Liberals: Fine, Obamacare is Forcing People Off of Their Plans, and That's Great News

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Photo Credit: TownHallPresident Obama and some of his most ardent media acolytes are insistent. No matter what you may have heard, Obamacare ‘is working’ in the ‘real world.’ That’s the new mantra. Learn it, love it, etc. The Lean Forward network, unsurprisingly, has served as the vanguard of this propaganda push. Their working theory seems to be that if you repeat an assertion often enough to the same tiny audience, you can wish-cast your dreams into reality:

The American people disagree, based on their own personal experiences with the law — via Gallup:

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Karl Rove Is Ruining the GOP

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Photo Credit: Politico Karl Rove recently tried to advise Republicans on how the party can more effectively take back the Senate in November. He made two main suggestions.

One was that Republican candidates must “make the case for electing someone new who will be a check and balance in the Senate on Mr. Obama and his agenda, rather than returning a Democratic loyalist who toes his line.” Rove’s second suggestion was that the party should “offer a positive, optimistic conservative agenda to make independents who disapprove of Mr. Obama comfortable voting Republican.”

Rove is right on both counts, especially about offering a positive and optimistic conservative agenda.

But there’s one big problem. This advice is coming from Karl Rove.

Rove has never cared about conservatism and has spent his entire career opposing any Republican who might be successful in promoting or implementing a conservative agenda.

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Justice Kennedy Blocks Gay Marriage Ruling in Idaho, Nevada

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Photo Credit: Chip Somodevilla / Getty Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy on Wednesday temporarily blocked an appeals court ruling that declared gay marriage legal in Idaho and Nevada.

Kennedy’s order came a little more than an hour after Idaho filed an emergency request for an immediate stay and about 10 minutes before the state said that state and county officials would otherwise have been required to begin issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

The order also applies to Nevada, where marriage licenses to same-sex couples were going to start to be issued later Wednesday.

The delay could last just a few days. Kennedy’s order requested a response from the plaintiffs involved in Idaho’s gay marriage lawsuit by the end of day Thursday.

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Embattled House Democrats Turn Against Nancy Pelosi

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Photo Credit: Win McNamee / GettyHouse Republicans have surprising new company in attacking Nancy Pelosi: her fellow House Democrats.

Three Democrats running in GOP-leaning House districts have used late-stage television ads in a bid to distance themselves from the liberal leader of Democrats’ House caucus—the same caucus they’re fighting to join in 2015.

“Here’s what I believe: Congress is broken,” says Gwen Graham, one of the Democratic Party’s top recruits, in a recent TV ad as a photo of Pelosi and House Speaker John Boehner flashes on the screen. “Both parties—Republican and Democrat—are to blame. And both need new leaders in Washington.”

In Georgia, Rep. John Barrow, one of five Democrats to vote against Pelosi as party leader at the start of the 113th Congress in 2013, uses that fact as one of the key reasons to reelect him. “I voted against Nancy Pelosi as speaker,” Barrow brags to Georgians in a recent television ad.

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Maryland Sheriff Frustrated Illegals He Arrested for Crimes Freed by Feds

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Photo Credit: Manuel Balce CenetaFrederick County Sheriff Chuck Jenkins is doing his best to try to get illegal immigrants who commit crimes off the streets of his Maryland community, but the Obama administration and immigrant rights groups are foiling him.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has released 25 of the 98 illegal immigrants county deputies arrested and tried to process so far this year through the federal government’s 287(g) program. In 2008, the final year of the Bush administration, ICE only released two of 100 illegal immigrants the county turned over.

“Right now there’s lack of enforcement of immigration laws. But if we run this program the right way, we can do what we can to try to enforce them and get these criminals off our streets,” Mr. Jenkins told The Washington Times. “In my heart, I truly believe we’re doing the right thing.”

The 287(g) program was established to let state and local police play a role in immigration enforcement. Deputies and officers are trained to interview potential suspects in jail and run their names through ICE’s databases to discover if they’re in the country legally. If someone is found to be in the country illegally, the county then turns them over to ICE, which can initiate removal proceedings or release them based on agents’ discretion, considering issues such as an immigrant’s health and type of crime committed.

Sheriff Jenkins signed up for the 287(g) program six years ago, figuring it was a common-sense collaboration with ICE to help rid the community of the illegal aliens who were fueling local gang violence.

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In This Election, Obama’s Party Benches Him

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Photo Credit: Doug Mills / The New York TimesWhen he soared to victory by almost 10 million votes in 2008, President Obama won in states like Virginia that Democratic candidates had not captured since 1964. He was trumpeted as a transformational leader who remade American politics by creating a new electoral map and a diverse voter coalition to shape the Democratic Party for the 21st century.

But for now he has been reduced to something else: an isolated political figure who is viewed as a liability to Democrats in the very states where voters by the thousands had once stood to cheer him.

When Mr. Obama entered the campaign fray last week, he did so by returning to the unconditional embrace of his own hometown, in a blue state where the incumbent Democratic senator faces scant opposition and the Democratic governor is running in part on his support for the Affordable Care Act. On Tuesday, the president attended private fund-raisers in Manhattan, to be followed by similar events in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Arkansas it is not.

As November nears, Mr. Obama and his loyalists are being forced to reconcile that it is not only Democrats in conservative-leaning states, like Senator Mark Pryor of Arkansas, who are avoiding him. The president who became the first Democrat since Franklin D. Roosevelt to twice win a majority of the vote is flying in politically restricted airspace.

Democratic senators in Colorado, North Carolina and Virginia — states that were pivotal to his success and whose demographics reflect his winning coalition of young, minority and female voters — do not want him. Nor does his party’s Senate nominee in Iowa, where Mr. Obama won twice and whose youth-filled 2008 Democratic caucuses vaulted him toward the nomination.

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Navy Sailors Distrust Commanders, Fear Crippling Political Correctness

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Photo Credit: US NavyNavy sailors harbor “widespread mistrust” in the admirals who command them, complaining of poor leadership and a disciplinary environment that tolerates absolutely no mistakes, says a survey of the fleet.

The disgruntlement runs deepest in the officer corps, where scores of commanders have been relieved of duty in recent years.

“Senior leadership should stop proactively highlighting the reliefs for cause of commanding officers, command master chiefs, and other senior enlisted advisors,” said the report “2014 Navy Retention Study.” “What was originally intended to demonstrate accountability to the public has, instead, resulted in a significant breach of trust with our sailors and resulting in an almost ‘reality TV’ mentality.”

The independent survey was released amid complaints by some aviators about excessive political correctness as the military seeks to stamp out sexual harassment and misconduct in an increasingly gender-integrated Navy.

“Most troubling is the perception sailors hold of senior leadership,” the report says under the heading “Widespread Distrust of Senior Leadership.”

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U.S. Troops in Africa May Come in Contact with Ebola Patients

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By AFP.

US troops deployed to West Africa to fight the Ebola outbreak could stay up to a year, depending on how quickly the virus can be contained, a top general said Tuesday.

The head of the US military’s Africa Command, General David Rodriguez, also rejected criticism that the American response to the crisis has been too slow, saying the troop deployment had to be designed to take into account Liberia’s limited infrastructure.

About 350 US troops have arrived in Liberia and Senegal so far as part of a 3,200-strong force due to help with logistical support, training for health workers and mobile test labs.

Asked how long American troops would remain in the region, Rodriguez told reporters: “I’m sure it’ll be about a year … at this point, but that’s just a guess.”

He said that “we’ll have to play that by ear” and see how fast transmission rates decline.

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US military personnel on Ebola mission to handle blood samples

By Justin Fishel.

The U.S. military mission to combat Ebola in West Africa is facing questions about the serious health risks American troops will encounter in heading to the epicenter of the deadly outbreak.

According to officials, a small group of trained military medical technicians on the ground will not be required to make direct contact with patients infected with the Ebola virus. However, they will have to handle infected blood samples, which Pentagon officials acknowledged Tuesday could be just as dangerous, if not more.

Already, three mobile-testing labs, staffed by three or four technicians each, have been deployed in Liberia as part of Operation United Assistance, the U.S. military’s effort to combat the Ebola virus. Four more labs have been requested.

Pentagon officials say the servicemembers on these small teams are the only individuals who will be intentionally handling any raw material that could be infected.

Gen. David Rodriguez, the head of U.S. Africa Command, told Pentagon reporters on Tuesday that these teams are trained to take all the necessary precautions.

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Ebola outbreak: Spread of deadly disease across Europe is ‘unavoidable’, warns WHO chief

By James Rush.

The spread of Ebola across Europe is “quite unavoidable”, the World Health Organisation has warned as four people were in hospital after a Spanish nurse became the first person known to have contracted the virus outside Africa.

WHO European director Zsuzsanna Jakab has said while more cases will spread in Europe, the continent should be well prepared to control the disease.

Health officials in Spain today said four people – the nurse, her husband and two others – were being monitored in hospital in a bid to stem the spread of the virus.

“Such imported cases and similar events as have happened in Spain will happen also in the future, most likely,” Ms Jakab told Reuters.

“It is quite unavoidable … that such incidents will happen in the future because of the extensive travel both from Europe to the affected countries and the other way around,” she said.

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Commission Says Christian Business Owners Should Leave Religion at Home

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Photo Credit: TownHallThe Human Rights Commission in Lexington, Kentucky has a chilling message for Christian business owners who refuse service to LGBT organizations: leave your religion at home.

“It would be safe to do so, yes,” Executive Director Raymond Sexton told me. “Or in this case you can find yourself two years down the road and you’re still involved in a legal battle because you did not do so.”

On Tuesday, a Lexington Human Rights Commission hearing examiner issued a recommended ruling that the owner of a T-shirt company violated a local ordinance against sexual-orientation discrimination. You can read the ruling by clicking here.

“It was a landmark decision,” Sexton said. “This is a very important ruling for us.”

The examiner concluded that Blaine Adamson of Hands On Originals broke the law in 2012 by declining to print shirts promoting the Lexington Pride Festival. The Gay and Lesbian Services Organization subsequently filed a complaint.

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Wal-Mart Cuts Health Benefits for 30,000 Part-Time Workers

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Photo Credit: Edgard Garrido / Reuters / LandovWal-Mart Stores Inc. plans to eliminate health insurance coverage for some of its part-time U.S. employees in a move aimed at controlling rising health care costs of the nation’s largest private employer.

Starting Jan. 1, Wal-Mart told The Associated Press that it will no longer offer health insurance to employees who work less than an average of 30 hours a week. The move, which would affect 30,000 employees, follows similar decisions by Target, Home Depot and others to eliminate health insurance benefits for part-time employees.

“We had to make some tough decisions,” Sally Wellborn, Wal-Mart’s senior vice president of benefits, told The Associated Press.

Wellborn says the company will use a third-party organization to help part-time workers find insurance alternatives: “We are trying to balance the needs of (workers) as well as the costs of (workers) as well as the cost to Wal-Mart.”

The announcement comes after Wal-Mart said far more U.S. employees and their families are enrolling in its health care plans than it had expected following rollout of the Affordable Care Act. Wal-Mart, which employs about 1.4 million full- and part-time U.S. workers, says about 1.2 million Wal-Mart workers and family members combined now participate in its health care plan.

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