Conservative Happenings

Sunday, October 20, 2013

Immigrant Activists In California Have Standoff With Homeland Security Officials During Protest Over Deportations

Undocumented immigrant activists in San Francisco came face to face with U.S. Homeland Security officials on Thursday night when, as part of a protest against deportations, they blocked a bus that was carrying foreign nationals who were in the custody of immigration officials.

The activists shouted “Undocumented, unafraid!” as they surrounded the bus, keeping it from moving forward, according to the San Francisco Bay Guardian

They taped a hot pink sign onto the bus that said: “Shut Down ICE,” the acronym for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the division that handles deportations.

Homeland Security officials confronted the activists and threatened to press felony charges against them if they did not move and let the bus could pass. The activists decided to continue their protest, the newspaper said. Several were detained by local police and later released.

We’ll get louder, stronger and more confrontational. That’s what movements have always done.

- Frank Sharry, head of America's Voice

Dean Santos, a California immigrant who took part in the Thursday protest in San Francisco, defended surrounding the bus to push for an end to the record deportations.

“I’ve been in that bus before, and I remember how powerless I felt,” said Santos, who in the past faced deportation and was held in a detention center in Arizona, according to the website notonemoredeportation.com

"Now, I’m coming back with the power of our communities in our effort to stop the separation of families.”

Via: Fox News Latino

ANALYSIS: TEA PARTY HAS UPPER HAND IN COMING FISCAL FIGHT

The mainstream media gloating over the Democrats' beat-down of the GOP concerning the recent government shutdown may be premature.

Without question, Obama and Harry Reid remained united and came out on top for the time being, forcing Tea Partiers and conventional Republicans alike to take a backseat and tend to their wounds. But if you survey the big picture, the outlook for Republicans and Tea Party advocates seems to fare much better than might first meet the eye.

True enough, Obamacare is here for now, but future policy struggles will revolve around spiraling deficits and the skyrocketing national debt (which has topped $17 trillion for the first time). This is home field turf for the Tea Party warriors and the Republicans in the main.

Moreover, since 2010, Republicans for the most part reserved the Bush tax cuts with the exception of the highest earners, while trimming government spending via the sequester (which Obama went on to politicize). These victories should not go uncounted.

Widespread counter-punching between Democrats and the moderate establishment GOP and the conservative grassroots over the debt ceiling are likely here to stay. The fight started, and the next round is on February 7th. This gives the Republicans and Tea Partiers another two months to land some blows and hammer their arguments about our economic fragility and the pending disaster of American spending more capital than it has.

Via Breitbart

Healthcare.gov Obama’s biggest lollygag to date

There must be a political strategy at work in President Barack Obama’s glitch-bedeviled healthcare.gov website and the enormous time and money it took just to get it up and running.

Everything Obama connected comes with a political strategy that many don’t see until it’s too late to act.

In terms of healthcare.gov, the Obama administration would call the big stall “buying time”. Those seeing clearly through the fog would call it “Obama lollygagging”. Make that Obama lollygagging up to and beyond the all-important November 4, 2014 Midterm Elections.

A website up and running smoothly would be the best education in existence to teach people exactly how much ObamaCare is going to cost them.

Obama can’t afford that kind of knowledge coming out until he and his Democrats are safely past next year’s midterms.

Forbes magazine hit the nail on the head when it headlined “Obama’s Website is Crashing Because It Doesn’t Want You to Know How Costly Its Plans Are”.

“A growing consensus of IT experts, outside and inside the government, have figured out a principal reason why the website for Obamacare’s federally-sponsored insurance exchange is crashing.

Healthcare.gov forces you to to create an account and enter detailed personal information before you can start shopping. This, in turn, creates a massive traffic bottleneck, as the government verifies your information and decides whether or not you’re eligible for subsidies. HHS bureaucrats knew this would make the website run more slowly. But they were more afraid that letting people see the underlying cost of Obamacare’sinsurance plans would scare people away. (Forbes, Oct. 14, 2013).

Via: Canada Free Press

The other side of Obamacare’s Oregon success: No one has bought private insurance

Yesterday I wrote about Oregon's big success signing people up for Obamacare: The state had, in the course of 17 days, signed up 56,000 people for the health law's Medicaid expansion. In one fell swoop, the state had cut its uninsured rate by 10 percent.

That is, however, only part of the story from Oregon. When it comes to private insurance, spokeswoman Amy Fauver said that it has not yet had any sign-ups.

"While we wish we were in a different place with our technology, we're implementing the contingencies we need to make sure no Oregonians get left behind," she said.

Cover Oregon decided Sept. 30, the day before the marketplace went live, that the software it uses to determine who qualifies for financial aid was coming up with too many errors to go live. It decided instead that it would process applications manually. Those applications have begun filtering in and determinations will likely go out later this month.

"They'll start hearing from us in the next week or two what about what their next step is," Fauver said. "We have staff trained to do that determination."

However, Fauver said that no Oregon health plan has received an enrollment through the marketplace. She declined to comment on the number of applications submitted to the marketplace, saying her department is "still working through the data to to arrive at a number we can stand by." It's possible that some of the applications could be incomplete, or represent multiple people. Cover Oregon doesn't know because they're still pending manual processing.

Via: Washington Post

Tech ‘surge’ to tackle Obamacare websites

The Obama administration Sunday said it’s called on “the best and brightest” tech experts from both government and the private sector to help fix the troubled website at the root of the Obamacare enrollment problems.

The unusual Sunday 600-word blog post from HHS was the first update in more than a week on the many failings of an expensive website that HHS itself described as “frustrating for many Americans.” But it didn’t specify who the administration had called in, or when the American people would see clear-cut results on Healthcare.gov.

We’re kind of thinking of it as a tech ‘surge,’” an HHS official told POLITICO.

The Health and Human Services statement didn’t explain everything that’s wrong, or give technical details about the repairs underway. It outlined some steps being taken to fix the site, including updates with “new code that includes bug fixes.” The department also says it’s installing monitors to catch parts of the website that are proving the most troublesome for consumers. And it also said it had seen some improvements in wait times and consumer access to the website, the online portal to health insurance exchanges or marketplaces the federal government is running in 36 states.

The administration said one essential component — the federal data hub — is working as hoped. That hub is crucial. It links federal agencies to determine an applicant’s eligibility for Obamacare coverage and subsidies. States running their own exchanges have to be able to draw on that data as well, and some of them have been doing so successfully.

Via: Politico

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Obamacare seeks to segregate patients, doctors by race

If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor under Obamacare — if you both belong to the same race.

Obamacare’s spectacular flop of a rollout distracts from its crude calculus that encourages the allocation of healthcare resources along racial lines and a doctor-patient system splintered into ethnicities.

While the 2010 Patient Protecion and Affordable Care Act’s language on diversity sounds innocuous, a review of the frankly separatist thinking of the law’s ardent supporters indicates Obamacare is aiming for a health care system that puts political correctness above the struggle against illness and death.

A 2009 report by the Center for American Progress (CAP) examining the House and Senate bill eventually signed by President Barack Obama advocates pairing patients and doctors of the same race, a goal toward which the law channels taxpayer dollars.

“Research suggests that health care providers’ diagnostic and treatment decisions, as well as their feelings about patients, are influenced by patients’ race or ethnicity,” the CAP report reads. “Several studies have shown that racial concordance is substantially and positively related to patient satisfaction.”

The key phrase is “race concordance” — a word which means “a state in which things agree and do not conflict with one another.”

“There is… evidence that race concordance — defined as shared racial or ethnic identities between clinicians and patients — is related to patient reports of satisfaction, participatory decision making, timeliness of treatment, and trust in the health system,” the report reads. In other words, fixing the broken U.S. healthcare system means assigning Hispanic doctors to Hispanic patients, African American doctors to African American patients, Creole doctors to Creole patients, and so on.

To accomplish this, the CAP report explains, Obamacare pours taxpayer dollars into affirmative-action candidates whose judgment will lead them to make life-or-death decisions. Ultimately, these taxpayer-funded grants would provide scholarships and loan forgiveness for minorities so they could provide healthcare services exclusively to their own race or ethnicity.

Via: Daily Caller

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[CARTOON] Shutdown No More

Via: California Political Review

[VIDEO] Nina Totenberg: ‘Nancy Pelosi Is the Most Effective Congressional Leader Probably in 30 Years’

On PBS’s Inside Washington Friday, NPR’s Nina Totenberg actually called House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) “the most effective Congressional leader probably in 30 years” (video follows with transcript and commentary):

NINA TOTENBERG, NPR: Nancy Pelosi, who in my view is the most effective Congressional leader probably in 30 years…

COLBY KING, WASHINGTON POST: You mean in the House?

TOTENBERG: In the House, has kept her troops in line. Every one of them voted for a compromise or voted for a bill they didn’t like. And she gave them a tough speech about how they had to hold their noses and vote for something they didn’t like. This was not, this is not our values, she told them, but we will fight again. She means 2014. And I don’t think that she has in mind caving on some of the issues that have to be caved on.

Isn't it fascinating how when Democrats hold together as a party, liberal media members think it's spectacular? But when Republicans do it, it's extortion, blackmail, and an act of terrorism.

Yet possibly even more comical about this remark is what the American people think of Pelosi.

Rasmussen in August pegged her as being unfavorably viewed by 56 percent of the nation, more than any other member of Congress.

Gallup in April found Pelosi to be the "Best Known, Least Liked of Congressional Leaders."

As such, Totenberg finds her views at odds with the majority of the nation.

But why should that surprise us?

Via: Newsbusters

[VIDEO] Sebelius ‘Will Testify’ On Obamacare Website Woes

A top Democratic senator said Sunday that Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius will testify before Congress about the problem-plagued ObamaCare website, amid a growing call for her to accept requests to testify.

“Ultimately, Secretary Sebelius will testify,” Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the chamber’s No. 2 Democrat, told “Fox News Sunday.”

Sebelius and the entire Obama administration has declined requests to testify on Capitol Hill about the site, which has been plagued by crashes, slow responses and other glitches since it went online Oct. 1.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee sent a letter directly to Sebelius last week asking her to testify Thursday on the matter.

Sebelius has yet to respond publicly, but reportedly plans to attend a gala the night before in Boston, which has fueled calls for resignation.

Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio said he’s “reluctant” to call for an immediate dismissal in such situations, but was critical of Sebelius for so far not agreeing to testify.

“Her refusal to testify and be transparent has undermined her credibility,” he told Fox News, adding her not testifying could lead to her resignation.

Via: Fox News
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Doctor search tool still not working on Covered California website

A highly-touted doctor search tool on the Covered California health insurance website has so far proven to be nothing but headaches for consumers and for officials of the state run insurance marketplace, who have taken the feature offline for repairs.

During the first week of enrollment that started Oct. 1, the doctor search didn’t work at all. Top officials touted it on opening day as an important tool for consumers who want to confirm that their doctor is included in any new health plan they may buy.

Early last week, Covered California officials announced the search tool was up and running. But, within hours, those using it found a slew of problems.

"I had an ophthamologist friend listed as speaking Farsi, Russian and Spanish, and he doesn’t speak any of those languages," says Dr. Richard Thorp, president of the California Medical Assn. The group represents about 37,000 doctors statewide.

Perhaps even more awkward, data loaded into the site contained errors that linked doctors to the wrong specialty. For instance, Thorp says, a gynecologist friend of his was listed as an ophthalmologist.

"You can understand that that’s a very different kind of encounter: thinking you're signing up for an ophthalmologist," he says, "and finding out the doctor you signed up for is an OB/GYN doctor or, visa versa, for that matter.”

Covered California spokeswoman Anne Gonzales says the agency took the doctor search tool offline last Tuesday to fix improperly loaded data. The agency is also trying to make the slow-working search run faster and to make the function easier for consumers to find and to use.

"It’ll have better page loading speed. We’re going to reconfigure some of the navigation paths so it’s not so confusing, and we’ll have some expanded search functions," Gonzales says. Officials hope the search tool will be running by sometime next week.

In the meantime, some are advising consumers shopping for insurance on the website to hold off on enrolling in a plan until the doctor search is working.

Via: The Right Scoop

Ohio Senate President Warns Gov. Kasich May Bankrupt State’s Medicaid Program

If Medicaid in Ohio goes bankrupt, it's because John Kasich bankrupted it

Ohio Senate President Keith Faber (R-Celina) has voiced concern that Governor John Kasich may bankrupt the state’s Medicaid program if the Ohio Controlling Board rejects Kasich’s request to spend Obamacare funding.

“If we don’t move the [Obamacare] money from the federal funds account and authorize it to go over to the Medicaid account, Medicaid goes bankrupt,” Sen. Faber told reporters in an October 15 exchange filmed by Youngstown Vindicator reporter Marc Kovac.

Last month, the Kasich Administration submitted a Medicaid state plan amendment to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) requesting to expand Ohio’s Medicaid program to cover the new population set by Obamacare. HHS approved the amendment on October 10.

Gov. Kasich has not issued an executive order to enact the Obamacare expansion, but Sen. Faber suggested on October 15 that Kasich would need to do so to expand eligibility.

Faber warned that if the Kasich Administration expands Medicaid and the Controlling Board refuses to appropriate Obamacare funds, ”current Medicaid recipients — you know, kids and moms and people that are currently covered under the Medicaid program — would not have services.”

“I don’t think that’s necessarily a good result, and so I would imagine the Controlling Board on Monday will give the governor authority to move [Obamacare money] from that federal line to the state line.”

A week earlier, the staunchly pro-expansion Columbus Dispatch reported that Sen. Faber had made similar comments. Dispatch reporter Jim Siegel speculated, “could GOP legislative leaders who have thus far resisted expansion argue that they are being forced to go along – or else bankrupt a system that serves 2.4 million Ohioans?”

Via: Red State

ObamaCare site glitches run risk of turning off millenials

The prolonged glitches with the ObamaCare website are frustrating many of the president’s most high-valued customers -- the young, tech-savvy generation that helped him win two terms and whose participation is critical to the success of the health care exchanges.

“You see this situation especially with college students,” Michael Cipriano, a student at American University told FoxNews.com on Friday. “They get frustrated, which creates a disincentive to sign up."

President Obama is depending on young people being the backbone of his signature, 2010 health care law. Typically among the mostly healthy Americans, their premiums were supposed to help finance coverage for the elderly, poor and others with long-term illnesses and more frequent emergency-care visits.

However, the glitches and other problems that have plagued the exchanges since they went online Oct. 1 could put the plan in jeopardy. The administration runs healthcare.gov for the 36 states that chose not to have their own sites. The 14 other states and the District of Columbia run their own site but are still part of ObamaCare.

“Based on what I’ve seen, people were really excited at first, then turned away,” said Cipriano, who tried successfully to navigate the site and is a junior who writes for the conservative-leaning, online college publication The College Fix.

Via: Fox News

[VIDEO] Sebelius to Attend Gala, but Unable to Testify About Obamacare - And healthcare.gov goes down for repairs again.

CNN reported last night that HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius will make time to attend a gala in Boston, but is too busy to testify on Capitol Hill about Obamacare:

"We have some breaking news, an official from the Department of Health and Human Services confirming to CNN that the glitch-filled Obamacare website will be coming down this weekend for maintenance," said CNN. "Now, this comes on the same day that new problems with the rollout were exposed.

"And an official from the Health and Human Services Department says Secretary Kathleen Sebelius will not be available to answer questions at a congressional hearing next week on what went wrong.

"Although I can tell you: At this moment, we have just found out that this Health and Human Services secretary, I'm looking here at my BlackBerry actually, has the time to appear at the inaugural Kennedy forum gala, the night before, in Boston. So she'll be in Boston at a gala but unable to testify on the Obamacare rollout in Washington the next day."

And here's a clip from NBC on the government bringing down the Obamacare website for repairs ... again:

Via: Weekly Standard

Thom Hartmann Blames Reagan for Starting Rightist 'Anti-American Crazies Who Hate Our Government'

The old Norm McDonald joke was “Germans love David Hasselhoff.” The liberal talk radio equivalent is “Thom Hartmann really hates Ronald Reagan.”

On Thursday afternoon’s show, Hartmann blamed Reagan for this whole Tea Party trend of “anti-American crazies who hate our government,” with that unpatriotic hatred somehow including veterans of every war, and George Washington, who “signed the first legislation that provided housing, food, medical care, and clothing to poor people.” Footnote, please?

THOM HARTMANN: Ronald Reagan came along and, in his first inaugural address, said the government is the problem, and ever since then there's been this small group of anti-American crazies who hate our government, our government that all these people over all these years, the people who fought in World War II; the people who fought in World War I; the people who fought in the Civil War, at least for the North; the people who fought in the Revolutionary War; the people who fought in the War of 1812; our government that they fought to keep, and many of them died.

Our government, according to these teabaggers, has become an evil thing, or was all along, actually. I mean, it was George Washington who signed the first legislation that provided housing, food, medical care, and clothing to poor people in Washington, D.C.

Hartmann summarized the shutdown as a Tea Party tantrum of hate: “They brought this government to its knees, and cost us $24 billion, for what? Because they don't want 46 million people who don't have health insurance to be able to get it? They brought this government to its knees because they object to the idea that people who have had, like my friend Tommy Christopher who had a heart attack and can't get health insurance, that they [say], 'Screw him, he shouldn't be able to get health insurance.' They really did this!”

Hartmann sounds just like one of my childhood friends, who tweaked me on Facebook: “What did the Republicans propose for health care? Other than to make people (like me) with chronic health problems feel they were being led to slaughter. Culling is the word. P.S. any organ donors out there?”

Via: Newsbusters

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‘Who’s the Whore Now?’ Bashir Gets In Explosive Argument With Tea Party Guest

MSNBC’s Martin Bashir got into a heated back-and-forth with tea party activist Larry Klayman on Friday over Klayman’s attacks on President Obama as a foreign-born Muslim whose foreign policies benefit America’s enemies at the expense of the United States and Israel. Klayman insisted he was being metaphorical when speaking about Obama, which set Bashir off even further.

Bashir first brought up Klayman’s book about political “whores” and asked him between Ted Cruz and Mitch McConnell who the whore is. Klayman said it was McConnell, hands-down.

Things got way more heated when Bashir brought up a clip of Klayman saying Obama should leave town and “put the Qu’ran down,” asking him if he really believes Obama is a “foreign-born Muslims who has hoodwinked the entire nation.” Klayman argued his statements were “metaphoric,” “but they ring true” because Obama has done everything he can to harm the U.S. in the Middle East.

Bashir asked, “Was it the act of a rabble-rouser who tells lies in public just to incite the crowd? And I have to ask you, who’s the whore now?”

Klayman took a shot at MSNBC for, once again, using “cropped quotes,” and then Bashir asked this burning question.

“How would you defend yourself if accused of being a delusional racist whose hatred for this president is, in fact, a form of psychiatric pathology, an illness?”

Watch the video below, via MSNBC:

Via: Mediaite.com

Former official: Admin refused to bring in outside help for ObamaCare website for fear GOP would subpoena them; Update: Ten-year-old technology? Update: No improvement in week two; Update: Wasn’t tested until days before launch?

Via Lachlan Markay and Ace, who calls it “Nixonian.” This is the rare Hot Air item that might actually make liberals angrier at the White House than conservatives. If you’d staked your party’s credibility on realizing the utopian dream of universal health care only to have Obama deliver this fartburger, you’d be furious. Why anyone on either side still wants Sebelius in charge, I have no idea.

Facing such intense opposition from congressional Republicans, the administration was in a bunker mentality as it built the enrollment system, one former administration official said. Officials feared that if they called on outsiders to help with the technical details of how to run a commerce website, those companies could be subpoenaed by Hill Republicans, the former aide said. So the task fell to trusted campaign tech experts.

Very important to understand: Between this and the fact that HHS deliberately hid the price of insurance behind a reg wall on Healthcare.gov to reduce “rate shock,” the grand takeaway about the website’s failure is that O and his team made it much worse than it needed to be because they were terrified of transparency. And the reason they were terrified of transparency, both in the case of hiding the cost of the premiums from web users and hiding the site’s architectural problems from contractors who might be hauled before Congress, is because they know they’ve delivered a bad product. Put the premiums on the front page and the public, expecting “affordable care,” would recoil at the truth. Put the contractors at the witness table before Issa’s committee and the public, expecting that the government would “fix” health care, would recoil upon discovering that they can’t even build a website with three years’ lead time.

I don’t know what’s more amazing, that they’d place their own political comfort above creating a smoother user experience for the uninsured or that they somehow didn’t realize that a botched rollout on October 1 would be far more embarrassing than contractors talking to Republicans under oath. Or … would it? What was HHS so worried that outside contractors would tell the GOP that they preferred to risk total chaos on the exchanges during launch month instead?

Via: Hot Air

Sunday, October 20, 2013

If Medicaid in Ohio goes bankrupt, it's because John Kasich bankrupted it

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