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.
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.
President Obama’s budget director Jack Lew in a Sunday opinion piece outlined some off the “tough choices” Obama is willing to make to cut spending in his 2012 budget request due out on Feb. 14.
The piece details cuts that affect initiatives dear to the president: programs to help the poor and to clean up the Great Lakes near the president’s home state of Illinois.
The cuts are relatively small, however, in the larger scheme of things. In total, the $775 million in detailed cuts fall far short of demands by congressional Republicans and will do little toward tackling the deficit, which is estimated to be $1.5 trillion this year by the Congressional Budget Office. The cuts are in addition to a five-year spending freeze which the administration says will save $400 billion over the next decade.
[…][Lew] said “this cut is not easy for” Obama.
The 2012 deficit is projected to be 1,500,000 million. TWELVE TIMES what the last Republican budget was back in 2007, when unemployment was at 4.3%. Government spending means taking money away from productive workers and from the businesses that hire those productive workers.
To see a graphical representation of the cuts as a portion of the entire budget, click here. The cuts cannot be seen with the naked eye, so the there are several images in that post, each one more zoomed in than the last.
WINTERY KNIGHT 