Obama Likens Health Care Law To Forcing People to ‘Buy a New Car’ (+video)

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Photo Credit: AP Photo/Charles DharapakBy Melanie Hunter.

President Barack Obama on Thursday compared the grandfather clause in Obamacare to telling people they have to buy a new car right now even if they can’t afford it – when cars were first required to have seat belts or air bags.

“So what we’re saying now is if you’re buying a new car, you’ve got to have a seat belt. Well, the problem with the grandfather clause that we put in place is it’s almost like we said to folks, ‘You gotta buy a new car, even if you can’t afford it right now,’” he said during Thursday’s press conference on how to fix the Affordable Care Act.

“And sooner or later, folks are going to start trading in their old cars, but if their life circumstance is such that for now at least, they want to keep their old car even if the new car is better, we should be able to give them that option, and that’s what we want to do,” Obama said.

According to healthcare.gov, grandfathered health insurance plans “are those that were in existence on March 23, 2010 and haven’t been changed in ways that substantially cut benefits or increase costs for consumers. Insurers must notify customers with these policies that they have a grandfathered plan.”

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Photo Credit: APObama: ‘I Must Win Back Credibility’

By Ben Shapiro.

On Thursday, President Obama took to the White House podium to explain that he would be unilaterally allowing insurance companies to continue selling health insurance plans Americans liked and wanted to keep. Obamacare has already wiped away those plans, and will undoubtedly drive up rates in both the now-broken individual market and the high-risk pool of people likely to enter the Obamacare exchanges.

President Obama was half an hour late to his press conference, which was supposed to begin at 11:35 a.m. ET. During his comments, he never called Obamacare by that name; instead, he reverted to terming it the Affordable Care Act. “Today I want to update the American people on our efforts to implement and improve the Affordable Care Act,” Obama said.

From there, Obama turned to the horrendously low Obamacare enrollment numbers. He noted that 106,000 Americans had selected a health insurance plan. “Is that as high a number as we’d like?” Obama said. “Absolutely not. But it does mean that people want affordable healthcare.” After blaming the website again, Obama said, “there’s no question that there’s real demand for quality affordable health insurance.”

Later, when asked by National Journal’s Major Garrett why he had continued to pump the website just one week before launch, and whether he had been informed about the technical problems, President Obama claimed ignorance. “I was not informed directly that the website was not working,” Obama said. “If I’d been informed, I wouldn’t have gone out and said ‘The website is going to be great.’” He added, “I don’t think I’m stupid enough” to compare the website to Amazon or Travelocity knowing it would fail.

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Second O’Keefe Video Exposes More Obamacare Navigators Telling People to Commit Fraud (+video)

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Photo Credit: capitolcityproject.comJames O’ Keefe’s Project Veritas has released a second video showing even more Obamacare Navigators in Texas suggesting fraud and deceit to undercover reporters — despite some in the mainstream media calling the first exposé an “isolated incident.”

“Today, Project Veritas released a second investigation exposing more Obamacare navigators counseling applicants to lie and cheat the health care system by erroneously reporting income status, health history, and more,” Project Veritas wrote.

They continue, “Critics said the first video was an isolated incident so we decided to visit with even more navigators funded by your American tax dollars. What we found was disturbing and showed a clear pattern of fraud through the Obamacare navigator program.”

Within the new video, Obamacare Navigators in Texas yet again counsel the reporters to lie in order to avoid higher premiums.

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Ted Cruz: Clintons Fleeing Obamacare (+video)

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Photo Credit: APSen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said on Wednesday that “nobody can defend” the Affordable Care Act following its troubled roll out, suggesting that recent comments by Bill Clinton should serve as a smoke signal to Democrats.

“Three and a half years ago it might have been possible for reasonable minds to differ,” he said on Fox News on Wednesday regarding the ACA. “Today, nobody is saying that. Nobody can defend it because millions of people are losing their jobs or are at part-time work.”

Cruz emphasized that millions of Americans have had their health insurance plans changed or cancelled in recent months, which has resulted in widespread criticism of President Barack Obama.

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Architect of ObamaCare Blames Fox News for Website’s Failure (+video)

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Photo Credit: Fox News Tonight on The Kelly File, Megyn Kelly took on the architect of ObamaCare for the second time. Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel called the ObamaCare numbers released today “disappointing,” but said it’s not surprising given the website’s problems.

“That’s not right, Megyn, you’ve got the numbers wrong,” Emanuel said right off the bat, challenging the fact that almost five million Americans have had their insurance plans canceled.

After a heated back-and-forth, Kelly asked Emanuel if he believes the cancelations are unrelated to the ObamaCare rollout. He maintained that insurance companies cancel plans “all the time.”

Kelly pressed Emanuel repeatedly on whether he predicted insurance companies would cancel individual plans, forcing people into the exchanges. “Whether you could anticipate what business would do is irrelevant,” he answered.

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Army Veteran Recalls the Unforgettable Moment When a Judge Told Him: ‘Your Time in Iraq Makes you a Threat to Society’ (+video)

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Photo Credit: YouTubeArmy veteran Andrew Chambers recently shared the story of how he was sentenced to ten years in prison after a judge allegedly told him that his service in the Iraq war makes him a “threat to society.” Video of his speech from prison for TEDxMarionCorrectional’s TEDxTalks is now going viral after being posted on Oct. 31.

After explaining that he decided to join the Army following the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, Chambers talked about the positive side of joining the U.S. military — traveling the world and experiencing different cultures. He was deployed to Iraq in 2004 after spending a year in Central America.

However, his experience in the devastated country took its toll. Chambers told his audience about the time he was working as a turret gunner on the top of a Humvee when gunfire erupted. He said he heard someone laughing and remembers asking himself, “who could be laughing at a time like this?”

As it turns out, it was he who was laughing.

“I felt like I was finally loosing control of that rage they (the military) taught me to harness,” Chambers said.

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Former Federal Reserve Official : ‘I’m Sorry for QE’ (+video)

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Photo Credit: CNBCThere’s a real question as to whether the massive bond-buying program known as quantitative easing was worth the cost, former Federal Reserve official Andrew Huszar said Tuesday.

“My argument is not that QE was not at all useful,” he said on CNBC’s “Fast Money.”

“I believe that at the time, it was just one more tool that the Fed introduced to try to help the economy,” he said. “My point, ultimately, is the idea that very quickly into QE, it started becoming obvious that it wasn’t working in the way that it was supposed to.”

Huszar, a senior fellow at Rutgers Business School and a former managing director at Morgan Stanley, noted a few of the program’s unintended effects.

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Krauthammer Answers the Question, “Do You Think America’s Going to Make It?” (+video)

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Charles Krauthammer appeared on the Christian Broadcasting Network’s 700 Club yesterday in an interview with the show’s co-host Pat Robertson.

Krauthammer is known to millions of nightly television viewers as an insightful political analyst and conservative commentator on the Fox News nightly program, “Special Report with Bret Baier.”

The wide-ranging interview touched on many topics in Krauthammer’s new book, “Things That Matter.” As the interview was drawing to a close, Robertson asked the doctor, “Do you think America’s going to make it?” Krauthammer responded, “I think one of the things you’ll find in the book ultimately is a kind of optimism about America. I’ve always had this sense of a providential hand. You know, we are a country that at the end of the 1700s was a little island of Western Civilization. Cut off, small number of people, and we developed the greatest generation of political geniuses in the history of mankind who give us the Constitution. The next century, we needed a Lincoln, we get a Lincoln.

“In the Twentieth, we needed an FDR in the Depression and in the Second World War. In the second half of the century, we needed a Reagan, and we got a Reagan. Now I can’t explain all this. In some sense, I think it comes out of the basic common sense and decency of the American people, who one way or the other find a way. You know Churchill once said, ‘the Americans always do the right thing after they have tried everything else.’ So here we are trying everything else, but in the end, I think we’re going to do the right thing.”

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Christians Face Culture of Fear, Intimidation in U.S. Military Today (+video)

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Photo Credit: APThe Family Research Council (FRC) released a video in time for Veterans Day that warns Americans about the persecution of U.S. troops who express their Christian faith.

The four-minute-and-44 second video, “A Clear and Present Danger,” features active duty members of the U.S. military sharing their concerns about the “tremendous culture of intimidation and fear in the ranks of the American military right now.”

The identities of the men the faces and voices of the man are obscured to cloak their identities.

“Soldiers give up a lot of privileges or rights to be soldiers and defend the freedom of others,” says one soldier in the video. “But certainly the free exercise of religious freedom is not one of them.”

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Limbaugh Compares Obama to Bernie Madoff; Fraud is Impeachable (+video)

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Photo Credit: APDuring his Monday radio show, conservative talker Rush Limbaugh made the argument that President Barack Obama “is defrauding the entire country” by saying that “if you like your plan, you can keep it.”

Limbaugh compared Obama to Ponzi scheme huckster Bernie Madoff and called the fraud “impeachable.”

He also said that the miserable HealthCare.gov rollout has gone exactly as planned. In order for Obamacare to be a successful policy, it requires people losing their health insurance and being forced to use the Obamacare exchanges, he explained.

“Here’s the thing — if you believe nothing of what I say, if you believe nothing of what I say — believe this,” Limbaugh said. “What people do not understand is that as far as Obama is concerned, Obamacare is working perfectly right now. It is happening exactly as it was drawn up. It is happening exactly as it was designed.”

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Eakinomics – Mandatory Spending Crowding Out the Rest (+video)

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Photo Credit: Washington Examiner American Action Forum President Douglas Holtz-Eakin is pushing back against complacency over deficits this week and calling for renewed attention to the problem of the United States’ long-term debt.

AAF, a right-leaning Washington think tank, is promoting videos of Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, drawing attention to the danger of rising long-term debt and calling on the federal government to cut spending, specifically mandatory spending — outlays on programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

The deficit for fiscal 2013 was the lowest since before President Obama took office at $680 billion, down from a high of $1.4 trillion in 2009. The broad-based sequestration spending cuts and the tax increases on high incomes that went into effect earlier in the year accounted for much of the reduction in the size of the government’s shortfall.

At $680 billion, the 2013 deficit was 4.1 percent of the country’s economic output. The Congressional Budget Office projects the deficit to keep falling, reaching 2 percent of gross domestic product by 2015. But over the longer term, as aging Baby Boomers enter retirement and draw on programs like Social Security and Medicare, deficits are expected to rise again, until the debt exceeds 100 percent of GDP in 2038.

By trying to refocus the debate on lowering the debt, Holtz-Eakin is taking on economic heavyweights like Larry Summers, Obama’s former top economic adviser, who argued in a recent Financial Times op-ed that addressing the debt should not be a priority right now.

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