RUTHFULLY YOURS

By Andrew Puzder

Dec. 27 (Bloomberg) — I am not an expert on health-care
policy, but I do know something about job creation. So when a
House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee asked me to
testify about the effect on employers of the Patient Protection
and Affordable Care Act, sometimes known as Obamacare, I thought
I could offer some insights.

As I told the committee in a July 28 hearing, it is
critical that Congress does a good job of balancing the benefits
of new legislation against the costs of that legislation. That
process begins with recognizing that laws like Obamacare come at
a price.

Our company, CKE Restaurants Inc., employs about 21,000
people (our franchisees employ 49,000 more) in Carl’s Jr. and
Hardee’s restaurants. For months, we have been working with
Mercer Health & Benefits LLC, our health-care consultant, to
identify Obamacare’s potential financial impact on CKE. Mercer
estimated that when the law is fully implemented our health-care
costs will increase about $18 million a year. That would put our
total health-care costs at $29.8 million, a 150 percent increase
from the roughly $12 million we spent last year.

http://www.hudson-ny.org/2700/got-missiles

Classified Ad: Missing 69 Patriot missiles and 160 tons of explosives? If so, contact traffic police, Kotka, Finland. Iran, don’t bother.

Dock workers in the port of Kotka were suspicious of ill-packed crates labeled “fireworks” on a ship bound from Germany to Shanghai. While adding to the existing cargo on the British-owned Thor Liberty, they found the explosive picric acid in open containers as well as the Patriots. Picric acid is a propellant (making one wonder where the radars and command-and-control systems are that complete the Patriot package). Traffic safety authorities took control of the ship and Finnish officials are questioning the two senior officers.

The head of Finland’s National Bureau of Investigation said that although there are customs documents showing a valid transaction and a legal end-user – South Korea – there are at least two crimes involved: the shippers did not request permission to transit missiles and explosives via Finland; and the explosives were not properly packed and safeguarded.

http://www.hudson-ny.org/2707/nigeria-church-attacks

Several churches in northern Nigeria were bombed December 25, in what has been described as “Nigeria’s blackest Christmas ever.” The attacks, perpetrated by the Muslim militant group Boko Haram, killed at least 39 people, “the majority dying on the steps of a Catholic church [in Madalla near the capital of Abuja] after celebrating Christmas Mass as blood pooled in dust from a massive explosion.” Charred bodies and dismembered limbs lay scattered around the destroyed church.

The world, as usual, offered its wishy-washy, half-hearted condemnations. Although Boko Haram has been bellowing its straightforward goals for over a decade — enforcing Sharia law and subjugating, if not eliminating Nigeria’s Christians — the word so many Western leaders, from the White House to the Vatican, selected to characterize this latest Muslim attack on Christians was “senseless”— which implies no motive, no goal, no rhyme, no reason. Reading the mainstream media’s coverage of these attacks, one walks away without any sense of continuity or context.

http://townhall.com/columnists/michellemalkin/2011/12/28/the_year_in_obama_scandals__and_scandal_deniers/print With 2011 drawing to a close, it is time to account. As an early-and-often chronicler of Chicago-on-the-Potomac, I am amazed at the stubborn and clingy persistence of President Barack Obama’s snowblowers in the media. See no scandal, hear no scandal, speak no scandal. Dartmouth College professor Brendan Nyhan asserted in May — while Operation […]

When “nation building” and utmost sensitivity to Islam, and a winning hearts and minds strategy and so called “counterinsurgency” creates rules of engagement that put our own soldiers in harm’s way….it just becomes “aw shucks.”….rsk

A BRIEF EXPLANATION OF THE CONCEPT OF SHOCK AND AWE:

Shock and awe (technically known as rapid dominance) is a military doctrine based on the use of overwhelming power, dominant battlefield awareness, dominant maneuvers, and spectacular displays of force to paralyze an adversary’s perception of the battlefield and destroy its will to fight. The doctrine was written by Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade in 1996 and is a product of the National Defense University of the United States.

Rapid dominance is defined by its authors, Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade, as attempting “to affect the will, perception, and understanding of the adversary to fight or respond to our strategic policy ends through imposing a regime of Shock and Awe.”[1] Further, rapid dominance will impose this overwhelming level of Shock and Awe against an adversary on an immediate or sufficiently timely basis to paralyze its will to carry on . . . [to] seize control of the environment and paralyze or so overload an adversary’s perceptions and understanding of events that the enemy would be incapable of resistance at the tactical and strategic levels.[2]

Ullman and Wade identify four vital characteristics of rapid dominance: “near total or absolute knowledge and understanding of self, adversary, and environment; rapidity and timeliness in application; operational brilliance in execution; and (near) total control and signature management of the entire operational environment.”[5] Shock and awe is most consistently used by Ullman and Wade as the effect that rapid dominance seeks to impose upon an adversary. It is the desired state of helplessness and lack of will. It can be induced, they write, by direct force applied to command and control centers, selective denial of information and dissemination of disinformation, overwhelming combat force, and rapidity of action.

http://spectator.org/archives/2011/12/27/dissolving-iraq/print
“Forseeably and inevitably, Iraq is falling apart. It’s the bonfire of the neocons burning brightly in Baghdad.”

What are our permanent interests? Conservatives will need to get it right before Election Day.

Less than two weeks ago, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta presided over the final withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. Since then, Iraq has been dissolving as quickly as an Alka-Seltzer tablet in warm water.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government issued an arrest warrant for the Deputy PM, Tareq al-Hashemi, promptly after the last U.S. truck convoy rolled across the border into Kuwait. Maliki, a Shiite, accuses Hashemi, a Sunni, of involvement in terrorism. Hashemi fled to the north, taking refuge in the Kurdish region under the protection of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani. Hashemi has admitted that some of his guards were involved in attacks, but denied involvement and refused to return to Baghdad for trial on the ground that Maliki exercised political control over the courts.

Last Thursday, in a series of coordinated attacks, more than seventy people were killed in Iraq. The Thursday attacks spurred speculation that al Qaeda in Iraq had been revived, though other terrorist groups were probably capable of the planning and coordination that had previously been al-Qaeda’s trademark. Another attack, a suicide bombing at Iraq’s Interior Ministry, killed at least six the day after Christmas.

http://frontpagemag.com/2011/12/27/obama-shifting-to-mideast-conflict-management/

Obama Shifting to Mideast ‘Conflict Management’? Posted By P. David Hornik

Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister Moshe Yaalon, a deep thinker and close colleague of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, claimed to a Jerusalem audience this week that Israel has talked some sense to President Barack Obama about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“We convinced the American administration,” Yaalon said, “that there is no way to solve the conflict in one or two years…. The US is trying to manage the conflict now, rather than solve it.”

Reporter Gil Hoffman notes that “there has been no public indication that the Americans have given up their hope of solving the conflict, and the US helped draft the Quartet position that aims to solve the conflict by the end of 2012.”

And just a few weeks ago Defense Secretary Leon Panetta sounded as sure as ever that the conflict could be solved if the parties would just “get to the damn table” and Israel would “reach out” to its neighbors and be more pliable.

Yaalon, for his part, gave Obama less credit on Iran, saying that “France and Great Britain are leading the West now in calling for crippling sanctions on the Iranian central bank and preventing Iran from exporting oil, while the US is unfortunately leading from behind.”

A Terrorist Returns Posted By Matthew Vadum

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2011/12/27/a-terrorist-returns/

Convicted terrorist collaborator Lori Berenson is fortunate that in the United States citizenship is not a license that expires upon bad behavior.

Berenson is back in America for the holidays, nearly two decades after the trust fund baby left to advance communism in Latin America.

A Peruvian court convicted her in 1996 of aiding a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla group that even now aspires to overthrow Peru’s government by force, but the 42-year-old New Yorker is free on parole. She was granted permission to visit the U.S. and has promised to return to Peru next month and remain there until her sentence is completed.

Berenson was paroled in 2010 after serving 15 years of a 20 year prison term for collaborating with the Movimiento Revolucionario Tupac Amaru (Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement) or MRTA. Along with Shining Path, a brutal Maoist guerrilla group, MRTA has long waged war against Peru’s democratically elected government.

http://frontpagemag.com/2011/12/27/diplomatic-supping-with-jihadist-devils-2/print/

While Western diplomats wring their hands over trivial insults to Islam, a slow-motion genocide of Christians has been unfolding in the Muslim world. The latest attack occurred on Christmas day in Nigeria, where the terrorist sect Boko Haram bombed two Catholic churches in the towns of Abuja and Jos, killing at least 39 worshipers. This same group killed 32 Christians last Christmas Eve. In this year alone, Boko Haram has murdered 491 people.

The killings in Nigeria are just one example of continuous violent attacks on Christians and their churches. Yet our Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been nearly silent about this war on Christianity. When the Egyptian military participated in the murder of 25 Egyptian Copts, her State Department rejected a request from the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom to put Egypt on its list of countries that violate religious freedoms. Instead, Secretary Clinton issued a generic warning to the generals ruling Egypt “to ensure that the fundamental rights of all Egyptians are respected, including the rights of religious freedom, peaceful assembly and the end of military trials for civilians, and that efforts be made to address sectarian tensions.” Compare this reflexive diplo-speak to her more passionate reaction to the recent beating of Egyptian women during a demonstration, one of whom was publicly stripped: “This systematic degradation of Egyptian women dishonors the revolution, disgraces the state and its uniform and is not worthy of a great people,” she said. Apparently, exposing a woman’s blue bra is a more heinous crime than running over a Copt’s head with a military vehicle.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.1685/pub_detail.asp Hamas calls for an Arab Army to Liberate Jerusalem Nigerians Fear More Attacks After Muslim Terrorists Kill 35 Catholics at Christmas Mass [CNS] 2011 New Home Sales: 2011 Will Likely End up as the WORST YEAR for Sales in History [AP] Degree of frustration with cost of college: Outcry grows on soaring tuitions [WT] […]