Religion aside, since 2008, health care workers have had the protection of law to say that they would not help with procedures such as abortion, sex changes, or other similar controversial medical procedures.
And now, the U.S. Health & Human Serviced Department (HHS) headed by Kathleen Sebelius is apparently attempting to remove the “conscience protections” for health care workers! This would eliminate any protection of a health care worker that attempts to opt out of helping with abortion procedures or other controversial medical procedures where the worker feels that his/her conscience tells them, no!
Elimination of the “conscience protections” would put many health care workers at risk of being punished, or actually fired from their jobs. There have been many cases prior to the 2008 implementations of these protections where the Pharmacist, nurse, or even doctors have been reprimanded, or even fired because they claimed “conscience protections”. Without these protections, there is no limit as to what may be required of health care workers.
In a letter signed by 46 members of the U.S. House of Representatives, it asks her to explain why her department is seeking to repeal conscience protections for health care workers in light of known attacks on such workers. The two situations cited in the letter involve clients represented by attorneys with the Alliance Defense Fund.
Another reason for the government to stay out of the private sector. The more money you give them is the more they can regulate your behavior.
Tens of thousands of workers with no right to be in Britain have been claiming benefits thanks to an extraordinary loophole in the law.
Ministers have discovered that Labour allowed 155,000 illegal immigrants to qualify for sickness benefits and maternity pay. Government sources put the cost to the public purse at ‘tens of millions of pounds’.
They say the shambles is a damning indictment of how Labour lost control of both the benefits and immigration systems with taxpayers left to foot the bill. Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith will outlaw the practice in welfare reform legislation expected to be unveiled this week.
Ministers believe most of those abusing the system came to work in Britain for a limited period and overstayed their visa. Others managed to get a job without a work permit.
At present, someone could be illegally in the UK and able to claim Employment and Support Allowance (ESA), paid to those too sick to work, as well as statutory payments such as maternity or paternity pay and sick pay.
Astonishingly, the Work and Pensions Department has not in the past asked to see work permits when assessing claims for ESA.
Employers, meanwhile, have not been asked to show proof that workers are in Britain legally when processing claims for maternity or paternity pay or sick pay.
[…]Hundreds of thousands of National Insurance numbers were handed out under Labour to illegal workers as, alarmingly, there was no requirement on JobCentre staff to check whether a person was in the country legally.
[…]However, the European Commission has warned ministers that the rules may infringe the human rights of EU citizens and are ‘not compatible’ with EU law. It has started legal proceedings against Britain to have restrictions on welfare claims by incomers scrapped.
[…]The scale of the welfare challenge facing Britain is laid bare today in figures which show at least 330,000 children – around one in 30 – are growing up with a parent claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance.
The Labour Party is the UK-based equivalent of the Democrat party here, and Democrats also advocate for similar welfare programs for illegal aliens. Here, illegal immigrants get free health care (from emergency rooms, that cannot turn anyone away), free schooling in public schools, and free birthright citizenship. And they get to work without paying any income taxes. It’s a mess. This is being paid for by everyone else who plays by the rules. And all this doesn’t even include the crime problems.
Ministers today faced calls for an inquiry into claims that their open-door immigration policy was designed to make Britain more multicultural and allow Labour to portray the Tories as racists.
A former Labour adviser alleged that the Government opened up Britain’s borders in part to try to humiliate Right-wing opponents of immigration…
The Daily Mail reported on Saturday the controversial claims by Andrew Neather, who worked for Tony Blair and Jack Straw.
He said Labour’s relaxation of immigration controls in 2000 was a deliberate attempt to engineer a ‘truly multicultural’ country and plug gaps in the jobs market.
He said the ‘major shift’ in immigration policy was inspired by a 2001 policy paper from the Performance and Innovation Unit, a Downing Street think-tank based in the Cabinet Office…
Ministers were reluctant to discuss the move publicly for fear that it would alienate Labour’s core working-class vote, Mr Neather said. But they hoped it would allow them to paint the Conservatives as xenophobic and out of touch.
‘I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended – even if this wasn’t its main purpose – to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date,’ Mr Neather added.
That’s right. This mess was intentionally created.
Last week, while other commentators ran around Cairo’s Tahrir Square, hyperventilating about what they saw as an Arab 1989, I flew to Tel Aviv for the annual Herzliya security conference. The consensus among the assembled experts on the Middle East? A colossal failure of American foreign policy.
This failure was not the result of bad luck. It was the predictable consequence of the Obama administration’s lack of any kind of coherent grand strategy, a deficit about which more than a few veterans of U.S. foreign-policymaking have long worried. The president himself is not wholly to blame. Although cosmopolitan by both birth and upbringing, Obama was an unusually parochial politician prior to his election, judging by his scant public pronouncements on foreign-policy issues.
Yet no president can be expected to be omniscient. That is what advisers are for. The real responsibility for the current strategic vacuum lies not with Obama himself, but with the National Security Council, and in particular with the man who ran it until last October: retired Gen. James L. Jones. I suspected at the time of his appointment that General Jones was a poor choice. A big, bluff Marine, he once astonished me by recommending that Turkish troops might lend the United States support in Iraq. He seemed mildly surprised when I suggested the Iraqis might resent such a reminder of centuries of Ottoman Turkish rule.
The best national-security advisers have combined deep knowledge of international relations with an ability to play the Machiavellian Beltway game, which means competing for the president’s ear against the other would-be players in the policymaking process: not only the defense secretary but also the secretary of state and the head of the Central Intelligence Agency. No one has ever done this better than Henry Kissinger. But the crucial thing about Kissinger as national-security adviser was not the speed with which he learned the dark arts of interdepartmental turf warfare. It was the skill with which he, in partnership with Richard Nixon, forged a grand strategy for the United States at a time of alarming geopolitical instability.
The essence of that strategy was, first, to prioritize (for example, détente with the Soviets before human-rights issues within the USSR) and then to exert pressure by deliberately linking key issues. In their hardest task—salvaging peace with honor in Indochina by preserving the independence of South Vietnam—Nixon and Kissinger ultimately could not succeed. But in the Middle East they were able to eject the Soviets from a position of influence and turn Egypt from a threat into a malleable ally. And their overtures to China exploited the divisions within the communist bloc, helping to set Beijing on an epoch-making new course of economic openness.
The contrast between the foreign policy of the Nixon-Ford years and that of President Jimmy Carter is a stark reminder of how easily foreign policy can founder when there is a failure of strategic thinking. The Iranian revolution of 1979, which took the Carter administration wholly by surprise, was a catastrophe far greater than the loss of South Vietnam.
Remind you of anything? “This is what happens when you get caught by surprise,” an anonymous American official told The New York Times last week. “We’ve had endless strategy sessions for the past two years on Mideast peace, on containing Iran. And how many of them factored in the possibility that Egypt moves from stability to turmoil? None.”
I can think of no more damning indictment of the administration’s strategic thinking than this: It never once considered a scenario in which Mubarak faced a popular revolt. Yet the very essence of rigorous strategic thinking is to devise such a scenario and to think through the best responses to them, preferably two or three moves ahead of actual or potential adversaries. It is only by doing these things—ranking priorities and gaming scenarios—that a coherent foreign policy can be made. The Israelis have been hard at work doing this. All the president and his NSC team seem to have done is to draft touchy-feely speeches like the one he delivered in Cairo early in his presidency.
These were his words back in June 2009:
“America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles—principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.”
Those lines will come back to haunt Obama if, as cannot be ruled out, the ultimate beneficiary of his bungling in Egypt is the Muslim Brotherhood, which remains by far the best organized opposition force in the country—and wholly committed to the restoration of the caliphate and the strict application of Sharia. Would such an outcome advance “tolerance and the dignity of all human beings” in Egypt? Somehow, I don’t think so.
It’s a disaster. The Obama presidency is a disaster in every area – fiscally, socially and even in foreign policy.
His strategy of giving happy-clappy speeches, bowing to enemy dictators, pussyfooting around terrorists and cutting the defense budget has emboldened our enemies. Barack Obama enables evil to thrive. Now Lebanon is run by Hezbollah and Egypt is poised to fall to Hamas. It’s a disaster. A colossal failure.
The fact that so many well-meaning Americans voted for this man disgusts me. So many left-wing Americans are spoiled, lazy, envious and ignorant. They vote based on what they see on the Comedy Channel, and so that they would fit in with their wordsmith professors. What a disaster. People are dying because the people who voted for Obama were too lazy to look at his voting record. They had no time to look at his record. No time to read ratings by groups like Citizens Against Goverment Waste or the National Taxpayers Union. Obama-voters wanted to be entertained. Their hatred of Sarah Palin for trivialities has increased the evil in the world. That makes Obama voters evil.
