By way of a HHS decision, we are all paying for it....
The Sha'ar Hanegev Regional Council area was battered with ten rockets from Gaza. Residents of the communities in the Sha'ar Hanegev area were instructed to remain in fortified shelters. Three rockets hit the Eshkol Regional Council area , one of which started a brush fire, and an additional two rockets landed in open territory in the Ashkelon Coast Council region.In addition for the first time since 2012, a rocket hit Be'ersheva.
Elder of Ziyon notes a number of attacks in and near Jerusalem and elsewhere over the weekend; including the torching of Joseph's Tomb in Nablus (Shechem)...
Obama's Mini-Me will protect all of Obama's, ahem, accomplishments....
Research into social media's impact on relationships, Twitter drama, Open Carry Guitar rally and more....
Six suspects have been arrested and interrogated in connection with the murder of 16-year-old Muhammed Abu Khdeir, whose burned body was found in the Jerusalem forest on Wednesday morning Police on Sunday said only that a “dramatic development” in the investigation has led them to believe that the act was most likely carried out by Jewish extremists in revenge for the killing of three Israeli teenagers earlier in June. “Apparently the people arrested in relation to the case belong to an extremist Jewish group,” an unnamed official was quoted by AFP as saying.... Police initially said they were investigating various avenues in the teen’s death, including criminal or personal motives, while Israeli social media abounded with rumors that he had been killed because he was gay or as part of an ongoing family feud. On Saturday, the Palestinian Authority attorney-general, Dr. Muhammed Abed al-Ghani al-Aweiwi, said that Abu Khdeir was burned alive, according to the preliminary findings of the autopsy.We will update when additional details are released by the police. In the meantime, the murder needs to be condemned unconditionally, and not celebrated or excused the way many Palestinians and BDS supporters immediately excused the killing of the three Israeli teens as a reaction to supposed Israeli crimes. These sentiments below are true, but in no way excuse what happened to Khdeir:
Jews know that this killing will be held against them all, always for ever while the 3 teenagers murder will be forgotten immediately
— Margie in Tel Aviv (@MargieInTelAviv) July 6, 2014Jewish suspects in #AbuKhdeir murder, if/when convicted, will not be heroes, receive gov't pensions, or be traded for Pales "Gilad Shalits"
— Lenny Ben-David (@lennybendavid) July 6, 2014
(added) This case of an Israeli teenager, Shelly Dadon, on way to job interview who was stabbed to death has received almost no international media attention:
A black man in New Jersey has filed a lawsuit against his former employer, Benjamin Moore Paints, which he says named one of its paint colors after him and then fired him when he complained.
In a sign of [ISIS] confidence, the hitherto secretive Baghdadi made an unprecedented public appearance in the militant-held north Iraq city of Mosul, ordering Muslims to obey him, according to a video distributed online on Saturday.Baghdadi addressed followers in a mosque in Mosul and delivered a Ramadan prayer and call to arms. According to @Francois_Gatete -- here are several excerpts of the video translated into English.
The Supreme Court reins in government bulliesTwo 5 to 4 decisions this week, on the final decision day of the Supreme Court’s term, dealt with issues that illustrate the legal consequences of political tactics by today’s progressives. One case demonstrated how progressivism’s achievement, the regulatory state, manufactures social strife and can do so in ways politically useful to progressives. The other case arose from government coercion used to conscript unwilling citizens into funding the progressives’ party.
Under the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), any government action that substantially burdens religious practices will be subject to strict judicial scrutiny to determine if it, rather than some less intrusive measure, is necessary to achieve a compelling government interest. The Affordable Care Act, as supplemented by regulations, requires for-profit employers to provide health-care coverage that includes all 20 Food and Drug Administration-approved birth control methods.
These include four that prevent a fertilized egg from being implanted in the uterus. Some persons consider this tantamount to abortion and oppose these abortifacients for religious reasons. Why did Congress, having enacted RFRA, write this clearly incompatible birth control mandate? Congress didn’t.
Read the entire column here.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration is scrambling to find a way to work around the Hobby Lobby ruling.
Holiday Document Dump: 1,300 Pages Of Obamacare Regs On July 4th Eve The Department of Health and Human Services released nearly 1,300 pages of new regulations related to the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) at 4:15 Thursday, just as the nation was beginning their Independence Day holiday weekend. The regulations deal with payment rates to doctors and hospitals. How doctors get paid by HHS through the new, overreaching Obamacare guidelines has been an item of concern for the American Medical Association, a key supporter of the health care law.Philip Klein of the Washington Examiner also noted the timing:
Let's rename Washington, DC "Obamadelphia."...
The universities are still out the money, and many students still are dead broke....
Just how bad a lawyer can be and still be deemed by the courts to have provided "effective counsel"?
We all have a Constitutional right to legal representation, and further we have the right that such representation be “effective.” If a lawyer is bad enough, a guilty verdict may be overturned on the basis of “ineffective assistance of counsel.” Many people, however, don’t really understand just how bad a lawyer can be, and still be deemed to have been “effective.” In the recently decided case of Hines v. State, 2014 Tenn. Crim. App. LEXIS 376 (TN Ct. App. 2014) we see that the answer is apparently, pretty darn bad.
Another dispatch from the wacky world of higher education....
My speech in Los Angeles: "How the Academic Boycott of Israel Hurts American Students"...
Beware a mindset that knows no boundaries of that sort...
The vice president, when he was a senator — a very new senator — voted against the aid package for South Vietnam, and that was part of the deal when we pulled out of South Vietnam to try and help them survive. He said that when the Shah fell in Iran in 1979 that that was a step forward for progress toward human rights in Iran. He opposed virtually every element of President Reagan's defense build-up. He voted against the B-1, the B-2, the MX and so on. He voted against the first Gulf War. So on a number of these major issues, I just frankly, over a long period of time, felt that he had been wrong."The latest blistering assessment of Biden was yesterday by Ali Khedery -- the longest continuously serving American official in Iraq, acting as a special assistant to five U.S. ambassadors and as a senior adviser to three heads of U.S. Central Command. Khedery wrote extensively yesterday in the Washington Post how the U.S. decision to leave Iraq under Obama resulted in Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki squandering all of the political and military gains since the American surge of troops. He meticulously describes how Maliki consolidated power, defied the vanishing U.S. influence, and turned a multi-party government into a one-man show by 2009.
