Early Elections Prove Democrats Have No Answer to Failed Obamacare

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Photo Credit: Alex Wong/Getty ImagesWhat are Democrats going to say about ObamaCare? It seems a little late to be asking that about a law passed four years ago this month, but that’s the central question of the midterm contests now underway.

The tardy talking points are in part a result of a strategy to delay the unpopular parts of the law until after President Obama had been safely re-elected. But it also reflects a major miscalculation among Democrats on the staying power of the law as an issue.

Conservatives and liberals alike are right in saying the election is about more than just ObamaCare. But the troubled law is the major motif of the election, much in the same way that 2006 wasn’t only about the Iraq war, but the conflict was the backdrop for the rest of the conversation.

Representative-elect David Jolly, R-Fla., who will be sworn in this afternoon, played it right. He talked about ObamaCare, but mostly as evidence that the left’s approach to governance was not working. Badly outspent and dealing with intra-party divisions, Jolly won in a district that hadn’t gone for a Republican presidential candidate since 1988. He did it by using ObamaCare to prove his point, not as the point itself.

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Analysis: Lois Lerner Can Be Held in Contempt for Her Failure to Testify

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While Lois Lerner’s reassertion of the Fifth Amendment, as well as the confrontation between Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R–Calif.) and Rep. Elijah Cummings (D–Md.), soaked up all of the media coverage of the IRS scandal last week, one interesting news item did not get much attention: the revelation by Lerner’s attorney, William Taylor III, that Lerner had given “a lengthy interview to Justice Department prosecutors within the last six months.” Even more surprising was Taylor’s admission that Lerner gave DOJ her testimony without getting any immunity from prosecutors.

If that is true, the former IRS official’s reassertion of the privilege against self-incrimination at the March 5 hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is problematic. While the prevailing rule in most federal courts is that a waiver of the Fifth Amendment privilege at one proceeding does not carry through to another proceeding, that is not the rule in the District of Columbia.

In Ellis v. U.S. (1969), the D.C. Court of Appeals specifically refused to adopt that rule, saying it was “unsound.” As the court held, “once a witness has voluntarily spoken out, we do not see how his protected interest is jeopardized by testifying in a subsequent proceeding, provided he is not required to disclose matters of substance which are unknown to the Government.” Under those circumstances, the court held, a person can reassert the privilege only if there is a “real danger of further criminalization.”

Ellis involved a defendant who voluntarily testified before a grand jury but then refused to testify at trial, asserting his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. Similarly, if Lerner—without receiving a grant of immunity—voluntarily spoke to Justice Department prosecutors and/or FBI agents involved in investigating IRS targeting of conservative groups, she cannot now invoke the privilege to avoid answering congressional questions that would require her to give the same information she has already provided to criminal investigators.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Taylor said he allowed his client to talk to DOJ because he had “every confidence” that prosecutors are fair-minded and haven’t prejudged the facts. In contrast, Taylor claimed that GOP committee members only want to “vilify” Lerner. But as any competent criminal defense lawyer can attest, you can’t assert the Fifth Amendment to avoid being “vilified”; you can assert it in a congressional setting only to prevent your hearing testimony being used against you in a criminal prosecution by the government. And in the D.C. Circuit, unlike every other circuit, you cannot assert the Fifth Amendment to avoid giving the same testimony that you have already provided to the government.

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McConnell and Begich Rank in the Top Ten Receivers of Lobbyists’ Money; See the Others

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Photo Credit: Open SecretsIt seems a lobbyist’s work is never done.

You have to know policy, wrangle with legislative language, persuade important people of the rightness of your cause, market yourself to clients. And then, for many on K Street, there’s another key part of the job: pulling out your checkbook. Federal lobbyists are often campaign contributors, too — sometimes offering, sometimes responding to not-so-subtle requests.

And the sums can be large. In fact, the 25 lobbyists who have given the most to political campaigns in the first half of the 2014 cycle have combined to give a total of $1.85 million. Whether they give strategically or out of partisan passion depends on the donor, but there’s little doubt that their generosity can play a role in wedging doors open in congressional office buildings.

Or, as sixth-ranking lobbyist-donor Ben Barnes put it, “I think anyone could be sanctimonious and say they’re donating for the love of their country, but how you make a living has something to do with it.” Barnes, whose clients include Texas A&M University, Texas Gulf Energy and Huntsman Corp., has long been a fixture of Democratic politics in Texas, and is a top bundler for congressional campaigns. So far in this cycle, he has given out about $79,000.

Lobbyists rank 13th among all interest groups in contributions so far in the 2014 campaigns, a jump from 22nd at the end of the 2012 cycle. Individual lobbyists contributed far more than lobbying firms’ PACs — 22 times as much.

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Wayne Allyn Root: Why Barack Obama’s Approval Rating Approaches Zero

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Photo Credit: TownHall Have you seen Obama’s poll numbers? They are among the lowest in history. As of last week, Obama’s approval rating is at 38%. That’s just barely above Richard Nixon. But that’s not the big story here.

Keep in mind that Obama has the support of about 35% to 40% of the population that will NEVER abandon him, no matter what he does, no matter how bad the jobs numbers look, no matter how low the economy goes, no matter how much scandal and corruption is exposed, no matter how strong the facts are against him. Nothing will ever change their minds. These are the “low information voters” of the Democratic Party.

In many cases they love Obama because of the color of his skin- and nothing else. They will never abandon a black President.

Even though black unemployment is at record levels. Even though black youth unemployment is at record levels. Even though black poverty is at record levels.

Even though Obama’s exact policies have been in place for over 50 years in Detroit, a majority black city run by black Democrat politicians…and the black population has been devastated, destroyed, and discarded. Left for dead in an abandoned, bankrupt city with very few street lights operating and the police leaving residents in many areas to fend for themselves.

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Provocative Weakness and Phony Promises

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Photo Credit: National Review Sixty-nine years after the American president traveled to the Crimean peninsula to capitulate to a Russian strongman, Barack Obama’s weakness is pushing the United States to another generational conflict with Moscow.

In exchange for some phony promises of future, multilateral cooperation, Franklin Roosevelt in 1945 sated Joseph Stalin’s appetite to expand the population of subjugates under Moscow’s thumb. Eastern European innocents would pay for that mistake in the cold, dark shadow of totalitarianism for nearly half a century. And Americans paid for it with a multibillion-dollar cold war that strained our budgets, dragged our economy, and posed an ever-present threat to the national psyche.

Roosevelt’s failure was to believe a land-grabber could be coaxed, instead of confronted, into submission. Of Stalin, he said, “I think that if I give him everything that I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work for a world of democracy and peace.” Sound familiar? President Obama’s performance in the current Crimean crisis bears all the marks of that same naïveté.

Obama seems to believe or, at a minimum, to hold out hope that multilateral shame can make a tyrant blush. Roosevelt, similarly, conceded Russian domination of Eastern Europe in exchange for Stalin’s agreement to become a member of the United Nations, where, Roosevelt presumably thought, Stalin would sit around the international family table and play nice.

Since Russian troops began massing on the border of Crimea, and then surrounding Ukrainian military assets, President Obama has couched his response only in terms of what the United States is doing to consult its allies. This leader of the free world, when put under pressure that only his office can address, resorts to speaking about process instead of principle. And as is ever the case, this president confuses talking with doing, and consultation with commitment.

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The Inevitability of Obamacare for Illegal Aliens

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Photo Credit: Michelle MalkinYou knew it was coming. I knew it was coming. When government expands entitlements, illegal aliens always end up with a piece of the pie. Obamacare promoters relented to GOP pressure to include an illegal alien ban on eligibility and vowed endlessly that no benefits would go to the “undocumented.” But denial isn’t just a river in Egypt. It’s the Obama way.

In Oregon this week, officials confessed that nearly 4,000 illegal immigrants had been “accidentally” steered from the state’s low-income Medicaid program and instead were enrolled in Obamacare in violation of the law. Oopsie. The Oregonian newspaper’s Nick Budnick reported that the health bureaucrats “discovered the problem several weeks ago and are correcting it.” Get in line. The beleaguered Cover Oregon health insurance exchange has been riddled with ongoing problems, errors and glitches since last October that have yet to be fixed.

Take note: This wasn’t a one-time computer meltdown. Because Oregon’s health insurance exchange website has been offline and its software architects under investigation for possible fraud, the Oregon Obamacare drones have been processing each and every application manually. That means nearly 4,000 illegal alien applications with “inaccurate” data somehow passed through government hands and somehow ended up getting routed through as new enrollees with Obamacare-approved full-service health care.

How many Obamacare services did these nearly 4,000 illegal aliens avail themselves of, and at what cost?

Does anyone believe the same incompetent boobs who enrolled them will be able to track down the nearly 4,000 illegal alien beneficiaries, “correct” the “errors” and ensure that it doesn’t happen again?

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Photo Credit: National Review Eat Your Words, Debbie Wasserman Schultz

At the end of 2013, Democratic representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Fla.) had some nasty words for yours truly. Irked that I used my Twitter feed to criticize her Obamacare propaganda efforts, Wasserman Schultz snarked back at me: “Thanks for spreading the word! You’ll be eating them next year. #GetCovered.”

Classy as always. And completely wrong-headed as usual. Less than three months into 2014, how’s dutiful Debbie and her Dear Leader’s pet government-takeover program doing? The most recent retreat measures (call it the Obamacare Endangered 2014 Midterm Democrats’ Rescue Plan) include:

Allowing insurers for two extra years to continue selling plans that otherwise would have been banned by Obamacare. Last fall, Americans across the country and from all parts of the political spectrum raised an uproar in the wake of millions of Obamacare-induced cancellation notices on their individual-market health plans. President Obama trotted out a “keep your plan” Band-Aid effective through this year. Now, the “transitional period” will extend through October 2016 and cover policyholders until the following September, after Obama is safely out of office.

Extending the open-enrollment period for 2015 from November 2014 to February 2015, a month longer than originally scheduled. (It will no doubt be extended again as the midterm elections get closer.)

Relaxing eligibility requirements for insurers to qualify for financial help under a three-year program intended to cushion insurers’ costs of complying with Obamacare mandates.

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EPA’s Climate Regulations Will Harm American Manufacturing

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The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) forthcoming climate change regulations for new and existing electricity generating units have been appropriately labeled the “war on coal,”[1] because the proposed limits for carbon dioxide emissions would essentially prohibit the construction of new coal-fired power plants and force existing ones into early retirement.

However, the casualties will extend well beyond the coal industry, hurting families and businesses and taking a significant toll on American manufacturing across the nation. Congress should stop the EPA and all other federal agencies from regulating carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions.

Driving Energy Prices Up, Economic Activity Down

Coal provides approximately 40 percent of America’s electricity generation.[2] By significantly limiting the use of an affordable energy source, the EPA’s regulations will increase electricity prices for American households. Since low-income families spend a larger proportion of their income on energy, a tax that increases energy prices would disproportionately affect the budgets of the poorest American families.

Higher energy prices as a result of the regulations will squeeze both production and consumption. Since energy is a critical input for most goods and services, Americans will be hit repeatedly with higher prices as businesses pass higher costs onto consumers. However, if a company had to absorb the costs, high energy costs would shrink profit margins and prevent businesses from investing and expanding. The cutbacks result in less output, fewer new jobs, and less income.

Heritage Foundation analysts modeled the economic effects of a phase-out of coal between the years 2015 and 2038. Using the Heritage Foundation Energy Model, a derivative of the federal government’s National Energy Model System, we found that by the end of 2023, nearly 600,000 jobs will be lost, a family of four’s income will drop by $1,200 per year, and aggregate gross domestic product decreases by $2.23 trillion over the entire period of the analysis.[3 ]

Manufacturing Hit Hard

America’s manufacturing base will be particularly harmed by the EPA’s climate regulations. Manufacturing accounts for over 330,000 of the jobs lost.[4] This occurs for a number of reasons.

As more coal generation is taken offline, the marketplace must find a way to make up for that lost supply. The Heritage Energy Model builds in the most cost-effective means of replacing the lost coal through a combination of consumers decreasing energy use as an adjustment to higher prices and increased power generation from other sources.

Manufacturing is an energy-intensive industry, and the impact of the higher energy prices on manufacturing averages to more than 770 jobs losses per congressional district. However, not all regions are affected the same, as districts in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois are especially hit hard. In fact, 19 out of the top 20 worse off congressional districts from the Administration’s war on coal are located in the Midwest region. In those districts, the manufacturing industry, on average, will slash more than 1,600 jobs by 2023. The table at the end of the paper shows the estimates of the decrease of manufacturing employment per congressional district by 2023.

Furthermore, manufacturing growth will be harmed as a result of the fuel switching that will occur to make up for lost coal generation. Natural gas will be diverted away from manufacturing and to power generation. As a result, the Heritage Energy model projects that natural gas prices will increase 28 percent by 2030.

Natural gas and liquids produced with natural gas provide a feedstock for fertilizers, chemicals and pharmaceuticals, waste treatment, food processing, fuel for industrial boilers, transportation fuel, and much more. The chemical-manufacturing base alone is building 148 new operations topping over $100 billion in response to current and projected low natural gas prices from the shale gas boom.[5] As the U.S. is experiencing a renaissance in manufacturing and energy-intensive industries, the Administration’s war on coal could adversely affect America’s competitive advantage.

Availability of Carbon Capture and Sequestration

The primary reason the EPA’s regulations will ban the construction of coal-fired electricity generating units is that to meet the thresholds, new plants will have to install carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology. As identified by the Obama Administration’s Interagency Task Force on Carbon Capture and Storage 2010 report, implementation of CCS has a number of extremely difficult obstacles to overcome. There are questions of technical scalability, regulatory challenges, long-term liability of storing the captured carbon dioxide, and above all, cost.[6 ]

No credible basis exists to state that CCS is adequately demonstrated today, since no large-scale power plant in the U.S. has CCS. One large-scale CCS project is currently under contract—the Kemper County Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) plant—but it is hardly a model for new coal-fired plants for the rest of the country. Setting aside the fact that the project has had nearly half a billion dollars in cost overruns and received over $400 million in Department of Energy grants and preferential tax credits,[7] the plant is using a lower-grade lignite coal rather than higher-grade bituminous and subbituminous coal found in many parts of the rest of the country.

The Kemper plant will use IGCC technology that turns coal into gas as opposed to pulverized combustion and the captured carbon dioxide will serve a purpose for enhanced oil recovery to help finance the plant. New coal-fired plants in other parts of the country will not have those opportunities, so the Kemper plant is not an indicator of adequate demonstration. Further, the fact that the plant is not actually operating disqualifies it as the model. CCS should be pursued only if companies believe it is in their economic interest to do so—for instance, if profitable opportunities for enhanced oil recovery exist nearby.

Congress Stepping In

Senator Joe Manchin (D–WV) and Representative Ed Whitfield (R–KY) have introduced the Electricity Security and Affordability Act (H.R. 3826) that would require that greenhouse gas regulations for electricity generating units meet certain standards that prove they are economically feasible to achieve and have a demonstrated positive environmental benefit. Any imposed standards to limit or contain emissions cannot have been tested in isolation and with special treatment like the Kemper plant but must have been used commercially for a year by multiple plants (at least six) in multiple regions in order to be representative of the industry.

To truly ensure that the technology is cost-effective, Congress should strip away all subsidies and Department of Energy spending for CCS in order to prevent the federal government from presenting a handful of fundamentally uneconomic CCS plants as proof that the standards are legitimate. However, the most effective policy solution would be to prohibit the EPA and all agencies from regulating greenhouse gas emissions.

—Nicolas D. Loris is Herbert and Joyce Morgan Fellow in the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies and Filip Jolevski is a Research Assistant in the Center for Data Analysis at The Heritage Foundation

This article appeared originally at Heritage.com and is re-published in full with the Heritage Foundation’s permission.

Once Obama Warned Putin Stand Down; Ukraine Occupation Was Assured

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Photo Credit: WND Once Barack Obama warned Putin to stand down in the Crimea, its occupation by Russian troops was assured. As Syria showed the world recently, and the Ukraine shows today, Barack Obama needs to learn how to shut his mouth. Yet, who knew when he said, “there will be costs,” we would be the ones to pay?

To paraphrase Lincoln, it is better to shut up and be thought weak than to open your mouth and prove it. Someone should tell Barry. Every time his mouth writes a check his butt won’t cash, he weakens America and makes the world a much more dangerous place for everyone. Does anyone really think that if the Chinese attack Japan over the Senkaku Islands, Obama, even though treaty-bound, will come to their aid? If the Iranians declare they have a nuclear weapon, will Obama do one damn thing?

Putin does not respect Obama — he views him as weak and incompetent, ill suited for the world stage and the big game. He took the measure of Obama in 2009, when Barry gave up his only bargaining chip, missile defense systems about to be deployed in Poland and the Czech Republic, before negotiations on cutting nuclear arsenals even began. The Russians were playing chess and Barry was playing with himself.

Has Barry done anything in the last five years to prove otherwise? Putin embarrassed him, casually dismissing his demand for Eric Snowden’s return, and then he embarrassed him once more with the Syria incident, and now yet again, with putting the ‘crime’ in Crimea.

Everyone remembers, “I didn’t set a red line. The world set a red line.” One would think he would have learned his lesson, having been so thoroughly humiliated with Syria.

Read more this story HERE.

Bait-and-Switch Liberalism: Obamacare and the Politics of Deception

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Photo Credit: National Review In June 2009, as health-care reform was being debated vigorously across the country, President Obama told the American Medical Association’s convention that, whatever the provisions of the health-care bill he would sign into law ultimately included, “we will keep this promise to the American people: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what.”

After the Affordable Care Act lurched into effect in 2013, it became clear the president meant to say that if you like your doctor and health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep them . . . footnote. And, as you’d expect from a former editor of the Harvard Law Review, that footnote has turned out to be as long and convoluted as a Russian novel.

When people who did like their health-care plans started receiving notices of cancellation or enormous rate increases, Obama’s defenders tried to qualify the original promise, which Obama had made repeatedly while campaigning, first for president and then for enactment of new health-care policies. Economist Jared Bernstein, who worked in the White House in 2009, said a better formulation would have been, “If you like your plan and it doesn’t get significantly worse such that it’s out of sync with what we’re trying to do here, you can keep it.” In fact, he argued, because “such nuances were clear at the time” — which is not how nuances typically operate — Obama’s veracity about his proposals’ consequences was not in question.

The New York Times editorial page took the same position: The president “clearly misspoke” when he promised that people could keep health-insurance policies they liked, but the controversy over that pledge was “overblown.” After the sanitizing “misspoke” set off a controversy of its own, the paper’s “public editor” prodded chief editorialist Andrew Rosenthal, who allowed that “clearly wrong” or “clearly weren’t true” might also have been fair characterizations of Obama’s promises.

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President Obama’s Foreign Policy is Based on Fantasy

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Photo Credit: J. Scott ApplewhiteBy Editorial Board.

FOR FIVE YEARS, President Obama has led a foreign policy based more on how he thinks the world should operate than on reality. It was a world in which “the tide of war is receding” and the United States could, without much risk, radically reduce the size of its armed forces. Other leaders, in this vision, would behave rationally and in the interest of their people and the world. Invasions, brute force, great-power games and shifting alliances — these were things of the past. Secretary of State John F. Kerry displayed this mindset on ABC’s “This Week” Sunday when he said, of Russia’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine, “It’s a 19th century act in the 21st century.”

That’s a nice thought, and we all know what he means. A country’s standing is no longer measured in throw-weight or battalions. The world is too interconnected to break into blocs. A small country that plugs into cyberspace can deliver more prosperity to its people (think Singapore or Estonia) than a giant with natural resources and standing armies.

Unfortunately, Russian President Vladimir Putin has not received the memo on 21st-century behavior. Neither has China’s president, Xi Jinping, who is engaging in gunboat diplomacy against Japan and the weaker nations of Southeast Asia. Syrian president Bashar al-Assad is waging a very 20th-century war against his own people, sending helicopters to drop exploding barrels full of screws, nails and other shrapnel onto apartment buildings where families cower in basements. These men will not be deterred by the disapproval of their peers, the weight of world opinion or even disinvestment by Silicon Valley companies. They are concerned primarily with maintaining their holds on power.

Read more this story HERE.

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MSNBC’s Wagner: Obama Hasn’t Articulated Foreign Policy Because “His Heart Has Never Been In It”

By Real Clear Politics.

ALEX WAGNER: A lot has been said about the administration’s foreign policy in recent weeks and especially in recent days, and a lot of it has been critical of the president. And I am sort of the camp that, you know, I’m not sure if the president could have done anything to prevent Vladimir Putin from doing what he was going to do. But it certainly puts the White House in a position where their foreign policy seems incredibly reactive and has so for really almost — the recent past, I mean, years at this point.

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