewish habitation, ever since.

One week ago the murder of IDF Sgt. Gal Kobi, shot in the neck by a suspected Palestinian sniper at an army checkpoint near the Machpelah cave, thrust Hebron back into the news. To be sure, the murder of Jews there is hardly novel. In 1929 a wave of Arab rioting, when sixty-seven Jews were brutally slaughtered, decimated the centuries-old Jewish community.

Restored to Jewish habitation by religious Zionist settlers after the Six-Day War, the Hebron community now numbers some seven hundred residents and two hundred yeshiva students. They inhabit the restored Jewish neighborhood adjacent to the Machpelah holy site, which Muslims enclosed inside a mosque and prohibited Jews from entering for seven centuries until 1967.

The murder of Sgt. Kobi revived sorrowful memories of the sniper killing of seven-month-old Shalhevet Pas in the Avraham Avinu quarter of Hebron in 2001. Responding to that tragedy, Hebron Jews reclaimed and inhabited abandoned property purchased for the Jewish community a century earlier – but eventually they were forced out by their own government.