Trouble For Obama At The Supreme Court?, Obamacare's Assault On The Middle Class, It's A Dangerous Job Representing A Dangerous "State", Hillary Looking To 2016
Trouble For Obama At The Supreme Court?
As many people were getting ready to celebrate the New Year, more than a few eyebrows were raised when news broke that Justice Sonia Sotomayor issued an order blocking enforcement of Obamacare's contraception mandate. The order came as the result of an emergency appeal from the Little Sisters of the Poor Home for the Aged, a charity run by Catholic nuns in Denver, Colorado.
It's always dangerous to try to predict how the justices will rule on any given issue. But the fact that Sotomayor -- Barack Obama's first appointee to the Supreme Court -- granted the injunction suggests that Obamacare's contraception mandate could be in trouble when the high court takes up the issue later this year.
Justice Sotomayor gave the Obama Administration until tomorrow morning to respond to her order. Predictably, the White House is digging in its heels and defending the mandate. A White House spokesman insisted the administration was confident that its rules strike the right balance between "providing women with free contraceptive coverage" and the religious objections of non-profit religious employers.
A lot of faith-based institutions disagree. The Washington Times reports that 91 cases have been filed against Obamacare's contraception mandate. An attorney representing the Little Sisters said, "The government has lots of ways to deliver contraceptives to people -- it doesn't need to force nuns to participate."
It's ironic that one of the biggest challenges facing Obamacare today stems from its assaults on the sanctity of life and religious liberty -- issues many in the Beltway establishment are urging candidates to avoid talking about. Yet as Fox News notes, "Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor has put religion at the forefront of the ObamaCare debate…"
Obamacare's Assault On The Middle Class
Throughout Barack Obama's campaigns for the White House, he repeatedly infused his speeches with rhetoric about protecting the middle class. For example, Obama promised over and over again that he would not raise taxes on the middle class. But that turned out to be a false promise.
The only way the Supreme Court agreed to uphold Obamacare's individual mandate was under Congress' power to tax. But Obamacare is taxing the middle class in more ways than one.
Barack Obama also promised that Obamacare would lower health insurance premiums by $2,500. Instead, as this article from The Fiscal Times notes, "Obamacare has delivered another sucker punch to the middle class. This time it's sticker shock. …And when the family budget gets hit in the solar plexus, guess what happens to consumer spending and the economy?"
Obamacare is hitting the middle class hard in order to provide subsidized healthcare to key liberal constituencies. As many feared, the costs of Obamacare are likely to be a drag on the economy.
Meanwhile, as the law kicks into high gear, many people are finding out that they aren't actually covered. Last week, 16,000 Iowans who enrolled through the glitchy federal exchange website were told to start over again.
It's A Dangerous Job Representing A Dangerous "State"
There isn't a nation called "Palestine" yet, but Barack Obama is committed to it coming into existence in 2014 -- carved out of Israel, of course. Meanwhile the non-existent country already has "ambassadors" stationed in foreign capitals. A couple of years ago, the Palestinian ambassador to the U.S. shocked reporters when he informed them that the new Palestinian state would be "Jew free." Even one Jew would just be unacceptable.
Now another ambassador from the non-existent nation of Palestine has made news. This one is Jamal al-Jamal, the Palestinian ambassador to the Czech Republic. He bombed too, sort of. More accurately, he was killed in an explosion at his home in Prague, which police say was caused by the "inexpert handling of an explosive."
Before big media could blame his death on "Zionist pigs," Czech media reported that while searching the ambassador's residence, police discovered he had stockpiled an arsenal large enough to arm a unit of ten men. It appears the explosion that killed him originated in his own safe, where he was storing more than diplomatic papers.
I'd suggest, given the type of ambassadors that the Palestinians select, that a new Palestinian state will not bring peace and reconciliation, but rather war and ethnic cleansing.
Hillary Looking To 2016
The New York Times is still taking heat for its blatantly political attempt to clean up Hillary Clinton's reputation by pushing a narrative on Benghazi that witnesses on the ground labeled as "completely false." But even though 2014 has just begun, the Clintons are out in full force, and for many liberals it may as well be 2016.
Bill and Hillary Clinton were the guests of honor at yesterday's inaugural ceremonies in New York City as the former president swore in New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. The Clintons and de Blasio have a long relationship. Bill de Blasio served in the Clinton Administration and he ran Hillary Clinton's 2000 Senate campaign. But Bill Clinton's high profile at yesterday's inaugural ceremonies has many political analysts buzzing.
De Blasio is not the kind of moderate, centrist Democrat that Bill Clinton claimed to be in the 1990s. No one doubts that he is the most left-wing mayor New York City has had in a very long time.
One liberal columnist explained Clinton's role this way: "[Bill Clinton] obviously thinks that swearing in de Blasio will help [Hillary], which means in turn that Bill Clinton thinks that de Blasio-style left-leaning populism represents something real within the Democratic Party."
