Politics Plus

I have been seeing many discussions online that result from the conflict that has even going on ever since Palestinians were called Philistines.  Most of the hate speech I’ve seen is from Zionists expressing displeasure at opponents of Zionism.  Although I have mixed heritage, including Hebrew, I consider myself an opponent of Zionism.  Although I have seen few, if any, examples of anti-Semitism in these discussions, it is on the rise in Europe, and KKK Republicans have a long history of it here.

From the immigrant enclaves of the Parisian suburbs to the drizzly bureaucratic city of Brussels to the industrial heartland of Germany, Europe’s old demon returned this summer. “Death to the Jews!” shouted protesters at pro-Palestinian rallies in Belgium and France. “Gas the Jews!” yelled marchers at a similar protest in Germany.

The ugly threats were surpassed by uglier violence. Four people were fatally shot in May at the Jewish Museum in Brussels. A Jewish-owned pharmacy in this Paris suburb was destroyed in July by youths protesting Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. A synagogue in Wuppertal, Germany, was attacked with firebombs. A Swedish Jew was beaten with iron pipes. The list goes on.

The scattered attacks have raised alarm about how Europe is changing and whether it remains a safe place for Jews. An increasing number of Jews, if still relatively modest in total, are now migrating to Israel. Others describe “no go” zones in Muslim districts of many European cities where Jews dare not travel…

Inserted from <NY Times>

We need to remember that Judaism is not Zionism, just as we need to remember that Islam is not terrorism.  Jews and Muslims are people, just like you and me.  There is no justification for violence against them or bigotry toward them, just because a few of their number are committing despicable acts. 

I can’t honestly say that I’m happy with everything Barack Obama has done as President.  I’m not angry, because both times that I voted for him, I knew I was voting for a centrist, even though I would rather have voted for a progressive, but I also knew that the only electable alternatives would have brought with them the end of representative government.  Even though they hold only one branch of the federal government, they are still using every lie, trick and theft they can muster in attempts to insert themselves into every position of power and between every woman’s legs.  At least with respect to the latter, he is fighting back.

For most of the last year, the Supreme Court has forced the Obama Administration into an elaborate dance, where the Court hands down orders casting doubt upon the administration’s efforts to ensure that all women have access to affordable birth control — while simultaneously implying that everything would be fine if the administration just designed their birth control policy a different way. Friday, the administration is expected to announce a new policy that appears designed to end this dance and force the justices to rule definitively [Faux Print delinked] on whether employers with religious objections to birth control effectively have the power to restrict their employees’ access to birth control coverage, no matter how the government structures its regulations.

Up until now, the administration’s rules treated non-profit and for-profit employers as separate entities. Religious non-profits who object to birth control could exempt themselves from the requirement to offer contraceptive care to their employees by filling out a specific form that informs the government of their objection, and sending a copy of the form to their insurance provider or administrator. In most cases, once the non-profit employer submitted this form, their insurer would then contract separately with their workers to ensure that those workers had contraceptive coverage. These non-profit rules spawned one round of litigation brought by religious non-profit organizations which claim that even being required to fill out a short form violates their religious liberty.

Meanwhile, for-profit employees were required to comply with their legal obligations to their employees. Prior to the Supreme Court’s June decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, which significantly reworked the balance of power between employers and employees, the law was clear that for-profit businesses could not invoke their owners’ religious beliefs to exempt themselves from their legal obligations to their workers. “When followers of a particular sect enter into commercial activity as a matter of choice,” the Court held in its 1982 decision in United States v. Lee, “the limits they accept on their own conduct as a matter of conscience and faith are not to be superimposed on the statutory schemes which are binding on others in that activity.” Hobby Lobby, of course, was the culmination of a second round of litigation brought by for-profit employers whose owners have religious objections to birth control. And it effectively eliminated the protections Lee extended to workers, at least with respect to federal law….

…In any event, however, the Obama Administration’s new rules will likely put an end to the Supreme Court’s ability to move the goalposts every time someone raises a new objection to the administration’s policy. The administration has now crafted its rules to comply almost to the letter with the requirements suggested by previous Supreme Court opinions. Now, the rest of the country will have to wait to find out whether Hobby Lobby actually permits this latest set of rules — or whether the language in that decision leading the Obama Administration in this direction will simply end with Lucy pulling away the football one more time…

Inserted from <Think Progress>

Click through for how the five Injustices SCROTUS (Republican Constitutional VD) have resorted to trickery to violate the Constitution while blaming their First Amendment violations on regulations.  It is my hope that Roberts will flip in an attempt to preserve the legacy of the Court,not that Obama is denying him regulations as an excuse.  Make sure to prevent any more Republican appointments to the court until children ask, “What’s a Republican?”, and nobody remembers.