CNN Poll – ObamaCare Is Sinking Obama: “The Numbers Are Ugly”

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Photo Credit: JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/GettyA new CNN poll confirms what America’s collective gut has been saying for weeks: Obamacare is sinking its namesake.

The numbers are ugly: Just one in four respondents say President Obama is a competent manager of the federal government. For all the hand-wringing about comparing the HealthCare.gov site rollout to Hurricane Katrina, the bottom line is that this president, like his predecessor, has now suffered a signature event that has convinced a majority of Americans that he is unfit for the job.

Piling on, the president also scored his lowest marks on honesty and trustworthiness, with 53 percent of those surveyed responding that they don’t feel Obama is being straight with them. To put it in some context, Bill Clinton was widely viewed as shifty but competent, and Jimmy Carter as honest but hapless. Obama at the moment seems to have combined the worst of both worlds.

The CNN results amplify Obama’s political problem: The Affordable Care Act imbroglio is having an outsized effect on his entire presidency, with voters reassessing his basic qualifications. “This is serious,” says Chris Kofinis, a Democratic strategist and former chief of staff to Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia. “This is much more serious than I hear some Democrats saying publicly. This is not a temporary drop.”

Adds John Geer, an expert on public opinion at Vanderbilt University, “In a sense, the public was collectively willing to be patient. That reservoir of support among independents and moderates has evaporated.”

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Map Shows the NSA’s Massive Worldwide Malware Operations

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Photo Credit: APA new map details how many companies across the world have been infected by malware by the National Security Agency’s team of hackers, and where the companies are located.

Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad reports the NSA uses malware to infect, infiltrate and steal information from over 50,000 computer networks around the globe. This new, previously unreported scope of the NSA’s hacking operation comes from another PowerPoint slide showing a detailed map of every infection leaked by former contractor Edward Snowden.

The practice is called “Computer Network Exploitation,” or CNE for short, and it’s carried out by the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations team. A yellow dot on the map signifies a CNE infection. The NSA plants malware within a network that can flipped on or off at any time. Once a network is infected, the malware gives the NSA unfiltered access to the network’s information whenever it’s most convenient. The Washington Post previously profiled the team of “elite hackers” who make up the NSA’s TAO division.

The British intelligence service liked this strategy too, NRC Handelsblad reports, because they successfully duped a Belgium telecom company with a fake LinkedIn account. A strip at the bottom says the map is relative to relative to the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, the “Five Eyes” nations that share intelligence.

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Large Employers Cite Obamacare ‘Cadillac’ Tax in Reducing Benefits (+video)

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Photo Credit: ReutersFor 75 million Americans who get their insurance through large companies, the Affordable Care Act is a mixed bag. Experts tell NBC News the new healthcare law is only slightly increasing premiums next year, but causing some companies with the most generous plans to reduce their employees’ benefits.

Aaron Baker, 36, his wife Billie and their two young children are covered under a generous health insurance plan offered by the private Midwestern university where he’s worked for 10 years. When they opened their benefits notice this year, they were pleased to see their $385 premium is only up by four dollars next year. However, they were shocked to discover that instead of covering the first dollar they spend with no deductible, the Baker’s plan now includes a $1,000 deductible and a $2,500 out of pocket maximum. They also will still have small co-pays for services.

According to the enrollment notice, the changes are “to relieve future health plan trend pressure and to put the university in a position to avoid the excise tax that becomes effective in 2018.” The 40 percent excise tax—often called the “Cadillac tax”— is part of Obamacare and is levied on the most generous health plans. It’s designed to bring down overall health costs by making companies and workers more cost-conscious. The thinking is that if consumers have to pay more expenses themselves, through higher deductibles and out-of-pocket expenses, they’ll avoid unnecessary or overly costly procedures. And that is supposed to make care more affordable for everyone.

Billie Baker doesn’t think much of that concept. “I think that saying that your insurance is too good so we’re going to give you a penalty,” she said, “is sort of outrageous to me.”

Said Aaron, “You would think the government would want employers to offer good health care packages to their employees. It seems like that is not the case.”

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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The Bad-Faith Presidency

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Photo Credit: APAt the end of the day, the root of President Obama’s mendacity on Obamacare was simple: He didn’t dare tell people how the law would work. He couldn’t tell people how the law would work.

Forthrightness was the enemy. It served no useful purpose and could only bring peril, and potentially defeat. It had to be banished. Instead of candor, Obama made the sale on the basis of dubious blandishments and outright deceptions.

If this is the only way to pass your signature initiative—and a decades-long goal of your party—it ought to give you pause. But Obama was a natural at delivering sweeping and sincere-seeming assurances that weren’t true. This kind of thing is his métier.

If he were awoken at 3 a.m. and told he had to make the case for nationalizing the banks by denying he was nationalizing the banks, he would do an entirely creditable job of it, even without a TelePrompTer. The salesmanship for Obamacare represents in microcosm the larger Obama political project, which has always depended on throwing a reassuring skein of moderation on top of left-wing ideological aims.

All politicians are prone to shaving the truth, giving themselves the benefit of the doubt and trying to appear more reasonable than they are. Obama has made it an art form. Bad faith is one of his signal strengths as a politician, and makes him one of the greatest front men progressivism has ever had.

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ObamaCare’s Arrogance, Corruption and Abuse is Just Beginning

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Photo Credit: Fox NewsBy Peter Morici.

It took paramount arrogance for President Obama and congressional Democrats to believe they could write an Affordable Care Act that would replace free markets across a health care sector as large as the economy of France.

Among the results include five million Americans with private insurance who are getting cancellation letters for policies the president promised they could keep. As Obama claims, some had “substandard” coverage, but many had perfectly good policies.

Stories are surfacing of cancer patients — now facing the loss of insurance policies that paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars in life-saving treatments — who cannot access the government run exchange. Or, if they are successful, their premiums are now dramatically higher, and they can no longer access the clinics and doctors that kept them alive.

Businesses around the country are replacing full-time employees with part-time hires to avoid paying rising, burdensome premiums for qualifying workers.

Others are simply dropping coverage altogether and electing to pay fines when those apply in 2014.

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No grounds for claim that ObamaCare lowers healthcare costs

By Charles Blahous.

Public support for the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has plummeted now that the oft-repeated claim that “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it” is widely understood to be untrue. Despite previous assurances, millions of Americans are now grappling with ACA-triggered cancellations of their health insurance policies. Faced with public anger, ACA supporters are now turning to another argument to promote the law: that the ACA is already working to hold down health care cost growth. Unfortunately, some of these claims are just as groundless as the ones that misled so many Americans to believe they would be able to keep their previous coverage.

One particularly egregious example is White House advisor David Cutler’s op-ed published November 8 in the Washington Post, entitled, “The health care law’s success story: slowing down medical costs.” This piece contains the following paragraph:

“Before he was criticized for his statements about insurance continuity, President Obama was lambasted for his forecasts of cost savings. In 2007, Obama asserted that his health-care reform plan would save $2,500 per family relative to the trends at the time. The criticism was harsh; I know because I helped the then-senator make this forecast. Yet events have shown him to be right. Between early 2009 and now, the Office of the Actuaries at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has lowered its forecast of medical spending in 2016 by 1 percentage point of GDP. In dollar terms, this is $2,500 for a family of four.”

To see why this is wrong, it is useful to break down this paragraph’s thesis into its component parts. Specifically, it claims that:

The President’s previous assertions that his “health-care reform plan” would “save $2,500 per family” have been “shown” “to be right,” and that;

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Telling the Truth About ObamaCare Can Get You Fired

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Are you afraid of the Obama White House? If you challenge the president’s beloved health care plan, maybe you should be. Consider the fate of William White, the Washington, D.C. Insurance Commissioner, who voiced skepticism about President Obama’s hastily assembled “fix” for the millions losing their insurance policies.

A day after suggesting that the new demands on insurers could destabilize the marketplace and lead to even higher premiums, White was canned.

Telling the truth about ObamaCare is risky.

Remember the manhandling of Congressional Budget Office head Douglas Elmendorf? When the supposedly neutral bean counters undertook the first analysis of ObamaCare ’s fiscal impact, their preliminary findings threatened to undermine the happy talk flowing from the White House. Elmendorf was summoned to a parlay with the president, who doubtless explained how the budget gurus might amend their analysis, as a patriotic duty…

Any surprise that the cost estimates from the CBO have made generous assumption — underestimating the number of Americans to receive subsidies and who will be added to Medicaid roles? I will guarantee that as this bill takes hold, costs will exceed those projected by the CBO.

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Lawmaker: Benghazi Operatives Likely Communicated with Al Qaeda Leaders Before, After Attack

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Photo Credit: REUTERSSome of the main operatives in the Benghazi terror attack were part of the Al Qaeda network and likely sought to communicate with Al Qaeda leadership in Pakistan leading up to and after the strike that killed four Americans, according to the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

“I can tell you we know the participants of the event were clearly Al Qaeda affiliates, had strong interest and desire to communicate with Al Qaeda core and others, in the process — we believe before and after the event,” Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., who has access to classified information and receives regular briefings, told Fox News in an exclusive interview.

Last month, Fox News was first to report that at least two of the key suspects in the Benghazi terror attack were at one point working with Al Qaeda senior leadership. Sources familiar with the investigation said one suspect was believed to be a courier for the network, and the other a bodyguard in Afghanistan prior to the 2001 terror attacks.

The direct ties to Al Qaeda senior leadership undercut early characterizations by the Obama administration that the attackers in Benghazi were isolated “extremists” with no organizational structure or affiliation. After the attack, the former bodyguard — Faraj al Chalabi — traveled to Pakistan, where he was detained, returned to Libya and eventually released before the FBI was granted access.

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Rush: Obama Uses His Own Ignorance As A Sign Of Brilliance (+audio)

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Photo Credit: APRUSH: The president of the United States actually said yesterday (paraphrasing), “Okay, on the website, I was not informed directly that the website would not be working the way it was supposed to. Had I been informed, I wouldn’t be going out saying, ‘Boy, this is gonna be great.’ You know I’m accused of a lot of things, but I don’t think I’m stupid enough to go around saying this is gonna be like shopping on Amazon or Travelocity a week before the website opens, if I thought it wasn’t gonna work.”

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Pope Francis: Catholic Church Will Never Compromise on Abortion (+video)

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Photo Credit: LifeNews Today, the Vatican released the text of Evangelii Gaudium (“The Joy of the Gospel”), an Apostolic Exhortation by Pope Francis that specifically addresses pro-life and pro-family issues.

The text of the message makes it clear that the Catholic Church cannot and will not compromise on its pro-life teachings on abortion.

214. Precisely because this involves the internal consistency of our message about the value of the human person, the Church cannot be expected to change her position on this question. I want to be completely honest in this regard. This is not something subject to alleged reforms or “modernizations”. It is not “progressive” to try to resolve problems by eliminating a human life. On the other hand, it is also true that we have done little to adequately accompany women in very difficult situations, where abortion appears as a quick solution to their profound anguish, especially when the life developing within them is the result of rape or a situation of extreme poverty. Who can remain unmoved before such painful situations?

Continuing that pro-woman theme, Pope Francis says the Catholic Church must do more to help women in various pregnancy situations and following an abortion.

213. Among the vulnerable for whom the Church wishes to care with particular love and concern are unborn children, the most defenceless and innocent among us. Nowadays efforts are made to deny them their human dignity and to do with them whatever one pleases, taking their lives and passing laws preventing anyone from standing in the way of this. Frequently, as a way of ridiculing the Church’s effort to defend their lives, attempts are made to present her position as ideological, obscurantist and conservative. Yet this defence of unborn life is closely linked to the defence of each and every other human right. It involves the conviction that a human being is always sacred and inviolable, in any situation and at every stage of development. Human beings are ends in themselves and never a means of resolving other problems. Once this conviction disappears, so do solid and lasting foundations for the defence of human rights, which would always be subject to the passing whims of the powers that be. Reason alone is sufficient to recognize the inviolable value of each single human life, but if we also look at the issue from the standpoint of faith, “every violation of the personal dignity of the human being cries out in vengeance to God and is an offence against the creator of the individual”.[176]

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California Bar Taking On City Hall Over Sign Supporting Veterans

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Photo Credit: Fox News A California bar owner is asking veterans to rally behind him after claiming that the city of Huntington Beach is ordering him to remove a sign on his roof that salutes those who served.

The city says it’s all a big mistake — that the issue really is about permits, not wording. But the bar’s co-owner, in turn, claims the city is not being truthful and says there’s “something fishy” about the whole situation.

The center of the dispute, an illuminated sign on the roof of Johnny’s Saloon, proclaims, “THANK a VETERAN for your FREEDOM” and is popular among the bar’s clientele–a lot of former soldiers.

But an anonymous person reportedly complained to the city and the bar owners now say the city is forcing them to take it down.

According to local reports, the owners of Johnny’s, John Marovic and Johnny Kresimir, say they received a letter in the mail this week from the city ,stating that they were required to remove the sign within two days or face nearly $1,000 in fines.

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