PERINO: Five Tips for Republicans Grilling Sebelius About ObamaCare on Wednesday

Here are five tips for a good hearing:

1. Take the umpteenth opportunity to make a new impression. Congressional hearings can be painful to watch. It makes people cringe to see members of Congress who haven't even looked at their staff's work before they sit down and start spouting.  With limited time to question a witness, it's understandable that rapid fire questions and sound bites might seem like better TV and the best way to leave a mark. But if people cringe when they're watching, you can lose ground. 

Bottom line, don't make me feel sorry for the witness!

2. Come with more facts. The secretary will be prepared, and the press is looking for Republicans to stumble, so the burden is on you to know more than anyone else in the room. Facts give you confidence and people recognize them as stronger than cotton candy talking points that melt on contact. As saying among trial lawyers goes, facts win.

3. Bottle the fake outrage. You need to project gravitas, not rage.  People want assured, confident leaders who sound like in control of their emotions...show some passion, sure, but don't over do it. Sincerity is key. Manners speak loudly.

4. Channel the frustration. Don't make the hearing personal about how mad YOU are but instead talk about your constituents. Repeat the stories and anecdotes you’ve heard from back home. And use the administration's own words against them. There are plenty of Democrats to quote -- the embarrassment should be solely theirs. Let them own it.

5. Be able to CRISPLY describe the policies that the GOP is FOR, not just what it is against. Persuade with facts. Make the alternative seem more attractive, rather than people walking away with the impression that you just can't stand Obama and don't want to support his signature legislation. Practice saying (in less than three sentences) what you're for and why it would be better.  Don't let them pin the "Republicans have no plan" tag on you. You're an elephant, not a donkey!

Via: Fox News

Continue Reading.....

President Obama's campaign group polling supporters on Obamacare

There's no doubt congressional investigators have their hands full probing allegations the Internal Revenue Service targeted conservative non-profit groups. But now a different IRS scandal -- involving the chronic, ongoing, mind-bogglingly wasteful mismanagement of a popular tax credit program -- demands Congress's attention because it has taken on new importance with the arrival of Obamacare.

The program is the Earned Income Tax Credit, through which the federal government gives out between $60 billion and $70 billion to low-income working Americans each year. It's known as a "refundable" tax credit, but it is basically a transfer payment, in which the IRS sends a check — perhaps even $5,000 every year — to workers who have little or no tax liability.

The problem is, the IRS does little to determine whether recipients actually qualify for the money. A recent report by the IRS inspector general says the agency has given out somewhere between $110 billion and $132 billion in improper Earned Income Tax Credit payments in the last decade. In that time period, between 21 and 30 percent of tax credit payments went to people who didn't qualify for them.

That is bad enough. But what infuriates lawmakers is that the IRS refuses to do anything about it. Agency officials told the inspector general they couldn't fix the problem because the tax credit program is very complicated, and also because they are afraid vigorous enforcement would discourage legitimately qualified recipients from applying for credits. And the IRS is not only not working to reduce improper payments, it is refusing to report those payments to Congress as required. The bottom line, in the words of inspector general Russell George: "The IRS is unlikely to achieve any significant reduction in Earned Income Tax Credit improper payments."

Rep. Dave Camp, R-Mich., chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, has heard that before. "The IRS has repeatedly ignored the fraud and abuse in the Earned Income Tax Credit program, which has already cost Americans over $100 billion," Camp said in a statement Monday. "Americans should be confident that their tax dollars are being used properly, but that confidence has been shattered by the blatant disregard this agency has shown for monitoring refundable tax credits and better protecting taxpayers."

Via: Washington Examiner

Continue Reading.....

ObamaCare Schaden-Fraud

In his weekly radio address, President Obama preposterously pouted that "it's well past the time for folks to stop rooting for [ObamaCare's] failure," with the obvious implication that conservative Republicans are in fact cheering for the pain of the un-insured.

No, Mr. President, we are not.  We are, however, having a delicious moment of schaden-fraud.  This is the magnificent validation we are experiencing as all elected Democrats and members of the Jurassic media are fast discovering that the man and the plan they have so arrogantly shoved down our throats - and so naively placed their hopes in -- are simultaneously being exposed as shams. 

And sham-wow, is it ever cathartic, as we have been called racists, terrorists, hostage-takers, kooks, haters, and stupid for years -- all because we deigned to be correct about the biggest legislative boondoggle in American history.  Of course, only a few of the Kool-Aid drinkers are admitting this...yet...but we can sense that many of them are panicking on the realization that they might one day have to.

We told you so!  I think the technical term is ROTFLMAO.

Via: American Thinker

Continue Reading.....

Charlie Rangel Doesn’t Know What He’s Talking About

BY: Washington Free Beacon Staff
October 29, 2013 11:41 am

Rep. Charlie Rangel (D., NY) quoted some false history during Tuesday’s Ways and Means Committee hearing regarding Obamacare’s rocky rollout.

During his allotted time to question Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Marilyn Tavenner, Rangel claimed that no Republican voted for the Social Security Act of 1935. When Chairman Dave Camp (R., Mich.) informed Rangel that such information was inaccurate, Rangel responded:

“Maybe one or two. I don’t know. But they opposed Medicare. I spoke with President Johnson and he shared with me at the ranch the people that had signed off on Medicare.”

Politifact fact-checked similar claims made by Fmr. Governor Howard Dean (D., Vt.) in 2009, and noted that in 1935 the Social Security Act passed the House 372-33, with 81 Republicans in support of the bill. The Senate passed the bill 77-6 with 16 Republicans on board.

Medicare passed in 1965, and while no Republicans voted for the bill when it came out of the Ways and Means Committee, 70 House Republicans voted for final passage. In the Senate, the bill passed 70-24, with 13 Republicans voting aye.

Via: WFB

Continue Reading.....

[VIDEO] CMS Administrator on Obamacare: ‘We Have a System That’s Working’

(CNSNews.com) – Marilyn Tavenner, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), testified before the House Ways & Means Committee on Tuesday that the Obamacare enrollment system is “working.”

“So what I can guarantee is we have a system that’s working. We’re gonna improve the speed of that system,” she said at the hearing on Obamacare enrollment.

The Obamacare website, healthcare.gov, has been rife with problems for those trying to enroll in the health care insurance program.

Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas) had asked Tavenner if she could guarantee that “no American will experience a gap in their health care.”

Brady interrupted Tavenner’s response, asking, “Excuse me, you’re saying the system right now is working?”

“I’m saying it’s working. It’s just not working at the speed that we want and at the success rate that we want, and those are the things we’re working on,” Tavenner said.

Via: CNS News
Continue Reading....

[VIDEO] Glenn Greenwald: NY Times Has 'Helped to Kill Journalism as a Potent Force for Checking Power'

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani says Y2K could have landed him in a similar situation to President Barack Obama's predicament with the disastrous Obamacare website rollout, but he averted it.

"I had to face Y2K when I was the mayor," Giuliani said Monday on Fox News Channel's "Hannity." 

"Everybody was afraid the computers were going to go down, people were going to be let out of jails, trains wouldn't run. We spent a couple hundred million to make sure that that worked."



Giuliani said he began getting regular briefings 16 months before the big day. There were a few breakdowns, but they were fixed months in advance, he said. 

"I knew if this failed I would look like a fool," Giuliani said. "And it wasn't my signature achievement. I guess reducing crime or welfare was. This was his [Obama's] signature achievement."

Via: Newsmax
Continue Reading.....

Farm Bills Would Cost More Than Obama Stimulus

The House and Senate are considering farm bill legislation this week whose costs should raise red flags for all Americans. In fact, the House and Senate versions of the bill would cost far more than the Obama stimulus package.

The costs are just one example of how the farm bill ignores taxpayers, consumers, and virtually all Americans.

First of all, the “farm bill” is a misleading title. It’s more appropriately called the food stamp bill, since nearly 80 percent of the costs are connected to food stamps. By combining agriculture programs with food stamps, legislators have turned the food stamp bill into a political game where, every five years, Congress rubberstamps legislation that helps special interests at the expense of most Americans.

Via: The Foundry

Continue Reading....

DEMOCRATS WANT REFUND FROM CONTRACTORS THAT BUILT OBAMACARE WEBSITE

Five Democrat representatives are asking the Obama administration to seek a refund from the company that built Healthcare.gov—"a website which has failed to work for most people trying to sign on for health insurance."

According to The Hill, Reps. Ron Barber (D-AZ), William Enyart (D-IL), Pete Gallego (D-TX), Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), and Filemon Vela (D-TX) made this request through a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder.

In the letter, they asked the administration to see if "CGI Federal and/or any other company involved in the construction of the website... violated the terms of its agreement or is in constructive breach of the contract." They say the administration "must hold the contractors accountable for their unsatisfactory work."

The letter was released for the public on October 28, one day before the House of Representatives begins hearings "on the failed Obamacare rollout." 

On October 29, the Ways and Means Committee "will meet with Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Marilyn Tavenner," and on October 30, the Energy and Commerce Committee "will hear from Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius."

Via: Breitbart

Continue Reading....

Brave New World By Patrick J. Buchanan

What kind of camaraderie, cooperation or friendship can endure in an environment where constant snooping on one's closest friends is accepted practice?

The first reports in early May of 1960 were that a U.S. weather plane, flying out of Turkey, had gone missing. A silent Moscow knew better. After letting the Americans crawl out on a limb, expatiating on their cover story, Russia sawed it off.

Actually, said Nikita Khrushchev, we shot down a U.S. spy plane 1000 miles inside our country flying over a restricted zone. We have the pilot, we have the camera, we have the pictures. We have the hollow silver dollar containing the poisoned-tipped needle CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers declined to use.

Two weeks later, Khrushchev used the U-2 incident and Ike's refusal to apologize to dynamite the Paris summit and the gauzy Spirit of Camp David that had come out of his ten-day visit to the USA.

Eisenhower's reciprocal trip to Russia was now dead.

A year later, President Kennedy would be berated by Khrushchev in Vienna. The Berlin Wall would go up. And Khrushchev would begin secretly to install nuclear missiles in Cuba, 90 miles from Key West.

Via: CNS News

Continue Reading.....

[VIDEO] Chris Matthews Questions Obama’s Credibility in Wake of NBC’s Obamacare Report

 

BY: Washington Free Beacon Staff
October 29, 2013 7:50 am

MSNBC host Chris Matthews said President Obama’s “credibility” would be under pressure Tuesday on Morning Joe if accounts that people with “normal medical expenses” were having their insurance plans cancelled are true, as NBC reported Monday.

“ I think it’s a real challenge if people with regular policies out there that cover normal medical expenses are now told, Wait a minute, that policy doesn’t count,’” Matthews said. “I think that will be a real problem for the president in terms of his credibility, if those accounts are in that list.”

NBC reported Monday the Obama administration knew since 2010 that millions of Americans would not keep their health insurance, despite his repeated pledges that Obamacare would not force cancellations of existing coverage policies:

Buried in Obamacare regulations from July 2010 is an estimate that because of normal turnover in the individual insurance market, “40 to 67 percent” of customers will not be able to keep their policy. And because many policies will have been changed since the key date, “the percentage of individual market policies losing grandfather status in a given year exceeds the 40 to 67 percent range.”

Via: WFB
Continue Reading..... 

The Americans are Coming! The Americans are Coming!

Velvet curtains are being drawn back on America’s glorious, adventure-steeped history today with the release of Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims: Time-travel Adventures with Exceptional Americans.

And with an unthinkable end being planned for America,  the release of Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims could not possibly have come at a better time.

Book protagonists ‘Rush Revere’ and his lovable talking horse, ‘Liberty’ will unleash the fertile imaginations of the only ones who can turn back the tide on a declining America:  its children.

Only a little boy grown tall as a man, raised by a family who believed in America’s noble, one-of-a-kind history could have written Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims; Time-Travel Adventures with Exceptional Americans, and that’s what Rush Limbaugh did.

In their nocturnal dreams children whose parents have read them bed time stories about the engaging antics of Rush Revere and the “Rush, rush, rushing to history”  cheerleading Liberty, will be shouting: “The Americans are coming! the Americans are coming!” 

Adults reading Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims to their small fry, will revel in America’s glorious past, and even learn some lessons in history.

One hundred percent accurate, the best thing about Limbaugh’s book is that it gives American children what they haven’t been getting in the classroom for decades: pride in America from its own documented glorious history.

Via: Canada Free Press

Continue Reading.....

10,000-word New Yorker article on rise in homelessness mentions ‘Barack Obama’ zero times

The New Yorker magazine’s latest issue features a nearly 10,000 word article on the rise in homelessness in New York City — but the piece doesn’t mention the name “Barack Obama” a single time.

According to the article, the number of homeless in New York City has exploded in recent years.

“For baseball games, Yankee Stadium seats 50,287. If all the homeless people who now live in New York City used the stadium for a gathering, several thousand of them would have to stand,” the article opens.

“More people in the city lack homes than at any time since . . . It’s hard to say exactly. The Coalition for the Homeless, a leading advocate for homeless people in the city and the state, says that these numbers have not been seen in New York since the Great Depression. The Bloomberg administration replies that bringing the Depression into it is wildly unfair, because those times were much worse, and, besides, for complicated reasons, you’re comparing apples and oranges. …In any case, it’s inescapably true that there are far more homeless people in the city today than there have been since ‘modern homelessness’ (as experts refer to it) began, back in the nineteen-seventies.”

Yet nowhere in the mammoth piece is President Obama’s economic record over the last five years even considered as a possible factor. The terms “Barack Obama” or “President Obama” don’t appear at all, though the term “Obama phones” comes up once:

“Nearby, a young man named Angel was helping a woman from Access Wireless hand out cell phones that were paid for by Medicaid,” the article reads. “He called them ‘Obama phones,’ because they were free.”

By contrast, a far more mild homelessness problem under President Ronald Reagan was universally deplored by the establishment media. As recently as September of this year, homelessness was cited by Salon as the centerpiece of the 40th president’s toxic legacy.

In his book “Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News,” former CBS reporter Bernie Goldberg used the media’s reporting on homelessness as an example of its bias against conservatives.

Via: Daily Caller

Continue Reading.....

President 'I Don't Know ... and I Don't Want to Know'

President Obama says he didn’t know the U.S. government was tapping Angela Merkel, and you know, maybe he didn’t. I have come to wonder if we don’t have what amounts to a deep state within the outer state in the U.S.—a deep state consisting of our intelligence and security agencies, which are so vast and far-flung in their efforts that they themselves don’t fully know who’s in charge and what everyone else is doing. Maybe they’re bugging so many people it’s hardly news to them when they bug the chancellor of Germany. Maybe they mentioned it to the president, maybe not. Maybe they don’t know.

Mr Obama has gone from seeming like someone who doesn’t quite know what’s going on in his government to someone who doesn’t really want to. He has perfected a sense of surprise. He’s always finding out at just the moment you are, and feeling your indignation.

So maybe he didn’t know. Maybe our intelligence and security apparatus—so huge and full of money since 9/11, so self-encased and self-perpetuating—didn’t tell him.

Before we think about that, should we be tapping Merkel’s phone?

No, for a simple reason: Because it is wrong. She is our friend. She is our ally. She leads a great nation. As such—friend, ally, greatness—she deserves respect. It is not respectful or friendly to invade her privacy and spy on her in this way.

It also seems sort of nuts. Does the National Security Agency think Angela Merkel is planning to blow up Times Square? That would be just like her, wouldn’t it? Does the NSA want to get the mood of her government before the trade talks commence? Then they can do it the old-fashioned way, through old-fashioned human measures: “Hey, source in the foreign ministry, what are you hearing?”

America has been embarrassed by this. A president with more than adequate political smarts would never OK it. But our intelligence and security agencies?

Via: WSJ

Continue Reading....

Report: Coburn calls Reid an 'absolute a--hole'

Coburn made the comment during an event for the New York Young Republican Club, the newspaper reported.

"There's no comity with Harry Reid,” he said. “I think he's an absolute a--hole."

Coburn’s office did not respond to a request for comment about the remarks.

Coburn did compliment other Democrats in the Senate, specifically naming Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.).

"I have great relationships with Chuck Schumer. I don't say that in Oklahoma," he said.

Coburn has had sharp words for Reid in the past. Earlier this year, Coburn said Reid was a “failure” as a majority leader and had been “dishonest” with him.

The dustup came because Coburn accused Reid of breaking his promise to allow a vote on an amendment allowing gun owners to carry firearms in recreational areas during the gun control debate.

In 2012, Coburn apologized after calling Reid incompetent.

Via: The Hill

Continue Reading.....

Video: 19 Times Obama Promised to Lower Annual Insurance Premiums By $2500

In California alone, The Los Angeles Times reports that the average middle class family will see a premium increase of 30%, which is in line with what we are seeing all over the country. But on at least 19 occasions, President Obama promised the American people that if you already have insurance, his plan would reduce your premiums to $2500 per year. 

Note: Obama did not say that his plan would save  $2500 based on what insurance might cost in 2014. In no way did he qualify or caveat this promise:

--

Via: Breitbart

Continue Reading.....