The Obama Doctrine Revealed
By Richard Butrick
....But
now an Obama doctrine has emerged. And the irony is that the basics of
the Obama doctrine have been revealed in a New York Times article
designed to remove the Benghazi stain from Hillary Clinton's tenure as
Secretary of State. It is a revisionist piece claiming that Al Qaeda was
not involved in the attack on the American consulate. Here is an
account from The Weekly Standard:
In a December 30 editorial, published under the headline "The Facts About
Benghazi," the newspaper proclaims an end to the 15 months of debate
about the fatal attacks on the U.S. consulate on September 11, 2012.
Citing an "exhaustive investigation by The Times" that it says "goes a
long way toward resolving any nagging doubts about what precipitated the
attack" and "debunks Republican allegations," America's Newspaper of
Record declares that "in a rational world" the investigation "would
settle the dispute over Benghazi."
In
the process of exonerating Clinton, the 8,000-word account by David
Kirkpatrick uncovers the two pivotal points of the Obama Doctrine:
(1)
Radical Islam in general is not inherently hostile to the US and once
they are shown due respect they can become US allies. This may mean
weakening ties with our traditional allies.
(2)
The only Islamic group that is a bona fide terrorist organization is
the faction of al-Qaida directly subordinate to Osama bin Laden's
successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Only this group cannot be appeased and
must be destroyed through force.
This explains:
(1) the attempts to accommodate the Taliban in Afghanistan,
(2) the backing of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt,
(3) the initial backing of the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Syrian opposition,
(4) siding with the PLO against Israel,
(5) the kid glove treatment given Iran's nuclear policy. In general, any group not in obeisance to Zawahiri is a potential US ally.
The
beauty of this is that once revealed, the central tenets of the Obama
Doctrine are so reality-challenged that the self-anointed "smart
diplomacy" mantle becomes ludicrous. Moreover, they have led to one
disaster after another to the extent that the US is not even considered
the main player in the foreign policy arena. From Russia's Putin to
France's François Hollande to China's Xi Jinping, American counsel is met with polite distain.
DOL: $7.3 Billion in Unemployment Insurance Overpayments in 2013
By Edwin MoraThe U.S. Department of Labor's (DOL) annual financial report revealed that in 2013 it improperly paid an estimated $7.7 billion in taxpayer funds to Unemployment Insurance (UI) beneficiaries, including $7.3 billion worth of overpayments.
President Obama and some lawmakers are pushing for an extension of unemployment insurance benefits, which expired for many Americans at the end of year. The Senate is expected to take this issue up as its first legislative action upon returning from Christmas break.
According to the fiscal 2013 annual financial report the DOL released in mid-December, the estimated $7.7 billion in improper payments made through waste, fraud, and errors last year constitute an approximately 20 percent decrease when compared to the $9.7 billion in 2012. However, the report pointed out that the “true” improper payment rate, which refers to mistaken payments as a percentage of program outlays, increased from 10.8 percent in 2012 to 11.5 percent in 2013.
This means that 10.8 percent of the $90.2 billion spent on unemployment benefits in 2012 was paid by mistake, compared to 11.5 percent of the $66.7 billion spent on UI last year. More than $1 out of every $10 spent on UI recipients in 2013 was paid in error.
Roberts Refuses to Grant Obamacare Emergency Stay
The Supreme Court has refused a group of doctors’ request to block implementation of the nation’s new health care law.
Chief Justice John Roberts turned away
without comment Monday an emergency stay request from the Association of
American Physicians & Surgeons, Inc. and the Alliance for Natural
Health USA.
They asked the chief justice Friday to
temporarily block the law, saying Congress had passed it incorrectly by
starting it in the Senate instead of the House. Revenue-raising bills
are supposed to originate in the lower chamber. They also wanted blocked
doctor registration requirements they say will make it harder for
independent non-Medicare physicians to treat Medicare-eligible patients.
Still pending is a decision on a
temporary block on the law’s contraceptive coverage requirements, which
was challenged by a group of nuns.
Journal published on WordPress platform costs $2.2 million per year
By Elizabeth Harrington
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has set aside $11
million to continue to publish its “environmental health” journal
online, according to a government contract released on New Year’s Eve.The National Institutes of Health (NIH) publishes a monthly peer-reviewed journal, Environmental Health Perspectives (EHP), which operates on the WordPress platform, at a cost of $2.2 million a year.
Brogan & Partners Advertising Consultancy could be paid up to $11,407,278 to run the site over a five-year period. The ad agency previously developed a “guerrilla marketing campaign” at bars for free HIV treatment in Michigan and created a Facebook page for honey-baked ham.
The purpose of the contract is “for the publication of the Environmental Health Perspectives (EHP) journal,” which will “communicate recent scientific findings and trends in the environmental health sciences” and “inform the public about important topics in environmental health.”
A “major objective” listed is to make the journal “accessible to people with disabilities” and to “increase readership.”
Millionaires on Medicaid
Got a house worth $802,000, lots of savings and a nice car? You might still qualify for benefits.
By Mark Warshawsky
Expanding Medicaid coverage to an estimated
nine million more Americans—as mandated by the Affordable Care
Act—reinforces the idea that Medicaid only serves the poor. That
perception is not accurate. And it distracts from a looming budgetary
threat to the program: long-term care.....We might accept these rising costs if benefits flowed only to the elderly poor, as originally intended. But that is not the case. Significant long-term care benefits flow to individuals in the top 20% of retirement earnings, enabled by Medicaid's generous asset-exclusion limits.
In many states, an elderly person may own a home valued at $802,000, plus home furnishings, jewelry and an automobile of uncapped value while receiving long-term Medicaid support. In addition, they are allowed to have various life-insurance policies, retirement accounts with unlimited assets, $115,920 in assets for a spouse, income from Social Security, and a defined-benefit pension plan. By most standards, such a household would be considered wealthy.
Despite these generous rules, some individuals even game the system further by arranging complex asset transfers or insurance transactions that sidestep congressional efforts to curb fraud.
The rules wouldn't matter if wealthy individuals shunned Medicaid long-term care benefits. But with Medicaid crowding out private alternatives, many don't. In fact, 15% of elderly individuals in the middle-income quintile, 8% in the upper-middle quintile, and 5% in the top quintile receive Medicaid benefits.
Even these numbers don't capture the burden wealthy individuals place on Medicaid because they live much longer than the poor. Beneficiaries in the top income quintile receive, on average, double the lifetime payouts of those that are less well-off. And because Medicaid lowers reimbursement rates to providers and restricts benefits to contain costs, the poor are tied to lower-quality care and enjoy far less provider flexibility.
Is it 1914 all over again? We are in danger of repeating the mistakes that started WWI, says a leading historian
...Professor Margaret MacMillan, of the University of Cambridge, argues that the Middle East could be viewed as the modern-day equivalent of this turbulent region. A nuclear arms race that would be likely to start if Iran developed a bomb "would make for a very dangerous world indeed, which could lead to a recreation of the kind of tinderbox that exploded in the Balkans 100 years ago – only this time with mushroom clouds," she writes in an essay for the Brookings Institution, a leading US think-tank."While history does not repeat itself precisely, the Middle East today bears a worrying resemblance to the Balkans then," she says. "A similar mix of toxic nationalisms threatens to draw in outside powers as the US, Turkey, Russia, and Iran look to protect their interests and clients.....In China and Japan, patriotic passions have been inflamed by the dispute over a string of islands in the East China Sea, known as the Senkakus in Japan and Diaoyus in China. "Increased Chinese military spending and the build-up of its naval capacity suggest to many American strategists that China intends to challenge the US as a Pacific power, and we are now seeing an arms race between the two countries in that region," she writes in her essay. "The Wall Street Journal has authoritative reports that the Pentagon is preparing war plans against China – just in case."
The US has a mutual self-defence treaty with Japan and in 2012 it specifically confirmed that this covered the Senkaku Islands. In November, China set up an "air defence" zone over the islands and a few days later two American B-52 bombers flew over the islands in defiance of Beijing.
"It is tempting – and sobering –to compare today's relationship between China and the US with that between Germany and England a century ago," Professor MacMillan writes. She points to the growing disquiet in the US over Chinese investment in America while "the Chinese complain that the US treats them as a second-rate power".
Another similarity highlighted by the historian is the belief that a full-scale war between the major powers is unthinkable after such a prolonged period of peace. "Now, as then, the march of globalisation has lulled us into a false sense of safety," she says. "The 100th anniversary of 1914 should make us reflect anew on our vulnerability to human error, sudden catastrophes, and sheer accident.
By M.D. Kittle
If you think the Internal Revenue Service’s persecution of conservative organizations has faded into an “inappropriate” past, the folks from the Rock River Patriots would like to set the record straight.
“We are being totally overrun by an out-of-control government,” said Marvin Munyon, a director of the southern Wisconsin tea party group.
The Rock River Patriots, like so many other limited-government organizations applying for tax-exempt status, was given the administrative runaround for more than a year before Munyon, exasperated and “threatened,” threw up his hands and dropped the group’s pursuit of 501(c)(4) status.
Not only has the revenue agency demanded the small, grassroots organization pay hundreds of dollars in taxes owed while the Rock River Patriots worked through the onerous tax-exempt application process, the IRS is charging nearly as much in late payment fees, penalties and interest.
Munyon said the group has no problem paying the $475 in taxes it owes as a taxable entity, for 2011 and 2012. They don’t mind picking up the $26 and change in interest owed on the back taxes. But the Patriots, which Munyon asserts the IRS originally targeted because of its tea party-sounding name, does take exception to the $300 plus in so-called “failure to file” fees and “failure to pay” penalties the IRS insists on assessing
The Rock River Patriots were caught in an administrative Catch-22, as is so often the case at the IRS. Munyon in April 2012 applied for 501(c)(4) designation for the group, as a pending tax-exempt organization. The IRS cashed the group’s $400 application fee on May 2, 2012, according to documents.
Munyon was informed by letter in January 2013 that the IRS was delayed in reviewing applications for tax-exempt status, all the while the meter was running on the conservative organization’s tab with the IRS.
“It’s a terrible cat-and-mouse game,” Munyon said. “It gets almost overwhelming. It’s hard for me to keep it all straight,” he said of the voluminous correspondence, forms and hours upon hours of phone calls Munyon has dealt with during the past couple of years.
The IRS did offer a deal, Munyon said — an offer the limited-government advocate had to refuse.
An IRS agent in Ogden, Utah, informed Munyon that if he could pledge that the Rock River Patriots never violated an election law in the past, were not violating any such laws at present and would never do so in the future, the IRS would guarantee the group a favorable ruling on its tax-exempt status within two weeks.
“I said, ‘If you have not been able to grant us a favorable status in two years, how could you grant it to us in two weeks?’” Munyon said. “Their comeback was that they ‘didn’t call to argue. We called you to help you.’”
Munyon said he didn’t want that kind of help from an agency now notorious for targeting conservative groups, flagging and delaying limited government nonprofits applying for tax-exempt status. Munyon, the leader of a small organization with limited resources, didn’t want to sign a document that could unwittingly land him in jail on perjury charges.
He said doesn’t believe the Rock River Patriots have ever done anything outside of the requirements of a tax-exempt status, but he has no idea what activities the government — particularly a federal government led by a liberal president — might deem unacceptable.
More galling, the IRS won’t give the group back its $400 tax-exempt application fee.
“One lady just laughed at me. She said, ‘You ought to know by now we don’t send any money back to anybody,’” Munyon said.
Exhausted, Munyon bowed to the mounting administrative pressure and what he considered to be IRS threats, ending the Rock River Patriot’s pursuit of tax-exempt status.
Conservative critics of the IRS say that is the outcome the agency seeks as it moves to change the rules on 501(c)(4) designations. In the guise of limiting politics in such groups, the IRS has triggered a political firestorm. Small organization leaders like Munyon say they know what it feels like to get burned.
“You can call it what you like but you are at their mercy,” he said of the IRS.
A representative from the Internal Revenue Service declined to comment on Munyon’s claims, saying the agency is strictly prohibited from talking about individual tax cases.
Satanic Temple plans monument at Oklahoma state Capitol
By Patrick HowleySatanists are planning to erect a statue of the Devil at the Oklahoma state Capitol.
The Satanic Temple, based in New York City, released its design Monday for a monument depicting children standing beside a horn-headed Satan at his throne.
The Satanic Temple applied to the Oklahoma Capitol Preservation Commission to build its monument as an antidote to a Ten Commandments monument erected in 2012 on Capitol grounds. The Ten Commandments monument is currently the subject of an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lawsuit.
“The monument has been designed to reflect the views of Satanists in Oklahoma City and beyond,” said Lucien Greaves, a spokesman for the Satanic Temple, in a statement. “The statue will also have a functional purpose as a chair where people of all ages may sit on the lap of Satan for inspiration and contemplation.”
An indiegogo campaign to raise money
for the monument has already generated more than $15,700.
No comments:
Post a Comment