RUTHFULLY YOURS

Higher premiums, impenetrable bureaucracy — where’s the upside?

Obamacare has enmeshed many Americans in a bureaucratic nightmare. True, the law has helped some uninsured people obtain coverage. But millions of people have seen their health-insurance plans canceled, because the plans did not meet the requirements of the Affordable Care Act. Others, particularly young Americans, have seen premiums rise to pay for the roster of newly added benefits.

Tommy Groves (not his real name), a young professional working at a small firm in Washington, D.C., was among the nearly 5 million Americans who received termination-of-coverage letters from their health-insurance providers because their plans did not comply with the ACA’s requirements. While about half the states offered to extend canceled plans for another year, later increased to two years, the District of Columbia required its residents to get new insurance.

Yup we really need more legislators like Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, Maxine Waters, Debbie Wasserman, Sheila Jackson Lee, Jan Schakowsky, and other sterling examples of liberal women ….oh yes and don’t forget Susan Collins Republican mediocrity…. we want the best and toughest legislators regardless of gender and proportional representation….rsk

Earlier this month, I predicted that a scheduled hearing at the Federal Election Commission was shaping up to be nothing more than a presentation of “the goofy gender ideology and politics of the progressive Left and academia.” And, oh, how right I was.

The May 12 forum on “Women in Politics” was organized by FEC chairwoman Ann Ravel without the approval of any of her colleagues and outside the legal authority of the FEC’s authorizing statute. Its avowed purpose: to “begin an open discussion” of why women are supposedly “significantly underrepresented in politics.”

But the question that hangs over Rotherham — and which even the latest independent review could not answer — is why so many people got away with these crimes for so long. It was left to a few intrepid journalists and four private citizens to uphold the law.

“It appears inevitable that Mr. Rahman will denounce this judgement as yet another instance of the racism and Islamophobia that have hounded him. … It is nothing of the sort. The law must apply fairly and equally to everyone. Otherwise we are lost.” — Judge Richard Mawrey QC.

Bad people do bad things, but when all the institutions of state fail to stop them, that is a problem for us all.

A veteran of the 1968 protest movements of 1968 once confided what, looking back, troubled him about his generation’s rebellion. “All young people rebel.” he said. “What is strange is that our parents’ generation gave in.” It is a sentiment that could just as easily be applied to modern Britain, if not the West. It is not surprising that people do bad things. What is surprising is that so many institutions and authorities allow them to get away with it.

Oh no! Not the International Criminal Court! [2]

What will North Korea possibly do if we refer it to the International Criminal Court? Besides laugh a lot.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Monday accused North Korea of a litany of crimes and atrocities while reassuring South Korea of America’s “ironclad” security commitments.

Obama Inc. also made “ironclad” security promises to the Gulf Arabs and Israel, so we know what those are worth.

Rampant, blind greed warps the perspectives of those who suffer from that ailment. Consider politicians who have declared that aliens who trespass on the United States and evade the inspections process conducted at ports of entry are “entitled” to United States citizenship or, at the very least, lawful status.

The outrageous view ignores both commonsense and the findings and recommendations of the 9/11 Commission and the 9/11 Commission Staff.

Our borders and our immigration laws are America’s first line of defense and last line of defense against international terrorists and transnational criminals, but you would never know this by reading most newspapers or watching most “news programs” in the mainstream media. You also would not learn the true importance of our borders and our immigration laws if you listened to Mr. Obama, leaders of his administration ranging from Jeh Johnson, the Secretary of Homeland Security or Loretta Lynch, the newly confirmed Attorney General.

We can’t fight for freedom while endorsing Sharia constitutions.

ISIS_Coptic_Christians Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.

Obama can’t defeat ISIS with soft power, though ISIS could beat him with soft power assuming its Caliph ever decided to agree to sit down at a table with John Kerry without beheading him. Iran has picked up billions in sanctions relief and the right to take over Yemen and raid ships in international waters in the Persian Gulf just for agreeing to listen to Kerry talk for an hour. And that might be a fair exchange.

As bad as having your capital or ship seized by Iran is, listening to John Kerry talk is even worse.

If ISIS were to agree to a deal, it could pick up Baghdad and Damascus just in exchange for showing up. All it would have to do is find a Jihadi who hasn’t chopped off any heads on camera to present as a moderate. The administration and its media operatives would accuse anyone who disagreed of aiding the ISIS hardliners at the expense of the ISIS moderates who also represent the hardliners.

If Obama did that, he would at least lose in a way that he understands; instead of in a way he doesn’t.

So far ISIS has preferred the classical approach of killing everything in its path. The approach, deemed insufficiently nuanced by masters of subtlety like Obama and Kerry, has worked surprisingly well. Their response, which is big on the Bush arsenal of drone strikes, Special Forces raids and selective air strikes, hasn’t. But Bush was fighting terrorist groups, not unrecognized states capable of taking on armies.

ACORN’s successor group in Missouri has been paying protesters $5,000 a month to generate civil unrest in Ferguson, the troubled St. Louis suburb where black youth Michael Brown was killed by a white police officer last August.

We know this because some of the protesters haven’t been paid and, now, they are demanding what they were promised. They held a sit-in at the offices of Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment (MORE) and posted a demand letter online.

Public opinion veers with every change in current conditions in Iraq.

Probable Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush got himself into trouble by sort of, sort of not, answering the question whether he would have supported going into Iraq in 2003 — had he known then what we know now.

Republican candidates vied in attacking Bush’s initial confusion about answering the question. Most reiterated that they most certainly would not have invaded Iraq, regardless of what they know now or thought they knew then. Politically, it appears to be wiser to damn the decision to invade Iraq and to forget the circumstances that prompted the war — and the later political environment that ended the American presence.

Unfortunately, our country seems to be suffering from collective amnesia.We apparently have forgotten a number of crucial points:

Liberals want to talk about anything but the current world disorder.

Normally it’s good when matters of policy turn into big public spats, because there is always the chance the public will learn something worth knowing. In the week since Jeb Bush was queried about the war that his brother waged in Iraq, the public’s store of useful knowledge about the Iraq war has, if anything, declined. Senator Marco Rubio is the latest Republican presidential candidate to wade through the media swamp called the Iraq war.

Fifty years ago this week, American Jews were up in arms over a deeply offensive art-and-poetry display at the World’s Fair – but unlike some of today’s aggrieved protesters, they responded with bologna rather than bullets.

The controversy began when the government of Jordan set up a harshly anti-Israel display at its Word’s Fair pavilion, in New York City in early 1964. It featured a wall-size mural of a Palestinian Arab child, flanked by the text of a long anti-Zionist poem.

“For centuries,” according to the poem, Christians, Muslims, and Jews all lived in harmony in the Holy Land, “Until strangers from abroad / Professing one thing, but underneath, another / Began buying up land and stirring up the people…The strangers, once thought terror’s victims, became terror’s fierce practitioners.”