RUTHFULLY YOURS

As Jonathan Gruber knows, the health-care law is a tax machine. The ‘Cadillac’ levy will hit the middle class.

Jonathan Gruber, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist, is making himself a household name, and not in a good way. A series of videos have emerged in recent days showing Mr. Gruber—an architect of the Affordable Care Act—telling college audiences that major parts of the law were designed purposely to mask its true cost to individual Americans.

As Mr. Gruber put it, speaking last year at a conference at the University of Pennsylvania: “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, you know, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass.”

One example cited by Mr. Gruber is the so-called Cadillac tax, as the ObamaCare excise tax on high-value employer health plans is known. The tax, which he helped devise and will take effect in 2018, imposes a 40% levy on individual health plans worth more than $10,200, and on family plans worth more than $27,500. As Mr. Gruber’s remarks were unearthed last week, economist Mark Wilson and I released a study of the excise tax that shows he is right about its deceptive design. The tax is likely to hit many people who don’t have high-end coverage.

Mr. Gruber says in one video that his real aim was to reduce the tax break available to those who get employer-sponsored insurance, about 170 million Americans. He lamented that it would be hard to persuade Congress to reduce people’s tax breaks: “You just can’t get through. It’s politically impossible.” True enough—the excise tax does the job instead. It is a stealthy way to reduce the tax preference for health care without taking it away from employers.

If the White House press corps wants to keep government honest, here’s a question to ask as President Obama prepares to legalize millions of undocumented immigrants by executive order: Has he sought, and does he have, any written legal justification from the Attorney General and the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) for his actions?

This would be standard operating procedure in any normal Presidency. Attorney General Eric Holder is the executive branch’s chief legal officer, and Administrations of both parties typically ask OLC for advice on the parameters of presidential legal authority.

The Obama Administration has asked OLC for its legal opinions on such controversial national security questions as drone strikes and targeting U.S. citizens abroad. It was right do so even though the Constitution gives Presidents enormous authority on war powers and foreign policy.

But a Justice-OLC opinion is all the more necessary on domestic issues because the President’s authority is far more limited. He is obliged to execute the laws that Congress writes. A President should always seek legal justification for controversial actions to ensure that he is on solid constitutional ground as well as to inspire public confidence in government.

Yet as far as we have seen, Mr. Obama sought no such legal justification in 2012 when he legalized hundreds of thousands of immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children. The only document we’ve found in justification is a letter from the Secretary of Homeland Security at the time, Janet Napolitano, to law enforcement agencies citing “the exercise of our prosecutorial discretion.” Judging by recent White House leaks, that same flimsy argument will be the basis for legalizing millions more adults.

It’s possible Messrs. Obama and Holder haven’t sought an immigration opinion because they suspect there’s little chance that even a pliant Office of Legal Counsel could find a legal justification. Prosecutorial discretion is a vital legal concept, but it is supposed to be exercised in individual cases, not to justify a refusal to follow the law against entire classes of people.

The truth is that there has never been an Israeli genocide against Palestinians, and that Israel has done everything in its power apart from not going to war at all — that is, apart from surrendering — to spare innocent lives, including the lives of people trying to destroy it.

Israel simply became a safe haven for a persecuted religious minority who sought statehood after having concluded that no state could guarantee their safety except for a Jewish state.

That Israel is not even any kind of player in this Muslim Sunni-Shia “ISIS War” apparently did not occur to Wijenberg.

As is so often true when vilifying Israel, “Israel” is, at bottom, most likely just a transparent fig-leaf for again vilifying “Jews.”

An increasingly popular argument, when certain Dutch officials and Muslim commentators discuss Islamic State [IS] jihadists from Europe, is that these jihadists are really no different from European Jews who choose to serve in the Israel Defense Forces [IDF].

In The Netherlands this trend seems to have started when an op-ed, entitled, “Jihad for Israel,” written for Al-Jazeera by Columbia University PhD. candidate Hanine Hassan, was translated into Dutch for the website “Wij Blijven Hier,” which means “We Are Here To Stay.” The website is hugely popular among Dutch youths from a Muslim background.

The main thesis of the op-ed was that serving in the IDF should be as punishable as joining IS, as the IDF, too, is a genocidal regime, just like IS.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has ordered what is being described in media reports as top-to-bottom changes in how the nation’s nuclear arsenal is managed.

Largely unreported in the coverage of the possible nuclear forces shakeup is that until his appointment as defense secretary, Hagel served on the board of a George Soros-funded group that advocates a nuclear-free world.

Ploughshares opposes America’s development of a missile-defense system and contributes funds to scores of anti-war groups highly critical of U.S. foreign policy and military expansion.

The fund identifies itself as a “publicly supported foundation that funds, organizes and innovates projects to realize a world free from the threat of nuclear weapons.”

On Friday, the Associated Press reported Hagel was slated to announce actions to improve nuclear force management, vowing to invest billions of dollars more to fix what that the agency described as a force suffering from leadership lapses, security flaws and sagging morale.

Senior defense officials speaking to the AP said Hagel would propose an amount between $1 billion and $10 billion in additional investments to the nuclear forces, including the replacement of a dated helicopter fleet.

While the exact nature of the investment is unclear and Hagel’s proposed top-to-bottom changes have not yet been specified, the defense secretary’s long-time association with the Ploughshares Fund may be cause for concern.

The fund calls itself “the largest grant-making foundation in the U.S. focusing exclusively on peace and security issues.”

The Ploughshares Fund has a long history of anti-war advocacy and is a partner of the Marxist-oriented Institute for Policy Studies, which has urged the defunding of the Pentagon and massive decreases in U.S. defense capabilities, including slashing the American nuclear arsenal to 292 deployed weapons.

The world has not stopped to contemplate the snowballing results of creating a “Palestinian” state.

“Palestine belongs to the Palestinians, from the (Jordan) River to the (Mediterranean) Sea. We must not cede this narrative. From the River to the Sea….Palestine belongs to the Palestinians; and the heart of the matter is the right of return, our cause is the right of return.” (Palestinian PA Parliament Member, Khalida Jarrar, April 16, 2014)

At a moment when supremely civilized countries all over the world seem eager to support Palestinian statehood – Germany is the latest – few have taken the trouble to examine precisely what this support could actually mean. To be sure, the expected impact of a 23rd Arab sovereignty would be most immediately injurious to Israel, although, over time, even enthusiastic European advocates of “Palestine” would likely suffer their own consequent harms. This is because a Palestinian state – any Palestinian state – would quickly become yet another dedicated launching site for Jihadist terrorism.

Oddly enough, nothing could be more obvious.

“Hamas is ISIS, and ISIS is Hamas,” correctly explained Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu before the U.N. General Assembly last September: “They all have the same ideology; they all seek to establish a global militant Islam, where there is no freedom.”

Also in September, Palestinian Authority President, Mahmoud Abbas, now working together with his “brothers” in Hamas, asked the U.N. Security Council to set a deadline of November 2016 for a full Israeli withdrawal from Judea/Samaria (West Bank), including East Jerusalem. His draft resolution vaguely accepts a “Two State Solution” for the disputed areas, but all major Palestinian media continue to speak, officially, of Israel itself as “Occupied Palestine.” The “moderate” PA “solution,” therefore, exactly like the “radical” Hamas “solution,” calls for a single Arab state, in all of the land now defined as Israel, West Bank, and Gaza.

“What if the Jews themselves were Nazis?,” mused French philosopher, Vladimir Jankélévitch in 1986. “That would be great. We would no longer have to feel sorry for them; they would have deserved what they got.” The recasting of Israelis, and, by extension, Jews as Nazis has, in fact, taken place, just as Jankélévitch envisioned. This summer’s Israeli incursion, Operation Protective Edge, provided anti-Semites and loathers of the Jewish state with resurgent justifications for assigning the epithet of Nazi on the Jews yet another time, together with oft-heard accusations of “crimes against humanity, “massacres,” genocide,” and, according to recent comments by Turkey’s prime minister Tayyip Erdoğan, in their treatment of the Palestinians, Israel has demonstrated that “. . . their barbarism has surpassed even Hitler’s.”

The Nazification of Israelis — and by extension, Jews — is both breathtaking in its moral inversion and cruel in the way it makes the actual victims of the Third Reich’s horrors a modern-day reincarnation of that same barbarity. It is, in the words of Boston University’s Richard Landes, “moral sadism,” a salient example of Holocaust inversion that is at once ahistorical, disingenuous, and grotesque in its moral and factual inaccuracy. In reflecting on the current trend, he perceived in the burgeoning of anti-Israelism around the world, Canadian Member of Parliament Irwin Cotler once observed that conventional strains of anti-Semitism had been masked, so that those who directed enmity towards Jews were now able to transfer that opprobrium to the Jew of nations, Israel. How had they effected that? According to Cotler, they did so by redefining Israel as the most glaring example of those human predations, what he called “the embodiment of all evil” of the Twentieth Century: apartheid and Nazism.

You wouldn’t guess that Stephen Hawking’s inspiring and dramatic life would need embellishment by withholding pertinent information and distorting facts, yet that is precisely what occurs in the film “The Theory of Everything.” Based on his first wife’s book (”Travelling to Infinity”), Jane Hawking is portrayed as a fresh-faced, forever young martyr who manages to take care of a completely paralyzed man and three children while working on her Ph.D and vacuuming the house – all unassisted. Since we have already witnessed that once Stephen required a wheelchair, he needed to be lifted and carried to his next location, we know that it just isn’t possible that they lived without additional help yet we don’t see a nurse enter until the children are fairly grown. In truth, as of 1974, a student always lived and traveled with the Hawkings to help with Stephen’s extraordinary health care needs.

For unexplained reasons, we are never told that after Stephen’s tracheotomy, he was cared for by three shifts of nurses, including Elaine Mason, the woman who caused the breakup in his marriage and whom he eventually married in 1995. Also not revealed is that those two divorced 11 years later after nasty rumors that she had been abusing him. Did the filmmaker think that the brilliant and helpless Hawking would be less sympathetic with some character flaws? Would his wife Jane appear less noble if the nurses who helped to care for him were acknowledged for their help? And why the omission of the fact that all of his care was paid for by a private American foundation since the National Health Service would only pay for him in a nursing home.

Who amongst us has ever heard of William A. Wirt?

In her exceptional book “American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character,” Diana West writes that Wirt, a Gary, Indiana schools superintendent, asserted before a Congressional committee in May 1934 that there was a deliberately conceived plot among members of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal administration to overthrow the established social order in the United States and substitute a communist-style planned economy.

The Roosevelt administration well understood that if Wirt’s accusations were seriously investigated it might distract from or even halt their political momentum. For that reason, it was decided that the proceedings would be a suppression of the truth rather than an uncovering of the truth.

For performing his patriotic duty, Wirt was branded a liar by committee Democrats, smeared by the press and even ridiculed by Roosevelt himself, a fate that would likewise befall future anti-communists such as ex-Soviet agent Whittaker Chambers, journalist M. Stanton Evans, Representative Martin Dies (D-TX) and Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI).

As West notes, a careful investigation of Wirt’s charges might have averted the Communist infiltration of the U.S. government that marked the middle decades of the twentieth century. Expert estimates now peg the number of Americans assisting Soviet intelligence agencies during the 1930s and 1940s as exceeding five hundred, including high-ranking government officials such as Alger Hiss (State Department), Lauchlin Currie (White House), Harry Dexter White (Treasury) and Roosevelt’s most intimate and Lend-Lease boss Harry Hopkins, who twice covertly passed vital secrets to the Soviets. World War II Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall said: “Hopkins’s job with the president was to represent the Russian interests. My job was to represent the American interests.”

More revealing is the political mechanism by which elected U.S. officials and the media have long sought to shield the apparent conspiracy from investigation, against an airing of the facts, even as they also casually sacrificed a good citizen to do so. This was the beginning of an era, an era of American betrayal and the onset of the Big Lie.

Political correctness now dominates the realm of this country. The result is that the law is maimed, and factual, logical, and rational thinking is attacked on a regular basis.

But the most egregious of political correctness stances is the one that maintains that Obama cannot be impeached because of the melanin level in his skin. In an incredibly prescient article from 2009, author L.E. Ikenga pointed out what would be America’s undoing if this country continued to obsess “over the color of Barack Obama’s skin” instead of paying more attention to his ardent desire to become a “despot.” At the time, Ikenga asserted that “Obama is intrinsically undemocratic and as his presidency plays out, this will become more obvious.”

And now six years later, Obama continues with his absolute and unrelenting intention to transform this country via unconstitutional means. The most shameful aspect of letting Obama get away with his unlawful actions is that it is an abject insult to the good people of this country. We are asked to ignore his actions and accept that, because he is black, his misdeeds do not matter. The message of moral rot is there for the next generation to see.

And see, they do. Millenials are beginning to understand the horror of Obamacare but only because it is hitting them in the pocketbook, not because of the inherent abuse of their freedoms. They may have voted Republican, but statistics show that they have lost faith with the system we have in America. And why wouldn’t they?

All they see is corruption from the top down. The latest revelation by Jonathan Gruber that Obama was in the room when the deceptive Cadillac tax was established is just another manifestation of the incredible hubris of Obama and company. Each Obama action makes a mockery of the Constitution and its safeguards of checks and balances.

And thus, we adults will have failed the millenials, if we do not put the brakes on Obama and his cronies. The Black American community has been terribly damaged by this man as well. Conservative writer Deneen Borelli, in her book Blacklash explains “how Obama and the Left are driving Americans to the government plantation” and that “members of the black community support what she says but can’t freely express themselves because of the attack[s] they will endure.” So law-abiding Americans are being muzzled. It is the ultimate insult to a free people as the rule of law becomes irrelevant and/or unjust.

Nobody asked your opinion. But when you spoke up we found you to be a turncoat.

Congratulations on becoming a filmmaker. So you’re in Canada promoting this film of yours “Rosewater.” Who knew you were so multi-talented.

Even those who do not watch your Daily Show know you as a comedian. So it comes as a surprise to find you making headlines as a Serious Person.

So this keeps coming up, about your hostility towards Israel and complaints that you are a self-hating Jew…and now where are all the writers you depend on for your material? I ask because to be quite honest something terrible happens when you stop being funny.

You become just another hotheaded jerk. Who knew you had such a large chip on your shoulder?

Maybe on the basis of one movie you imagine yourself an auteur. Well hold the chariots, Mr. DeMille.

So I’m reading (courtesy of Canada’s National Post) that you are beyond reproach because you lost family in the Holocaust. That’s an obnoxious evasion.

Every single Jewish person suffered the same infamy. You won’t get sympathy on the basis of being an orphan.