AQAP offers bounty on US ambassador in Yemen

Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Penninsula (AQAP) has offered a reward of $160,000 in gold for the death of America's ambassador to Yemen or any US soldier stationed in the country.

Associated Press:

Al-Qaida's branch in Yemen has offered to pay tens of thousands of dollars to anyone who kills the U.S. ambassador in Sanaa or an American soldier in the country.

An audio produced by the group's media arm, the al-Malahem Foundation, and posted on militant websites Saturday said it offered three kilograms of gold, worth $160,000, for killing the ambassador.

The group said it will pay 5 million Yemeni riyals ($23,000) to anyone who kills an American soldier inside Yemen.

It said the offer is valid for six months.

The bounties were set to "inspire and encourage our Muslim nation for jihad," the statement said.

The U.S. Embassy in Sanaa did not respond to an Associated Press phone call asking for comment.

Washington considers al-Qaida in Yemen to be the group's most dangerous branch.

The group overran entire towns and villages last year by taking advantage of a security lapse during nationwide protests that eventually ousted the country's longtime ruler. Backed by the U.S. military experts based at a southern air base, Yemen's army was able to regain control of the southern region, but al-Qaida militants continue to launch deadly attacks on security forces that have killed hundreds.

In the capital, Sanaa, security officials said two gunmen on a motorbike shot and killed two intelligence officers early Sunday as they were leaving a downtown security facility. The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity according to regulations, said all intelligence and security officers have been instructed to take precautionary measures outside working hours.

As we have learned the hard way, this is no idle threat. Not that al-Qaeda fighters need any more incentive to kill Americans, but the bounty will probably bring foreign mercenaries into the country looking for the reward. In a desperately poor country like Yemen, it may also draw locals into the sweepstakes.

There will be no shortage of assassins to take out our people. And short of keeping them all locked up, there's not much we can do to protect them from determined killers.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/12/aqap_offers_bounty_on_us_ambassador_in_yemen.html

Congress Passes Bill That Allows Law Enforcement to View Emails Without Warrant

A new bill passed by Congress will allow Netflix to share your video rental history on Facebook (just like Spotify does now when linked to your FB account), but an email privacy add-on was removed last minute.

Legislation sent to President Obama this week quietly removed language in a bill that would have — for the first time — forced law enforcement to obtain a warrant to read Americans’ email. Currently, private email that has been stored by a third party for more than 180 days can be accessed by the government without a warrant.

The Senate Judiciary Committee had added a provision to legislation demanding that law enforcement or government agencies show probable cause for email searches. The provision was added to a bill aimed to allow users the ability to post on their Facebook feeds what they are watching on video services [such as Netflix]. The bill, the Video Privacy Protection Act, changed laws passed in 1988 that made it illegal disclose someone’s video rental history following the leak of failed-Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork’s video history to the Washington City Paper.

So now you can let your friends on Facebook know that you just watched 20 consecutive episodes of Parks and Recreation, but your emails stored by a Google or Yahoo for more than 180 days still do not require a warrant to be seen.

http://www.ijreview.com/2012/12/27025-congress-passes-bill-that-allows-law-enforcement-to-view-emails-without-warrant/

Math Is Coming

All the debate over spending is starting to remind me of the movie Jaws. We have some people who believe there is this big threat headed our way, but the authorities all tell us not to panic — but instead of the mayor of Amity Island telling us the beaches are safe, President Obama is telling us we’ll grow our way out of this deficit.

Right now the Republicans and Democrats are hotly debating which of their two wholly inadequate plans we should use to avoid the fiscal cliff, but looking at the size of the deficit, they’re proposing different-sized Band-Aids where a tourniquet is needed. If you point this out, you’re called a Tea Party extremist who wants to throw old people off a cliff and deny underprivileged Ivy League law students free birth control. “You silly person. Budgets don’t have to balance. That’s just a superstition.”

Everyone is so used to politicians treating our tax dollars with less seriousness than the average person treats Monopoly money that they just don’t get why people are suddenly talking about the need for spending cuts. But this isn’t some idea invented by the Tea Party or Paul Ryan or the Koch brothers while sitting in their hollowed-out-volcano Koch Lair. They only mention cuts because they fear the one truly insisting on them: Math.

Politicians have long ignored Math. And it’s no wonder: Math is unelected, unsympathetic, and highly biased toward the rich and keeps demanding cuts to spending and changes to entitlements that are politically infeasible. In a nation filled with obese poor people, we’ve discovered a long list of things everyone should be entitled to besides food, clothing, and shelter — things people need, like subsidized hybrids — but heartless, uncompromising Math keeps looking at our revenue and telling us we can’t have all of that.

Thus Obama wants Math locked completely out of the fiscal cliff talks and instead wants unlimited power to raise the debt ceiling and then tax the rich because of the demands of Fairness — Fairness being the left’s favorite imaginary friend. Math won’t stop laughing at Obama’s plan to pay for everything by taxing the rich, so Obama just won’t work with it at all.

The Republicans at least acknowledge that Math exists but are only trying to compromise with it. We’re broke, and Obama wants to buy a Ferrari we can’t afford, and they’re trying to argue him down to a BMW we can’t afford. I guess they think if they make some changes to entitlements, Math will just relent and allow 2 + 2 to equal 5 so the rest will add up.

But Math can’t be ignored and won’t compromise. We can plead and cry all day about how much spending cuts will hurt those in need, but this will not move Math. It’s a remorseless adding machine, and it will eventually balance its numbers and doesn’t care what it will have to destroy in the process. But the politicians don’t believe this, and while Obama has so little concern about Math that he sometimes even taunts it (“Obamacare will reduce the deficit!”), some of us see what Math did to Greece and wonder when it’s coming for us. Thus we few ask for spending cuts, as they’re all that will save us. I know it’ll be hard to tell a five year old he won’t get the exact same Medicare coverage as his grandma — especially since he won’t understand what you’re talking about — but that’s the only way to turn Math’s wrath.

People don’t want to listen. But Math is coming. It’s $16 trillion in debt and growing, and one day it will rise out of the water, and even those ignoring it will finally be afraid and gasp, “We’re going to need a bigger boat.”

No, you idiots! Haven’t you been listening? We need a smaller boat. One we can actually afford.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/math-is-coming/?singlepage=true

Obama’s Deadly Plan for the Death Tax

I’m referring instead to what might happen because of Obama’s proposal for a much more onerous death tax, which is part of his class-warfare agenda and would take effect in just a couple of days.

It seems that there’s good evidence this may lead to some premature deaths. CNBC reports.

Many families are faced with a stark proposition. If the life of an elderly wealthy family member extends into 2013, the tax bills will be substantially higher. An estate that could bequest $3 million this year will leave just $1.9 million after taxes next year. Shifting a death from January to December could produce $1.1 million in tax savings. It may seem incredible to contemplate pulling the plug on grandma to save tax dollars. While we know that investors will sell stocks to avoid rising capital gains taxes, accelerating the death of a loved one seems at least a bit morbid—perhaps even evil. Will people really make life and death decisions based on taxes? Do we don our green eye shades when it comes to something this serious? There is good evidence that there is some “elasticity” in the timing of important decisions about life and death.

And what does that mean? Well, according to some of the academic research, the President is going to have proverbial blood on his hands.

Gans and Leigh looked into another natural experiment. In 1979, Australia abolished its federal inheritance taxes. Official records show that approximately 50 deaths were shifted from the week before the abolition to the week after. “Although we cannot rule out the possibility that our results are driven by misreporting, our results imply that over the very short run, the death rate may be highly elastic with respect to the inheritance tax rate,” Gans and Leigh write. This isn’t just something peculiar to Australia. Economists Wojciech Kopczuk of Columbia University and Joel Slemrod of the University of Michigan studied how mortality rates in the United States were changed by falling or rising estate taxes. They note that while the evidence of “death elasticity” is “not overwhelming,” every $10,000 in available tax savings increases the chance of dying in the low-tax period by 1.6 percent. This is true both when taxes are falling, so that people are surviving longer to achieve the tax savings, and when they are rising, so that people are dying earlier, according to Kopczuk and Slemrod. “Death elasticity” does not necessarily mean that greedy relatives are pulling the plug on the dying or forcing the sickly to extend their lives into a lower taxed period. According to a 2008 paper from University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Doctor G. Stuart Mendenhall, while tax increases give potential heirs large economic incentives to limit care that would prolong life, distressed patients may “voluntarily trade prolongation of their life past the end [a low tax period] for large ﬁnancial implications for their kin.

I’ve previously cited the research from Australia, and also wrote a post about incentives to die in 2010, when the death tax temporarily was abolished, so this research makes sense.
What’s the bottom line?

…based on past reactions to changes in taxes, it at least seems likely that some deaths that might otherwise have occurred shortly after January 1 will occur shortly before. Death may slip in ahead of the tax man for some with estates worth over $1 million.

In the grand scheme of things, I have a hard time feeling anguish about some elderly rich guy dying today rather than one week from now. But there is real data to suggest that Obama’s policies will cause premature deaths.

And these premature deaths will only occur because the President is greedy for more revenue from a tax that shouldn’t even exist. Indeed, it’s worth noting that every pro-growth tax reform plan – such as the flat tax or national sales tax – eliminates this pernicious form of double taxation.

http://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2012/12/29/obamas-deadly-plan-for-the-death-tax/

Hobby Lobby and the Loss of America's Soul

In America, established rights such as religious liberty and the right to bear arms are currently under attack. Liberals are in charge and they seem to feel that straightforward Constitutional precepts require alteration or eradication.

Take for instance the "right to privacy" -- the left has had no problem broadening the meaning of "privacy" to include the right to kill an unborn child. As for religious liberty, unless you're a Muslim demanding a Ramadan meal, liberals like Supreme Court judge Sonia Sotomayor, rather than uphold religious liberty, facilitate Barack Obama's effort to redefine the free exercise clause of the First Amendment.

Currently, Obamacare is ushering in a new definition of "religious liberty." So far, the Catholic Church has already received fair warning that when it comes to providing insurance that covers birth control and abortion, there are limits on "religious liberty." Moreover, they are also finding out that refusal to conform to progressive edicts could result in the federal government raining down fire and brimstone on the defiant.

So, in conjunction with the updated version of the "right to bear arms," right about now liberals should provide a lexicon that defines religious liberty in the following way: The right for the government to demand, by law, that religious institutions be forced to support policies that contradict their core beliefs.

Take for example the Oklahoma-based companies craft store giant Hobby Lobby and booksellers Mardel Inc. In 2010 Hobby Lobby grossed $2.6 billion in sales, and employed 13,000 people in 455 outlets in 42 states.

Both companies are owned by Bible-believing Christian families who close up shop on the Sabbath and pay full-time employees a minimum wage of $11 per hour versus the federally required $7.25 minimum wage.
Currently, Hobby Lobby is the largest religiously-owned non-Catholic business to have filed a lawsuit against the HHS birth control directive. Yet, despite the fact that they've been founded and run on Christian principles, Oklahoma U.S. District Judge Joe Heaton ruled that Hobby Lobby and Mardel are not religious organizations and therefore subject to the federal birth control dictate.

Because the Christian-owned company maintains that the mandate "violates the religious beliefs for their owners," it's evident that Hobby Lobby must think "religious liberty" is defined in a way other than how it is being defined by liberals at this time.

Hobby Lobby maintains that the "morning-after pill is tantamount to abortion because it can prevent a fertilized egg from becoming implanted in a woman's womb." Therefore, "defy[ing] a federal mandate requiring it to offer employees health coverage that includes access to the morning-after pill" is the company's way of staying true to its core convictions.

In the meantime, for failing to meet what she called "the demanding standard for the extraordinary relief,"Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor has denied a request for an injunction while the Hobby Lobby lawsuit is pending. If the injunction were granted that would have prevented the birth control mandate from beginning on January 1st.

Because it was denied, until the lawsuit reaches the lower courts, Hobby Lobby had better submit to the HHS mandate or, starting January 1, 2013, figure out a way to come up with $1.3 million a day in IRS excise taxes.

Whatever the ultimate outcome of the case, if government can now force Christians to pay for insurance that covers abortion-inducing drugs, shouldn't they also require other religiously-based businesses like Halal food markets to sell foodstuffs considered haram? After all, in the words of the Honorable Joe Heaton, a food market is not a religious organization. Right?

Attorney Kyle Duncan of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty speaking for Hobby Lobby said the company would continue to "provide health insurance to all qualified employees." But while its lawsuit is pending, the company does not intend to offer health insurance that provides pharmaceuticals that induce spontaneous abortion.

On behalf of Hobby Lobby, maybe Duncan should point out that the $3.75 per hour over and above the $7.25 per hour the Christian-run business's full-time employees would be earning if they worked 40 hours a week elsewhere comes to $150 extra per week, which should be more than enough money to purchase emergency birth control.

Despite facing millions in fines, the noncompliant Hobby Lobby and Mardel Inc. CEO and founder David Green refuses to surrender the companies' religious convictions. Green has said he'd rather abandon the business. A $2.2 billion-a-year company that is willing to close itsdoors rather than compromise its core principles? Now that's impressive.

Green maintains that Hobby Lobby, "[b]y being required to make a choice between sacrificing our faith, or paying millions of dollars in fines, we essentially must choose which poison pill to swallow. We simply cannot abandon our religious beliefs to comply with this mandate." Sounds like Hobby Lobby's David Green believes verbatim the Scripture verse that asks "What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?"

In the end it is clear that Hobby Lobby's CEO is more concerned about his standing before God than his standing in the business world, hence proving that in their effort to gain the world, liberals' redefinition of "religious liberty" forfeits our nation's soul.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/12/hobby_lobby_and_the_loss_of_americas_soul.html

Also Read:

How Chicago and Obama Globalized Voter Fraud

"It has been 27 years since Chicago started sanctuary policy for illegal immigration. Since that time Chicago, Illinois, and other cities and states have expanded the illegal immigrant population by stretching the envelope of immigration through Sanctuary Policy. At the same time they have stretched the concept of voter registration.
The notion that foreign nationals can influence elections is no longer a possibility but a reality. The first president to both actively participate in that process and benefit from it is Barack Obama. These actions prove that President Obama is not a socialist or a Marxist, he is an old-fashioned Chicago Democrat who is focused on padding the voter registration list to get elected."