Kudlow: Don’t Delay Obamacare, GOP; Let the Democrats Hang Themselves

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Photo Credit: Scott ClarkOne huge political question surrounds the catastrophic launch of Obamacare: Will the cancelled insurance contracts for millions, terminated doctor-patient relationships, sticker shock from higher premiums and deductibility, damage to job hiring and economic growth and the administration’s double-talk get the GOP off the shutdown hook for the 2014 midterm elections?

That is the question. Donald Rumsfeld would call it a known unknown. And right now nobody knows the answer.

But Christopher Ruddy, founder and CEO of Newsmax, makes an interesting point about this: “The key to stopping Obamacare is for its opponents to win in congressional elections in 2014. Delaying Obamacare only helps the Democrats who support this boondoggle.”

So far, with all the problems plaguing the Obamacare website, Senator Marco Rubio is leading the Republican charge to delay the March 31 enrollment deadline and tax penalty. And a lot of Republicans are lining up behind him. But is that the right tactic? On the Democratic side, Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and nine of her colleagues are urging the White House to push back the same deadline.

But is that just to save their re-election hides next November?

Read more from this story HERE.

Census Bureau: Means-Tested Gov’t Benefit Recipients Outnumber Full-Time Year-Round Workers

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Photo Credit: AP/Carolyn KasterAmericans who were recipients of means-tested government benefits in 2011 outnumbered year-round full-time workers, according to data released this month by the Census Bureau.

They also out-numbered the total population of the Philippines.

There were 108,592,000 people in the United States in the fourth quarter of 2011 who were recipients of one or more means-tested government benefit programs, the Census Bureau said in data released this week. Meanwhile, according to the Census Bureau, there were 101,716,000 people who worked full-time year round in 2011. That included both private-sector and government workers.

That means there were about 1.07 people getting some form of means-tested government benefit for every 1 person working full-time year round.

The Census Bureau counted as recipients of means-tested government programs “anyone residing in a household in which one or more people received benefits from the program.” Many of these people lived in households receiving more than one form of means-tested benefit at the same time.

Read more from this story HERE.

Is Mark Begich Becoming a “Knucklehead?”

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Photo Credit: APFairbanks, Alaska. — U.S. Senate candidate Joe Miller is pleased to learn that Senator Mark Begich has apparently changed his mind and now embraces delaying Obamacare’s individual enrollment mandate. According to news reports, Begich has joined with other “red state” Democrat Senators – who are coincidentally up for re-election next year – in signing a letter to Kathleen Sebelius calling for an open-ended delay in the deadline to enroll for Obamacare until the much-publicized website problems are resolved.

One of the Republican compromise proposals to fully fund the government earlier this month called for a one-year delay in the individual mandate. Senator Begich called those who offered this compromise “a small band of knuckleheads” who are “holding the country hostage over the health care law.”

Miller said, “I am happy to learn that Senator Begich has taken off his rose-colored glasses long enough to see one of the glaring flaws of Obamacare. Interestingly enough, the senator promised the people of Alaska that the healthcare exchange would function like buying airline tickets on Expedia. Well, let’s just say that was a little overly optimistic.”

Over two weeks after the launch of the exchange, not a single Alaskan had been able to sign up. Now after nearly four weeks, major systemic problems continue to plague the Obamacare website.

Miller opposed the passage of Obamacare because it created another entitlement program the federal government did not have the Constitutional authority to undertake. Further, with the nation already experiencing trillion dollar plus deficits, it could in no way afford the program. The so-called Affordable Care Act also did not address rising healthcare costs. Instead of introducing more free market principles into the heavily regulated health insurance industry, Obamacare does just the opposite, adding over 20,000 pages of new regulations to-date.

“If the federal government cannot even set up a website, why should the American people have any confidence it can oversee healthcare for an entire nation? Nobel prize winning economist Milton Friedman’s words come to mind: ‘If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there’d be a shortage of sand,’” said Miller. He added, “Too bad Mark Begich could not have been more of a ‘knucklehead’ back in 2010 when he was the 60th and deciding vote for Obamacare’s passage.”

Steve Forbes: Obamacare Website Rollout ‘Incompetent From Top to Bottom’

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Photo Credit: Reuters/Landov By Andrea Billups and Kathleen Walter.

Publisher Steve Forbes minces no words when it comes to placing blame for over the disastrous website rollout by the Obama administration for its sweeping healthcare program.

“It’s incompetence from top to bottom,” Forbes told Newsmax in an exclusive interview Friday as Democrats continued to jump ship amid 2014 election fears and as the administration scrambled to fix a website that has kept untold thousands from registering from federally required health insurance.

“It starts with the top — with the president — and then everyone in the chain of command, including [HHS] Secretary [Kathleen] Sebelius,” said Forbes, publisher and editor-in-chief of his namesake magazine. “Everyone knew that there were going to be problems and then something as complex as this, you have to bird-dog it every step of the way.

“Clearly no one was in charge. They just let it contract and just hoped things would work out.”

Moving forward, Forbes, who sought the Republican White House nomination in 1996 and 2000, shares the views of a growing bipartisan group in Washington and around the nation that the healthcare program should be postponed.

Read more from this story HERE.

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NY Times: Obama Deserves an ‘F’ on Healthcare.gov

By John Sexton.

Princeton economics professor Uwe E. Reinhardt gives President Obama a letter grade on the roll out:

President Obama taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School. How would he have graded a student’s performance on, say, a term paper or test that the professor viewed as “unacceptable,” especially when there was “no excuse” for the paper’s deficiencies?

One would hope that the grade would have been F, even under modern grade inflation. I certainly would affix that grade to such inexcusably deficient work.

Reinhardt finds it incredible that the President was left out of the loop (as Sec. Sebelius has claimed). If true, he thinks this is one of the worst aspects of the overall failure:

As someone who has lectured on corporate governance and served on corporate boards, I find Secretary Sebelius’s statement astounding. Is this how the project was managed? They knew the Web site was not working and yet decided to go ahead with it anyway, without the president’s personal O.K. for so strategic and risky a decision?

Read more from this story HERE.

Rand Paul Threatens to Hold Yellen Nomination: Source (+video)

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesSen. Rand Paul is threatening to put a hold on the nomination of Janet Yellen to chair the Federal Reserve, a source close to the Kentucky Republican said Friday.

Paul is insisting on a vote on his Fed transparency bill, and has informed Senate leadership of his intentions, the source said.

“As part of Senate consideration of the Janet Yellen nomination to be Chair of the Federal Reserve, I will request a vote on my bipartisan Federal Reserve Transparency Act, S. 209. The American people deserve transparency from the federal reserve and the federal government as a whole,” Paul said in a statement following the reports.

Read more from this story HERE.

How Washington is Killing the Economy

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Photo Credit: APThe latest round of fiscal drama has sputtered to a temporary close, but the routine crises have one clear victim: the U.S. economy, which is once again losing altitude. And for the third year in a row, Washington gets much of the blame.

There’s not much hope for a quick turnaround.

The most recent slowdown — highlighted by poor job growth, softening corporate earnings and decimated confidence — comes just as Republicans and Democrats prepare to square off in a fresh fight over the federal budget with another potential shutdown looming in January and a renewed debt ceiling crisis possible in February.

Washington’s drag on the economy now springs from a multiplying array of sources, including the constant threat of devastating fiscal crisis, the blunt nature of the sequester spending cuts, the troubled roll-out of Obamacare and the now deeply strained relations with key economic allies over clandestine surveillance allegations.

Taken together, Washington’s toxic politics and poorly executed policies have all but ensured that fourth quarter growth comes in soft after forecasters initially predicted a strong close to the year. And they mean that 2014, which initially looked like a possible breakout year for the U.S. economy, now seems like it will be a dreary rerun of 2013 featuring sluggish growth, modest job creation and stagnant wages.

Read more from this story HERE.

Democrats’ United Front Cracks

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Photo Credit: APThe great Democratic unity of 2013 held for five-and-a-half days.

For weeks leading up to the shutdown — and over the 16 days it dragged on — President Barack Obama did the unthinkable: he held every Democrat in the House and Senate together. There weren’t any defectors. There wasn’t even anyone running to reporters to question his strategy. The man who’d disappointed them so many times was suddenly exciting them, with his newly apparent backbone and successful resistance to Republicans. They were rushing to do whatever they could to stand by him, next to him, with him.

Like any fad, that’s gone the way of trucker hats and the macarena.

The problems with the Obamacare website have transformed the president from a man who seemed to have gotten a sudden infusion of political capital to a man who’s been pushed back on his heels. He was firm, and he was setting the agenda. Now he’s back to trying to beating back the latest frame Republicans have forced on him, inadvertently providing evidence to support the doubts they’ve been trying to sow from the beginning. He spent last week against the backdrop of a shutdown that made people appreciate all the things government can do for them. Now he has a website which shows how little it can.

And Democrats have scattered, raising the question of whether the president will be able to preserve any of the new cohesion he inspired earlier in the month, or whether the rift is going to widen again.

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Obama the Avatar

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Photo Credit: National Review Discussing the Obamacare disaster in the Rose Garden on Monday, President Obama led with a phrase to which we have become accustomed: “Nobody,” the president emoted, “is madder than me” about this mess.

Along with “let me be clear” and “make no mistake,” this is a favorite construction. Obama, you see, is more concerned for and correct about everything than everybody else at all times. “Nobody shares the frustrations of the American people more than I do,” he told WABC earlier this month; “nobody is more frustrated” than he about the IRS scandal; “no person,” the president affirmed during the election, “is more interested” in “seeing this economy growing strong.”

The line is contagious. In January, while trying pathetically to sell gun control, “Shotgun” Joe Biden informed the press that “nobody” was “more committed to acting on this moral obligation we have than the president of the United States.” “Nobody is more interested,” either, “in finding out exactly what happened” in Benghazi,” “more upset” about “the oil spill in the Gulf, or “more offended about the anti-gay and -lesbian legislation that you’ve been seeing in Russia.”

Even when he’s not interested he’s interested. “The bottom line,” Obama instructed NASA after cancelling the Constellation program, “is that nobody is more committed to manned spaceflight, to human exploration of space, than I am.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Paul Ryan Co-Writing Bill Legalizing America’s Illegal Immigrants

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Photo Credit: AFPHouse Budget Committee chairman Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) is writing a bill that would grant legal status to America’s at least 11 million illegal immigrants, The New York Times reports.

“Republican Representatives Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin and Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida have been working on legislation that includes a process by which immigrants here illegally could ‘get right with the law’ and eventually become citizens,” the Times’ Eric Lipton and Ashley Parker wrote on Friday in a piece about immigration reform.

While the Times reported here, and Politico reported on Friday morning, that the Speaker and other House GOP leadership figures are privately saying they do not expect a vote on immigration measures this year, publicly they say they want to hold a vote on something on the floor of the House.

Technically, there are only 19 legislative days left in 2013’s calendar for the House, so doing so would be difficult. But it appears, according to liberal blogger Greg Sargent, that the public appearance of immigration reform being “dead” may be a coordinated leak system from the House GOP leadership in order to distract conservatives.

Read more from this story HERE.

Former Guantanamo Detainee Was on Ground in Benghazi During Terror Attack, Source Says

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Photo Credit: Fox News A former Guantanamo Bay detainee with Al Qaeda ties was in Benghazi the night of the Sept. 11 attack, according to a source on the ground in Libya.

The source told Fox News that ex-detainee Sufian bin Qumu, who is suspected of running camps in eastern Libya where some of the assailants trained, is also a “respected member” of Ansar al-Sharia — one of the Islamist groups identified in State Department email traffic two hours after the attack.

Two sources familiar with the investigation, when asked about bin Qumu’s whereabouts the night of the attack, did not dispute the claim he was in Benghazi.

While it is not clear whether bin Qumu was directing the assault, his security file from Guantanamo may be revealing. Having already trained in Usama bin Laden’s camps, in 1998 bin Qumu joined the Taliban in Pakistan and “communicated with likely extremist elements via radio during this period indicating a position of leadership,” the file shows.

Fox News’ ongoing reporting on the attack has shown that at least four key Benghazi suspects have ties to the Al Qaeda senior leadership in Pakistan. They include bin Qumu and Muhammad Jamal, whose network is also suspected of training jihadists for the attack. Jamal was held, and later released by, Egyptian authorities. Earlier this month, the State Department’s terrorist designation for Jamal and his network cites letters he exchanged with Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, where Jamal asked for money and explained the scope of his training camps, which included Libya and the Sinai.

Read more from this story HERE.