What’s interesting in the news today?
Open Thread, with a few to start things off.
1. Looks like some Democrats are waking up to the unworkable realities of ObamaCare. But the President is still threatening to veto a legislative fix. He changes it illegally anytime he wants, so he’s probably unfamiliar with the concept of legal legislative fixes.
From TheWashingtonTimes “Congressional lawmakers, including Democrats, rebuked the White House on Wednesday for refusing to allow tweaks to Obamacare, saying President Obama is reneging on his promise to work to fix problems in the law.
A day after the White House said it would veto a bill to re-establish the 40-hour workweek standard, House and Senate members said they would press ahead and dare the president to oppose them.”
“Under Obamacare, businesses must count as full-time employees anyone who works at least 30 hours a week.
Critics say that is pushing employers to cut some workers’ hours to stay below the threshold for having to comply with the Obamacare business mandate. They want to restore the 40-hour definition.”
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2. One of the 3 suspects in the attack on a French paper’s office has turned himself in.
From APNews “One man sought in the deadly shooting at a French satirical paper has turned himself in, and police hunted Thursday for two heavily armed men with possible links to al-Qaida in the military-style, methodical killing of 12 people at the office of a satirical newspaper that caricatured the Prophet Muhammad.
President Francois Hollande, visiting the scene of France’s deadliest such attack in more than half a century, called the assault on the weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo “an act of exceptional barbarism.”
France raised its terror alert system to the maximum — Attack Alert — and bolstered security with more than 800 extra soldiers to guard media offices, places of worship, transport and other sensitive areas. Fears had been running high in France and elsewhere in Europe that jihadis trained in warfare abroad would stage attacks at home.
French brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi, in their early 30s, should be considered armed and dangerous, according to a police bulletin released early Thursday. Mourad Hamyd, 18, surrendered at a police station in Charleville-Mezieres, a small town in France’s eastern Champagne region, said Paris prosecutor’s spokeswoman Agnes Thibault-Lecuivre. She did not offer details on Hamyd’s relationship with the men.”
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3. Isn’t Graham kinda stating the obvious here?
From HotAir “Before you start in the comment section, I know. It’s Lindsey Graham. He’s a RINO. Amesty or something. In response to the terrorist attack this morning in Paris, he’s the first elected official to call it like it is, firmly and unreservedly. In an interview taped just a few minutes ago with Hugh Hewitt that will air at 7:06 EST, the senior senator from South Carolina had this to say, especially after Egypt’s President al-Sisi spoke out publicly for the need to reform Islam.
LG: I think the President of the United States is undercutting the president of Egypt. We’re in a religious war. These are not terrorists. They’re radical Islamists who are trying to replace our way of life with their way of life. Their way of life is motivated by religious teachings that require me and you to be killed, or enslaved, or converted. The President of the United States tip-toes around the threats we face, and he is trying to diminish the religious aspect of this war. Why? I don’t know. And he is not engaging the enemy in an aggressive fashion, which makes it more likely we’ll get attacked. What he’s doing is pretending to want to destroy ISIL when in fact, he’s trying to get out of office without having to commit American ground forces to do the job as part of a team in the region, because he made a campaign promise. His campaign promises, Hugh, are getting a lot of people killed.”
“I hope so, because this is not a cartoon problem. Our way of life doesn’t fit into their scheme of how the world should be. If you stopped talked about radical Islam, if you never did a cartoon again, that’s not enough. What people need to get is they can’t be accommodated. They can’t be negotiated with. They have to be eventually destroyed. And the way you destroy them over time is to have the people within the religion turn on them, have the capability to keep them at bay within the countries where they exist. That requires capacity building. That requires partnerships. But the way you defeat radical Islam is the way the KKK was defeated. People in the South over time turned against them. They got more educated. They rejected the extreme philosophy. And we’re going to have to invest in countries and people that would reject radical Islam, side with them, partner with them to keep the war over there. And here’s what I would say to President Obama. Your strategy of containing or destroying ISIL will not work. Your goal of containing them until you get out of office puts our country at risk. You’re not a very good commander-in-chief. Your policies to take the intelligence gathering process and destroy it by treating terrorism as a common crime is going to hurt this country. And to my fellow members of Congress, you’re part of the problem, too. If you don’t find a substitute for these Defense and intelligence cuts, you’re reducing our ability to defend this nation. There’s a perfect storm brewing, and I am going to keep talking about this until we get some action.”
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Wandering Views 
Graham may be a RINO, but his comment was correct.
We are in a religious war. But we can’t say that because we remember the history lessons about how wars of religion were so terrible.
We are in a war of religion, of culture, and of dominance. Graham was right, “They’re trying to replace our way of life with their way of life..
Just a question to consider:
Other than the killing of people by drones, has Obama done anything at all to deter Islam?
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The captured terrorist in France have some information that can prevent other atrocities.
Unfortunately, they won’t tell us, and we can’t make them tell.
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From the Washington Times via Drudge:
A backdrop to the massacre in Paris on Wednesday by self-professed al Qaeda terrorists is that city officials have increasingly ceded control of heavily Muslim neighborhoods to Islamists, block by block.
France has Europe’s largest population of Muslims, some of whom talk openly of ruling the country one day and casting aside Western legal systems for harsh, Islam-based Shariah law.
Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jan/7/french-islamist-mini-states-grow-into-problem-out-/#ixzz3OEgHYnoY
Follow us: @washtimes on Twitter
That is the essential problem. They don’t assimilate. Where any culture doesn’t assimilate, you have problems.
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#1 How does increasing the threshold from 30 hours to 40 solve the problem?
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It doesn’t solve the problem. What is does it help the economy somewhat. Smaller businesses let some employees go because they couldn’t afford to pay the insurance on them and some companies cut back on hours people could work so they wouldn’t have to pay. Say you were working part time and averaging 30-32 hours a week and were barely making it, but were cut back to 20 or 25, now you would have to work 2 part time jobs.
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Please, no more ground troops in Islamic countries. Even thought there would be the chance that ISIL would spread like wildfire, we need to do something other that ground troops. A nuke would do it, but would mean too many innocents killed. I don’t know a solution, but I don’t think we need another Afghanistan or Iraq debacle.
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Linda,
The problem is the thirty hour limit requires employers to pay expensive benefits for a part-time employee. It’s not cost effective to do so for an employer. It makes it cost prohibitive. If you don’t need a full time employee, why would you pay full time benefits? What employer is gonna pay wages plus costly benefits to a part-timer who doesn’t do enough work to justify those costs? Certainly not one that wants to stay in business.
So employers cut employees, or they cut hours to skirt around it. Unlike govt, an employer doesn’t have a cash cow to milk more money out of. What this will do is put things as they were. It’s better for small business, and it’s better for employees because they won’t see their hours cut to get in compliance with this stupid rule. Besides, the high deductible, high co-pay insurance they got in exchange is useless anyway unless there’s a major health issue. Minor stuff is still coming out of their pocket. This did nothing for employers or employees, but without all that money in, the whole scam will collapse anyway.
Next should be the useless medical device tax, which has done nothing but increase costs for everyone, docs, hospitals, and the patient. Just another money making scam to prop up this piece of trash they call “reform.”
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From Albert Mohler on the Paris attacks (long article, a transcript, in part, from a podcast):
http://www.albertmohler.com/2015/01/08/theological-extremism-in-a-secular-age/
“As the news of the massacre unfolded, I immediately thought of an editorial that ran in the final edition the Wall Street Journal in 2014. That editorial, entitled ‘Progressives and Disorder,’ pointed to the fact that Western elites are often relatively unwilling or unable to deal with the disorder that has now emerged on the world scene. Western elites believe and insist that humanity operates on basically rational terms. No one better illustrates this rationalist approach to world affairs than President Barack Obama. But as the Wall Street Journal editors made clear, those Western elites are relatively helpless when it comes to dealing with the world that will not operate by the same rules of rational order and rational discourse.
“The massacre in Paris is yet another sign that a a good portion of the world’s population operates by a very different worldview and by a very different moral code. There is a form of rationality evident in the Islamic attacks, in the larger context of Islamic terrorism, and in particular in the attack upon the newspaper Charlie Hebdo. But that rationality is the rationality of Islam, not of the Western worldview; certainly not of the modern Western secular worldview. …
” … In an absolutely stunning development this morning, USA Today ran an article by an extremist Muslim cleric in Britain, Anjem Choudary, who wrote, ‘Contrary to popular misconception, Islam does not mean peace but rather means submission to the commands of Allah alone. Therefore, Muslims do not believe in the concept of freedom of expression, as their speech and actions are determined by divine revelation and not based on people’s desires.’
“He went on to write, ‘Although Muslims may not agree about the idea of freedom of expression, even non-Muslims who espouse it say it comes with responsibilities. In an increasingly unstable and insecure world, the potential consequences of insulting the Messenger Muhammad are known to Muslims and non-Muslims alike.’ Choudary went on basically to defend the massacre in Paris. ..”
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Here’s an update on #2.
Predictable…….
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/01/08/the-left-rushes-to-sympathize-with-paris-terrorist-after-he-claims-abu-ghraib-radicalized-him/
“Here we go. It has always been difficult for Westerners to understand a murderous, illiberal ideology of Islamist extremism. The torturous course of self-examination in which liberals engage in the wake of this kind of a terrorist attack has become a familiar ritual. This customary practice following the deadly assault on the offices of Charlie Hebdo began just 24 hours after the bloody attack.
In a profile published in the French center-left paper Le Monde, one of the two French brothers responsible for the massacre of 12 and the injury of 11 others on Wednesday reportedly cited the abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison facility in 2004 as the impetus for his radicalism.
Indeed, Sharif Kouachi was no stranger to Islamist militancy. He was tried in 2008 for assisting in the recruiting and funneling of French fighters into Iraq to aid in the insurgency.”
“And we were off to the races.
“Because an 11-year-old scandal is a reasonable justification for the raising of a fundamentalist army dedicated to the enslavement of minorities, women, children, the slaughter of innocents, the crucifixion of non-believers, and the destruction of 2,000-year-old religious heritage sites.”
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And another……
I find this mindboggling. I simply cannot get my mind to accept the concept that a police officer would be unarmed, ever. How can you protect without the means to do so?
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/01/07/unarmed-french-police-literally-retreated-in-the-face-of-islamist-attackers/
“The two French police officers, who both lost their lives in the effort to prevent the Charlie Hebdo attackers from executing their grim mission, are heroes. Their sacrifice in defense of their fellow citizens is beyond noble, and their bravery will be remembered in the coming days.
It is not a knock on Parisian police but French domestic policy to note and criticize the fact that the first responders who arrived at the scene on bicycles and without defensive weaponry were entirely unprepared to face an ongoing attack by murderous, AK-47-wieldling Islamist gunmen. The first police to arrive at the scene of the attack were forced to withdraw in the face of superior firepower.
The Guardian reported. “We heard shouting in the street,” Benoît Bringer, who works at a press agency on the same floor as the magazine’s offices, told France Info radio. “We saw hooded men carrying Kalashnikovs entering the building. We called the police. After a few minutes we heard heavy firing – a lot of firing, a hell of a lot. We went upstairs to take shelter on the roof. Then after about 10 minutes we saw two armed men come out on to the street. There was more shouting, more firing.
“Three policemen had arrived on bikes but had to leave because the men were armed, obviously … Then the attackers took off in a car.”
“It is speculative at this stage, but it is also relatively safe to assume that if those officers had been armed they would have had an opportunity to disable the attackers before they fled. As a result of the lack of preparedness on the part of the Parisian police, the three gunmen who killed 12 and wounded 11 more remain at large. Perhaps this atrocity will result in a review of Paris’s counter-terror planning ahead of the next terrorist incident. It is surely coming.”
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Another important portion of Mohler’s comments:
” … It is very important that Christians understand that it is not our responsibility to defend the honor of Jesus Christ. As the Bible indicates, Christ will do that himself. Our responsibility is to bear testimony to Christ and, in following his example, bear scorn where necessary in his own name. For this reason, Christians support freedom of expression; understanding that to be a basic human right and not one granted merely by the secular state. Rather freedom of conscience and freedom of expression is bound up in the fact that God has created us in his own image. Christians must therefore defend freedom of expression even while we engage in the public square and bear testimony to the lordship of Christ. …”
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I read in the paper this morning the driver of the Paris car turned himself in and WAS NOT CHARGED?
How can that be possible?
It did not, however, say they let him go, but still, isn’t he a self-confessed accessory to murder? Shouldn’t that be a charge?
I just don’t understand. 😦
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And more fun to come ….
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/08/saudi-arabia-blogger-raif-badawi-public-flogging
“A Saudi blogger who was sentenced last May to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes will be publicly flogged for the first time after Friday prayers outside a mosque in the Red Sea coastal city of Jeddah, according to a person close to his case.
“Raif Badawi was sentenced on charges related to accusations that he insulted Islam on a liberal online forum he had created. He was also ordered by the Jeddah criminal court to pay a fine of 1m Saudi riyals, or about $266,000.
“Rights groups and activists say his case is part of a wider clampdown on dissent throughout the kingdom. Officials have increasingly blunted calls for reforms since the region’s 2011 Arab Spring upheaval. …”
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michelle, there’s been a lot of bad information going out about arrests, etc. — a security expert interviewed last night on CNN was also cautioning viewers and the media about the reports on the one suspect who “turned himself in” — apparently he may be a cousin(?), but the thinking was he may or may NOT have been involved in the crime & could have gone to the police only when he heard his name being bandied about in a news or other kind of report?
Lots of confusion, NBC was insisting for hours yesterday that the other 2 had been arrested, but that apparently wasn’t the case.
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CNN (which also links into a European simulcast during later hours for overnight coverage), by the way, is still the go-to channel for international (or even national) breaking news at night.
For some reason, Fox stays stuck in a loop of rerunning commentator shows (hannity, o’reilly, etc.) all recorded much earlier in the day, which I completely don’t understand.
Fox’s live news operation still leaves much to be desired (although they did finally get news crews out in Ferguson for live evening coverage, but it took them a while).
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So, to recap, #1 represents mitigating unintended consequences but really does nothing to address the actual problem(s).
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