Photo Credit: AP/Charlie RiedelDespite a decision by the NFL to ignore the administration’s pleas to promote Obamacare, the Super Bowl champion Baltimore Ravens have decided to go all in — in exchange for a $130,000 contract, according to documents unearthed by a public watchdog group.
Judicial Watch told Secrets that the team was recruited by Maryland state officials to help it sell Obamacare, the new health care insurance program that has run into mammoth computer and bureaucratic troubles in its first three weeks.
The state previously announced its plans but the size of the check was not released. Judicial Watch received a copy of the agreement between the 2013 football champs and the Maryland Health Benefit Exchange.
Photo Credit: newsbusters.orgJohn Dickerson could not have been more blunt on Monday’s CBS This Morning about the political damage HealthCare.gov’s well-established technical difficulties is already causing President Obama: “It’s been far worse than a glitch. It’s been a total fiasco, as Senator McCain said. And the problem here is that the administration could get into, sort of, a credibility death spiral.”
The liberal political director, who is usually an Obama apologist, also surprisingly acknowledged that conservatives were right in their longstanding criticisms of ObamaCare: [MP3 audio available here; video below the jump]
JOHN DICKERSON:
There has always been charges from the right that the President’s health care promises didn’t turn out to be true. But then, some of those charges turned out to have some merit. The President said, if you had your own health care plan and if you were satisfied with it, you’d be able to keep it. Well, that didn’t quite turn out to be true.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-10-22 00:47:062016-04-11 11:15:52CBS’s Dickerson: White House Risks ‘Credibility Death Spiral’ Over ‘Total Fiasco’ of ObamaCare Site (+video)
President Barack Obama delivered an Obamacare speech Monday that sounded a lot like hold music.
With a staunch defense of the law and a hint of outrage over its problems, Obama sought to buy time with Congress, potential customers and the public while his administration rushes to fix HealthCare.gov, the beleaguered website that threatens the viability of his signature domestic achievement.
But as congressional oversight committees circle, he has to hope that improvements to the website ramp up more quickly than do the calls for suspending or delaying enrollment.
“There’s no sugarcoating it. The website has been too slow,” Obama said in the White House Rose Garden. “People have been getting stuck during the application process. And I think it’s fair to say that nobody’s more frustrated by that than I am. Precisely because the product is good, I want the cash registers to work, I want the checkout lines to be smooth, so I want people to be able to get this great product.
It’s not the GOP that President Barack Obama has to worry about in defending his botched health care rollout, it’s fellow Democrats.
They voted for the law, sang its praises for three-plus years and still believe in the promise of health care reform. But now they face a conundrum: stay in lock step with Obama and risk their credibility as advocates for the law’s benefits or publicly criticize the administration for its recent problems — especially a failure to more quickly acknowledge, and rectify, the major malfunction of its Internet marketplace.
It’s a particularly vexing question for Democrats worried about their party’s chances in the 2014 midterm elections, and, increasingly, they’re opting for the latter strategy.
“What has happened is unacceptable in terms of the glitches,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said on ABC’s “This Week.” “They were overwhelmed to begin with. There is much that needs to be done to correct the situation.” It was the second time in a week that Pelosi had gone public with her dismay over the implementation of a law that she carried to enactment by winning tough votes on the House floor in 2009 and ’10.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-10-22 00:43:272016-04-11 11:15:52Obama: Your Call is Important to Us (+video)
Photo Credit: MYFOXNY.COMSome couples in New Jersey had waited decades. At the stroke of midnight the moment arrived as New Jersey became the the 14th state to legalize gay marriage.
The celebrations came three days after the state Supreme Court rejected Gov. Chris Christie’s request to delay the start of the nuptials while he appealed a lower court’s ruling on same-sex marriage.
Weddings were held in several cities and towns across the state in the first minutes of Monday morning, as soon as a court order requiring the state to recognize gay marriage went into effect.
Peter Connell and David Calle have been together 13 years and were among those toasting their commitment at midnight. Now official they say the historic day was made even better when Christie announced Monday morning that he is dropping his appeal in the legal case.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-10-22 00:10:442016-04-11 11:15:56NJ Becomes 14th State to Recognize Gay Marriage (+video)
Photo Credit: IsraelinUSAThe United States should not ease sanctions against Iran until it can prove that Iran has fully dismantled its nuclear program, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday.
The warning comes amid reports that the Obama administration is considering offering Iran a chance to recover frozen assets overseas in exchange for steps to scale back its nuclear program.
“The question is not of hope,” Netanyahu said on “Meet the Press” on NBC. “The question is of actual results.”
“I think the pressure has to be maintained on Iran, even increased on Iran, until it actually stops its nuclear program,” he added. “You don’t want to go through halfway measures.”
Netanyahu compared Iran’s nuclear program to chemical weapons stockpiles in Syria, which President Bashar Assad has pledged to eliminate.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-10-21 02:00:252016-04-11 11:15:58Netanyahu Warns US Not to Roll Back Iran Sanctions, Release Frozen Assets (+video)
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) appeared on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday morning where reporter Dana Bash questioned him about the efficacy of his position on the government shutdown over the Affordable Care Act. Cruz said that those Republicans who want to implement the ACA and hasten its collapse are misguided.
Bash asked Cruz if he believed that Health and Human Services Sec. Kathleen Sibelius should resign. Cruz replied that he believed she should. Bash questioned him about the politics of that. She asked, if Sebelius is such a liability for the Obama administration, whether Republicans benefit more from her remaining in her position.
“There are Republican gray beards that make the point, ‘Let’s let this collapse,’” he said.
Sen. Ted Cruz says he’s not bothered by the tensions and anger from his Republican colleagues over his strategy to defund Obamacare, saying he doesn’t work for “party bosses.”
“Not remotely, because the people I work for are the women and men and men you just saw. I work for 26 million Texans. That’s my job to fight for them. I don’t work for the party bosses in Washington. I work for the people of Texas and I fight for them,” Cruz said in an interview aired Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
The freshman Republican from Texas also took a shot at his Republican colleagues, whom he said would commented “very differently” if cameras were inside their closed-door meetings.
“You know what was very interesting about some of those closed-door discussions? What I said in those closed-door discussions, I would’ve said the exact same thing if CNN”s camera was sitting in the room. What I say privately to my colleagues is the same thing I say publicly,” Cruz said.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-10-21 01:57:342016-04-11 11:15:58Ted Cruz: GOP’ers Who Want To Implement Obamacare Want to See ‘The American People Suffer’ (+video)
Photo Credit: Freedom To Marry/FlickrTennessee Democrat Rep. Steve Cohen called tea party congressional Republicans “domestic enemies” against which he must defend the country, describing them as rabid, sophomoric and in ambitious pursuit of their policies.
“I obviously do not have an opportunity to go within the conference, the Republican — we call it a caucus, they call it a conference,” Cohen said on Saturday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Up with Steve Kornacki.” “But I know some of the members there — and a lot of those members — they’re rabid, they’re sophomoric, literally, they’re second term in Congress, never worked in politics before, and they think they are somehow like — it’s all talked in military terms. They think they’re some kind of guerrillas there to strike a blow for freedom.”
Photo Credit: APCNBC’s Jim Cramer said the U.S. is “a laughing stock around the world, maybe worse than Italy in some ways when I look at benchmarks. We have obviously lost the faith of a lot of countries.”
“If there was a way to be able to take your money out of this country and put it in Germany … if I were Brazil, if I were Japan I would do it immediately,” he said Thursday on “Squawk Box.”
He went on to say that the slumping dollar index, which measures the greenback’s value against a basket of currencies, reflects the current sentiment of investors around the world. They are saying “lets go into gold, lets get out this dollar … lets not be in bonds in the United States, we’d rather be in any other currency because they basically have lost control,” he said.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-10-18 02:14:492016-04-11 11:16:08Cramer: Dollar is a Laughing Stock Worldwide (+video)
Photo Credit: APA stern President Obama lectured Republicans on Thursday, one day after they accepted a Democrat deal to end the government shutdown and raise the debt limit until Feb. 7–getting nothing in return.
The president suggested that the system of checks and balances invoked by tea party Republicans in an attempt to defund Obamacare is not what the Founding Fathers had in mind.
“Let’s work together to make government work better, instead of treating it like an enemy or purposely making it work worse,” Obama said.
“That’s not what the founders of this nation envisioned when they gave us the gift of self-government.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-10-18 02:11:512016-04-11 11:16:09Obama: Founding Fathers Would NOT Have Approved (+video)
