THE FOUNDATION
"The best and only safe road to honor, glory, and true dignity is justice." --George Washington, letter to Marquis de Lafayette, 1779TOP 5 RIGHT HOOKS
Ebola Doesn't Convince Kerry to Secure the Borders
The Left's aversion to securing the nation's borders is because the influx of illegal immigrants assures the growth of a critical Democrat constituency. Secretary of State John Kerry said that while Ebola is dire and the efforts to stop it need to be increased, the disease is no reason to close American borders. "We need airlines to continue to operate in West Africa and we need borders to remain open," Kerry insisted. Meanwhile, Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly noted that 1.4 million people may be infected with Ebola worldwide if the current third-world trends continue. If the disease reaches countries like Haiti, Guatemala or Honduras, Kelly said, "It's literally, 'Katie bar the door,' and there will be mass migration into the United States. They will run away from Ebola, or if they suspect they are infected, they will try to get to the United States for treatment." Of all the reasons to secure the border, Ebola is certainly a good one. However, we note regarding pandemic concerns that the media hype about Ebola in the U.S. is highly sensationalized. While Americans should be concerned, let's put Ebola into perspective: In the latest year of record for CDC epidemiology reports, there were 53,826 deaths from influenza and pneumonia. Currently, the Enterovirus D68 is in 42 states and is killing elementary age school children now.Comment | Share
Why Yes, Obama Delayed Immigration Action Because of the Election
White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest has a confession: The White House is playing politics with immigration. "The fact is -- or I guess, the concern is -- that had the president moved forward with his [plan] prior to Election Day, you would have seen Republican candidates do more to make the immigration issue central to their campaign," Earnest said. "And in the event that they were successful in their campaign, the concern would be that they would cite their opposition to immigration reform as a reason for their success. That is not a storyline that the president, or that anybody here, wanted to contribute to." Not that this delay has stopped Obama from making a promise to do something a central part of his own campaign, but Democrats don't want voters making informed decisions based on actions taken by the president.Comment | Share
Which Came First, the Racism or the Tension?
Ever since the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, this summer, tensions have been high in the St. Louis suburb. Protests and even some arrests continue. And according to The Washington Post, it's forcing the city's whites to confront racial tension they never knew was there: "They have discovered that blacks and whites here profoundly disagree about the existence of racism and the fairness of the justice system. And now, whites who once believed their town was an exception in a country struggling with racial divisions have to confront the possibility it is not." Is it possible that racism has been bubbling under the surface, completely unbeknownst to white residents until a white police officer shot a black teen thug? Perhaps, but doubtful. Because instead of rationally handling the situation, professional race hustlers like Al Sharpton fomented racism among blacks to perpetuate the need for their own services. Now, the city faces even more chaos if Officer Darren Wilson is not charged in Brown's death. To top it off, there is more rioting because, on Wednesday, another white police officer shot and killed an armed black teen thug.Comment | Share
Can't Build Keystone? Just Go Around.
With the Obama administration obstructing the Keystone pipeline for the last few years and no real resolution in sight, Canada is considering alternatives for transporting its valuable oil sands. First, some suggested a relatively short pipeline to the Pacific, from which Canada could market its crude to oil-thirsty Asia. Then came another idea: "Instead, go east, all the way to the Atlantic," reports Bloomberg. "Thus was born Energy East, an improbable pipeline that its backers say has a high probability of being built. It will cost C$12 billion ($10.7 billion) and could be up and running by 2018. Its 4,600-kilometer (2,858-mile) path, taking advantage of a vast length of existing and underused natural gas pipeline, would wend through six provinces and four time zones. It would be Keystone on steroids, more than twice as long and carrying a third more crude oil. Its end point, a refinery in Saint John, New Brunswick, operated by a reclusive Canadian billionaire family, would give Canada’s oil-sands crude supertanker access to the same Louisiana and Texas refineries Keystone was meant to supply." Memo to Obama: Put that in your pipe and smoke it. More...Comment | Share
White House Staffer Linked to Secret Service Prostitution Scandal
The 2012 scandal where members of the Secret Service bought prostitutes in Colombia goes all the way to the White House. Turns out, one White House staffer/volunteer by the name of Jonathan Dach checked a prostitute into his room for the night, documents obtained by The Washington Post show. But the White House barely investigated him because -- you guessed it -- the 2012 election was coming up. As a volunteer on the trip, Dach was told he was a "mini-ambassador" and was given preferential treatment when the ax fell because the White House is the holy of holies. Dach refuses to talk about the incident and denies he hired a prostitute. However, 10 Secret Service agents lost their jobs and reputations over what happened. As for Dach? The Post reports the State Department hired him as an adviser to its Office on Global Women's Issues. We just can't make this stuff up. More...Comment | Share
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RIGHT ANALYSIS
Walmart: Save Money. Dump Health Insurance.
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Walmart announced it is dropping health insurance for nearly 30,000 part-time employees -- moving them into ObamaCare. And the nation's largest private employer also put its full-time employees on notice that their share of insurance premiums is going to be substantially higher as a result of ObamaCare mandates.
It's no small irony that in 2009, Walmart enthusiastically endorsed ObamaCare. In a letter to the president, Walmart explained, "We are for shared responsibility. Not every business can make the same contribution, but everyone must make some contribution. We are for an employer mandate which is fair and broad in its coverage, but any alternative to an employer mandate should not create barriers to hiring entry-level employees."
How very egalitarian of them. But could it be that from the get-go, Walmart was only looking for ways to avoid "shared responsibility"? In 2012, Walmart quietly announced plans to cease offering health insurance to newly hired part-time employees clocking in fewer than 30 hours a week. On top of that, part-time workers hired during or after 2011 would face an "Annual Benefits Eligibility Check," with the accompanying risk of losing health insurance. And now, the company is taking the inevitable further step and simply dropping employee coverage to avoid higher costs.
So much for "shared responsibility." Turns out, business logic overruled rhetoric because, at the end of the day, it makes more fiscal sense for businesses to stop coverage and funnel employees directly into the government exchange. In fact, that was one aim of ObamaCare all along.
In 2010, among other Democrats sounding the alarm, former Tennessee Governor Philip Bredesen, who lorded over his state's failing TennCare version of ObamaCare, forewarned, "Because of the magnitude of the new subsidies created by Congress, the economics become compelling for many employers to simply drop coverage and help their employees obtain replacement coverage through an exchange." He added, "Perhaps this is a miscalculation by the Congress, perhaps not." We in our humble shop will go with "perhaps not."
As late as last year, former Washington Post "Wonkblog" editor Ezra Klein and others discounted warnings that companies would drop insurance coverage. According to Klein, "Employers offer health insurance because employees demand it. If you're an employer who doesn't offer insurance and your competitors do, you'll lose out on the most talented workers. An employer who stopped offering health benefits would see his best employees immediately start looking for other jobs."
Alas, this promise is akin to Obama's oft-repeated assurance, "If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period. If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what."
Walmart employees aren't the only ones suffering from the fallout. Recent reports show that 30,000 people in New Mexico are about to lose their health care plans, 14,000 in Kentucky, 800 in Alaska, and as many as 250,000 in Virginia -- all directly because of ObamaCare. There will be many more to come, but not a peep of distress from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, because this feeds more people into the federal system, which is exactly what Obama wants.
Aside from the downright hypocrisy, Walmart is simply taking the path of logical business sense. Indeed, companies including Target, Trader Joe's and Home Depot have done the same.
But the reality is, for all its abysmal failures -- skyrocketing costs, fewer choices in doctors, lost coverage, and on and on -- ObamaCare is doing exactly what it was designed to do: break the old system, send the government in to gather the pieces, and sweep Americans into a single-payer, government-run health system. Then, "If you like your plan, you can keep it" will become, "Even if you hate your plan, you can't get rid of it."
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The JV Team Takes on ISIL
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Perhaps he hasn't named anything because things aren't going well. Earlier this month, the U.S. almost mistakenly bombed "moderate" rebels in Syria, Iraqi forces did wrongly drop supplies to the enemy and the Obama administration announced that standards for civilian casualties don't apply.
Just yesterday, we reported State Department spokeswoman Jennifer Psaki's difficulty naming gains against ISIL. In fact, just the opposite -- ISIL has nearly overrun Kobani, a strategically important and largely Kurdish city on Syria's border with Turkey. Kurdish militia fighters backed by U.S. airstrikes are engaged in a bid to hold the city, but ISIL controls a growing portion of it after a three-week siege. The administration's response to its possible fall is essentially, "Yeah, whatever. It's not important."
The Obama administration, meanwhile, is preemptively blaming "our partner and friend" Turkey for the fall of Kobani. "There’s growing angst about Turkey dragging its feet to act to prevent a massacre less than a mile from its border," said an anonymous administration official. "This isn’t how a NATO ally acts while hell is unfolding a stone’s throw from their border."
Turkey has indeed been reluctant to commit its own ground troops for many reasons. First, the Syrian Kurds under assault by ISIL are allies of Turkey's Kurdish Workers Party, the PKK -- a militant separatist group. Helping them isn't what Turkey wants to do. Second, Turkey's chief desire is the ouster of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, and it considers the U.S. focus on ISIL to be a distraction. Finally, Turkey knows Obama won't have its back, because he's dead set against U.S. ground troops.
Rear Admiral John Kirby warned, "Airstrikes are not going to save the town of Kobani." He added, “We should all be steeling ourselves for [the] reality" that Kobani will fall. And if that happens, a Kurdish official warned, "we should expect to have 5,000 dead within 24 or 36 hours."
Kirby implicitly acknowledged the foolish limits placed upon the U.S. military by the president. This became an American military operation once we launched airstrikes, and any gains ISIL makes are now against the U.S. That makes recruitment easier, among other bad consequences. It's astounding that the Pentagon is having to concede territory to ISIL because Obama is so uncommitted to victory that he's unwilling to even name the operation, much less make it a successful one.
Maybe Obama should call it Operation JV Team.
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TOP 5 RIGHT OPINION COLUMNS
- Victor Davis Hanson: Is the French Revolution Our New Model?
- Cal Thomas: The Supreme Court's Nonruling on Gay Marriage
- Michael Reagan: Don't Scare Us, Prepare Us
- Burt Prelutsky: Liars & the Lies They Tell
- Rebecca Hagelin & Kristin Carey: Pornography Pandemic
OPINION IN BRIEF
Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906): "The majority is never right. Never, I tell you! That's one of these lies in society that no free and intelligent man can ever help rebelling against. Who are the people that make up the biggest proportion of the population -- the intelligent ones or the fools? I think we can agree it's the fools, no matter where you go in this world, it's the fools that form the overwhelming majority."Historian Victor Davis Hanson: "At the end of the 18th century, there were two great Western revolutions -- the American and the French. Americans opted for the freedom of the individual, and divinely endowed absolute rights and values. A quite different French version sought equality of result. French firebrands saw laws less as absolute, but instead as useful to the degree that they contributed to supposed social justice and coerced redistribution. They ended up not with a Bill of Rights and separation of powers, but instead with mass executions and Napoleonic tyranny. Unfortunately, the Obama administration is following more the French model than the American. Suddenly, once-nonpartisan federal bureaucracies have become catalysts for fundamentally transforming America. Often-ideological bureaucrats have forgotten their original mission. ... [F]ederal agencies are now in service to the goal of changing America from cherishing an equality of opportunity to championing an equality of enforced result. Our revolutionary inspirations are now Georges Danton, Jean-Paul Marat and Maximilien de Robespierre, not the Founding Founders."
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Columnist Cal Thomas: "If there is no longer to be a single standard for marriage, what other standards might soon be abandoned? This is the most important point of all, because if there is to be no standard are we prepared for the social anarchy that will likely follow? Is the acceptance of everything simply a matter of conditioning, or are there some things that are true for all time, regardless of the age? Are we willing to accept the consequences of being mini-gods, deciding what is right and wrong in our own eyes? Is this the ultimate triumph of the 'If it feels good, do it' mantra of the ‘60s? Those who regard same-sex marriage as more evidence of a decline in morality will see America following other great empires and nations that collapsed from within before they were conquered from without. Those working so diligently to attack structures that have preserved cultures for centuries have an obligation to at least tell us how far they intend to go and on what basis they would shout, 'stop, no further.'"
Comedian Jimmy Fallon: "The White House dismissed former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta's criticisms of President Obama, saying he has faced some of the most difficult issues of our time. That would be a great defense if EVERY president didn't face the most difficult issues of their time. That's the job."
Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis!
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.
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