The ‘No Excuse’ Administration Has a Whopper of an Excuse for Obamacare

By John Fund
...But there was also this startling explanation of what went wrong at HHS:
“We talked about having testing going forward, and if we had an ideal situation and could have built a product and, you know, a five-year period of time, we probably would have taken five years but we didn’t have five years. And certainly, Americans who rely on health coverage didn’t have five years for us to wait. We wanted to make sure we made good on this final implementation of the law.”
Well, okay, she only had three and a half years since Obamacare became law in early 2010 to oversee the design of the exchanges and the website accompanying them. So now she tells us she needed five years. Bruce Webster, a noted IT consultant to many companies, is stunned that Sebelius thinks “that ‘we needed five years but only had two’ is somehow an excuse for this disaster. That’s like Boeing saying, ‘We know the plane crashed, but we needed four years to build it and a year to test it, but we only had two years.’ Color me boggled.”

Steny Hoyer wants more money to fix Obamacare exchanges

By Steve Contorno
...Asked Tuesday how Congress could help improve the system by which millions of Americans must buy insurance by the end of the year, the House minority whip and Maryland Democrat said, "We can give them a little money."
"[Republicans have] been pretty much focused in the House of Representatives on undermining the implementation of the Affordable Care Act in every which way that we possibly could," he said.
Hoyer admitted that he does not know whether the project, which has already cost more than $400 million, has faced funding problems. "I don't think that's the reason," he said. "If I know that, I'll blame it."

How Jon Stewart became President Obama’s biggest problem

By Chris Cillizza
...Stewart dedicated the entire first 10 minutes of his show — three full segments — on Monday to slashing hits on the Web site and the president’s handling of the problems.
....Who cares what a late night comedian/talk show host thinks? President Obama should if viewership details on Stewart’s show are right.
According to a 2012 Pew Research Center poll, “The Daily Show” has the second largest share of young viewers — aged 18-29 — of any of the 24 media outlets tested. (The only one with a higher number of young viewers was the “Colbert Report”.)

Oblivious Obama totally clueless of ObamaCare troubles, Sebelius asserts

By Andrew Malcolm
According to Kathleen Sebelius, Barack Obama knew nothing, absolutely nothing, about the fundamental problems with the Oct. 1 roll-out of his namesake legislation that will affect nearly one-fifth of the nation's economy.
He didn't know about the last-minute test of the website expected to handle millions of customers and how it had crashed when only a few hundred samplers tried to get on at the same time. He had no idea that IT people had been expressing deep concerns for months that the site costing hundreds of millions of dollars was being constructed like an "Our Gang" clubhouse.
According to former Gov. Sebelius, the president of the United States was totally unaware that anything was wrong with ObamaCare for "a couple of days" after the bungled launch. A couple of days? Seriously?
...So, how could this Harvard grad, who's supposed to be so smart except when he's conveniently clueless, be oblivious to opening day of this mammoth legislative heave that cost his party the House of Representatives in 2010 and could well turn top Senate Democrat Harry Reid into a former majority leader next year?

Obama Keeps 'Affordable Care' Ruse Going

By M Catharine Evans
What's going to happen when Obama's senior adviser Valerie Jarrett and chief of staff Denis McDonough meet with insurance company executives on Wednesday?

...Will the CEO's knuckle under before their Boards push them out the door for allowing the President to destroy their businesses? Will Jarrett and McDonough threaten them with the IRS and the NSA if they don't agree to artificially lower the costs until after the midterm elections?
Will insurance companies be asked for voluntary contributions to fix the mess? HHS Secretary Sebelius tried to shake them down for donations to help fund the Obamacare PR campaign last spring.

Top Ten Obamacare Disasters to Come

Obamacare’s digital issues are just the beginning.

By Grace-Marie Turner
The problems increasingly are going to be up close and personal, as people see for themselves the impact it has on their lives and pocketbooks. The top ten debacles to come:
1. Deductible shock: When consumers finally do get onto the Healthcare.gov website, they are in for a new kind of sticker shock. Avik Roy of the Manhattan Institute has exposed the high cost of Obamacare premiums — the next price shock will be the whopping cost of the deductibles.

Don't Forget Obamacare's Electronic Medical Records Wreck

By Michelle Malkin
Dr. Nicholas DiNubile, a Philadelphia orthopedic surgeon, has a timely reminder for everyone encountering the federal health care exchange meltdown: "If you think signing up for Obamacare is a nightmare, ask your doctor how the EMR mandate is going."
Bingo.
...As I reported last year, Obamacare's top-down, tax-subsidized, job-killing, privacy-undermining electronic record-sharing scheme has been a big fat bust. More than $4 billion in "incentives" has been doled out to force doctors and hospitals to convert and upgrade by 2015. But favored EMR vendors, including Obama bundler Judy Faulkner's Epic Systems, have undermined rather than enhanced interoperability. Oversight remains lax. And after hyping the alleged benefits for nearly a decade, the RAND Corporation finally 'fessed up that its cost-savings predictions of $81 billion a year -- used repeatedly to support the Obama EMR mandate -- were (like every other Obamacare promise) vastly overstated.
In June, the Annals of Emergency Medicine published a study warning that the "rush to capitalize on the huge federal investment of $30 billion for the adoption of electronic medical records led to some unfortunate and unintended consequences" tied to "communication failure, poor data display, wrong order/wrong patient errors and alert fatigue." Also this summer, Massachusetts reported that 60 percent of doctors could not meet the EMR mandate and face potential loss of their licenses in 2015. And a few weeks ago, the American College of Physicians pleaded with the feds to delay the mandate's data collection, certification and reporting requirements.
...Let me underscore that again: Doctors face steep penalties if they can't meet the radical technology goals imposed by the very same glitch-plagued Obamacare bureaucrats who now need an emergency "tech surge" to fix their own failed info-tech Titanic. The Obamacare wrecking ball has only just begun.

Report: State Exchange Enrollments Mostly Medicaid, Not Private Insurance Plans

By Dr. Susan Berry
Defenders of President Obama’s signature health reform legislation claim the states that put effort into establishing their own exchanges, mostly Democrat-led, are signing people up successfully for ObamaCare. A new report, however, indicates that most of the individuals signing up in these state-run exchanges are enrolling into Medicaid.
Rachana Dixit at InsideHealthPolicy wrote Tuesday that enrollment into Medicaid in many of the state-run exchanges is “significantly outpacing the number of people that so far have enrolled into qualified health plans.” Medicaid enrollment numbers, Dixit observed, have reached tens of thousands in states such as Maryland, Washington, and Oregon.

ObamaCare Debacle: American Media Misses Yet Another Scandal

By John Nolte
The Washington Post's Ezra Klein now admits that weeks before the disastrous ObamaCare launch, he heard "some very ugly things about how the system was performing[.]" We also now know that a few hundred people were involved in a test that crashed the site days before the launch and that insurance companies were complaining about the site before the launch. On top of all that, we are now seeing story after story about the red flags ignored by the Administration. But it isn't just the White House claiming to be caught off guard by The Obvious, it is also a useless American media that seems incapable of breaking stories embarrassing to this president.
...Once again, despite numerous red flags, our media claims to be as surprised by a major scandal as the rest of the America. This isn’t the first major Obama White House scandal the media failed to break. The NSA, Associated Press, IRS, and Benghazi scandals were all missed by an American mainstream media that apparently spends its days spinning for the White House instead of engaging in the kind of investigative journalism into it that might result in revelations they don't want to know about or report.

The Shutdown that Ruined Christmas?

By Brent Bozell
The numbers are in for the evening news coverage of the shutdown. During the first 15 nights of October, ABC, CBS and NBC blamed the Republicans 41 times for the shutdown, blamed both sides 17 times, and blamed Obama and the Democrats ... never.

Obama Admin Asks Blue Cross Blue Shield to Hide Poor Enrollment Numbers

By William Bigelow
In a bombshell revelation, a consumer sales manager for North Dakota’s largest health insurer said Monday that the Obama Administration asked Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Dakota to hide how many people registered for health insurance through an online exchange that just went up.

The JPMorgan Shakedown Slush Fund

By Howard Richman
Like me, Morici described the settlement as a "shakedown":

"The president is shaking down JPMorgan. There's no other word for it," Morici told "The Steve Malzberg Show" on Newsmax TV.
"They started investigating these mortgage-related securities fraud ... about the time that Morgan ... decided not to support the president in his re-election campaign. How about that?"
Morici says the Justice Department targeted JPMorgan Chase even though "most of the sins were committed by companies it acquired at the behest of the Bush Treasury Department," including Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual.

Morici predicted more shakedowns in the future:

"You can count on more shakedowns. It would be a felony for me to, for example, threaten you with fraud to get the upper hand in a civil complaint, but not so the attorney general," he said.

In an interview with Univision that aired in October 2010, President Obama once said, "We're going to punish our enemies and we're gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us."

Did Obama Draw a ‘Road Map’ for the IRS to Target Tea Party Groups?

By Fred Lucas

President Barack Obama’s rhetoric toward conservative nonprofits inspired the Internal Revenue Service to target Tea Party groups, a broad lawsuit against the IRS alleges.

“The president of the United States gave the IRS a road map to investigate the tea party in the United States,” David French, senior counsel to the conservative American Center for Law and Justice told TheBlaze.

...The ACLJ is representing 41 Tea Party and patriot groups from 22 states, claiming the IRS committed unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination by blocking or delaying their applications for tax exempt status. The suit does not name Obama as a co-defendant, but includes him in the narrative of what led to the alleged abuses from the agency.

...The plaintiffs’ complaint states: “The White House, congressional Democrats and the liberal media increasingly criticized the IRS for allowing conservative groups to exercise their First Amendment rights as tax exempt organizations and demanding that for those groups, the IRS should adopt more rigorous standards than applied to, for example, the Barack H. Obama Foundation.”

It continues, “IRS employees, including political employees to the IRS, eager to please their benefactors or kindred spirits forced plaintiffs applications into a Byzantine process, harassed them and systematically deprived them of their right to engage in constitutionally protected speech.”

Emails: White House, State Department coordinated with journalist on national security leaks

By Patrick Howley

White House

and State Department officials cooperated extensively on background with a New York Times journalist during the period that he broke confidential national security information in a series of leaks that prompted outrage from lawmakers, according to unearthed 2011 and 2012 emails.
The nonprofit organization Freedom Watch, which obtained the internal State Department emails through a Freedom of Information Act request, believes that the Obama

administration carried out the leaks to bolster a tough image for itself on Iran.

The Air Force as Taxi Service

By Victor Keith
Congress is closing down Thursday to attend the funeral of Representative C.W. Bill Young, a Republican from Florida who passed away October 18, 2013. Now many may not mind that Congress is closing for a day because, firstly, we are used to paying them for doing nothing and, secondly, the less work they do, the less damage to the country they cause.
What should bother most taxpayers, however, is that the Air Force is going to provide transportation for members of Congress to fly them all to Florida to attend the services. Defense Department spokesmen could not comment on what the costs of this operation would be.
So it seems, even while bemoaning the increasing national debt and out-of-control spending, Congress is still incapable of reaching into their own pockets to pay their personal bills.

If Money is Property

By Michael Bargo, Jr.

...If this entire discussion seems rather tedious, it is only because government, and in particular the federal government, has entangled its administrative power with Constitutional corruption to enable themselves to dominate America's social and political fabric. The tendency of governments to seize property without court hearings is one of the three abuses of individual rights that motivated the Fifth Amendment. As government grows and encroaches upon individual rights there is no doubt that while it may not yet be able to seize property without due process, every day more regulations are written by the Obama Administration that allow it to seize money without due process.
Legal foundations should take it upon themselves to challenge federal administrative guidelines and bring this issue to the Supreme Court. If the time ever comes when money is defined as property by the Supreme Court bureaucratic powers will be greatly weakened. The government's ability to seize the wealth of Americans and transfer it to themselves will be severely curtailed.

Broke U.S. Resumes Spending

By John Stossel
What would you think of a person who earned $24,000 a year but spent $35,000? Suppose on top of that, he was already $170,000 in debt. You'd tell him to get his act together -- stop spending so much or he'd destroy his family, impoverish his kids and wreck their future. Of course, no individual could live so irresponsibly for long.
But tack on eight more zeroes to that budget and you have the checkbook for our out-of-control, big-spending federal government.
Yet when Congress and President Obama agreed on a deal last week to raise the debt ceiling and resume government spending, people reacted as if a disaster was averted -- instead of reacting as if a disaster had resumed. It has. And it continues.

Curing Majority Faction Mischief

By Robert Weissberg
As the recent federal "shutdown" and the possibility of Washington defaulting on its debt fade into history, the chattering class turns to preventing future similar crises. The consensus is that "something is broken" (usually thanks to the demonic Tea Partiers) and therefore should be fixed. Nothing is broken; today's critics just need some history lessons regarding the U.S. Constitution and how far current political understandings have strayed from what our Constitution permits.
The Constitution was never designed to facilitate curing the ills of society -- creating a government to feed the hungry, heal the sick, and otherwise march to Utopia on the installment plan. The pursuit of such lofty aims is not explicitly forbidden; rather, those admirable aims are not the Constitution's paramount purpose. If the Founders wanted a government capable of fixing our ills by decree they would have instituted an absolute monarchy and then hoped for the best.

PK'S NOTE: I'm beginning to think this is the way to go. We've given it two elections already.

Will a New Republican Party Please Stand Up?

By Kathleen Gotto
...All three branches of the federal government have seized our inheritance to the point where now we citizens are the ones who support and defend the Constitution, and career politicians and judges are destroying what is left of it.
It is indisputable that the Republican Party offers no united opposition to the tyrannical Left. Indeed, in the recent government shutdown fiasco, Republican senators repudiated their fellow House Republicans and stood against them with the Democrats. That action was a slap in the face to not just those Republicans trying to rein in the Left's disastrous fiscal policies, but to all Americans who are concerned about the socialist agenda that is destroying our nation. The question before us is what to do about it.
...There are two major schools of thought on what should be done. One is to change the Republican Party from within. However, the Establishment members have been so long entrenched in their power positions that there is no way they will just move aside and let the conservative members assume positions of leadership in the party.
...Many people evince abject fear that third parties will only split the vote and hand victory to the Democrats. But we need to ask ourselves if the end result of a split vote is any different from the result of millions of voters staying away from the polls? More voters will continue to stay away if they are not offered a candidate who has strong conservative values.
...Would there be risks in establishing a third party? Of course. We may lose an election or two until a New Republican Party becomes established. However, by that time the old Republican Party may very well have become the third party. That can happen if we unite, rise up, and help it meet its destiny on the rag heap of history.
Let it sink in: We are not going to change the Republican Party. We need a New Republican Party that represents millions of Americans all across this country. We don't have such a party now. A New Republican Party name acknowledges what the old party once stood for and what a new party will uphold. It comprises both name recognition and name differentiation, and throws down the gauntlet to the status quo and inertia facing us. This is not just a political issue, but one that touches our very existence and fundamental freedoms.
...If we conservatives can honestly acknowledge that we are on the ropes and have nowhere else to go, that can be the first step to change. It is either allow Establishment Republicans to continue leading us by the nose, or come out swinging with all we've got, come hell or high water.

Blaze Sources: Obama Purging Military Commanders

By Sara Carter

Nine senior commanding generals have been fired by the Obama administration this year, leading to speculation by active and retired members of the military that a purge of its commanders is underway.

Retired generals and current senior commanders that have spoken with TheBlaze say the administration is not only purging the military of commanders they don’t agree with, but is striking fear in the hearts of those still serving.

...“Obama will not purge a civilian or political appointee because they have bought into Obama’s ideology,” Vallely said. “The White House protects their own. That’s why they stalled on the investigation into fast and furious, Benghazi and Obamacare. He’s intentionally weakening and gutting our military, Pentagon and reducing us as a superpower, and anyone in the ranks who disagrees or speaks out is being purged.”

Rumor Check: Has Saudi Arabia Really Severed Ties with the U.S.?

By Dave Urbanski

A recent Daily Mail piece notes, “Saudi Arabia severs diplomatic ties with US over response to conflict in Syria.”

But while relations appear strained, it looks as though diplomatic ties haven’t been severed just yet.

According to a Reuters article, ”Saudi Arabia warns of shift away from U.S. over Syria, Iran,” which the Daily Mail bases its headline on. Saudi Arabia’s intelligence chief says the longtime U.S. ally will initiate a “major shift” in relations with the U.S. in protest of perceived inaction regarding Syria’s civil war and recent U.S. discussions with Iran, according to a source close to Saudi policy.

What Isn't Racist? According to the Media, Nothing

By Ben Shapiro
...Charges of racism have echoed from nearly every left-leaning mouth of late. Opposition to Obamacare: racist. Opposition to President Obama on the shutdown: racist. Don't like the president's tie-shirt combination? Racist.
This is not what Americans were promised. What's worse, it's un-American drivel. Ascribing racial motives to those who have none has become a near pathological condition among those on the left who cannot come to terms that their beloved leader's second term is a policy disaster. Racism is the last bullet in the leftist arsenal. And they're running out of ammo quickly.

Race-Hustling Results: Part II

By Thomas Sowell
...But that is no reason why the Washington Redskins should succumb to those pressures.
Among the reasons why they should not is the fact that being offended is one of the tactics of a race hustling industry that is doing more harm to Indians and other minorities than any name is likely to do. Some people are in the business of being offended, just as Campbell is in the business of making soup.
...So long as the race industry -- the Al Sharptons, Jesse Jacksons, and their counterparts in various minorities -- can get political or financial mileage out of being offended, they are going to be offended. The only thing that will put a stop to this racket is refusing to be taken in by it or intimidated by it.
...Young blacks are especially susceptible to the message that all their problems are caused by white people -- and that white society is never going to give them a chance. In short, they are primed to resent and hate individuals they have never seen before and who have never done a thing to them.

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