Mac Wins Sandra Fluke Vote; Media Anoint Christie GOP Nominee

Crony businessman Terry McAuliffe rode a massive 70-22% margin among single women to a shockingly tiny victory over Ken Cuccinelli -- while Chris Christie has been declared the winner of the GOP Media Primary for the 2016 presidential nomination.  These are just a few of the fascinating developments from Virginia, New Jersey, and elsewhere last night.  Oddly, Fox News was not nearly as fascinated by any of it as were CNN and MSNBC -- that is, until Christie took to the podium at 10:15 eastern.

Meanwhile, the Republican establishment's expected victory dance on the grave of the Tea Party movement should be at least postponed, if not canceled -- and the Jurassic media's "move along, nothing to see here" attitude toward ObamaCare's nearly devastating impact on McAuliffe's campaign rang hollow and desperate across cable networks last night.

Oh, and while we're at it, let's not forget the game-changing significance that socially liberal faux libertarian Robert Sarvis had on the Virginia race.  For months, it was assumed he was hurting Ken Cuccinelli's campaign.  However, in the final weeks, as his liberal social positions became more evident, it appeared that he was perhaps pulling a lot of support from McAuliffe as well.  In the end, exit polls from yesterday prove that he did indeed hurt the Republican the most, validating the money Democrat bundlers put behind this campaign -- a captivating dynamic that saw the light of day just 24 hours ago.

Via: American Thinker
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Apple Inc. releases first report on government requests for customer information Published: November 5, 2013 Updated 22 hours ago

Apple Inc. on Tuesday released its first report on the numbers of requests it received in the first half of this year from governments seeking customer account and data information, and - no surprise here - the United States outpaced the rest of the world combined.

But the company couldn't disclose precisely how many U.S. government requests it received and the extent to which it complied. That's because U.S. restrictions required Apple to combine national security orders with account-based law enforcement requests - subpoenas, court orders and warrants - and report only the combined amounts in increments of 1,000.

"The U.S. government does not allow Apple to disclose, except in broad ranges, the number of national security orders, the number of accounts affected by the orders, or whether content, such as emails, was disclosed," said the report. "We strongly oppose this gag order, and Apple has made the case for relief from these restrictions in meetings and discussions with the White House, the U.S. Attorney General (Eric Holder), congressional leaders and the courts."

Via: McClatchyDC

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Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/11/05/207560/apple-inc-releases-first-report.html#storylink=cpy

'Obamacare' Memos Reveal Chaos, Confusion of October Rollout

More than 175 pages of internal Obama administration memos, obtained by the House Oversight Committee, released Tuesday and reviewed by ABC News, present the most detailed account yet of the troubled rollout of thefederal health insurance exchange, HealthCare.gov.

While there are no bombshell revelations, the documents make clear that the administration grossly underestimated the scope of the website's technical problems; struggled to contain widespread confusion among insurers and applicants; and now faces a barrage of new challenges triggered by its emphasis on paper applications.

The memos from Oct. 1 through Oct. 27 are "war room notes" from the government team charged with overseeing the health care law rollout. They don't provide any hard enrollment figures, which officials have promised to release later this month. But they do suggest the administration likely fell well short of its 500,000 enrollment target in the first month, possibly reaching fewer than one tenth of that goal.

Here are some highlights from the document trove:

CHAOS, CONFUSION BEHIND THE SCENES: 'TIGER TEAM' RESPONDS

From the moment HealthCare.gov went live, there were problems across the board, not just limited to logging in or creating an account. There were widespread reports of insurers' plans not showing up in the marketplace, or showing up with the wrong pricing or details. Many applicants (90 percent) who managed to get into the system couldn't pass residency tests to determine Medicaid eligibility. Meanwhile, agents and brokers couldn't access their portal, while regional account officers and caseworkers were "unavailable."

A Critical Incident Response Team (CIRT), also known as the "Tiger Team," composed of members of each division involved with the rollout, convened immediately. They began meeting daily at 8 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. until Oct. 15. The group stopped meeting regularly after that point, but "continue to discuss urgent topics."

Via: Yahoo

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Senate liberals blast Medicare boss over ObamaCare

WASHINGTON – The official in charge of the glitch-plagued ObamaCare Web site got taken to the woodshed Monday by some of Senate’s most liberal Democrats.

“There has been a crisis of confidence created in the dysfunctional nature of the website, cancellation of policies and sticker shock for some people,” Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), a die-hard liberal and usually a staunch supporter of President Obama, fumed at Medicare chief Marilyn Tavenner.

Tevenner, on the hot seat in front of the Democratic-led Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, pledged that HealthCare.gov was getting better every day and that the administration would launch a media campaign to entice Americans back to the site.

“I would encourage folks, if they have not gone onto the website in the last few days, to go onto the website,” she said.

She said the site can now process nearly 17,000 registrants per hour, or 5 per second, with “almost no errors.”

Almost on cue, the Web site crashed again for about 90 minutes in middle of the hearing.

Taverner also admitted that the administration didn’t perform a full security check on the Web site before it launched on Oct. 1.

Concerns that peoples’ personal information is at risk on the site is another issue dogging the ObamaCare rollout.

“We couldn’t test live until we went live,” Tavenner said.

Via: New York Post

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Sebelius: If We Delay Obamacare People Will Die of Cancer or Diabetes…

Lead author of Obamacare law criticizes administration over rollout

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A senior Democratic senator who served as a lead author of President Barack Obama's healthcare law criticized the administration on Wednesday for failing to alert lawmakers to problems that led to the program's troubled rollout.

Senator Max Baucus, chairman of the U.S. Senate Finance Committee, who worried openly in April that the rollout could become "a train wreck" said he has been disappointed to hear administration officials say they didn't see problems with the federal healthcare website HealthCare.gov coming.

"When we asked for updates on the marketplaces, the responses we got were totally unsatisfactory. We heard multiple times that everything was on track. We now know that was not the case," he told U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius at an oversight hearing.

But Baucus also sounded a conciliatory note, saying he wanted to avoid assigning blame. "That's in the past," Baucus said. "Now it's time to move forward and figure out how to fix it."

Under the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, it is mandatory for everyone to have health insurance or pay a fine. Republicans oppose the plan on the grounds that it is an unwarranted expansion of the federal government.

The administration is working around-the-clock with the help of outside tech advisers to resolve problems that have plagued HealthCare.gov since it opened on October 1 and reduced an expected flood of new enrollees to a trickle.

Via: Chicago Tribune

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Democrats start to notice that maybe Obamacare isn’t working out so well

You gotta hand it to ‘em: Democrats are stupid liars, but at least they don’t catch on too quickly.

Steven T. Dennis, The Hill:

When a loyal leader on your own team says there is a “crisis of confidence” surrounding your signature initiative, you’ve got trouble.

That’s the phrase Democratic Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski of Maryland used repeatedly Tuesday morning to describe the rollout of the new health care law as she questioned Marilyn Tavenner, the head of the health agency tasked with overseeing the law’s implementation.

“I believe that there’s been a crisis of confidence created in the dysfunctional nature of the website, the canceling of policies, and sticker shock from some people,” said Mikulski, who has generally been a strong ally of the administration.

You bet she has. Why, as recently as September, she was blurting out nonsense like this about the efforts to stop Obamacare:

“The reason Ted Cruz stood up and asked for a delay is so that he could have a vote during today when he’s… the teabaggers in his tea party were going to watch. This is why I have repeatedly said the greatest deliberative body in the world has become the greatest delaying body in the world.”

Well, you got what you wanted, Babs. How’s that workin’ out for ya, teabaggee?

Don’t worry, everybody. I’m sure this moment of clarity is just a brief phase. Mikulski and her comrades will figure out some way to pin this disaster on the people who have opposed it from the beginning. MSNBC and the NYT and the rest are already being fed their talking points. It’s everybody’s fault except for the people who lied us into this mess and then lied about us when we spoke up about it.

This is a Pyrrhic victory for the Democrats, if Pyrrhus had set off a nuke on his own throne.

Told ya so, you morons.

Via: Daily Caller

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Loyal Obama Supporters, Canceled by Obamacare

San Francisco architect Lee Hammack says he and his wife, JoEllen Brothers, are “cradle Democrats.” They have donated to the liberal group Organizing for America and worked the phone banks a year ago for President Obama’s re-election.

Since 1995, Hammack and Brothers have received their health coverage from Kaiser Permanente, where Brothers worked until 2009 as a dietician and diabetes educator. “We’ve both been in very good health all of our lives – exercise, don’t smoke, drink lightly, healthy weight, no health issues, and so on,” Hammack told me.

The couple — Lee, 60, and JoEllen, 59 — have been paying $550 a month for their health coverage — a plan that offers solid coverage, not one of the skimpy plans Obama has criticized. But recently, Kaiser informed them the plan would be canceled at the end of the year because it did not meet the requirements of the Affordable Care Act. The couple would need to find another one. The cost would be around double what they pay now, but the benefits would be worse.

“From all of the sob stories I’ve heard and read, ours is the most extreme,” Lee told me in an email last week.

I’ve been skeptical about media stories featuring those who claimed they would be worse off because their insurance policies were being canceled on account of the ACA. In many cases, it turns out, the consumers could have found cheaper coverage through the new health insurance marketplaces, or their plans weren’t very good to begin with. Some didn’t know they could qualify for subsidies that would lower their insurance premiums.

Via: Pro Publica

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Marvel Rolls out Muslim Girl Superheroine

It must be really exciting being a kid today. Denied the strength that “lies in our diversity,” youngsters languishing in the unenlightened 1960s had to content themselves with banal white male superheroes such as Superman, Spiderman and Ironman.

But not only has affirmative action created a Hispanic Spiderman (perhaps a white Hispanic?); a homosexual Pink…I mean, Green Lantern; and a Batwoman reintroduced in 2006 as a lesbian (the irony is that she was originally introduced in 1956 as a romantic interest designed to dispel rumors about Batman’s homosexuality); now Marvel Comics is giving us a female Muslim superheroine.
Writes The Telegraph:

Marvel Comics is bringing Ms. Marvel back as a 16-year-old daughter of Pakistani immigrants living in Jersey City named Kamala Khan.
The character - among the first to be a series protagonist who is both a woman and Muslim - is part of Marvel Entertainment’s efforts to reflect a growing diversity among its readers while keeping ahold of the contemporary relevance that have underlined its foundation since the creation of Spider-Man and the X-Men in the early 1960s.

Writer G. Willow Wilson and artist Adrian Alphona, working with editor Sana Amanat, say the series reflects Khan’s vibrant but kinetic world, learning to deal with superpowers, family expectations and adolescence.

Via: Canada Free Press

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Blue State Lawmakers Make Taxpayers Blue

The terms “Blue State” and “Red State” were coined about a dozen years ago by journalist Tim Russert and were based on the colored maps being used by the television networks to graphically display presidential election results. Although originally based on the arbitrary decision to label Republican voting states red, and those supporting the Democratic candidate blue, these colors have also come to represent liberal (blue) and conservative (red).

The latest Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association Legislative Report Card demonstrates that, in terms of state representation, California continues to be the bluest of blue. But while California has a reputation as being ultra-liberal on a host of issues, for purposes of the HJTA Report Card, we focused solely on how legislative votes were cast on tax issues.

Taken as a whole, the Report Card shows that a preponderance of lawmakers actively support the redistribution of wealth, not from one citizen to another, but from all citizens to the government. This allows the majority party in the Legislature to continue to reward their most active backers, the government employee unions. Government employees in California are the highest paid in all 50 states and it is no secret that money to meet the payroll must come from taxpayers.

The HJTA Legislative Report Card is designed to help Californians gauge how their state representatives are actually performing on taxpayer-related issues. For the 2013 legislative year, 20 bills were used to evaluate and grade voting records. Practically all of these bills deal with tax increases — often masquerading as fees — or direct assaults on Proposition 13 and Proposition 218, the Right to Vote on Taxes Act.

There is no question that the consequences of what occurs “Under the Dome” are very real and personal for average taxpayers. For example, decisions made by legislators in the last five years have helped ensure we have the highest income, sales, and gas taxes in the nation. These are facts most lawmakers fail to mention when discussing their voting records. The letter grades allow Californians to see past the politicians’ self-promoting press releases and glossy campaign mailers touting their record in Sacramento.

Via: California Political Review

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[CARTOON] Obamacare Rollout

Via: California Political Review

CUCCINELLI, SARVIS COMBINE FOR 53% OF VOTE

Despite polls which showed Democrat Terry McAuliffe with a solid lead, it looks like he will eke to victory in the race for Virginia Governor. With 92% of the vote counted, he leads Republican Ken Cuccinelli, 46.8% to 46.5%. Libertarian Robert Sarvis garners 6.7% of the vote. Combined, the Republican and Libertarian get 53% of the vote. McAuliffe will be elected with 47% of the vote. 

Just a few thousand votes separate McAuliffe and Cuccinelli. Sarvis received over 130,000 votes. 

Cuccinelli, it should be noted, was out-spent at least 3-1 by McAuliffe. Outside Democrat groups amplified the funding disadvantage facing the Republican. By finally nationalizing the campaign and focusing on ObamaCare, however, he was able to come within a few thousand votes of winning. All in the face of a GOP Establishment that turned its back on him, a consultant class that misguided his campaign and GOP pundits and commentators who said for weeks he couldn't win. 

Yes, the libertarian cost Cuccinelli votes. The campaign, however, bears some responsibility for allowing Sarvis to gain traction.

This was clearly a very winnable race, in spite of what people say about conservatives or the government shutdown. The GOP abandoned Cuccinelli. And, Virginians certainly didn't embrace Terry McAuliffe.  

Via: Breitbart

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