New Study: Obamacare Will Actually INCREASE the Number of Uninsured

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Photo Credit: IJ Review A new study was released which shows that Obamacare will both increase the cost of health insurance and increase the number of uninsured.

From Conservative Hideout:

Nationally, we estimate an initial decrease in the uninsured with greater use of the private health insurance subsidies, but over time health plan prices are likely to increase faster than the value of the insurance subsidy. As a result of the declining purchasing power of the insurance subsidy, the implementation of the qualified health plan requirements and the end of the reinsurance and risk corridor programs we estimate a significant reduction in the private insurance market in 2017 with steady declines continuing for the rest of the decade.

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Boston Globe, LA Times Declare Obama Incompetent (+video)

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Photo Credit: APThe scandal at the Veteran’s Administration is rocking the Obama regime and may yet be one of the worst scandals of the Obama era. Already two major newspapers are starting to accuse the Obama administration of utter incompetence.

In fact, a lack of “competence” is exactly how columnist for the Boston Globe Jeff Jacoby put it May 25.

Jacoby points out that Obama ran on the claim that he would be the perfect manager because he would put all the right sort of intellectual, liberal managers in place while he ran herd on them all. As he first vied for president in 2008, Obama got the endorsement of most voters because of his promise of competence.

Voters – encouraged by newspaper endorsements that saw in Obama’s campaign “a marvel of sound management” (The Boston Globe) and backed him because he “offered more competence than drama” (Los Angeles Times) – ate it up. An astonishing 76 percent of respondents in a CNN/ORC poll shortly after the 2008 election agreed that Obama could “manage the government effectively.”

However, as Jacoby painfully points out, today’s reality stands in stark contrast to the fantasy Obama candidate in 2008. With the latest strike of the VA scandal against him, “Five years of Obama’s presidency have certainly shattered that delusion,” Jacoby wrote.

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White House Hid Obama’s Lunch With Hillary From Reporters

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Photo Credit: White House / Pete SouzaThe White House apparently tried to keep President Barack Obama’s lunch with Hillary Clinton Thursday under wraps.

Obama’s public schedule did not include the meal, but word got out after a photo was posted on People Magazine’s official Twitter account. The picture showed Clinton with People’s Washington bureau chief, Sandra Westfall. An accompanying message referenced the lunch.

“PEOPLE’s @sswestfall chats w/@HillaryClinton before her @WhiteHouse lunch. Hope she wasn’t late for @barackobama!” the tweet said.

People quickly deleted the tweet. It was reposted again a little over an hour later.

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Evidence of Reverse Discrimination Was So ‘Overwhelming’ That a Jury Awarded the Victim More Than $1 Million

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Photo Credit: Village of FreeportA New York police officer was awarded $1.35 million dollars this week after he successfully sued the village of Freeport, alleging he was passed over for a promotion because of his race.

A Long Island jury sided with Lt. Christopher Barrella after he claimed that then-Mayor Andrew Hardwick overlooked him to become chief of police so that he could name a Hispanic candidate to the position instead.

“I am very gratified that the jury ruled that I deserved to be chief of police. Throughout this entire process, I have tried to maintain a positive attitude and do my best for the department and the village of Freeport and will continue to do so,” Barrella said in a statement. “It has been a long and trying process, but I always had faith that if we could present our case to a jury of my peers they would see that I was discriminated against.”

His legal team, comprised of Amanda M. Fugazy and Adam C. Weiss, said that “racial discrimination against white employees is just as unlawful as discrimination black, Hispanic or Asian employees.”

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Alaska Journalist Bob Tkacz Found Dead

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Editors Note: For the first time in four years, Restoring Liberty received a complaint from the original publisher of an excerpt that was re-published on this site, in this case, KTOO out of Juneau, Alaska. Restoring Liberty publishes excerpts under the broadly accepted “Fair Use” doctrine but will always remove a short excerpt of an article where the original publisher objects. We have done so in this case even though the presence of such an article drives traffic – and therefore revenue – to the original publisher.

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House Bolsters ‘De Facto Amnesty’ Probe (+video)

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Photo Credit: APThe House on Thursday adopted a proposal to bolster an investigation into the Department of Homeland Security’s release of illegal immigrants known to have committed crimes.

Passed 218-193, Rep. Steve King’s (R-Iowa) amendment to the 2015 appropriations bill funding the Justice Department, Commerce Department and science programs would direct $5 million toward an investigation.

“It is de facto amnesty that is going on in the Department of Homeland Security,” King said.

“So my request is that $5 million out of this administrative budget be directed to investigating the actions of the Department of Homeland Security and coming back with an analysis of what is going on and why that we have so many criminals released onto the streets of America,” King said, citing statistics that nearly 900,000 illegal immigrants pending deportation had been released, including more than 36,000 criminals.

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Village Protests Rape, Killings of Indian Sisters

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Photo Credit: Dennis Jarvis / Creative CommonsTwo teenage sisters in rural India were raped and killed by attackers who hung their bodies from a mango tree, which became the scene of a silent protest by villagers angry about alleged police inaction in the case. Two of the four men arrested so far are police officers.

Villagers found the girls’ bodies hanging from the tree early Wednesday, hours after they disappeared from fields near their home in Katra village in Uttar Pradesh state, police Superintendent Atul Saxena said. The girls, who were 14 and 15, had gone into the fields because there was no toilet in their home.

Hundreds of angry villagers stayed next to the tree throughout Wednesday, silently protesting the police response. Indian TV footage showed the villagers sitting under the girls’ bodies as they swung in the wind, and preventing authorities from taking them down until the suspects were arrested.

Police arrested two police officers and two men from the village later Wednesday and were searching for three more suspects.

Autopsies confirmed the girls had been raped and strangled before being hung, Saxena said.

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Think Internet Data Mining Goes Too Far? Then You Won’t Like This

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Photo Credit: EmotivThese days, you can hop on the Internet and buy yourself a consumer-grade brain scanning device for just a few hundred dollars. Technically, they’re called brain computer interfaces, or BCIs. As these devices develop, researchers are thinking a few steps ahead — they’re worried about how to keep marketers from scanning our brains.

The technology, which is basically headgear that senses electrical patterns in your brain, can tell if you’re excited, relaxed or focused. Fed into a computer, that brain wave information can be used for any number of applications. One of the most popular ideas is to use the brain as a “third hand” to control video games. Believe it or not, the second neurogaming expo was held recently in San Francisco.

“It’s happening somewhat faster than we thought,” says Howard Chizeck, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Washington. “A couple of the new products that have shown up are already along the pathway that I think we thought were a couple of years away.”

He believes we’re at the edge of a boom in BCI-mediated products, and he’s in a hurry to get out in front of the technology’s potential threat to privacy. He’s working with graduate students Tamara Bonaci and Jeffrey Herron to study how invasive these brain sensors could become.

In the study, funded by the National Science Foundation, human subjects wear a research-grade BCI while playing a video game the researches have dubbed “Flappy Whale.” While the subjects play the game, images of commercial logos flicker on the screen. The sensor cap records the subject’s involuntary emotional responses to those logos.

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Residents of Small Guatemalan Town Want Jews to Leave

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Indigenous residents of San Juan La Laguna, a small town of under 10,000 in the Guatemalan state of Sololá, have asked members of the Jewish community — comprising 10 ultra-Orthodox families, most of whom arrived only recently — to identify themselves in a municipal registry and leave within the next few months.

The registry was established to verify whether immigrants from the Jewish community are legally in the country and where they are from, information which has not been asked of other foreigners granted temporary visas.

“We, as a local authority, have nothing against the Jewish community,” city mayor Rodolfo López told The Times of Israel on Tuesday. “But every community, and especially ours, as indigenous Mayans, has very special customs and traditions and we have to defend our rights.”

Residents have filed complaints with the municipality that the community of ultra-religious Jews have used a public body of water as a mikveh (ritual bath), practiced unhygienic rituals like kaparot (where a chicken is swung around a rabbi’s head before being slaughtered), and made disparaging comments about immodesty to tourists.

According to the mayor, the indigenous population has also been suspicious since a Canadian couple accused of child abuse reportedly moved to San Juan La Laguna with their six children.

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Obama Signals Significant Shift in US Foreign Policy at West Point Commencement

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Photo Credit: AP

President Obama, in a commencement address at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, signaled a significant shift in U.S. foreign policy — one that pulls back from what he described as “military adventures” while wielding American power in other ways.

The president described the new American foreign policy as one of “collective action” and restraint, deploying unilateral U.S. military force only when the American people are threatened. He outlined the approach a day after announcing his plan for gradually drawing down the U.S. force in Afghanistan once the war formally ends later this year.

“The landscape has changed,” Obama told the graduating class at West Point on Wednesday, citing the end of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

The president took on what he described as “interventionists” from both parties, and said that while “isolationism” is not an option, “U.S. military action cannot be the only — or even primary — component of our leadership in every instance.”

The president advised that crises around the world that don’t directly threaten Americans be met first with non-military options: diplomacy, sanctions and “collective action.”

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