Just where is Scott Brown? New Hampshire? Massachusetts? BY DAVID LIGHTMAN

Where's Scott Brown? Not clear that Scott Brown knows.

Brown is the former Massachusetts senator who's being mentioned as a possible U.S. Senate candidate in New Hampshire next year.

The Republican was interviewed in Londonderry, N.H., Thursday, and momentarily seemed to forget where he was.

Here was his comment:

"What I've heard from the Republicans up here is they're thankful that I've been around for a year, helping them raise money, helping them raise awareness as to the issues that are affecting not only people here in Massachuset--uh, in New Hampshire, but also in Massachusetts, obviously, in Maine. I've been to Maine, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Connecticut, I've been all over the New England area, certainly, talking and helping people raise money."

The video was publicized Friday by American Bridge, a group with strong Democratic party ties.

Via: MCClatchyDC

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[VIDEO] Cotton Invites Obama To Visit Arkansan Obamacare Victims

Congressman Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) released a video Friday inviting President Obama to visit those who have been negatively affected in Arkansas.

“This week, President Obama announced a 23-day PR blitz to tout his signature program, Obamacare. I’d like to invite the President to bring his Obamacare roadshow to Arkansas, so he can see firsthand the devastating effects the law is having on Americans who live outside Washington DC.”

Cotton listed a number of demographics that have been hurt by Obamacare in his state: 50,000 families who have lost their insurance plans; workers who have been laid off or had their hours cut; families with higher premiums and deductibles; and seniors who have seen their doctor dropped from Medicare or their insurance network.

“The President can meet with them if had the courage to come to Arkansas,” Cotton said.

Cotton also referenced Sen. Mark Pryor, the Congressman’s Democratic opponent in the state’s Senate race, saying Pryor has called Obamacare good for America and an “amazing success story”. “Obamacare is not working,” Cotton asserted, “and it’s time for the President and Senator Pryor to admit it.”

Pryor and Cotton are currently neck-and-neck in recent polling.

Via: WFB

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AFTER DENYING THEY MET, WHITE HOUSE ADMITS OBAMA LIVED WITH UNCLE

In yet another example of White House dissembling and our subservient media rolling over, the White House admitted Thursday that President Obama not only knows a Kenyan uncle who faced deportation, but that the president lived with this uncle in the eighties. When asked in 2011, the White House said there was no record of the two ever meeting. Apparently, our crackerjack media accepted that false information without ever following up or even asking if the president had been asked.

The Boston Globe reports that at a recent deportation hearing, the president's uncle, Onyango Obama, testified that "his famous nephew had stayed at his Cambridge apartment for about three weeks. At the time, Onyango Obama was here illegally and fighting deportation."

Obviously, this testimony directly contradicted the 2011 statement from the White House. Faced with the contradiction, the White house offered the following explanation:

[T]he press office had not fully researched the relationship between the president and his uncle before telling the Globe that they had no record of the two meeting. This time, the press office asked the president directly, which they had not done in 2011.

Only with a Democrat in office would "we have no record of the two meeting" not sound like a non-answer answer to the media. And once again it wasn't our media that dug up an Obama scandal or embarrassment; in this case it was the uncle.

During his briefing Thursday, White House spokesman Jay Carney said that he personally chose to ask the president about the relationship. The Boston Globe adds:

“The President first met Omar Obama when he moved to Cambridge for law school,” said White House spokesman Eric Schultz. “The President did stay with him for a brief period of time until his apartment was ready. After that, they saw each other once every few months, but after law school they fell out of touch. The President has not seen him in 20 years, has not spoken with him in 10.”

Via: Breitbart

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Illinois governor signs pension overhaul into law

Gov. Pat Quinn has signed landmark legislation Thursday to reform Illinois' massively-underfunded pension system, though the new law is certain to face threatened lawsuits by labor unions.

The overhaul, approved by the General Assembly this week after years of delay and inaction, cuts benefits for most employees and retirees. It has a June 1 effective date, but could be delayed by the legal challenges.

Quinn, who often signs new laws in celebratory public events, signed the pension bill Thursday afternoon in a private ceremony. It was a mark of how politically sensitive the issue is in Democrat-controlled Illinois, with hundreds of thousands of public employees and retirees across Illinois being negatively affected.

Illinois' $100 billion shortfall in funding employee retirement benefits is considered the worst pension crisis in the nation. For decades, while other states dealt with similar problems, Illinois lawmakers and governors skipped or shorted payments to their state's five pension systems. It led to repeated downgrades of the state's credit rating and diverts millions of dollars from education and social programs.

Via: Fox News Political

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The GOP’s secret campaign weapon: NYC’s uber-liberal new mayor Bill de Blasio

Bill de Blasio’s win in New York City’s mayoral race has put the Democrat in charge of the nation’s largest city and smack in the middle of the nation’s largest media market — giving him an unmatched platform both to pursue liberal policies and to cause all sorts of headaches for his party’s leaders in Washington.

Mr. de Blasio’s landslide victory made him a hero among liberal activists, who likened him to Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and embraced his campaign promises to raise taxes on the city’s wealthier residents and use the new pot of money to expand government programs and tackle inequality.

Republican strategists already anticipate being able to use the mayor’s stances as a wedge against Democrats running for national office, and analysts said some Democrats may indeed have to spend time defending their left flank.

“De Blasio poses interesting challenges for the Democratic Party,” said Darrell M. West, director of the Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. “He is more liberal than the typical officeholder and will attract a lot of media attention given his platform in New York City. That will inject him into many public discussions. I don’t think he will become a Ted Cruz figure for the Democratic side, but he has the potential to be a Howard Dean who seeks to rally the public towards a more progressive view of the world.”

Via: Washington Times

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HAGAN PLEADS THE FIFTH ON OBAMACARE

Last week more of Kay Hagan’s Democratic colleagues revealed that they knew full well that some Americans would lose health care plans that they liked, yet repeatedly made dishonest promises otherwise.

Kay Hagan, however, has repeatedly refused to acknowledge the truth that millions of Americans are losing health insurance that they like as they are forced into the ObamaCare exchanges. This is - and always has been - an intended consequence of the Affordable Care Act.

ABC11′s Jon Camp reports: “Sen Kay Hagan defends ‘Obamacare’ but won’t say when she learned not everyone would be able to keep their insurance, as promised.”

Click here to watch the full segment.

Kay Hagan’s own spokesperson all but admitted that the Senator knew that Americans would lose their health insurance, despite repeatedly promising otherwise. Three years ago, Hagan joined her Senate Democratic colleagues in unanimously supporting the very ObamaCare rule that’s responsible for the health insurance cancellations that have caused so much consternation over the last month. Even though 473,000 North Carolinians face the possibility of losing their health insurance, Kay Hagan refuses to accept responsibility for her deciding vote in favor of ObamaCare.

Either Hagan was knowingly dishonest about people keeping their care yet repeatedly promised otherwise; or, Hagan is so incompetent that she didn’t comprehend the legislation that she championed.

Via: Human Events

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Obamacare: Grumbling is not enough

It is amazing how fast momentum can shift in politics. And it usually happens for reasons that could not have been predicted.

Case in point: only a month ago, the reckless shutdown of the federal government left its engineers -- the tea party and the Republican Party -- weakened, and the president and Democrats energized and with the wind at their back.

And beyond Washington, the people's movement in the shutdown's wake was energized too.

But this newly acquired momentum turned out to be far more momentary than most anticipated, myself included. In fact, it lasted only a few days. Why? Because Republicans seized the opportunity provided by the big problems with the rollout of the Affordable Health Care Act. They were all over it, with the help of compliant corporate media.

Literally, overnight the atmosphere changed for the worse. President Obama and Democrats, rather than riding a wave, found themselves on the defensive. And the Republicans' shutdown disaster became a distant memory.

Now, if the health insurance exchanges are running smoothly by the end of the year, as they appear to be in many states, much of the furor will die out. But if they aren't, Obamacare will be turned by the far right into a metaphor for "broken government" and the prospects of unseating Republicans in Congress and statehouses next fall will become problematic.

Which means that grumbling about the problems of the health care rollout heard in some progressive and left circles needs to give way to actively resisting the right wing's campaign to kill Obamacare and regain the initiative leading into the midterm and 2016 elections.

Via: People's World

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California: Vacant seats? Let the governor fill 'em

State Sen. Bill Emmerson, second from left, has decided to leave the Legislature, saying that his passion has waned. Officials estimate that a special election will cost $1.1 million. (Associated Press / November 25, 2013)

The price of electing lawmakers to replace ones who bolt is high. The Senate leader says it's time to let the chief executive decide.

SACRAMENTO — Senate leader Darrell Steinberg says he has seen enough. He wants to rid California of incessant special elections to fill vacancies in the Legislature.

The elections interrupt the legislative process, he asserts, and they bleed local taxpayers — roughly $1 million each time some lawmaker jumps ship, which has been increasingly often.

Let the governor fill vacant seats and be done with it, the Sacramento Democrat contends.

Amen.

If it were possible, I'd order lawmakers to stop the music, grab a seat and stay put. This musical chairs game is too expensive for the adults, the taxpayers. No more switching offices in midterm.

But forbidding politicians to run for another office is probably unconstitutional. So if they do bail in midterm, just let the governor choose their replacement.

Like the governor is allowed to do when there's a vacancy in a statewide office. Or when there's an opening on a county board of supervisors. Or a U.S. senator quits or dies.

If there's a vacant seat in the U.S. House delegation, the U.S. Constitution decrees that there must be a special election. But there's no such federal mandate for replacing a state legislator. Only a state law.

"The cost of these special elections and the delays for months at a time compels us to look at different ways to fill the vacancies," Steinberg says. "It would be much better to have the governor make the appointment."

Count up the legislative defections in the past year alone: There have been 10.

The latest is Sen. Bill Emmerson (R-Hemet), who's departing Sacramento because his "passion has waned" for legislating.

Via: LA Times

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Obama Had Senate-Office 'Portrait Session' With Pornographer -

WARNING: Some of the images and language in this story are sexually graphic and disturbing.

(CNSNews.com) -- On June 20, 2007, then-Sen. Barack Obama (D.-Ill.), who was seeking the Democratic presidential nomination at the time, hosted a “portrait session” in his U.S. Senate office where he posed for and with Terry Richardson, a man already well-known, as the flyleaf of a coffee-table collection of his work put it, as the photographer who “took 1970s porn esthetic and made it fashion chic.”

“Who uses his fashion money to fund an X-rated website? Yes, Richardson,” said the flyleaf to the 2004 book Terryworld, published by Taschen Books.

“And who can’t resist getting his clothes off and jumping in front of his own lens? Well, that would be Terry Richardson as well,” said the flyleaf. “Welcome to ‘Terryworld,’ the land restraint forgot. Porn stars, super models, transsexuals, hillbillies, friends, pets and celebrities all do for his lens what they’ll do for no other. And if any of them later wonder why they did it, just blame it on ‘Terryworld,’ where taboos are null and void, and fashion finds sex a perfect fit.”

Via: CNS News

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