Exposed: Pallywood Returns to Gaza

America’s Free Speech Retreat

From: Reason.com

On the 11th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, scores of men armed with rocket propellers, hand grenades, and automatic rifles assaulted two separate U.S. diplomatic buildings in Benghazi, Libya, for more than four hours, killing Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. Despite clear evidence of planning and the symbolism of September 11, officials in Barack Obama’s White House spent the next week blaming the attacks on a crude, straight-to-YouTube trailer for an anti-Islam movie called Innocence of Muslims, made by an ex-convict living in Cerritos, California.

“What sparked the recent violence was the airing on the Internet of a very hateful, very offensive video that has offended very many people around the world,” the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, said September 16 on Fox News Sunday. “It began spontaneously in Benghazi, as a reaction to what had transpired some hours earlier in Cairo,” Rice asserted on ABC’s This Week that same day, “where, of course, as you know, there was a violent protest outside of our embassy sparked by this hateful video.”

Hostess to close striking bakeries in Seattle, St. Louis, Cincinnati

From: Dallas Morning News

On the first business day after bakers went on strike against Hostess Brands, the Irving-based company said Monday it will permanently close three striking bakeries, putting 627 employees out of work.

The company has no bakeries in Texas.

Late Friday, the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union went on strike against Irving-based Hostess to protest cuts and give-backs in the company’s last, best, final contract offer. The contract, which was rejected by 92 percent of the union members who voted, called, in part, for 8 percent pay cuts, a company hiatus from contributions to a multi-employer pension plan and changes in work rules.

As of Monday, bakers had set up picket lines at about 23 of the 36 bakeries and production plants operated by the bankrupt snack maker. Hostess said the strike “has prevented the facilities from producing and delivering products.”

“Our customers will not be affected because we will continue to serve them from other Hostess Brands bakeries, but sadly this action will result in the permanent closure of three facilities and the loss of 627 jobs,” said Gregory Rayburn, Hostess Brands’ chief executive.

“We deeply regret this decision, but we have repeatedly explained that we will close facilities that are no longer able to produce and deliver products because of a work stoppage — and that we will close the entire company if widespread strikes cripple our business.”

The bakeries to be closed immediately are in Seattle, St. Louis and Cincinnati. The Seattle facility employs 110 people and produces Hostess cake products. The St. Louis facility employs 365 people and produces Hostess cakes and Nature’s Pride and Wonder breads.

The Cincinnati facility employs 152 people and produces Butternut, Beefsteak and Wonder breads.
Officials with the bakers’ union could not be reached for comment Monday.

The union’s website listed plants across the nation honoring the strike, including Tulsa, Los Angeles and Cincinnati. The company said operations were proceeding normally at the majority of plants, using managers, nonunion employees, employees represented by other unions, and bakers’ union employees who have crossed the picket lines, said Hostess spokesman Erik Halvorson.

He did not say how many plants had bakers who had crossed the picket lines.

“Generally, other unions are coming to work, but there are exceptions to that as well,” he said.

He said production is being shifted to other locations as needed but he could not quantify the amount.

The bakers’ union is Hostess’ second-largest union behind the Teamsters. The baker’s union did not “alert or otherwise notify the Teamsters of the strike action,” according to the Teamsters’ website.

A bakers’ union fact sheet said that before an earlier Hostess bankruptcy in 2004, the union “represented more than 10,000 Hostess workers. That number is now approximately 5,000 due to plant closings.”

Follow Karen Robinson-Jacobs on Twitter at @krobijake.

Obama takes aim at religious liberty

From: WashingtonExaminer.com

As an old saw has it, "your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose." The Obama administration says your right to live as a Christian ends if you go into business.

Democrats are crowing about a second Obama term, and the Left's culture-war troops are emboldened by their trouncing of social conservatives. Religious conservatives need to plant their spears and brace for the coming federal assault on religious liberty.

The Obama administration this month, in defending its health plan's contraception mandate, articulated a narrow view of the First Amendment's religious liberty protections.

Obamacare requires employers to pay for contraception and sterilization coverage. This includes coverage of "morning-after" contraceptives, whose makers admit the drugs can kill a fertilized egg by preventing or "affect[ing]" implantation.

Many Christians oppose Obama's mandate on the grounds that morning-after pills function as abortifacients. Catholic teaching also holds that contraception undermines marriage and the family by stripping sex of its natural life-giving and love-giving properties.

The Catholic Church lobbied for an exemption. The administration exempted only houses of worship, but not the institutions run by the church. So, St. John the Evangelist parish in Silver Spring doesn't have to buy contraception insurance for its employees, but what about Holy Cross Hospital down the road? It will get huge fines if its health plan even requires a $5 co-pay for the Pill.

Other religious institutions, such as Catholic colleges Belmont Abbey and Notre Dame, along with evangelical Wheaton College, have sued, arguing that they should not be forced to violate their consciences.

But why should only religious institutions be allowed to exercise their consciences? The First Amendment states that "Congress shall make no law ... prohibiting the free exercise" of religion. 

Should government be allowed to force ordinary people to violate the moral laws to which they subscribe?

David Green says no. Green and his family own Hobby Lobby, a chain of arts-and-crafts stores. They sued the administration on the grounds the contraception mandate prohibited their free exercise of Christianity by forcing them to pay for abortifacient morning-after pills.

The Greens weren't arguing that morning-after pills should be illegal. They weren't even trying to keep their employees from using them. They just didn't want to implicate themselves in what they saw as immoral activity.

The administration responded with an unsettling argument: The Greens aren't protected by the First Amendment's "free exercise" clause in this case because they operate a secular business. "Hobby Lobby is a for-profit, secular employer," the Obama administration wrote in a brief, "and a secular entity by definition does not exercise religion."

Part of the administration's argument is that the mandate controls the corporation's actions but it does not apply to individual owners.

So, people have First Amendment protections as long as they don't start businesses. If they do, and if they operate their businesses according with their own consciences, they "become laws unto themselves," as the Obama administration puts it.

So this is who the Left has in mind when it says conservatives are trying to legislate morality: people who dare to follow their moral and religious beliefs, as opposed to a code devised by bureaucrats regulating a secular state.

If people want to adhere to their faith, they best stay quiet about it. The liberal commentariat made that clear this past election season.

"I'm tired of religious groups operating secular enterprises (hospitals, schools)," writer Kevin Drum fumed in the liberal Mother Jones, "hiring people of multiple faiths, serving the general public, taking taxpayer dollars -- and then claiming that deeply held religious beliefs should exempt them from public policy."

Washington Post religion writer Lisa Miller probably made it clearest with her op-ed blasting the "smug fecundity" of Mitt Romney, Ron Paul and Rick Santorum. You see, they have too many kids. 

She sneered at their "family photos, with members of their respective broods spilling out to the margins."

This is the culture war today -- Christians offend secular liberals by not abiding by the Left's social mores. In effect, they "impose" their morality if they dare exercise their religion in public. Christians are intolerable rebels if they try to operate institutions outside of government.

This is why a re-elected Obama is daunting. Conservative theologian George Weigel warned that the Obama administration "will, unfettered by reelection concerns, accelerate its efforts to bring free voluntary associations to heel as de facto extensions of the state."

In the case of Green and Hobby Lobby, the Obama administration showed its narrow view of the freedom of religion. Where else will this view lead the administration?