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Lessons of the VA Scandal

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Photo Credit: National Review If our government has any obligation to fulfill its many promises on health care, it should be first and foremost to the men and women who served in our armed forces. But the scandal over hidden waiting lists at a growing number of veterans’ hospitals (seven so far) — wherein dozens of veterans died while waiting months for vital treatment, and the VA covered up the lengthy wait times — should make everyone wonder whether we can place our trust in a government-managed health-care system. The Dayton Daily News reported on Sunday that its investigation of a database of claims paid by the Department of Veterans Affairs shows that the words “delay in treatment” were used 167 times. The VA paid out a total of $36.4 million to settle the claims. There could well be many more cases of “death by delay” at the VA that never came to light.

Are there lessons in the VA scandal for the rest of us if Obamacare survives and even expands?

You betcha. The first lesson is that as government expands taxpayer subsidies for health care, the demand will always outstrip supply. Here is President Obama in a speech to disabled veterans in August 2013:

The last time I was with you, I pledged to cut the backlog, slash those wait times, deliver your benefits sooner. And I’m going to be honest with you; it has not moved as fast as I wanted. Part of it is all these new veterans in the system who came in — Agent Orange, PTSD. It means a lot more claims, and despite additional resources, it’s resulted in longer waits. And that’s been unacceptable — unacceptable to me, unacceptable to [Department of Veterans Affairs] Secretary [Eric] Shinseki.

A few weeks later, President Obama had to admit that he found the fiasco of the HealthCare.gov website also “unacceptable.” Last week, his aides told reporters he was “madder than hell” over the veteran waiting-list scandal.

Read more from this story HERE.

Mom of Marine Jailed in Mexico Says Son ‘Not a Criminal,’ Hopes for White House Response

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Photo Credit: Fox News The mother of a U.S. Marine being held in a Mexican prison on weapons charges told Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren Monday that her son is “not a criminal,” and she is hoping President Obama will respond to his plight.

Jill Tahmooressi said on “On the Record with Greta Van Susteren” that she recently saw her son Andrew after he was transferred to a new prison. She said she was able to bring him clothes and books but not food, and that her son told her he was always hungry.

Sgt. Andrew Tahmooressi, 25, has claimed he was headed to dinner in San Ysidro, California on March 31 when he mistakenly wound up at a border crossing point in Tijuana. According to his mother, Tahmooressi said he made a wrong turn, and Mexican authorities found three guns in his truck.

In an interview on the Mexican border, Jill Tahmooressi told Van Susteren her son would have never intended of smuggling or selling his guns, adding he had them for self-defense.

“He needed those firearms for his own sense of security,” she said. “He never – not for any price – would he have sold those guns.”

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Mega Church Pastor: Obama Legacy Is That He Destroyed The Experiment Called America (+video)

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Photo Credit: Western Journalism San Diego evangelical minister, James L. Garlow, says if history books are not distorted by today’s revisionistic tendencies, President Obama’s legacy should be that he’s responsible for “morally and economically destroying a wonderful experiment called America.”

In this two part video interview with Daily Caller, Pastor Garlow also says that President Obama’s Attorney General has brought the nation “legal anarchy.”

Garlow says, “I do not recall in my lifetime anything remotely close to what we are seeing. For the law enforcer in Washington D.C., the chief in America, to tell the Attorneys General across the states that you don’t have to enforce the law if you don’t like it. That is beyond anything I was taught in school. Rule of law and consent of the governed has been lost.”

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Obama “Madder than Hell” Over VA, But Who Actually Has The Scars?

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Photo Credit: WNDIt seems fair to suggest Barack Obama’s chief of staff Dennis McDonough could have made some better word choices when discussing Obama’s feelings regarding the ongoing Veteran’s Administration scandal with Major Garrett.

DENIS McDONOUGH: ..the President is madder than hell, and I’ve got the scars to prove it given, briefings that I’ve given the President and the conversations that he and Rick and I have had on these matters…but at the same time that we’re looking at accountability we want to continue to perform to provide our veterans the services that they have earned ….

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The Obamas: It Is All About Us

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Photo Credit: RedState One of the more public displays of narcissism by Obama has been his constant inserting of himself into every situation. It started out funny when it was noticed that Obama had been inserted into the official White House biographies of other presidents. Then he became a part of Rosa Parks’ legacy by having himself photographed in the bus where she refused to give up her seat. This had been followed by other images sent out by the White House placing Obama center stage in commemorations of such significant figures as:

– Nelson Mandela
– George Washington
– Abraham Lincoln

When teenage thuglet, Trayvon Martin, was killed while conducting a beatdown on a neighborhood watch volunteer, Obama first said:

“If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,”

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“Honey, I Shrunk the Presidency”

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Photo Credit: ReutersAs Barack Obama enters the twilight of his tenure, the debate over his legacy is ­beginning, but one conclusion already seems certain. It can best be described as “Honey, I shrunk the presidency.”

Not since Jimmy Carter was held hostage by Iran has the Oval Office seemed so inconsequential against the forces of international darkness. The mismatch is particularly striking because smallness has been Obama’s choice.

Although he is guilty of executive overreach at home, that bully behavior only sharpens the contrast with a foreign policy that is feeble when it is not comatose. The president’s estrangement from the demands of global leadership is giving a green light to tyrants and malevolent opportunists everywhere.

His preference for navel gazing over action was on full display last week. As Russia and China menaced their neighbors and Islamist terrorists set off bombs in a half-dozen countries, Obama accepted an award from Hollywood pal Steven Spielberg for fighting genocide. Passing up a chance to give a full-throated defense of freedom and Western civilization, the president lapsed into what The New York Times called a “meditation” on the limits of his power.

That’s far too kind. It was a white flag of surrender and more proof that Obama lacks the capacity to shoulder the responsibilities that have belonged to the Oval Office for 100 years.

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The Obama Coalition is About to Come Apart

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Photo Credit: UPIFor the past decade the Democrats have managed to defy gravity by bolting together an unlikely coalition of the richest and poorest Americans. It’s no secret. Ever since President Bush’s re-election in 2004, the pattern has been clear. People making above $100,000 and below $40,000 vote Democratic. The people in the middle vote Republican.

But now that top-bottom coalition is about to come apart, or lose its majority status at least. And the issue will be one that may loom larger than the debacle of Obamacare — the Keystone Pipeline.

Forget all that business about Barack Obama being the first African-American President, the child of poverty and discrimination who fought his way to the top through sheer brilliance and doggedness. Sure African-Americans vote 90 percent for him and form an indispensable part of his coalition. But Obama hasn’t done a thing for them since taking office except increase unemployment.

No, the real Obama is the one who came out of Harvard and Chicago Law Schools, picking up everything he knows in the faculty lounge. That’s where he met the people who taught him that middle Americans are frustrated yahoos “clinging to their guns and religion,” the ones who set him on the lunatic path of believing that what the weather is going to be like in 50 years is the most important issue facing America.

Obama’s critical support comes from the upper crust of America, the citizens who live comfortably sheltered in academia and the non-profit sector, who don’t care much about electricity or the manufacturing economy but who honestly believe that we can shut down the whole middle portion of the country and turn off the lights in order to save the world from the “pollution” of carbon dioxide.

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John Bolton: Children Are In Charge Of Obama’s Foreign Policy (+video)

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When asked about the Administration’s response to the kidnapping of over 200 Christian girls by a radical Islamist group in Nigeria, Bolton told WMAL radio in Washington, DC, that the President’s “hashtag diplomacy” is “embarrassing” and merely a “way of emoting. I bet it makes the people who do it feel good, but it has no impact on what’s actually going on in Nigeria.”

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Ted Cruz: 76 ‘Lawless’ Obama Actions

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Photo Credit: REUTERS / Kevin Lamarque

Photo Credit: REUTERS / Kevin Lamarque

Republican Sen. Ted Cruz released a definitive list Wednesday of 76 “lawless” Obama administration actions and abuses of power.

Cruz’s “The Legal Limit Report No. 4,” obtained by The Daily Caller, delves into little-known and little-reported details of President Obama’s executive actions. Cruz was set to discuss his report at the Federalist Society in the Promenade Ballroom of the Mayflower Hotel in Washington at 2:15 PM Wednesday.

Cruz details 76 specific actions over eight chapters. We’ve listed eight of them, as chronicled by Cruz, below:

1. “Obama implemented portions of the DREAM Act by executive action”

2. “Ended some terror asylum restrictions”

3. “Recognized same sex marriage in Utah despite a Supreme Court stay on a court order allowing the institution”

4. “Illegally revealed the existence of sealed indictments in the Benghazi investigation”

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Barack Obama’s Dysfunctional Washington

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Photo Credit: Benjamin Krain

Photo Credit: Benjamin Krain

Barack Obama fell in love with the sound of his voice at an early age. It’s the love that dares shout its name, and will not die even when everybody else has quit listening.

The president traveled this week to Hollywood, the reliable refueling stop for Democratic candidates, and preached to show-biz friends who paid up to $65,000 each for supper and had to eat it in a tent in the backyard. Everybody who was anybody was there, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Tom Rothman, James Brolin. Barbra Streisand, no doubt hoping Bubba might drop by unexpectedly, was there, too.

The president didn’t have to pay for a plate of beans and cornbread, so he returned the gift with his voice. Washington, he said, isn’t working because it’s “dysfunctional” and despite everything he has done “there’s still disquiet around the country.” (Jimmy Carter called it “malaise.”)

Mr. Obama, like Mr. Jimmy, railed about disquiet and dysfunction on the Potomac, forgetting that he lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, which is well within the District of Columbia and the fount of the bad stuff. The president is the very point of Washington. If Washington isn’t working, maybe it has something to do with what he brought to town.

But no, it’s not him. The disquiet, “an anxiety and a sense of frustration,” he said, “afflicts the body politic despite “a list of accomplishments.” It’s everybody else’s fault. It always is. He warned of a “self-fulfilling prophecy” in the midterm congressional elections, where “people who have the most at stake in a government that works, opt out of the system, and those who don’t believe government can do anything, are empowered. Gridlock reigns, and we’ve got this downward spiral of even more cynicism, and more dysfunction. And we have to break out of that cycle, and that’s what this election is all about.” So break out your checkbooks, and buy some more dysfunction.

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