Fighting Obamacare: The Difference Between Cutting Spending and Limiting Harmful Government

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photo credit: fibonacci blueAs Mitch McConnell puts the finishing touches on his terms of surrender, here are some thoughts to ponder.

Republicans and conservatives have spent the past few years messaging their platform to the American people built upon budget-speak. It’s all about the debt and cutting spending.

In reality, we don’t have a spending problem per se, we have a big and harmful government problem. The two are not always the same.

All of us who follow policy issues very closely understand that debt in itself is not just a problem for the federal balance sheet, it will have to be paid back by our children and grandchildren. However, most people don’t see it that way, at least not in a meaningful way. What people care about is loss of employment, lower/stagnant wages, the rising cost of living, and personal liberty. It is our job to prioritize an agenda both in substance and messaging that directly addresses the harmful effects of government on jobs, standard of living, and personal liberty. The federal budget is secondary, and will take care of itself once we restore government to its proper role.

For example, we spend roughly $8 billion in discretionary spending funding the EPA each year. Now, is that $8 billion in wasted spending contributing to our debt? You betcha. But the more serious problem with the EPA is not the $8 billion in discretionary spending, but the hundreds of billions that are removed from the private economy in the form of lost jobs and higher cost of living (not to mention personal liberty), as a result of the regulatory regime.

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The Senate GOP’s Surrender

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Photo Credit: National Review House Republicans had a joke in the mid-1990s that the Democrats were their opponents, but the Senate was the enemy. Today’s House Republicans are beginning to develop the same sentiment — but this time, it’s not a joke.

When Representative Paul Ryan last week used the pages of the Wall Street Journal to suggest a way out of the shutdown/debt-ceiling morass, conservatives complained that Ryan’s column did not even mention Obamacare. Yet now Ryan himself, less than a week after some conservatives accused him of sandbagging their efforts, is complaining that Senate Republicans are sandbagging his own compromise proposal just as it seemed to be gaining traction.

Conservatives were right about Ryan, and Ryan is right about the Senate. The Senate’s apostasy, though, appears substantially worse.

At least Ryan’s proposal aimed to accomplish conservative goals: long-term savings, entitlement reform, new limits on the coddling of federal employees, and a simplified tax code with lower corporate rates. Its deliberate refusal to include even the slightest nick in Obamacare’s edifice provided evidence that Ryan is far from averse to disappointing conservatives — but at least he could claim to be keeping his eye on the long-term goal of greater fiscal responsibility.

Nothing like that can be said about the Senate plan whose details began to emerge on Saturday. It would essentially forfeit all leverage associated with both the debt ceiling and the annual appropriations process by providing a largely “clean” spending resolution through March while raising the debt ceiling enough to last through January. The only “concession” it would extract from the Left would be a two-year delay — not even a repeal but merely a delay — in the medical-device tax. The full repeal of this tax already enjoys majority support in both houses of Congress, and Barack Obama has indicated it is not central to his health-insurance Leviathan.

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Catholic Priest Threatened with Arrest If Voluntarily Conducts Mass On Navy Base During Shutdown

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Photo Credit: WNDIn what has been described as “an astonishing attack on religious freedom,” Catholics at a Navy base were banned from attending worship services because of the partial shutdown of the federal government.

In response, the Thomas More Law Center announced it has filed a lawsuit over the orders at Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base in Georgia.

The legal team said a Catholic priest who serves the community on the military base “has been prohibited from even volunteering to celebrate Holy Mass without pay and was told that if he violated that order, he could be subject to arrest.”

Without explanation, however, Protestant services continued.

“This is an astonishing attack on religious freedom by the federal government and the latest affront toward the military since the beginning of the shutdown,” said a report by the Thomas More Law Center.

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Unions Poised to Win Delay of ObamaCare Tax in Budget Deal

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Photo Credit: majunznkLabor unions are poised to score the delay of an ObamaCare tax in the bipartisan budget deal emerging in the Senate.

The bargain under negotiation would make small adjustments to the healthcare law, including delaying the law’s reinsurance fee for one year. The three-year tax is meant to generate revenue that will stabilize premiums on the individual market as sick patients enter the risk pool.

The tax applies to all group health plans, but unions argue it will raise their healthcare costs while providing them no benefit.

The reinsurance tax figured prominently in discussions at a recent AFL-CIO convention, where workers passed a resolution demanding changes to ObamaCare.

The White House recently denied labor’s top priority on ObamaCare, ruling that union health plans are not eligible for the new subsidies because they are already helped by the tax code.

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NSA Collects Millions of E-mail Address Books Globally

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Photo Credit: Social BIz SolutionsThe National Security Agency is harvesting hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world, many of them belonging to Americans, according to senior intelligence officials and top-secret documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

The collection program, which has not been disclosed before, intercepts e-mail address books and “buddy lists” from instant messaging services as they move across global data links. Online services often transmit those contacts when a user logs on, composes a message, or synchronizes a computer or mobile device with information stored on remote servers.

Rather than targeting individual users, the NSA is gathering contact lists in large numbers that amount to a sizable fraction of the world’s e-mail and instant messaging accounts. Analysis of that data enables the agency to search for hidden connections and to map relationships within a much smaller universe of foreign intelligence targets.

During a single day last year, the NSA’s Special Source Operations branch collected 444,743 e-mail address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from unspecified other providers, according to an internal NSA PowerPoint presentation. Those figures, described as a typical daily intake in the document, correspond to a rate of more than 250 million a year.

Each day, the presentation said, the NSA collects contacts from an estimated 500,000 buddy lists on live-chat services as well as from the inbox displays of Web-based e-mail accounts.

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5 Things Super Successful People Do Before 8 AM

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Photo Credit: WikipediaRise and shine! Morning time just became your new best friend. Love it or hate it, utilizing the morning hours before work may be the key to a successful and healthy lifestyle. That’s right, early rising is a common trait found in many CEOs, government officials, and other influential people. Margaret Thatcher was up every day at 5 a.m.; Frank Lloyd Wright at 4 am and Robert Iger, the CEO of Disney wakes at 4:30am just to name a few. I know what you’re thinking – you do your best work at night. Not so fast. According to Inc. Magazine, morning people have been found to be more proactive and more productive. In addition, the health benefits for those with a life before work go on and on. Let’s explore 5 of the things successful people do before 8 am.

1. Exercise. I’ve said it once, I’ll say it again. Most people that work out daily, work out in the morning. Whether it’s a morning yoga session or a trip to the gym, exercising before work gives you a boost of energy for the day and that deserved sense of accomplishment. Anyone can tackle a pile of paperwork after 200 ab reps! Morning workouts also eliminate the possibility of flaking out on your cardio after a long day at work. Even if you aren’t bright eyed and bushy tailed at the thought of a 5 am jog, try waking up 15 minutes early for a quick bedside set of pushups or stretching. It’ll help wake up your body, and prep you for your day.

2. Map Out Your Day. Maximize your potential by mapping out your schedule for the day, as well as your goals and to dos. The morning is a good time for this as it is often one of the only quiet times a person gets throughout the day. The early hours foster easier reflection that helps when prioritizing your activities. They also allow for uninterrupted problem solving when trying to fit everything into your timetable. While scheduling, don’t forget about your mental health. Plan a 10 minute break after that stressful meeting for a quick walk around the block or a moment of meditation at your desk. Trying to eat healthy? Schedule a small window in the evening to pack a few nutritious snacks to bring to work the next day.

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Feds Reviewed Only One Bid for Obamacare Website Design

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Photo Credit: Washington Examiner Federal officials considered only one firm to design the Obamacare health insurance exchange website that has performed abysmally since its Oct. 1 debut.

Rather than open the contracting process to a competitive public solicitation with multiple bidders, officials in the Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Medicare and Medicaid accepted a sole bidder, CGI Federal, the U.S. subsidiary of a Canadian company with an uneven record of IT pricing and contract performance.

CMS officials are tight-lipped about why CGI was chosen or how it happened. They also refuse to say if other firms competed with CGI, or if there was ever a public solicitation for building Healthcare.gov, the backbone of Obamacare’s problem-plagued web portal.

Instead, it appears they used what amounts to a federal procurement system loophole to award the work to the Canadian firm.

CGI was one of 16 companies that had been qualified by HHS during President George W. Bush’s second term to deliver, without public competition, a variety of hardware, software and communication products and services.

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Walmart Shelves in Springhill, Mansfield, Cleared in EBT Glitch (+video)

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Photo Credit: kslaShelves in Walmart stores in Springhill and Mansfield, LA were reportedly cleared Saturday night, when the stores allowed purchases on EBT cards even though they were not showing limits.

The chaos that followed ultimately required intervention from local police, and left behind numerous carts filled to overflowing, apparently abandoned when the glitch-spurred shopping frenzy ended.

Springhill Police Chief Will Lynd confirms they were called in to help the employees at Walmart because there were so many people clearing off the shelves. He says Walmart was so packed, “It was worse than any black Friday” that he’s ever seen.

Lynd explained the cards weren’t showing limits and they called corporate Walmart, whose spokesman said to let the people use the cards anyway. From 7 to 9 p.m., people were loading up their carts, but when the cards began showing limits again around 9, one woman was detained because she rang up a bill of $700.00 and only had .49 on her card. She was held by police until corporate Walmart said they wouldn’t press charges if she left the food.

Lynd says at 9 p.m., when the cards came back online and it was announced over the loud speaker, people just left their carts full of food in the aisles and left.

KSLA News 12 Shreveport, Louisiana News Weather

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Feds Blocking Road to Open-Air Flight 93 Memorial (+video)

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Photo Credit: CNSNews.comAmericans who want to honor and reflect upon the memory of the crew and passengers who perished aboard United Flight 93 on Sept. 11, 2001 will find that the federal government has blocked the road four miles down from the open-air memorial near Shanksville, Pa.

CNSNews.com photographed the spot of the road closure this past weekend. The steel barrier blocking vehicles from passing says: “Because of the federal government shutdown, this National Park Service facility is closed.”

United Flight 93 was scheduled to fly from Newark to San Francisco on Sept. 11, 2001. It was hijacked by four al Qaeda terrorists, who turned it around and started flying it toward Washington, D.C.

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Why College Costs Will Soon Plunge

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Photo Credit: AP“My goal,” says the candidate, “is a healthier America. That is why I am setting an ambitious target of sending 1 million more Americans to the hospital in the next five years. To make sure they get there, I am announcing a new, low-interest loan program to help them pay for their treatment. This will ensure that hospital costs stay within reach of the typical American family.”

If you heard a speech like that, you probably would start scratching your head. Sure, people with acute medical conditions need hospital care. But most people don’t have to lie for weeks in a hospital bed to get healthy. And lavishing more money on hospital care will simply drive the price up — just as giving everyone a $2,000 vehicle subsidy would jack up prices for cars and trucks.

Yet this is what politicians routinely propose for higher education: Send more people to college, and give them more money to help them get there. Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell proposed cranking out 100,000 more college degrees in 15 years. Around the same time, President Barack Obama said he wanted the U.S. to have “the highest proportion of college graduates in the world” — which would more than double enrollment. His new higher-ed plan calls for yet more financial aid….

Trend lines like these cannot go on — and they won’t. But not because of politicians’ efforts to rein in college costs. College costs will drop because of market forces politicians will be powerless to stop.

In his new book Average Is Over, George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen explains why: Thanks to the Internet, you no longer have to sit in a lecture hall to get a superb education. And you certainly don’t have to shell out ungodly sums for five-star dormitories, Olympic-level gymnasiums and sushi bars.

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