Obama’s conscience tax begins on August 1

Last week, Hercules Industries, a heating ventilation and air conditioning manufacturer based in Denver, Colorado, won a preliminary injunction in federal court against Barack Obama’s fiat that all companies pay for the contraceptives, sterilizations, and abortifacients of their employees. Run by a Catholic family with conscientious objections to the mandate, Hercules Industries, which employs roughly 300 workers, was looking at potential fines of over $3 million a year. While the injunction is only temporary and applies to only this one company, it nonetheless represents an important rebuke to the Obama administration — a rebuke from a Jimmy Carter appointee no less.
“On balance, the threatened harm to plaintiffs, impingement of their right to freely exercise their religious beliefs, and the concomitant public interest in that right strongly favor the entry of injunctive relief,” ruled Judge John L. Kane.
The argument used by Obama’s Justice Department lawyers to try and shut down the company’s request for an injunction was telling in its crude secularism: they argued that the Catholic owners of Hercules Industries lost their right to religious liberty the moment they decided to own a business. “Indeed, the Supreme Court has recognized that, ‘[w]hen followers of a particular sect enter into commercial activity as a matter of choice, the limits they accept on their own conduct as a matter of conscience and faith are not to be superimposed on the statutory schemes which are binding on others in that activity,” read their motion, as reported by FoxNews.com.

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2012/07/31/obamas-conscience-tax-begins-on-august-1/#ixzz22I2p6cct

U.S. raises pressure for euro zone crisis action

The United States raised pressure on euro zone leaders to take decisive action to solve the region's debt crisis, notably by lowering troubled members' borrowing costs, on the eve of a crucial European Central Bank meeting.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said the euro zone must take steps including "bringing down interest rates in the countries that are reforming and making sure those banking systems can provide the credit those economies need".
He made the comments in an interview with Bloomberg Television recorded in Los Angeles on Tuesday, a day after he flew specially to Germany to meet Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble and ECB President Mario Draghi. The interview was broadcast on Wednesday.
Italy and Spain, the euro zone's fourth and third largest economies, risk losing access to credit markets as the risk premium investors demand to hold their bonds rather than safe-haven German debt has spiraled to levels considered unsustainable in the long term.
Draghi last week said that the central bank would do whatever it takes to preserve the euro, stirring speculation it might take more radical steps when the ECB's policy-setting Governing Council holds its monthly meeting on Thursday.
Geithner said Schaeuble and Draghi had walked him through plans they were putting in place to try to solve the crisis, but he cautioned against expecting immediate action.


Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/01/us-eurozone-idUSBRE8700AZ20120801

Why Citizens United Has Nothing to Do with What Ails American Politics

How to address the core flaw in the campaign finance regime.

Citizens United is one of the most misunderstood Supreme Court decisions ever. It doesn’t stand for what many people say it does.
Take, for example, President Obama’s famous statement that the decision “reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests—including foreign corporations—to spend without limit in our elections.” In one sentence, the former law professor made four errors of law.
First, Citizens United didn’t reverse a century of law. The president was referring to the Tillman Act of 1907, which prohibited corporate donations to candidates and parties. Citizens United didn’t touch that. Instead, the overturned precedent was a 1990 case that, for the first and only time, allowed a restriction on political speech based on something other than the appearance of corruption.
Second, the floodgates point depends on how you define those terms. As even the July 22 New York Times magazine reported, there’s no significant change in corporate spending this cycle. There are certainly people running Super PACs who would otherwise be supporting candidates directly, but Citizens United didn’t cause Super PACs (as I’ll explain shortly). And the rules affecting the wealthy individuals who are spending more haven’t changed at all. It’s unclear that any “floodgates” have opened or which special interests didn’t exist before.
Third, the rights of foreigners—corporate or otherwise—is another issue about which Citizens United said nothing. Indeed, just this year the Supreme Court summarily upheld the restrictions on foreign spending in political campaigns.
Fourth and finally, while independent spending on elections now has few limits, candidates and parties aren’t so lucky, and neither are their donors. Again, Citizens United didn’t affect laws regarding individual or corporate contributions to candidates.

Read more: http://www.american.com/archive/2012/august/why-citizens-united-has-nothing-to-do-with-what-ails-american-politics

Obama urging defense contractors ‘to disobey the law’ by not warning of layoffs

On Monday, the Department of Labor sent a letter to all state workforce agencies, administrators and liaisons, hoping to deter defense contractors from notifying employees of diminishing government funding, and urging them to forget about telling employees about the potential for massive layoffs “right before Election Day.”
As lawmakers on Capitol Hill work to deliver a solution to a looming deadline that could “sequester” billions from the defense budget, the Obama administration is advising defense contractors to forget about the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act – ensuring employers that the standards in the law need not apply to them.
“Such federal announcements would be sudden and dramatic, and in such cases, consistent with the WARN Act, employers would not have to provide the full period of notice,” the letter stated.
While defense contractors and GOP lawmakers have been probing the White House for guidance on the sequestration, the Department of Labor’s only suggestion is to delay notification until after the November 6 election.
Members of both the House and Senate along both party lines are working to avoid more than $1 trillion in defense cuts, yet the Obama administration has yet to offer a solution to either the Department of Defense and defense contractors.
Under the Budget Control Act passed by Congress and approved by the President last year, massive mandatory cuts would go into effect on January 2 — jeopardizing the jobs of hundreds of thousands in the defense industry.
Because the Pentagon would be forced to eliminate a substantial chunk of its budget, defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin and Northrup Grumman stand to lose funding from the government.

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2012/08/01/inhofe-obama-urging-defense-contractors-to-disobey-the-law/#ixzz22I0Zm89s

Fed to signal more easing but stop short of big steps

The Federal Reserve is likely to show on Wednesday that it is ready to act against a weakening economy but stop short of aggressive measures for now.
Economists say the central bank could well push back its guidance for when it sees the need for an eventual rate hike into 2015 from the current Fed consensus of late-2014, a move that could signal the depth of the central bank's concerns about the economy and hint at new measures ahead.
Wall Street is braced for another round of Fed bond purchases, and some see an off chance that it might even come this afternoon. But analysts believe policymakers will wait until at least September, giving them more time to lay out the case for their preferred method for easing policy in speeches between now and then.
"We do not expect any new initiative from the Fed," said Eric Green, economist at TD Securities. "A dovish statement signaling willingness to do more will manage frustrated expectations for more (monetary easing)."
Fed officials will hint at their intent to deliver further stimulus in part through what most analysts envision as a substantially weaker outlook on the U.S. economy than that delivered in June.

Read more:  http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/01/us-usa-fed-idUSBRE87007A20120801

Obama's Calculated Deception

Calculated Deception. That is the central theme of the Obama campaign. Calculated Deception is the term I use for Obama's rhetorical practice of trying to take advantage of what he calculates the average person does not know, and his party-controlled, so-called mainstream media won't report. And that can be seen over and over in the Obama campaign.
Obscuring the Worst Recovery Since the Great DepressionIn Monday's Wall Street Journal, Edward Lazear, former Bush chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors, notes, "A graph titled 'Private Sector Job Creation' on the Obama-Biden campaign website… announces proudly that 4.4 million private sector jobs have been created over the past 28 months." But that factoid is meaningless out of any context, more like a pediatrician boasting to you that under his care your 16-year-old son has grown to 4 feet 4 inches. At the same point during the Reagan recovery, the economy had created 9.5 million new jobs.
Moreover, Lazear correctly adds, "there hasn't been one day during the entire Obama presidency when as many Americans were working as on the day President Bush left office." That's right, contrary to the Obama campaign's misleading claim of 4.4 million new jobs created, total jobs today are still half a million less than in January 2009 when Obama entered office.

Read more: http://spectator.org/archives/2012/08/01/obamas-calculated-deception

Fast and Furious report: Gunwalking idea came from top Holder deputies in 2009

A new congressional report explores how gunwalking, as it occurred in Operation Fast and Furious, appears to have had its “genesis” in the offices of Attorney General Eric Holder’s top deputies.
The report also lays blame for Fast and Furious at the feet of five senior Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) officials.
Gunwalking describes a law enforcement operation in which law enforcement agents choose not to interdict or seize firearms they know were illegally bought by straw purchasers — in the case of Fast and Furious, representatives of Mexican drug cartels — with the goal of allowing them to penetrate further into a criminal conspiracy chain.
Once Fast and Furious-related weapons were “walked” across the U.S.-Mexico border, they could only be recovered at crime scenes in Mexico and the United States, or during raids other law enforcement officials conducted. Mexican drug cartel operatives commonly leave murder weapons at crime scenes so they aren’t found with them at a later time.
Walking guns is tactically fraught with danger because those weapons are often used in crimes. In Fast and Furious, U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed in this way; so was Mario Gonzalez, the brother of now-former Mexican government prosecutor Patricia Gonzalez.
It also appears Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jaime Zapata was killed with a Fast and Furious-related weapon. Mexican government officials have estimated that hundreds of people in their country were killed with the guns the Obama administration walked to Mexico.
Holder has denied he or anyone in the Department of Justice’s leadership knew of or approved gunwalking related to Fast and Furious.

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2012/08/01/fast-and-furious-report-gunwalking-idea-came-from-top-holder-deputies-in-2009/#ixzz22HynEZLH