Happy Birthday, ObamaCare

VIDEO: IHOP Owner Fears Obamacare’s Impact on Jobs and Economy  "Under the year-old law, Womack must provide health insurance to all full-time employees beginning in 2014. Right now, he employs nearly 1,000 full- and part-time workers and already offers insurance to his management staff. He simply does not know how he’ll generate the revenue to do more.

"Womack estimates the cost of the law to his company will be 50 percent greater than his company’s earnings — in other words, beyond his ability to pay."

Happy Birthday, Obamacare? What It Really Means for American Businesses  "...Obamacare also creates penalties for firms with more than 50 workers that do not provide employees with a level of health coverage deemed adequate by Washington. This discourages small businesses from expanding. As Heritage analyst Brian Blase writes, “The economic effects of the employer mandate will likely be lower profits for many businesses, lower wages for millions of workers, increased unemployment, and higher prices for many goods and services.” Since employers will be required to increase the amount they compensate workers in the form of benefits, they will reduce the amount of compensation they provide as wages, since, after all, “Productivity gains, not acts of Congress, are required to increase worker compensation over time.”"

Government Treats the Taxpayers Like a Piggy Bank

Big Government  "My 401K is down 40%, my employer just cut the match; and it looks like I may have work until I’m 70 years old. I also pay for pensions to public employees who retired in their 50s.
"I don’t have enough money to go on vacation this year, but I paid my share of the federal government’s $2.6 million grant to teach Chinese prostitutes to drink responsibly. I pay for bridges to nowhere."

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
   
No Country Leans on Upper-Income Households as Much as U.S.: Some comments take issue with this claim.

Videos: US fighter crashes, crew rescued by US, rebel forces

Hot Air  "One of the jet’s airmen landed in a field of sheep after ejecting from the plane, then raised his hands and called out “OK, OK” to a crowd who had gathered, the Telegraph cited witness Younis Amruni, 27, as saying.
"“I hugged him and said: ‘Don’t be scared, we are your friends,’” Amruni told the newspaper, adding that people then lined up to shake the airman’s hand.
"“We are so grateful to these men who are protecting the skies,” he said. “We gave him juice and then the revolutionary military people took him away.”"

Eight years after Iraq, the Bush doctrine lives on..

JAMES TARANTO  "Obama's eventual decision to strike Libya is more consistent with the Bush doctrine--that promoting democracy in the Muslim world, sometimes by military means, is in America's national interests--than with Obama's own inclinations. It has drawn harsh if predictable criticism from both the isolationist right and the anti-American left. Providing some comic relief, Politico reports that Rep. Dennis Kucinich is even making noises about impeachment."


Mixed signals from Obama and the Middle East

 Richard Cohen   "The change that Obama promised has settled on us all like an irritating drizzle. His ideas were untested by either age or experience. It is one thing to decry American unilateralism and quite another to await international action when time is of the essence. It is not necessary for America always to lead, but it is sometimes necessary for it to do so — and always necessary for the president to know when that moment has arrived. Obama seems not to know. He often solves problems by ignoring them."



http://townhall.com/political-cartoons/kencatalino



More on this at Lucianne

AP: Obama Playing 'Grand Tourist' in Rio 'Sure to Endear Him Even More' to Brazilian People

Media Research Center "CBS's Sunday edition of the Evening News seemed to pick up on the tone of the AP article, as White House correspondent Chip Reid declared: "It's being called the split-screen presidency – on one side the military operation in Libya; on the other President Obama in Brazil, visiting a Rio de Janeiro shanty town known as the City Of God. And refusing to allow the turmoil in Libya to distract him from what he insists is vitally important business here."

More from Media Research on this subject here.   All this makes the difference in the way media treated Bush even more stark.

Pump prices may put Obama in peril

Washington Times  "Consumers' pain at the gas pump will likely be shared by President Obama at the polls in 2012 and could cost him a second term unless energy prices take a drastic turn for the better in the next 18 months.
""Energy prices should be the Achilles' heel for Obama," said Scott Wheeler, executive director of a conservative political action committee."  Via Heritage.

NY Times  "Volvo, the Swedish automaker, is the most reliant of the European car companies on Japanese parts — seven of its suppliers are based in the region ravaged by the earthquake and tsunami, including one on the cusp of the radiation zone. Volvo managers are trying to determine how many parts already were loaded on ships."

 The Double Whammy Of Libya And Japan Bullish For Oil Prices  "What’s more: crude oil demand in the US rose 4.4% last month, further indication of a recovering economy.
"Add in the very real blow to nuclear power prospects by the the existence of iodine and cesia in the Tokyo tap water and the uncertainty of getting the reactors in northern Japan completely under control and in repair."

With no debate and no objective, Obama enters a war

 Washington Examiner   "Since World War II, the executive branch has steadily grabbed more war powers, and Congress has supinely acquiesced. Truman, Johnson, Reagan, Clinton and Bush all fought wars without a formal declaration, but at least Bush used force only after Congress authorized it."

NBC's Andrea Mitchell Enthralled by 'Remarkable Job' on Libya Done By Obama and Rice "...Mitchell, who after a 2008 presidential debate hailed Barack Obama’s foreign policy knowledge (“boy, he did show a command of foreign policy in terms of the nuts and bolts of it”), on Sunday’s Meet the Press trumpeted now-President Obama’s Libya action: “This was pretty remarkable – bringing this whole coalition together and getting the Arab League” to back military action."  Brent Baker, MRC

Libya 101   "So while Barack Obama is picking out his college basketball bracket, Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice, Obama's ambassador to the United Nations, jump into action. Hillary manages to convince the Arab League of Nations not only to support a no-fly zone but had Arab governments willing to participate in military action. Meanwhile, Susan Rice..."
So Obama lets Pelosi and Reid carry the load for healthcare,  Brazil drill for our oil and Bill Clinton handle his press conferences. But he has been PRESENT in spirit.

IMPEACHMENT CALLS .. FROM DEMOCRATS?  "Funny how these progressives suddenly become so concerned about our constitution. I would think that many of these progressives probably supported not only ObamaCare but a single-payer, individual mandate system of healthcare in this country ..... where do they find the constitutional authority for that?"

"Speaking of moonbats, Michael Moore tweeted over the weekend that Obama should return his Nobel Peace Prize  because of our actions in Libya. Why return it? The Nobel Peace Prize has become a joke, and Obama is a joke. The prize is right where it needs to be. Does anybody even take it seriously anymore? I mean, when Obama was awarded the prize, what had the guy even done other than be elected?" Neal Boortz.   
  No disrespect intended.

By the Numbers: Obama's Alliances vs. Bush's Unilateralism  "Just for the record, let us see how Bush's "unilateralism" looks when placed against Obama's working with the world:"...

British Conservative Melanie Phillips Being Investigated For Her Blogpost on Fogel Family Massacre

Gateway Pundit   "A Melanie Phillips blogpost on the Spectator website which referred to the “moral depravity” of Arab “savages” is being investigated by the Press Complaints Commission.
"The online comment piece, headlined “Armchair barbarism”, focused on media coverage of the murder of five members of a Jewish family in the West Bank settlement of Itamar by Palestinian militants earlier this month.
"“The moral depravity of the Arabs is finding a grotesque echo in the moral bankruptcy and worse of the British and American ‘liberal’ media,” wrote Phillips."























Ms Phillips can now join the company of such courageous and persecuted critics of Islam as Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant.

Video: Ezra Levant's eloquent and heroic defense before the Canadian Human Rights Commission. The opening statement he reads is powerful, but so is his unscripted defense.

Wisconsin protests veer to the left

Althouse "The protests began with the teachers — well-paid, privileged Wisconsin professionals. After a few days, students took over, aided by union folk bused in from wherever. But the weeks wear on, and people have other things to do. The bill is passed. But the people still show up to the Capitol. Earlier today, there was an anti-war rally. And then, this evening, there were these muddle-headed lefties. A vivid public square is a fine thing. I love it. I celebrate diversity. But the cause of the teachers and the public employees unions brought out the crowds and made the Capitol square the cool place to hang out, and the opportunistic politicos have descended. "

Grievance Politics Barks, King Hearings Move On

Bruce Thornton  "But facts seldom inhibit grievance-politics mongers, whose power and prestige derive from incessantly replaying the melodrama of white racism, xenophobia, and other “irrational fears,” as Eugene Robinson put it in The Washington Post. Hence the panoply of false analogies, cheap pathos, and outright lies that has characterized King’s critics."

That 3 am phone call

http://wpcomics.washingtonpost.com/client/wpc/po/2011/03/17/

The Rise of Samantha Power and the risks for the American- Israel relationship  "As stories leak out regarding who was responsible for Barack Obama's sudden pivot from passivity regarding Libya towards military engagement (albeit with England and France being in the lead) one name has emerged as playing a key role in persuading him to push the button: Samantha Power.
"Her influence might cause qualms among supporters of the American-Israel relationship."