Photo Credit: Mark Wilson/Getty ImagesYou know things are bad for President Barack Obama when New York Magazine, no bastion of conservatism, is producing videos pointing out your lies.
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Photo Credit: YouTube The advocacy group Senate Conservatives Action announced Tuesday that it will spend six figures on a new television ad bashing Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell — but national Republicans are brushing off the buy.
Senate Conservatives Action, the PAC of the Senate Conservatives Fund that last week endorsed McConnell’s Republican primary opponent, Matt Bevin, will spend $330,000 to air the television ad across Kentucky, the group said. The 30-second spot attacks McConnell for his role in negotiations to end a 16-day government shutdown by restoring government funding, but without blocking the implementation of Obamacare.
“Conservatives asked Mitch McConnell to lead the fight against Obamacare,” the ad’s narrator says. “He didn’t listen.”
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Photo Credit: WND After defending Obamacare from the vilest of insults from angry citizens, a former Democrat congressional aide says that she’s finally given up and admitted that she was wrong.
What prompted the turnabout?
Sue Klinkhamer is one of an estimated millions who, contrary to President Obama’s famous promise, has received, or is about to receive, a policy-cancellation notice.
After getting hers in the mail, she fired off an email to her former boss, Rep. Bill Foster, D-Ill., and other Democratic colleagues, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.
Klinkhamer wrote: “I spent two years defending Obamacare. I had constituents scream at me, spit at me and call me names that I can’t put in print.”
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Photo Credit: APThe Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has approved over 80 percent of young illegal immigrants who have applied for its Deferred Action program, an administrative version of the DREAM Act.
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said they have granted legal status to 474,000 of the 580,000 illegal aliens who have applied.
“Last June, DHS announced the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals process, allowing young people who meet the guidelines to seek a two year provisional legal status to remain in the United States,” wrote Maria Odom, the ombudsman for USCIS, on Oct. 24.
“Our office played a key role in this effort by assisting with individual cases, sharing stakeholder feedback with USCIS and suggesting improvements to the application process,” she said.
“Already, more than 580,000 individuals have requested deferred action, and after a thorough review of each of those cases, including a background check, more than 474,000 requests have been approved, allowing these young people to continue to contribute to the country they call home.”
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Photo Credit: Times Online/GDA Photo Service/NewscomBrooke Greenberg, who baffled scientists because she never aged, has died at the age of 20, never having developed beyond the physical size of an infant or the mental capacity of a 2-year-old.
The daughter of Howard and Melanie Greenberg from Reisterstown, Md., Brooke is one of about a dozen children in the world who have what some call syndrome X — a kind of Benjamin Button disorder that prevents them from aging.
Her funeral was Sunday at a synagogue outside Baltimore, family friends confirmed.
“The family is doing as well as can be expected,” Chris Cole, a colleague of Brooke’s father, told ABCNews.com today. “They are going through their traditions this week — the shiva.”
Brooke has been pushed around in a stroller all her life. In 2009, when her family was interviewed on ABC’s “20/20,” Brook weighed 16 pounds and was 30 inches tall. She didn’t speak, but she laughed when she was happy, and clearly recognized her three sisters: Emily, now 26; Caitlin, now 23; and Carly, now 17.
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Photo Credit: Bob LairdIn the 2014 elections, Republicans need to net a six-seat pickup to retake control of the U.S. Senate. They have high hopes, but there is little room for error. In the House, Democrats need a net gain of 17 seats next year to gain majority control and return Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to the speaker’s chair. Here are seven key races to watch in each chamber:
SENATE
•ALASKA: In 2010, Tea Party candidate Joe Miller shocked the GOP by defeating incumbent Lisa Murkowski in a primary; she came back to win re-election as a write-in candidate. Now Miller is expected to be one of three candidates vying for the Republican nomination to challenge Mark Begich, the first-term Democratic incumbent. Other Republicans who could be strong candidates: Lt. Gov. Mead Treadwell and Dan Sullivan, former head of the state’s natural resources department.
•LOUISIANA: Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu has been called vulnerable in each of her three prior Senate races, and her fourth run is no different. Louisiana regularly votes Republican in presidential years, and Landrieu’s support of the Affordable Care Act has not helped boost her popularity. Her opponent, Republican U.S. Rep. Bill Cassidy, staunchly opposes the law although he introduced health care legislation while a state senator in Louisiana.
•ARKANSAS: Mark Pryor is a moderate Democrat hoping for a third term. His voting record on the Affordable Care Act in increasingly conservative Arkansas, coupled with a strong Republican challenge, may hamper that. Republicans have quickly coalesced around Tom Cotton, a young freshman congressman who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. This race will be a huge spend for partisans on both sides of the aisle.
•KENTUCKY: Americans are frustrated with Washington, and Mitch McConnell is one of its best-known faces. The five-term senator is facing a primary challenge from Tea Party candidate Matt Bevin and, if he survives, an Election Day challenge from Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes. Major ad buys are already taking over the airwaves – eight months ahead of the primary.
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Photo Credit: APIn a blockbuster report on Monday, sources told NBC News that at least half to three quarters of those who buy individual insurance will have that insurance cancelled by their insurers over the next year thanks to changes mandated by Obamacare. A huge number of the people forced off their current insurance will have “sticker shock,” the sources said. What’s more, President Obama knew all that even as he campaigned on the promise that if you liked your insurance, you could keep it: “the administration knew that more than 40 to 67 percent of those in the individual market would not be able to keep their plans, even if they liked them.”
Robert Laszewski of Health Policy and Strategy Associates has been a supporter of Obamacare, but stated, “This says that when they made the promise, they knew half the people in this market outright couldn’t keep what they had and then they wrote the rules so that others couldn’t make it either.” On Monday, White House spokesperson Jessica Santillo said that people might have to pay more for insurance, but that their insurance would be better: “One of the main goals of the law is to ensure that people have insurance they can rely on – that doesn’t discriminate or charge more based on pre-existing conditions. The consumers who are getting notices are in plans that do not provide all these protections – but in the vast majority of cases, those same insurers will automatically shift their enrollees to a plan that provides new consumer protections and, for nearly half of individual market enrollees, discounts through premium tax credits.”
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Photo Credit: heritage.orgBy Marguerite Bowling.
The hype and dream are fizzling out with the Administration’s big promise on Obamacare—that every American who liked his or her health plan could keep it. According to a new tally, nearly 1.5 million customers in the individual insurance market have lost their current health plans.
They’re losing coverage that many of them liked, with one woman in Florida saying the new option under Obamacare would cost her more than 10 times what she currently pays in monthly premiums. David Hogberg breaks down the insurance cancellations to date at the National Center for Public Policy Research:
-800,000 in New Jersey.
-119,000 from Blue Shield in California.
-160,000 from Kaiser in California.
-300,000 in Florida.
-24,000 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
-13,000 in central and eastern Pennsylvania.
-76,000 from CareFirst in Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia…
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Photo Credit: westernjournalism.comWhite House Extends ObamaCare Enrollment Period
Americans now have an additional six weeks in which to enroll for a government-mandated healthcare plan without incurring penalty charges.
In the wake of ObamaCare’s rising unpopularity and a website that does not function for the vast majority of users, White House spokesman Jay Carney confirmed Monday that the enrollment deadline has been extended to March 31. Last week, Carney indicated the administration would work to fix the litany of issues plaguing healthcare.gov.
After sending Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on a whirlwind tour to put a positive spin on the site’s malfunctions, the Obama administration apparently decided damage control was not working.
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Photo Credit: APThere’s no doubt congressional investigators have their hands full probing allegations the Internal Revenue Service targeted conservative non-profit groups. But now a different IRS scandal — involving the chronic, ongoing, mind-bogglingly wasteful mismanagement of a popular tax credit program — demands Congress’s attention because it has taken on new importance with the arrival of Obamacare.
The program is the Earned Income Tax Credit, through which the federal government gives out between $60 billion and $70 billion to low-income working Americans each year. It’s known as a “refundable” tax credit, but it is basically a transfer payment, in which the IRS sends a check — perhaps even $5,000 every year — to workers who have little or no tax liability.
The problem is, the IRS does little to determine whether recipients actually qualify for the money. A recent report by the IRS inspector general says the agency has given out somewhere between $110 billion and $132 billion in improper Earned Income Tax Credit payments in the last decade. In that time period, between 21 and 30 percent of tax credit payments went to people who didn’t qualify for them.
That is bad enough. But what infuriates lawmakers is that the IRS refuses to do anything about it. Agency officials told the inspector general they couldn’t fix the problem because the tax credit program is very complicated, and also because they are afraid vigorous enforcement would discourage legitimately qualified recipients from applying for credits. And the IRS is not only not working to reduce improper payments, it is refusing to report those payments to Congress as required. The bottom line, in the words of inspector general Russell George: “The IRS is unlikely to achieve any significant reduction in Earned Income Tax Credit improper payments.”
Rep. Dave Camp, R-Mich., chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, has heard that before. “The IRS has repeatedly ignored the fraud and abuse in the Earned Income Tax Credit program, which has already cost Americans over $100 billion,” Camp said in a statement Monday. “Americans should be confident that their tax dollars are being used properly, but that confidence has been shattered by the blatant disregard this agency has shown for monitoring refundable tax credits and better protecting taxpayers.”
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Photo Credit: Wonderlane/flickrEnroll Alaska, an organization that was specifically created to aid Alaskans in enrolling for Obamacare, has thrown in the towel, at least for the time being.
As the Peninsula Clarion reports, Enroll Alaska has been able to enroll a grand total of only three people since the launch of the health-insurance marketplaces on October 1. It has now given up entirely on that goal, at least until Healthcare.gov, the federal health-care exchange, gives Alaskans accurate figures on the subsidies they’re eligible for.
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