Tails News Complaints topic
Nov 27, 2013 14:50:38 GMT -5
Post by Tails82 on Nov 27, 2013 14:50:38 GMT -5
If idol worship wasn't a problem, it wouldn't have to be mentioned. Just like how the Bible doesn't mention gay "marriage" which is a disgusting absurd fad and is obviously a lie to everyone, it was not needed. Homosexuality has always been gross though so it was rightly condemned. 
It's not an argument if I put a smiley face at the end.
online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303281504579221893649519668
On Jan. 28, 1986, over the objections of engineers who described a high probability of catastrophic failure, senior NASA managers authorized the launch of the Challenger. The shuttle exploded 73 seconds into its flight.
In the last week of September 2013, a "pre-flight checklist" indicated that 41 of the 91 Healthcare.gov functions for which a key contractor was responsible were not working. Another checklist prepared a week later showed serious, and in five cases critical, defects in functions previously categorized as working. Nonetheless, the website was launched on Oct. 1 and failed almost immediately.
These episodes have a common feature: In both, the pressure to meet deadlines overrode evidence that screamed for delay. But there is a key difference. President Reagan memorably eulogized those who died when the Challenger disintegrated, but he bore no responsibility for the disaster. The Affordable Care Act, by contrast, is President Obama's signature legislative achievement, and the trail of responsibility for its botched rollout ends at the Oval Office.
He rejected excellent advice from many quarters to appoint an overall project manager, reporting directly to the White House, who was a skilled executive with experience implementing complex information systems. The day-to-day links between the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services frayed, and responsibility for the website shifted four times before ending up in the hands of a midlevel bureaucrat at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services who lacked the authority to crack heads and break logjams. Although there were dozens of contractors, there was no prime contractor, a role for which CMS was ill-suited but filled by default.
Making matters worse was a tension between politics and administration. The emerging narrative suggests that key regulatory decisions were delayed to avoid giving Republicans potent lines of attack before the 2012 election. Technology experts contend that crucial parameters were specified too late to permit adequate design and testing, and they are incredulous that testing of the overall system did not begin until just weeks before the launch.
The American people are losing what little confidence they retained in the capacity of the national government to act effectively, and the president's standing as a competent manager of his own government has eroded badly. Unless President Obama can restore confidence in the government and in his leadership, the people may well hold the rest of his ambitious agenda at arm's length.
blog.heritage.org/2013/11/26/supreme-court-hear-challenges-obamacare-anti-conscience-mandate/
Today, the Supreme Court announced that it will take up two cases challenging the Obamacare anti-conscience mandate that employers must provide health insurance coverage that includes abortion-inducing drugs, contraceptives, and sterilizations.
Over 80 lawsuits with more than 200 plaintiffs have been filed by religious organizations and other private employers to block the mandate from going into effect. The challengers argue that it violates their free exercise of religion—guaranteed by the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom and Restoration Act (RFRA).
Americans don’t forfeit their freedoms by going into business, and the anti-conscience mandate is inconsistent with the protection of religious freedom enshrined in the Bill of Rights and in laws such as RFRA. The Greens and Hahns, along with more than 200 other plaintiffs challenging this coercive mandate, remain hopeful that the Supreme Court will recognize that all Americans should be free to live and work in accordance with their faith.
blog.heritage.org/2013/11/27/obamacare-undermines-american-values/
Obamacare includes special provisions that allow many legal, non-citizen residents to qualify for federally subsidized insurance and, in so doing, offers these non-citizens more and better coverage options than American citizens.
Several studies show that patients with Medicaid coverage have worse outcomes than the uninsured, and some Medicaid beneficiaries do not consider the program “real insurance.” Yet Obamacare dumps millions of American citizens into this troubled program, even as it grants many non-citizens the opportunity to pick health plans of their choosing.
It simply doesn’t make sense to offer non-citizens more and better coverage options than American citizens. This potentially encourages immigration to the United States by those seeking to benefit from taxpayer-funded welfare programs, which increases the incentives for people not to become citizens, and thus full, integral members of our civic society.
blog.heritage.org/2013/11/26/q-iran-nuclear-deal/
This is a flawed deal that risks reducing sanctions pressure on Iran over the next six months in return for easily reversible Iranian pledges, some of which Iran has given before but subsequently reneged on. The nuclear deal requires Iran to curb some, but not all, of its nuclear activities in return for about $7 billion in sanctions relief over six months. The problem is that easing sanctions will make the final step harder. To force Tehran to make the necessary deeper concessions in a final deal, more sanctions are required. But the deal commits the Administration to refrain from imposing more sanctions over the next six months.
The agreement also implicitly recognizes Iran’s claim that it has a “right” to enrichment by stipulating that the final agreement will “involve a mutually defined enrichment program.” This abandons the demand for a suspension of enrichment mandated by multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions. The agreement also does not address weaponization research and development or Iran’s ballistic missile program, which will continue to advance.
The agreement will marginally slow, but not halt, Iran’s nuclear efforts. It has been incorrectly described as a “freeze,” but many elements of Iran’s nuclear program will continue. Iran is allowed to enrich uranium, despite the fact that this explicitly violates U.N. Security Council resolutions...the agreement does nothing to reduce Iran’s stockpile of low enriched uranium, ostensibly meant for its nuclear power reactor at Bushehr, despite the fact that reactor will be fueled by the Russians for at least 10 years anyway.
Key U.S. allies, especially Israel and Saudi Arabia, publicly complained about the Administration’s negotiating approach before the interim deal was reached. After the deal was announced on Saturday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denounced the deal as a “historic mistake” and warned that Israel “has the right and duty to defend itself by itself.”
This is a signal that Israel could take preventive action to protect itself against Iran’s nuclear threat in the future. Saudi Arabia and Arab oil kingdoms remain worried that the deal will not end Iran’s nuclear ambitions but will leave them more vulnerable to Iranian coercion, especially if the Obama Administration disengages from the Middle East and actually does “pivot” to Asia. Those fears may lead the Saudis and other states threatened by Iran to seek their own nuclear capabilities, which will make the volatile Middle East even more dangerous.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has already declared that the deal has recognized Iran’s “right” to uranium enrichment. This sets the stage for Iran to back out of the deal if pressed hard in the future, claiming that the West reneged on its commitments. As in previous negotiations with Iran, the interim agreement may eventually prove to be a diplomatic dead end.
online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304011304579219834225827504
An Iranian Insider's View of the Geneva Deal
'If the right to enrich is accepted, which it has been, then everything that we have wanted has been realized.'
The Obama administration and Western diplomats were elated by an agreement, negotiated over the weekend, to temporarily limit some aspects of Iran's nuclear-weapons program. The elation was shared by Tehran's negotiating team, led by Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, whose beaming smile and social-media savvy have been fixtures of the talks in Geneva.
On Sunday, I spoke on the phone with Payam Fazlinejad, a Kayhan writer and senior researcher and lieutenant of Mr. Shariatmadari's. The 32-year-old Mr. Fazlinejad is also a lecturer who addresses Islamic Republic elites on the ideological threats facing the regime—themes he has expounded on in such books as "Knights of the Cultural NATO" and "The Intellectuals' Secret Army." While he emphasized on the phone that his opinions don't necessarily represent those of his employer, Mr. Fazlinejad's views are typical of those held by a large and powerful element of the Tehran regime.
Mr. Fazlinejad's reading of the Geneva agreement mixes triumphalism and hard-nosed skepticism. "We need to be able to have an accurate view of what occurred and then assess it against the positions of the supreme leader and his guidance," he says. "But as a general matter, if the right to enrich is accepted, which it has been, then everything that we have wanted has been realized."
Last year, Mr. Shariatmadari, the editor of the newspaper, wrote that Iran has a right to enrich uranium up to 99%. The Obama administration insists that the Geneva agreement doesn't enshrine a right to enrich uranium. Yet the deal permits the Iranian regime to continue enriching uranium up to 5%—a level that can be quickly escalated to produce weapons-grade material. Mr. Fazlinejad views the Geneva 5% concession as great-power acquiescence to Tehran's enrichment program. "Now, the details—including the amount of enrichment and the specific enrichment locations and the technological shape of our enrichment program—are up to our technicians to determine," he says.
Given that the Geneva deal is an interim, six-month arrangement, with a final agreement still to come, Mr. Fazlinejad suggests that Western leaders must "take into account that the supreme leader's support for the negotiations and agreement has been conditional and by no means absolute. The leader instructed us that if the rights of the Iranian nation and the principles of the revolution are respected and the negotiating team stands up to the overbearing demands of the United States and the global arrogance"—the regime's terms for the West generally—"then he would support their work." On the other hand, if the agreement denies Iran's absolute right to enrich, "then it is from our view essentially void."
The Kayhan writer warns against perceiving any diplomatic agreement over Iran's nuclear program as a first step toward broader rapprochement between Washington and Tehran. "The nature of the opposition of the Islamic revolution with the regime of liberal democracy is fundamentally philosophical," Mr. Fazlinejad says. "It's an ideological difference. It is not a tactical enmity, or one that has to do with temporary interests, which can be shifted and the enmity thus done away with. . . . So in contrast to all the punditry of late in the international media, which says that these negotiations are a step toward peace between Iran and the United States—those who take this view are completely mistaken."
It's not an argument if I put a smiley face at the end.
online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303281504579221893649519668
On Jan. 28, 1986, over the objections of engineers who described a high probability of catastrophic failure, senior NASA managers authorized the launch of the Challenger. The shuttle exploded 73 seconds into its flight.
In the last week of September 2013, a "pre-flight checklist" indicated that 41 of the 91 Healthcare.gov functions for which a key contractor was responsible were not working. Another checklist prepared a week later showed serious, and in five cases critical, defects in functions previously categorized as working. Nonetheless, the website was launched on Oct. 1 and failed almost immediately.
These episodes have a common feature: In both, the pressure to meet deadlines overrode evidence that screamed for delay. But there is a key difference. President Reagan memorably eulogized those who died when the Challenger disintegrated, but he bore no responsibility for the disaster. The Affordable Care Act, by contrast, is President Obama's signature legislative achievement, and the trail of responsibility for its botched rollout ends at the Oval Office.
He rejected excellent advice from many quarters to appoint an overall project manager, reporting directly to the White House, who was a skilled executive with experience implementing complex information systems. The day-to-day links between the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services frayed, and responsibility for the website shifted four times before ending up in the hands of a midlevel bureaucrat at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services who lacked the authority to crack heads and break logjams. Although there were dozens of contractors, there was no prime contractor, a role for which CMS was ill-suited but filled by default.
Making matters worse was a tension between politics and administration. The emerging narrative suggests that key regulatory decisions were delayed to avoid giving Republicans potent lines of attack before the 2012 election. Technology experts contend that crucial parameters were specified too late to permit adequate design and testing, and they are incredulous that testing of the overall system did not begin until just weeks before the launch.
The American people are losing what little confidence they retained in the capacity of the national government to act effectively, and the president's standing as a competent manager of his own government has eroded badly. Unless President Obama can restore confidence in the government and in his leadership, the people may well hold the rest of his ambitious agenda at arm's length.
blog.heritage.org/2013/11/26/supreme-court-hear-challenges-obamacare-anti-conscience-mandate/
Today, the Supreme Court announced that it will take up two cases challenging the Obamacare anti-conscience mandate that employers must provide health insurance coverage that includes abortion-inducing drugs, contraceptives, and sterilizations.
Over 80 lawsuits with more than 200 plaintiffs have been filed by religious organizations and other private employers to block the mandate from going into effect. The challengers argue that it violates their free exercise of religion—guaranteed by the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom and Restoration Act (RFRA).
Americans don’t forfeit their freedoms by going into business, and the anti-conscience mandate is inconsistent with the protection of religious freedom enshrined in the Bill of Rights and in laws such as RFRA. The Greens and Hahns, along with more than 200 other plaintiffs challenging this coercive mandate, remain hopeful that the Supreme Court will recognize that all Americans should be free to live and work in accordance with their faith.
blog.heritage.org/2013/11/27/obamacare-undermines-american-values/
Obamacare includes special provisions that allow many legal, non-citizen residents to qualify for federally subsidized insurance and, in so doing, offers these non-citizens more and better coverage options than American citizens.
Several studies show that patients with Medicaid coverage have worse outcomes than the uninsured, and some Medicaid beneficiaries do not consider the program “real insurance.” Yet Obamacare dumps millions of American citizens into this troubled program, even as it grants many non-citizens the opportunity to pick health plans of their choosing.
It simply doesn’t make sense to offer non-citizens more and better coverage options than American citizens. This potentially encourages immigration to the United States by those seeking to benefit from taxpayer-funded welfare programs, which increases the incentives for people not to become citizens, and thus full, integral members of our civic society.
blog.heritage.org/2013/11/26/q-iran-nuclear-deal/
This is a flawed deal that risks reducing sanctions pressure on Iran over the next six months in return for easily reversible Iranian pledges, some of which Iran has given before but subsequently reneged on. The nuclear deal requires Iran to curb some, but not all, of its nuclear activities in return for about $7 billion in sanctions relief over six months. The problem is that easing sanctions will make the final step harder. To force Tehran to make the necessary deeper concessions in a final deal, more sanctions are required. But the deal commits the Administration to refrain from imposing more sanctions over the next six months.
The agreement also implicitly recognizes Iran’s claim that it has a “right” to enrichment by stipulating that the final agreement will “involve a mutually defined enrichment program.” This abandons the demand for a suspension of enrichment mandated by multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions. The agreement also does not address weaponization research and development or Iran’s ballistic missile program, which will continue to advance.
The agreement will marginally slow, but not halt, Iran’s nuclear efforts. It has been incorrectly described as a “freeze,” but many elements of Iran’s nuclear program will continue. Iran is allowed to enrich uranium, despite the fact that this explicitly violates U.N. Security Council resolutions...the agreement does nothing to reduce Iran’s stockpile of low enriched uranium, ostensibly meant for its nuclear power reactor at Bushehr, despite the fact that reactor will be fueled by the Russians for at least 10 years anyway.
Key U.S. allies, especially Israel and Saudi Arabia, publicly complained about the Administration’s negotiating approach before the interim deal was reached. After the deal was announced on Saturday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denounced the deal as a “historic mistake” and warned that Israel “has the right and duty to defend itself by itself.”
This is a signal that Israel could take preventive action to protect itself against Iran’s nuclear threat in the future. Saudi Arabia and Arab oil kingdoms remain worried that the deal will not end Iran’s nuclear ambitions but will leave them more vulnerable to Iranian coercion, especially if the Obama Administration disengages from the Middle East and actually does “pivot” to Asia. Those fears may lead the Saudis and other states threatened by Iran to seek their own nuclear capabilities, which will make the volatile Middle East even more dangerous.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has already declared that the deal has recognized Iran’s “right” to uranium enrichment. This sets the stage for Iran to back out of the deal if pressed hard in the future, claiming that the West reneged on its commitments. As in previous negotiations with Iran, the interim agreement may eventually prove to be a diplomatic dead end.
online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304011304579219834225827504
An Iranian Insider's View of the Geneva Deal
'If the right to enrich is accepted, which it has been, then everything that we have wanted has been realized.'
The Obama administration and Western diplomats were elated by an agreement, negotiated over the weekend, to temporarily limit some aspects of Iran's nuclear-weapons program. The elation was shared by Tehran's negotiating team, led by Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, whose beaming smile and social-media savvy have been fixtures of the talks in Geneva.
On Sunday, I spoke on the phone with Payam Fazlinejad, a Kayhan writer and senior researcher and lieutenant of Mr. Shariatmadari's. The 32-year-old Mr. Fazlinejad is also a lecturer who addresses Islamic Republic elites on the ideological threats facing the regime—themes he has expounded on in such books as "Knights of the Cultural NATO" and "The Intellectuals' Secret Army." While he emphasized on the phone that his opinions don't necessarily represent those of his employer, Mr. Fazlinejad's views are typical of those held by a large and powerful element of the Tehran regime.
Mr. Fazlinejad's reading of the Geneva agreement mixes triumphalism and hard-nosed skepticism. "We need to be able to have an accurate view of what occurred and then assess it against the positions of the supreme leader and his guidance," he says. "But as a general matter, if the right to enrich is accepted, which it has been, then everything that we have wanted has been realized."
Last year, Mr. Shariatmadari, the editor of the newspaper, wrote that Iran has a right to enrich uranium up to 99%. The Obama administration insists that the Geneva agreement doesn't enshrine a right to enrich uranium. Yet the deal permits the Iranian regime to continue enriching uranium up to 5%—a level that can be quickly escalated to produce weapons-grade material. Mr. Fazlinejad views the Geneva 5% concession as great-power acquiescence to Tehran's enrichment program. "Now, the details—including the amount of enrichment and the specific enrichment locations and the technological shape of our enrichment program—are up to our technicians to determine," he says.
Given that the Geneva deal is an interim, six-month arrangement, with a final agreement still to come, Mr. Fazlinejad suggests that Western leaders must "take into account that the supreme leader's support for the negotiations and agreement has been conditional and by no means absolute. The leader instructed us that if the rights of the Iranian nation and the principles of the revolution are respected and the negotiating team stands up to the overbearing demands of the United States and the global arrogance"—the regime's terms for the West generally—"then he would support their work." On the other hand, if the agreement denies Iran's absolute right to enrich, "then it is from our view essentially void."
The Kayhan writer warns against perceiving any diplomatic agreement over Iran's nuclear program as a first step toward broader rapprochement between Washington and Tehran. "The nature of the opposition of the Islamic revolution with the regime of liberal democracy is fundamentally philosophical," Mr. Fazlinejad says. "It's an ideological difference. It is not a tactical enmity, or one that has to do with temporary interests, which can be shifted and the enmity thus done away with. . . . So in contrast to all the punditry of late in the international media, which says that these negotiations are a step toward peace between Iran and the United States—those who take this view are completely mistaken."
Spinning round and round like the deadly hands of a radium clock. 
