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This is a pebble in the water which , if allowed to continue, will make concentric circles which will destroy our freedoms!
This is Obama's intention - and what he means by radical change.!(See 2, 2a and 2b below.)
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Dick
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1)Palestinian Corruption - Again
by Shoshana Bryen
Gatestone Institute
Gatestone Institute
f the Palestinian movement believes it lives outside the laws of politics, nature and economics, it may be right.
The PA and Hamas occupy a split territory with two feuding governments -- both dictatorships with all the arbitrariness and lack of accountability implied by that; multiple armed services that fight each other and, occasionally, kill Israelis; a school system that teaches children that the IDF ate Mickey Mouse and Jews have no history in the land of the Bible; a civic culture that venerates suicide bombers and the mothers who seem to revel in their children's bloody demise; and an economy that produces nothing of export value. Yet it operates on the principle that it will be bailed out by European and American political support and international largesse. And that Israel will be blamed for the Palestinian failure to thrive.
Two stories this week, however, may challenge endlessly naïve European and American fealty to the Palestinian narrative.
Israel uncovered a huge new tunnel from Gaza into Israel, built with the concrete slabs Israel permitted to be imported for the construction of houses. And the European Union, the largest provider of economic assistance to the Palestinians, discovered in an audit that the PA has stolen, lost or misappropriated $2.7 billion in EU development money.
Israel and Egypt maintain an embargo on a variety of goods entering Gaza as a result of the Hamas rocket war and the kidnapping of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit (since released). The UN Palmer Commission deemed the blockade legal under international law, but Israel has been castigated by "humanitarian" organizations for its embargo on building supplies, which Israel maintains can be diverted for military use. Last month, however, with Gaza feeling the effects of a much more stringent embargo by Egypt and the destruction of perhaps 90% of its smuggling tunnels, Israel permitted cement and other building supplies to enter. It was a humanitarian gesture that resulted in Hamas building a mile-long concrete-lined tunnel 60 feet underground, running about 1,500 feet into Israel. According to the IDF, it had lights and a rail for a small trolley, "probably intended to transfer terrorists or soldiers from side to side rapidly." It was, in short, a tunnel with no economic value, designed to kidnap Israeli soldiers and transport them into Gaza for ransom or mayhem.
No word from the "humanitarians" on the diversion of civilian aid to more nefarious ends.
Palestinian theft of European and American aid money simply is not new (for samples, look here in 2007, here in 2009, here in 2010, here in 2012, and here earlier this year.). Not for nothing do 78% of Palestinians think the PA is corrupt and 64% think Hamas is corrupt. The Palestinians create for themselves a perpetual financial crisis, which they -- with help from international institutions -- blame on Israel. In its most recent report, the World Bank blamed the Palestinian economic crisis on Israeli checkpoints. That is to say, the Palestinian right to practice terrorism against its neighbor (and most practical trading partner) trumps Israeli security concerns.
But if the findings of the EU audit are not a surprise, European taxpayers might consider taking a hard look at the sheer magnitude of the fraud, both in economic and political terms.
In 2004, the PA was among the first members of the European Neighborhood Policy. Since 1995, it has been a
member of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership and since 1997 the EU and the PLO have an interim Association Agreement on Trade and Cooperation. The EU participates in the training of the Palestinian security services and provides technical assistance for the establishment of courts that meet international legal standards. These agreements imply responsibility on the part of the Palestinians in international institutions.
And then there is money. In 2013, direct financial support for the PA was scheduled to be $124 million, up from $115 million in 2012, plus another $97 million in additional "projects," and an average of $136.5 million annually for UNRWA. On top of which, there are the "programs." The PA is eligible to receive EU money through the Partnership for Peace -- $6.8 million for 2013; the Cross Border Cooperation Program; Investing in People; and the Erasmus Mundus External Co-operation Window; and Tempus (higher education) programs. In 2012, the EU put extra money into UNRWA through its Food Facility, Social Safety Net ($54.3 million), and Instrument for Stability ($10.2 million) programs, sums that are expected to be provided again in 2013. Plus and plus, the total comes to nearly $500 million annually.
On the other side of the equation is Palestinian budget math. The PA in 2013 expects to take in revenues of $2.88 billion and run a deficit of $1.4 billion, which it plans to cover with foreign aid – including some $400 million from the U.S. (not including more than $70 million to the Palestinian security services and $200+ million to UNRWA). It should be noted that the Hamas budget is separate from that of Fatah on the West Bank, but the math is similar. Hamas's expected revenue in 2013 is $243 million, against planned expenses of $897 million, the deficit of $654 million to be covered by donations (from Iran?). The destruction of smuggling tunnels by the Egyptian army may force a revision of the figures, but by way of comparison, for 2012, Hamas planned on revenues of $60 million and a deficit of $480 million.
The story of Israel's departure from Gaza in 2005 is well known. There was no Gaza embargo, no impediment to independent Palestinian economic activity. In fact, the Palestinian new agency Ma'an was ecstatic about economic opportunities in Gaza, particularly with the acquisition of the greenhouses and agricultural equipment the Israelis were leaving behind in a $14-million deal. It is also well known that Palestinian looters attacked the greenhouses, and by early 2006, they and the $100 million in annual exports to Europe they had produced were destroyed.
What appears less well understood is that Palestinian choices, both in Gaza and in the West Bank, have economic consequences. Violence against Israelis from terrorism and rockets makes it all but certain that Israel will take a "security first," not "economic development first," attitude toward its Palestinian neighbors. The willingness of the EU and other international donors to believe that Israel's security accounts for Palestinian poverty reflects the European attitude toward Israel -- not EU economic theory. Perhaps $2.7 billion in aid money stolen from European taxpayers will get their attention and their ire.
It would be a first step toward a rational view of the violent destructiveness of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas not only toward Israel, but toward their own people as well.
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2)
Progressives Made Their Beds; It’s Time They Lay In It
By Derek Hunter
Throughout the government shutdown, Democrats, who knew Republicans wouldn’t be able to delay Obamacare, routinely said, “It’s settled law.” President Obama was re-elected, they say – though he said almost nothing about Obamacare during the campaign, and what he did say amounted to platitudes he knew were false. And the Supreme Court ruled it constitutional.
The debate was over, progressives crowed. It was going to happen. Soon they will be eating crow, and Republicans have to position themselves smartly and strategically now to make sure that crow is served up to them on a silver platter.
The roll out of Obamacare has been a disaster that makes “New Coke” look like the iPad. The website rarely works, and when it does, it sends incorrect information to insurers. And when young and healthy people do sign up, they discover they’re going to be paying exponentially more for insurance to subsidize premiums for wealthy retirees.
That last one should stick in the craw of everyone under 35. They will be paying thousands of dollars per year more so retirees who technically have no income but own their homes and are living off savings and investments – which don’t count as income when it comes to subsidies for the “poor.” And they will be paying for this until they reach 65 and go on Medicare, at which point still younger people will be subsidizing them.
In short: Obamacare is a massive wealth “spreading” from the young and struggling to the old and well off.
Add to that Obamacare’s devastating impact on the economy and part-timing of the American workforce, and you can almost see the train flying off the rails.
There will be attempts at bi-partisan “fixes” to some of the more visible problems caused by Obamacare. Republicans and Democrats have been working together to delay or repeal the medical device tax and change the definition of a full-time employee back to 40 hours per week from Obamacare’s 30 – to name just two.
Republicans must resist the urge to help with these “fixes.”
We just spent a month being lectured by arrogant know-it-alls about how Obamacare is “settled law.” So keep it settled.
Obamacare is failing already, and it will continue to fail in more spectacular ways as we move forward, let it.
Democrat wrote the bill, Democrats voted for the bill, a Democrat president signed it into law. It’s theirs. Make them live with it. As is.
Do not change one comma, one letter. It’s settled law! This is what they wanted, this is what people voted for. If the full failure of Obamacare isn’t allowed to happen, if “fixes” are passed, it will live on in a money-sucking spiral of destruction that will lead to a complete and total government takeover of health care in this country – which is their goal.
It’s going to be painful, but it’s also going to be quick. And the pain will be nothing compared to the damage to the economy and our future if this Frankenstein’s monster is helped to limp into permanency.
Republicans have to be united. Conservatives have to be united
Progressives are unified and indignant. They are indifferent to the cost to both the country and individual, and the pain to the individual is, to them, irrelevant. This is about the concept.
To protect their agenda, they will highlight any success story, no matter how dubious. Conservatives must beat them at their own game. They trot out personal stories constantly; we must do the same. If the president gives a speech touting Obamacare in Fresno, Calif., every reporter within 100 miles should be served up a menu of people suffering under it before Air Force One touches the ground.
This is a winnable fight. It’s our fight to win. But if there’s one thing Republicans and conservatives excel at, it’s snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
Obamacare is a disaster, not just in code on a website, but in concept and construction. It survives if we allow it to survive. No more delays, no more defunds, and no more changes. Every unconstitutional change the president makes must be immediately met with a court challenge, even if it’s good. It’s his law. It’s his “medicine.” Make him take it.
2a)Is the White House Now Thinking the ‘Unthinkable’ about Obamacare?
Posted By Rick Moran
This is a brutal assessment of the Obamacare insurance exchange by NRO’s Yuval Levin, who talked to several upper-echelon bureaucrats at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) as well as some insurance industry people intimately involved in the sign-up process.
After many caveats and qualifiers, Levin describes the panic of those he spoke with regarding just how bad the problems are with the Healthcare.Gov website. Despite round-the-clock attempts to fix the problems, things aren’t getting any better and the prospects for a functional system that could sign up enough enrollees to make Obamacare work are not very good.
Some highlights from Levin’s article that should be read in its entirety to get the full scope of desperation and resignation that he found with the CMS and insurance reps:
What has happened, at least so far, presents itself in several layers. One key problem, which to date has been the most prominent in public, has to do with a late-in-the-game decision to require users to go through a complex account-creation process before even reaching any coverage options. Administration officials apparently went back and forth several times on this question, and the ultimate decision required the creation of a series of patches over an already developed site in a very short time. Most of the problems people have faced so far are a function of that decision, and have had to do with creating user accounts and so getting through the very first steps involved in purchasing coverage. Some journalists and analysts have speculated that this decision was made in order to prevent people from seeing premium costs before they could also see any subsidies they might be eligible for, so that the shock of higher prices could be contained and so that simply curious observers and journalists couldn’t get a picture of premium costs in the various states. This explanation strikes me as plausible, and it struck several of the people I spoke with as plausible, but none of them could confirm it. It may be true, but it’s surely not the only possible explanation. Whatever the cause, that decision has created crippling problems that are still largely unresolved.
This fits right in with the general dishonesty that has been a hallmark of Obamacare from the time it was introduced to the present. They are pathologically incapable of being honest about the deleterious effects of Obamacare on business, on the economy, on the consumer, and on the health and well-being of the American people.
The problems people are now facing with the basic interface have taken up most of the time that CMS and its contractors have devoted to troubleshooting so far, and although things have improved a little on this front quite serious problems remain. But there are very serious problems beyond that, which are more like the sorts of problems people were predicting before the launch: database problems at the nexus of several federal and industry data sources. The federal data hub itself is so far doing reasonably well at its basic tasks, and that has come as a relief to CMS. But some of the site functions that rely on the hub, both in the federal exchanges and a number of the state exchanges, remain highly problematic. The calculation of subsidies continues to fail tests, and it’s pretty clear that some actual consumers have made actual purchases with bad information, which will become apparent to them when they get their first bills. If the interface problems are addressed and the volume of purchases increases, this calculation problem could become a huge concern.
What happens if tens of thousands of consumers get their first insurance bill and discover they’re paying more than they thought? Or get a notice from the IRS that the subsidy they thought they were getting is incorrect? Imagine: pitchforks, tar, and feathers.
CMS officials and the large insurers thought at first that the garbled data being automatically sent to insurers must be a function of some very simple problems of format incompatibility between the government and insurer systems, but that now seems not to be the case, and the problem appears to be deeper and harder to resolve. It is a very high priority problem, because the system will not be able to function if the insurers cannot have some confidence about the data they receive. At this point, insurers are trying to work through the data manually, because the volume of enrollments is very, very low. But again, if that changes, this could quickly become impossible.
Given all of the above, what are the options going forward?
The nightmare scenarios, the “unthinkable options,” involve larger moves than that—like putting enrollment on hold or re-starting the exchange system from scratch at some point. No one seems to know how this could work or what it would mean, but everyone involved is contending with a far worse set of circumstances than they were prepared for. This is a major disaster from their point of view, not a set of glitches, and they simply do not know how long it will take to fix. They dearly want to see progress day by day, but they are generally not seeing it.
The canned response from many on the right is that the system was “designed” to fail or that Obama and the Democrats want it to fail so that a single-payer system can be implemented. It’s an interesting theory but not likely, as Jim Geraghty points out:
This is where you say, “It’s designed to fail! It’s designed to collapse the existing health-care system!” That’s a really compelling theory, but the catch is that it’s got Obama’s name on it and the Democratic party has built just about all of their political capital on the idea that it would work. Democrats would be betting that after completely fouling up their signature domestic policy and one-sixth of the American economy, the voters would trust them to give it another shot, this time making even bigger, more radical, expensive, and complicated changes.
Besides, for the conspiracy to work, a single-payer system would have to get through the GOP House, not to mention needing 60 votes in the Senate. Does anyone believe that after the internal bloodletting over defunding Obamacare there are any Republicans who would vote for their own electoral execution and help pass a single-payer system?
No, this is sheer incompetence, coupled with typical dishonesty from the administration. They may pay for it by owning the biggest boondoggle in American history — the failure of a government entitlement that could discredit the idea of big government for a long time.
Incriminating revelations of illegal IRS behavior are now emerging daily. Thanks to the diligence of Chairman Darrell Issa’s House Oversight Committee, we now know that the White House hosted an unprecedented number of meetings with IRS officials during the time period that the known targeting of conservative groups took place.Gonzalo,
The implications of this level of coordination between the White House and the IRS are chilling, to say the least.
Please see my important update on the outrageous IRS/White House liaisons below – Mat.
According to recently released reports, the White House visitor records show an alarming 155 meetings between the IRS and White House officials who allegedly exchanged private taxpayer information illegally during and as a result of those meetings.
The plot in this IRS scandal is thickening by the day, and every new revelation seems to take us one step closer to uncovering the Oval Office’s direct involvement.
++The out-of-control Obama administration.
Susan Hall Ingram, who once headed the IRS office overseeing tax-exempt nonprofit groups, was awarded a sizeable bonus authorized directly by President Barack Obama for her IRS service, and she was subsequently appointed to head up the IRS’ ObamaCare enforcement division.
Earlier this week, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee exposed Ingram for illegally disclosing confidential taxpayer information to White House officials – a federal crime punishable by up to five years in prison.
In addition to these unlawful communications, White House officials invited Ms. Ingram to the White House for more than 155 documented White House meetings in a relatively short period of time.
Without question, these interactions between the IRS and the White House were unlawful means to achieve a politically expedient agenda, and should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
++It is high time for justice in these matters.
If we do not demand justice in the IRS scandal now, Americans may fondly look back on Nixon’s Watergate, for at least justice was eventually served.
Interestingly, journalist Bob Woodward, a key figure in exposing the Watergate scandal, is calling for Barack Obama’s impeachment for the IRS scandal and other actionable abuses of power.
Liberty Counsel is aggressively calling for a complete investigation aimed at holding those responsible accountable. As of now, over 85,000 friends of Liberty Counsel have signed our powerful petition.
As soon as we reach the 100,000 petition threshold, Liberty Counsel will hand-deliver the petitions to lawmakers on Capitol Hill, demanding truth and accountability.
The only way the truth will be brought to light before the 2014 election cycle is through the appointment of a Special Counsel. That’s precisely why Liberty Counsel has launched a national petition calling for the appointment of a Special Counsel to oversee and lead a thorough investigation into the ever-deepening IRS scandal.
++IRS targeting changed the outcome of the 2012 elections.
According to a new study, the unfair political persecution of Tea Party groups by the IRS likely swung the 2012 election. The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) has published their findings in a report entitled, “Do Political Protests Matter? – Evidence from the Tea Party Movement.”
AEI economist Stan Veuger gives the analysis of the report in an article written for RealClearMarkets.com…
This report shows the Tea Party contributed between three and six million votes to the Republican Party in the 2010 election, and had they continued at the same growth rate, they would have added five to eight million votes to the 2012 elections.President Barack Obama won the 2012 election by a margin of merely five million votes.
The effects of this kind of political persecution by the feared IRS are clear, and left unpunished are absolutely destructive to our constitutional republic.
++The agent of “Change” can teach us something.
One of President Obama’s political mantras has been, “In the face of impossible odds, people who love this country can change it.”
While it is questionable that this president or any of his associates actually love this country, he is correct that even in the face of great adversity, those who love the United States can turn the tide of the nation.
I believe that Liberty Counsel’s grassroots supporters are among those people. Friends like you have proven it time and again!
Barack Obama has turned today’s IRS into the most politicized agency in our nation’s history!
Without the greatest possible public outcry, the Obama administration may succeed in deflecting the investigation or minimizing its significance in the public’s view.
Mathew Staver, Founder and Chairman
Liberty Counsel
P.S. This administration promised the American people transparency, but has proven to be one of the most secretive, underhanded administrations in the history of this great nation. The Obama administration’s abuse of power and utilization of a federal agency to punish political dissidents must not be overlooked.
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