MEGYN KELLY PULLED OFF SOMETHING MSNBC’S PRESIDENT SAID WAS ‘IMPOSSIBLE’

It turns out Megyn Kelly’s ratings did double on the second night of her primetime Fox News show, despite the president of MSNBC calling it “impossible.”

Phil Griffin actually said there should be “some investigations” after ratings for “The Kelly File”increased 100 percent on the show’s second night.

Megyn Kelly, host of Fox News Channel’s “The Kelly File,” rehearses for the debut of her new show, in New York, Friday, Oct. 4, 2013. (AP)

“Monday we had a really good day in the key demographic, on the night that Fox News debuted their three shows, we either tied or beat them in those hours,” Griffin said last week. “Tuesday–you guys should be doing some investigations–I have never seen it in all my years of cable, same overnight, same everything, and they doubled their ratings in a day? It is impossible.”

The New York Daily News reported that ratings tracker Nielsen conducted an investigation and, sure enough, Kelly’s numbers were accurate.

Via: WFB

Continue Reading....

Bodies Double as Cash Machines With U.S. Income Lagging: Economy

Out of work for more than two years and facing eviction from her home, Hare recalled Louisa May Alcott’s 19th-century novel and took to her computer.

Enlarge image

A doctor marks which kidney to remove on a kidney donor in Baltimore, Maryland. Photographer: Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

“I was just trying to find ways to make money, and I remembered Jo from ‘Little Women,’ and she sold her hair,” the 35-year-old from Atlanta said. “I’ve always had lots of hair, but this is the first time I’ve actually had the idea to sell it because I’m in a really tight jam right now.”

The mother of two posted pictures of her 18-inch auburn mane on www.buyandsellhair.com, asking at least $1,000 and receiving responses within hours. Hare, who also considered selling her breast milk, joins others exploring unconventional ways to make ends meet as the four-year-old economic expansion struggles to invigorate the labor market and stimulate incomes.

In all but two quarters since the beginning of 2011, “hair,” “eggs,” or “kidney” have been among the top four autofill results for the Google search query, “I want to sell my...,” according to Nicholas Colas, chief market strategist at New York-based ConvergEx Group, which provides brokerage and trading-related services for institutional investors.

While Americans can legally sell hair, breast milk and eggs, the sale and purchase of a kidney in the U.S. is against the law.

“The fact that people even explore it indicates that there are still a lot of people worried about their financial outlook,” said Colas, who tracks off-the-grid economic indicators. “This is very much unlike every other recovery that we’ve had. It’s going to be a slow-grinding, very frustrating recovery.”

Via: Bloomberg

Continue Reading....

A Bleak First Week: 99.6% of Healthcare.gov Visitors Did NOT Enroll in Obamacare

Since October 1st, Americans living in the 50 states and Washington, D.C. can purchase healthcare through exchanges as part of the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare.) Little information has been made available by the administration on the level of interest these exchanges have received or more importantly the number of consumers who actually enrolled, although the rollout has been plagued with widespread reports of system outages and bugs.

Millward Brown Digital (formerly Compete, inc.) prepared the following analysis in order to provide visibility around consumer activity on the various healthcare exchanges since the launch of Obamacare.

Over the course of Obamacare’s first week, 9.5 million people visited healthcare.gov, the federal government’s official healthcare website and the de facto exchange for residents of two thirds of the states. In addition, the 16 operational state-run exchanges combined to attract over 3.1 million visitors during the same period. In total, 11.3 million consumers visited the federal and state exchanges during their first week of operation. Unfortunately, what started as a fire hose of interest, resulted in only a small trickle of actual healthcare enrollments.

Among the visitors to healthcare.gov, 5.7 million (or 60% of total visitors to the site) navigated to the individual marketplace landing page where, after selecting their state, they were either directed to continue using the federal site or were redirected to their state-run exchange. From here 1.3 million left for their state-run exchange, while another 3.7 million attempted to register on healthcare.gov. The latter didn’t get far. For two thirds of these consumers, the site either hung or failed altogether before it was finally taken offline over the first weekend. Most had to abandon their attempts to register after facing the government’s equivalent of the blue screen of death, which notified them of ongoing system maintenance.

Despite a myriad of issues with the site, just over a million consumers actually made it through the first gauntlet and successfully registered on healthcare.gov, after which they were sent verification emails. Problems persisted as consumers next encountered difficulty verifying their email addresses and logging into the accounts they had just created. Over 214,000 consumers sought help on the “I’m having trouble logging in to my marketplace account” page, making it one of the most popular pages on the site. Just 27% of those who registered on healthcare.gov successfully logged into accounts.

Via: Complete Pulse

Continue Reading.....

House GOP drops ObamaCare’s medical-device tax from new bill, final cave looming

The most pitiful part of what’s happening right now isn’t the cave itself, which was predictable since day one of the quixotic “defund” effort, but the fact that they’re going to drag it out another day or two to the bitter end purely for theatrical purposes. There’s a 99 percent chance that Reid will reject whatever emerges tonight from the House, leaving Boehner to float a clean debt-ceiling hike tomorrow and let Pelosi and the Democrats bail him out, but in order to marginally reduce the upset among grassroots conservatives, he’s going to push this to the last possible moment. That means passing — hopefully — one more House bill to show that he really did try to get something in return for raising the debt limit, even though what he and House Republicans are now asking for barely qualifies as “something.”

Now that the medical-device tax is out, the already weak House bill has even fewer ObamaCare-related demands in it than it did this morning. And the punchline is, it’s been pulled not as a concession to Obama but because House conservatives regard it as a giveaway to business lobbyists. As James Antle put it, “So the only easily gettable Obamacare concession is out because Rs can’t sell it as Obamacare concession.”

Conservatives complained today that delaying the [medical-device] tax would be “crony capitalism” and they can’t sell it to the Republican base as a viable Republican win.

But that swift change hasn’t stalled the GOP’s push for a Tuesday vote. “The leaders are giving us one more chance to get something passed out of the House before the Senate does its thing,” says a veteran House Republican. “I think we’ll get it through, at least that’s my sense of things now. We want to do something that marks our position, so we don’t end up swallowing whatever terrible bait the Senate casts our way. Now, I know, and the majority of us know, that this is futile. But believe me, even getting to 218 on this plan will be an achievement.”…

House insiders say Boehner’s fear is that conservative activists and powerful conservative groups start to align against the bill and rattle its fragile coalition. If that happens, and the bill’s support falls apart, a simple, six-week debt-ceiling extension is still in the leadership’s back pocket, but there’s no plan to bring that up anytime soon. More likely, should things fizzle on the whip front, is that another conference meeting is called and the House GOP “gets real,” as one Boehner ally puts it, about “what’s possible within divided government, and whether Republicans are willing to back anything at all.”

Translation: The leadership’s going to make one last stand tonight to show conservative voters that they really fought on this, even though what they’re now fighting for is worthless to everyone, and then inform House conservatives tomorrow that they have no choice but to pass some sort of clean debt-ceiling hike with Democratic help. That’s because “what’s possible within divided government” was painfully apparent two weeks ago, but if Boehner had caved then instead of now, he would have been accused of not “trying.” So he went through the motions of trying, up to and including a shutdown, and now it’s time to do the responsible thing and not risk a new recession with a technical default. Meanwhile, the Senate isn’t doing anything right now except waiting to see if Boehner can get anything passed through the House with Republican votes. If he can’t, then Reid will might well end up demanding that even the token concessions to the GOP in his bill with McConnell be dropped. After all, it’ll be Democrats who are now the main actors in passing something in the lower chamber, not Republicans.

Via: Hot AIr

Continue Reading....

President Crisis And The Wishful Thinking Brigade

The hallmark of the Obama era is government of, for and by crisis. Elected amid (or possibly because of) a financial crisis, the Panic of 2008, President Obama has spent his time in office lurching from disaster to disaster.

Obama’s reflexes, praised instinctive timing and audacious as a candidate, turn out to be poorly suited to high office. Obama has been mostly reactive and mostly captive to events. Veering here and there is part of being president. The world is big and dangerous and governance is hard. But watching Obama govern is like watching a distracted man flipping through television channels and all of it bad.

“If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.”(flip) Never mind. (flip) We must bomb Syria now! (flip) Er, scratch that. (flip) Al Qaeda is on the run. (flip) It depends on what you mean by “core al Qaeda.” (flip)

Some of the crises have been self-inflected, and sometimes even intentional. Obama’s signature health law, for example, was born of a crisis in Congress. As support for the entitlement long sought by liberals was fracturing, even with Democrats in complete control of Washington, the president jammed the throttle down. The crisis of confidence demanded that a poorly constructed law be passed. Now! Now! Don’t think. Don’t read. Just vote.

That decision, of course, has led to other crises. The one playing out now is the risible implementation of the law. Democrats are all dripping with glib swipes about how Republicans have been waging a very messy civil war amid the partial government shutdown. But the Democrats are pushing their confident chuffles through gritted teeth. They know that the launch has been damaging, and if unrepaired, possibly fatal to the law. However the current budget debacle ends, the ObamaCare debacle has just begun.

Via: Fox News

Continue Reading.....

Antonin Scalia: 14th Amendment Protects Everyone, Not 'Only The Blacks'

During oral arguments on an affirmative action case on Tuesday, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said the 14th Amendment protects everyone, not "only the blacks."

The quote was tweeted by the New York Times' David Leonhardt:

The high court debated Tuesday whether voters can ban affirmative action programs through a referendum. The case is centered around a 2006 Michigan vote that approved a ballot initiative amending the state's constitution to ban affirmative action programs in higher education.

Scalia has brought race into previous arguments. In February 2013, Scalia suggestedthat the continuation of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act represented the "perpetuation of racial entitlement," saying that lawmakers had only voted to renew the act in 2006 because there wasn't anything to be gained politically from voting against it.

Via: Huffington Post Politics

Continue Reading.....

PALIN TO IOWA

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin will return to Iowa on November 9, returning to the state that holds the country's first-in-the-nation caucuses. These are dominated by social conservatives who Palin appeals to as strongly as she resonates with independent-minded fiscal conservatives.

Palin will be a speaker at a Faith and Freedom Coalition (FFC) event that will honor Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), who led the fight to defund Obamacare along with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX).

"We are thrilled and honored that Gov. Palin has confirmed to address Iowa's top conservative activists, as we kick off the 2014 election cycle," FFC president Steve Scheffler said. "Without a doubt, her appearance will motivate activists to be involved in grassroots politics here in Iowa that will help turn the tide here in Iowa, by electing more family-friendly public officials at all levels."

As David Brody at the Christian Broadcasting Network noted, the appearance will underscore Palin's influence among conservatives, especially those in Iowa, regardless of whether she decides to run for president in 2016. If she does not, her endorsement will be the most coveted among the GOP presidential contenders. 

One of the reasons Palin has been called the prototypical "Teavaneglical" politician is because she fervently appeals to faith-based voters as much as she does to fiscally conservative voters. Her influence was proven during the 2012 cycle when she praised Rick Santorum in December in 2011 when Iowans seemed lukewarm about the field of Republican primary candidates. After Palin made her remarks on December 2 on Fox News's Hannity, Santorum, who was at four percent in the polls in Iowa--barely above Jon Huntsman, who was not even competing in the state--started getting momentum and eventually won the caucus a month later. Though Santorum had gone "all-in" in Iowa and planted his campaign exclusively in the state, voters were persuaded to consider his candidacy more seriously after Palin spoke kindly of him. 

Via: Breitbart

Continue Reading.....

Gun Expert Piers Morgan Gets His Constitutional Amendments Mixed Up ...

BY: Washington Free Beacon Staff
October 15, 2013 8:07 am

CNN host and noted gun control supporter Piers Morgan got his constitutional amendments mixed during an interview on CBS This Morning Tuesday promoting his new book.

Morgan announced himself a supporter of the First Amendment right of Americans to defend themselves with a handgun in their home, but it’s the Second Amendment granting the right to bear arms.

Morgan has been a fierce advocate for gun control on his CNN show Piers Morgan Live over the past year, getting in a shouting match with the founder of Guns Save Lives Day Alan Gottlieb as recently as Monday night:

NORAH O’DONNELL: You were talking about banning guns. We have the Second Amendment here in America, and there are more than 100 million gun owners in this country. It is is a right that many Americans enjoy and use safely.

PIERS MORGAN: I have no problem in a country with so many guns in circulation with a family exercising their First Amendment right to defend their families with a handgun at home. But nobody can tell me that any civilian in America needs a military-style assault weapon or a magazine which has 30 to 100 bullets as we saw in Aurora or Sandy Hook.

A Return to Keynes?

The nomination of Janet Yellen to become head of the Federal Reserve System has set off a flurry of media stories. Since she will be the first woman to occupy that position, we can only hope that this will not mean that any criticism of what she does will be attributed to sex bias or to a "war on women."

The Federal Reserve has become such a major player in the American economy that it needs far more scrutiny and criticism than it has received, regardless of who heads it.

Ms. Yellen, a former professor of economics at Berkeley, has openly proclaimed her views on economic policy, and those views deserve very careful scrutiny. She asks: "Will capitalist economies operate at full employment in the absence of routine intervention?" And she answers: "Certainly not."

Janet Yellen represents the Keynesian economics that once dominated economic theory and policy like a national religion -- until it encountered two things: Milton Friedman and the stagflation of the 1970s.

At the height of the Keynesian influence, it was widely believed that government policy-makers could choose a judicious trade-off between the inflation rate and the rate of unemployment. This trade-off was called the Phillips Curve, in honor of an economist at the London School of Economics.

Professor Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago attacked the Phillips Curve, both theoretically and empirically. When Professor Friedman received the Nobel Prize in economics -- the first of many to go to Chicago economists, who were the primary critics of Keynesian economics -- it seemed as if the idea of a trade-off between the inflation rate and the unemployment rate might be laid to rest.

Via: TownHall

Continue Reading.....

MSNBC Anchor Asks GOP Congresswoman If She Hates Obamacare More Than She Loves America

MSNBC anchor Thomas Roberts and Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R., Tenn.) had a testy exchange Tuesday on MSNBC Live, starting with Roberts asking Blackburn a loaded question about whether she “hated Obamacare” more than she loved the country.

Roberts also continued to use Democratic talking point language, asking Blackburn if she thought it was inappropriate to take Americans “hostage” and push them over the cliff, similar to rhetoric used by President Obama and other Democratic leaders castigating Republicans over the shutdown.

Blackburn chastised him for his loaded questions.

“Listen to yourself,” she said. “Just listen to the way you’re sounding, my goodness. We didn’t want a government shutdown. We don’t want a government default. We in the House are continuing to work through this.”

THOMAS ROBERTS: Congressman, let me ask you, when it comes to Obamacare, do you hate Obamacare more than you love your country?

MARSHA BLACKBURN: I’ve got to tell you something. I think that comments like that that you are making are just incredibly inappropriate. What we have to realize –

ROBERTS: You don’t think it’s incredibly inappropriate to shut down our government and take all the hostages of Americans that you’ve taken? No, no, no, it’s not inappropriate because you’ve taken the government hostage through a shutdown and all the American people, you’re now walking them to a cliff, the economy, and you’re going to push them over one by one based on the fact that you don’t like the ACA. That’s all it is. You don’t like the Affordable Care Act.

BLACKBURN: Listen to yourself. Listen to yourself. We didn’t want a government shutdown. Just listen to the way you’re sounding, my goodness. We didn’t want a government shutdown. We don’t want a government default. We in the House are continuing to work through this.

Via: WFB

Continue Reading.....

The Obamacare implosion is worse than you think

Obamacare is imploding. But thanks to the government shutdown, everyone is talking about the implosion of the GOP instead.

The shutdown drama has distracted from the fact that Obamacare’s debut is worse than many realize — and it threatens the fundamental viability of the law itself. The administration claims the Obamacare online exchanges crashed because the Web site got more than 8 million hits in the first week. Please. You know how many people visit Amazon.com every week? More than 70 million. The difference is: 1.) Amazon seldom crashes, and 2.) on Amazon, people actually buy something.

It appears virtually no one is buying Obamacare. While administration officials brag about how many visitors the site is getting, they refuse to divulge how many people actually signed up. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius was asked that directly by Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show.” “Fully enrolled?” Sebelius stuttered. “I can’t tell you. Because I don’t know.” That is a frightening admission of incompetence. If the Obama administration can’t even track how many people signed up, how on earth is it going to verify whether those people are eligible for subsidies? How will it protect against fraud?

The Post reported this past weekend that the failure of the Web site is worse than previously known: “Even when consumers have been able to sign up, insurers sometimes can’t tell who their new customers are because of a separate set of computer defects.” It turns out that in some 99 percent of applications, the Obamacare site did not provide insurers with enough verifiable information to enroll people in their plans.

Computer experts say the problems with the site are not because of heavy traffic but are the result of structural flaws in system architecture. It is going to take months to rebuild it. That raises a question: If the federal government can’t manage a simple Web site, how on earth is it going to manage the health care of millions of Americans?

Patients Pay Before Seeing Doctor as Deductibles Spread

When Barbara Retkowski went to a Cape Coral, Florida, health clinic in August to treat a blood condition, she figured the center would bill her insurance company. Instead, it demanded payment upfront.

Earlier in the year, another clinic insisted she pay her entire remaining insurance deductible for the year -- more than $1,000 -- before the doctor would even see her.

“I was surprised and frustrated,” Retkowski, a 59-year-old retiree, said in an interview. “I had to pull money out of my savings.”

The practice of upfront payment for non-emergency care has been spreading in the U.S. as deductibles rise. Now, the advent of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is likely to accelerate that trend.

Many of the plans offered through the law’s insurance exchanges have low initial premiums to attract customers, while carrying significant deductibles and other out-of-pocket cost sharing. The second-lowest tier of Obamacare plans inCalifornia, for example, carries a $2,000 annual deductible.

Hospitals say they need to charge patients prior to treatment because Americans are increasingly on the hook for more of their own medical costs. And once care is provided, it’s often difficult for hospitals to collect.

“It used to be taboo to look like you were looking for money at a time when you were supposed to be focused on patient care,” David Williams, president of Boston-based consulting firm Health Business Group, said. “It’s not taboo anymore.”

Via: Bloomberg

Continue Reading.....

How Mich. Rebuts Redistricting/Polarization Claims

Dave Weigel wrote a brief post on gerrymandering last Friday in response to my piece on the same topic. He used Michigan as an example of how Republicans were able to use redistricting to enhance their standing in the House, particularly by shoring up vulnerable members, thereby contributing to extremism.

Before responding, I think it’s important to note up front, as Weigel does, that this isn’t really a black-and-white issue, a fact that is easily glossed over. People run along a continuum of opinion regarding how much redistricting contributed to the GOP’s House majority and to polarization. We might place Tom Friedman at one pole, as he seemingly laid our increasingly divided nation at the feet of redistricting, Citizens United, and Fox News. At the other end are those political scientists who find little to no effect from redistricting. In the middle are people like Weigel, Charlie Cook, and myself, who think redistricting played a role, but who disagree -- sometimes strongly -- on the extent to which it mattered and how much other factors contributed.

From my point of view, redistricting helped Republicans gain between five and 10 seats that they wouldn’t have otherwise won, by shifting the median district rightward. But even this is more a function of polarization than a cause of it.

Weigel’s Michigan example is actually instructive in showing the limits of what redistricting contributes to polarization. At first blush, it looks like a classic case of a horrendously gerrymandered state. Barack Obama defeated John McCain by 16.4 percentage points there, more than twice his national average. Mitt Romney ran a much stronger race four years later, but the president still managed to win by a healthy 9.4 points. Yet under the Republican-drawn maps, the president ran better than his statewide 2008 showing in only five districts (of 14), and ran ahead of his national showing in just six. Romney carried nine of these districts outright.

As Weigel writes:

It’s not like gerrymandering created Justin Amash. It shored up Tim Walberg. Who's Tim Walberg? He was a Club for Growth-backed candidate who primaried a moderate Republican in 2006, lost in the 2008 Democratic wave, came back in 2010, and benefited when the new GOP legislature drew a map that packed Democrats in Detroit and Flint-centric districts, shoring him up to make no news but provide reliable "no" votes on anything that did not delay or defund Obamacare.

Via: Real Clear Politics

Continue Reading....

The Louisiana Heist - Food-stamp fraudsters should be punished to the full extent of the law.

On Saturday, Louisiana’s “EBT” system malfunctioned, causing spending limits on users’ food-stamp cards temporarily to be lifted. In two counties at least, recipients noticed the error, spread the word, and set about trying to check out as much as they could fit into shopping carts. At Walmarts in the towns of Springhill and Mansfield, employees called corporate headquarters to ask what they should do. They were instructed to “keep the registers ringing.” This they did — and with a vengeance.

By the time that proper limits on the cards had been restored a couple of hours later, the shelves had been all but stripped bare. “Just about everything is gone, I’ve never seen it in that condition,” Anthony Fuller, a customer in Mansfield, told the press. Will Lyn, the chief of police in nearby Springhill, agreed, telling the Daily Mail that “it was definitely worse than Black Friday. It was worse than anything we had ever seen in this town. There was no food left on any of the shelves, and no meat left. The grocery part of Walmart was totally decimated.” One man even managed to spend $700.

“I saw people drag out eight to ten grocery carts,” Lynd reported. Those who did not manage to take advantage in time simply abandoned their hauls in the middle of the aisles.

“Contrary to rumors,” CBS proclaimed, “nobody was unruly or arrested and [the police] were mainly there to help prevent shoplifting and theft.” Given the circumstances, “preventing theft” is a rather peculiar way of describing the behavior of officers who stood and watched the incident. Whether or not local authorities had legal cause to arrest the shoppers on the spot, there really should be no doubt that widespread theft took place — or, perhaps, that widespread fraud took place. Neither that the beneficiaries evidently believe that they could get away with it, nor that the victim was the unsympathetically anonymous mass of Louisianan and federal taxpayers alters the plain fact. This was a crime.

Via: NRO

Continue Reading....

FLASHBACK: Separate But Equal – It’s The Law Stupid …

We hear a lot of hemming and hawing from Democrats these days that Obamacare is the law of the land and found constitutional.

That got me to thinking – has there ever been a bad law that was ruled constitutional previously, verified as “The Law of The Land” yet ruled unconstitutional many years after?

I cracked open an old history book I had from my high school days and believe it or not, I actually did find one.

America is a Democratic Republic and as such, there are things that are made law every single day.  Most of these laws of which we’re completely unaware.

There are bad laws and there are good laws.  Our founders gave us a document that is a companion to the brain that God gave us.  They knew that “the law” is not rigid and uncompromising, but a living, evolving entity.

They knew things can and will change with the times.  To say that something is simply “the law” is asinine and ignorant of our country’s rich history of enacting laws that suckand then repealing laws when cooler/wiser/different heads prevailed.

I’ll leave you with this small list of laws that sucked and were ultimately repealed.

• Separate but Equal
• Jim Crow
• Prohibition
• Fugitive Slave Act
• Alien & Sedition Act
• Chinese Exclusive Act

Via: Weasel Zippers

Continue Reading....