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Study: HHS Adds $9.1 Billion in New Regs in January

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The Department of Health and Human Services passed three new rules over the course of just four days, adding $9.1 billion of regulatory burden during the first month of the new year, a new report claims.

According to a study by the American Action Forum released Friday morning, the new regulations will “account for 797 pages, $9.1 billion in new costs, and 10.6 million additional paperwork burden hours.”

One of the major costs came from the expansion of Medicaid, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, and the state-based health insurance exchange programs, all mandated under the Affordable Care Act. The total price tag is $2.6 billion with a paperwork burden of 518,432 hours. HHS only allowed 17 working days to submit comment on the nearly 500-page overhaul of Medicaid and SCHIP programs.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Threatens Fox News, Rush Limbaugh

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In a sycophantic interview with The New Republic, conducted by former campaign staffer Chris Hughes and leftist writer Franklin Foer, President Obama suggested that he had all the answers to the pressing issues facing America and therefore no compromise was necessary with Republicans. He added that Republicans should compromise. And if those Republicans don’t compromise, Obama suggested that the fault would lie at the feet of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh – and that the calculus had to be changed to force Fox News and Limbaugh to stop holding Republicans accountable to conservatism.

Here’s Obama on how he’s going to fix the country:

“The truth is that most of the big issues that are going to make a difference in the life of this country for the next thirty or forty years are complicated and require tough decisions, but are not rocket science. We know that to fix our economy, we’ve got to make sure: that we have the most competitive workforce in the world, that we have a better education system, that we are investing in research and development, that we’ve got world-class infrastructure, that we’re reducing our health care costs, and that we’re expanding our exports. On issues like immigration, we have a pretty good sense of what’s broken in the system and how to fix it. On climate change, it’s a daunting task. But we know what releases carbon into the atmosphere, and we have tools right now that would start scaling that back, although we’d still need some big technological breakthrough. So the question is not, Do we have policies that might work? It is, Can we mobilize the political will to act?”

Despite the fact that Obama’s policies have been abysmal failures on virtually every front, the question for Obama is not what to do, but how to swindle the American people into doing it. And Obama said he would not be focusing on how to get things done in Washington, D.C.; instead, he’d be attempting to drum up public support on every issue. Obama then compared himself to Lincoln for such tactics:

“I always read a lot of Lincoln, and I’m reminded of his adage that, with public opinion, there’s nothing you can’t accomplish; without it, you’re not going to get very far. And spending a lot more time in terms of being in a conversation with the American people as opposed to just playing an insider game here in Washington is an example of the kinds of change in orientation that I think we’ve undergone, not just me personally, but the entire White House.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Sellout: Republican Senators Strike Amnesty Deal With Dems

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A powerful group of senators from both parties has reached a deal on the outlines of a comprehensive immigration overhaul, a development that will drive an emotional debate on a hot-button issue unseen in Washington for more than half a decade.

The group is expected to unveil the basics of its proposal at a Monday news conference on Capitol Hill, essentially laying down a marker on the issue one day before President Barack Obama heads to Las Vegas to unveil more details about his own immigration proposal.

According to a five-page document provided to POLITICO, the sweeping proposal — agreed to in principle by eight senators — would seek to overhaul the legal immigration system as well as create a pathway to citizenship for the nation’s roughly 11 million illegal immigrants. But establishing that pathway would depend on whether the U.S. first implements stricter border enforcement measures and new rules ensuring immigrants have left the country in compliance with their visas. Young people brought to the country as children illegally and seasonal agriculture industry workers would be given a faster path to citizenship.

The broad agreement by the influential Gang of Eight senators amounts to the most serious bipartisan effort to act on the highly charged issue since George W. Bush’s comprehensive measure was defeated in the Senate in 2007.

Read more from this story HERE.

Bipartisan House Leaders Urge Obama to Fill State Department IG Job Vacant Since 2008

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Four top members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee representing both parties say the U.S. Department of State has gone long enough without an Inspector-General.

In a letter to President Obama, committee chairman Rep. Darrell Issa, R-CA; ranking member Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-MD; Subcommittee on National Security Chairman Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-UT, who is chairman of the panel’s subcommittee on national security; and Rep. John F. Tierney, D-MA, urged the chief executive to make filling the long-standing vacancy a top priority.

“The department has not had a Senate-confirmed Inspector General since 2008, which is the longest vacancy of any of the 73 Inspector General positions across the federal government,” the four said in the letter. “During your entire first term as president, you did not nominate anyone to serve in this critical position. This failure evidences a clear disregard for the Inspector General Act and the will of Congress.

“In the context of the upcoming confirmation hearings for Sen. John Kerry, D-MA, as your nominee to become the next Secretary of State, we are sure that the question of who you plan to nominate to serve as Inspector General for the State Department will be a top priority for Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle.”

The Issa panel held a hearing on IG vacancies on May 10, 2012, and noted at the time that:
• There are currently 10 vacant IG posts. Of those, eight are at agencies where the IG is presidentially appointed . . .

Read more from this story HERE.

Video: Warning to Politicians – People Will Fight for Guns

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“Come and Take It,” the song that has rallied gun owners with its remember-the-Alamo-like message, now has an accompanying music video with a special message for Barack Obama and members of Congress.

As WND reported, Grammy-winning musician Steve Vaus, creator of the Buck Howdy character, recorded the song that defies those advocating gun confiscation with one of the slogans of the Texas Revolution, “Come and take it.”

Though the song itself is more vague, the video leaves no doubt who Vaus is talking to in the lyrics.

“Mr. President, members of Congress,” Vaus says in the opening to the video, “you’ve been making a lot of noise about taking our guns away. But you might want to review history.

“1835. Gonzales, Texas Territory,” Vaus continues. “The authorities wanted to confiscate the big gun that protected that colony. You know what the people said? ‘Come and take it.’ Because they were willing to fight for their freedom and their guns. So are we.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama’s Anti-Military Bias: Cut Medical Benefits for Active, Retired Military, Not Union Workers

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This is another one of those issues that should have been hammered home during the campaign, and especially during the debates, but that Romney failed to really pick up on… It goes to the heart of Obama’s contempt for the military:

In an effort to cut defense spending, the Obama Administration plans to cut health benefits for active duty and retired military personnel and their families while not touching the benefits enjoyed by unionized civilian defense workers.

The move, congressional aides suggested, is to force those individuals into Obamacare, Bill Gertz reported at the Washington Beacon.

Gertz added: “The proposed increases in health care payments by service members, which must be approved by Congress, are part of the Pentagon’s $487 billion cut in spending. It seeks to save $1.8 billion from the Tricare medical system in the fiscal 2013 budget, and $12.9 billion by 2017.”

Not everybody is happy with the plan, however.

Military personnel would see their annual Tricare premiums increase anywhere from 30 – 78 percent in the first year, followed by sharply increased premiums “ranging from 94 percent to 345 percent—more than 3 times current levels.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Continues to Violate His Own ‘Stimulus’ Law by Not Releasing Quarterly Reports

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Have you heard much about President Obama’s $787,000,000,000 economic “stimulus” (now estimated to cost $831,000,000,000) lately? In its last report, published in 2011, the president’s own Council of Economic Advisors released an estimate showing that, for every $317,000 in “stimulus” spending that had by then gone out the door, only one job had been created or saved. Even in Washington, that’s not considered good bang for the buck.

Moreover, that was the fifth consecutive “stimulus” report that showed this number getting progressively worse.

Alas, that was the last report we’ve seen. Never mind that Section 1513 of the “stimulus” legislation, which Obama spearheaded and signed into law, requires the executive branch to submit a new report every three months. It reads:

“In consultation with the Director of the Office of Management and Budget and the Secretary of the Treasury, the Chairperson of the Council of Economic Advisers shall submit quarterly reports to the Committees on Appropriations of the Senate and House of Representatives that detail the impact of programs funded through covered funds on employment, estimated economic growth, and other key economic indicators.”

(The head of the Council of Economic Advisors, currently Alan Krueger, is appointed by the president, confirmed by the Senate, and works in the Executive Office of the President. He is the president’s chief economic adviser.)

Read more from this story HERE.

Report: Washington Didn’t Even Tell Marine Gen. He Was Being Replaced

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United States Marine Corps Gen. James “Mad Dog” Mattis was notified that he was being replaced as commander of U.S. Central Command not by a phone call from Washington, but by a note passed to him by an aide, according to Foreign Policy’s Thomas E. Ricks.

From Ricks’ report: “… General Mattis was travelling and in a meeting when an aide passed him a note telling him that the Pentagon had announced his replacement as head of Central Command. It was news to him — he hadn’t received a phone call or a heads-up from anyone at the Pentagon or the White House.

Ricks says he inquired further into this report. This is what he was told: “…the commander-in-chief can make a change whenever he wants and give no reason. That is right and proper under our system of government.

But there’s also the matter of common courtesy to an uncommon man. Here is what one person wrote to me: “What message does it send to the Services when the one leader known for his war-fighting rather than diplomatic or bureaucratic political skills is retired early via one sentence in the Pentagon’s daily press handout? Even in battle, Mattis was inclusive of all under his command. He took the time to pull together his driver and guards after every day’s rotation on the battlefield, telling them what he thought he had learned and asking them for input. Surely senior administration officials could have found the time to be gracious. But they didn’t.”

President Obama appointed Gen. Mattis as commander of U.S. Central Command in the summer of 2010. He was quickly confirmed by the U.S. Senate.

Read more from this story HERE.

Abuse of Power: Court Says Obama Appointments Violate Constitution

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WASHINGTON (AP) – President Barack Obama violated the Constitution when he bypassed the Senate last year to appoint three members of the National Labor Relations Board, a federal appeals court ruled Friday in a far-reaching decision that could severely limit a chief executive’s powers to make recess appointments.

The decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit marked a victory for Republicans and business groups critical of the labor board. If it stands, it could invalidate hundreds of board decisions over the past year, including some that make it easier for unions to organize.

When Obama filled the vacancies on Jan. 4, 2012, Congress was on an extended holiday break. But GOP lawmakers gaveled in for a few minutes every three days just to prevent Obama from making recess appointments. The White House argued that the pro forma sessions – some lasting less than a minute – were a sham.

The court rejected that argument, but went even further, finding that under the Constitution, a recess occurs only during the breaks between formal year-long sessions of Congress, not just any informal break when lawmakers leave town. It also held that presidents can bypass the Senate only when administration vacancies occur during a recess.

White House press secretary Jay Carney said the administration strongly disagrees with the decision and that the labor board would continue to conduct business as usual, despite calls by some Republicans for the board members to resign.

Read more from this story HERE.

The Obama Simulacrum

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If I’m following this correctly, according to one spokesperson for the Marine Corps Band, at Monday’s inauguration Beyoncé lip-synced to the national anthem but the band accompanied her live. However, according to a second spokesperson, it was the band who were pretending to play to a pre-recorded tape while Beyoncé sang along live. So one or other of them were faking it. Or maybe both were. Or neither. I’d ask Chuck Schumer, the master of ceremonies, who was standing right behind her, but he spent the entire performance staring at her butt. If it was her butt, that is. It might just have been the bulge of the Radio Shack cassette player she was miming to. In an America with an ever more tenuous grip on reality, there’s so little to be sure of.

Whether Beyoncé was lip-syncing to the band or the band were lip-syncing to Beyoncé is like one of those red pill/ blue pill choices from The Matrix. Was President Obama lip-syncing to the Founders, rooting his inaugural address in the earliest expressions of American identity? (“The patriots of 1776 . . . gave to us a republic, a government of, and by, and for the people, entrusting each generation to keep safe our founding creed.”) Or maybe the Founders were lip-syncing to him as he appropriated the vision of the first generation of Americans and yoked it (“preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action”) to a statist pitch they would have found utterly repugnant.

The whole event had the air of a simulacrum: It looked like a presidential inauguration, but the sound was tinny and not quite in sync. Obama mouthed along to a canned vocal track: “We reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future.” That’s great! It’s always reassuring to know the head of state is going to take issue with all those people wedded to the “belief” that America needs either to shove every granny off the cliff or stake its newborns out on the tundra for the wolves to finish off. When it comes to facing the music, Obama is peerless at making a song and dance about tunes nobody’s whistling without ever once warbling the real big numbers (16 trillion). But, like Beyoncé, he’s totally cool and has a cute butt.

A couple of days later, it fell to the 45th president-in-waiting to encapsulate the ethos of the age in one deft sound bite: What difference does it make? Hillary Clinton’s instantly famous riposte at the Benghazi hearings is such a perfect distillation that it surely deserves to be the national motto of the United States. They should put it on Paul Krugman’s trillion-dollar coin, and in the presidential oath: “Do you solemnly swear to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States?”

“Sure. What difference, at this point, does it make?”

Read more from this story HERE.