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« on: October 25, 2013, 09:04:14 PM » |
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The Patriot Post Friday Digest 10-25-2013
From The Federalist Patriot
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Friday Digest
Oct. 25, 2013
THE FOUNDATION
“While we are zealously performing the duties of good citizens and soldiers, we certainly ought not to be inattentive to the higher duties of religion. To the distinguished character of Patriot, it should be our highest glory to add the more distinguished character of Christian.” –George Washington (1778.)
CULTURE, SCIENCE & FAITH
AFA: ‘God’ Already Gone
by Mark Alexander
Getting it only half right, Fox News reports1 that the Air Force Academy is contemplating the removal of “so help me God2” from its Cadet Honor Oath. However, on the facing page in Contrails, the Cadet handbook, “so help me God” has already been removed from the Cadet and Officer oaths. Click to View3
As I first reported last May in “The DoD’s Frontal Assault on Faith4,” up until 2012, the Cadet Contrails handbook contained the words “so help me God” after the Cadet and Officer oaths, but those words were removed from the Class of 2016 handbooks. When I inquired with the AFA’s Public Affairs Office as to who removed “so help me God” in 2012 and why, the PAO dodged the question and tersely responded that I could file a “Freedom of Information Act” request. In other words: “Take a hike.”
While Obama’s top military appointees at the AFA are claiming its review of “so help me God” in the Honor Oath is the result of a challenge by ultra-leftist Mikey Weinstein’s so-called “Military Religious Freedom Foundation” (MRFF), Weinstein is little more than an atheist proxy for the Obama administration – a surrogate doing the bidding of the most faith-intolerant regime5 in the history of our Republic. (Of course, if any military officer suggested this was their CINC’s agenda, they would be civilians the next day.)
The MRFF is dedicated to freedom from religion, not freedom of religion. In 2011, Weinstein, an AFA graduate (‘77), demanded and received an apology from the AFA for its cadet support of “Operation Christmas Child,” which assembles and fills millions of shoe boxes with toys, school supplies and other gifts for impoverished children in 130 countries! Weinstein objected because OCC places a Christian tract in those boxes.
Under the pretense of “religious tolerance,” Barack Hussein Obama’s6 administration has been quietly advancing his mandate to remove any expression or manifestation of faith, particularly Christianity, from government forums – first and foremost, the U.S. military. His civilian “leaders” at DoD have ramped up that eradication, even threatening UCMJ charges against any military personnel whose expression of faith might be interpreted as “proselytizing.”
My colleague, Lt. Gen. (Ret.) William “Jerry” Boykin, notes, “The very troops who defend our religious freedom are at risk of having their own taken away. The worst thing we can do is stop soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines, especially for the chaplains, from the free exercise of their faith.”
Notably, if the AFA folds under pressure from Weinstein, the other Service Academies will surely follow.
The Left is constantly endeavoring to replace Rule of Law7 with the rule of men8, because the former is predicated on the principle of Liberty “endowed by our Creator,” Obama’s administrators constantly look for ways to undermine Rule of Law by driving wedges between our Liberty and its foundational endowment9.
GOVERNMENT & POLITICS
Was It Ever Supposed to Work?
Congress began hearings Thursday into the well-catalogued disaster that is the Healthcare.gov rollout. Testimony did not, however, include that of HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who was busy doing … other things. But contractors who built the monstrosity did testify, and they cast all the blame at the feet of the Obama administration. Each contractor assured Congress that their portion of the site worked when they turned in their assignments, and that HHS is at fault for not making all the pieces work together. Buck passing is, after all, the path of least resistance.
Chief among the assertions was that Healthcare.gov was not tested until just days before its Oct. 1 launch, and it crashed after a few hundred people logged on. HHS made a drastic last-minute change requiring that consumers log in before shopping, rather than allowing anonymous “window shopping,” and then HHS gave the green light anyway after failed and inadequate testing. That change, said one contractor, “created a bottleneck that prevented the vast majority of users” from accessing the site. The primary contractor, CGI, promises major improvement by Dec. 15, but that’s two-and-a-half months after launch.
As a result of the problems, the administration, without congressional authorization, granted consumers six more weeks in 2014 to buy insurance before being penalized (or “taxed,” as SCOTUS Chief Justice John Roberts might argue). Some Democrats are demanding a longer delay for the individual mandate. Democrats thought it was anarchist, racist and treasonous when Republicans said the same thing just last week.
Sebelius lamented this week that the rollout couldn’t wait – not even until the website worked – because, “There are people in this country who have waited decades for affordable health care coverage.” Of course, neither the (broken) website itself nor the health coverage sold on it are affordable. One analyst puts federal spending on contractors at $1 billion10, and that’s not including fixing the site. Worse, as many as 16 million Americans could lose their health plans11 and be forced into something more expensive. Remember when President ShamWow12 promised, “You can keep your plan!” Good times.
National Review’s Rich Lowry observed13, “The administration clearly wanted no further delays that could give fodder to opponents of the law. Perversely, it gave them, instead, the most powerful symbol of government dysfunction of the Obama era.”
But maybe that was actually part of the plan. Healthcare.gov reportedly consists of 500 million lines of code – more than Apple’s OS X, Windows XP, Facebook, Linux and Google’s Chrome web browser … combined. That number strains credulity, but if it is, in fact, accurate, then we have to wonder if the whole thing was designed to fail. You don’t throw 500 million lines of code into a project over a matter of months and start testing a few days before launch unless it was never supposed to work to begin with. We have long argued that the goal of this administration and its allies is single-payer government health care. To go about achieving that by sabotaging their own hybrid system is beyond devious – “governing by crisis”14, if you will – but it seems increasingly plausible. |
