Year: 2013

Unnamed healthcare officials admit that the Obama administration specifically wrote the Obamacare regulations so that millions would have to lose their healthcare plan.

7:35 pm

He lied: Unnamed healthcare officials admit that the Obama administration specifically wrote the Obamacare regulations so that millions would have to lose their healthcare plan.

Buried in Obamacare regulations from July 2010 is an estimate that because of normal turnover in the individual insurance market, “40 to 67 percent” of customers will not be able to keep their policy. And because many policies will have been changed since the key date, “the percentage of individual market policies losing grandfather status in a given year exceeds the 40 to 67 percent range.”

That means the administration knew that more than 40 to 67 percent of those in the individual market would not be able to keep their plans, even if they liked them.

Yet President Obama, who had promised in 2009, “if you like your health plan, you will be able to keep your health plan,” was still saying in 2012, “If [you] already have health insurance, you will keep your health insurance.”

These regulations were written in the executive branch, which is the complete responsibility of Obama. So, the agency he controls wrote regulations they knew would force the cancellation of millions of healthcare plans, and Obama went around the country lying about it. It is as simple as that.

But remember! Obama and the Democrats forced a government shutdown so Obamacare would go into effect now. Shouldn’t we all be grateful?

Update: The quote above is from the original version of the story. The article itself disappeared from the web on Monday night and then reappeared at a new url (which I have linked to above) with some changes to some paragraphs, none of which did much to change the essential content.

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Sierra Nevada provides an update on the condition of its Dream Chaser test vehicle after this weekend’s glide flight and bad landing.

7:06 pm

Sierra Nevada provides an update on the condition of its Dream Chaser test vehicle after this weekend’s glide flight and bad landing.

SNC has not yet decided whether to repair the Dream Chaser test craft, which does not use the same landing gear the orbital vehicle would use. Investigating what went wrong will take “a couple of weeks,” Sirangelo estimated. He said the vehicle, which is now in a hangar in Mojave, Calif., was “fully intact” after the crash.

“The pressure vessel was completely pristine, the computers are still working, there was no damage to the crew cabin or flight systems,” Sirangelo said. “I went inside it myself and it was perfectly fine. There was some damage from skidding.

“We learned everything we wanted to on this test, and learned more than we expected to learn,” Sirangelo said. “We believe we’ve got most of the data we need [but] I can’t honestly say, I just don’t know yet. It’s not going to affect our schedule in the long term [but] It might affect whether we do another free flight test this year or next year. We’re still assessing that.”

The company also claims that the flight met the requirements of a $15 million NASA milestone payment, since the goals of the flight were to test the vehicle’s flight capabilities, not its landing gear. (The failed landing gear used will not be the gear used on the final flight vehicle.)

They have scheduled a press conference for tomorrow. Stay tuned.

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Lockheed Martin successfully powered up the first Orion capsule last week.

7:00 pm

Lockheed Martin successfully powered up the first Orion capsule last week.

During the test, operators in the Test Launch and Control Center (TLCC) introduced software scripts to the crew module’s main control computers via thousands of wires and electrical ground support equipment. During this process, the foundational elements, or the “heart and brains” of the entire system were evaluated. The main computers received commands from the ground, knew where to send them, read the data from different channels, and successfully relayed electrical responses back to the TLCC. The crew module power systems will continue to undergo testing for six months as additional electronics are added to the spacecraft.

It is a good thing that NASA has finally gotten this far with this very expensive capsule. However, pay no attention to their claims that the capsule “is capable of taking humans farther into space than they’ve ever gone before.” Any long journey it takes will be quite limited in scope. Humans can’t really travel beyond lunar orbit in just a capsule. You need a real interplanetary spaceship for that, and Orion does not fit this bill.

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Why governments can’t do it

10:46 am

A government official today unwittingly revealed a fundamental and unpleasant truth about how governments: operate. In an interview today, the head of India’s space agency denied that his country is in a space race with anyone.

Mr. Radhakrishnan, Secretary in the Department of Space and Chairman of Space Commission, said each country — whether it’s India, the US, Russia or China — had their own priorities.

“There is no race with anybody. If you look at anybody, they have their own direction. So, I don’t find a place for race with somebody. But I would say we are always on race with ourselves to excel in areas that we have chalked out for ourselves,” he told PTI here in an interview.

How typical. By denying the reality of the competition that India is part of Mr. Radhakrishnan illustrates for me and everyone once again the basic reason all government efforts eventually fail.
» Read more

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The 13 Democratic Senators up for re-election in 2014 who voted for Obamacare, both in 2009 and last month.

10:43 pm

The 13 Democratic senators up for re-election in 2014 who voted for Obamacare, both in 2009 and last month.

Here are the Dirty Baker’s Dozen:

  • Mark Begich (Alaska)
  • Mark Pryor (Arkansas)
  • Mark Udall (Colorado)
  • Mary Landrieu (Louisiana)
  • Al Franken (Minnesota)
  • Max “Trainwreck” Baucus (Montana)
  • Jeanne Shaheen (New Hampshire)
  • Tom Udall (New Mexico)
  • Kay Hagan (North Carolina)
  • Jeff Merkeley (Oregon)
  • Tim Johnson (South Dakota)
  • Mark Warner (Virginia)
  • Jay Rockefeller (West Virginia)

It is time for these politicians to find other work.

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Half a million Californians to lose their health insurance because of Obamacare.

5:19 pm

Half a million Californians to lose their health insurance because of Obamacare.

We are learning now that Obamacare was very specifically designed to eliminate many health insurance plans, especially the ones that cost less and provided fewer benefits (the kinds of plans that young, healthy people prefer). Considering the blatant promise by Obama, repeated over and over again before Obamacare was passed, that if people liked their plan they would get to keep it, these appalling numbers and the fact that Obamacare is very clearly designed to eliminate these low-cost plans, Obama either knew his statement was an outright lie, or he is truly one of the most incompetent presidents ever.

In the first case he was dishonest and corrupt, intending to force a change that people did not want. In the second, Obama was pushing for the passage of a law to which he literally had no understanding. I’m not sure which is worse.

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In its first free flying glide test, the Dream Chaser engineering test vehicle had a perfect flight and approach to landing but flipped over on the runway when its left land gear failed to deploy.

3:43 pm

In its first free flying glide test, the Dream Chaser engineering test vehicle had a perfect flight and approach to landing but flipped over on the runway when its left land gear failed to deploy.

I haven’t yet found any post landing images, nor any information about damage to the test vehicle. This is the kind of tragic failure that sometimes kills a project. The vehicle, operating unmanned, performed quite well actually, flying freely and gliding to the runway as planned. The failure of the one landing gear to deploy is a relatively easy engineering fix. However, the failure could cost a fortune, money the company might not have, if it requires the construction of an entire new test vehicle.

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The Washington Times is preparing to take legal action in connection with the raid of a reporter’s home by government officials.

8:20 am

The Washington Times is preparing to take legal action in connection with the raid of a reporter’s home by government officials.

The warrant was narrowly written to limit the raid to a search for weapons owned by the reporter’s husband. Instead, the raiders carefully picked through the reporter’s files and took those pertaining to her stories about the TSA. The man in charge of this search also happened to be a former TSA employee who apparently had a direct interest in those files.

That her private files were seized, says Mrs. Hudson [the reporter], is particularly disturbing because of interactions that she and her husband had during the search of their home, as well as months afterwards, with Coast Guard investigator Miguel Bosch. According to his profile on the networking site LinkedIn, Mr. Bosch worked at the Federal Air Marshal Service from April 2001 through November 2007.

It was Mr. Bosch, Mrs. Hudson says, who asked her during the Aug. 6 search if she was the same Audrey Hudson who had written the air marshal stories. It was also Mr. Bosch, she says, who phoned Mr. Flanagan a month later to say that documents taken during the search had been cleared.

During the call, according Mrs. Hudson, Mr. Bosch said the files had been taken to make sure that they contained only “FOIA-able” information and that he had circulated them to the Transportation Security Administration, which oversees the Federal Air Marshal Service, in order to verify that “it was legitimate” for her to possess such information.

“Essentially, the files that included the identities of numerous government whistleblowers were turned over to the same government agency and officials who they were exposing for wrongdoing,” Mrs. Hudson said.

In other words, Bosch used the search to obtain the files so that the TSA could identify Mrs. Hudson’s sources within the agency. Expect those individuals to be punished in the coming years, for the crime of telling the truth about America’s KGB.

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