Friday Digest

October 25, 2013

THE FOUNDATION

"While we are zealously performing the duties of good citizens and soldiers, we certainly ought not to be inattentive to the higher duties of religion. To the distinguished character of Patriot, it should be our highest glory to add the more distinguished character of Christian." –George Washington (1778)

CULTURE, SCIENCE & FAITH

AFA: 'God' Already Gone

by Mark Alexander

2012 Cadet Handbook

Getting it only half right, Fox News reports that the Air Force Academy is contemplating the removal of "so help me God" from its Cadet Honor Oath. However, on the facing page in Contrails, the Cadet handbook, "so help me God" has already been removed from the Cadet and Officer oaths. Click to View

As I first reported last May in "The DoD's Frontal Assault on Faith," up until 2012, the Cadet Contrails handbook contained the words "so help me God" after the Cadet and Officer oaths, but those words were removed from the Class of 2016 handbooks. When I inquired with the AFA's Public Affairs Office as to who removed "so help me God" in 2012 and why, the PAO dodged the question and tersely responded that I could file a "Freedom of Information Act" request. In other words: "Take a hike."
While Obama's top military appointees at the AFA are claiming its review of "so help me God" in the Honor Oath is the result of a challenge by ultra-leftist Mikey Weinstein's so-called "Military Religious Freedom Foundation" (MRFF), Weinstein is little more than an atheist proxy for the Obama administration -- a surrogate doing the bidding of the most faith-intolerant regime in the history of our Republic. (Of course, if any military officer suggested this was their CINC's agenda, they would be civilians the next day.)

The MRFF is dedicated to freedom from religion, not freedom of religion. In 2011, Weinstein, an AFA graduate ('77), demanded and received an apology from the AFA for its cadet support of "Operation Christmas Child," which assembles and fills millions of shoe boxes with toys, school supplies and other gifts for impoverished children in 130 countries! Weinstein objected because OCC places a Christian tract in those boxes.
Under the pretense of "religious tolerance," Barack Hussein Obama's administration has been quietly advancing his mandate to remove any expression or manifestation of faith, particularly Christianity, from government forums -- first and foremost, the U.S. military. His civilian "leaders" at DoD have ramped up that eradication, even threatening UCMJ charges against any military personnel whose expression of faith might be interpreted as "proselytizing."
My colleague, Lt. Gen. (Ret.) William "Jerry" Boykin, notes, "The very troops who defend our religious freedom are at risk of having their own taken away. The worst thing we can do is stop soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines, especially for the chaplains, from the free exercise of their faith."
Notably, if the AFA folds under pressure from Weinstein, the other Service Academies will surely follow.
The Left is constantly endeavoring to replace Rule of Law with the rule of men, because the former is predicated on the principle of Liberty "endowed by our Creator," Obama's administrators constantly look for ways to undermine Rule of Law by driving wedges between our Liberty and its foundational endowment.

GOVERNMENT & POLITICS

Was It Ever Supposed to Work?

Congress began hearings Thursday into the well-catalogued disaster that is the Healthcare.gov rollout. Testimony did not, however, include that of HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who was busy doing ... other things. But contractors who built the monstrosity did testify, and they cast all the blame at the feet of the Obama administration. Each contractor assured Congress that their portion of the site worked when they turned in their assignments, and that HHS is at fault for not making all the pieces work together. Buck passing is, after all, the path of least resistance.
Chief among the assertions was that Healthcare.gov was not tested until just days before its Oct. 1 launch, and it crashed after a few hundred people logged on. HHS made a drastic last-minute change requiring that consumers log in before shopping, rather than allowing anonymous "window shopping," and then HHS gave the green light anyway after failed and inadequate testing. That change, said one contractor, "created a bottleneck that prevented the vast majority of users" from accessing the site. The primary contractor, CGI, promises major improvement by Dec. 15, but that's two-and-a-half months after launch.
As a result of the problems, the administration, without congressional authorization, granted consumers six more weeks in 2014 to buy insurance before being penalized (or "taxed," as SCOTUS Chief Justice John Roberts might argue). Some Democrats are demanding a longer delay for the individual mandate. Democrats thought it was anarchist, racist and treasonous when Republicans said the same thing just last week.
Sebelius lamented this week that the rollout couldn't wait -- not even until the website worked -- because, "There are people in this country who have waited decades for affordable health care coverage." Of course, neither the (broken) website itself nor the health coverage sold on it are affordable. One analyst puts federal spending on contractors at $1 billion, and that's not including fixing the site. Worse, as many as 16 million Americans could lose their health plans and be forced into something more expensive. Remember when President ShamWow promised, "You can keep your plan!" Good times.
National Review's Rich Lowry observed, "The administration clearly wanted no further delays that could give fodder to opponents of the law. Perversely, it gave them, instead, the most powerful symbol of government dysfunction of the Obama era."
But maybe that was actually part of the plan. Healthcare.gov reportedly consists of 500 million lines of code -- more than Apple's OS X, Windows XP, Facebook, Linux and Google's Chrome web browser ... combined. That number strains credulity, but if it is, in fact, accurate, then we have to wonder if the whole thing was designed to fail. You don't throw 500 million lines of code into a project over a matter of months and start testing a few days before launch unless it was never supposed to work to begin with. We have long argued that the goal of this administration and its allies is single-payer government health care. To go about achieving that by sabotaging their own hybrid system is beyond devious -- "governing by crisis", if you will -- but it seems increasingly plausible.

ECONOMY, REGS & TAXES

ObamaCare: A Drag on the Economy

Perhaps the glitches in the Healthcare.gov website are emblematic of the economy and job creation as a whole -- stuck in a never-ending loop with little choice but to pull the plug and start over. When the delayed September jobs report came out Tuesday, some were quick to tell us the news wasn't all that bad -- the headline unemployment rate declined to its lowest point in nearly five years at 7.2% and there was "little evidence" that employers were lopping off hours to avoid the pitfalls of mandatory insurance for their employees.

But beyond the numbers, the situation was still dire for many millions of unemployed Americans -- who remain languishing without work a near-record 37 weeks on average -- and reports compiled by the various regional Federal Reserve banks indicated that the effects of ObamaCare were a concern for job creation going forward despite the one-year delay in the employer mandate.

In their monthly Beige Book, the Federal Reserve made the case that "several Districts reported that contacts were cautious to expand payrolls, citing uncertainty surrounding the implementation of the Affordable Care Act and fiscal policy more generally." Furthermore, the regional report from Richmond pointed out that "many smaller retailers have limited weekly hours per employee to control healthcare costs."
This reduction is leading to a new phenomenon. "As a result," continues the Richmond report, "some employees are taking second jobs, and a few firms are even partnering to help their employees 'stitch together' full time hours by working for both businesses." Yet while the workers have enough hours to get by as ostensibly full-time workers, they would no longer necessarily qualify as full-time workers entitled to benefits. And guess where they have to go? They're at the mercy of Healthcare.gov. If only we could pull the plug on the Obama regime and start over.

NATIONAL SECURITY

International NSA Kerfuffle

America's European allies are up in arms this week after it was revealed that the National Security Agency has been involved in widespread data collection in France, Germany and elsewhere on the continent. According to information stolen and made public earlier this year by former NSA employee Edward Snowden, the NSA intercepted over 70 million phone calls and text messages in France during a 30-day period at the end of 2012 and the beginning of 2013. The personal communications of German Chancellor Angela Merkel have also been intercepted.
Foreign leaders roundly criticized America and Barack Obama specifically for the data mining. Merkel and French President Francois Hollande have tossed around phrases like "deep disapproval" and "unacceptable." Both governments made a show of summoning the respective U.S. ambassadors for further consultation, a rare, though not unprecedented action. EU leaders meeting at a regularly scheduled summit in Brussels are now reviewing Europe-wide privacy policies and to what extent they should continue cooperating with the U.S. on intelligence matters.
Spying on allies, however, is not exactly a new phenomenon. In fact, it's about as common a practice as spying on enemies, and the U.S. isn't the only country doing it. Israel, France, Britain and many other allied nations have active data collection efforts targeted at America, and while the scope of their efforts is probably dwarfed by our own, the U.S. does have in place significantly more stringent privacy and safety protocols. But, politically, our allies must be "outraged."
This latest development is significant, though, because it exposes the growing lack of trust our allies have in Obama. We Americans have unfortunately become quite used to Obama saying one thing and doing another, but when our closest allies begin to question the integrity of our nation's leader, it doesn't bode well for political and economic relations, and it could be a severe blow to concerted international efforts to combat Islamic terrorism.

BRIEF OPINION

Essential Liberty

Former Heritage president Ed Feulner: "[T]he Founders' attitude toward religion is widely misunderstood. A major source of confusion is the phrase 'separation of church and state,' used by President Thomas Jefferson in an 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut. Many have interpreted this phrase to mean that religion should be entirely personal, kept out of schools and other public institutions. However, as Heritage scholar Jennifer Marshall has argued, this interpretation is incorrect: 'Jefferson wanted to protect states' freedom of religion from federal government control and religious groups' freedom to tend to their internal matters of faith and practice without government interference generally.' America's Founding Fathers did not want the government to impose a government-sponsored church on all Americans. Neither did they seek to confine religion to a separate, private sphere of life. On the contrary, they believed that religion had a vital and enduring role to play in the public affairs of the new American Republic."

Political Futures

Columnist Jonah Goldberg: "As political scientist Larry Bartels recently observed, the public is 'more conservative than at any time since 1952.' That new progressive era liberals promised in 2008? It never happened. The public has grown more conservative during the Obama presidency. The catch: It's grown less Republican too. ... Six months ago, most Tea Party leaders were eager to get rid of the medical device tax under Obamacare. But, in the recent budget battle, getting rid of it was suddenly an ideological betrayal and a sop to big business. A culture war is definitely raging on the right, and a civil war may follow, though I hope not. I'd hate to see the GOP establishment create an ideological rationale for being anti-Tea Party. It's better for conservatism if the GOP establishment is pulled toward the Tea Party, rather than repelled from it. Likewise, it's better if the Tea Party sees the GOP as a vehicle for its agenda rather than an obstruction."

Faith and Family

Economist Thomas Sowell: "Some people are in the business of being offended, just as Campbell is in the business of making soup. ... Social dynamite can accumulate among whites as well as among blacks. White extremist hate groups already exist, though they are a fringe, as the Nazis were once a disdained fringe in Germany. It was the people's loss of confidence in the respectable institutions of society that gave the Nazis their chance for power. The blind and dishonest political correctness of our media and educational institutions on racial issues today can eventually forfeit the confidence of Americans and give similar extremist groups their chance to ignite a race war in the United States. And once a race war starts, it can be virtually impossible to stop."

For more, visit The Right Opinion.

CHRONICLE QUOTES

Upright

Columnist John Stossel: "[W]hen Congress and President Obama agreed on a deal last week to raise the debt ceiling and resume government spending, people reacted as if a disaster was averted -- instead of reacting as if a disaster had resumed. It has. And it continues. Congratulating ourselves for raising the debt ceiling once again, the way we do every time this drama plays out, is like congratulating an alcoholic for talking the bartender out of cutting him off. As with alcoholics, there's a deeper problem here. It's not just that America is addicted to debt. Everyone agrees we should pay our bills, just not when or how. The deeper addiction is to government."

Demo-gogues

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV): "The only people who feel there shouldn't be more coming in to the federal government from the rich people are the Republicans in the Congress. Everybody else, including the rich people, are willing to pay more. They want to pay more."

From the 'Non Compos Mentis' File

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA): "I don't even buy into the idea that [Democrats] lost the [2010] election because of health care. One of the most damaging votes that our members had to take was the TARP. The Democrats were the one who saved the day with that vote, and people never really got over that vote."

The BIG Lie

Rep. Henry Waxman: "The Affordable Care Act is an enormous success, with one obvious exception: It has a poorly designed website. The law has already accomplished a lot."

Braying Jackass

Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. during Thursday's Healthcare.gov hearing: "I started out in my opening statement saying there was no legitimacy to this hearing, and the last line of the questioning certainly confirms that. ... No health information is required in the application process. And why is that? Because pre-existing conditions don't matter. ... I will not yield to this monkey court or whatever this thing is. ... [W]hy are we going down this path? Because [Republicans] are trying to scare people so they don't apply, and so therefore the legislation gets delayed, or the Affordable Care Act gets defunded, or it's repealed. That's all it is, hoping people won't apply."

Village Idiots

Al Gore: "I use only carbon-free electricity. Have 33 solar panels on my roof, seven deep geothermal wells under my driveway, LED lights and highest-grade energy-saving windows, max insulation, hybrid plug-in car, etc. No fountains, btw. What you can do? Make smart choices for low-carbon options in the marketplace, make sure you divest from carbon-intensive stocks; be a smart and active citizen!"

Short Cuts

Comedian Jay Leno: "Here's a very disturbing story. You may have heard about this -- 25-year-old man in New York arrested for trying to join al-Qaida. Well, here is the amazing part. He said it was still easier to join al-Qaida using their website than it was to sign up for ObamaCare. ... Today there were more problems with the website. It seems when you type in your age, it's confusing, because it's not clear if they want the age you are right now or the age you'll be when you finally log in."

Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis!
Nate Jackson for The Patriot Post Editorial Team

Join us in daily prayer for our Patriots in uniform -- Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen -- standing in harm's way in defense of Liberty, and for their families.

Friday, October 25, 2013

PATRIOT POST 10/25/2013