Author: Papa Giorgio
The Clothing Store, Forever 21, Slashes Hours ~ Obama-Care (UPDATED w/Dennis Prager)
Apparently PolicyMic is out of the loop, this is one of many companies that are cutting hours due the Affordable Care Act. I wonder if this is what Mary Landrieu meant by saying Obama-Care causes “no more free rides“?
The predictions and fears of the Affordable Care Act’s adversaries have begun to materialize, specifically fears that the law will encourage employers to demote their employees to part-time positions in order to evade federal health care requirements. Popular clothing company Forever 21 is the first of what might be many companies to limit its non-management workers’ hours to 29.5 a week, just below the 30-hour minimum that the ACA deems full-time work.
Explaining that the company “recently audited its staffing levels, staffing needs, and payroll in conjunction with reviewing its overall operating budget,” Associate Director of Human Resources Carla Macias informed employees that effective 8/31/13, they will no longer be full-time employees of Forever 21.
It is a move that will likely harm the reputation of the company, will absolutely harm the economic circumstances of its employees, and will function as a tangible example of the Affordable Care Act’s consequences and shortcomings.
[…..]
It is probable that in a perfect world, Forever 21’s management would love to continue employing full-time workers, provide them with substantial health care benefits, and maintain low prices for its customers. But in a nation with uniquely high health care costs, an issue that the Affordable Care Act fails to address, this is a regrettably unrealistic business model.
George Will: `Obama Ignores Law, Like Nixon`
George Will: Obama Ignores Law, Like Nixon, via NewsMAX!
Barack Obama’s increasingly grandiose claims for presidential power are inversely proportional to his shriveling presidency.
Desperation fuels arrogance as, barely 200 days into the 1,462 days of his second term, his pantry of excuses for failure is bare, his domestic agenda is nonexistent and his foreign policy of empty rhetorical deadlines and redlines is floundering. And at last week’s news conference he offered inconvenience as a justification for illegality.
Explaining his decision to unilaterally rewrite the Affordable Care Act, he said: “I didn’t simply choose to” ignore the statutory requirement for beginning in 2014 the employer mandate to provide employees with healthcare. No, “this was in consultation with businesses.”
He continued: “In a normal political environment, it would have been easier for me to simply call up the speaker and say, you know what, this is a tweak that doesn’t go to the essence of the law . . . it looks like there may be some better ways to do this, let’s make a technical change to the law. That would be the normal thing that I would prefer to do. But we’re not in a normal atmosphere around here when it comes to Obamacare. We did have the executive authority to do so, and we did so.”
Serving as props in the scripted charade of White House news conferences, journalists did not ask the pertinent question: “Where does the Constitution confer upon presidents the ‘executive authority’ to ignore the separation of powers by revising laws?” The question could have elicited an Obama rarity: Brevity. Because there is no such authority.
Obama’s explanation began with an irrelevancy: He consulted with businesses before disregarding his constitutional duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” That duty does not lapse when a president decides Washington’s “political environment” is not “normal.”
When was it “normal”? The 1850s? The 1950s? Washington has been the nation’s capital for 213 years; Obama has been here less than nine years. Even if he understood “normal” political environments here, the Constitution is not suspended when a president decides the “environment” is abnormal.
Neither does the Constitution confer on presidents the power to rewrite laws if they decide the change is a “tweak” not involving the law’s “essence.” Anyway, the employer mandate is essential to the ACA.
[….]
[….]
In a 1977 interview with Richard Nixon, David Frost asked: “So, what in a sense you’re saying is that there are certain situations . . . where the president can decide that it’s in the best interests of the nation . . . and do something illegal?”
Nixon: “Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
Frost: “By definition.”
Nixon: “Exactly, exactly.”
Nixon’s claim, although constitutionally grotesque, was less so than the claim implicit in Obama’s actions regarding the ACA. Nixon’s claim was confined to matters of national security or (he said to Frost) “a threat to internal peace and order of significant magnitude.” Obama’s audacity is more spacious; it encompasses a right to disregard any portion of any law pertaining to any subject at any time when the political “environment” is difficult.
Obama should be embarrassed that, by ignoring the legal requirement concerning the employer mandate, he has validated critics who say the ACA cannot be implemented as written. What does not embarrass him is his complicity in effectively rewriting the ACA for the financial advantage of self-dealing members of Congress and their staffs.
The ACA says members of Congress (annual salaries: $174,000) and their staffs (thousands making more than $100,000) must participate in the law’s insurance exchanges. It does not say that when this change goes into effect, the current federal subsidy for this affluent cohort — up to 75 percent of the premium’s cost, perhaps $10,000 for families — should be unchanged.
When Congress awakened to what it enacted, it panicked: This could cause a flight of talent, making Congress less wonderful. So Obama directed the Office of Personnel Management, which has no power to do this, to authorize for the political class special subsidies unavailable for less privileged and less affluent citizens.
If the president does it, it’s legal? “Exactly, exactly.”
Obama/Biden Montage: `We Decimated Al Qaeda`
World’s First `Earth-Rise`
Via Sugar Pine Reality Blog
Video Description:
The Apollo project was the first mission to take images of Earth rising over the Moon. The KAGUYA successfully shot high-definition images of the Earth-rise showing an impressive image of the blue Earth which was the only floating object in pitch-dark space. These are the world’s first high-definition earth images taken from about 380,000 km away from the earth in space.
The image taking was performed by the KAGUYA’s onboard high definition television (HDTV) for space use developed by NHK. The moving image data acquired by the KAGUYA was received at the JAXA Usuda Deep Space Center, and processed by NHK.
The satellite was confirmed to be in good health through telemetry data received at the Usuda station.
* Note: Earth-rise is a phenomenon seen only from satellites that travel around the Moon, such as the KAGUYA and the Apollo space ship. The Earth-rise cannot be observed by a person who is on the Moon as they can always see the Earth at the same position.
The World Gone Mad! (Afterburner)
ZoNation (MachoSuace) Defines Feminism, via, The Clintons ~ Hillary-ous Feminism
McCarthyism Against Religious People in the Military
This is from the Baptist Press via Pastor Dean:
SAN ANTONIO (BP) — Due to a perceived slight against homosexuality, Senior Master Sgt. Phillip Monk is in a fight for his career. The Lackland Air Force base first sergeant was told by his commanding officer to clear out his office on Aug. 9. The point of contention reportedly is not about anything Monk said, but what he refused to say.
“It’s all because he didn’t say anything wrong. He thought it,” said Steven Branson, pastor of Village Parkway Baptist Church in San Antonio. Monk, his wife and their three teenage sons faithfully attend services each Sunday the pastor said.
Branson said he has been in touch with Monk since the sergeant told him Sunday (Aug. 11) of the untenable situation. The pastor said Monk feels abandoned by the institution he has served for 19 years. Deployed as a medic, Monk devoted himself to saving the lives of his fellow service men and women, according to his pastor.
“Now I’m in trouble,” Monk told Branson, “and everybody’s leaving me behind.”
At issue is Monk’s refusal to reveal his personal views regarding homosexual marriage to his commanding officer. According to a Fox News report, the commander, a lesbian, asked Monk to report on disciplinary proceedings for an Air Force instructor under investigation for making objectionable comments about homosexual marriage during a training session.
According to Fox News, Monk interviewed the instructor and determined his comments were not intentionally provocative. But some trainees complained. Monk suggested that his commander use the incident as a learning tool about tolerance and diversity, but to no avail.
“Her very first reaction was to say, ‘We need to lop off the head of this guy.’ The commander took the position that his speech was discrimination,” Monk reportedly recounted.
Branson said the commander began to press Monk about his views on the issue.
Fox reported, “She said, ‘Sgt. Monk, I need to know if you can, as my first sergeant, if you can see discrimination if somebody says that they don’t agree with homosexual marriage.'”
Having witnessed the commander’s ire regarding the instructor, Monk declined to answer. He also understood Air Force policy demands silence from homosexual detractors.
“She got angrier and angrier with him,” Branson said. “So he got fired for something she thinks he believes.”
The action will be a mark on an otherwise spotless record. Branson called Monk “pure military” — a real “do-it-by-the-book” serviceman who also happens to be a strong Christian.
…read more at Fox News Insider…
Evolution Vs. God ~ Serious Saturday
Video Description:
Hear expert testimony from leading evolutionary scientists from some of the world’s top universities:
• Peter Nonacs, Professor, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, UCLA
• Craig Stanford, Professor, Biological Sciences and Anthropology, USC
• PZ Myers, Associate Professor, Biology, University of Minnesota Morris
• Gail E. Kennedy, Associate Professor, Anthropology, UCLA
A study of the evidence of vestigial organs*, natural selection, the fifth digit, the relevance of the stickleback, Darwin’s finches and Lenski’s bacteria—all under the microscope of the Scientific Method–observable evidence from the minds of experts. Prepare to have your faith shaken.
This is the second of a great series, below was the first release:
* See my paper on this.
Friday Fodder (8-16-2013)
Norway’s Prime Minister Turns Taxi Driver ~ Jens Stoltenberg Drives A Cab
Beer Stabilizer
Closest Engine Company
None Shall Pass!
Best Job Interview Eva!… Oh, Wait
Just making it into the 20th-century… Sorta
Russian Truck Driver ~ Skill Level: Boss
Gotta Love the Irish (Language Warning)
Useful Magic
Baby Bulldog Plays with Butterfly
As Maxwell Smart Would Say, “The Ol’ Switcheroo”
Some “Best of the Web” Vids
Polly Wants Some Breast Milk?
Stuffed Cat Still a Threat
A Twist on Fishing
Panda Hugs
Group Pool Dunk
Car – 1 // Motorcycle – 0
Californians (SNL)
Russian Fly By
John Heffron
NBC Finally Catching On ~ Obama-Care Killing Jobs
Via Michelle Malkin:
WH in Denial ~ Still
(Via GayPatriot) The White House still dismisses the evidence as “anecdotal”, as NBC points out – and despite the growing data on the matter.
NBC delicately uses “unintended consequences” to describe the Obamacare job/hour losses, despite the fact that such losses were foreseen by many.
Via Zero Hedge.
Last month, Jay Carney said that the suggestion that Obamacare is reducing full-time hiring is “belied by the facts,” not unlike Jay Carney usually is.
There have been numerous reports of slashed worker hours due to looming Obama-care regs, and it must be pretty bad because even the networks are starting to catch on. NBC News contacted numerous businesses and others and found that hours are being cut because of Obamacare (video via Weasel Zippers).
That story should come as a surprise only to those who get all their information from network newscasts.
The White House has to stick to their story because they have no other choice:
But the White House, NBC News reports, says that there is no systematic evidence that this is because of Obamacare and dismisses the report as anecdotal.
Maybe President Obama can straighten out the CEO of NBC’s parent company, because they’re playing golf today.
Ball State Would Censor Thomas Jefferson ~ OBEY!
The president of Ball State University is forbidding faculty to endorse intelligent design, the belief that the universe is too complex to have evolved by chance.
President Jo Ann Gora has sent a letter to faculty and staff saying intelligent design is not appropriate material for science courses.
Gora said only humanities or social science courses may discuss topics like intelligent design, as long as professors do not openly support it.
That letter comes after an atheist group complained that the school hired a science professor who wrote a book on intelligent design and another professor was accused of teaching creationism….
A bit more from Evolution News and Views:
Next time someone tells you intelligent design is “based on religion,” you might point him to American Founder Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence. As I explain in a special July 4th edition of ID the Future, Jefferson not only believed in intelligent design, he insisted it was based on the plain evidence of nature, not religion.
Ironically, the critics of intelligent design often think they are defending the principles of Jefferson. The National Council for the Social Studies, for example, claims that intelligent design is religion and then cites Jefferson’s famous Letter to the Danbury Baptists calling for a “wall of separation” between church and state. The clear implication is that Thomas Jefferson would agree with them that intelligent design is religion. A writer for Irregular Times goes even further, insisting that “the case of Thomas Jefferson makes it quite clear that there was not a consensus of support among the authors of the Constitution to allow for the mixing of religion and government to support theological doctrines such as intelligent design.”
In reality, Jefferson did not believe that intelligent design was a religious doctrine. In a letter to John Adams on April 11, 1823, he declared:
I hold (without appeal to revelation) that when we take a view of the Universe, in its parts general or particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite power in every atom of its composition. (emphasis added)
By insisting that his defense of intelligent design was made “without appeal to revelation,” Jefferson clearly was arguing that the idea had a basis other than religion. What was that basis? He went on to explain:
The movements of the heavenly bodies, so exactly held in their course by the balance of centrifugal and centripetal forces, the structure of our earth itself, with its distribution of lands, waters and atmosphere, animal and vegetable bodies, examined in all their minutest particles, insects mere atoms of life, yet as perfectly organised as man or mammoth, the mineral substances, their generation and uses, it is impossible, I say, for the human mind not to believe that there is, in all this, design, cause and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a fabricator of all things from matter and motion, their preserver and regulator while permitted to exist in their present forms, and their regenerator into new and other forms.
In sum, Jefferson believed that empirical data from nature itself proved intelligent design by showing the natural world’s intricate organization from the level of plants and insects all the way up to the revolution of the planets.
Intelligent Design pre-dates even Jesus! [Earthly visit]
“When you see a sundial or a water-clock, you see that it tells time by design and not by chance. How then can you imagine that the universe as a whole is devoid of purpose and intelligence when it embraces everything, including these artifacts themselves and their artificers? Our friend Posidonius as you know has recently made a globe which in its revolution shows the movements of the sun and stars and planets, by day and night, just as they appear in the sky. Now if someone were to take this globe and show it to the people of Britain or Scythia [barbarians at this time] would a single one of those barbarians fail to see that it was the product of a conscious intelligence.”
[….]
But if the structure of the world in all its parts is such that it could not have been better whether in point of utility or beauty, let us consider whether this is the result of chance, or whether on the contrary the parts of the world are in such a condition that they could not possibly have cohered together if they were not controlled by intelligence and by divine providence. If then the products of nature are better than those of art, and if art produces nothing without reason, nature too cannot be deemed to be without reason. When you see a statue or a painting, you recognize the exercise of art; when you observe from a distance the course of a ship, you do not hesitate to assume that its motion is guided by reason and by art; when you look at a sun-dial or a water-clock, you infer that it tells the time by art and not by chance ; how then can it be consistent to suppose that the world, which includes both the works of art in question, the craftsmen who made them, and everything else besides, can be devoid of purpose and of reason? Suppose a traveller to carry into Scythia or Britain the orrery recently constructed by our friend Posidonius, which at each revolution reproduces the same motions of the sun, the moon and the five planets that take place in the heavens every twenty-four hours, would any single native doubt that this orrery was the work of a rational being? These thinkers however raise doubts about the world itself from which all things arise and have their being, and debate whether it is the product of chance or necessity of some sort, or of divine reason and intelligence…
Cicero, Nature of the Gods, Translated by H. Rackam, p. 207-209.
Via Russell Grigg, A Brief History of Design:
Cicero (106–43 BC), used this concept in his book De Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods) to challenge the evolutionary ideas of the philosophers of his day.
The two main schools of philosophy then were Epicureanism and Stoicism. The Epicureans sought happiness through bodily pleasures and freedom from pain and anxiety. The two chief causes of anxiety were fear of the gods and fear of death, so Epicurus sought to nullify both of these by teaching an evolutionary atomic theory.
He denied that there was any purpose in nature, because everything was composed of particles (atoma: atoms), all falling downwards. He said that these sometimes spontaneously “swerved” to coalesce and form bodies — non-living, living, human, and divine. The gods were made of finer atoms than humankind. They did not create the world or have any control over it, so they were not concerned with human affairs, and there was therefore no need for man to fear them. At death, the soul disintegrated and became non-existent, so there was no need to fear death or the prospect of judgment after death.
Cicero used the Stoic character in his book to refute these ideas with arguments from design, aimed to show that the universe is governed by an intelligent designer. He argued that a conscious purpose was needed to express art (e.g. to make a picture or a statue) and so, because nature was more perfect than art, nature showed purpose also. He reasoned that the movement of a ship was guided by skilled intelligence, and a sundial or water clock told the time by design rather than by chance. He said that even the barbarians of Britain or Scythia could not fail to see that a model which showed the movements of the sun, stars and planets was the product of conscious intelligence.
Cicero continued his challenge to the evolutionism of Epicurus by marvelling that anyone could persuade himself that chance collisions of particles could form anything as beautiful as the world. He said that this was on a par with believing that if the letters of the alphabet were thrown on the ground often enough they would spell out the Annals of Ennius.
And he asked: if chance collisions of particles could make a world, why then cannot they build much less difficult objects, like a colonnade, a temple, a house, or a city?