A man in Ohio is arrested for the crime of having an empty hidden compartment in his car.
Read the story and weep for the death of freedom and individual rights.
The Washington Times and the journalist whose confidential files were taken illegally during a house search on an unrelated matter are suing Homeland Security.
The suit is also demanding that they be allowed depose the Homeland Security agent “who attended the raid and was involved in collecting the reporter’s materials to determine how widely information from the newspaper’s documents was distributed within the government.” That agent appeared to be on a fishing expedition to get these files, containing the names of several Homeland whistle-blowers, and then pass that information along to higher-ups in the agency.
The law is such an inconvenient thing: The Obama administration has delayed next year’s enrollment deadline under Obamacare.
Some of the buzz about this delay is that it pushes it to after the elections. This isn’t significant, and might even be worse for the Democrats, as everyone will still find out about the higher premiums just before the election. What is significant is how nonchalant this administration is about rewriting legislation without going through Congress. I thought Obamacare was the “law of the land” and that the Republicans were terrorists, racists, and bomb-throwers for suggesting changes during the government shutdown debate in October. Yet, Obama and the Democrats see nothing wrong with his administration rewriting laws at his whim, without getting the law changed by Congress.
In other words, the Republicans were not only right about the disaster that is Obamacare, they have been trying to fix it the correct and legal way.
The essay here is focused on what makes Obamacare politically different — and quite deadly for its supporters.
Working for the Democratic Party: In undercover tapes, the communications director of Enroll America, an organization that helps sign people up for Obamacare, is seen agreeing to help get confidential personal data of enrollees so that it can be used for political purposes.
From the beginning I have always thought the most vile aspect of Obamacare was how it made your private and personal medical records available to hordes of government workers in multiple government agencies, a situation that is very vulnerable to corruption and abuse. Not surprisingly, it hasn’t taken long for Project Veritas to uncover such political corruption.
Finding out what’s in it: It ain’t your doctor!
As Americans have begun shopping for health plans on the insurance exchanges, they are discovering that insurers are restricting their choice of doctors and hospitals in order to keep costs low, and that many of the plans exclude top-rated hospitals. The Obama administration made it a priority to keep down the cost of insurance on the exchanges, the online marketplaces that are central to the Affordable Care Act. But one way that insurers have been able to offer lower rates is by creating networks that are far smaller than what most Americans are accustomed to.
In other words, because of Obamacare, you will either have to pay for your doctor up front and without any help from insurance, or you won’t be able to keep your doctor at all. So much for that promise.
The day of reckoning looms: The federal budget deficit for October was “only” $91 billion.
The AP article makes a big deal about how much lower this deficit is compared to past Octobers, but at this level, we would still have an annual deficit over $1 trillion. Even it ends up as half that, the numbers are still terrible.
The budget deal that ended the government shutdown ends on January 15. Be prepared for another shutdown. I expect some Republicans are going to once again tie that shutdown to repealing Obamacare.
Thugs: A father is arrested merely because he wants to pick up his kids from school and walk home with them.
Watch the video below the fold. It ends with the police officer physically hitting the person with the camera.
I can think of no sane reason why a school would not release this man’s children to him. What difference does it make whether he leaves on foot or in a car?
» Read more
Good enough for government work: The Pentagon has for years routinely been doctoring its budget numbers, and has no idea where billions of its money is going.
In its investigation, Reuters has found that the Pentagon is largely incapable of keeping track of its vast stores of weapons, ammunition and other supplies; thus it continues to spend money on new supplies it doesn’t need and on storing others long out of date. It has amassed a backlog of more than half a trillion dollars in unaudited contracts with outside vendors; how much of that money paid for actual goods and services delivered isn’t known. And it repeatedly falls prey to fraud and theft that can go undiscovered for years, often eventually detected by external law enforcement agencies.
The Obamacare website apparently has security flaws so significant that experts are afraid to describe them.
Kennedy, a former U.S. Marine Corps cyber-intelligence analyst, presented a 17-page report describing the problems to the House Science, Space and Technology Committee. It does not go into specifics in some areas, he said, because that could provide criminals with a blueprint for launching attacks. … “There is a lot of stuff that we are not publicly disclosing because of the criticality of the findings,” Kennedy said. “We don’t want to hurt people.” When asked to describe the severity of the threat that they posed to the public, he said it was a “critical risk.”
Does this make you feel safer? The Homeland Security employee who runs a website that calls for the the mass murder of whites has still not been fired.
Kimathi, using the online nom de guerre “the Irritated Genie,” called for “ethnic cleansing” of “black-skinned Uncle Tom race traitors” on his website, which envisioned a massive race war on the horizon. “In order for Black people to survive the 21st century, we are going to have to kill a lot of whites—more than our Christian hearts can possibly count,” he wrote.
In other postings, he warned that whites and their enablers like President Obama are trying to “homosexualize” black men in order to make them weaker, and suggested that a woman’s primary role in life should be to “keep a strong Black man happy.” He also seemed to hold anti-Semitic views, claiming in a Facebook post that his website was under attack from a conspiracy of “zionist smallhats, the Uncle Tom koons,” and, naturally, “the haters.”
Working for the Democratic Party: Newly released emails provide more evidence that IRS official Lois Lerner was lying when she said the IRS scandal was confined to the low-level employees in Cincinnati.
An IRS official blasted Lois Lerner for her attempt to blame the agency’s targeting scandal on low-level employees in Cincinnati, according to newly released emails. “Cincinnati wasn’t publicly ‘thrown under the bus’ (but) instead was hit by a convoy of Mack trucks,” wrote Cindy Thomas, former director of the IRS exempt organizations office in Cincinnati, in a May 10, 2013 email to Lerner obtained by the House Ways and Means Committee.
Thomas wrote the email on the very day that the IRS targeting scandal broke when Lerner, a senior agency official based in Washington, D.C., admitted that her exempt organizations division engaged in improper targeting of conservative groups.
The truth was that the low-level employees in Cincinnati were getting their orders to harass conservatives from high up the chain in Washington.
Working for the Democratic Party: The Census Bureau apparently faked the unemployment numbers prior to the 2012 election to make it appear more people were employed.
In the home stretch of the 2012 presidential campaign, from August to September, the unemployment rate fell sharply — raising eyebrows from Wall Street to Washington. The decline — from 8.1 percent in August to 7.8 percent in September — might not have been all it seemed. The numbers, according to a reliable source, were manipulated.
And the Census Bureau, which does the unemployment survey, knew it. Just two years before the presidential election, the Census Bureau had caught an employee fabricating data that went into the unemployment report, which is one of the most closely watched measures of the economy. And a knowledgeable source says the deception went beyond that one employee — that it escalated at the time President Obama was seeking reelection in 2012 and continues today.
An excellent article on what is probably one of the worst photo-ops ever attempted by a political campaign. My one disagreement is how the article focuses on how silly Dukakis looked in the helmet. This wasn’t what made the photo-op a disaster. What really made it fail was how absurd it was for him to think that riding in a tank would make people forget his deep and longstanding opposition to the military. Watch the Reagan campaign’s response ad, which used the tank ride to point this out. This is what made the photo-op a failure.
An Obamacare supporter begins to see the light.
None of the surprising disasters he describes should have been a surprise to him, but for the fact that he likely considered any criticism in 2010 of Obama or Obamacare by his conservative friends pure racism and not worth listening to. Thus, he never heard them tell him that these disasters were exactly what was going to happen.
Will he change his voting allegiances come November? I doubt it. Too many of the liberal voters I have met in my life are downright bigoted when it comes to politics. To them, Democrats are “the good people who protect the weak and poor” while Republicans are “the evil racists who want to starve little children.” With this simplistic view of the world, they are generally unable to consider the possibility that they have this wrong.
The House, with 39 Democrats voting yes, today passed its “You can keep your plan If you like it” bill.
Where is the damn Republican Obamacare repeal bill? After the 2010 elections they introduced and voted on one. Why not re-introduce it now?
So, when does Ted Cruz get his apology?
Cruz, recognizing that Obamacare is a disaster, tried to stop it. The Democrats, in love with Obamacare and oblivious to its impending problems, fought back and forced the government shutdown rather than agree to any of Cruz’s proposals. At the same time, Cruz was called all kinds of names by people on both the left and the right. (Consider John McCain, who was vicious in his attacks on Cruz but now is calling for a full repeal of Obamacare.)
Cruz was right however. Obamacare is a disaster. It must be repealed. And the Democrats must be forced to agree or pay the penalty at the ballot box.
Good news! Obama announces he will veto any bill that changes Obamacare, including the “Keep your plan” offers from both parties in Congress.
For once I agree whole-heartedly with Obama. The bills in Congress now are foolish, and only serve to make Obamacare more permanent and even more flawed. Let us have a full repeal, and let him veto that. At least then the next election will be on this issue, clearly.
And in related news, Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) states that he is going to introduce repeal legislation.
It appears state insurance regulators are also telling Obama to go to hell with his lawless announcement that the parts of Obamacare causing him political troubles are temporarily suspended.
Commissioner Mike Kreidler said Thursday he won’t allow insurance companies to extend their old policies that didn’t meet the requirements of federal health care reform. An estimated 290,000 Washington residents have received notices that their old insurance policies will be canceled. “Trying to do what the president has proposed would be very disruptive to the insurance market in the state of Washington so no, we will not be allowing insurance companies to extend these policies,” he said. “You’d have to go back and re-rate all of the policies, and the premises for what they originally proposed rates would all change.”
That is Washington. Arkansas has also issued a similar ruling.
I repeat: The Republicans should introduce today a bill to repeal Obamacare in full.
Update: “Insurers are furious about the White House’s new Obamacare plan.”
“The lawlessness of Obamacare, root and branch.”
The author details one by one the numerous lawless aspects of this law and the administration that created it, illustrating bluntly that, as damaging as Obamacare is to the health insurance industry, it has been far more harmful to the rule of law and the American system of justice and Constitutional government.
Weep for our country if Obamacare stands.
Surprise, surprise! Insurance companies are already saying that they cannot go along with Obama’s decision to suspend the cancellation of insurance policies.
As stated by an insurance representative:
This a new insanity.
I do not know how the insurance carriers and federal government are going to be dealing with this. First, many states require a 60-day notice of a change in plan or a cancellation. It’s November 15! How can they comply with this new element of federal law, and with their state laws?
As I said, if I was an insurance company I would continue to simply follow Obamacare as written. This action carries the least legal risk.
Which means Obama’s proposal today is mere show and will accomplish nothing. The Democrats remain politically exposed. If the Republicans had any brains, they would move now to propose a full repeal of Obamacare.
Does this make you feel safer? A GAO report has found no evidence that TSA personnel can spot terrorists at airport checkpoints.
The law is such an inconvenient thing: With a wave of his hand, Obama today has declared that insurance companies need not cancel policies forbidden under Obamacare.
In remarks at the White House today, Obama said, “I completely get how upsetting this can be” lose insurance plans that I promised Americans would be able to keep. “To those Americans, I hear you loud and clear.”
But there’s a catch with president’s proposed solution. The president is not proposing that the law be changed to allow all health insurance plans grandfathered into Obamacare’s eligibility requirements.
No, instead the White House is saying that it will use “enforcement discretion” to allow illegal health insurance plans to be able to still be sold. That is, the Obama administration will not enforce the penalty on individuals for not having eligible health insurance plans and they’ll allow the insurance companies to still sell so-called bad plans — plans they technically can’t sell under Obamacare.
If I was an insurance company I would not take Obama at his word. If they don’t cancel these forbidden policies, they might find the administration coming after them later for not obeying the law.
Also, this action by Obama solves none of the political problems facing the Democratic Party for its creation of Obamacare. Even if it happens, it is merely a one year delay in the cancellation of these policies, which would place their final cancellation to just before next year’s election.
Republican House leader John Boehner in 2010, on the day Obamacare was passed, successfully predicting its every failure and lie since.
It didn’t take clairvoyance to make these predictions, merely a willingness to read the bill and apply common sense.
It wasn’t just Obama: Ten Democrats who repeatedly lied about Obamacare.
Each one made the same false claim that no one would lose their doctor or health plan because of Obamacare.
Obamacare and the unstoppable project.
On multiple occasions over the past 18 years, I have been that IT consultant yelling “Stop!” to a client (sometimes a software developer, sometimes a customer) who very much does not want to hear that. In one instance, the executive vice-president in the charge of the project I had just spent a few months reviewing walked out of the meeting in which I was presenting my findings in order to track down and destroy all copies of the report containing those findings. Likewise, I’ve had a few engagements that have ended abruptly due to my insistence on honesty and reality, but I sleep well at night, so the trade-off is excellent.
Stick around till the end, because the Dilbert cartoon there encapsulates everything we know about how today’s federal government operates: “You should buy twice as much.”
You think their website is bad? The Obama administration has had to issue 254 corrections to its own Obamacare regulations.
The damage wasn’t limited to little-used regulatory language that needed to be fixed of careless mistakes. The medical loss ratio requirement has been hotly debated as a tool to limit insurance companies’ profitability. Billed by The Washington Post as the “provision that terrifies insurers,” the policy forces insurance companies to spend a mandated percentage of patient premiums on patient care in order to keep premiums artificially low. Twenty-four corrections were issued to the Medical Loss Ratio rule alone. Some parts of the regulations were “technically inaccurate and [conflicted] with language elsewhere,” according to Batkins. Some corrections had to be corrected again later on.
The report pointed to the real-world effects of mistakes in the dense regulations, specifically federal officials’ assumption that it would take 28 minutes to complete an online application via the federal exchange, which turned out to be drastically wrong. [emphasis mine]
Remember, the word “regulation” is really about control and power. One entity, the government, gets to regulate the behavior of others. The problem is that this particular government, whether run by Democrats or Republicans, is wholly incompetent.
President Obama’s new big lie.
The article, which outlines why Obama’s claim that all those canceled insurance plans are “substandard” is an outright lie, also had these two paragraphs scream out at me:
Cancer patients whose plans are cancelled are getting whacked the hardest. They are losing access to the specialized cancer hospitals and oncologists treating them. And they will get meager help, if any, paying for innovative cancer drugs that cost thousands of dollars.
The most troubling provision in Obamacare’s Section 1311 gives the Secretary of Health and Human Services blanket authority to control how doctors and hospitals treat patients. This is all in the name of improving “quality.” This could mean everything in medicine.
Ain’t it great how the Democrats have stood by this law from day one?
And then there’s this, “The transportation breakthrough America needs!”
A Republican bill to allow insurance companies to continue to offer their old policies is gaining Democratic support.
This bill once again proves that the Republicans are the stupid party. This bill is a travesty. It will not solve any problems, but will transfer the disaster to the federal budget. Under Obamacare the insurance companies can’t afford those old health plans since Obamacare now requires them to give insurance to everyone, even the sick who do not have insurance. Thus, they need to charge more to pay for those sick customers. If the old plans are forced on them, they will need significant subsidies from somewhere to stay in business, and this bill gives it to them out of the U.S. treasury. Moreover, the bill only adds more complexity and confusion to the whole mess.
If the Republicans had any brains, they would simply demand repeal at this moment. Repeal is the only real solution, so that we can start over and deal intelligently with the problems of the health insurance industry. It is also the smart political move. If the Democrats refuse to cooperate, they once again will be forced to endorse Obamacare as it collapses. If they go along, the Republicans get what the country needs, while winning politically.
And there’s this: It’s a trap!
