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Obama administration will pay companies to violate law governing layoff notices

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From the Heritage Foundation.

Excerpt:

The Obama Administration’s disregard for the law has struck again—and this time, it’s encouraging others to violate the law at taxpayer expense.

That’s worth saying again: The Obama Administration is encouraging people to violate a law, and promising that it will use taxpayer money to cover fines incurred from this action.

The law: The law in question is called the WARN Act, and it requires that federal contractors send employees layoff notices 60 days before a plant closing or mass layoff.

The inconvenience: Massive defense spending cuts under sequestration are scheduled to hit on January 2, 2013. Defense contractors affected by the budget cuts would have to issue notice letters to employees by November 2 (four days before the election) to meet the January 2 start date for the spending cuts.

The penalty taxpayers would pay: Employers who violate the WARN Act are liable to their former employees for “back pay for each day of a violation” and “benefits under an employee benefit plan,” as well as a penalty of $500 for each day that notice has not been sent to the local government where the layoffs will occur.

As an example, Lockheed CEO Bob Stevens has said that 123,000 of his employees would receive layoff notices. If companies fail to meet the WARN Act’s deadline, lawsuits from employees could result—but the White House has provided a taxpayer-funded guarantee as a way to counter their fears of enormous litigation costs. This guarantee is not only unprecedented but also potentially unlawful.

This President is only interested in one thing – misleading the American people on the issues so he can get re-elected. We have about a week to get this out there, or he’s going to do it. Make sure you keep sharing all of these articles with people who haven’t voted. We need to get everyone informed and into the ballot box on election day.

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Kyle Clarke of 9NEWS grills Obama on Benghazi and green energy corruption

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Watch the raw video (7 minutes) here before it disappears. (H/T ABC News via ECM)

Excerpt:

KUSA – President Barack Obama would not directly address questions from 9NEWS on whether Americans under attack in Libya were denied requests for assistance during the September 11th terror attack.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Friday that the military did not send immediate help to the consulate in Benghazi because commanders lacked enough information about the ongoing attack to put troops in harm’s way.

President Obama discussed the situation in Libya during a satellite interview Friday afternoon with 9NEWS reporter Kyle Clark, who also asked if it’s fair for Americans to be told to wait until after the election to learn what truly happened in Libya.

“The election has nothing to do with four brave Americans getting killed and us wanting to find out exactly what happened,” President Obama said. “Nobody wants to find out more what happened than I do.”

President Obama was directly asked twice whether pleas for help on the ground in Libya were denied during the attack. Both times, he repeated his standard call for a thorough investigation.

The President was also asked about the loss of tens of millions of taxpayer dollars in the failure of Abound Solar, a Fort Collins company connected to one of the President’s billionaire fundraisers.

“These loans that are given out by the Department of Energy for clean energy have created jobs all across the country,” President Obama said. “Some of them have failed but the vast majority of them are pushing us forward into a clean energy direction.”

“These are decisions, by the way, that are made by the Department of Energy, they have nothing to do with politics,” President Obama said.

President Obama was asked, in light of his calls for increased civility in politics, why he recently called Governor Mitt Romney a “bullsh—–” in an interview appearing in Rolling Stone magazine.

That article has excerpts from the transcripts for those who cannot watch the video.

This interview is amazing. Actual journalism. This is a must-see. Click the link and watch it NOW. Watch Obama squirm to defend his record without a teleprompter to save him. Oh my God. I have never, ever seen a reporter actually challenge this President in four years. This is amazing. CLICK THE LINK AND WATCH IT.

The mainstream media, tilted to the left as it is, has given Barack Obama a pass for the last four years. No one wanted to ask him any hard questions. Until this interview.

Also, please check the links below to make sure you keep up to date on this story, and Obama’s other foreign policy blunders. This is our generation’s Watergate – only it’s worse. Obama lied, Americans died. His weak foreign policy emboldened our enemies. Rather than hold the terrorists accountable, he blamed some unknown film maker who had nothing to do with causing the attack.

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Paul Nelson: the most interesting and significant paper we’ve read in years

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Wow, check out this post by Paul Nelson over at Evolution News.

Excerpt:

Now, the paper I retrieved for my co-worker, entitled “The Levinthal paradox of the interactome,” Protein Science 20 (2011):2074-79, explains why the space of “being alive” is so much vastly smaller, and harder to find, than the space of being “not alive.” The paper is short (only six pages) and was written by two structural biologists, Peter Tompa of Vrije Universiteit in Brussels and George Rose of Johns Hopkins University, neither of whom is an intelligent-design advocate. But the paper’s arguments bear so strongly on the design debate, and represent so remarkable a challenge to widely held assumptions about (for instance) the origin of cells, that its effect promises to be far-reaching. As in, revolutionary.

[…]Tompa and Rose draw a number of lessons from their calculations. They argue, first, that any increase in biological realism will only make the Levinthal interactome paradox worse:

Of course, there are additional complicating factors such as alternative splicing, post-translational modifications, non-pairwise macromolecular interactions, incorrect complex formation that is adventitiously stable, and so forth. However, even neglecting such complications, the numbers preclude formation of a functional interactome by trial and error complex formation within any meaningful span of time. This numerical exercise…is tantamount to a proof that the cell does not organize by random collisions of its interacting constituents.But secondly, what they call “the most profound conclusion” from their analysis bears directly on widely held assumptions about the origin of life.

A highly enriched soup of proteins and nucleic acids will never form a functional cell, even if lipid bilayer membranes were provided to help these materials become organized. Indeed, the fully functional contents of a living cell, once the wall or membrane enclosing them has been breached (thus, killing the cell), move irreversibly in the direction of non-living chemistry. Humpty Dumpty, once he cracks, does not reconstitute, but enters what Tompa and Rose call the “zone of chaos,” never to return.

Tompa and Rose have sketched the theoretical basis for why this happens:

[O]ur calculations of combinatorial complexity [show] that the emergent interactome could not have self-organized spontaneously from its isolated protein components. Rather, it attains its functional state by templating the interactome of a mother cell and maintains that state by a continuous expenditure of energy. In the absence of a prior framework of existing interactions, it is far more likely that combined cellular constituents would end up in a non-functional, aggregated state, one incompatible with life…The spontaneous origination of a de novo cell has yet to be observed; all extant cells are generated by the division of pre-existing cells that provide the necessary template for perpetuation of the interactome.

Tompa and Rose spell out other implications of their analysis (e.g., for medicine and synthetic biology), but maybe we’ve piqued your curiosity enough already. This paper deserves your attention. As noted, for a close circle of us at Discovery and Biologic, it’s the most interesting and significant paper we’ve read in years.

Dr. Nelson’s post explains a bit more with pictures.