VIDEO: Paul Ryan Nails IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel on a Health Care Law Loophole

Usually, C-SPAN is about as boring as watching the grass grow, but it yielded some impressive action recently when Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) went head to head with acting IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel over the Health Care Law on August 1st.

During the brief confrontation, Ryan blasted Werfel over a subsidy loophole in the ObamaCare Mandate, which Werfel proved unable to adequately explain.

• The unavoidable loophole, as Ryan notes, will happen as the administration's primary "enforcement tool," the Employer Mandate, will not be active until 2015.  Essentially, a person receives an unentitled subsidy from their employer, and, once the Employer Mandate becomes operational, the unlawful subsidy will be discovered, forcing the person to pay back the entire amount. 
  Rep. Ryan summarized his criticism by saying, "You're gonna have a lot of people getting subsidies they're not supposed to get, and then you're gonna hit them with a big tax bill in about two years to claw it back..."
  As if enough people were not already upset about ObamaCare, this is yet another reason for them to be.  A general rule about humanity is that, when it comes to money, people usually like to keep what they are given.  Imposing another potential tax on an already overtaxed population is not something you want to do, especially this way. 
  This is the equivalent of forcing a person to pay back prize money they believe they have rightfully won, after they've already spent some of it or stashed it away for something special.  Not only does this automatically threaten to drive a person into debt, but I don't know of anyone who would be the least bit happy to have such a thing happen to them.
  Once again, well done IRS..
  Via: MRCTV
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Economic Recovery? We'll Take Reagan's, Thanks

This past July’s dismal jobs report was no outlier. Job gains during the Obama recovery have been slow at best.

If monthly job gains going back to 1946 are ranked in order of best to worst, the difference between job growth during the first four years of economic recovery under President Ronald Reagan and Obama is astounding. Total job growth during the first four years of the Obama recovery has been 4,657,000 or just 97,020 jobs per month. That's not even enough to hit the breakeven level of 150,000 jobs per month when population growth is taken into account. (video after break)

Now, contrast that with the Reagan recovery. That generated a total of 11.2 million new jobs or 233,333 per month, more than enough to put people back to work. Reagan's best job month garnered the very top ranking since WWII with 1,114,000 jobs added in September 1983. A single month with more than a million jobs added. So far Obama can only wish for such a total.

Via: Newsbusters
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VIDEO: Tingles On MSNBC Being Obama’s Cheerleading Team: “We Agree With Him Sometimes”…

Only if sometimes means 99.99% of the time.

Via Newsbusters:

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Community banks, lenders cast doubt on Obama push to wind down Fannie, Freddie

Community bankers and mortgage lenders across the country are viewing with skepticism President Obama's call to do away with government-backed mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as the president unveiled his latest housing plan during a speech in Phoenix. 

The president, after touring a construction site in Arizona, endorsed the call by many in Congress to phase out Fannie and Freddie, while still calling for 30-year mortgages to be available to borrowers. The government-backed mortgage giants were caught in the housing crisis which ended in a $187 billion taxpayer bailout. 

The idea is to have the private sector play a bigger role in guaranteeing loans. 

"For too long, these companies were allowed to make huge profits buying mortgages, knowing that if their bets went bad, taxpayers would be left holding the bag," Obama said of Fannie and Freddie. "Private capital should take a bigger role in the mortgage market --  I know that sounds confusing to folks who call me a socialist." 

But some lenders worry that the still-fragile U.S. housing industry is not ready for such a change. 

“Removing them entirely would be devastating,” Kelly Powers, vice president for advocacy at the Arizona Mortgage Lenders Association, told FoxNews.com.

Powers argues that there isn’t enough private capital to step in and take over, and the results on lending could be damaging.

“It would make it much more difficult for people to borrow,” she said. “There would be less liquidity and less players in the game. The requirements would go up and people won’t be able to qualify for loans.”

Via: Fox News

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Obamacare months behind in testing IT data security: government

MAKES YOU FEEL VERY SECURE IN THE KNOWLEDGE THAT ITS GOING TO GO DOWN!!

(Reuters) - The federal government is months behind in testing data security for the main pillar of Obamacare: allowing Americans to buy health insurance on state exchanges due to open by October 1

The missed deadlines have pushed the government's decision on whether information technology security is up to snuff to exactly one day before that crucial date, the Department of Health and Human Services' inspector general said in a report.

As a result, experts say, the exchanges might open with security flaws or, possibly but less likely, be delayed.

"They've removed their margin for error," said Deven McGraw, director of the health privacy project at the non-profit Center for Democracy & Technology. "There is huge pressure to get (the exchanges) up and running on time, but if there is a security incident they are done. It would be a complete disaster from a PR viewpoint."

The most likely serious security breach would be identity theft, in which a hacker steals the social security numbers and other information people provide when signing up for insurance.

The inspector general's report, released without fanfare last Friday, found that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services or CMS - the agency within HHS that is running Obamacare - had set a May 13 deadline for its contractor to deliver a plan to test the security of the crucial information technology component.

Via: Reuters

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Race is on to define Hillary Clinton’s potential presidential candidacy

The 2016 presidential contest is more than two years away, and Hillary Rodham Clinton has not decided whether she will be a part of it. But the race to define her potential candidacy is well underway — and far outside her control.

Already, independent super PACs have sprouted to boost or bludgeon the former secretary of state, and a television miniseries and documentary are in the works — projects one person close to Clinton called “ill-conceived.”

Clinton is trying to hover above the partisan fray for as long as possible, but some of her allies appear to be placing her back in it. Emily’s List, a group that works to elect Democratic women who support abortion rights, is staging a town hall meeting Friday in Iowa to start making the case for putting a woman in the White House.

On Monday, the Republican National Committee tried to pop the Clinton balloonby threatening to refuse to partner with NBC and CNN in future presidential debates unless they stop the production of planned projects about Clinton’s life.

Scarred after two consecutive defeats in presidential contests, Republicans are wary of allowing another Democratic candidate to become a seemingly untouchable luminary, as Barack Obama became in the run-up to the 2008 election.

RNC Chairman Reince Priebus wrote in letters to network executives that the NBC miniseries and CNN documentary are a “political ad masquerading as an unbiased production.”

Via: Washington Post

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White House unveils Health Care Wizard to teach business owners about Obamacare

The White House has kicked its Obamacare outreach and education efforts into full gear, including a new Website designed specifically for curious and confused business owners.

The new site allows employers to input their location, company size and current insurance plans and receive tailored information about changes under the law, important dates to remember, and the formulas for determining requirements and penalties.

Dubbed the Health Care Wizard, the site is part of BusinessUSA, the administration’s interagency information outlet for employers. The new site churns out information gathered from Department of Health and Human Services, the Treasury Department and the Small Business Administration.

Officials say the goal was to bring state- and size-specific information as well as universally important facts about the law together in one place — part of a broader effort to disperse facts and dispel rumors about Obamacare.

On Monday, DHHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told reporters the agency is still on pace to open the law’s new health insurance exchanges for individuals and small businesses in October. In addition, the department has made an effort to shield its Obamacare outreach efforts from the $15.5 billion in spending cuts the agency sustained as part of the sequester.

“This has been a significant priority area so we’re finding ways to limit other kinds of administrative costs,” Sebelius said, adding that the agency is reserving enough money to make “sure I can travel and that people who need to do outreach can travel.”

Via: The Washington Post

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Krauthammer: Obama Administration Treated Benghazi Like a Crime Instead of Act of War

      

BY: Washington Free Beacon Staff
August 6, 2013 7:08 pm

Columnist Charles Krauthammer criticized the Obama administration’s treatment of the Benghazi terrorist attack like a crime rather than an act of war on Special Report Tuesday, pointing out a similar approach by the Clinton administration in responding to the al-Qaeda attack on the U.S.S. Cole in 2000 led to huge difficulties in holding the guilty parties responsible.

News broke Tuesday that federal agents and prosecutors investigating Benghazi filed charges against Ahmed Khattalah, leader of a Libyan militia officials believe orchestrated the assault. According to CNN, the charges under seal are the first criminal counts to emerge from the probe.

KRAUTHAMMER: Well, it’s about time. It turns out the administration tried to run from Benghazi but can’t hide. I think it’s a little curious the timing of this leak about the charges being filed against the Benghazi suspects. We have known who they are. Obviously journalists have spoken with them. They’ve been out there in the open for days, for weeks, for months. I’d say better late than never, but it does remind me of the critique of the Clinton administration after the attack on the U.S.S. Cole. When we sent the FBI to investigate in Yemen, there was resistance by the authorities. We were then pre-9/11, looking at the law enforcement paradigm, treating it like a crime instead of like war. I’m glad that we have the sealed indictments, but the question is if we have the intelligence, we have CIA on the ground, we have operatives out there, why haven’t we snatched them, interrogated them. The answer is that this administration from the beginning decided to undo everything the Bush administration had done, so we’ve had no interrogations, nowhere to put them, nowhere in Guantanamo. All you can do is an indictment, a trial in New York, or nothing.

“When you do the law enforcement model, you are completely handicapped in trying to deal with terrorism, and that’s why it’s always been the wrong one,” Krauthammer said to close the segment.

Via: WFB

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Obama urges revival of bubble-era mortgage policies

President Barack Obama today urged a revival of two devastating mortgage policies that helped inflate the real estate bubble before the economic crash of 2008.

“Let’s make it easier for qualified buyers to buy homes they can,” he said in a campaign-style speech in Phoenix, Arizona, today.

“We should simplify overlapping regulations and cut red tape for responsible families who want to get a mortgage, but who keep getting rejected by banks,” he said, echoing President George W. Bush’s support in 2002 for lower lending standards.

Obama, like Bush, also urged greater immigration. Conceding that this totally unrelated item from his laundry list was “something you don’t always hear about when it comes to the housing market,” the president claimed an influx of new and in many cases low-skill immigrants will spur home buying and house prices.

“It’s pretty simple: when more people buy homes, and play by the rules, home values go up for everybody,” he told a cheering audience of local Democratic activists. “The Senate has already passed a bipartisan immigration bill that’s got the support of CEOs, labor, and law enforcement… let’s get this done.”

This time around, Obama insisted, massive government interference in the private real estate market would not produce the catastrophe Americans endured in the last decade.

“I hope everybody here learned some hard lessons from what happened… It was kind of crazy,” Obama told his Phoenix audience. “So what we want to do is something stable and steady,” he said.

Obama’s proposal to stimulate the real estate sector echoes Bush’s call in 2002 to spur home-buying by immigrants and African-Americans.

Via: Daily Caller

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