Daily Archives: 3 June 2014

On Bergdahl’s…Release

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Leaving aside the fact that acceding to the terrorists’ ransom demands placed at risk all Americans and especially our soldiers from every two-bit terrorist wannabe looking to make a buck—and from every serious terrorists, there are other concerns.

But wait. Terrorists already are kidnapping “young school girls, business people and other innocent people.” Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said as much in defending this ransom payment. Unfortunately, he carefully elided the fact that, with empirical evidence that the thing works with our government, that risk has gone up sharply. The United States does not negotiate with terrorists? This administration just did.

But back to my main point. The law of the land—the just passed (!) 2014 National Defense Authorization Act requires the administration to give a 30-day notification to Congress before releasing detainees—five of whom, in the present case, constituted the ransom—from Guantanamo. Here is where the dishonesty so ingrained in this administration’s senior personnel that they don’t even recognize what they’re doing becomes obvious.

Hagel justified the lack of notice by claiming there wasn’t time. He deliberately omitted to give that required notification because

We believed that the information we had, the intelligence we had, was such that Sgt Bergdahl’s safety and health were in jeopardy. In particular his health was deteriorating. It was our judgment that if we could find an opening and move very quickly, we needed to get him out of there, essentially to save his life.

He also said, though, in that same discussion with a distracted press,

This didn’t just start; this has been an ongoing effort. The timing was right, the pieces came together. Our consistent efforts that we have been making over the years paid off.

By his own words, this administration had the time to obey the law. The law, though, was inconvenient.

And This Tidbit Re Obamacare—Finding Out More of What Is In It

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Even The New York Times is starting to figure it out.

Many employers had thought they could shift health costs to the government by sending their employees to a health insurance exchange with a tax-free contribution of cash to help pay premiums, but the Obama administration has squelched the idea in a new ruling. Such arrangements do not satisfy the health care law, the administration said, and employers may be subject to a tax penalty of $100 a day—or $36,500 a year—for each employee who goes into the individual marketplace.

The ruling…by the Internal Revenue Service…blocks any wholesale move by employers to dump employees into the exchanges.

Many employers—some that now offer coverage and some that do not—had concluded that it would be cheaper to provide each employee with a lump sum of money to buy insurance on an exchange, instead of providing coverage directly.

And

When employers provide coverage, their contributions, averaging more than $5,000 a year per employee, are not counted as taxable income to workers. But the Internal Revenue Service said employers could not meet their obligations under the health care law by simply reimbursing employees for some or all of their premium costs.

Of course, in a sane world, such reimbursement would be equivalent to providing coverage, just letting the individual

Never mind that such reimbursements are exactly that coverage—especially since the reimbursements are paid only when there’s been a health plan bought: sort of contained in the meaning of “reimbursement.” But then Big Government would have to accept that individuals are fully capable of exercising their own choice—their own judgment—in the matter, rather than needing Momma IRS’ judgment.

There’s more in the NYT‘s piece….