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Senate Backs Cloture Over Cruz’s Objections – 18 Stand With Cruz (+video)

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller

Photo Credit: Daily Caller

Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz’s latest battle to get the Senate to defund Obamacare came to an abrupt halt Friday afternoon, when a large majority of senators voted in favor of the procedural move that Cruz had been opposing as the last barrier against the health-care law.

Over Cruz’s objections, Senators voted 79-19 in favor of invoking cloture on the House-passed resolution to fund the federal government past Monday, when the current funding resolution expires. Voting on cloture is a procedural vote that allows the Senate to move forward with consideration of the bill.

Cruz was joined by just 18 of his fellow Republicans: Sens. Mike Crapo of Idaho, Mike Enzi of Wyoming, Deb Fischer of Nebraska, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Dean Heller of Nevada, James Inhofe of Oklahoma, Mike Lee of Utah, Jim Moran of Kansas, Rand Paul of Kentucky, Rob Portman of Ohio, Jim Risch of Idaho, Pat Roberts of Kansas, Marco Rubio of Florida, Tim Scott of South Carolina, Jeff Sessions of Alabama, Richard Shelby of Alabama, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania and David Vitter of Louisiana.

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Romney Decries the ‘Political Dysfunction’ in Washington

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romney_bigotryMitt Romney thinks Obamacare is a bad law and would like to see it “go away,” but said Friday he disagrees with how conservatives are trying to engineer that.

In an interview with CNN, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee said using the the Affordable Care Act in the debate over a funding bill and debt ceiling rise is not effective — and counterproductive.

“We’re more effective tactically not to use a shutdown of some kind to pursue the … anti-Obamacare objective,” he said. “I don’t think that will be as effective.”

“The tactic of using a government shutdown to try and push that will be counterproductive politically, that it’s going to end up hurting our party, and it could well – it could be inconvenience, and hurt some individuals as well, and checks are late, and so forth,” said Romney.

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Ted Cruz Part II, Republican Takes On Republican (+video)

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picture - Cruz debateSen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) got into a tense back-and-forth on the Senate floor Thursday over the Texas Republican’s 21-hour anti-Obamacare speech and the House-passed bill that defunds President Obama’s health care overhaul.

Corker accused Cruz of being “confused” and argued Senate Republicans should vote in favor of cloture on the bill sent over from the House because it defunds Obamacare. However, Cruz was quick to remind his colleague that a vote in favor of cloture is a vote in “favor of granting the majority leader [Harry Reid] the ability to fund Obamacare.”

Corker also asked Cruz why he voted for a motion to proceed on the House-passed continuing resolution after he spent 21 hours “filibustering” the bill. He told Cruz, “y’all have sent out released, emails and you want everybody to be able to watch,” but added that the so-called filibuster was not in the best interests of the country or conservative policy.

Cruz seemingly went into “prosecutor”-mode, questioning Corker on every point.

Watch the tense debate below:

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Would Democrats Accept Obamacare Delay in Return for Debt Hike?

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Photo Credit: J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Photo Credit: J. Scott Applewhite/AP

House Speaker John Boehner said Thursday he would agree to raise the nation’s debt ceiling before the federal government hits its credit limit on Oct. 17, but only if Democrats agree to delay implementation of Obamacare for one year.

Though still in the formative stage, the House GOP’s debt bill right now would also authorize construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline, permit more energy exploration on federal lands, block federal regulation of greenhouse gas emissions, establish a timeline for comprehensive tax reform, limit medical malpractice suits, and raise the cost of Medicare for wealthier Americans.

“We’re going to introduce a plan that ties important spending cuts and pro-growth reforms to a debt limit increase,” said Speaker Boehner at a press conference with GOP leaders.

Remember, the debt limit is a separate issue from the government spending bill that’s now in the Senate and is about to be pinged back to the House, shorn of a provision that would defund the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) for good.

The spending bill would authorize appropriations to keep the government open. It’s not yet clear whether Congress will be able to pass such legislation before the US fiscal year ends at midnight Monday.

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Catholic Bishop on Obamacare Rule: ‘We Cannot–We Will Not–Comply With This Unjust Law’

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Photo Credit: CNS News

Photo Credit: CNS News

As many Americans start to enroll in the Obamacare health insurance exchanges on Oct. 1, the position of Bishop Paul S. Loverde, head of the Catholic diocese of Arlington, Va., on the law’s mandate that nearly all health insurance plans include contraception, sterilizations, and abortifacient drugs without co-pays has not changed and is clear: “We cannot – we will not – comply with this unjust law.”

Bishop Loverde made that statement in a joint letter with Bishop Francis X. DiLorenzo of the Richmond Diocese to the Catholics of Virginia – some 700,000 of them — on Jan. 30, 2012. Bishop Loverde’s office confirmed this week that, given the mandate has not been changed or rescinded, the bishops’ position has not changed.

Back in March 2012, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) described the Obamacare rule as an “unjust and illegal mandate” that violates religious freedom under the First Amendment, and noted that it affects employers and nearly all individuals — a “violation of personal civil rights.”

On the mandate, issued by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), “almost all employers, including Catholic employers, will be forced to offer their employees’ health coverage that includes sterilization, abortion-inducing drugs and contraception,” explained Bp. Loverde in the letter. “Almost all health insurers will be forced to include those ‘services’ in the health policies they write. And almost all individuals will be forced to buy that coverage as a part of their policies.”

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Democrat Sen. Manchin Breaks Ranks to Back Individual-Mandate Delay

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia broke ranks with fellow Democrats and said he’d support a stopgap spending plan that delays the individual-mandate in President Barack Obama’s health-care law.

“There’s no way I could not vote for it,” Manchin said at a Bloomberg Government breakfast today. “It’s very reasonable and sensible.”

The individual mandate is the linchpin of the law that requires most Americans to purchase health care through government-run insurance exchanges. Republicans, led by a group of newcomers in the House, are pushing to dismantle the health- care law and are using a ticking clock on a possible Oct. 1 government shutdown as leverage.

The Democratic-led Senate will vote in coming days on the stopgap spending plan and before sending it back to the House will remove language that defunds Obamacare. Obama and House Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, have said they won’t support using the budget to change the health law.

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Laborers’ Union: Fix Obamacare or Repeal It; ‘We’re Getting Our A– Kicked Here’ (+video)

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Terry O’Sullivan, president of the 600,000-plus-member Laborers’ International Union of North America (LiUNA), often referred to as the Laborers’ Union, said that if Obamacare is not fixed, then “it needs to be repealed.”

At a convention in Las Vegas of the AFL-CIO, with which the Laborers’ Union is affiliated, O’Sullivan took to the podium to endorse a proposition and then launched into a criticism of Obamacare, how it is hurting union members’ health coverage, and demanded it be fixed, adding that if it is not fixed, labor will make the issue a “big fricking deal.”

“If the Affordable Care Act is not fixed, and it destroys the health and welfare funds that we have all fought for and stand for, then I believe it needs to be repealed,” said O’Sullivan. “We don’t want it repealed, we want it fixed, fixed, fixed, and I commend Richard Trumka and the AFL-CIO for leading that charge. ”

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Ted Cruz Might Just Have Won the Future for the GOP

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Photo Credit: The Washington Post

Photo Credit: The Washington Post

Make no mistake about it: the “extended speech” by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) had absolutely nothing to do with defunding the Affordable Care Act—or even delaying it for one go*da** day.

As the long list of Senate Republicans who declined to back a full-blown, fill-your-hands-you-son-of-a-bitch filibuster over Obamacare could tell you, it’s a done deal that the president’s consistently unpopular health-care law is going forward even if the government shuts down. Come next week, the enrollment period is going to start, and come January 1, 2014, the plan will kick into gear despite every reason to believe it will be a clusterfudge of epic proportions.

So what exactly was Cruz doing up there, hogging the limelight on C-SPAN’s low-wattage webstream for a couple of hours, if he wasn’t serious about stopping Obamacare? He was playing his part in a pretty goddamned brilliant strategy to win the future not for himself but for the Republican Party.

Cruz and his fellow Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) are the best-known of the gaggle of legislators that Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) denounced as “wacko birds” earlier this year. “It’s always the wacko birds on right and left that get the media megaphone,” sputtered McCain in the wake of Paul’s immensely popular and influential filibuster, which called much-needed attention to the Obama administration’s glib attitude toward civil liberties and executive branch overreach.

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Obama on Obamacare: “We did Raise Taxes on Some Things.”

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Obama-self-satisfiedDuring his Tuesday remarks at the Clinton Global Initiative, President Obama admitted that his health care law raises taxes: “So what we did — it’s paid for by a combination of things. We did raise taxes on some things.”

“Some things” is an understatement. Below is just a partial list of Obamacare’s new or higher taxes on Americans:

Starting in tax year 2013:

Obamacare Medical Device Tax: Medical device manufacturers employ 409,000 people in 12,000 plants across the country. Obamacare imposes a new 2.3 percent excise tax on gross sales – even if the company does not earn a profit in a given year. In addition to killing small business jobs and impacting research and development budgets, this will make everything from pacemakers to artificial hips more expensive.

Obamacare High Medical Bills Tax: Before Obamacare, Americans facing high medical expenses were allowed a deduction to the extent that those expenses exceeded 7.5 percent of adjusted gross income (AGI). Obamacare now imposes a threshold of 10 percent of AGI. Therefore, Obamacare not only makes it more difficult to claim this deduction, it widens the net of taxable income.

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IRS Watchdog: $67 Million Missing from Obamacare Slush Fund

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Photo Credit: thomasmoresociety

Photo Credit: thomasmoresociety

The IRS is unable to account for $67 million spent from a slush fund established for Obamacare implementation, according to a Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) report released today.

The “Health Insurance Reform Implementation Fund” (HIRIF) was tucked into Obamacare in order to give the IRS money to enforce the tax provisions of the healthcare law. The fund, totaling some $1 billion of taxpayer money, was used to roll out enforcement mechanisms for the approximately 50 tax provisions of Obamacare.

According to the report: “Specifically, the IRS did not account for or attempt to quantify approximately $67 million [from the slush fund] of indirect ACA costs incurred for Fiscal Years 2010 through 2012.”

The report also found several other abuses of taxpayer funds…

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