[CARTOON] ObamaCare: It’s Good

Via: California Political Review

Federal Appeals Court Rules Bloggers Have First Amendment Protections

GRANTS PASS, ORE. –  A federal appeals court ruled Friday that bloggers and the public have the same First Amendment protections as journalists when sued for defamation: If the issue is of public concern, plaintiffs have to prove negligence to win damages.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered a new trial in a defamation lawsuit brought by an Oregon bankruptcy trustee against a Montana blogger who wrote online that the court-appointed trustee criminally mishandled a bankruptcy case.

The appeals court ruled that the trustee was not a public figure, which could have invoked an even higher standard of showing the writer acted with malice, but the issue was of public concern, so the negligence standard applied.

Gregg Leslie of the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press said the ruling affirms what many have long argued: Standards set by a 1974 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Gertz v. Robert Welch Inc., apply to everyone, not just journalists.

"It's not a special right to the news media," he said. "So it's a good thing for bloggers and citizen journalists and others."

Via: Fox News

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[CARTOON] Abuse Outrage

Via: California Political Review

Question for ObamaCare: Where's the money?

More numbers from Obama Care but we still don't know what the health of the program is.

According to POLITICO:

"The administration's monthly enrollment update showed 2.2 million people had picked health plans in the federal or state health exchanges from Oct. 1 through Dec. 28. It's not yet clear how many have paid their first monthly premium, a requirement before coverage can begin. An additional 3.9 million people have been deemed eligible for Medicaid. 

 

More than half of those who have signed up are between 45 and 64, an age range that tends to be sicker and costlier to cover, according to the enrollment figures released Monday by the Department of Health and Human Services."

So let me get this straight:

1. No young people, or the ones who will fund the ACA;

2. Too many older and sick people, or the ones who will very likely use the service; and,

3. We do not have official reports on the premiums collected.  Is the Obama administration afraid of releasing premium info because so few have paid?

It looks to me that The Affordable Health Care Act is in very bad health. The death spiral is literally here.

Via: American Thinker
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'HANNITY' Cable Exclusive: MOTIVES QUESTIONED? Obama Was 'Suspicious' of Military Leaders, Gates Says

Published January 15, 2014FoxNews.com
Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates says he always felt President Obama was respectful of senior military leaders, but at the same time was “suspicious of their motives” and seemed to feel pressure to from them to adopt their recommendations.
However, Gates said he also admired what he called Obama’s “courageous” decision to order the troop surge in Afghanistan in 2010, saying the president did so against the advice of all of his advisers because Obama believed it would work.
In an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity Tuesday night the former Pentagon boss spoke at length about his time serving under Obama and President George W. Bush, on the same day his controversial memoir “Duty” hit stores.
Gates said on “Hannity” he felt there was a difference between how Obama and Bush viewed meeting with senior military leaders. Bush, he said, seemed to genuinely enjoy meeting with them, but Obama did not seem to feel the same.
“He always gave the military leaders as much time as they wanted, listened carefully, was never nasty to them,” Gates said. “But I always had the feeling with him, that first of all he was suspicious of their motives and second that time spent with them was an obligation rather than something he enjoyed…”
Gates said he felt the root of the problem seemed to be Obama felt that military leaders such as Admiral Michael Mullen, Gen. David Petraeus and Gen. Stanley McChrystal were pressuring him in public to adopt their recommendations.
“I believe that was not an orchestrated effort to pressure the president,” he said.
However, Gates said he admired Obama’s “courageous” decision to go forward with the troop surge in 2010 against the advice of all of his advisers. He responded to a widely-reported excerpt of his book, in which he said Obama expressed doubts about the strategy in Afghanistan and seemed convinced it would fail.
Gates told Hannity it is important to look at Obama’s view toward the Afghan strategy as more of an evolution. He says he believes Obama truly did believe the surge would work, but became concerned during 2010 when the civilian side of the operation in particular clearly was failing.
“Our military operations were taking longer and were tougher than anticipated and so I think he had these reservations,” he said. “I will give him credit as late as December 2010, he was still going out to the public and announcing the results of the latest review and saying we’re moving ahead we’re doing a good job, we’re accomplishing what we set out to do. But I think behind the scenes he was continually worried.”

Via Fox Nation
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Obama’s use of executive power faces reckoning at Supreme Court

The O-man, Barack Hussein Obama, is an eloquently tailored empty suit. No resume, no accomplishments, no experience, no original ideas, no understanding of how the economy works, no understanding of how the world works, no balls, nothing but abstract, empty rhetoric devoid of real substance.He has no real identity. He is half-white, which he rejects. The rest of him is mostly Arab, which he hides, but is disclosed by his non-African Arabic surname and his Arabic first and middle names as a way to triply proclaim his Arabic parentage to people in Kenya. Only a small part of him is African Black from his Luo grandmother, which he pretends he is exclusively. What he isn't, not a genetic drop of, is African-American,the descendant of enslaved Africans brought to America chained in slave ships. He hasn't a single ancestor who was a slave. Instead, his Arab ancestors were slave owners. Slave-trading was the main Arab business in East Africa for centuries until the British ended it. Let that sink in: Obama is not the descendant of slaves; he is the descendant of slave owners. Thus he makes the perfect Liberal Messiah. It's something Hillary doesn't understand how some complete neophyte came out of the blue and stole the Dem nomination from her. Obamamania is beyond politics and reason. It is a true religious cult, whose adherents reject Christianity yet still believe in Original Sin, transferring it from the evil of being human to the evil of being white. Thus Obama has become the white liberals' Christ, offering absolution from the Sin of Being White. There is no reason or logic behind it, no faults or flaws of his can diminish it, and no arguments Hillary could make of any kind can be effective against it. The absurdity of Hypocrisy Clothed In Human Flesh being their Savior is all the more cause for liberals to worship him: Credo quia absurdum, I believe it because it is absurd. Thank heavens that the voting majority of Americans remain Christian and are in no desperate need of a phony savior. He is ridiculous and should not be taken seriously by any thinking American.

Oregon Health Exchange Yet to Complete One Enrollment

Oregon will consider a switch to the federal health care exchange next year amid ongoing problems with its online enrollment program, Politico Pro reports.

The state’s exchange, Cover Oregon, still cannot process an entire enrollment online — a problem that is not expected to be repaired until after the 2014 enrollment period ends in March.

That has state officials weighing several options including scrapping its own enrollment system and moving to HealthCare.gov, the federal enrollment portal which is working better now after its own disastrous start. Switching to the federal site could be considered a significant political defeat for the state and Democratic Gov. John Kitzhaber, who strongly embraced the president’s health care law and is seeking reelection this year.

“As much as we don’t want to walk away from a big IT project, we have to consider it,” Kitzhaber health policy adviser Sean Kolmer told Politico. “It’s all about enrollment.”

Oregon is now analyzing what went wrong with the website, with many blaming the main contractor of the site.

Via: WFB

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[CARTOON] Stuck in Global Warming

Via: California Political Review

ObamaCare May Be On Life Support If Young Don’t Sign Up

Now that more than 2 million people have signed up for private insurance plans created by President Barack Obama's healthcare law, a crucial next check-up for the new marketplace will be to see how old customers are.

Early data from a handful of state exchanges shows the administration needs more young adults to sign up in the next three months to help offset costs from older enrollees and prevent insurers from raising their rates.
Critics of Obama's Affordable Care Act say the market won't attract enough young people to keep it financially viable, putting more pressure on government funds to compensate for any insurer losses.

Data from seven states and the District of Columbia, which are running their own marketplaces, show that of more than 200,000 enrollees, nearly 22 percent are 18 to 34 years old, according to a Reuters analysis.

The administration had hoped that over 38 percent, or 2.7 million, of all enrollees in 2014 would be 18 to 35 years old, based on a Congressional Budget Office estimate that 7 million people would sign up by the end of March.

"The whole insurance relationship is counting on them signing up," said Dale Yamamoto, an independent healthcare actuarial consultant. "Otherwise rates will have to increase."

The picture from the initial state data is likely to change, since it mostly includes people who enrolled only through November, before a year-end surge of sign-ups for people wanting coverage effective Jan 1. Many experts speculate the early enrollees were more likely to be in urgent need of coverage, and therefore more likely to be older or sicker.

A recent survey by The Commonwealth Fund, a healthcare research foundation, found that 41 percent of those who had shopped at the various state marketplaces by the end of December were ages 19 to 34, up from 32 percent from an October survey.

One marketplace with current data, the District of Columbia, said on Friday that of the 3,646 enrollees in private plans through Thursday, about 44 percent are young adults.

Healthcare experts say many young healthy people may sign up only at the end of enrollment on March 31 to avoid paying the law's penalty for not having health insurance.

Via: Newsmax

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How to Do the War on Poverty Right

Fifty years ago, LBJ launched a "War on Poverty."  It has failed horribly.  But fifty years before LBJ, on January 5, 1914, another man launched his own "War on Poverty" that was a dazzling success.  That was the day Henry Ford announced that he would pay his workers $5 per day, twice the average factory wages at the time, and that the workday would be reduced to eight hours.  Ford also offered workers profit-sharing plans. 

Ford was a hardheaded and self-made businessman who understood that paying high wages to productive workers was good business.  Turnover at his plants dropped dramatically.  Workers were able to afford his Model T, the cheapest and best car in the world at the time, and quickly they became solid middle-class homeowners.

Excellent wages encouraged the best workers to stay with the best companies, and it also influenced his competitors, who also had to pay good wages to their workers in order to keep them from working for Ford.  The explosion in productivity transformed America and awed the rest of the world.  In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, the chronology of human affairs was calculated based upon Ford -- A.F. was "After Ford."

Henry Ford insisted that his workers lead honest and upright lives.  His "Sociological Department" intruded into the lives of his workers, demanding that they fill out long questionnaires describing how they live.  Young men who wanted the new high wage levels had to be married.  Drunken wastrels were ineligibles for the $5 a day.  His employees' homes had to be neat and clean.  He did not tolerate immoral behavior from his employees.

Ford Motors did, however, offer help to employees with problems.  Without the whip of government, Ford used a private-sector carrot and stick to make sure that his employees had nuclear families, good homes, and wholesome lives.  This was the other part of Ford's war on poverty.

Both arms of Ford's war on poverty worked.  The muckraking journalist Ida Tarbell went to Michigan to "expose" this "oppressive" corporate behavior, but he instead came back with high praise.

Henry Ford showed how the private sectors, without using a nickel of the taxpayers' money and without using the coercive power of Washington, could transform the lives of the poor.  Part of his success was paying workers very well for hard work and company loyalty, and the other part was insisting that workers accept his own private moral values in their own lives.  Although the federal government would soon be trying to stem the social disaster of alcoholism with Prohibition, with calamitous results, Ford as a businessman was encouraging sobriety without the lash of government.  And it worked.

The contrast between these two anniversaries of private-sector and public-sector wars on poverty is stark.  The "Great Society" of LBJ did not work, and its successor leftist utopian nostrums have also failed miserably.  The sheer cost of these programs is breathtaking.  The residue of the nanny state in fatherless children, in savage and decaying welfare neighborhoods, in awful public schools that teach less and less, and social welfare programs that hobble rather than help the poor -- all the raw sewage that is leftist government in practice -- has failed absolutely and completely to help the poor at all.

Hard-headed and eminently practical Henry Ford -- along with other common men raised to the heights of business by grit and gumption and gambling -- working without using other people's money, without laws and regulations from government, and in pursuit of enlightened self-interest lifted millions of Americans into the middle class and beyond by determining what actually worked and then using that as the path to success. 

Ford was hardly alone.  The whole army of so-called "Robber Barons" comprised men like Ford:  men who came from poor homes and who had little formal education and who were very practical and very diligent and very resilient.  These were the sort of men whom Obama mocked in his infamous "You didn't build that business" comments during the 2012 presidential race.

Our dim bulb in the Oval Office, as always, does not know what he is talking about.  While he flushes a few trillion dollars down the drain in hapless pursuit of shovel-ready government-propped jobs, and while we lament the grim legacy of LBJ and his War on Poverty, we ought to be recalling what Henry Ford did one hundred years ago.  He launched a war on poverty in the name of private profit.  What he did worked.

© 2011 AmericanThinker

Accenture settles US fraud claims for $63.7 million

Global consulting giant Accenture has agreed to pay $63.7 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that it defrauded the US government, US officials said on Monday.

"Accenture has agreed to resolve allegations that it received kickbacks for its recommendations of hardware and software to the government," the US Department of Justice said in a statement.

The firm also "fraudulently inflated prices and rigged bids in connection with federal information technology contracts," the statement said.

The lawsuit was brought against Accenture in the southern state of Arkansas by two whistleblowers who are entitled to receive part of the settlement under a US law designed to help ferret out fraud in government contracting.

Accenture, which employs more than 223,000 people around the world and had more than $21 billion in revenues last year, is one of the world's largest technology outsourcing and management consulting companies.

Via: Yahoo News

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[CARTOON] Chris Christie’s Apology

Via: California Political Review

Gov. Brown Advances Apparently Balanced Budget

Gov. Jerry Brown today advanced a budget proposal that apparently is balanced for fiscal year 2014-15, which begins on July 1. It would spend a record $106.8 billion on the general fund, which is up a hefty 23 percent from the $86.8 billion of his first budget three years ago, for fiscal 2011-12.

The new budget includes a $1.6 billion “rainy day fund,” or 1.5 percent of the total.

The budget addresses what the governor has called the “Wall of Debt” run up by the state, currently totaling $24.9 billion. The major items are:

* $6.1 billion in deferred payments to schools, which will be eliminated;

* $3.9 billion for the Economic Recovery Bonds voters approved in 2004, at the insistence of Gov. Arnold Schwarenegger, which will be eliminated;

* $3.9 billion in loans from special funds, which will be reduced by $1 billion, to $2.9 billion;

* $5.4 billion in unpaid costs to local governments and schools for state mandates, which will remain the same;

* $2.4 billion for the under-funding of Proposition 98 for schools, which will be reduced by $600 million, to $1.8 billion.

Spending increase

In a question-and-answer session with reporters, CalWatchdog.com asked about the $20 billion increase in spending over three years.

The governor replied that most of the new spending is going to pay down the Wall of Debt. “When you pay off that debt, you improve the debt, you don’t make it worse,” he said.

Via: California Political Review

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FBI Contacts Tea Party Groups Targeted By IRS

The FBI finally has begun to contact some of the tea party groups targeted by the Internal Revenue Service for inappropriate scrutiny in the first public signs that the administration’s criminal investigation is progressing.

A lawyer representing some of the tea party groups that battled the IRS for tax-exempt status told The Washington Times that a “small number” of his clients were recently contacted, seven months after the investigation was supposed to have begun.

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SPECIAL COVERAGE: Tea Party Voices

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The progress was revealed a day after The Times reported that the Justice Department lawyer who is leading the investigation into the IRS, Barbara Kay Bosserman, has donated more than $6,000 to President Obama’s presidential campaigns — a move that, for many Republicans, has called into question the entire investigation.

“They say the fox isn’t good to guard the henhouse; the fox is probably not good to investigate the henhouse, either,” said Sen. Rand Paul, Kentucky Republican. “I think these investigations need to be done by independent people outside of the administration.”

Mr. Holder ordered an FBI investigation in the days immediately after the internal auditor of the IRS revealed that the agency had been inappropriately targeting tea party groups for intrusive scrutiny and wrongly delayed the approval of hundreds of conservative groups’ applications for tax-exempt status.

Via: Washington Times

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Why your Facebook could start affecting your credit score

Looking up loan applicants’ social media activity has become a popular trend among lenders, and major credit rating agencies like Fair Isaac Corp (FICO) are starting to catch on.

Facebook factors like the number of friends an applicant has, the number and time span of jobs they have listed on their timeline and status updates about losing a job help to decide whether they’re approved or denied, and now will likely begin to influence their credit score as well.

“There could come a time where certain social media could be predictive and we’re looking at that, but it isn’t yet,” FICO consumer-credit specialist Anthony Sprauve told the Wall Street Journal.

FICO scores are used in more than 90 percent of all credit worthiness lender decisions.

Twitter and LinkedIn are also used to follow a potential borrower’s tweets about their job, and whether or not the job they have listed on their application matches the one posted on their LinkedIn profile. Lenders also check and see whether the friends and connections of an applicant have paid back their loans.

Some are even using it to communicate with current borrowers about their repayment options and urging them to make payments on loans. Lenddo, a platform that helps potential borrowers build creditworthiness through social media, sends messages about repayment directly to users’ accounts.

Government regulators and privacy advocates like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Federal Trade Commission have begun examining lenders’ use of social media, with early reports calling it a violation of consumer privacy.

With laws already on the books in some states to keep employers from using social media from judging job candidates and schools from evaluating prospective students, a similar law against the use for approving loans and establishing credit ratings is a possibility.

Via: Daily Caller

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Congress Turns Spotlight to Government Waste

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform highlighted wasteful federal spending on Thursday, holding a hearing that cited numerous examples of the practice, but few successes in eliminating it.

The hearing led with testimony from Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Carper (D., Del.) and Ranking Member Tom Coburn (R., Okla.), whoserecent release of the 2013 Wastebook identified over $30 billion in frivolous government spending.

Coburn said the problem of government waste is not caused by a lack of bipartisanship in Washington.

“My take is we get along too well,” he said. “We have presidents that come and go, Congresses who come and go, and we still have government waste. Why is that?”

“The problem isn’t that we don’t know what the problem is,” Coburn said, “it’s that we don’t act on the problem.”

The hearing exposed a lengthy list of examples, including $9 billion in tax breaks and loans to the wealthy that saw farm subsidies going to Ted Turner, Jon Bon Jovi, and former NBA player Scottie Pippen.

Thomas Schatz, the president of Citizens Against Government Waste, testified to the numerous overlap in federal programs. “Analysis is virtually non-existent” for the 47 job training programs across nine agencies, he said, which cost $18 billion in fiscal year 2009.

Thirteen agencies administered 209 science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) programs totaling $3.1 billion in FY 2010, though the United States still lags behind other countries in the STEM field.

Via: WFB:

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Obamacare 2014 – More Losers Than Winners

Covered California’ the state’s Obamacare exchange, has racked up one accomplishment.  Thanks to its policies, there are more uninsured Californians in January 2014 then there were one year ago.

According to media reports, some 430,000 people signed up for health insurance through Covered California during the three month sign up period to be covered January 1.  But over the past year, 1,087,169 Californians in the individual market had their plans canceled due to Obamacare’s new rules.

Nationwide, some 5 million people lost their health insurance.  When President Obama felt the heat, he saw the light and asked the states and insurers to extend the cancelled plans for another year.  California Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones had already pressed insurers to extend these plans and immediately endorsed the one-year extension.

These 1.1 million people are mostly healthy and had limited coverage catastrophic plans that they liked.  But for Covered California’s actuarial schemes to work, these people must be forced into the exchange.  So exhibiting the empathy of Stalinist five year planners, Covered California denied the extension.  As a result, came January 1 these people had no coverage.

But even if you assume that all 430,000 enrollees in the new exchange come from this pool (probably an inaccurate assumption), that still leaves 670,000 Californians with cancelled plans.  Some probably found new plans through the private market, but how many simply are doing without insurance because they cannot find or cannot afford another plan?

President Obama received the Politifact “Lie of the Year” award for “If you like your plan, you can keep it.”  But there is an even bigger lie that has been spread by the Administration and its liberal supporters, and that is that there are no losers in Obamacare, only winners.  In fact, there are more losers so far in California than winners, and there is every reason to expect this disparity to grow in 2014.

That’s because Obamacare is essentially a huge redistribution of wealth between income levels and between generations, and in that there are always winners and losers

Via: California Political Review

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