Most weeks, our preference is to devote this space to matters directly affecting the East County. Now and again, though, events beyond our region’s interests are so alarming, bizarre or compelling they cannot be ignored.

This is one of those occasions, particularly in light of the surreal events of last week. We’re referring, of course, to the Obama administration’s assault on religious rights and then its announcement that it is confiscating $26 billion from American banks as punishment for sloppy legal work.

Help us out: Is this America? It seems so surreal.

+ Obama ‘pro-choice’ for some
Last week, we devoted space in the Longboat and Sarasota editions to Obama’s tyranny against the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of the right to religious freedom. And we were just one small pebble of an overpowering avalanche of dissent that caused the administration to alter its Obama-imposed rules concerning the forced dispensing of free contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs.

Obama may have assuaged the Catholic church by removing the requirement from religious organizations to be forced to provide contraceptives, et al, in their health insurance policies. But he still misses the overall confiscation of your freedoms that he is imposing, similar to way the feudal European kings of the 15th and 16th centuries enslaved their countrymen.

Let’s just use our little company, The Observer Group Inc., as an example. It used to be in our self-interest to subsidize, at a high cost to the company, health insurance for our associates. For decades, American companies used this perk to help them attract good employees.

(Many of you probably remember that company-provided health insurance became prevalent during World War II. It was a work-around to another federal government confiscation of freedom. To stem rising wages during the war (because of a shortage of labor), the Roosevelt administration capped raises that employers could give to employees. In response, employers figured a way around this was to offer to pay for employees’ health insurance — an indirect increase in an employee’s pay

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