When a reporter arrived at the Democratic campaign office of Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper to pick up copies of the candidate’s income tax records, already released to other more friendly news agencies, he was escorted from the building and threatened with arrest.
A very detailed and accurate description of the disaster that is Obamacare. Key sentence:
Over the next couple of years, I will lose my doctor, I will lose my plan and my healthcare costs will increase.
Read it all, and remember that this disaster is coming to all of us in the coming years. Note also that just because the Obama administration is delaying the release of next year’s ballooning health insurance premiums until just after the election does not require us to be stupid and to make believe these increases aren’t going to happen. They are, because the design of Obamacare rations treatment, imposes unneeded costs on everyone, and stifles the free market (which is the best tool for keeping costs down).
And then there’s this: “Grim milestone: Semi-retired president plays 200th round of golf in office.”
Finding out what’s in it: Health insurance premiums in Iowa and Louisiana will go up from 9 to almost 20 percent next year because of Obamacare.
We know about these brutal increases because state regulators have released the information. Meanwhile, on the Obamacare website the 2015 premiums are being kept secret until after the election. I wonder why.
The most transparent administration ever: The EPA has admitted that text messages demanded in a lawsuit, which the agency is required by law to retain, have been lost.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) told a federal court that it may have lost the text messages at the center of a lawsuit by a libertarian think tank.The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) sued the EPA last year in federal court to compel the release of text messages to and from Administrator Gina McCarthy and her predecessor under the Freedom of Information Act. In the Tuesday filing to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, Justice Department lawyers representing the EPA said the agency will soon file a notice that it may have misplaced records that it was legally required to retain.
It seems pretty clear that the Obama administration has decided to follow the same playbook with all its many scandals: stonewall and coverup, legally or illegally.
Finding out what’s in it: Thirteen states plus the District of Columbia are expected to force the cancellation of hundreds of thousands of health care policies just before the November elections because they are not in compliance with ObamaCare.
In coming weeks, 13 states and the District of Columbia plan to cancel such policies, which generally fall out of compliance with the Affordable Care Act because they don’t offer the level of coverage the law requires. Virginia will be hardest hit, with 250,000 policies expected to be canceled. And because federal law requires a 60-day notice of any plan changes, voters will be notified no later than November 1, right before the Nov. 4 midterms.Many of those forced out of their current plans and into ObamaCare may not be able to keep their doctors. They also could face higher deductibles and out-of-pocket expenses, making ObamaCare an election issue on the eve of voting.
But we all know none of this is possible because Obama promised us multiple times that “If you like your plan you get to keep your plan. Period.” And everything Obama and every Democrat says is always true!
Working for the Democratic Party: The IRS has begun an audit of an anti-Obamacare filmmaker, even as it proceeds with audits of other consevatives.
Logan Clements, producer of “Sick and Sicker: ObamaCare Canadian Style,” announced via press release Tuesday that he is being audited for the first time ever. The news comes one month after the conservative Breitbart News announced that it, too, was being audited and that the action was probably politically motivated. Mr. Clements‘ movie makes the case that Obamacare will eventually lead to socialized medicine like Canada.
Remember, Obama claimed there wasn’t a “smidgeon of corruption” surrounding the IRS. And of course, we all believe everything this Democratic politician says!
Another late night raid of a citizen’s home, based on the lies of a drug user, has resulted in the death of that innocent citizen.
The police entered the home without knocking or identifying themselves. Their warrant apparently required them to knock first. The home had been burglered two nights earlier by the drug user, so the homeowner’s were understandably on edge.
This is nothing more than murder. It is also unconstitutional. Every police SWAT team in the nation should be dismantled now. We managed for 200 years without them, and can do so again.
Finding out what’s in it: Walmart is dropping health insurance for its part time workers because of Obamacare.
Starting Jan. 1, Wal-Mart told The Associated Press that it will no longer offer health insurance to employees who work less than an average of 30 hours a week. The move, which would affect 30,000 employees, follows similar decisions by Target, Home Depot and others to eliminate health insurance benefits for part-time employees.
This is only a sampling of what is beginning to happen throughout private industry. If companies aren’t cutting hours to less than 30 for many employees so they don’t have to provide Obamacare, they are cutting their total staff to less than 50 to exempt themselves from the law. And they are doing it not because they want to but because they have to. If they don’t, the cost of Obamacare will bankrupt them.
Of course, it is also bankrupting the individuals who now have to find their own insurance and quickly find they can’t afford health insurance as offered by Obamacare.
But remember, the Democrats and Obama care! So what they are idiots and wrote a law that does nothing but harm. We must vote for them anyway because they care!
The uncertainty of science: A new NASA study finds that the deep oceans have not warmed since 2005, striking dead one of the favorite theories of global warming advocates to explain the 18 year stall in global warming.
In the 21st century, greenhouse gases have continued to accumulate in the atmosphere, just as they did in the 20th century, but global average surface air temperatures have stopped rising in tandem with the gases. The temperature of the top half of the world’s oceans — above the 1.24-mile mark — is still climbing, but not fast enough to account for the stalled air temperatures.
Many processes on land, air and sea have been invoked to explain what is happening to the “missing” heat. One of the most prominent ideas is that the bottom half of the ocean is taking up the slack, but supporting evidence is slim. This latest study is the first to test the idea using satellite observations, as well as direct temperature measurements of the upper ocean. Scientists have been taking the temperature of the top half of the ocean directly since 2005, using a network of 3,000 floating temperature probes called the Argo array.
“The deep parts of the ocean are harder to measure,” said JPL’s William Llovel, lead author of the study published Sunday in the journal Nature Climate Change. “The combination of satellite and direct temperature data gives us a glimpse of how much sea level rise is due to deep warming. The answer is — not much.”
The bottom line: no one really knows what is going on, climate scientists still do not have a good handle on how the climate works, the science is not “settled”, and anyone who says it is is a liar.
The Texas judge who visited the infected apartment of America’s first ebola victim without protection has now had a complaint filed against him for endangering his own 9-year-old daughter.
The concerned citizen reached out to Breitbart Texas in a phone interview and provided information about his complaint to [Child Protective Services]. He told Brietbart Texas he wanted to remain anonymous because he is a business owner and is concerned about retaliation. He said he felt Jenkins’ conduct was inappropriate and unnecessarily exposed his child to potential danger. “I am doing this because I am concerned about the child,” the complainant said, “and I am concerned for the children in her school who might become exposed if the virus were to spread.”
Read the article at the link. The risks to the judge’s family and their acquaintances are real. Moreover, there is evidence that the judge has spent considerable time in contact with infected locations and individuals, without protection.
But he cares! That absolves him of any guilt should his actions causes others to die!
The uncertainty of science: There has now been no global warming for 18 years, a time period that is more than half the entire satellite temperature record.
The Great Pause is the longest continuous period without any warming in the global instrumental temperature record since the satellites first watched in 1979. It has endured for a little over half the satellite temperature record. Yet the Pause coincides with a continuing, rapid increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration. …
The length of the Great Pause in global warming, significant though it now is, is of less importance than the ever-growing discrepancy between the temperature trends predicted by models and the far less exciting real-world temperature change that has been observed.
If you click on the link you will see quotes from one global warming scientist who, rather than honestly deal with the conflict between theory and data, instead uses name-calling as an argument. He unfortunately is the rule, not the exception.
Left wing fantasies meet the real world: Apropos my previous post about the refusal of the modern intellectual liberal elite to face reality, on Thursday a liberal Democrat Texas judge and two assistants entered the Ebola-infected apartment of America’s first Ebola patient without any protection.
Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins shocked the local press corps Thursday night when he and two female workers entered the apartment where America’s first Ebola patient was staying. He entered without any visible protection from possible exposure to the deadly virus. Judge Jenkins entered the apartment to speak with the occupants who are now being held inside their home under a protection order requiring their compliance. He and two unknown women entered and were not visibly wearing gloves or any kind of mask or other form of protection from the virus.
This idiot and his assistants are now wandering around Dallas, shaking hands at political rallies and possibly spreading the disease far and wide. But it is all okay because he cares for these poor infected blacks and wants to help them. And if you die because of his actions it will only be because you are a raaaaaacist!
And those reasons have less to do with actual problems and more to do with the incompetence of our culture’s intellectual leadership.
Over the last few years the divergence between what the government promises and what it delivers, between what it says is happening or will happen and what actually is happening and does happen, between what it determines to be important and what the public wishes to be important—this gap has become abysmal, unavoidable, inescapable. We hear of “lone-wolf” terrorism, of “workplace violence,” that if you like your plan you can keep your plan. We are told that Benghazi was a spontaneous demonstration, that al Qaeda is on the run, that the border is secure as it has ever been, that Assad must go, that I didn’t draw a red line, the world drew a red line, that the IRS targeting of Tea Party groups involved not a smidgen of corruption, that the Islamic State is not Islamic. We see the government spend billions on websites that do not function, and the VA consign patients to death by waiting list and then cover it up. We are assured that Putin won’t invade; that the Islamic State is the jayvee team of terrorism; that Bowe Bergdahl served with honor and distinction; that there is a ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia.
While the public remains pro-Israel, our government negotiates with Israel’s enemies. While the public wants to reduce immigration, the preeminent legislative objective of both parties is a bill that would increase it. While the public is uninterested in global warming, while costly regulations could not pass a filibuster-proof Democratic Senate, while the scientific consensus behind the green agenda is, at the very least, fraying, the president says that climate change is the greatest threat to the United States. While Americans tell pollsters their economic situation has not improved, and that things are headed in the wrong direction—while even Democratic economists acknowledge the despondent state of the middle class—the president travels to Chicago to celebrate his economic recovery.
These disjunctions and confusions, these missteps, scandals, and miscalculations, have hurt Obama’s approval numbers. They endanger the Democratic Senate majority, contribute to the widespread sense of disorder and decay, shatter trust in government and in public institutions. They have put into stark relief a political class dominated by liberal partisans, captured by ideas and interests removed from those of ordinary Americans. The stories of ineptitude or malfeasance that appear in the daily newspaper are more than examples of high ideals executed poorly. They are examples of the pursuit of ideas—of equality and diversity and progress and centralization and environmentalism and globalization—to absurd and self-destructive limits. [emphasis mine]
Read the whole essay, as I couldn’t have said it better. The incompetence of our intellectual partisan liberal elite, more consumed with pie-in-the-sky leftwing agendas than the real world around them, has become downright frightening. The sooner the general public rejects them, wholly and completely, illustrated by a landslide election, the sooner our society can get back to the business of dealing with the increasingly deadly problems of the real world.
And I call it fascism because that is what it is, the misuse of government force by members of one political party, the Democrats, to harass and destroy the lives of citizens who happen to disagree with them about policy.
“Houses were surrounded and lit up,” O’Keefe said. “Children and spouses were home in multiple cases, and made to suffer through two-and-a-half-hour raiding parties going through all paper files and seizing computers and phones. Children in multiple cases were told they could not inform their schools why they were late.”
After investigators stormed into their homes and rooted through their possessions, the conservative targets and their families suffered the additional insult of the gag order, O’Keefe said. “So a traumatic event is imposed on entire families, and they are told to suck it up, don’t talk to your friends, relatives, ministers, colleagues,” O’Keefe said. “Don’t explain the deputies’ cars, the boxes they took from your house. Don’t allow your children to tell the truth.”
Once again, the only reason these SWAT team searches were done was because the citizens under attack happened to oppose the politics of the propsecutor who ordered them. And if he could have arrested these citizens without trial, I firmly believe he would have.
In a lawsuit settlement Homeland Security has agreed to pay $50,000 and promise to return everything they seized — including confidential files and paperwork that identified Homeland Security whistleblowers –during an illegal raid of a reporter’s home.
Audrey Hudson, an award-winning journalist most recently at the Washington Times, told The Daily Signal she was awoken by her barking dog around 4:30 a.m. on Aug. 6, 2013, to discover armed government agents had descended on her property under the cover of darkness. The agents had a search warrant for her husband’s firearms. As they scoured the home, Hudson was read her Miranda rights.
While inside Hudson’s house, a U.S. Coast Guard agent confiscated documents that contained “confidential notes, draft articles, and other newsgathering materials” that Hudson never intended for anyone else to see. The documents included the identities of whistleblowers at the Department of Homeland Security. The Coast Guard is part of Homeland Security.
The settlement requires the government to return all documents, destroy all notes made from these papers, and promise it did not copy anything. Does anyone believe this?
Posted from Sedona, Arizona, where Diane and I will be for the next week.
Looks like a pattern to me: In a different legal case separate from its harassment of conservatives, the IRS has been accused of wiping more hard drives and destroying more evidence.
In its latest court filing, NetJets claims the IRS has been concealing evidence. Its lawyers say the computers of three key IRS employees were wiped clean, including the computer of “an excise-tax policy manager and a key decision maker regarding the application of the section 4261 ticket tax to whole and fractional aircraft-management companies.”
While the harassment of conservatives was a poltical act apparently instigated by the White House, this case has more to do with IRS managers interpreting the tax code, possibly improperly, so as to squeeze as much money from an American company as possible. That it is also possible that they were also willing to destroy evidence suggests a rampant corrupt culture that needs a major house-cleaning.
We can hope the next Congress will force this house-cleaning after the November election.
Posted on the road passig through Phoenix.
Finding out what’s in it: A new report says that 50,000 people in seven states will have their health insurance plans cancelled in the next month.
This of course is only a small sampling. The disastrous ramifications of Obamacare have only just started.
I wonder if Obama has found out about this. Usually he has to read a newspaper to find out what happens in his administration, and this story is just breaking now.
Another federal court has ruled against an IRS decision to allow Obamacare subsidies in states with federal Obamacare exchanges.
This means that anyone who gets Obamacare using the federal exchange because their state did not set up its own exchange will not be legible for subsidies.
The court was also bluntly critical of the liberal judges who had written dissents trying to defend the IRS ruling, noting that
The role of this Court is to apply the statute as it is written – even if we think some other approach might ‘accor[d] with good policy.’” [Quoting a number of other decisions:] (“This Court has no roving license, in even ordinary cases of statutory interpretation, to disregard clear language simply on the view that . . . Congress ‘must have intended’ something broader.”) (“The power of executing the laws necessarily includes both authority and responsibility to resolve some questions left open by Congress that arise during the law’s administration. But it does not include a power to revise clear statutory terms that turn out not to work in practice.”).
This badly written law, forced down our throats by Obama and the Democratic Party, is going to do significant harm to many people now, because they will not get subsidies for their health insurance and the law itself forces the price for that health insurance to skyrocket to prices they cannot afford.
All the more reason to vote for Democrats in November, not because they have any brains or have demonstrated even the slightest ability to write laws, but merely because they care! All that other stuff is irrelevant!
Does this make you feel safer? President Obama routinely misses 60% of his intelligence briefings.
A new Government Accountability Institute (GAI) report reveals that President Barack Obama has attended only 42.1% of his daily intelligence briefings (known officially as the Presidential Daily Brief, or PDB) in the 2,079 days of his presidency through September 29, 2014. The GAI report also included a breakdown of Obama’s PDB attendance record between terms; he attended 42.4% of his PDBs in his first term and 41.3% in his second.
The GAI’s alarming findings come on the heels of Obama’s 60 Minutes comments on Sunday, wherein the president laid the blame for the Islamic State’s (ISIS) rapid rise squarely at the feet of his Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. “I think our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that I think they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria,” said Obama.
According to Daily Beast reporter Eli Lake, members of the Defense establishment were “flabbergasted” by Obama’s attempt to shift blame. “Either the president doesn’t read the intelligence he’s getting or he’s bullshitting,” a former senior Pentagon official “who worked closely on the threat posed by Sunni jihadists in Syria and Iraq” told the Daily Beast.
This data, coupled with numerous reports showing that the intelligence community was quite clear about the threat of ISIS for years, illustrates how uninformed our President has been about these matters. Worse, it once again proves how willing he is to blame someone else for his own failures.
The law is for the little people: A recent ACLU audit finds that the TSA routinely gives a pass to government employees and politicians while blacklisting ordinary citizens.
Meanwhile, conservative writers are quickly put on the terrorist watch list. That’s keeping us safe TSA!
