Food Stamp Opportunists Who Raided Walmart During EBT Glitch to be Cut Off from Program

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Photo Credit: Natural News The ruthless hordes of food stamp recipients that went wild last month during a major glitch in the Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) program could end up getting cut off from the program forever, claim new reports. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal recently announced that everyone who participated in fraud in his state by raiding stores and going on out-of-control shopping sprees will soon receive letters notifying them of either a temporary or permanent loss of benefits.

As you may recall, a number of Walmart stores and other retailers throughout Louisiana were ransacked back in October when the federal EBT database suddenly went offline, registering the equivalent of unlimited balances on people’s cards. Enticed by the prospect of having no spending limits, thousands of EBT cardholders who discovered the glitch early decided to take full advantage of it, ransacking stores and filling up their carts with the most expensive food products they could find.

Many of these looters made off with the stolen goods in their carts, as checkers at some stores rang them up even though the system was down, trusting that they had enough credit on their EBT cards to cover the costs. But now that officials have had the chance to go back and review these purchases, there is clear evidence that many of the looters were simply there to steal as much as possible.

“More than 12,000 people were sent an insufficient funds notice when the problem with the EBT cards was fixed on October 12,” writes William Bigelow for Breitbart.com. “[T]hose who transgressed may lose their EBT cards for a year.”

The glitch was not limited to just Louisiana, as at least 17 states reportedly had problems with their EBT card systems during the same time. But Louisiana is among the first to actually hold its offending EBT cardholders accountable for both fraud and attempted fraud, even indicating that it plans to cut some people’s benefits off for good.

Read more from this story HERE.

Thousands of Doctors Dropped by Insurer After Obamacare Funding Cuts

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Photo Credit: WNDBy Newsmax Wires.

United Health Group has dropped thousands of doctors from its networks in recent weeks, leaving many elderly patients unsure whether they need to switch plans to continue seeing their doctors, the Wall Street Journal reported Saturday.

The insurer said in October that underfunding of Medicare Advantage plans for the elderly could not be fully offset by the company’s other healthcare business.

The company also reported spending more healthcare premiums on medical claims in the third quarter, due mainly to government cuts to payments for Medicare Advantage services.

“Medicare Advantage, an alternative to traditional Medicare, combines hospital and doctor coverage and often includes prescription drugs and perks like gym memberships,” the Journal explained. “Enrollment has more than doubled since 2004 to 13 million in 2012, which represents about 27 percent of Americans on Medicare.

“The federal government pays private insurers a per-capita fee to manage the benefits. The rate is currently about 12 percent more than the average Medicare patient spends annually. The Obama administration plans to cut those extra payments to insurers by about $150 billion over the next 10 years to help pay” for the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Why the Obamacare Insurance Delay Isn’t Legal

By John Yoo.

I agree with Adam below that President Obama does not have the legal authority for his health care decision yesterday, though the issue is not easy to resolve. The legal complexity might allow the White House to get away with another lawless act—as it has with the delay of the employer mandate, the waiving of welfare work rules, the free pass for marijuana users, and the non-enforcement of immigration laws.

The President announced on Thursday that, for the next year, anyone can keep the health plans that they held before the passage of Obamacare. Obamacare requires all individual to purchase health care. The problem is that the Administration, acting pursuant to the Affordable Care Act, has the authority to define what qualifies as health insurance. The Obama administration notoriously defined acceptable health care policies to only include those that met minimum requirements, including prenatal care (even for men). Pre-existing health care plans will be lost, because most of them do not meet these criteria.

Initially, Obama’s decision might seem to rely on the safe ground of the delegated authority under the ACA to define insurance policies. Obama could just order HHS to alter its regulation so that any and all insurance policies could meet the insurance mandate.

The problem with Obama’s suspension, as I understand it, is that any regulation must undergo what is known as “notice-and-comment” under the Administrative Procedure Act. All regulations—issued pursuant to authority delegated to the executive branch by Congress—must first be publicly proposed, and then wait for a period of time for the public to make comments. Then the agency must issue the regulation with reasoned explanations for its policy choices. Changes to existing regulations usually must undergo the same process.

Obama’s decision yesterday, however, apparently is not to forego “notice-and-comment” rulemaking. If the President wants to snuff out the raging political fires engulfing his Administration, his one-year delay has to have immediate effect. Obama cannot wait around for the normal procedures required by the Administrative Procedure Act.

Read more from this story HERE.

Trans-Pacific Partnership: Obama’s Dangerous International Deal Surrendering U.S. Sovereignty

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Photo Credit: WikicommonsWhile the Obama Administration appears to be growing ever-more-limp domestically, the president is still making a vigorous international push that has the potential to shift economic power dynamics, rewrite intellectual property laws, establish new labor and environmental regulations, and reduce the authority of Congress. And, the White House hopes to have all this sorted out by the end of this year.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), considered the “cornerstone of the Obama Administration’s economic policy in the Asia Pacific,” has been quietly negotiated since since the president’s first term began. The U.S. Trade Representative Office (USTR) presents the agreement as a means for the United States and other 11 other Pacific-rim countries to be the leaders of a technology-fueled future by trading with each other free of government tariffs. For all this, it has received a ringing endorsement from the New York Times.

However, as documents from negotiations have been leaked, a growing number of politicians and policy groups across political ideologies have found disconcerting features of the TPP that point not at all toward free trade, but bigger government, stricter laws, and less accountability.

Too Much Secrecy

Perhaps the most widely discussed aspects of the ongoing TPP negotiations is the apparent secrecy. Senators Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) have spoken out against the lack of transparency for such a massive agreement. Warren even wrote a letter to Obama, goading him that the Bush administration conducted more democratic, transparent trade negotiations.

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You Can’t Fix Stupid… Or Crazy

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Photo Credit: Townhall Let’s get this out of the way right now—there is no Obamacare fix.

Repeat after me—there is no Obamacare fix.

Obamacare is not an epic failure simply because of its incompetent implementation best symbolized by a $94 million website that doesn’t work. Rather, Obamacare’s incompetent implementation is a symptom of its real disease.

That real disease is this: Obamacare cannot possibly work because it operates outside the natural laws of economics, and it’s another ham-fisted attempt by government to do something that is outside of its God-given (or Constitutional) jurisdiction.

In other words, Obamacare is magical thinking. It’s tilting at windmills, or the legislative equivalent of howling at the moon. It’s an attempt to ignore reality, which is to say its sheer lunacy. And you can’t fix crazy anymore than you can fix stupid. This was never going to work. It was always going to start and end like this, and therefore any earnest or well-intentioned attempts to put lipstick on this turd will just make the foul stench surrounding it all the worse.

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Obama’s Lawlessness

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Photo Credit: National Review By Andrew C. McCarthy.

Obama claims a power to enforce laws selectively under the doctrine of “prosecutorial discretion.” This is merely an allocation doctrine, however: a commonsense acknowledgment that finite resources make it impossible to enforce every law equally. An administration, for example, might say, “DEA has finite resources, so we’re going to focus on heroin trafficking rather than marijuana possession.” This does not mean the administration is saying marijuana possession is no longer a crime; just that it has higher enforcement priorities and a limited budget. To the contrary, Obama has distorted the doctrine to claim, in effect, that illegalities he unilaterally chooses not to police are somehow no longer illegal — at least until the “waivers” he grants expire. (I would call the waivers capricious, but there really is a rigor to them — they expire after Election Day to protect Democrats from political accountability.)

Prosecutorial discretion is the fig leaf Obama uses to rationalize his noxious decision to relieve corporations, political cronies, and members of Congress from their Obamacare burdens while the rest of us are crushed under ours. It is also the hocus-pocus behind his latest fix. Panicked by millions who’ve lost coverage, sinking poll numbers, and jittery Democrats, the president is now purporting to allow insurance companies to ignore the law and reissue the policies Obamacare’s mandates forced them to terminate.

But here is the problem: This “waiver” is irrelevant. Even if it were constitutionally proper for a president to flout Congress in the executive branch’s enforcement practices, all that means is that the Obama administration will give insurers a pass until 2014. The Obama “waiver” does not change what Congress’s law actually says, and therefore it has no bearing on the legal obligations attendant to the relationship between the insurer and the insured.

As a practical matter, it is nearly inconceivable that insurance companies would be able to reissue the canceled health-care plans. The process, as Avik Roy expertly explains, is too extensive and complex to complete in the few weeks between now and Obamacare’s coverage deadline — something that an administration that can’t, after three years, get a functioning website running should know. But even if it could be done, the insurance companies would be insane to offer plans that failed to comply with the letter of the Obamacare statute. Similarly, the state insurance commissioners would be insane to permit them, and Americans would be insane to buy them. The policies would be legally unenforceable.

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Man Tased, Arrested Over Leash-Law Violation

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Photo Credit: Opposing Views California resident Gary Hesterberg was running the trails with his two dogs at Rancho Corral de Tierra in San Mateo County last year when he was stopped by a park ranger for not leashing his terrier (his other dog, a beagle, was on a leash). When the ranger, Sarah Cavallaro, would not let Hesterberg walk away after a verbal warning, he accused her of unlawful detainment and attempted to leave anyway. She tased him, and he collapsed to the ground. Then police came to arrest him, and detained him for eight hours.

Hesterberg is suing for violation of his Fourth Amendment rights as well as battery. The 9th Circuit could not decide his case in a summary judgment , so the plaintiff is now headed for trial.

Witness John Bartlett described the scene to the San Francisco Chronicle: “He said something about ‘are you going to arrest me,’ something like that, and the next thing I heard was a shot and a scream of agony from him as he fell on his back. He seemed to be out for two or three minutes.”

Bartlett also said, “It did rattle me. I’ve never seen anything like it. I’m 77 years old, never had such an emotional reaction to something. I didn’t know if the guy was dying. For a leash on a dog…”

Read more from this story HERE.

The U.S. May be Hitting its Ethanol Limit. So EPA Wants to Relax its Biofuels Goals.

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Photo Credit: Chuck Olson / FlickrWhen it comes to ethanol, the United States may have reached its limit — at least for now.

Back in 2007, Congress passed a law that would require the nation to use more and more ethanol and other biofuels each year. But for reasons of chemistry and economics, those targets are becoming increasingly difficult to fulfill.

That helps explain why, on Friday, the Environmental Protection Agency took the unusual step of proposing to cut its biofuels targets for next year. The agency will require gasoline refiners to use just 15.2 billion gallons of biofuels in 2014 — down from 16.55 billion gallons this year. The new target is 14 percent lower than the original goal envisioned by Congress.

The EPA’s move is a victory for gasoline refineries, which have long argued that the original targets were unworkable. And it’s a fairly big setback for the biofuels industry, at least for the time being.

Here’s the back story: In 2007, Congress updated its Renewable Fuel Standard, which set rough targets for the amount of ethanol and other biofuels that had to be blended into the nation’s gasoline supply each year. By 2013, that target rose to 16.55 billion gallons — and it was supposed to keep rising until it hit 36 billion gallons in 2022.

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The 23 Most Revealing Words Obama Spoke

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Photo Credit: art_es_annaPresident Obama uttered a surprisingly revealing 23-word sentence Thursday that reveals so much about his thinking and why his second-term is shaping up as worse than Jimmy Carter’s last.

But, first, let’s get this straight right off the bat: President Obama is not a dummy.

He acts like a dummy, an arrogant one at that. The chief executive of the United States tries to convince the world he’s a dummy, bizarrely claiming he didn’t know so many stupid, illegal, corrupt, partisan, lying things were going on in his administration lo these past 1,760 divisive days.

He naively expected Iran to cave to the kind of political muscle that works back home in the Windy City. Obama painted himself into a red-lined corner on Syria, only to have his south side saved humiliatingly by Russia’s shirtless President Putin.

And apparently the White House did not pay its cable bill this fall. Because according to Kathleen Sebelius, the president was unaware the ObamaCare rollout was an utter disaster for days after the Oct. 1 limp launch. Does anyone ever talk to anyone else on Obama’s team?

Read more from this story HERE.

Where’s the Outrage?! MSNBC Host Martin Bashir Encourages Defecation, Urination on Sarah Palin

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Photo Credit: MSNBCIn yet another outrageous example of the duplicity of the nation’s leftwing media, MSNBC commentator, Britain Martin Bashir, viciously attacked Sarah Palin during the close of his Friday show, calling her “America’s resident dunce” and then encouraging someone to commit horrific acts against her.

How any news organization could continue to employ someone who made such incredibly unjustified and outrageous statements about any person, let alone Mrs. Palin, is a testament to its moral bankruptcy.

Here’s the shameful exchange (the written transcript follows the video):

MARTIN BASHIR: It’s time now to clear the air. And we end this week in the way it began, with America’s resident dunce, Sarah Palin, scraping the barrel of her long deceased mind and using her all-time favorite analogy in an attempt to sound intelligent about the national debt.

SARAH PALIN: Our free stuff today is being paid for by taking money from our children and borrowing from China. When that note comes due … and this isn’t racist, so yeah, try it, try it anyway. This isn’t racist. But it’s going to be like slavery when that note is due.

BASHIR: It’ll be like slavery. Given her well-established reputation as a world class idiot, it’s hardly surprising that she should choose to mention slavery in a way that is abominable to anyone who knows anything about its barbaric history. So here’s an example.

One of the most comprehensive first person accounts of slavery comes from the personal diary of a man called Thomas Thistlewood, who kept copious notes for 39 years. Thistlewood was the son of a tenant farmer who arrived on the island of Jamaica in April 1750, and assumed the position of overseer at a major plantation. What is most shocking about Thistlewood’s diary is not simply the fact that he assumes the right to own and possess other human beings, but is the sheer cruelty and brutality of his regime.

In 1756, he records that, “A slave named Darby catched eating canes. Had him well-flogged and pickled. Then made Hector, another slave, s-h-i-t in his mouth.” This became known as Darby’s dose, a punishment invented by Thistlewood that spoke only of the slave owner’s savagery and inhumanity.

And he mentions a similar incident again in 1756, this time in relation to a man he refers to as “Punch.” “Flogged Punch well, and then washed and rubbed salt pickle, lime juice and bird pepper. Made Negro Joe piss in his eyes and mouth.” I could go on, but you get the point.

When Mrs. Palin invoked slavery, she doesn’t just prove her rank ignorance. She confirms that if anyone truly qualified for a dose of discipline from Thomas Thistlewood, then she would be the outstanding candidate.

White House Defends Obama’s Executive Authority to Act on Health Insurance Without Congress

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Photo Credit: AP/ Evan VucciWhite House press secretary Jay Carney defended President Barack Obama’s authority to take unilateral action on health insurance plans – even comparing it to the administration’s action last year not to prosecute certain illegal immigrants.

Carney also reiterated the pledge to veto House bill to allow people to keep their insurance plans cancelled as a result of Obamacare, even after 39 Democrats joined the House Republican majority to support the bill.

The House bill, sponsored by Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) would allow anyone who had a health insurance policy cancellation, or would get a cancellation, to keep their plan, thus keeping Obama’s broken promise that if you like your health care, you can keep it. The administration objects because it would allow new policies that do not comply with Obamacare to still be sold.

Thus Obama unveiled his own plan on Thursday, to preempt the House vote, that would administratively waive insurance companies from having to comply with Obamacare standards for one year, but also require those insurance companies inform consumers that tax credits and other benefits of the Affordable Care Act plans.

But some have questioned Obama’s ability to take such an action without Congressional authorization. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney took a question about the president’s authority, and said that the health care law defers certain discretion to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

Read more from this story HERE.