Obamacare: States and universities begin cutting workers hours to avoid healthcare costs
The irony of this story is just too sweet to ignore.
As a result of the provision in the healthcare reform law which reclassified full time employees as those employees working at least 30 hours instead of 40 hours we have seen several companies announce they are cutting the hours of their part-time employees to under 30 hours because they cannot afford to provide them with healthcare and they wish to avoid the Obamacare penalty.
Of course the only people being hurt by this are the workers who will now be taking home less money and will now be the ones paying the penalty on their taxes next year if they do not purchase what the government deems to be an acceptable healthcare plan. (Thank you John Roberts!)
But the story I linked to above contains an interesting twist to this trend because now we are learning that some states are cutting the hours of part-time employees to under 30 hours as well. No longer can the left make the claim that greedy corporations are only looking to save a buck while trying to blame Obamacare because now the government is doing the same.
And the same applies to more and more universities (which have been pushing a liberal agenda for years) across the nation as well, I guess they don’t want to practice what they have been preaching.
I’ve written it many times in the past but it bears repeating: this was the desired effect of Obamacare from the beginning. The law was designed to push people out of employer based healthcare knowing the people couldn’t afford healthcare on their own in the hope that this would force people into supporting a single-payer (government run) system. And the plan is coming together…..
Open thread for Sunday, February 10th: I survived the blizzard of 2013
Here is the open thread for Sunday, February 10th: please feel free to post links to interesting articles and to discuss whatever issues might arise during the course of the day.
You can follow America’s Watchtower on Facebook and Twitter by clicking on the links to the right.
As you can tell by this post and by the two posts I wrote yesterday I have survived the big blizzard of 2013. (Although my flagpole did not survive and I won’t be flying the flag until Spring, when I can install a new one.)
When all was said and done this storm amounted to nothing more than a normal snowstorm in New England in the Winter–at least in my area, some places were harder hit. It snowed for a day and a half but we were spared the high winds and thankfully that means the lights didn’t so much as flicker. We ended up with about 18 inches of snow with three to four foot drifts which took me the morning to clear, but life goes on.
While Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick desired to flex his muscles by calling out the snow gestapo and threatening his subjects with arrest and fines for simply trying to get home after work or for going to the store to buy milk for the babies New Hampshire took a more reasonable, trust in the intelligence of the people approach by declaring a snow emergency and asking people to use common sense–a concept foreign to nanny staters–there were no proclamations from a government who felt they had to babysit the public.
Whenever we get snow I am reminded of a video from my all time favorite band–The Cure–entitled ‘Pictures of You.’ The video is set in the midst of a snowy Winter scene, complete with palm trees, and Robert Smith and the boys engage in a snowball fight while the brooding lyrics of remembrance and of longing for a past relationship and personal second guessing offset the playful nature of the video. I think the symbolism of the palm trees and the snow are supposed to reflect the good days in the relationship and the cold future of a lost love.
Remembering
You fallen into my arms
Crying for the death of your heart
You were stone white
So delicate
Lost in the cold
You were always so lost in the dark
Remembering
You how you used to be
Slow drowned
You were angels
So much more than everything
Hold for the last time then slip away quietly
Open my eyes
But I never see anything
If only I’d thought of the right words
I could have held on to your heart
If only I’d thought of the right words
I wouldn’t be breaking apart
All my pictures of you
Barack Obama’s nominee for Treasury Secretary, Jack Lew, has money hidden in the Cayman Islands
You may remember that during the 2012 campaign much was made of the fact that Mitt Romney had money hidden in the Cayman Islands to avoid paying taxes. This was harped on over and over again by Democrats seeking to paint Mitt Romney as a tax cheat who was out of touch with the American people, and apparently it was effective.
Now we are learning that Barack Obama’s choice to replace tax cheat Timothy Geithner as Treasury Secretary, Jack Lew, also has (or had?) hidden in the Cayman Islands.
As recently as 2010, Jack Lew, President Obama‘s nominee to be the next secretary of the Treasury, had $56,000 invested in a CitiGroup venture capital fund based in the Cayman Islands’ notorious Ugland House, a building whose mailboxes are home to nearly 19,000 corporate entities, many of them tax shelters.
Venture capital? I thought this was in and of itself eveil, but I digress. This is what Max Baucus said in 2008 about the Ugland House in the Cayman Islands:
Today we will take a look at some ostensibly crowded halls, those of the Ugland House in the Cayman Islands,” Senator Max Baucus of Montana, the committee’s chairman, said, opening the hearing. “That is a remarkable five-story building that the G.A.O. tells us has some 18,857 tenants. Today we will examine whether many of those tenants are feasting at America’s taxpayers’ expense.
And Barack Obama himself once spoke out on the evils of the Ugland House: Read more…
Deranged leftist Christopher Dorner goes on a killing spree and the media remains silent about his beliefs
The left and the mainstream media have gone out of their way to try to pin recent shootings on the Tea Party: When Jared Laughner shot Gabby Giffords the left tried to blame the Tea Party and Sarah Palin, when Jim Holmes shot up a movie theater Brian Ross and George Stephanopoulos found a man with the same name who was a member of the Tea Party and tried to claim it was the same man, and they even went so far as to claim the Times Square Bomber was someone who was probably upset with Obamacare.
They did all of this to advance an agenda but yet when it comes to the story of Christopher Dorner the media has not tried to make this same connection and that is because this deranged man left behind a manifesto which the media has seen but remains silent about because it doesn’t forward the agenda.
Chris Dorner is a deranged leftist who supports Barack Obama, Mia Farrow, Dianne Feinstein, Peirs Morgan, gun control, and he supports Hillary Clinton in 2016 and hates the president of the NRA so the media has decided to overlook his background.
Is it any wonder why I call the mainstream media the propaganda arm of the Obama regime?
The idea for this post came after reading this article at Capitol Commentary, please check it out.
How many times after the war on terror began did we hear the left claim that President Bush was a war criminal? All you have to do is google “Bush war criminal” and you will come up with innumerable articles calling President Bush a war criminal and calling for him to be tried for war crimes. Here is one such article:
Some 269 war crimes during the Bush administration, based primarily on autobiographical and journalistic reports in four categories—illegal decisions to go to war, the military conduct of war, mistreatment of prisoners of war, and the misoccupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.
(To be fair you can find some articles calling Barack Obama a war criminal, but where are the protesters?)
Leon Panetta spoke in front of the Senate today about the terrorist attack in Benghazi which left Americans Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty, and Tyrone Woods dead and God knows how many survivors hidden from the Congress.
Leon Panetta testified that he only spoke to Barack Obama at a pre-scheduled meeting on September 11th at 5:00, and that he spoke to the president for about fifteen minutes about the attack before moving on to other issues. Barack Obama basically told Leon Panetta he was on his own.
As these four Americans fought for their lives Barack Obama couldn’t even be bothered enough to make a phone call to find out a status on the attack because he had more important things to do. After all, he was tired and needed to get some rest before a major fundraiser in Las Vegas because he was fighting for his political life.
So we now know that apparently Barack Obama had more important issues to deal with but what about Hillary Clinton? Where was she during this attack? Nobody seems to know because much like Barack Obama she didn’t bother to call in and find out what was going on. Leon Panetta and Martin Dempsey never talked to America’s leading diplomat.
Not only did we learn that Hillary Clinton was AWOL during the attack but we also learned that she never requested support in Benghazi before the attack in spite of Chris Stevens’s repeated requests:
Why didn’t you put forces in place to be ready to respond?,” Senator John McCain asked the general.
Dempsey started, “Because we never received a request to do so, number one. And number two, we –“
McCain interrupted, “You never heard of Ambassador Stevens’s repeated warnings?”
“I had, through General Ham,” responded Dempsey, referring to the commander of AFRICOM. “But we never received a request for support from the State Department, which would have allowed us to put forces
He stopped short of blaming the State Department but the implication was there. He did say he heard about Chris Stevens’s requests through General Ham and that is interesting in and of itself when you consider that shortly after the attack the Obama regime relieved General Ham from duty. The cover up continues, but then again what difference does it make…..
Back in August of 2011 Barack Obama signed sequestration into law in exchange for raising the debt ceiling, but now as sequestration inches closer to reality Barack Obama is claiming it will hurt the economy to allow the policies he supported to be allowed to go into effect, and he is calling on the Congress to protect America from his own policies while trying to deflect his decision back on the Congress.
Here is what he is saying now:
I know that a full budget may not be finished before March 1 and, unfortunately, that’s the date when a series of harmful automatic cuts to job-creating investments and defense spending — also known as the sequester — are scheduled to take effect
So let me just repeat: Our economy right now is headed in the right direction, and it will stay that way as long as there aren’t any more self-inflicted wounds coming out of Washington. So let’s keep on chipping away at this problem together, as Democrats and Republicans, to give our workers and our businesses the support that they need to thrive in the weeks and months ahead
It is clear to me that Barack Obama only asked for and signed these cuts into law as a means to kick the can down the road until after the presidential election of 2012. With that pesky little election out of the way he is now seeking to undo what he has done.
New Hampshire Democrat Annie Kuster’s tax problem
Last November Annie Kuster defeated Charlie Bass and became New Hampshire’s District 2 Representative. She ran the typical class warfare campaign: claiming that billionaires and billionaires weren’t paying their fair share, and saying that she understood middle class struggles and she would fight for them even though she was a millionaire herself who just happened to own two houses in New Hampshire.
So you can imagine my surprise when the story broke a few days ago that Annie Kuster has a history of tax delinquency. At the time of her election she owed $14,000 in property taxes on one of her properties and when this story broke she still owed roughly $6,000 on that same property.
Barack Obama targeted drone strike kills 16 year old boy…..why?
I have written about the Obama’ regime’s use of drones to kill Anwar al-Awlaki, a radicalized American citizen who was living in Yemen, and my conflicted feelings about this killing a couple of times in the past; the most recent being earlier today when I wrote about the Obama regime’s defense for killing American citizens.
The most troubling aspect of this defense is the Obama regime’s assertion that it needs no proof that the American target is plotting against the United States.
The condition that an operational leader present an ‘imminent’ threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future
Which leads us to this story: Several weeks after killing Anwar al-Awlaki the Obama regime targeted his 16 year old son, and Denver resident, killing him as he was eating at a restaurant. His crime? Apparently just being the son of Anwar al-Awlaki, here is what Robert Gibbs had to say about the killing when he was asked about it last October:
I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well-being of their children
Simply being the son of a despicable human being now makes you a legitimate target of the Obama regime even if there are no charges against you and without due process. Barack Obama is now the judge, the jury, and the executioner. If Barack Obama had a legitimate reason for ordering the drone strike against this child he needs to explain it to the American people NOW!
Sandy Hook father speaks out against proposed assault weapons ban
Below is a video that has been making the rounds from a Sandy Hook father speaking out against the proposed assault weapons ban, it is a must see.
America's Watchtower 