Daily Archives: January 28, 2014

01/28/14

The Black Hole in The White House

By: Nelson Abdullah
Conscience of a Conservative

Like scum floating on a polluted swamp, like turds in a cesspool, all power rises to the top. As if being drawn into some looming singularity, otherwise known as a Black Hole, politics in Washington produces the largest accumulation of this odorous substance anywhere. And the leadership of the Democratic Party and their RINO accomplices may well have the exclusive rights. As the venerable Lord Acton once said, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” Barack Hussein Obama seems to have been born for no other reason than to offer living proof for this logic as if it were an immutable law of physics. So begins a new era of the American Imperial Presidency and our Nation’s Founders are turning over in their graves. Obama’s communist upbringing and his anti-Christian education has skilled him in reducing our once great nation into a third-world banana republic. And every third-world banana republic needs a dictator to run it.

The new seat of power.

Obama has said that he doesn’t need Congress to write his laws, he has his own pen and he plans to use it to issue his Executive Orders. Pray tell, how else does one define a dictatorship any other way? It is hard to pick the worst of what he has already accomplished but one thing is sure and that is what he has done to America was not by accident or failure. It was by design. So how do others view this abomination in our Constitutional Republic? Take a look.

The new symbol of power in Washington is now depicted wearing a crown. And the new seat of power is a throne. For the previous 7 years our leftist news media depicted him with a halo as if he was some messianic reincarnation. Now he has elevated himself to royalty to rule a country without the consent of a legislature. Obama himself, once described his arrival on the political scene as “The One who would cause the rise of the oceans to slow”. It isn’t known if he was still smoking pot from his college days when he said it but no one ever questioned him about it. That’s what happens when you have a state-run news media and a corps of journalists who forgot their ethical standards. No one ever says the Emperor has no clothes.

We still have one more chance to right the wrong in November. If we blow it again we’re screwed.

My name is Nelson Abdullah and I am Oldironsides

01/28/14

Another Obamacare Fiasco

By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

President Barack Obama said his biggest mistake of 2013 was the rollout of the Obamacare website. But the website was just a small manifestation of the many real problems with Obamacare, some of which have only recently become apparent. Actually, his biggest mistake may have occurred during the government shutdown negotiations, by not taking the Republicans up on their efforts to postpone its implementation by a year. Just think of the concessions he might have gotten from them on a host of other issues—such as immigration reform and the minimum wage—and the aggravation he could have avoided if he had agreed to push the pause button until after the 2014 election.

Accuracy in Media has pointed out many of the problems with Obamacare. It is a job-killing disaster, it was sold to Congress and the American public based on a series of lies, and it is doing serious damage to the quality of healthcare in this country. Millions of people have had their policies cancelled, with tens of millions more expected to have theirs cancelled once the employer mandate kicks in. The fact that President Obama has arbitrarily delayed aspects of the law, such as the employer mandate, means that he recognizes them as politically damaging to the Democrats.

People are being asked to sign up on a website that is not secure, and is in fact even less secure than it was two months ago, with no recourse for ordinary citizens if their most personal information is hacked. And the government is misrepresenting and concealing the number of people signing up for Obamacare by not distinguishing between previously uninsured people who have now purchased insurance, from those who have merely gone online to explore their options, or those who are signing up for Medicaid or subsidized policies.

The health insurance industry, which last week saw its “Industry Outlook” in terms of creditworthiness, as characterized by Moody’s, go from stable to negative, is protected against losses by a taxpayer-funded bailout provision in the so-called Affordable Care Act.

The incentives are perverse throughout Obamacare, such as cities with unfunded health-care commitments preparing to dump their retirees on the state exchanges, and companies reducing the number of full-time employees and the number of hours they can work. And the system is supposed to be enforced by the IRS, which has been highly politicized under this administration. What could possibly go wrong?

On top of all that, there has been the serious problem of cronyism. Healthcare.gov is additional proof that cronyism continues to be the name of the game in America under President Obama. As AIM previously explored in a special report, CGI Federal was awarded the contract to work on the government health care website after donating extensively to the Obama campaign. It was the only bidder. The company’s senior vice president also attended Princeton with Michelle Obama. Remember when no-bid contracts were a source of outrage and cause for investigation? No more.

Now, the Canadian-owned CGI Federal is out and a new company, called Accenture, is in. Except that the company winning this no-bid contract has offices in Chicago and is incorporated in Ireland, which its spokesman says “reflect[s] its global business across Europe, Asia, and the Americas.” It works through tax havens. “Accenture previously was incorporated in America but then reportedly moved to the tax haven of Bermuda,” reported Aaron Klein for WorldNetDaily. Bloomberg News wonders why the Senate isn’t investigating Accenture for using tax havens, like they investigated Apple last year for that very same matter. “Democrats in Congress generally don’t want to be seen badmouthing the White House,” they conclude, “or the Affordable Care Act.”

And Accenture looks to be a hefty Obama supporter as well. Accenture employees, family members, and its political action committee gave nearly four times as much to Obama as they did to Mitt Romney. They have given nearly $300,000 to Obama’s campaigns over the years.

In a letter to Front Page Magazine, Accenture Director of Corporate Communications James McAvoy clarified that the Accenture PAC itself did not contribute to Obama’s Senate campaign or his presidential campaigns.

But the amount given by employees overall is dwarfed by the amount bundled by Accenture senior manager Tracey Patterson’s husband, Chaka Patterson. He is listed on the Obama-Biden website as having bundled over $500,000 for the re-election campaign in 2012. Chaka received a shout out from the President on June 1, 2012, when he was traveling through Chicago and Minneapolis to make six fundraisers in one day. Chaka’s and his wife’s party was among them.

And another former employee of Accenture, Rayid Ghani, self-identifies as the former “Chief Scientist at [the] Obama for America 2012 campaign.”

“Rayid Ghani, chief scientist of the Obama for America data analytics team, came to the Obama campaign in 2011 after a long stint directing the analytics research group at Accenture Technology Labs, where he engineered new ways for companies to track consumers’ personal preferences,” reported The Daily Caller.

In other words, the administration transitioned from using a company for its government website that had known ties to the Obama administration to one that has less-well-known ties—but arguably ones that also run deep.

Where are the mainstream media in reporting this information? They seem to have no interest in exposing Obama’s revolving-door cronyism, and no-bid contracts. Can it get any worse for the American taxpayer?

Yes, it can.

It seems that, according to the New York Post, Obama has effectively outsourced his health care project by giving it to this company. “Accenture has 80,000 Indian workers, 35,000 in the Philippines and only 40,000 in the United States,” reported Robert Oak for the Post on January 18. “Over 40 percent of their worth comes from outsourcing. In all probability, the tech jobs awarded under this contract and paid for with U.S. tax dollars are going abroad.”

“But even if the work is done locally, chances are the employees are foreigners brought in for lower wages using the controversial H-1B visa program—where companies are allowed to hire guest workers from abroad,” reports Oak. In other words, those working on the website likely come from outside the U.S. and are paid as much as 25% less than American workers.

Accenture ranked very high among American companies in using these visas, reports Oak. The year before last, Accenture brought in over 4,000 foreign workers on these visas; they even paid one “chief programmer” about $25,000 a year.

The rationale, argues Oaks, for hiring foreign engineers and programmers is that there aren’t enough American ones. But, he notes, “It has been proved repeatedly there is no shortage of Americans with technical skills and talent.”

Will Accenture’s future employees be paid fairly? Probably not. Oak reports that in 2012, the median salary for an H-1B visa worker at Accenture was about $30,000 less than the median salary for an equivalent visa worker at Amazon.

For a comprehensive overhaul of the U.S. health care system and a vital component of Obama’s signature legislation, the administration has chosen to rely once again on a foreign-affiliated technology company with ties to Obama’s own fundraising apparatus. This is one company guaranteed to underpay its workers and outsource its production.

It’s time the media took notice of these facts and stopped ignoring the inconvenient truths about Accenture—and about Obamacare.

Roger Aronoff is the Editor of Accuracy in Media, and can be contacted at [email protected]. View the complete archives from Roger Aronoff.

01/28/14

Telos Group: The Taking of Our Children by the Progressive Left

By: Susan Knowles
Gulag Bound

So, it’s another Monday. Fresh off of going to church on Sunday, if you are Christian, and off to another busy work week. Taking the kids to school, dashing off to work, figuring out how to pay the bills while juggling who has to take little Susie to the doctor and when little Johnnie has to be picked up from school in order to make his soccer tryouts on time. Then its head down after work helping the kids do their homework so that you can get clothes washed for the kids to wear to school tomorrow, baths completed before bedtime, and then catching up on the sleep you missed last night worrying about the mounting bills and the shrinking paychecks, so that you can start the chaotic cycle all over again tomorrow.

If you are like many parents today, you barely have time to think. Your kids are growing up so fast and you will only spend a few minutes with them this week actually finding out what they are doing in school. It’s a hectic world and it’s not getting any less hectic.

I remember when I was growing up with my two brothers in North Carolina that life at times could be very stressful because both of my parents worked and due to our differences in age, I usually attended a separate school than my brothers. They spent a lot of time shuttling us back and forth while trying not to be late for work. All in all, my parents had similar worries to those experienced by parents today.

One difference, however, is that my parents had help, indirectly, but help nonetheless. You see, being raised in the South and in the time period that I grew up, we had the eyes of all of our neighbors and our elders on us at all times, whether they knew my parents or not. If we did something that we weren’t supposed to do, my parents would hear about it even before we had time to get home and tell them ourselves. The direct help my parents received, however, never involved telling my parents how they should raise us. These people just wanted to ensure our safety as well as all kids in the neighborhood.

Most parents today would never stand for that kind of assistance. If anyone tried to help them out by telling them what inappropriate behavior their child had committed, most parents would come unglued. They would be more mad at the neighbor or elder rather than at the child for the behavior. I believe that this reaction is mostly due to the guilt that many parents feel because they don’t have adequate time with their children due to having to work many hours just to put food on the table. Any direct and overt help from a neighbor or older person would be seen as a judgment of their parenting skills and not tolerated.

The downside is that a number of kids need this additional help or set of eyes on them because mom and dad can’t be everywhere at once. Without the direct and overt assistance from our neighbors or our elders, parents are limited in their resources.

No need to fear! That’s where the State steps in to offer more of an indirect, silent partnership, if you will. You know the kind of help I’m talking about. The kind that the First Lady, Michelle Obama offers when she tells you that she will figure out what is best for your child to eat at school. Heck, she and others will even go so far as to “help” you decide what’s best for you to eat. Isn’t that awesome? You not only get support with how you should raise your children but you don’t have to worry about yourself either.

teleprompter-obamaMichelle’s husband, President Barack Obama is even “helping” your children out at school by offering such a great program as Common Core. Common Core, the academic curriculum that will “help” your children learn more about saving the environment, how bad U.S. History was, and even how to do a math problem the long and arduous way rather than the commonsensical and well-substantiated way. What could be better?

Are you feeling splendid now that you know the government is your “silent” partner ready to go to great lengths to raise your children?

Do you really want a helping hand with your children from the progressive left? Well, if your answer is yes, then look no further.

In addition to all the help from the President and First Lady, you now have the Telos Group who is also ready to “help” your kids out. This time, the Telos Group is ready to pour all of its efforts into impacting your children’s spirituality. No longer will you as a parent need to worry about teaching your kids about God. Your children may not be taught the Biblical principles of “your God” but does that really matter when you are tired and need to focus on the day to day issues?

Who is the Telos Group you may ask? Here is its mission statement:

MISSION + VISION

“Telos strengthens the capacity of American faith communities – and especially American evangelicals – to help positively trans­form the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Our vision is security, freedom, and dignity for every human being in the Holy Land, and our belief is that a viable two-state solution supported by the United States is the best and most practical way to realize that vision. In other words, we at Telos are genuinely pro-Israeli, pro-Palestinian, pro-American, and pro-peace, all at the same time.”

The Telos Group’s President and Co-Founder at one point, advised the Palestinian leadership on peace negotiations with Israel. Sounds good, right? A great organization dedicated to helping your children, especially American evangelicals, to help positively transform the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

What could be better than that? We’ve all heard about “hope and change” and we’ve all seen how great that has worked under the Obama Administration. The same Administration that brought us the Benghazi conflict and four dead Americans, including a U.S. Ambassador, Obamacare with a great website and more canceled plans than those enrolled, and high unemployment numbers. What could go wrong with the “transformation” being offered by the Telos Group?

Not much, if you are a fan of George Soros, an atheist billionaire from Hungary. The Telos Group fails to mention that George Soros provides “approximately half” of the Telos Group’s funding.

Additionally, McKay Coppins of Buzzfeed reports that the Telos Group is campaigning a quiet effort to push evangelical Christians away from their loyalty to Israel and toward “increasing solidarity with the Palestinians.” Another silent partner like the government that is willing to help you raise your kids with the “correct” ideology about Israel. One that is a “little” different from the Bible, perhaps.

Also, Alexander H. Joffe, PhD and author wrote a book “where he exposed organizations funded by George Soros seeking to change American Christian’s viewpoints on Israel.” He listed the Telos Group as one of those organizations.

Parents, more and more people and organizations than ever are stepping up to fill your busy shoes. They are attacking on all grounds to reach your children’s developing minds. The question becomes are you okay with that or are you willing to stretch your already full schedule to participate in stopping the takeover of your children from the progressive left. Conservative and Libertarian organizations can only do so much without your help. Isn’t it time to take a stand and tell the progressive left that “they can’t have our children?” Get involved before it’s too late!

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Knowles-Freedoms-FlightSusan Knowles is an author, psychotherapist and former practicing attorney. Her latest book, a political fiction, is entitled, “Freedom’s Fight: A Call to Remember” available on Amazon.com. Her website is www.susanknowles.com, where this article may also be found.

The article appearing on this site is the property of Susan J. Knowles. It is protected by U.S. Copyright Laws, and is not to be downloaded or reproduced in any way without the written permission of Susan J. Knowles. Copyright 2014 Susan J. Knowles All Rights Reserved.

 

 

 

References:

  • http://www.telosgroup.org/
  • http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/george-soros-funding-anti-israel-evangelical-group/
  • Photos:
  • https://www.google.com/search?q=children+pics&tbm=isch&source=iu&imgil=71dqkcgdIpRuTM%253A%253Bhttps%253A%252F%252Fencrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com
  • https://www.google.com/search?q=elderly+pic&espv=210&es_sm=93&tbm=isch&source=iu&imgil=400rP6-_K09NgM%253A%253Bhttps%253A%252F%252Fencrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com
  • http://www.telosgroup.org/ http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/george-soros-funding-anti-israel-evangelical-group/