Rhetoric vs. Reality on Obamacare

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Photo Credit: AFP / Nicholas KAMM

Photo Credit: AFP / Nicholas KAMM

President Barack Obama once again came out swinging in defense of his signature healthcare law.

Countless times since the rollout, and again last week, he proclaimed that Obamacare is working, called on Democrats to defend it, and chastised conservatives for their opposition that he believes is entirely political. But people should look beyond Obama’s rhetoric and consider reality – Obamacare is bad medicine for America.

The president’s definition of success is a curious one. More than six million cancelled plans, lost doctors, and higher costs aside, Obama is in essence celebrating the expansion of the welfare state. In order to get more people insured, it was not necessary to raise taxes, restrict choice, drive the debt up to $27 trillion, and make millions more people dependent on the government.

But that is precisely what Obamacare is doing. And President Obama insists that it is working as he intended.

But even beyond the negative consequences on the nation’s well-being, claiming victory from a practical sense is a stretch, to say the least. Obama “spiked the football” as he touted seven million enrollees, but there is still no clear estimate of how many of those seven million were previously uninsured and have actually paid a premium signifying they are covered. The president’s vague claim that “a sizeable part of the U.S. population” is enjoying health insurance for the first time remains completely unquantifiable.

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WATCH: Cruz Calls on Kerry to Resign After ‘Apartheid’ Remark

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Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore

Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore

Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) demanded on the Senate floor Monday that Secretary of State John Kerry resign from his post following highly controversial remarks about the state of Israel.

Kerry came under fire from lawmakers and a variety of pro-Israel organizations after he told world leaders in a closed door meeting that Israel risks becoming “an apartheid state” if it fails to reach peace with the Palestinians.

Israel cut off peace talks late last week after Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas formed a unity government with the terror group Hamas, which announced that it would not renounce violence or recognize Israel’s right to exist.

Cruz said in a speech on the Senate floor that Kerry should immediately offer his resignation to President Barack Obama.

“John Kerry should offer President Obama his resignation and the president should accept it,” Cruz said.

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Photo Credit: Brendan Smialowski / Reuters

Photo Credit: Brendan Smialowski / Reuters

Kerry Warns Israel Could Become ‘An Apartheid State’

By Josh Rogin.

If there’s no two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict soon, Israel risks becoming “an apartheid state,” Secretary of State John Kerry told a room of influential world leaders in a closed-door meeting Friday.

Senior American officials have rarely, if ever, used the term “apartheid” in reference to Israel, and President Obama has previously rejected the idea that the word should apply to the Jewish state. Kerry’s use of the loaded term is already rankling Jewish leaders in America—and it could attract unwanted attention in Israel, as well.

It wasn’t the only controversial comment on the Middle East that Kerry made during his remarks to the Trilateral Commission, a recording of which was obtained by The Daily Beast. Kerry also repeated his warning that a failure of Middle East peace talks could lead to a resumption of Palestinian violence against Israeli citizens. He suggested that a change in either the Israeli or Palestinian leadership could make achieving a peace deal more feasible. He lashed out against Israeli settlement-building. And Kerry said that both Israeli and Palestinian leaders share the blame for the current impasse in the talks.

Kerry also said that at some point, he might unveil his own peace deal and tell both sides to “take it or leave it.”

“A two-state solution will be clearly underscored as the only real alternative. Because a unitary state winds up either being an apartheid state with second-class citizens—or it ends up being a state that destroys the capacity of Israel to be a Jewish state,” Kerry told the group of senior officials and experts from the U.S., Western Europe, Russia, and Japan. “Once you put that frame in your mind, that reality, which is the bottom line, you understand how imperative it is to get to the two-state solution, which both leaders, even yesterday, said they remain deeply committed to.”

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Judge OKs Decision to Sell Widow’s Home Over $6.30 Debt

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Photo Credit: Eric Allix Rogers

Photo Credit: Eric Allix Rogers

A widow was given ample notice before her $280,000 house was sold at a tax auction three years ago over $6.30 in unpaid interest, a Pennsylvania judge has ruled.

The decision last week turned down Eileen Battisti’s request to reverse the September 2011 sale of her home outside Aliquippa in western Pennsylvania.

“I paid everything, and didn’t know about the $6.30,” Battisti said. “For the house to be sold just because of $6.30 is crazy.”

Battisti, who still lives in the house, said Monday that she plans to appeal to Commonwealth Court. That court earlier ordered an evidentiary hearing, which led to last week’s ruling.

Beaver County Common Pleas Judge Gus Kwidis wrote that the county tax claim bureau complied with notification requirements in state law before the auction. She had previously owed other taxes, but at the time of the sale she owed just $235, including other interest and fees.

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BLS: In 20% of American Families, No One Works

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Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons photo

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons photo

In 20 percent of American families in 2013, according to new data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), not one member of the family worked.

A family, as defined by the BLS, is a group of two or more people who live together and who are related by birth, adoption or marriage. In 2013, there were 80,445,000 families in the United States and in 16,127,000—or 20 percent–no one had a job.

The BLS designates a person as “employed” if “during the survey reference week” they “(a) did any work at all as paid employees; (b) worked in their own business, profession, or on their own farm; (c) or worked 15 hours or more as unpaid workers in an enterprise operated by a member of the family.”

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Big Chill: Feds Want to Scour Net, Media for ‘Hate Speech’

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Photo Credit: WND

Photo Credit: WND

If two Democratic lawmakers have their way, Barack Obama’s Justice Department will submit a report for action against any Internet sites, broadcast, cable television or radio shows determined to be advocating or encouraging “violent acts.”

This according to the text of a new bill from Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y.

The Hate Crime Reporting Act of 2014 “would create an updated comprehensive report examining the role of the Internet and other telecommunications in encouraging hate crimes based on gender, race, religion, ethnicity, or sexual orientation and create recommendations to address such crimes,” stated a news release from Markey’s office.

The one-page bill, reviewed by WND, calls for the Justice Department and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights to “analyze information on the use of telecommunications, including the Internet, broadcast television and radio, cable television, public access television, commercial mobile services, and other electronic media, to advocate and encourage violent acts and the commission of crimes of hate.”

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Study: 1 in 25 Death Cases Likely Innocent

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Photo Credit: Ken Piorkowski / Creative Commons

Photo Credit: Ken Piorkowski / Creative Commons

Science and law have led to the exoneration of hundreds of criminal defendants in recent decades, but big questions remain: How many other innocent defendants are locked up? How many are wrongly executed?

About one in 25 people imprisoned under a death sentence is likely innocent, according to a new statistical study appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And that means it is all but certain that at least several of the 1,320 defendants executed since 1977 were innocent, the study says.

From 1973 to 2004, 1.6 percent of those sentenced to death in the U.S. — 138 prisoners — were exonerated and released because of innocence.

But the great majority of innocent people who are sentenced to death are never identified and freed, says professor Samuel Gross of the University of Michigan Law School, the study’s lead author.

The difficulty in identifying innocent inmates stems from the fact that more than 60 percent of prisoners in death penalty cases ultimately are removed from death row and resentenced to life imprisonment. Once that happens, their cases no longer receive the exhaustive reviews that the legal system provides for those on death row.

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Obama’s Fading Dream of a Foreign Policy Legacy

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Photo Credit: Getty Images

Photo Credit: Getty Images

President Barack Obama envisioned building a foreign-policy legacy in his second term: a nuclear deal with sanction-strapped Iran, an end to U.S. involvement in conflicts overseas, and a successful pivot to Asia, including a trans-Pacific trade pact.

Fifteen months after his second inaugural, those goals look more problematic, and Syria’s Bashar Assad and Russia’s Vladimir Putin have created new crises. Dashed foreign-policy dreams aren’t unique to this second-term president: Dwight D. Eisenhower had to contend with the downing of a spy plane by the Soviet Union, the Iran-contra scandal bedeviled Ronald Reagan, and the Iraq War turned into a nightmare in George W. Bush’s second term.

Obama’s woes are complicated by a sense — denied by the White House — of American disengagement. “The perception of American withdrawal is palpable,” says Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser to George W. Bush.

“The Europeans and the Gulf states think that we’re leaving,” says Bill Cohen, who served as defense secretary under President Bill Clinton. “The Asian countries think we’re not coming.”

Moreover, the president is caught in a contradictory, and unfair, squeeze. On issues such as Syria and Russia, he’s depicted as insufficiently aggressive or tough. At the same time, the American public, turned off by the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, wants no part of more aggressive foreign entanglements. Even some Republicans are taking cues from Senator Rand Paul’s quasi-isolationists stance.

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Tornadoes kill 16 in Arkansas, 1 in Oklahoma

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Photo Credit: AP / The Joplin Globe, Roger Nomer

Photo Credit: AP / The Joplin Globe, Roger Nomer

Emergency officials were searching for survivors Monday in the debris left by a powerful tornado that carved an 80-mile path of destruction through suburban Little Rock, killing at least 16 people.

The tornado that slammed into Vilonia, about 10 miles west of the state capital, on Sunday evening grew to about half a mile wide and was among a rash of tornadoes and heavy storms that rumbled across the center and south of the country overnight. The National Weather Service warned that more tornadoes, damaging winds and very large hail would strike in parts of Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee and Louisiana on Monday.

“We’ve got a powerful storm system affecting the eastern two-thirds of the United States over the next few days,” said Russell Schneider, director of the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla.

Brandon Morris, spokesman for the Arkansas Department of Emergency Management, said crews were sifting through the rubble in the hope of uncovering survivors and to assess the full extent of the destruction.

“Right now, the main focus is life safety,” Morris said. “We’re trying to make sure everyone is accounted for.”

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One-Third of Americans Haven’t Visited Dentist in Past Year

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About one in three U.S. adults say they did not visit the dentist at some point in the past 12 months. The 64.7% in 2013 who said they did visit the dentist at least once in the previous year is essentially unchanged from the rate found in 2008. Women are more likely than men to report visiting the dentist annually.

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These findings are based on interviews with 178,072 American adults conducted during 2013 and with 354,645 adults conducted during 2008 as part of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index. Respondents were asked whether they had visited the dentist in the previous 12 months. Results for all years between 2008 and 2013 are similar.

The American Dental Association recommends that adults develop a plan for dental visits with their dentist, but say even those at low risk of oral disease benefit from at least annual cleanings. Thus, one in three American adults do not meet this minimum level of dental care.

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Emails Reportedly Show Close Coordination Between CNN Team, Emanuel on ‘Chicagoland’

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

The Chicago Tribune reviewed more than 700 emails pertaining to the making and filming of “Chicagoland,” an eight-part series which finished airing last week.

Though coordination can be expected in any documentary series, the emails reportedly show the Emanuel administration playing an active role in the narrative — and producers encouraging them to play ball.

One email showed executive producer Marc Levin appealing to the mayor’s office last May to be “on the phone in his SUV, in city hall with key advisers and his kitchen cabinet and meeting with CPS head BBB (Barbara Byrd-Bennett) and with CPD (Superintendent Garry) McCarthy.”

The first episode of the series showed several such scenes.

In a separate exchange, the daughter of a PR executive who helped arrange the CNN/Emanuel project reportedly emailed the mayor’s press secretary asking for “the list of story/interview ideas that you and your team were going to put together” for the producers.

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