OBAMACARE ‘NAVIGATORS’ OUTRAGE: OBAMA TO HAND ALL YOUR PRIVATE INFO, INCLUDING SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER, TO LEFTIST COMMUNITY ORGANIZERS

Related: No Background Checks For Obamacare ‘Navigators’ Privy To All Your Private Info, Including Social Security Number

Excerpted from NRO: President Obama has had a poor record of job creation, but at least one small economic sector is doing well: community organizing.

The Department of Health and Human Services is about to hire an army of “patient navigators” to inform Americans about the subsidized insurance promised by Obamacare and assist them in enrolling. These organizers will be guided by the new Federal Data Hub, which will give them access to reams of personal information compiled by federal agencies ranging from the IRS to the Department of Defense and the Veterans Administration. “The federal government is planning to quietly enact what could be the largest consolidation of personal data in the history of the republic,” Paul Howard of the Manhattan Institute and Stephen T. Parente, a University of Minnesota finance professor, wrote in USA Today. No wonder that there are concerns about everything from identity theft to the ability of navigators to use the system to register Obamacare participants to vote.

HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius wasn’t satisfied with the $54 million in public funds allocated for navigators this year, so she tried to raise money from health-industry executives for Enroll America, the liberal nonprofit group leading the PR push for Obamacare. She had to retreat under withering criticism that she was shaking down companies that were dependent on government, a clear conflict of interest.

Because 34 states have declined to set up their own insurance “exchanges,” the job of guiding exchange enrollees in those states has been left to Washington. The identity of the groups who will get the Sebelius grants isn’t yet known, but Politico reports they are likely to include Planned Parenthood, senior-citizen advocacy organizations, and churches.

So far everything we’ve learned indicates the navigators will be flying blind, or could well be “unsafe at any speed.” In June, the Government Accountability Office reported that HHS is considering allowing navigators to assist with outreach and enrollment tasks even before completing their formal training. The reason? Like so much of Obamacare, the navigators program is behind schedule and drowning in its own complexity.

Via: Pat Dollard

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Upgrades aim to extend B-52 bombers' already long lives

For Air Force Capt. Daniel "Swoop" Welch, flying a B-52 bomber has become the family business.

His father, retired Lt. Col. Don Welch, was trained to drop nuclear bombs with the aircraft during the height of the Cold War. His grandfather, retired Col. Don Sprague, flew B-52 combat missions in Vietnam.

"It is definitely a testament to the robust design of the B-52," said Welch, 28. "Getting to fly the same aircraft as my father and grandfather has been pretty cool."

Despite the bomber's more than half-century of service, the Air Force believes that modifications and overhauls have made the B-52 ageless. Now engineers and technicians are working on a contract worth up to $11.9 billion for an array of upgrades to bring the B-52 Stratofortress fleet into the 21st century.

The plane's computers are only as powerful as the original PCs in the early 1980s. Bombing mission information has to be uploaded before a flight. It can't be changed in the air — even if the target on the ground changes.

Now Boeing is expanding on the bombers' limited capabilities by providing an upgraded communications system so aircrews can send and receive information via satellite links. This enables the B-52's five-person crews to change mission plans, re-target weapons in flight and interact better with ground forces and other aircraft.

Nobody can say for sure how many of the government's 76 B-52s — down from 744 in the plane's heyday — will survive three more decades. The most recent variant of the plane, built between 1960 and 1962, has undergone more than 30 major modifications.

Although the revisions have maintained the plane's 185-foot wingspan and a length of nearly 160 feet, the guts of the B-52 have been continually revamped. For example, the World War II-era tail gunner position has been removed and new electronics have been installed, although some planes still have vacuum tubes.

Now the plane, which was designed on the back of a napkin over a weekend in 1948 by three Boeing employees, is getting modern digital display screens, computer network servers and real-time communication uplinks.

Via: LA Times

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True Patriots Know at Heart That It’s Never too Late to Never Give Up

If you want to rescue America and restore her to a Constitutional Republic, you must be like a Mark Levin.  That is, be more solution oriented than staying put as part of the Big Whine.

Millions have been longing to put the pieces back together and Levin shows the way to the restoration of constitutional republicanism through a well-thought-out series of amendments to the Constitution.

It will for certain be a long road back, but traveling along one that is doable with determination and the right winning attitude.

A president called Barack Obama is forcing the ‘Fundamental Transformation of America’ on a population of a mostly unwitting 330 million.  Radio talk show host, constitutional lawyer and patriot Mark Levin’s latest book, The Liberty Amendments: Restoring the American Republic is forcing the Fundamental Transformation of Obama and the progressive collective that have followed a 100-year-old blueprint to take the USA down.

Bold, brave and persistent is what Levin is trying to get you to be with the plan laid out in his runaway best seller, The Liberty Amendments.

The rousing cheers of patriots that can be heard through the White Noise of government-manufactured confusion and propaganda is because they know Mark Levin is the man who can turn The Good Ship USS America around.

True patriots know at heart that it’s never too late to never give up.

“I know of no one who has a greater reverence for our Constitution and for the scheme of limited government and personal liberties it established,” writes David Limbaugh. “Mark has been a student of America’s founding and its constitutional history since he was a young boy, when he and his friends would visit Philadelphia, where it all started, and study the history.

Via: Canada Free Press

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How Obama has abused the Patriot Act

The White House's justification for collecting Americans' phone data doesn't stand up to the light of day.

On Aug. 9, the Obama administration released a previously secret legal interpretation of the Patriot Act that it used to justify the bulk collection of every American's phone records. The strained reasoning in the 22-page memo won't survive long in public light, which is itself one of the strongest arguments for transparency in government. As the late Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote, "Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants."

Recent revelations by the Washington Post emphasize the need for greater transparency. The National Security Agencyfailed to report privacy violations that are serious infringements of constitutional rights. Beyond these blatant violations, the foundation of the programs is itself illegal.

Section 215 of the Patriot Act authorizes the collection of certain business records — in this case, phone records — when there are reasonable grounds to believe that the records are relevant to an authorized investigation into international terrorism. The key legal term is "relevance."

Under this relevance standard, the administration has collected the details of every call made by every American, even though the overwhelming majority of these calls have nothing to do with terrorism. Since first learning of the program this spring, I have been a vocal critic of such dragnet collection as a gross invasion of privacy and a violation of Section 215.

The administration's memo begins by acknowledging that its interpretation of the statute is at odds with the plain meaning of "relevance." It argues there is a "particularized legal meaning" of relevance, but it ultimately concedes that it fails to meet this standard as well.

Via: LA Times

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The Citizen of the World Presidency

In 2007, early in the improbable presidential candidacy of Barack Obama, the young first-term senator began a series of foreign-policy speeches that seemed too general to provide a guide to what he might do if elected. Aside from making it clear he was not George W. Bush and would get out of Iraq, the rest read like liberal boilerplate: “We have seen the consequences of a foreign policy based on a flawed ideology….The conventional thinking today is just as entrenched as it was in 2002….This is the conventional thinking that has turned against the war, but not against the habits that got us into the war in the first place.” In 2008, he visited Berlin and told an enraptured crowd: “Tonight, I speak to you not as a candidate for president, but as a citizen—a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of the world…the burdens of global citizenship continue to bind us together.”

In Obama’s fifth year as president, it is increasingly clear these vague phrases were not mere rhetoric. They did, in fact, accurately reflect Obama’s thinking about America’s role in the world and foreshadow the goals of the foreign policy he has been implementing and will be pursuing for three more years. Obama’s foreign policy is strangely self-centered, focused on himself and the United States rather than on the conduct and needs of the nations the United States allies with, engages with, or must confront. It is a foreign policy structured not to influence events in Russia or China or Africa or the Middle East but to serve as a bulwark “against the habits” of American activism and global leadership. It was his purpose to change those habits, and to inculcate new habits—ones in which, in every matter of foreign policy except for the pursuit of al-Qaeda, the United States restrains itself.

 In the beginning came “engagement.” In his first State of the Union speech in February 2009, Obama told us that “in words and deeds, we are showing the world that a new era of engagement has begun.” A few days later he delivered a speech about the Iraq war and said again that “we are launching a new era of engagement with the world.” There would now be “comprehensive American engagement across the region.” In his first speech to the United Nations General Assembly, in September 2009, he repeated the phrase: “We must embrace a new era of engagement based on mutual interests and mutual respect….We have sought, in word and deed, a new era of engagement with the world.”

Via: Commentary

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Top 2 Myths About Defunding Obamacare

Is it even possible to defund Obamacare? And does advocating this mean you want to shut down the government?

Critics are giving the wrong answers to these questions. Watch our new video to hear these myths debunked.

Myth #1: Congress cannot defund Obamacare.

Congress defunds mandatory spending on appropriations bills every year. In fact, it has even defunded part of Obamacare already—billions of dollars in “mandatory spending” for the co-op program.

>>> See our fact sheet: Can Appropriations Bills Defund Obamacare?

Myth #2: Obamacare opponents are trying to shut down the government.

This isn’t true, either.

As Heritage health care expert Chris Jacobs says in the video above, “Conservatives want to keep the federal government open—we just want to shut down Obamacare.”

Legal expert Hans von Spakovsky explains how this could be done. Funding the federal government—with the exception of Obamacare—“would force the President and his supporters to explain why they would shut down the government to fund an unfair, unaffordable, and highly unpopular law that is so unworkable that the Administration has itself admitted it cannot manage to implement major portions on time such as the employer mandate to provide insurance.”

Via: The Foundry

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