Photo Credit: YouTube On Wednesday morning, CNN anchor Carol Costello made a shocking statement on air.
She said that the Obama administration threatens the jobs of reporters who make the president look bad.
During a discussion about the firing of national security official Jofi Joseph, panelist Jason Johnson said, “The Obama administration is very thin-skinned.”
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Photo Credit: Fox News The Justice and State departments are now citing a year-old FBI investigation and a future criminal prosecution to block access to survivors of last year’s Benghazi terror attack.
In an Oct. 28 letter to Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.,the State Department’s Assistant Secretary for Legislative Affairs, Julia Frifield, refers to “significant risks” and “serious concerns about having the survivors of the attack submit to additional interviews.”
Graham has been asking since last year for the FBI’s transcripts of interviews with State Department and CIA survivors who were evacuated to Germany after the Sep.11 attack on the U.S. consulate.
He and other Republicans believe the transcripts will show the survivors told the FBI it was a terrorist attack and made no mention of a video or anti-U.S. demonstration at the consulate.
This intelligence was likely available to the president, his national security team and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, who five days after the assault blamed it on an anti-U.S. demonstration and inflammatory video.
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Photo Credit: Fox News Obamacare was sold to credulous “Progressives” on the grounds that it was the way to achieve universal health insurance coverage for all Americans. But the Congressional Budget Office scored the legislation as leaving 30 million uninsured 10 years after full implementation! That is more than half the nation’s uninsured pre-Obamacare.
But just one month after Obamacare went into effect, the number of uninsured Americans has gone up rather than down. Just last week, Florida Blue announced it was issuing termination notices for 300,000 policies, about 80 percent of its individual policies in the state. Kaiser Permanente in California cancelled 160,000 policies, about half of its individual policies in the state. Insurer Highmark in Pittsburgh dropped 20 percent of its individual policies. In Philadelphia, Independence Blue Cross nixed 45% of its individual policies. CareFirst Blue Cross Blue Shield cancelled 76,000 individual plans in Virginia, Maryland and Washington, DC, over 40 percent of its individual policies in those states.
But didn’t President Obama tell us that if you liked your health plan, you could keep it? Current policies were supposed to be “grandfathered” in under Obamacare. But the HHS regulations implementing that provision are so restrictive that few current policies qualify under it. The Weekly Standard estimates that as a result 16 million current individual policies, in a nationwide market of 19 million, would be cancelled because they do not meet the new regulatory requirements of Obamacare. That is 85 percent of the individual health insurance market, which involves health coverage individuals buy outside of employer provided insurance.
This is just the beginning, however, of the Obamacare collapse in health insurance coverage. CBO estimates that as many as 20 million will lose their employer provided health insurance under Obamacare. Former CBO Director Douglas-Holtz-Eakin estimated in a study for the American Action Forum that the number will be 40 million.
The individual and employer mandates were supposed to force most Americans to buy the health insurance that the Obama Administration specifies they must buy. But in most cases, the penalty for failing to comply is only a small fraction of the cost of the required health insurance. Moreover, employers can give their workers a raise now by dropping costly Obamacare coverage, and most workers can get Obamacare subsidies on the Exchanges as well, which will further induce employers to drop their coverage. Workers on their own can evade the individual mandate, and rely on Obamacare’s guaranteed issue and community rating regulatory requirements to buy coverage at standard prices if they get sick with costly illnesses.
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Photo Credit: Brian Snyder, ReutersEnrollment in health insurance plans on the troubled Obamacare website was very small in the first couple of days of operation, with just 248 Americans signing up, according to documents released on Thursday by a U.S. House of Representatives committee.
The Obama administration has said it cannot provide enrollment figures from HealthCare.gov because it doesn’t have the numbers. The federal website, where residents of 36 states can buy new healthcare plans under President Barack Obama’s law, was launched on October 1.
“We do not have any reliable data around enrollment, which is why we haven’t given it to date,” Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told lawmakers on Wednesday.
But the documents, which are labeled “war room” notes and appear to be summaries of issues with the problematic website beginning on October 2, indicate a mere six enrollments had occurred by that morning – the day after the website was launched and almost immediately crashed.
“High capacity on the website, direct enrollment not working,” the October 2 notes said. By later that day, “approximately 100” enrollments had taken place.
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Photo Credit: AP/Eric GayA federal appeals court issued a ruling Thursday reinstating most of Texas’ controversial new abortions restrictions, just three days after a federal judge ruled they were unconstitutional.
A panel of judges at the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans said the law requiring doctors to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital can take effect while a lawsuit challenging the restrictions moves forward. The panel issued the ruling after District Judge Lee Yeakel said the provision serves no medical purpose.
The panel’s decision means as least 12 clinics won’t be able to perform the procedure starting as soon as Friday. In its 20-page ruling, it acknowledged that the provision “may increase the cost of accessing an abortion provider and decrease the number of physicians available to perform abortions.”
However, the panel said that the U.S. Supreme Court has held that having “the incidental effect of making it more difficult or more expensive to procure an abortion cannot be enough to invalidate” a law that serves a valid purpose, “one not designed to strike at the right itself.”
The panel left in place a portion of Yeakel’s order that prevents the state from enforcing the U.S. Food and Drug Administration protocol for abortion-inducing drugs in cases where the woman is between 50 and 63 days into her pregnancy. Doctors testifying before the court had said such women would be harmed if the protocol were enforced.
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Photo Credit: APAn A-Team of tech experts is being brought in to help the Obama administration iron out the cyber wrinkles associated with the rocky roll out of the Affordable Care Act.
Google, Red Hat and Oracle are loaning the government dozens of their top computer engineers, programmers and site developers to help the Obama administration fix the problem-plagued insurance exchange website.
“As part of the ‘Tech Surge,’ we’ve added key personnel from the government and private sector, including expert engineers and technology managers,” Julie Bataille, a spokeswoman for Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, said.
Among those rushing to the rescue is Michael Dickerson, a site reliability engineer from Google, and Greg Gershman, the innovation director for smartphone application maker Mobomo.
“Michael is onsite working with QSSI, the general contractor, leveraging his experience stabilizing large, high throughput applications to improve HealthCare.gov’s reliability and performance,” Bataille said.
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Photo Credit: Susan Walsh/APSome Senate Democrats resumed calls for the so-called “nuclear option” Thursday after Senate Republicans blocked two presidential nominees.
Republicans have blocked the nomination of Democratic Rep. Mel Watt to lead the Federal Housing Finance Agency and the nomination of Patricia Millett to the U.S. Appeals Court for the Washington, D.C. Circuit by voting against cloture, effectively filibustering the nominations.
If invoked, the nuclear option would allow Democrats to push through presidential nominations without any support from Senate Republicans.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell struck a deal in January to avert the nuclear option. In July, the two again negotiated on a “new normal,” in Reid’s words, to streamline the process for confirming presidential nominees. The deal, Reid said at the time, was that “Qualified executive nominees must not be blocked on a procedural supermajority vote.” An exception was made for “extraordinary circumstances.”
But after the Watt and Millett votes, the nuclear option is back on the table, some Democrats have declared.
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Photo Credit: APAs Congress takes a closer look at Internet privacy with this week’s Federal Trade Commission oversight hearing in the House, conservatives have a unique opportunity.
Privacy used to be a dirty word among many conservatives because the liberal Warren Court of the 1960s used concepts such as “penumbras” – words not expressly found in the Constitution — to overturn state laws that protected traditional moral precepts or valid law enforcement.
In recent years, however, beginning with the passage of the USA Patriot Act during the George W. Bush years, but expanded seemingly without limit under Barack Obama, conservatives have awakened to the threat of the massive surveillance state.
Some of the leading Republican presidential prospects are taking a hatchet to the Obama administration over the scandal. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has introduced a bill to rein in the National Security Agency’s sweeping powers, and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) recently knocked President Obama for allowing an “unprecedented and intrusive surveillance system” to take hold, eroding Americans’ privacy rights.
House conservatives have joined the fight, too. An amendment to shut down the NSA’s sweeping Internet and phone data collection programs sponsored by Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) was narrowly defeated after leadership stepped in to vote it down. And just recently, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R.-Tenn.), a Tea Party favorite, resumed a series of briefings focused on the growing threats to privacy and the collection of personal data.
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Photo Credit: National Review In light of a recent report, Senator Rand Paul (R., Ky.) fears the National Security Agency may be spying on President Barack Obama. “They could well be spying on the president, for all I know,” Paul says, in an interview with National Review Online. “He has a cell phone, and, in fact, my guess is that they have collected data on the president’s phone.”
Paul also believes the federal government may be tracking Pope Francis. “The most important question we need to ask the NSA is, ‘Are you telling us you’re collecting no data on the pope?’ And, ‘Did you collect any information on him when he was the archbishop, while staying in a certain residence in Rome at the time of the election?’ I don’t think they’re telling the truth.”
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Photo Credit: ThinkstockWhere are Americans moving, and why? Timothy Noah, writing in the Washington Monthly, professes to be puzzled. He points out that people have been moving out of states with high per capita incomes — Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, Maryland — to states with lower income levels.
“Why are Americans by and large moving away from economic opportunity rather than toward it?” he asks.
Actually, it’s not puzzling at all. The movement from high-tax, high-housing-cost states to low-tax, low-housing-cost states has been going on for more than 40 years, as I note in my new book Shaping Our Nation: How Surges of Migration Transformed America and Its Politics.
Between 1970 and 2010 the population of New York state increased from 18 million to 19 million. In that same period, the population of Texas increased from 11 million to 25 million.
The picture is even starker if you look at major metro areas. The New York metropolitan area, including counties in New Jersey and Connecticut, increased from 17.8 million in 1970 to 19.2 million in 2010 — up 8 percent. During that time the nation grew 52 percent.
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