Ex-ACORN Operatives Helping Roll Out ObamaCare

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Photo Credit: Fox News A group formed from the ruins of ACORN is hard at work signing people up for ObamaCare, and may be collecting taxpayer cash for their work despite Congress’ efforts to cut the organization and its affiliates off from government funding, a watchdog group charged.

The United Labor Unions Council Local 100, a New Orleans-based nonprofit, announced last month it would take part in a multi-state “navigator” drive to help people enroll in President Obama’s health care plan. The labor council was established by ACORN founder Wade Rathke after his larger group was broken up amid scandal in 2009 and banned from receiving taxpayer funds.

“At a time when our government has ceased functioning due to an appropriations gap, it is ironic that America’s tax dollars are being doled out to an entity whose poor stewardship of our funds was well-established by Congress,” said Dan Epstein, executive director of Cause of Action, a nonpartisan watchdog group based in Washington.

“… it is ironic that America’s tax dollars are being doled out to an entity whose poor stewardship of our funds was well-established by Congress.”

– Dan Epstein, executive director of Cause of Action

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President Crisis and the Wishful Thinking Brigade

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Photo Credit: ReutersThe hallmark of the Obama era is government of, for and by crisis. Elected amid (or possibly because of) a financial crisis, the Panic of 2008, President Obama has spent his time in office lurching from disaster to disaster.

Obama’s reflexes, praised instinctive timing and audacious as a candidate, turn out to be poorly suited to high office. Obama has been mostly reactive and mostly captive to events. Veering here and there is part of being president. The world is big and dangerous and governance is hard. But watching Obama govern is like watching a distracted man flipping through television channels and all of it bad.

“If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.”(flip) Never mind. (flip) We must bomb Syria now! (flip) Er, scratch that. (flip) Al Qaeda is on the run. (flip) It depends on what you mean by “core al Qaeda.” (flip)

Some of the crises have been self-inflected, and sometimes even intentional. Obama’s signature health law, for example, was born of a crisis in Congress. As support for the entitlement long sought by liberals was fracturing, even with Democrats in complete control of Washington, the president jammed the throttle down. The crisis of confidence demanded that a poorly constructed law be passed. Now! Now! Don’t think. Don’t read. Just vote.

That decision, of course, has led to other crises. The one playing out now is the risible implementation of the law. Democrats are all dripping with glib swipes about how Republicans have been waging a very messy civil war amid the partial government shutdown. But the Democrats are pushing their confident chuffles through gritted teeth. They know that the launch has been damaging, and if unrepaired, possibly fatal to the law. However the current budget debacle ends, the ObamaCare debacle has just begun.

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Obamacare’s Website Is Crashing Because It Doesn’t Want You To Know How Costly Its Plans Are (+video)

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Photo Credit: Forbes By Avik Roy.

A growing consensus of IT experts, outside and inside the government, have figured out a principal reason why the website for Obamacare’s federally-sponsored insurance exchange is crashing. Healthcare.gov forces you to create an account and enter detailed personal information before you can start shopping. This, in turn, creates a massive traffic bottleneck, as the government verifies your information and decides whether or not you’re eligible for subsidies. HHS bureaucrats knew this would make the website run more slowly. But they were more afraid that letting people see the underlying cost of Obamacare’s insurance plans would scare people away.

HHS didn’t want users to see Obamacare’s true costs

“Healthcare.gov was initially going to include an option to browse before registering,” report Christopher Weaver and Louise Radnofsky in the Wall Street Journal. “But that tool was delayed, people familiar with the situation said.” Why was it delayed? “An HHS spokeswoman said the agency wanted to ensure that users were aware of their eligibility for subsidies that could help pay for coverage, before they started seeing the prices of policies.” (Emphasis added.)

As you know if you’ve been following this space, Obamacare’s bevy of mandates, regulations, taxes, and fees drives up the cost of the insurance plans that are offered under the law’s public exchanges. A Manhattan Institute analysis I helped conduct found that, on average, the cheapest plan offered in a given state, under Obamacare, will be 99 percent more expensive for men, and 62 percent more expensive for women, than the cheapest plan offered under the old system. And those disparities are even wider for healthy people.

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Photo Credit: AFPBeyond ‘Glitches’: Obamacare Nightmare Just Beginning

By Ben Sasse.

“Train wreck.” “Fundamentally flawed.” “Not ready for primetime.” This is the rollout of Obamacare.

Constant “glitches” keep people from logging into the exchanges. Humiliating live video of reporters normally favorable to Obamacare simply giving up in frustration because they cannot sign up. Consumers who are lucky enough to get through the system are stunned to learn that their premiums have skyrocketed by thousands of dollars. One Pennsylvania mother says that she can either pay her increased premiums or pay for her kids to eat, but she can’t do both.

Extremely personal information has already leaked from the system in Minnesota. Software security experts from McAfee predict millions of identity theft victims. And one of the healthcare exchanges was forced to acknowledge that information collected from patients will be shared with law enforcement.

Tom Bevan at RealClearPolitics wondered why Kathleen Sebelius still has a job. Jon Stewart invited her onto The Daily Show and mocked that he could “download every movie ever made” before she could log onto her own website. Her home state senator called for her to resign for “gross incompetence,” as exactly “zero” residents of Kansas were able to successfully enroll in the program.

The rollout has been such a nightmare that it is abundantly clear now that members of Congress really did not, as then-Speaker Pelosi admitted, even read the Obamacare bill before they passed it. In fact, the program’s launch has been such an unimaginable disaster that it raises an alarming new question that would have been unthinkable amid the exaggerated claims of health utopia from three years ago: Did President Obama even read this legislation before he signed it into law?

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Afghan War Vet Awarded Medal of Honor, Seeks to Return to Active Duty

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Photo Credit: Fox News After nearly being overlooked, and according to some accounts intentionally forgotten, Army Capt. William Swenson received the Medal of Honor at an emotional White House ceremony Tuesday for his heroic actions during the 2009 Battle of Ganjgal in eastern Afghanistan.

Ganjgal was one of the bloodiest battles of the 12-year war. Ambushed by the Taliban, coalition forces were pinned down for nine hours. The fight ended with five U.S. deaths, 10 Afghan army deaths and over two-dozen coalition wounded.

Late Tuesday, Fox News confirmed reports that Swenson, who since leaving the Army in 2011 has spent much of his time in the wilderness of Washington state, has asked the Army to return him to active duty — a rare request for a Medal of Honor recipient. An Army spokesman said, “We are reviewing his request and processing it within established policy.”

The ceremony Tuesday marked only the second time in half a century that the nation’s highest award for valor has been given to two survivors of the same battle. In 2011, Marine Sgt. Dakota Meyer, who fought alongside Swenson, received the same medal for his actions at Ganjgal.

But Swenson’s battle didn’t end in Ganjgal. After the battle, he bitterly complained about incompetence in the ranks, suggesting to Army investigators and reporters that his commanders decided the political risk of civilian casualties outweighed the need to protect the lives of Americans.

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Issa: Any Deal Must Address ‘The Excesses That Need to Be Reined In’

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Photo Credit: AP“I look forward to the government reopening and getting back to really dealing with entitlements and with waste in government,” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer Monday evening.

Asked if House Republicans would approve a deal that excludes Obamacare, Issa said they need to vote for something that deals with entitlements and “the excesses that need to be reined in.

“That’s what sequestration was about, even though it was a bad solution,” Issa said. So I think as long as we’re dealing with entitlements, Obamacare being an entitlement, but there’s a lot of other entitlements and a lot of waste in government that we keep showing, but not dealing with.”

The deal shaping up in the Senate reportedly would fund the government through January 15, raise the nation’s debt limit through Feb. 15, and have House and Senate Budget Committee conferees try to work out their spending differences by the end of the year.

“If that’s the deal, are you ready to go along with it?” Blitzer asked Issa.

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Pentagon Admits Christian Ministry Not a ‘Hate Group,’ Says Label Does Not Reflect Official Doctrine

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Photo Credit: APThe Pentagon has admitted that information used in an Army briefing that labeled the American Family Association (AFA) as a domestic hate group was not acquired from official sources and does not reflect Army doctrine.

Meanwhile, the president of the well-respected Christian ministry says his organization may file a defamation lawsuit against the military.

“We are probably going to be taking legal action,” said Tim Wildmon, president of one of the nation’s most prominent Christian ministries. “The Army has smeared us. They’ve defamed the American Family Association.”

The AFA was listed alongside domestic hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan, Neo-Nazis, the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam during a briefing last week at Camp Shelby in Mississippi.

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Heavy Campaigning For Booker, Lonegan Day Before N.J. Senate Vote (+video)

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Photo Credit: Nick.FisherThe New Jersey U.S. Senate race was in a fight to the finish Tuesday, a day before voters were set to head to the polls in a special election.

As CBS 2’s Christine Sloan reported, Democrat Cory Booker is hitting the Democrat-favoring communities of Belleville, New Brunswick, Hoboken and Newark, where he is mayor.

Republican Steve Lonegan is campaigning Tuesday in Basking Ridge, Flemington, Belvidere, Morristown and Middletown — all places where Republicans usually get the most votes. He’s also stopping in Jersey City.

Lonegan also received the endorsement of former Jersey City Acting Mayor Joe Rokawski. And Lonegan attacked Booker for his performance as Newark mayor.

“Two people were shot to death on the streets of Newark last night. Unemployment in Newark has gone from 8 to 14 percent,” Lonegan said. “Mr. Booker has failed Newark. That’s extreme. See, he’s an extreme failure.”

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Former San Diego Mayor Filner Pleads Guilty To Felony

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Photo Credit: APFormer San Diego Mayor Bob Filner, who resigned from the helm of California’s second-largest city after a string of sexual harassment allegations, pleaded guilty on Tuesday to charges of false imprisonment and battery involving three women, prosecutors said.

A former Democratic congressman who served only a brief mayoral tenure after being elected last year, Filner was charged with felony false imprisonment and two misdemeanor counts of battery, the San Diego Superior Court and state prosecutors said.

“This conduct was not only criminal, it was also an extreme abuse of power,” said state Attorney General Kamala Harris, who filed the complaint against Filner. “This prosecution is about consequence and accountability. No one is above the law.”

Under the terms of a plea agreement, Filner will serve three months of home confinement and will be on probation for three years, the attorney general said in a statement.

Filner resigned in August as part of a settlement with the city over how to handle a lawsuit filed by his former press secretary, Irene McCormack Jackson, who was among at least 18 women who accused the 71-year-old politician of making unwanted sexual advances. She is so far the only one to sue him.

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The Louisiana Heist

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Photo Credit: APOn Saturday, Louisiana’s “EBT” system malfunctioned, causing spending limits on users’ food-stamp cards temporarily to be lifted. In two counties at least, recipients noticed the error, spread the word, and set about trying to check out as much as they could fit into shopping carts. At Walmarts in the towns of Springhill and Mansfield, employees called corporate headquarters to ask what they should do. They were instructed to “keep the registers ringing.” This they did — and with a vengeance.

By the time that proper limits on the cards had been restored a couple of hours later, the shelves had been all but stripped bare. “Just about everything is gone, I’ve never seen it in that condition,” Anthony Fuller, a customer in Mansfield, told the press. Will Lyn, the chief of police in nearby Springhill, agreed, telling the Daily Mail that “it was definitely worse than Black Friday. It was worse than anything we had ever seen in this town. There was no food left on any of the shelves, and no meat left. The grocery part of Walmart was totally decimated.” One man even managed to spend $700.

“I saw people drag out eight to ten grocery carts,” Lynd reported. Those who did not manage to take advantage in time simply abandoned their hauls in the middle of the aisles.

“Contrary to rumors,” CBS proclaimed, “nobody was unruly or arrested and [the police] were mainly there to help prevent shoplifting and theft.” Given the circumstances, “preventing theft” is a rather peculiar way of describing the behavior of officers who stood and watched the incident. Whether or not local authorities had legal cause to arrest the shoppers on the spot, there really should be no doubt that widespread theft took place — or, perhaps, that widespread fraud took place. Neither that the beneficiaries evidently believe that they could get away with it, nor that the victim was the unsympathetically anonymous mass of Louisianan and federal taxpayers alters the plain fact. This was a crime.

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What to Do About America’s Low Sky Workforce

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Photo Credit: National Review Some bad news for America, not on the political front this time, but in what corporate executives call human resources.

It’s from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s report on adult skills, based on 166,000 interviews in 24 economically advanced countries in 2011 and 2012.

The verdict on the United States: “weak in literacy, very poor in numeracy, but only slightly below average in problem-solving in technology-rich environments.”

On literacy, just 12 percent of U.S. adults score at the top two levels, significantly lower than the 22 percent in largely monoethnic and culturally cohesive Japan and Finland. American average scores are below those in our Anglosphere cousins Australia, Canada, England, and Northern Ireland.

One-sixth of Americans score at the bottom two levels, compared with 5 percent in Japan and Finland.

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