Obama continues his Culture of Corruption as Detailed by Michelle Malkin....

The Thuggery of Obamacare Czarina Kathleen Sebelius
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2013
U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius is allergic to the truth. She is the ruthless enforcer of Obamacare’s Jenga tower of lies upon lies upon lies. Now that this fatally flawed government edifice is collapsing, you can expect Sebelius to do what she has done her entire career: blame, bully and pile on more lies.

Three years ago, when insurers and other companies had the audacity to expose Obamacare’s damage to their customers and workers, Sebelius brought out her brass knuckles. Remember? As I reported at the time, the White House coordinated a demonization campaign against Anthem Blue Cross in California for raising rates because of the new mandate’s costs. Obama singled out the company in a “60 Minutes” interview, and Sebelius sent a nasty-gram demanding that Anthem “justify” its rate hikes to the federal government.

A private company trying to survive in the marketplace was forced to “explain” itself to federal bureaucrats and career politicians who have never run a business (successful or otherwise) in their lives. Sebelius went even further. She called on Anthem to provide public disclosure of how the rate increases would be spent — a mandate that no other private companies must follow.

In an even more heavy-handed effort to suppress criticism, Sebelius wrote America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the national association of health insurers, “calling on their members to stop using scare tactics and misinformation to falsely blame premium increases for 2011 on the patient protections in the Affordable Care Act.” The threatening cease-and-desist letter commanded: “I urge you to inform your members that there will be zero tolerance for this type of misinformation and unjustified rate increases. … Simply stated, we will not stand idly by as insurers blame their premium hikes and increased profits on the requirement that they provide consumers with basic protections.”

The speech-stifling gag order declared war on every opponent of Obamacare who dared to question the administration’s phony claims of cost-savings or expanded access. When McDonald’s notified the feds that it might have to cancel health insurance plans for 30,000 workers because of Obamacare’s effective prohibition on low-cost plans, Sebelius slammed The Wall Street Journal for reporting the story. She then rushed to issue McDonald’s an Obamacare waiver, the first of thousands to quell criticism and bleeding.
Health care policy analyst Merrill Matthews points out that Sebelius cracked her whip against health insurer Humana even before the law had passed. When the insurer warned seniors that an Obamacare proposal to cut reimbursements could harm their Medicare Advantage benefits and coverage, Sebelius demanded that the company “suspend potentially misleading mailings to beneficiaries about health care and insurance reform.”

The warning, of course, proved true. In September 2010, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care canceled MA policies covering 22,000 seniors precisely because of Obamacare rules on reimbursements and MA-style plans.

Sebelius’ power-mad partner on Capitol Hill, Henry Waxman, targeted companies including Deere, Caterpillar, Verizon and ATT in a brass-knuckled effort to silence companies speaking out about the cost implications and financial burdens of Obamacare. After the firms reported write-downs related to the Obamacare mandate (disclosures that are required by law), Waxman scheduled an inquisition hearing to berate them publicly. After the Democrats’ own congressional staff pointed out that the companies “acted properly and in accordance with accounting standards” in submitting filings that were required by law, Waxman called off the hounds.


It was a temporary reprieve. Caught with their pants down on the Obamacare website abomination and unable to stifle the cries of millions of Americans who are unable to keep the plans and doctors they like, Sebelius and her corrupt company are now blaming insurers, contractors and customers for the Obama administration’s ideological mess. In short: They lied, but for your own good. Culture of Corruption 101.

It took CNN five years to figure this out! Obama threatens reporters? Really? Oh no, not this president...

CNN Anchor: Obama Threatens Reporters Who Say “Anything Bad” About Him

Ms. Conservative

October 29, 2013 12:18pm PST

According to CNN’s Carol Costello, the Obama Administration tries to get reporters fired for embarrassing the president.

No, this is not a joke.

On CNN last night, Costello said if you make Obama look bad, you can lose your job as a reporter.
She said, “And Will really does have a point. Because I felt it first hand when I was, you know, reporting on the presidential race. I mean President Obama’s people can be quite nasty. They don’t like you to say anything bad about their boss, and they’re not afraid to use whatever means they have at hand to stop you from doing that, including threatening your job.”

I bet not even this blatant, arrogant example of government cronyism will resonate with the Obama Zombies who think that their leader is still the Messiah...

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The Magnificent Failure of www.Healthcare.Gov Gary North - October 28, 2013 The federal government is coercive and incompetent. The public vaguely understands this, although only in theory. People have a difficult time imagining just how incompetent the federal government is, because it is too big to understand. It spends over $3.5 trillion a year. People can understand crony favoritism when we are talking about a few million dollars. This is comprehensible. But crony favoritism on a scale that the federal government is capable of, and is constantly implementing, is beyond anyone's power of comprehension. It is just too large, too complex, and too difficult to trace. In order to get across to people just how rigged the system is, we need representative examples. They have to be clear-cut. They have to be striking. Most of all, they have to gain public attention. They cannot be concealed, or least once they have become public knowledge, there is no way for the government to conceal them. Those of us who believe staunchly in the inherent corruption of big government, long for poster child examples of this corruption. We long for cases so blatantly against the public interest that we can make them examples of the system that operates in Washington, D.C. In what is one of the greatest examples of crony capitalism of my adult life, the main company that produced the incomparable failure known as www.healthcare.gov turns out to have gained its share of the $678 million contract without facing competitive bids. That's right. There were other companies that submitted bids, but those bids were not considered, or so initial reports indicate. Why no bids? We are not told. This kind of thing goes on all the time, but usually it is never discovered. But the website was rolled out as the prime example of President Obama's signature program, which bears his name unofficially: ObamaCare. This program was going to be the deliverance long awaited for by 15 million Americans who did not have healthcare coverage. It went online, and it was dead on arrival: a corpse of government medicine. It died so spectacularly that it became front-page news around the world. It is such a total failure that there is a kind of magnificence about it. Millions of people tried to get in. Millions of people could not get in. Now Congress is conducting an investigation of how this happened, and it turns out, that it happened because it was a sweetheart deal from the get-go. The man who is in charge of the company became an Obama supporter in 2012, I can hardly blame him. His ship came in. Unfortunately, the ship has just sunk in full public view. It is like the capsized cruise ship on its side off the coast of an Italian island in 2012. The site is there, dead in the water, for the whole world to see. It even turns out that a senior executive with the company used to be a classmate at Princeton of Michelle Obama. This may just be a coincidence, but it is to big a coincidence to ignore. So, it got into the headline on Drudge Report. The website that pursued the story contacted the company, and the company stonewalled the reporter. Some low-level PR flak in the company did not understand just how big this story is, and just how dangerous it is to stonewall a reporter. The pathetic flak issued this statement: there would be "nothing coming out of CGI for the record or otherwise today." Any sensible firm would have hired a million-dollar PR firm to deal with damage control. But not CGI. CGI lets a low-level flak issue an inept statement that was guaranteed to get wide coverage. Drudge ran this story as the lead story: the kiss of public relations death. CGI got Lewinskied. From start to finish, or in this case, a non-finish, this story is breathtaking. It will stand as a kind of monument to the crony deals of this government. It will stand as a legendary example of total incompetence. The initial cost $678 million was just the beginning. The repairs may cost more, and still may not work well -- surely not in one month, as promised by the repairman called in to fix it. A story like this only comes along once or twice in a generation. Savor it. Feast on it. It belongs in the textbooks. Let's hope that he gets into the case law curriculum of the Harvard Business School.

Interesting hypothesis here... would 2,000 names pulled from the Boston telephone book have built a better healthcare.org website than the "brilliant" government lackeys that were entrusted with the task?

HealthCare.gov: Hope and Change in Action 

By Marta H. Mossburg
Thursday, October 24, 2013

Instinctively I always agreed with William F. Buckley Jr. that, "I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University." Watching the implosion of HealthCare.gov, I now know it for a fact.

Would those first 2,000 people have the temerity to waste half a billion dollars on an IT infrastructure that doesn't work remotely as advertised and then blame political opposition that had no part in its creation for its failure?

Would those 2,000 say with a straight face that a doubling or in some cases tripling of health insurance premiums is "affordable" for Americans?

Would those 2,000 describe, like White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, the widespread and fatal problems with the Obamacare websites at both the federal and state level as simply a matter of needing to work "more effectively"?

Would those 2,000 force Americans to pay a fine, per the Affordable Care Act, for not signing up for insurance on websites that don't work? Mr. Carney would not answer that question when asked earlier this week.

Would those 2,000 lie about the problems with the websites and hide what went wrong and how long it will take to fix them?

Would those 2,000 decline to say how many people have purchased insurance through the exchanges to date like the president's administration – the one described in a major new report as the most secretive since President Nixon?

Would those 2,000 refuse to hold the person responsible for building and launching the site accountable for its failure?

To put things in perspective, can anyone imagine a website built by North Korea's Kim Jong-un's government operating any worse than HealthCare.gov?

Making matters worse is the media's propensity to bring in political operatives to enlighten American audiences about what has gone wrong and what it's going to take to fix problems instead of people who actually know something about technology.

As the late great liberal columnist Molly Ivins wrote in 1987, "The American press has always had a tendency to assume that the truth must lie exactly halfway between any two opposing points of view. Thus, if the press presents the man who says Hitler is an ogre and the man who says Hitler is a prince, it believes it has done its full measure of journalistic duty."

She's right. No one would hire a political consultant to fix a sink, so why do the major networks incessantly ask people with no quantifiable IT skill to weigh in on the infrastructure problems of Healthcare.gov? Couldn't CNN's Piers Morgan, for example, have asked as a guest someone from Silicon Valley, or even the local Best Buy, instead of Mr. Carney on October 21 to discuss the failures of the site?

On the bright side, I hope the failure brings fresh scrutiny to how many billions have been spent on computer systems throughout the government that don't work as intended or at all just as the decadent 2010 General Services Administration conference in Las Vegas focused attention on out-of-control conference spending in multiple federal agencies. Just because the best and brightest are the ones who are in charge in Washington does not mean that they should be allowed to disregard the rules the rest of us must follow.

I also hope that the incompetency on full display in HealthCare.gov translates to a new skepticism of big government by Americans because this is what hope and change looks like in action. What should be obvious to anyone by now is that convening the first 2,000 people in the Boston phonebook to build HealthCare.gov would have resulted in a far superior product.

Marta H. Mossburg writes frequently about national affairs and about Maryland, where she lives. Follow her on Twitter at @mmossburg.


https://mail.google.com/mail/?shva=1#inbox/141ec49e3b47d6c2

Tea Party only wants fiscal responsibility, less government intrusion and civility....we are not terrorists, arsonists, wife-beaters as betrayed by the slanderous liberal politicians!

Erosion of civility prevents serious dialogue 

By Sal Russo - Chief Strategist, Tea Party Express

The recent controversy over funding the government and our nation reaching the statutory debt limit was resolved like most problems in Washington today - do nothing of substance and engage in hateful, outlandish language. Neither contributes to solving the serious economic problems facing the country.

Americans are frustrated and angry at a government that refuses to deal with excessive spending, an unsustainable debt and a slow-growing economy that is inhibiting so many Americans from realizing the American Dream. It is bad enough that the politicians' idea of a solution is the proverbial "kick the can down the road," but they compound the injury by engaging in such outrageous attacks against conservatives that civil discourse has become nearly impossible.

For the Democrats, vicious anti-tea party hate speech has become regular and no one seems to hold them accountable, certainly not the compliant major media. This devolution of civility, while effective in trying to alienate the opposition, is no way to govern a nation.

Democrat Congressmen Alan Grayson of Florida and Steve Cohen of Tennessee both exemplify the problem, and it is a sorry state that any voter can find their service worthy of re-election. This past week Grayson sent out a fundraising email depicting the Tea Party as the Klu Klux Klan, while Cohen called Tea Partiers "domestic enemies."

After seeing rhetoric like that, it's no wonder a Rasmussen poll earlier this year found 26% of Obama supporters view the Tea Party as the nation's top terror threat.

When liberals view concerned Tea Party Americans as domestic terrorists, more dangerous than Al Qaeda, that should be a hint to everyone that it is time to tone down the rhetoric. Unfortunately, the left has shown an unwillingness to take a stand and condemn even some of the most outrageous smears.

President Obama ran as a candidate willing to bring civility back to D.C. If it were not such a dismal failure, that campaign promise would be laughable. How can he continue to speak about bipartisanship when Democrats are engaging in barbaric smears? Hate speech, especially from our leaders in Washington, should be unacceptable and condemned.

According to the New York Times, Tea Partiers are wealthier and more educated than the general public. Additionally, a Yale professor recently found that Tea Partiers are more scientifically literate than your average American. These are hardly profiles of enemies-of-the-state or radical, fringe elements of the Republican base.

Contrary to the perception perpetuated by the mainstream media, the Tea Party movement is made up of Americans from all walks of life. Within the movement there is a wide variety of beliefs on social and foreign policy issues. The one shared concern that has galvanized this movement is the unsustainable size, cost, and intrusiveness of the federal government with the obscenely growing national debt, now over $17 trillion.

If you are part of the 64% of Americans that think spending cuts are best for the economy, you may be surprised that Washington won't cut any spending. Budgets from both Republicans and Democrats only cut the increase in spending - that means they still increase spending, just not as much as they planned. It's that kind of deception that Americans are fed up with.

If you are one of the 11 million people that cannot find work or know someone that falls into that category, it is only the Tea Party that has proposed meaningful, pro-growth policies. This, of course, includes the delay of Obamacare. Yet, Democrats have been unwilling to abandon their failed policies that are hurting individuals and damaging the economy.

In the end, we all want the same thing: insure America remains the greatest country in the world. What we may differ on is how we get there. But that is the beauty of our Republic - we have the freedom to disagree and the obligation to govern. That can't be done, though, when one side tries aggressively to alienate their opponents from the discussion.

If the President really wants to lead America like the voters elected him to do, he must rein in his party's rhetoric so all sides are welcome at the table. He must restore Lincoln's vision of a government that is of the people, by the people and for the people. And finally, he must recognize the need to resolve America's fiscal crisis.

Sal Russo is chief strategist for Tea Party Express.

Michelle Malkin thoroughly exposes Obama's continuing "Culture of Corruption" in the White House....Brilliant reporting....

What happened to all of Obama’s technology czars?

By Michelle Malkin  •  October 25, 2013

Why does the White House need a private-sector “tech surge” to repair its wretched Obamacare website failures? Weren’t all of the president’s myriad IT czars and their underlings supposed to ensure that taxpayers got the most effective, innovative, cutting-edge and secure technology for their money?

Now is the perfect time for an update on Obama’s top government titans of information technology. As usual, “screw up, move up” is standard bureaucratic operating procedure.

Let’s start with the “federal chief information officer.” In 2009, Obama named then 34-year-old “whiz kid” Vivek Kundra to the post overseeing $80 billion in government IT spending. At 21, Kundra was convicted of misdemeanor theft. He stole a handful of men’s shirts from a J.C. Penney’s department store and ran from police in a failed attempt to evade arrest. Whitewashing the petty thief’s crimes, Obama instead effused about his technology czar’s “depth of experience in the technology arena.”

Just as he was preparing to take the federal job, an FBI search warrant was issued at Kundra’s workplace. He was serving as the chief technology officer of the District of Columbia. Two of Kundra’s underlings, Yusuf Acar and Sushil Bansal, were charged in an alleged scheme of bribery, kickbacks, ghost employees and forged timesheets. Kundra went on leave for five days and was then reinstated after the feds informed him that he was neither a subject nor a target of the investigation.

As I noted in my 2009 book, “Culture of Corruption,” city and federal watchdogs had identified a systemic lack of controls in Kundra’s office. Veteran D.C. newspaper columnist Jonetta Rose Barras reported that Acar “was consistently promoted by his boss, Vivek Kundra, receiving with each move increasing authority over sensitive information and operating with little supervision.” Yet, Team Obama emphasized that Kundra had no idea what was going on in his workplace, which employed about 300 workers.

A mere 29 months after taking the White House job, Kundra left for a cushy fellowship at Harvard University. In January 2012, he snagged an executive position at Salesforce.com, which touted his “demonstrated track record of driving innovation.”

In 2011, Obama appointed former Microsoft executive and FCC managing director Steven VanRoekel to succeed Kundra. At the time, he promised “to make sure that the pace of innovation in the private sector can be applied to the model that is government.” Mission not accomplished.

Next up: Obama’s “U.S. chief technology officer.” In May 2009, the president appointed Aneesh Chopra “to promote technological innovation to help the country meet its goals such as job creation, reducing health care costs and protecting the homeland. Together with Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra, their jobs are to make the government more effective, efficient and transparent.”

Chopra’s biggest accomplishment? A humiliating cameo in December 2009 on “The Daily Show” with liberal comedian Jon Stewart, who mocked the administration’s pie-in-the-sky Open Government Initiative. Chopra resigned three years later, ran unsuccessfully for Virginia lieutenant governor and now works as a “senior fellow” at the far-left Center for American Progress, which is run by former Clinton administration hit man turned Obama helpmate John Podesta.

Obama replaced Chopra with Todd Park, the former “chief technology officer of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.” The White House described him as a “change agent and ‘entrepreneur-in-residence,’ helping HHS harness the power of data, technology and innovation to improve the health of the nation.” Park oversees the “Presidential Innovation Fellows” program and is also a “senior fellow” in health IT and health reform policy at Podesta’s Center for American Progress. CAP has tirelessly defended Obamacare and its global joke of an IT infrastructure.

In 2010, when President Obama first rolled out a dog-and-pony demonstration of Healthcare.gov, Park basked in the glow of positive media coverage. He bragged to TechCrunch.com about working “24/7 … in a very, very nimble hyper consumer focused way … all fused in this kind of maelstrom of pizza, Mountain Dew and all-nighters, and you know, idealism.”

It was, as you all now know, all hype and glory. So who has Obama called in to oversee the HealthCare.gov rescue mission? None other than the administration’s “change agent and entrepreneur-in-residence,” CTO Todd Park, who helped build the broken system in the first place!

Obamacare also created the “Bureau of Health Information” and a new “assistant secretary of health information,” who coordinates with a separate “national coordinator for health information technology” overseeing the equally disastrous electronic medical records mandate. Harvard University’s David Blumenthal held the post from 2009 to 2011 before returning to his Ivy League home.

Then came Farzad Mostashari, who was “at the forefront of the administration’s health IT efforts and is a resource to the entire health system to support the adoption of health information technology and the promotion of nationwide health information exchange to improve health care.” In August 2013, Mostashari announced his resignation, and earlier this month, he became a “visiting fellow” at the Brookings Institution’s Engelberg Center for Health Care Reform.

Those who can, do. Those who can’t, waste our money screwing things up and then run back to academia to train the next generation of incompetent technocrats.

Once again Ann Coulter is spot on...

HANG ONE, TO ENCOURAGE THE OTHERS

October 23, 2013

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One of the most effective ways of discouraging people is to make them think there's absolutely nothing they can do about something, anyway. Thus, liberals have tried to insinuate that Obamacare is impossible to remove, hoping conservatives will despair.

But with only one-half of one branch of government, Sens. Ted Cruz and Mike Lee and the House Republicans have made it absolutely clear that Republicans are not giving up on repealing Obamacare. Inasmuch as "bubonic plague" is polling higher than "Obamacare," I'd say this is a brilliant marketing strategy for the GOP.

Unlike every other idiotic government program ever foisted on us by the Democrats, this time Republicans are not rolling over on this illegitimately passed, disastrous legislation. Give Republicans a veto-proof majority in the Senate, America, and they will rid us of this plague. (Without even charging a co-pay!)

Not only that, but Republicans have exposed Democrats as hypocrites who are forcing the rest of the country to live under Obamacare, while shutting down the government rather than live under it themselves.

With any luck, the Obama-Reid government shutdown -- as Sean Hannity calls it -- has also impressed upon Republicans the importance of winning elections.

Whatever cavils and objections liberals have to the Republicans' majority in the House, the Democrats' Senate majority certainly does not reflect the popular will. At least nine sitting Democratic senators have asterisks by their names, indicating seats given away by Republicans through unforced errors.

The only thing the Democrats' majority demonstrates is the stunning incompetence, stupidity and malfeasance of the Republican Party.

Here are a few Senate seats recently sacrificed by Republicans.

In 2008, career prosecutors in George W. Bush's Department of Justice convicted Republican senator Ted Stevens of Alaska for various corruption offenses just weeks before the election. The prosecution was so sleazy that not only was the conviction thrown out, but the indictment was tossed -- by Obama's Justice Department, no less.

Too late! Stevens had already lost his re-election. The winning Democrat will now hold that seat in perpetuity.

If that were ever done to a Democrat, the prosecutors' names would be known by every American, objects of obloquy worse than "Halliburton." But there's no cost to throwing a Republican senator's election.

That's one Senate seat.

Also in 2008, Democrats openly stole a Senate election for Al Franken in Minnesota right under the nose of Republican governor Tim "Blood and Guts" Pawlenty. You don't have to be like the Democrats and steal elections, Republicans, but can you at least stop letting them be stolen?

That's two Senate seats.

Then there are the races where Republicans were screwed by campaign consultants more interested in being able to buy another vacation home than winning elections -- as described in my new book, Never Trust a Liberal Over Three-Especially a Republican.


Republican campaign consultants ran Linda McMahon for the Senate from Connecticut in 2010, and then -- to pay off the mortgage -- again in 2012.

McMahon is an American patriot who spent a lot of her own money to beat a Democrat. Unfortunately, she never had a chance to win a statewide election in Connecticut, as anyone with half a brain knew. (See my multiple columns screaming this fact from the rooftops before she won the nominations with the help of her high-priced consultants.)

Former congressman Rob Simmons could have won either of those Senate races in Connecticut. He had been elected to the House from a swing district in 2000, beating an incumbent Democrat, then held his seat for six years, losing in 2006 by about three votes. He's a Haverford College graduate, was an Army colonel who served in Vietnam, worked at the CIA and taught at Yale. That's a candidate Connecticut soccer moms would love.

But if Simmons had won the nomination, how would Republican campaign consultants be able to retire early? They wanted a money-bags candidate, not a winner.

Running McMahon in Connecticut was not a mistake -- it was a betrayal of the Republican Party by political consultants who wanted to line their bank accounts instead of backing a winner.

Republican political consultants did the exact same thing with another great patriot, John Raese, in West Virginia. West Virginians heard Raese had homes in Palm Beach and Telluride and didn't believe he was one of them. Political consultants heard he had homes in Palm Beach and Telluride and started shopping for Jaguars.

Poor Raese has spent a lot of his own money to lose four statewide elections in conservative West Virginia, including the 2010 and 2012 U.S. Senate elections.

Those races alone amount to at least three and maybe four more Senate seats Republicans should have picked up from Connecticut and West Virginia, but lost for no good reason.

That's five Senate seats.

I haven't even gotten to the tea party candidates, and we would already have a U.S. Senate that's 51-47 Republican, absent Republican traitors, morons and hacks.

No one gets rich by hurting the Democratic Party. But a lot of people get rich off losing races for the Republican Party.

The Republicans' recent brave fight against Obamacare should make conservatives proud. But you know what would have made it even better? If Republicans had had a majority in the Senate.

In 2014, how about Republicans concentrate on flipping Democratic seats to the GOP in conservative Arkansas, Louisiana, West Virginia, Montana and Alaska, instead of wasting money and energy purging impure Republicans in safe seats? Can't we wait until we have a nice big majority to start purging our own incumbents?

Other than Sen. Lindsey Graham -- you can purge him. As a character in Voltaire's "Candide" said, "It is good to hang an admiral from time to time, in order to encourage the others."

COPYRIGHT 2013 ANN COULTER
DISTRIBUTED BY UNIVERSAL UCLICK

http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/2013-10-23.html#read_more

Words fail me...and still the Liberals embrace Hope & Change...

Hope and Change: Obama Smeared Bush for 10.6% Black Unemployment Rate; Five Years Later it’s 12.9%

At times, a leader’s ineptitude can best be revealed when he parades his failures as victories. While America still remains in the clutches of a dismal economy, the Obama Administration has become their own cheerleaders, announcing victory when there is no reason to celebrate.

President Obama and his cagey mouthpiece, Jay Carney, have become more and more committed to spinning every failure as victories with only minor hiccups. With the nation’s economy still in poor shape five years after he assumed office, with Obamacare making the Edsel look like a smashing success and with the country heading to yet another showdown as lawmakers continue to ignore the $17 trillion elephant in the room, the question remains:

At what point does this president stop trying to con us and admit that these obvious failures need addressing?

Today, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released their report that showed that black unemployment dropped this last month from 13% to 12.9%.

So… Break out the champagne, I guess….

The report indicates that 148,000 jobs were created in September, which dropped the official unemployment rate to 7.2%. Curiously enough, however, the labor-force participation rate fell to 35-year lows- a true testament to the creative accounting for which this administration is known. As more and more people are discounted from the figures for having been out of work for too long, the rate continues to drop as people officially leave the job market.

Still, the Obama Administration continually pretends that these failures are successes. However, when compared to the Bush Administration, the failures become more pronounced.

In 2008, as Senator Barack Obama campaigned against Senator John McCain, a popular method of attack was to attack the unpopular Bush Administration and then link McCain’s proposed presidency to that of the Bush presidency.

Exactly five years ago today, October 22nd, 2008, the Obama Campaign shredded the Bush Administration for their black unemployment rate.

Exactly five years ago today, the black unemployment rate was 10.6%. Now it is 12.9%.

“I wish we could say that reaching 10.6 percent is the highest unemployment we’ve had under this administration,” said Alexis Herman, a member of the Obama Campaign. “But we’ve actually seen rates as high as 11.5 percent.”
“The fact is that when you look at the unemployment numbers” under Bush, she said, “we have lost good jobs in our community, particularly in construction and manufacturing, where we are disproportionately employed. Any attempts to continue to open the doors of the middle class and to move us up the economic ladder really have been stopped dead in its tracks by this administration.”

Of course, Herman’s critiques were immediately followed by an explanation of how President Obama would turn things around by supporting increases in federal minimum wage.

It is both sad and ironic that the first biracial president has so supremely failed the black community. While the Obama Campaign of yesteryear was content with smearing the Bush Administration for their 10.6% black unemployment rate, this administration continues to overlook the hypocrisy of finding 10.6% unacceptable but failing to remedy an economy that has produced such dismal effects for Americans.

Won't see this story in the Lame Stream Press that's for sure....Obamacare's Deathblow? This will make Chief Justice Roberts look like a real tool.

Reprinted from The Daily Mail.

Bombshell: Federal judge suddenly green-lights lawsuit that could stop Obamacare in its tracks

By David Martosko, U.s. Political Editor  Daily Mail

PUBLISHED: 14:27 EST, 22 October 2013 | UPDATED: 15:05 EST, 22 October 2013 

• Small-business plaintiffs say the government is treating all 50 states the same even though Congress allowed them to opt out – and 36 did
• The IRS is granting insurance subsidies to taxpayers in the 'refusenik' states, even though the text of the Obamacare law doesn't allow it
• A federal judge denied the government's motion to dismiss the case on Tuesday
• He also refused, however, to issue an injunction barring the Obama administration from implementing the law while the case moves forward

A federal judge on Tuesday refused to dismiss a case that could fatally cripple the Obamacare health insurance law.

The Affordable Care Act forbids the federal government from enforcing the law in any state that opted out of setting up its own health care exchange, according to a group of small businesses whose lawsuit got a key hearing Monday in federal court.

The Obama administration, according to their lawsuit, has ignored that language in the law, enforcing all of its provisions even in states where the federal government is operating the insurance marketplaces on the error-plagued Healthcare.gov website.

Thirty-six states chose not to set up their exchanges, a move that effectively froze Washington, D.C. out of the authority to pay subsidies and other pot-sweeteners to convince citizens in those states to buy medical insurance.

But the IRS overstepped its authority by paying subsidies in those states anyway, say the businesses and their lawyers.

Tea party conservatives have long pushed for an end to Obamacare, and the lawsuit might give them the victory they're after.

The IRS has been offering tax incentives to citizens in all 50 states to get them to enroll in Obamacare, the plaintiffs say, although the Affordable Care act forbids it in the 36 states that have opted out. Without the subsidies, the employer mandate doesn't go into effect.

The subsidies serve as a trigger that determines who has to comply with the now-famous individual and employer mandates. So, the lawsuit claims, the Obama administration illegally enforced the Affordable Care Act – suddenly making millions of taxpayers and small employers subject to paying fines if they don't play ball.

The Affordable Care Act authorizes subsidies only for policies purchased 'through an Exchange established by the State.'

A different section of the law empowers the federal government to set up its own exchanges for each state that chose not establish one.

More...

• Thanks for catching me, Mr President! Diabetic expectant mother tweets her gratitude after she fainted behind Obama during healthcare speech
• Website programmers KNEW there were problems with the Obamacare site but government testers gave it the green light
• Obama asks people to call in to sign up to Obamacare after 'unacceptable' problems with $394 million website... but now the PHONES aren't working
• Just THREE of the 13 Americans standing behind Obama in Monday's Rose Garden Obamacare photo-op have actually signed up
• How the government spent $394 MILLION on the Obamacare website - more than it cost to build Facebook and Twitter - and it STILL doesn't work

But government lawyers have argued that 'Congress made clear that an exchange established by the federal government stands in the shoes of the exchange that a state chooses not to establish.'

The Treasury Department, they contend, 'has reasonably interpreted the Act to provide for eligibility for the premium tax credits for individuals in every state, regardless of which entity operates the exchange.'

But that amounts to the federal government ignoring the letter of the law, lawyer Sam Kazman says.

And 'without those subsidies, the employer mandate isn't triggered,' he told MailOnline.

And that could make the entire Obamacaresystem unsustainable.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is the named defendant in the legal action, which claims her agency is ignoring 36 states' desire to opt out of enforcing the Affordable Care Act

Oops: President Obama appeared with 13 Obamacare supports Monday in the White House rose garden, but only three of them have actually enrolled in the health insurance exchanges Kazman is general counsel for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market think tank that is coordinating the case.

Attorney Sam Kazman says the federal government is illegally subsidizing health insurance in all the states that chose not to set up their own health care marketplaces. And without the subsidies, the entire Obamacare system could fail

'The IRS cannot rewrite the law that Congress passed,' said Tom Miller, resident fellow at another think, the tank American Enterprise Institute.

'Its regulation expressly flouts the statutory text of the Affordable Care Act, the intent of Congress and the reasoned choices of [36] states.'

'The fiscal impact' of denying the Obamacare system millions of dollars in lost fines, 'while sizable, wouldn't be large enough to bring down the house,' Kazman added. The poltical one, however, is.'

'You'd have 34 "refusenik" states exempting their employers and many of their citizens from the employer mandate and portions of the individual mandate,' he explained.

'You'd have companies in participating states considering whether to move their operations' to states where they don't have to obey the Affordable Care Act. 'And you might even have some of those states seeking to undo their choice to participate.'

Headaches: The Obamacare website has suffered glitch after glitch since its October 1 launch, creating PR problems for the White House and practical problems for the HHS and IRS

The Competitive Enterprise Institute said in a statement that the IRS and the Department of Health and Human Services have pushed regulations that Congress didn't authorize, forcing some employers 'to cut back employees' hours' in order to dodge Obamacare's more economically challenging requirements, 'even though they are located in states that have refused to set up their own insurance exchanges.'

U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman refused to dismiss the case, as the government requested, but also denied the plaintiffs' request for a preliminary injunction that would prohibit the IRS and HHS from granting subsidies in what lawyer Kazman calls 'refusenik' states.

This Michigan company says complying with the Obamacare law is forcing it to let some employees go and trim others back to part-time hours to offset the cost of the employer mandate -- a provision that wouldn't kick in without the IRS subsidies

Judge Friedman said Tuesday that he will rule on the merits of the case by February 15.

By then the Obamacare law will be in full swing, nearing the end of its open enrollment period and providing health care services to Americans who sign up for coverage by December 15.

Kazman said his organization would 'take an immediate appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals' in order to get a re-hearing on the motion for an injunction to stop the clock on Obamacare while the larger legal issues are worked out.

At the lawsuit's heart is a set of distinctions that Congress drew between the 14 states – 15 including the District of Columbia – that chose to establish health insurance exchanges and the 36 that opted out.

The plaintiffs, who all hail from 'refusenik' states, say the federal government has invalidated their state governments' choices.

Kazman said that the Obamacare statute does not empower the IRS or HHS to 'give subsidy funding to people in states not authorized by Congress to receive it. That move, he agreed, had he effect of 'gutting a choice – to participate in the exchange program or not – that states were given by Congress.'

The government is 'asking you to interpret "north" to mean "south,"' plaintiffs’ attorney Michael Carvin told Judge Friedman on Monday.

The White House referred questions about the lawsuit to the Health and Human Services Department, which declined requests for comment and passed the buck to the Justice Department. The DOJ didn't respond to emails seeking a position on the lawsuit, which its lawyers are defending.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2471978/Bombshell-Federal-judge-suddenly-green-lights-lawsuit-stop-Obamacare-tracks.html#ixzz2iZyPy9u1
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