White House week ahead: Obama tries to limit Veterans Affairs headache
By Brian HughesPresident Obama will unveil his pick Monday to lead the problem-plagued Department of Veterans Affairs, tapping a former chief executive at Procter & Gamble to tackle deadly lapses in medical care at the overwhelmed agency.
The unorthodox selection of Bob McDonald, who most recently served as chairman of Procter & Gamble, breaks from the tradition of selecting a senior military leader for the post. However, the administration hopes that McDonald, a Republican who donated money to GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney in 2012, will garner bipartisan support a deliver badly needed customer service to veterans.
...In addition to the VA announcement, Obama on Monday will meet with Chile's president, Michelle Bachelet, at the White House. And he will host a reception to honor LGBT Pride Month.
The president on Tuesday will hold a Cabinet meeting and give an economic speech at the Georgetown Waterfront Park in Washington.
Obama on Wednesday will host a lunch for top economists at the White House.
And on Friday the president will celebrate the July Fourth holiday with a barbecue and concert for veterans and their families.
SCOTUS: Private contractors don't have to pay union dues even if union bargains for them
By Rick Moran
This is a partial victory for non-union workers who are employed in the public health system. In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that a group of Illinois private contractors who supplied home health care services under Medicaid, were not obligated to pay dues to SEIU.
CBS News:
In a split decision, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday that under the First Amendment, private health care contractors are not obligated to pay public sector union dues even if they are paid by public health care programs....The ruling affects a very narrow group of employees who recieve compensation from Medicaid disbursements. But it leaves the door open for a broader ruling involving other private workers later.
The 5 to 4 decision does not eviscerate the "fair share" fees that public unions collect from all public sector workers, regardless of whether they are in the union or not. However, it does cut off public unions from tapping into the growing market of private contractors who work in public health care systems.
...SEIU is breathing a sigh of relief, but it may be shortlived. Other cases involving non-union workers being forced to pay for the privilege of a union negotiating on their behalf are working their way up the court system. Any one of them may result in unions losing millions in dues and being cut down to size.
Hobby Lobby 1, Obamacare 0
By Thomas Lifson
The Supreme Court upheld the religious freedom rights of Hobby Lobby, the closely-held corporation owned by believing Christians who objected to being required to supply the abortion pill to their employees. Steve Ertelt of Life News reports:
…the U.S. Supreme Court today issued a favorable ruling in Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., a landmark case addressing the Constitutionally guaranteed rights of business owners to operate their family companies without violating their deeply held religious convictions.Note that this ruling only applies to closely-held corporations, but does not rule out applying the same religious freedom reasoning to publicly-held firms and nonprofits.
Writing for the 5-4 majority, Justice Samuel Alito handed down the decision for the high court, saying, “The Supreme Court holds government can’t require closely held corporations with religious owners to provide contraception coverage.”
“HHS’s contraception mandate substantially burdens the exercise of religion,” the decision reads, adding that the “decision concerns only the contraceptive mandate and should not be understood to mean that all insurance mandates.”
Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote a concurring opinion saying that government itself could provide the coverage for contraception and the abortion-causing drugs if a company declines to do so.
The Hobby Lobby decision only applies to companies. Non-profit groups like Priests for Life and Little Sisters are still waiting for a ruling about their right to opt out of the mandate.
If you are a “solid liberal” in the United States, you are unlikely to be “proud to be American,” according to a new Pew Research poll.
The Washington Post explains:
According to a new Pew Research Center study, only 40 percent of consistently liberal Americans say they often feel proud to be Americans.The poll results also show that only half of liberals see themselves as “typical Americans.”
The other 60 percent say that doesn’t describe them. [...]
By contrast, more than seven in 10 “steadfast conservatives” and eight in 10 “business conservatives” say they are generally proud to be Americans.
The poll also shows many liberals don’t liken themselves to your average American. Just 51 percent say they feel as though they are ”typical Americans” — as compared to three-quarters of conservatives and at least two-thirds of all the other groups.
By Ed Driscoll
Jonah Goldberg, in his latest G-File, has a brief rundown on “Scandalclipse”....
Have you noticed that basically the only way this White House can get out from under one scandal or controversy is by getting crushed by another? The White House was reeling from the VA scandal, which is why they rolled out the Bergdahl news. They didn’t expect that the Bergdahl story would become so controversial; fortunately they were rescued by the June 6 news of thousands of immigrant children showing up at the border. Hey, quick question: I can’t get my kid out of an airport without her getting messy. Isn’t it strange that all of these kids seem to show up, after a 1,000-mile journey looking so spiffy? Anyway, the immigrant-kid story was pretty brutal for the White House; fortunately they were rescued three days later by the news that ISIS had taken Mosul. The “Who Lost Iraq?” narrative isn’t great for the White House either, which is why it might have been a relief when the IRS announced on June 13 that they lost Lois Lerner’s e-mails.In an article a year ago in the New York Post, Glenn Reynolds added up the IRS scandal alongside the Obama administration’s other debacles, including Benghazi, its journalist-snooping scandal, and Kathleen Sebelius’ shakedown of the healthcare industry before asking, “Tired already?”
I don’t blame you, and I haven’t even mentioned the Pigford scandal, involving payments out of the Treasury’s “Judgment Fund” as part of a settlement scheme that seems rather iffy, even to The New York Times.
I’m reminded of the old “dense pack” missile-basing idea from the 1980s: The idea was to put missile silos close enough together that if one was hit by an atomic bomb, the mushroom cloud would protect the other silos from incoming attacks.
Likewise, it’s argued, by bringing all these scandals out at once — the IRS scandal actually first hit the news thanks to a question planted by IRS official Lois Lerner — the Obama administration may have a few bad weeks, but ensures by the sheer proliferation of scandal that no one of these will get the attention it deserves.
That might work, if you think of scandals as things that, like Watergate, knock out a presidency. But most don’t. The proliferation of scandal in most administrations — think George W. Bush or Bill Clinton — is more like acid rain. There’s no knockout, just an erosion of popularity and clout.
Al Qaeda Breakaway Group, ISIS, Names Leader of New Caliphate, Formally Declares Islamic State
By Dave Urbanski
The Al Qaeda breakaway group that has seized huge tracks of Iraq and much of neighboring northern Syria has named the leader of the new caliphate and formally declared the creation of an Islamic state in the territory under its control.
The spokesman for the group, known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, made the announcement in an audio statement posted online Sunday.
Abu Mohammed al-Adnani said the group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is the head of the new caliphate — a term used to describe a medieval Islamic state. Al-Adnani called on those living in the area under the group’s control to swear allegiance to al-Baghdadi.
Islamic extremists have long dreamed of recreating the Islamic caliphate that ruled over the Middle East for hundreds of years
The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) plans to use the territory it has recently secured as a launching pad for attacking the U.S. homeland, according to a new congressional report that cites comments by the leader of the al Qaeda-linked militant group.
The Washington Times reports:
The CRS [Congressional Research Service] report, delivered to members of Congress, makes the point that ISIL is a well-organized, well-funded terrorist group with definite goals to take territory and kill people it considers nonbelievers.
“Several leading representatives of the U.S. intelligence community have stated that [ISIL] maintains training camps in Iraq and Syria, has the intent to attack the United States and is reportedly recruiting and training individuals to do so,” says the June 20 report.
It quotes al-Baghdadi threatening the U.S.: “Know, O defender of the Cross, that a proxy war will not help you in the Levant, just as it will not help you in Iraq. Soon, you will be in direct conflict — God permitting — against your will.”
What makes ISIL even more dangerous is its ability to raise, and steal, money. Wealthy Sunni sheiks in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar have funneled money to ISIL to help it bring down the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad, who is an Alawite, an offshoot of Shia Islam. Mr. Assad aligns himself with Shiite-dominated Iran, and its proxy in Lebanon, the militant group Hezbollah.
By Bill Gertz
A Syrian rebel group closely aligned with al Qaeda’s official central leadership has switched sides and is now supporting an ultra-violent offshoot, following the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant’s blitzkrieg attack on Iraq, according to U.S. officials and reports from the region.
A local unit of the Al Nusra Front—the official rebel group of al Qaeda in Syria—agreed to back the ISIL on Wednesday.
The merger of one portion of al Nusra with ISIL is being viewed by government intelligence analysts and others as a troubling indicator that the inner battle between the two groups may be shifting in ISIL’s favor.
Sebastian Gorka, a counterterrorism specialist and military theorist at the Marine Corps University, said the defection of the Nusra group to ISIL, also known as ISIS, is very significant.
“ISIS and al Nusra have fought each other in the past,” Gorka said. Nusra’s swearing loyalty to ISIL “is a clear sign that ISIS is now more important than the original al Qaeda,” he said.
By Adam Kredo
Congress is poised to significantly cut funding for a key U.S. missile defense system that is slated to be deployed against threats in the Washington, D.C., area, prompting outrage from former military leaders and defense industry insiders.
Congress is seeking to slash $25 million from JLENS, or the Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor, an advanced missile detection radar system capable of finding and intercepting missiles, drones, and planes far before they reach the homeland.
Major cuts to the system are coming down the pike just as JLENS is to be deployed in the nation’s capital and integrated into the region’s air defense system.
Former military leaders and defense experts warn that the funding cut will jeopardize the JLENS program at a key juncture and potentially prevent the military from employing the advanced defense system in global hot spots.
The cuts come as rogue nations such as China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran significantly boost investments in their own cruise and ballistic missile programs, a threat that JLENS is specifically meant to detect and combat.
5 New Signs of the West’s Myopia About the Jihad Threat
By Robert Spencer
...1. “Middle East security analyst”: rise of global jihad “has nothing to do with Islam”
The Daily Mail also quoted Andreas Krieg, a Middle East security analyst at King’s College London in Qatar, absolving Islam of blame for the current global crises involving Islamic jihadists. “All the empirical evidence shows that it is on the rise,” he acknowledged. “You’re seeing it in all the headlines, then you’re looking at Iraq, you’re looking at Syria, you’re looking at Nigeria.” However, “in all three cases this has nothing to do with Islam. I think people in the West may think it is because they feel alienated by Islam. There is a lot of Islamaphobia.”
Krieg added: “When communities become disenfranchised – and lot of them are Muslim – they use Islam to further their particular cause. They adhere to a radical interpretation of Islam, but it has nothing to do with the religion.”
How could a “radical interpretation of Islam” have “nothing to do with the religion”? How is it that these groups that uniformly explain and justify their actions on the basis of Islam have nothing to do with Islam? How is it that a group that calls itself the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant and another that calls itself the Congregation of the People of the Sunnah for Dawah and Jihad have nothing to do with Islam? Why is it that study after study has shown that jihadis are actually generally wealthier than their peers, and yet Krieg asserts that the jihadis are “disillusioned by austerity” and thus turn to Islam?
Why is it also that this palpable nonsense gets printed in the mainstream media without a murmur of dissent? Why does the Daily Mail quote only Krieg and no one who looks at the available evidence and says that the rise of the global jihad has everything to do with Islam? Why does the Daily Mail not ask Krieg to give anything more than the barest explanation for his counterfactual claims? Why does the mainstream media always rush to exonerate Islam of all responsibility for the ever-mounting number of atrocities done in its name and inspired by its texts and teachings, instead of confronting the ideology that jihadis say motivates and inspires them and formulating positive and effective ways to limit its power to incite to violence?
Unless and until this self-imposed myopia is cured, and as long as counter-jihadists remain enemies of the people, there will only be more jihad attacks.
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