RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/obamacares-tough-day-in-court?f=puball

Since its passage, a number of lawsuits have attempted to undermine Obamacare as a law, with varying degrees of success. The individual mandate challenge failed before the Supreme Court in 2012, despite what seemed like positive reception to the challenge during oral argument. Hobby Lobby went before the Supreme Court on March 25 to challenge the religious liberty implications of the contraception mandate portion of the law.

While the media have largely focused on the Hobby Lobby challenge, a few blocks away, the D.C. Court of Appeals was hearing another argument about Obamacare-one that, if passed, could well have the effect of ending this law as we know it. And it has liberals running scared.

In the piece “Forget Hobby Lobby. The Bigger Legal Threat to Obamacare Still Has Life,” Alec Macgillis writes for the New Republic, “If the contraception challenge succeeds, it just means that that one sliver of Obamacare is struck down. If this other challenge succeeds, both sides agree that it would blow up the entire law.”

The argument for the plaintiffs is as follows: In order to provide the 60th vote, which was necessary to get the bill through the Senate, Ben Nelson, the then-Democratic senator from Nebraska, insisted on a clause that said that federal subsidies could only go to people who signed up on exchanges set up by the states. The purpose was to incentivize states to actually set up exchanges.

Then, the plaintiffs argue, the IRS wrote a rule in 2012 which reinterpreted the law to say that federal exchanges could give out subsidies as well. “The alternative policy under the IRS’ rewriting of the rule creates a bizarre circumstance where it’s almost impossible to fulfill the Act’s purpose of having state-run exchanges, because it eliminates any tangible incentive for these people to go ahead and adopt the exchanges,” argued Michael A. Carvin, the plaintiffs’ attorney, before the Court of Appeals on March 25. “So they’ve created a situation which has predictably resulted in only 14 states doing what Congress clearly wanted 50 states to do, which is to set up their exchanges.”

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/fjordman/natos-next-secretary-general-jens-stoltenberg/print/

NATO’s Next Secretary General: Jens Stoltenberg

Posted By Fjordman On March 27, 2014 @ 12:40 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | No Comments

The Norwegian press has been buzzing with rumors lately that Jens Stoltenberg — who until the autumn of 2013 was the Prime Minister of Norway — is a serious candidate for becoming the new Secretary General of the Western defense alliance NATO. The former Danish PM Anders Fogh Rasmussen is stepping down from this position later in 2014.

Apparently, German Chancellor Angela Merkel proposed Stoltenberg for the job. Merkel made her proposal directly to US President Barack Obama, who agreed that he was a good choice for the role. Stoltenberg allegedly spent months discussing the role with the US Secretary of State John Kerry and his security advisor Susan E. Rice while he was in New York, ostensibly in his role as UN Special Envoy for Climate Change.

This is not a done deal yet, however. One of Mr. Stoltenberg’s presumed rivals for the job as head of NATO is José Barroso, Portugal’s former Prime Minister and also a former Communist. In 2014 Barroso will be stepping down as President of the European Commission, the unelected and unaccountable government for half a billion people in the EU. Barroso has held this job for ten years. Other possible NATO candidates who have been mentioned are Franco Frattini, Italy’s former Foreign Minister, and Radoslaw Sikorski, Poland’s current Foreign Minister.

The decision on who will become the next formal head of NATO has thus not been made yet. However, Jens Stoltenberg himself is taking this possibility so seriously that there are already rumors that he might soon be leaving his current position as the leader of the Norwegian Labour Party.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obama-and-putin-two-totalitarians-one-game/print/

War is what Obama does best. The War on Women. War on Poverty. Class War. Race War.

Walk up to a union member snoozing on a bus, a Latino man crossing the street, a gay cowboy poet earning minimum wage, and community organize him along with a few hundred thousand others into the latest battle in the social justice war that never ends.

“Fight for card check, for birth control, for gay marriage and illegal alien amnesty.”

Every time a battle is won and an election ends, a new source of social conflict is dug up and deployed for war.

As a domestic radical, divisiveness is his natural weapon. Obama plays on fragmented identities, assembling coalitions to wage war against some phantom white heteronormative patriarchy consisting of a middle class barely able to pay its bills.

It’s governing by terrorism. The bombs are ideological. The objective is a constant state of war.

The war that never ends has been good to Obama. Its various clashes have given him two terms and very little media scrutiny. They have given him a post-American army of identity groups with few mutual interests except radical politics and government dependency.

While Obama profits from stirring up conflicts at home, making it easy for him to light some fuses and walk away, he loses from conflicts abroad.

A Reaganesque president could have turned the Syrian Civil War or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine into an approval rating bonanza. Foreign conflicts pay off politically for presidents even when they aren’t involved. But that’s not true of Obama who is congenitally incapable of showing strength and reacts to a foreign crisis by playing for time while struggling to resolve the ideological betrayal of using American power abroad.

Internationally, it’s the KGB agent, not the community organizer, who profits from conflict. Putin plays Obama’s role in the world community, dividing and conquering, doing to America internationally what Obama does to it domestically.

Obama uses a phantom patriarchy, a phantom white privilege, a phantom 1 percent, to mobilize a coalition for his own agenda. Putin uses the United States as a phantom enemy to organize a coalition of “oppressed” tyrants from Belarus to Venezuela to North Korea.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

The post-American world will be many things, but multilateral isn’t one of them. There will be no world government and international organizations will be good for little except sucking up the last drops of wealth and prestige of the United States. It will be a chaotic place with everyone out for themselves.

The Cold War map of the world divided into two camps was simple and clear. The post-American
world will be a much more ambiguous place. Instead of two global ideological alliances based around two world powers, there will be three post-ideological powers, no longer global in scope, and one worldwide ideological alliance.

The United States, Russia and China are post-ideological states. Russia and China have abandoned Communism. The United States is even abandoning nationalism; to say nothing of capitalism, democracy or freedom. Its rulers cling to scraps of global leftist ideology that isolate them from their own people.

Russia and China are run by powerful corrupt elites who emerged from the old Communist order to build economic oligarchies enforced by the ruthless use of force. The United States is increasingly run by an oligarchy of ideological bureaucrats, corrupt technocrats and leftist academics that has a distant resemblance to the USSR and the PRC; but its long march through the institutions hasn’t turned fully totalitarian yet. That may be less than a generation away.

Russia, China and the United States are all demographically unstable. Russia and the United States are both on track to become majority-minority countries. China’s demographic disaster will be the outcome of its one child policies, gender abortion and its war on the countryside. The United States will probably weather its demographic problems better than Russia or China, because the former faces a fatal Muslim demographic takeover and the latter a conflict that will tear its society apart, but like Russia and China, the demographic crisis in the United States will be exacerbated by the lack of common bonds to see it through a period of social stress.

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4835/israel_palestine_peace_talks_head_for_inevitable_failure
Nick Gray is Director, Christian Middle East Watch, a British organisation dedicated to objective and factual discussion of Middle Eastern issues, especially of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Nick, who is a regular contributor to The Commentator, blogs at cmewonline.com
Israel-Palestine peace talks head for inevitable failure
A whole generation of Palestinians has grown up under PA-sanctioned incitement to hate Israelis and Jews and has been encouraged to continue “the resistance”. That’s no basis for any kind of peace

Like two naughty school boys, Bibi Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas have, in the last couple of weeks, been called to the Head Master’s study in Washington for a stern talking to. No doubt, both were told “could do better”, but their respective reactions to The “framework” presented to them will surely have left the gap between the protagonists as wide as ever.

We might have expected some immediate follow-up from John Kerry, but one or two other issues have cropped up around the world that need his attention first. The red lines on both sides must have left the State Department frantic to find some miraculous way to rescue these doomed talks before the end of April.

After so many years of conflict and twenty years of “peace process”, did John Kerry really believe he was ever going to wrap things up in nine months with no loose ends?

In international conflict resolution situations the spotlight is naturally on the lead players; in this case Messrs Netanyahu and Abbas. The teams behind them doing the real work seldom get much recognition but their bosses get the credit or the blame in the end-game.

What the media-led frenzie usually forgets is that neither leader acts alone. Both Netanyahu and Abbas have to answer to their political constituencies for decisions they make — decisions which thoseconstituencies can reject, swiftly returning us to square one.

The hard truth is that neither of the two leaders can accept what is on offer from Washington. Aside from the fact that the two negotiating teams have not spoken face to face for weeks, both have come under immense pressure to perform what is essentially face-saving for Obama and Kerry.

http://americanthinker.com/assets/3rd_party/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/03/the_coming_paradigm_shift_on_climate_.html
The just-published NIPCC reports may lead to a paradigm shift about what or who causes current climate changes. All the evidence suggests that Nature rules the climate – not Man.

Watch for it: We may be on the threshold of a tipping point in climate history. No, I’m not talking about a tipping point in the sense that the Earth will be covered with ice or become hellishly hot. I’m talking about a tipping point in our views of what controls the climate — whether it’s mainly humans or whether it’s mainly natural. It makes an enormous difference in climate policy: Do we try to mitigate, at huge cost, or do we merely adapt to natural changes — as our ancestors did for many millennia?

Such tipping points occur quite frequently in science. I have personally witnessed two paradigm shifts where world scientific opinion changed rapidly — almost overnight. One was in Cosmology, where the “Steady State” theory of the Universe was replaced by the “Big Bang.” This shift was confirmed by the discovery of the “microwave background radiation,” which has already garnered Nobel prizes, and will likely get more.

The other major shift occurred in Continental Drift. After being denounced by the Science Establishment, the hypothesis of Alfred Wegener, initially based on approximate relations between South America and Africa, was dramatically confirmed by the discovery of “sea-floor spreading.”

These shifts were possible because there were no commercial or financial interests — and they did not involve the public and politicians. But climate is a different animal: The financial stakes are huge — in the trillions of dollars, and affect energy policy, and indeed the economic wellbeing of every inhabitant of the developed and developing world. For example, the conversion into ethanol fuel of a substantial portion of the US corn crop raised the price of tortillas in Mexico and caused food riots.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/374292/print

On January 23, 1980, Jimmy Carter delivered his final State of the Union address. It was a difficult time: Iran held American diplomats captive, and the Soviet Union had just invaded Afghanistan. “As we meet tonight,” the president told the assembled members of Congress, “it has never been more clear that the state of our Union depends on the state of the world.”

Carter, who had devoted the first part of his presidency to domestic reforms and arms control, was now prepared to act decisively; his eyes had been opened by the Russian move into Afghanistan, which he described as a “radical and aggressive step.” He imposed a number of stiff economic sanctions on the USSR, from denying fishing rights to shutting down access to high-technology equipment, and asked the Europeans not to “replace our embargoed items.” He articulated a “Carter Doctrine,” asserting that the United States would not countenance disproportionate Russian influence in the Middle East. But most of all, he moved to swiftly rebuild U.S. military strength, creating the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force, the precursor to today’s U.S. Central Command, and proposing a 5 percent annual increase in defense spending — the precursor to the Reagan-era buildup.

But where Carter moved to restore the sinews of America’s weakened armed forces, today we adhere to the constraints of a Budget Control Act that is steadily eviscerating a battle-tested professional force. Carter, in the final year of what would prove to be a single term as president, took steps to create new options for future commanders-in-chief. Barack Obama, with three years left, appears resolutely committed to foreclosing American military options.

However, thanks to the constitutional separation of powers and the competition of our political parties, the president’s weaknesses need not be the final word on such matters. It is the duty of Congress “to raise and support Armies,” “to provide and maintain a Navy,” and to provide for the common defense. And it is the duty of the loyal opposition to make the arguments that might correct the course of failing policies.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/374293/print

Climate science moves in one direction, the AAAS moves in the other.

Paul C. Knappenberger is assistant director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute.

In its new report on the risks from human-caused climate change, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) sets climate science back rather than “advancing” it. The report, counterfactually titled “What We Know,” is more an account of what the scientific community thought it knew about a decade ago than an up-to-date telling of current understanding.

Not surprisingly, the group ignores the fact that climate science is moving in a direction that increasingly suggests that the risk of extreme climate change is lower than has been previously assessed. Instead, the AAAS continues to play up the chance of extreme outcomes with the intent of scaring us into taking action — action that would have little impact on either future climate change or the risks therefrom.

The AAAS largely appeals to its own authority in trying to persuade us to believe its conclusions and yet informs its authority with old and obsolete science.

Nowhere is this more true than in its justification for highlighting the risks of “abrupt climate change” and in its faith in the ability of climate models to provide reliable and informed guidance regarding the probability of extreme climate changes’ occurring in the future.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/374303/print

Transparency and truth are the fuels that run sophisticated civilizations. Without them, the state grinds to a halt. Lack of trust — not barbarians on the frontier, global warming or cooling, or even epidemics — doomed civilizations of the past, from imperial Rome to the former Soviet Union.

The United States can withstand the untruth of a particular presidential administration if the permanent government itself is honest. Dwight Eisenhower lied about the downed U-2 spy plane inside the Soviet Union. Almost nothing Richard Nixon said about Watergate was true. Intelligence reports of vast stockpiles of WMD in Iraq proved as accurate as Bill Clinton’s assertion that he never had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky.

Presidents fib. The nation gets outraged. The independent media dig out the truth. And so the system of trust repairs itself.

What distinguishes democracies from tinhorn dictatorships and totalitarian monstrosities are our permanent meritocratic government bureaus that remain nonpartisan and honestly report the truth.

The Benghazi, Associated Press, and National Security Agency scandals are scary, but not as disturbing as growing doubts about the honesty of permanent government itself.

It is no longer crackpot to doubt the once impeccable and nonpartisan IRS. When it assured the public that it was not making decisions about tax-exempt status based on politics, it lied. One of its top commissioners, Lois Lerner, resigned and invoked the Fifth Amendment.

A system of voluntary tax reporting rests on trust. If the IRS itself is untruthful, will it be able to expect truthful compliance from taxpayers?

Many doubt the officially reported government unemployment rates. That statistic is vital in assessing economic growth and is of enormous political importance in the way citizens vote.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303802104579451103019884322?mod=Opinion_newsreel_1

Obamacare is the albatross being carried by almost every single Democrat Congressman and Senator running in the midterm 2014 elections and the Republican challengers- from moderate to Tea Party conservatives consider this a priority issue…..stay tuned….rsk

One by one, the myths of the Affordable Care Act have been revealed. When the curtain on open enrollment falls on March 31, the last remaining big myth of ObamaCare will be fully exposed: The individual mandate has failed.

After a last-ditch effort with President Obama himself encouraging “young invincibles” to sign up before the deadline, the administration is scrambling to boost enrollment. On Tuesday, the White House announced that people who applied for coverage on the federal health-insurance exchange will have until mid-April to finish the paperwork.

The mandate was supposed to be the administration’s magical elixir for the assorted shortcomings of the Affordable Care Act. Disappointing early enrollment numbers? More people will sign up eventually to avoid mandate penalties. Potential premium spikes for government-approved coverage that must ignore cost differences in the age- and health-related risks of enrollees? Forcing young and healthy individuals to buy coverage will spread out the costs.

But the individual mandate was never strong enough to force millions of Americans to buy insurance they did not want or could not afford. Last week, the Obama administration estimated that five million Americans had signed up thus far for insurance on the exchanges, falling short of original projections by the administration and the Congressional Budget Office that there would be seven million first-year enrollees. Yet even the five million figure needs to be discounted by at least another 20% to account for people who fail to pay for their first month’s premium, according to insurers’ estimates of early enrollees.