Obamacare Will Cancel 50,000 More Plans Before November

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Photo Credit: GettyBy Sarah Hurtubise.

Tens of thousands more Obamacare cancellations are going to pile up over the next month, potentially putting pressure back on the health-care law in the weeks before the election.

Insurance companies across the country are slated to send close to 50,000 people cancellation notices before November, according to the Morning Consult. That includes at least 30,000 New Mexicans who will be kicked off their plans, the Albuquerque Journal reported Tuesday.

“We got together and said, ‘This would be the right time to make sure all the citizens in the state who had a plan that wasn’t ACA-compliant would have the opportunity to convert to one,” said New Mexico insurance superintendent John Franchini, apparently without any irony. The state decided in May not to extend plans not compliant with Obamacare past the end of 2014.

Another 14,000 people in Kentucky (mostly Humana customers) and 800 Moda customers in Alaska will receive cancellation letters by Oct. 1. Both states accepted three-year extensions of plans not compliant with Obamacare regulations, but top insurers are ending their plans early. It’s a financial boost for Obamacare exchange insurers (both Humana in Kentucky and Moda in Alaska offer exchange plans) to terminate their noncompliant plans.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Barely a Third of Democrat Congressional Candidates Support Obamacare

By Christine Rousselle.

As we rapidly approach the one year anniversary of Obamacare’s implementation and the horrendous launch of HealthCare.gov, a new report from the Brookings Institution shows that Democrat candidates for Congress aren’t exactly embracing the law—in fact, most are avoiding it entirely.

Read more from this story HERE.

Report: Obama Has Missed Over Half His Second-Term Daily Intel Briefings

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Photo Credit: BreitbartA new Government Accountability Institute (GAI) report reveals that President Barack Obama has attended only 42.1% of his daily intelligence briefings (known officially as the Presidential Daily Brief, or PDB) in the 2,079 days of his presidency through September 29, 2014.

The GAI report also included a breakdown of Obama’s PDB attendance record between terms; he attended 42.4% of his PDBs in his first term and 41.3% in his second.

The GAI’s alarming findings come on the heels of Obama’s 60 Minutes comments on Sunday, wherein the president laid the blame for the Islamic State’s (ISIS) rapid rise squarely at the feet of his Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

“I think our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that I think they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria,” said Obama.

According to Daily Beast reporter Eli Lake, members of the Defense establishment were “flabbergasted” by Obama’s attempt to shift blame.

Read more from this story HERE.

Refugee Plan Set Up for Central American Minors

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Photo Credit: REUTERS / JOSE LUIS GONZALEZThe Obama administration is initiating a program to give refugee status to some young people from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador in response to the influx of unaccompanied minors arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Under the program, immigrants from those countries who are lawfully in the United States will be able to request that child relatives still in those three countries be resettled in the United States as refugees. The program would establish in-country processing to screen the young people to determine if they qualify to join relatives in the U.S.

In a memorandum to the State Department Tuesday, President Barack Obama allocated 4,000 slots for refugees from Latin America and the Caribbean for next year. The number is a fraction of the number of children who have already crossed the border into the United States and are awaiting deportation proceedings.

The program would not provide a path for minors to join relatives illegally in the United States, and would not apply to minors who have entered the country illegally.

Instead, it aims to set up an orderly alternative for dealing with young people who otherwise might embark on a dangerous journey to join their families in the United States.

Read more from this story HERE.

Uncle Sam’s $8 Trillion Annual Debt Churn: Why Washington Is Pertrified Of Honest Interest Rates

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Photo Credit: NewscomI know that headline sounds completely outrageous. But it is actually true. The U.S. government is borrowing about 8 trillion dollars a year, and you are about to see the hard numbers that prove this. When discussing the national debt, most people tend to only focus on the amount that it increases each 12 months. And as I wrote about recently, the U.S. national debt has increased by more than a trillion dollars in fiscal year 2014.

But that does not count the huge amounts of U.S. Treasury securities that the federal government must redeem each year. When these debt instruments hit their maturity date, the U.S. government must pay them off. This is done by borrowing more money to pay off the previous debts. In fiscal year 2013, redemptions of U.S. Treasury securities totaled $7,546,726,000,000 and new debt totaling $8,323,949,000,000 was issued. The final numbers for fiscal year 2014 are likely to be significantly higher than that.

So why does so much government debt come due each year?

Well, in recent years government officials figured out that they could save a lot of money on interest payments by borrowing over shorter time frames. For example, it costs the government far more to borrow money for 10 years than it does for 1 year. So a strategy was hatched to borrow money for very short periods of time and to keep “rolling it over” again and again and again.

This strategy has indeed saved the federal government hundreds of billions of dollars in interest payments, but it has also created a situation where the federal government must borrow about 8 trillion dollars a year just to keep up with the game.

Read more from this story HERE.

Secret Service Missed Man with Gun in Elevator with Obama

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Photo Credit: REUTERS / Jason ReedBy Susan Crabtree.

A man with a gun that the Secret Service did not know about rode in an elevator with President Obama during his visit to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta on Sept. 16.

The previously undisclosed breach, confirmed by two sources familiar with the case, raises new questions about the agency’s ability to protect the president.

The incident, which took place three days before an intruder jumped a fence and sprinted inside the White House, involved a failure in Secret Service advance work to prevent an armed man from coming into close proximity with Obama while he was visiting the CDC to receive a briefing about the Ebola threat.

The threat to the president appeared minimal, but the incident alarmed agents on site and exposes a breakdown in several important Secret Service security protocols, the sources say.

The information comes the same day Secret Service Director Julia Pierson appeared before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and lawmakers publicly upbraided her for three hours about the Sept. 19 White House security breach, among other problems at the agency.

Read more from this story HERE.

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WATCH: Secret Service Can’t Answer Key Trey Gowdy Questions on 2011 White House Shooting

By Pete Kasperowicz.

Secret Service Director Julia Pierson on Tuesday indicated her agency had little or no reason to decide that the shots fired at the White House in 2011 was just the noise of a car backfiring, and failed to answer why agents didn’t do a thorough examine of the White House grounds after the shooting.

Pierson was pressed on the 2011 shooting by Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) at a House Oversight hearing, which also dealt with this month’s incident in which a fence-jumper was able to enter the White House and enter several rooms before being taken out.

On the 2011 shooting, Gowdy noted that several Secret Service agents said they smelled gunpowder and drew their weapons in response to what they thought was a shooting. But after a brief examination, the Secret Service decided, in coordination with the U.S. Park Service, that the noise of the shots were just a car backfiring.

Gowdy started by asking why agents didn’t run through a full examination of the White House, even if some believed it might have been a car backfiring.

Read more from this story HERE.

Reporter 'Creeped Out' by Obama Aide

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Photo Credit: TownHallBy Ky Sisson.

The White House was recently accused of changing press pool reports and pressuring journalists to modify their stories. And now, another journalist has been told what to do by an Obama aide.

Read more on the White House’s paranoid control over the press.

Meg Kissinger, a reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for 35 years, was covering Michelle Obama’s campaign visit for Wisconsin gubernatorial Democratic candidate, Mary Burke. She was told by aides for the first lady that she could not talk to people in the crowd.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: Daily Signal Reporter Forbidden to Speak to Crowd at Michelle Obama Event

By Kate Scanlon.

Meg Kissinger, a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, covered first lady Michelle Obama’s Milwaukee campaign stop Monday for Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke. But, Kissinger says, she was barred from speaking to members of the crowd.

Kissinger, a veteran of covering political events, said of the request that she’s “never seen anything like it in 35 years as a reporter.”

At the event, Kissinger noticed that members of the media were “cordoned off” from the crowd at the event.

Read more from this story HERE.

U.S. Law Enforcement Seeks to Halt Apple-Google Encryption of Mobile Data

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Photo Credit: Politico U.S. law enforcement officials are urging Apple Inc. (AAPL) and Google Inc. (GOOG) to give authorities access to smartphone data that the companies have decided to block, and are weighing whether to appeal to executives or seek congressional legislation.

The new privacy features, announced two weeks ago by the California-based companies, will stymie investigations into crimes ranging from drug dealing to terrorism, law enforcement officials said.

“This is a very bad idea,” said Cathy Lanier, chief of the Washington Metropolitan Police Department, in an interview. Smartphone communication is “going to be the preferred method of the pedophile and the criminal. We are going to lose a lot of investigative opportunities.”

The dispute is the latest flare-up that pits the federal government against the nation’s leading technology companies since National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden disclosed last year the extent of U.S. snooping on phone and Internet communications — and how companies cooperated.

U.S. Justice Department and FBI officials are trying to understand how the new Apple and Google Android systems work and how the companies could change the encryption to make it accessible when court ordered. Their requests to the companies may include letters, personal appeals or congressional legislation, said a federal law official who requested anonymity to discuss the sensitive issue.

Read more from this story HERE.

Why America Won't Have Enough Money to Battle ISIS

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Photo Credit: AP / U.S. Air Force, Staff Sgt. Shawn NickelPresident Obama says that it may take the U.S. and its allies three years to defeat Islamic State of Iraq and Syria militants, with heavy dependence on stepped up U.S. airstrikes. And some defense experts say it could cost the government an additional $15 billion to $20 billion a year to pursue this hazardous mission.

The fight against ISIS is already expensive. As of late August, the United States had spent $560 million fighting the group, and continues to spend $7.5 million daily on operations in Iraq. Last week Congress authorized the administration to spend an estimated $500 million to equip and train so-called moderate Syrian rebels to help counter the fast growing threat of ISIS.

But what if the mission mushrooms into a much bigger, more intensive and considerably longer operation than Obama has outlined — one that eventually forces the U.S. to send in combat troops into Iraq again? Will there be enough money in the defense budget to achieve Obama’s goal of “degrading and destroying” ISIS while preserving a strong armed forces?

Probably not, short of a major downsizing of the military and its gold-plated retirement and health care programs or a massive increase in deficit spending, according to economist Eugene Steuerle, a budget expert with the Urban Institute.

Steuerle, author of Dead Men Ruling: How to Restore Fiscal Freedom and Rescue Our Future, argues that years of accumulated tax cuts, discretionary budget policy, and entitlement programs have set so much of federal spending in concrete that lawmakers and the administration have little flexibility to respond to major crises or problems such as natural disasters or the upheaval in the Middle East.

Read more from this story HERE.

New Jersey Man Accused Of Shooting Down Neighbor’s Remote Control Drone

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Photo Credit: ThinkstockA New Jersey man was arrested after police say he shot down a neighbor’s remote control drone.

According to investigators, officers with the Lower Township Police Department were called to a home in the 1000 block of Seashore Road on September 26th to investigate the report by a resident that his remote control helicopter (drone) was shot down.

Investigators say the resident was taking aerial photographs of his friend’s home, which is under construction.

While doing so, the resident told police he heard several gunshots as he simultaneously lost control of the drone.

Read more from this story HERE.

Huckabee: It's an Urgent Time to Stand with Israel (+video)

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Photo Credit: Gage SkidmoreOn Sunday, October 5, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee joins Concerned Women for America for a rally in support of Israel in Washington, D.C.

“I have been to Israel nearly 30 times over the past 41 years and have never seen the nation under such threat,” Huckabee said. “Israel is our closest ally and friend in the Middle East, and they are suffering due to the weak policies of the Obama administration.”

“God has protected this tiny but increasingly powerful nation, and it’s time for the United States to do the same,” he said.

Read more from this story HERE.