Report: Danger of Government-Created Solar Bubble Bursting When Subsidies Expire in 2016

(CNSNews.com) – Federal subsidies have created a massive “green bubble” in the solar industry that is in danger of bursting when they expire next year, leaving taxpayers on the hook for billions of dollars, according to a report by the Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA).

Homeowners and businesses that install a solar energy system are currently entitled to a 30 percent Solar Investment Tax Credit (ITC), which was initially passed by Congress in 2006 and extended for another eight years in 2008. 

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However, the ITC will drop to 10 percent for commercial and zero for residential properties on Dec. 31, 2016.

And even members of the heavily-subsidized solar industry, which provides less than one percent of the nation’s electricity, are worried that it cannot stand on its own without government handouts.

“The reality is that we will lose 100,000 jobs if we lose the ITC — and these are conservative numbers. Ninety percent of solar companies will go out of business,” Rhone Resch, executive director of the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), told participants at PV American 2015 in March.

SEIA spokesman Ken Johnson said that lobbying Congress to extend the ITC beyond 2016 is the group’s “top priority.”

According to the TPA report, entitled From Washington to Wall Street: How Government Policies are Skewing Solar Investments, solar companies are currently “bundling and securitizing” third-party solar leases, similar to the activity that triggered the housing market collapse.

“Since most homeowners do not have enough tax liability to utilize the Investment Tax Credit and some state incentives, the leasing company can take advantage of subsidies the average homeowner cannot,” the report explained.

“Solar leasing companies then take hundreds or thousands of leases and PPAs [in which the homeowner pays the company for the solar power produced] and bundle them together to offer them to investors (banks, insurance corporations and corporate investors) as asset backed securities, using the homeowner’s lease or PPA payment to service the debt.”

But the report pointed out that after 23 years, production of wind power “dropped off significantly” when a similar $12 billion annual federal wind production tax credit was set to expire, warning that “solar could well suffer a similar fate.”

“Much like the government-created housing bubble and subsequent financial crisis, handouts at the federal and state level are creating a solar bubble that taxpayers are propping up, and it will the taxpayers and investors who take the hit when the industry comes crashing down,” the TPA report predicted.

According to a March report to Congress by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), “the total value of direct federal financial interventions and subsidies [to the energy sector] decreased 23% between FYs 2010 and 2013, declining from $38 billion to $29.3 billion” even as domestic energy production “rose 10% from 73.7 quadrillion Btu in FY 2010 to 81.1 quadrillion Btu in FY 2013.”

However, during that same time period there was a $4.2 billion increase in solar subsidies, “from $1.1 billion in FY 2010 to $5.3 billion in FY 2013…reflecting a large increase in the installation of solar facilities utilizing the ARRA [American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009] Section 1603 grant payments or the 30% Investment Tax Credit.”

TPA calculates that the total amount of federal subsidies, including loans, grants and tax incentives, amounts to about $39 billion annually in addition to generous state and local subsidies.

Yet despite these massive government subsidies, firms such as SolarCity, the nation’s largest solar energy provider, and other solar installation and leasing companies are operating at a loss,” the report points out.  

“We’re concerned that taxpayers and consumers are going to be caught in this web. Because homeowners will be caught." TPA president David Williams told CNSNews.com.

"Because if a company goes bankrupt, who services those panels, who services the house to make sure that the panels are working correctly, what happens to the lease or to the loan, however they purchased these panels? Taxpayers.

"Because Congress has this penchant for bailing out companies, big and small. And I think that if the bubble does burst, you’re going to have a lot of members of Congress who don’t want to accept the failure of green energy and make sure that the people that did get these panels, and that they would actually prop up these companies with taxpayer funds,” he said.

Via: CNS News

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CALIFORNIA: Legislation Hiking Initiative Filing Fee Faces Resistance

Unexpected bipartisan opposition has formed against a piece of legislation designed to cut down on California’s sometimes outrageous ballot initiatives.

In addition to the left-leaning Consumer Watchdog organization, citizens’-rights groups like the California Taxpayers Association and the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association have mustered their members against the bill. Carmen Balber, executive director of Consumer Watchdog, told the San Francisco Chronicle “that only six of the 26 states that allow citizen initiatives have filing fees and that the highest is $500, in Mississippi and Wyoming.”

Hoping to stave off a shift in fortunes, Assemblyman Evan Low, D-Campbell, has already tweaked Assembly Bill 1100 in an effort to calm the drama. Co-authored by Assemblyman Richard Bloom, D-Santa Monica, the bill originally proposed a massive increase in the fee charged by the state to file an initiative. Currently just $200, Low and Bloom set out to hike the fee to $8,000 — a daunting number for some, but calculated to just about cover what it costs the state to pay the attorney general’s office for drafting each initiative’s title and summary.

Low was inspired to push for the reform by a contentious recent effort that would have created a so-called Sodomite Suppression Act. “Huntington Beach attorney Matt McLaughlin submitted a ballot measure in February that would have ‘any person who willingly touches another person of the same gender for purposes of sexual gratification be put to death by bullets to the head or by any other convenient method,’” as the Sacramento Bee recalled. “Determined to prevent the measure from moving forward, Attorney General Kamala Harris took the measure to court and was relieved of the official duty to write the title and 100-word summary necessary before signature-gathering.”

A checkered past

Proponents of Low’s reform insisted that the bill was about more than shutting down such lurid proposals. California’s ballot initiative system has seen its fair share of half-baked ideas over the years, drawing criticism from more conservative analysts concerned that the state’s view of direct democracy was too romantic and naive.

As the Chronicle noted, initiatives have now been filed that would ban alimony, create a secession commission, eliminate private power companies, fly the state flag above the national flag, “and call the state’s top elected official ‘president of California.’”

Another ongoing challenge, some critics noted, was guiding voters away from voting in favor of unaffordable but otherwise appealing measures.

In fact, Low’s efforts to curb crazy initiatives have not been the first — nor the first to do so by jacking up the price of admission. “Given the sheer number of proposals that have been submitted recently, the Legislature has actually already tried to make filing fees more expensive,” Civinomics noted. “Laws were submitted in 2009, 2010, and 2011 to raise the fee, but two of them were vetoed by then-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and the other was dropped by the bill’s author.”

GOP opposition

For now, Republicans have recently tended more toward supporting a permissive initiative process, concerned that California lacks many other effective hedges against the state’s near-one-party rule and its more liberal judges, who largely dominate the courts. So when AB1100 came to a vote in the Assembly, votes for and against split almost exactly along party lines. Assemblywoman Shannon Grove, R-Bakersfield, put forth a popular argument on the right, warning “the higher fee would make it difficult for individuals and nonprofit groups to file for an initiative,” as the Los Angeles Times reported. “She said that if the increase in the cost of living since the fee was implemented was figured in, it would now be $2,700.”

Then, as the bill made its way to the Senate, reality set in. In committee, “the filing fee was trimmed from $8,000 to $2,500 and then to $2,000,” the Chronicle recounted. “The plan to hike the charge in lockstep with increases in the Consumer Price Index also disappeared.” Nevertheless, the changes weren’t enough to satisfy critics, who will likely have to count on Gov. Jerry Brown to stop the bill from becoming law.

Via: California Political Review

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If Hillary’s Server Was ‘Blank,’ Why Was It Kept At A Data Center In New Jersey?

The new revelation that Hillary Clinton’s private server was made “blank” in June 2013 — but nonetheless stored at a data center in New Jersey — raises a slew of new questions about the former secretary of state’s handling of her emails.

The attorney for Platte River Networks, the Denver-based cybersecurity company Clinton hired shortly after leaving office to handle the server, says that she does not know why the hardware would have been stored in a New Jersey data center if it was “blank.”

“The server that was turned over to the FBI voluntarily yesterday to our knowledge has no information on it,” the attorney, Barbara Wells, told The Daily Caller in a brief phone interview.

On Wednesday, after Platte River Networks gave the server to the FBI, Wells told The Washington Post that the information from it “had been migrated over to a different server for purposes of transition” in June 2013.

“To my knowledge the data on the old server is not available now on any servers or devices in Platte River Network’s control,” Wells told the paper.

That revelation is significant because until now, most observers have assumed that Clinton wiped her server clean sometime after October, when the State Department sent a letter requesting that she hand over all of her emails. Clinton’s attorney, David Kendall, informed the House Select Committee on Benghazi in late March that the server had been wiped clean.

But the new claim that the server has been useless for more than two years indicates that when Clinton finally did produce her emails in December — 55,000 pages worth — they were drawn from a different device.

Kendall recently gave the FBI three thumb drives that held Clinton’s emails, but Wells said she had no information on whether the data from Clinton’s old server was transferred directly to lawyer’s thumb drives. Neither the Clinton campaign nor Kendall responded to questions from TheDC.

Asked why the server would have been stored in New Jersey if it did not have any useful information on it, Wells said, “I have no information on that.”

Asked if Clinton or anyone associated with her campaign is still paying Platte River Networks for its services, Wells said, “I can’t comment on that.”

Clinton hired Platte River Networks to handle her server shortly after she left the State Department in Feb. 2013. Prior to that, the server resided in the basement of Clinton’s Chappaqua, N.Y. home. When Hillary Clinton was tapped to head the State Department, she hired one of her presidential campaign’s IT department staffers to beef up the system so she could use it in an unprecedented manner at the agency.

Via: Daily Caller

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Senior Democratic Whip Announces Opposition To Iran Nuclear Deal

Rep. Alcee Hastings (D – Fla.) is the latest senior Democratic member of Congress to announce his opposition to the nuclear deal with Iran, the Palm Beach Post reportedtoday.

Hastings, a liberal Democrat who usually supports Obama, joins another Palm Beach County delegation member who’s normally a pro-Obama vote — Rep. Ted Deutch, D-Boca Raton — in opposing the agreement. …

Both Hastings and Deutch say the deal allows Iran to remain a “threshold nuclear state.”

Their opposition stands in contrast to Obama’s efforts in a speech last week to cast the deal’s critics as partisan Republicans who are making “common cause” with Iranian hardliners.

Hastings, a Senior Democratic Whip in the House, made his announcement in an op-edpublished in the paper [non-paywalled version here]. Hastings observed that the deal “allows Iran to remain a nuclear a nuclear threshold state,” and that the billions of dollars Iran will gain in sanctions relief will allow it to increase its funding of terror groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthi rebels in Yemen.

Hastings also questioned whether sanctions could really “snap back” in the event of Iran violating the deal, given the increased commerce between Iran and the rest of the world that the deal will spur.

We must maintain a strong sanctions regime — to do otherwise is to give up our leverage. Sanctions are what brought Iran to the table, and they depend on large-scale international cooperation and compliance.

Companies from around the world have started lining up to invest in Iran. Should sanctions need to be re-imposed, it is not clear whether investment contracts implemented in the meantime would be voided. Indeed, many nations may no longer feel bound to U.S. sanctions once U.N. and EU-based sanctions are eased.

The provisions of the agreement that allow sanctions to “snap back” are of particular concern. This process could take well over two months and is limited to “significant” violations of the deal (the [deal] fails to define what qualifies as significant). Iran could undermine the agreement in ways that would be nearly impossible to stop.

Hastings also announced his intention to introduce legislation authorizing the “sitting president or his successors” to use military force in case Iran is about to develop nuclear weapons.

House Democrats Juan Vargas (D – Calif.), Grace Meng (D – N.Y.), Albio Sires (D – N.J.), and Kathleen Rice (D – N.Y.) were the first group to announce their opposition to the deal. Later, three high-ranking Jewish Democrats in the House—Representatives Steve Israel (D – N.Y.), Nita Lowey (D – N.Y.), and Ted Deutch (D – Fla.)—joined them in opposition. Representatives Eliot Engel (D – N.Y) and Brad Sherman (D – Calif.) also announced their opposition to the deal last Friday. Engel is the Ranking Member of theHouse Foreign Affairs Committee, of which Sherman, Sires, Meng, and Deutch are members.

Via: The Tower

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[VIDEO] Clinton aide Huma Abedin STILL hasn't sworn under oath that she's turned over all her State Department emails

Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton declared Monday under penalty of perjury that she has given the State Department all of her work-related emails from her four years as secretary of state, but her trusted aide Huma Abedin has not yet taken that step – despite a request from a federal judge. 

Abedin's lawyer Karen Dunn told Politico on Thursday that the longtime Clinton insider, who served as deputy chief of staff at State, plans to turn over her work-related emails and other messages from her tenure there by August 28.

But Dunn declined to say whether or not Abedin will ink the same statment Clinton has signed.

Abedin enjoyed a rare but legal status as a 'Special Government Employee' during part of her time in government, allowing her to double-dip with a second paycheck in the private sector.

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TROUBLE COMING: Clinton aide Huma Abedin has yet to swear that she's turned over all her work-related emails and other materials to the State Department as an investigation swirls around Hillary

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SAFE FOR NOW? Clinton signed a statement under penalty of perjury, but there's no indication when or whether her top staffers will follow suit

That arrangement has led some Republicans to speculate that she might have exposed classified information to people who are not authorized to see it. 

Donald Trump told DailyMail.com on July 30 that it's reasonable to think Abedin may have shared information with her husband Anthony Weiner, including the contents of classified emails that passed through the former secretary of state's private home-brew server.

Weiner, a former Democratic congressman, resigned in 2011 amid lewd sexting scandals. 

Trump told DailyMail.com during a wide-ranging interview in his New York City Office that 'the person seeing [Clinton's] emails more than anybody else is Huma. And who's Huma married to? The worst deviant in the United States of America, right? Weiner!'

Abedin holds a security clearance of the kind that typically comes with detailed guidance on what kind of information must be kept secret from family members, including spouses. 

Trump said Weiner's actions were 'shocking and disgusting' and questioned whether 'anyone that untrustworthy' should be 'anywhere around national secrets.'

'Huma knows all those emails,' Trump insisted, 'and she's married to a deviant who has a big

Via: Daily Mail

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MSNBC’s Donny Deutsch: Americans Are ‘Tired of Hillary Clinton’

MSNBC contributor Donny Deutsch said on Morning Joe that the greatest problem with Hillary Clinton’s Democratic presidential campaign is that the American people are simply tired of her.

“The emails are actually just a symptom of the problem of Hillary,” Deutsch said. “Americans are just tired of Hillary Clinton. There comes a point in time where she comes on the TV — Hillary Clinton is very competent and very bright, just Americans have fallen out of like with her. It’s that simple.”

“Are you tired of her?” host Joe Scarborough asked.

“Yes,” he replied. “I think Hillary at this point, regardless of her skill set, would not be an effective leader because her fault or not, the country is polarized. She cannot lead effectively, because she’ll not be able to bring this country together.”

Deutsch, who identifies as a liberal, said he was basing his observation in part on his conversations with powerful New York City establishment Democrats. “That’s Democrats,” Scarborough pointed out. “That’s not Republicans. These are around the dinner table, around the lunch table powerful Democrats saying ‘We just can’t do this.’

Via: Mediaite

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EXCLUSIVE — DONALD TRUMP EXPECTS TO FACE VP JOE BIDEN IN GENERAL ELECTION: HILLARY CLINTON’S ‘BIG LEAGUE’ EMAIL SCANDAL WILL FORCE HER OUT

NEW YORK CITY, New York — Should billionaire and GOP frontrunner Donald Trump win the Republican primary in 2016—as he certainly wants to do—he expects he will face Vice President Joe Biden in the general election since he thinks the current email scandal plaguing former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will eventually knock her out of the race.

When asked in a wide-ranging interview with Breitbart News in his office on the 26th floor of Trump Tower if he could envision a general election with him at the top of the Republican ticket and Vice President Biden leading the Democratic ticket, Trump said, “I think so.”

“I think Hillary has got huge problems right now,” Trump said, adding:

Is she going to make it? I hear this thing is big league. Why did she do it? You use the server? Because they’re always looking to go over the edge, whether it’s Whitewater or anything else. They always want to go over the edge. I’m just looking at it saying what the hell was she doing? You know what she was doing. She was guarding from the president seeing what she doing.

Trump said he thinks this email scandal will take Clinton down.

“It just looks like Hillary is going to not be able to run. It looks to me like that’s what’s going to happen,” Trump told Breitbart News. He went on to say:

I think it’s unlikely if you look at what she’s done. What she’s done is ten times worse than what General Petraeus did—far more sensitive documents, top-of-the-line sensitive documents, far more of them. What she did is ten times worse. It destroyed him, so I don’t see how she’s going to possibly be able to run. It’s pretty conclusive right now, too.

Trump previewed some of his policy framework, too, which his campaign is in the process of preparing to roll out. He also explained that most of the policy papers from most of the politicians running against him for president will never see the light of day, and explained how things actually get done “in the real world.”

“Over the next number of weeks, once we get out of August, we’ll be talking about taxes and tax policy,” Trump told Breitbart News, also stating:

We’ll be talking about healthcare policy. We have some really excellent things to come out. I’m already discussing military and plans. With all of that being said, in the real world, you don’t just roll things out. You go out and you negotiate back and forth. It’s a tug of war back and forth with all of these different people you have to get on board. So rolling anything out is a lot different than going in and getting everybody together. It’s called leadership.

Trump compared how he would govern if elected President of the United States to how he’s achieved success in real estate deals.

“When I bought Doral in Miami—which was sought after by everybody, every developer in the country wanted it. I didn’t say, ‘Wow, I’m going to do a ten-point plan on how to buy Doral.’ I went down, and I just fought like hell, and I got it,” Trump said, adding:

I didn’t sit down and say, “Okay, I’ll make a phone call at 7 in the morning, and then I’ll do this, and then I’ll get on a plane.” It doesn’t work that way. I went down and met with the people. I had lunch. I had dinner. I didn’t leave. And I made a great deal. Same thing with Turnberry in Scotland, sold by people in Dubai. I met with them. I worked them. I didn’t do a 14-point plan that says I’m going to make a phone call at 10:30. It doesn’t work that way. So we have to get—as you know, we’ve had no leadership in the country—we have to get everybody on board. For doing that, you need compromise. You need back-and-forth. And it’s not about a plan. It’s about flexibility. You need flexibility. So you could put out a plan, but most of that plan comes back—and you need flexibility to get it done. It can be done beautifully and in harmony and without executive orders all over the place.

Trump also told Breitbart News he’s pleased he remains the GOP frontrunner after a failed attempt by Fox News anchors to wipe him out in the recent debate. He will be going to Iowa on Saturday and will be in New Hampshire on Friday evening.

“So I’m so honored because I went up in all the polls,” Trump said when asked about the recent polls. “In Iowa, I was in second place; now, I’m in first place. Now, the new polls came out from CNN; two of them came out where I’m in first place. It’s such a great honor. I love the people of Iowa. Love the people of New Hampshire. I’m going to Iowa this weekend, and I’m going to New Hampshire on Friday—which is tomorrow.”

The real estate magnate just wrapped up a massively successful trip to Michigan, where thousands came out to see him speak—many of whom are not traditional Republicans. Trump thinks the big crowds that keep coming out to see him are coming because people want a leader like him to stop “incompetent politicians” from further destructing the economy of the United States:

People in this country are really smart. They’re tired of watching incompetent politicians. They get it. They get it. They’re tired of watching our country withering away under the leadership of incompetent people. They know I won’t let that happen. I’m not going to let China continue to destroy us. I’m not going to let Japan and Mexico and all of these countries continue to destroy us. They get it. I’m going to be great to women. You know, all the health issues with women which Jeb Bush has just punted on—which has been disgraceful—the women’s health issues are very important to me. I’m going to be so good on that. I say I’m going to win the women’s vote, and I’m going to win the Hispanic vote. Already you’re seeing Hispanics. That’s been amazing what’s going on. In Las Vegas, I won in the polls by a lot. It’s amazing. But I think more than anything else, they’re tired of watching incompetent people.

Trump told Breitbart News that the Rust Belt—places like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and others—where blue collar American workers, many of them Ronald Reagan Democrats, are states he will certainly win if he wins the GOP nomination.

“Those are my states,” Trump said.

Trump also said since his appeal goes beyond politics, he expects that should he win the nomination, he’ll bring the GOP more states that Republicans traditionally haven’t had much luck in.

“I believe we will win states that the Republicans were never even thinking about winning,” Trump said.

Throughout the entire interview, which lasted about a half hour, Trump also kept pointing out that he thinks former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush isn’t doing very well as a candidate. For instance, he discussed his appearance on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program—handing this reporter a printout of a Variety magazine article from the outlet’s senior editor, Rick Kissell, that laid out that Trump’s hour-long interview on the show earlier this week pushed it to a four-month-high in ratings, and said Bush would never be able to do that.

“Hannity won the entire evening with my interview the other night,” Trump said. “He’s not going to win it with Jeb Bush. You think he’s going to win it with Jeb Bush? He’s got $100 million, which means he’s a puppet. You know that, right?

Via: Breitbart

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'Script Won't Go According to Plan': Drip, Drip, Drip of Hillary Email Scandal Puts Dems In Near-Panic Mode

Democratic insiders haven't hit the panic button yet, but Hillary Clinton's burgeoning scandal over her use of a private email server while secretary of state is leaving them with a bad case of political heartburn.

In interviews Thursday, Democrats based in Washington insisted that their faith that Clinton would win the party's 2016 nomination and be elected president hasn't been shaken. But when a campaign holds an emergency conference call with party insiders and media surrogates to quell nerves and offer messaging guidance, as Team Clinton did late Tuesday evening, people are bound to worry that a situation dismissed as Republican shenanigans might be worse than feared.

"There's a little nagging worry in Democrats that probably won't go away and probably will only grow larger," Jimmy Siegel, a Democratic strategist who produced campaign ads for Clinton's 2008 presidential bid, told the Washington Examiner. The concern is "that somehow, some way, the script won't go according to plan."

"It is concerning to watch the drip-drip-drip of the story, with the 'it's nonsense' response from the campaign," added a Democratic operative backing Clinton. "It feels terrifyingly similar to the partisan dynamics of the Swift Boat mess of 2004. I really hope I'm wrong."

Via: Washington Examiner

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Obamacare: An Alarming Checkup

OK, Obamacare. Up on the table. It’s time for your annual physical.

Three years old, eh? Well, with any luck, you’ll leave here with a clean bill of uh-oh. I can see one problem already. Have you seen these tax hikes?

Let’s see — five, 10, 15, 18 tax hikes in all. That hardly seems wise, considering the fragile health of the economy, but there they are.

There’s the tax on individuals who don’t purchase health insurance. That will cost $55 billion over the next decade. I also see a 40 percent excise tax on “Cadillac” health plans costing more than $10,200 for individuals and $27,500 for families. It’ll be $111 billion for that between 2018 and 2022. Several smaller ones, such as limiting the amount people can set aside in their flexible spending accounts: $4.5 billion there from 2011 to 2022.

It all adds up, Obamacare. It’s not healthy.

Hate to tell you this, but it gets worse. See this? That’s the number of people who are going to lose their current health insurance because of you. Not thousands, but 7 million, according to the Congressional Budget Office. This isn’t guesswork; it’s already happening.

Take Universal Orlando, which recentlyannounced that it won’t continue to cover its part-time workers. Why? Not because they’re coldhearted, but because they can’t afford it. Your prohibition of annual benefit limits beginning next year is making Universal’s health plans too expensive. The word is, this will affect about 500 Universal employees.

Or consider the American Veterinary Medical Association in Illinois. “[M]edical coverage will end for some 17,500 association members and thousands of their dependents at year’s end,” the group says in a news release. There are many more to come, from other employers. Ouch.

Wait. Obamacare, didn’t you say that nobody who liked his current plan would lose it? Yes. You promised it, in fact — repeatedly. I’d better note that in your chart.

You may be getting uncomfortable, but we’re not done yet. Over here, there’s another serious problem: You’re hurting hiring — and right at a time when the economy could use all the help it can get to reduce unemployment.

You don’t believe it? Look at the “Beige Book,” a report that the Federal Reserve publishes eight times a year detailing the economic activity in the Fed’s 12 regions. According to its most recent report: “Employers in several districts cited the unknown effects of the Affordable Care Act as reasons for planned layoffs and reluctance to hire more staff.”

“Affordable Care Act.” That’s you.

There’s more. It’s a good thing you’re sitting down. It turns out you’re making it more difficult to access Medicare services.

You can be as skeptical as you want, but this is right from the Congressional Budget Office and Medicare’s own trustees. They’ve shown what you don’t want to admit: You’re raiding Medicare to pay for other new programs.

Payment rates for Medicare Advantage: down $156 billion over the next decade. Home health services: down $66 billion. Hospice services: down $17 billion. The biggest one is hospital services, which you cut by $260 billion. What’s that? No, the cuts do not target medical institutions or organizations suspected of waste, fraud or abuse. Nice try.

Finally, I see that insurance premiums are going to skyrocket under you. It’s those coverage mandates you put in place; they’re the culprit. According to a congressional report by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, some premiums are set to rise in every state. Yes, every state, and not by small amounts. In many states, they’re primed to go up by more than 50 percent; in others, by more than 100 percent. It’s all as a result of changes you’ve introduced.

This despite your claim that your law would “cut the cost of a typical family’s premium by up to $2,500 a year.” That sure isn’t working out, is it?

You can pay the receptionist on your way out. No, I’m afraid we don’t accept that insurance plan anymore.

-Ed Feulner is president of the Heritage Foundation (heritage.org).

First appeared in The Washington Times.

Via: Heritage Foundation

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No means no: Keep Gitmo jihadists out of America!

No means no: Keep Gitmo jihadists out of America!

by Michelle Malkin

Creators Syndicate

Copyright 2-15

Get off that late-summer snooze button, America. The Obama administration is plotting to break a major promise made under oath — and jeopardize our nation in the name of social justice.

This week, top White House officials floated renewed plans to close down Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Pentagon and Justice Department bureaucrats have been powwowing over how to shutter the facility and import up to hundreds of detained jihad suspects into the U.S. It’s a longtime legacy promise President Obama wants to fulfill to progressives before he rides off permanently to Martha’s Vineyard and Hawaii’s lushest golf courses.

There’s one teeny-tiny problem: the promise former Attorney General Eric Holder swore to Congress after the last time his stubborn boss tried to dump the detainees on American soil. Somehow, as they busied themselves with the nitty-gritty details of transferring Islamic enemy combatants to Gitmo North, key members of Team Obama suffered a disturbing bout of national security amnesia.

Promise? What promise?

Let’s refresh their leaky memories. In 2009, the White House first floated the idea of using the Thomson Correctional Center, a high-security prison in Illinois, to house Gitmo denizens. Family members of 9/11 victims, God bless them, raised anational uproar. Debra Burlingame, sister of American Airlines Flight 77 pilot Chic Burlingame, blasted the feckless president’s assertion that no one would be put in danger by his Gitmo relocation program.

Citing convicted shoe bomber Richard Reid’s successful push (backed by liberal ACLU lawyers) to proselytize about Islam at the supermax facility here in Colorado, where I live, Burlingame cut through the bullcrap. “Mr. Obama has repeatedly suggested that the security challenge of bringing more than 100 trained and dangerous terrorists onto U.S. soil can be solved by simply installing them in an impenetrable fortress. This view is either disingenuous or naive,” she wrote.

“The militant Islamists at Guantanamo too dangerous to release believe that their resistance behind the wire is a continuation of holy war. There is every reason to believe they will continue their jihad once they have been transported to U.S. soil where certain federal judges have signaled a willingness to confer upon them even more rights.”

And don’t forget the legions of jihadi-lovin’ lawyers out there ready, willing and able to abet them. Remember Lynne Stewart, who was convicted in 2005 of helping World Trade Center bombing mastermind terrorist Omar Abdel Rahman — the murderous Blind Sheik — smuggle coded messages of Islamic violence while behind bars to outside followers in violation of an explicit pledge to abide by her client’s court-ordered isolation? The Obama administration released her from prison in January 2014, citing “compassion” for her health.

The breast cancer-surviving terrorist helper, who remains defiantly unapologetic about her service to jihad, is alive — and more than a year and half later has beenhappily kicking our country in the gut on the far-left America-bashing speech trail.

But I digress.

After citizens and public officials in Illinois, Michigan and Kansas (where another Gitmo North alternative, Fort Leavenworth, is located) staged vocal protests against Obama’s sneaky plans three years ago, Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., chairman of the House appropriations subcommittee overseeing the Justice Department’s budget, moved to block the administration from using unspent Justice Department funds for the Thomson deal. With bipartisan support, Congress passed a law barring the transfer of Gitmo detainees to Thomson or any other civilian prison.

As I reported at the time, the message was clear: Taxpayers don’t want manipulative Gitmo detainees or their three-ring circuses of transnationalist sympathizers and left-wing lawyers on American soil. Period.

Insolent as ever, the White House went ahead and acquired Thomson for $165 million as part of its Gitmo gambit. The backlash forced Holder to vow to Capitol Hill in 2012: “We will not move people from Guantanamo, regardless of the state of the law, to Thomson. That is my pledge as attorney general.”

And if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. This will be the most transparent administration in history. We will do whatever it takes to prevent Iran from producing an atomic bomb. Yadda, yadda, yadda.

For those who are awake now, I ask:

Do you want Gitmo jihadists in your backyard? Or your front yard?

Do you know what, if anything, your representatives in Washington are doing to ensure America’s safety?

Do you trust the administration that brought you the bloody Fast and Furious mess, Benghazi, the healthcare.gov debacle, the deadly Veterans Administration scandal, last year’s reckless illegal alien border surge and last week’s massive EPA pollution of Colorado’s Animas River to prevent Gitmo’s bottom-of-the-barrel goons from wreaking havoc behind bars here?

Anyone? Anyone?

Via: Michelle Malkin

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Lerner Rages Against 'Evil and Dishonest' Republicans, Will Nets Report?

Lois Lerner’s utter contempt for Republicans was on full display in a newly uncovered email in which she railed: “They called me back to testify on the IRS ‘scandal,’ and I too[k] the 5th again because they had been so evil and dishonest in my lawyer’s dealings with them.”

The question has to be asked, will Lerner’s use of such inflammatory language be enough to wake the Big Three (ABC, CBS, NBC) network evening and morning shows out of their IRS scandal coverage slumber? 

So far, they have yet to report on any of the recent IRS scandal revelations such as Lerner setting her sights on Bristol Palin, her glee when she found out instant messaging emails were not automatically archived, and the IRS’s targeting of donors to conservative organizations.

On Thursday, Politico’s Katy O’Donnell, in article headlined “Lerner Slammed ‘evil and dishonest’ GOP Inquisitors,” reported on a “Politico examination of thousands of pages of emails and other material recently released by the Senate Finance Committee” that uncovered  particularly spiteful emails Lerner had sent to a friend:

When she was under investigation by Congress, she offered a blistering critique of her inquisitors. In a March 6, 2014, email, Lerner told a friend: “They called me back to testify on the IRS ‘scandal,’ and I too[k] the 5th again because they had been so evil and dishonest in my lawyer’s dealings with them.”

In June 2014, Lerner told the same friend that an unflattering picture of her appearing before Congress kept surfacing because “it serves their purposes of hate mongering to continue to use those images. I was never a political person — this whole fiasco has only made me lose all respect [for] politics and politicians. I am merely a pawn in their game to take over the Senate.”

These emails come on the heels of new evidence that Lerner’s IRS was holding up approval of conservative groups. 

On August 11, Americans for Tax Reform’s Alexander Hendrie reported that Lerner’s IRS granted only one conservative group non-profit status in three years:

Lois Lerner’s political beliefs led to tea party and conservative groups receiving disparate and unfair treatment when applying for non-profit status, according to a detailed report compiled by the Senate Finance Committee.

Because of Lerner’s bias, only one conservative political advocacy organization was granted tax exempt status over a period of more than three years:

“Due to the circuitous process implemented by Lerner, only one conservative political advocacy organization was granted tax-exempt status between February 2009 and May 2012. Lerner’s bias against these applicants unquestionably led to these delays, and is particularly evident when compared to the IRS’s treatment of other applications, discussed immediately below.”

As the report notes, Lois Lerner became aware in April or May of 2010 that the IRS Exempt Organizations (EO) division had begun receiving a high number of applications from Tea Party organizations. But as the backlog of applicants increased, Lerner added “more layers of review and raised hurdles for applicants to clear.”

Via: Newsbusters

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