US stocks resume rise with Dow clearing 16,000; S&P 500 above 1,800

U.S. stocks gained on Monday, with the S&P 500 and Dow industrials at or near record highs, as Wall Street weighed a measure of builder sentiment coming in below expectations against the potential implications for the Federal Reserve's monetary policy.

Underlying gains that took the Dow above 16,000 for the first time and the S&P 500 above 1,800 is ongoing optimistic about stimulus from the Fed. "The market is very Fed oriented," said Paul Nolte, managing director at Dearborn Partners.

	Name	Price		Change	%Change
DJIA	Dow Jones Industrial Average	16002.12		40.42	0.25%
S&P 500	S&P 500 Index	1798.12		-0.06	0%
NASDAQ	Nasdaq Composite Index	3982.08		-3.89	-0.10%

Benchmark indices initially trimmed their rise after the release of the National Association of Home Builders/Well Fargo Housing Market Index, which found home builder confidence to be flat this month from a downwardly revised level of 54 the prior month.

"Every question gets answered with what does this mean to the Fed? The builders confidence falling below forecasts means the Fed is going to stay in the market," said Nolte, downplaying the survey's impact.

After clearing 16,000 for the first time, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose to an intraday record of 16,030.28. Boeing led blue-chip companies on the rise, after the plane maker received more than 250 orders for its revamped 777 jet at an airshow in Dubai.

The S&P 500 also surpassed a psychological hurdle, rising above 1,800 for the first time, with industrials and financials pacing sector gains and utilities and consumer staples the worst performing of its 10 industry groups. It set an intraday record of 1,802.37.

Via: CNBC

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Eight More Nightmare Scenarios for ObamaCare

They’re mostly worst-case scenarios, and an Obamacare recovery in the next few months could still prevent some of the biggest ones from ever happening. But health care experts are taking all of them a lot more seriously now — because at this point, why wouldn’t they?

A complete list of possibilities could be overwhelming, but here are the main ones to watch:

‘Death spiral’

This was always the worst of the worst-case scenarios: Only sick people enroll in the Obamacare health insurance plans, healthy people stay away, and everyone’s premiums rise out of control because there are no healthy people to cover the sick people’s costs.

That’s the dreaded “death spiral,” and it has been a possibility all along. But it was only a remote one — because health care experts have counted on the attraction of Obamacare’s subsidies, along with the threat of fines from the individual mandate, to lure enough healthy customers to prevent a meltdown.

The cost of the cancellations fix

There’s another problem, and it has nothing to do with the website. Insurers and actuaries say the Obama administration’s solution to the canceled policies mess could backfire — because by telling insurers they can extend people’s individual coverage, they might cause the insurance prices to rise anyway.

That’s because the mix of healthy and sick people in the new Obamacare plans would be disrupted. In the worst-case scenario, it would be the healthy people that renew their old, pre-Obamacare insurance, and only the sick people would switch to the new plans — because they’d want the new coverage that accepts anyone with pre-existing conditions.

Via: Fox News

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[CARTOON] Obamacare Turkey

Via: California Political Review

Obama admin. not prosecuting wind farms for bird deaths

The Obama administration is giving wind power producers a pass by not going after them for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of federally protected birds and bats.

But the feds have gone after fossil fuel and other companies that have killed these animals.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service currently has 18 open investigations into bird and bat deaths due to wind power operations, according to a service spokeswoman, with 14 of these cases involving the death of at least one golden eagle — which are federally protected under three different laws. Seven of these cases have been referred to the U.S. Justice Department for “potential prosecution.”

A spokesman with the Justice Department, however, told The Daily Caller News Foundation that there “have been no prosecutions to date under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and/or the Bald and Gold Eagle Protection Act related to the deaths of migratory birds, including eagles, at wind facilities.”

The Obama administration’s support for wind energy development and inaction against wind producers that allegedly break these laws has sparked the ire of House Republicans. Earlier this month, Republicans on the Committee on Natural Resources sent letters to the administration slamming them for not providing documentation related to bird deaths from wind farms.

“[Justice Department’s] lack of a timely response is unacceptable and frustrates Congress’s ability to conduct oversight of this important matter,” reads one letter sent to the Justice Department.

One of the most contentious energy issues of the 2012 campaign was the Wind Production Tax Credit, or wind PTC, which paid wind power producers for the electricity they generated from harnessing the wind.

Obama supported the tax credit to bolster support in states like Iowa where the wind energy industry has a huge presence. Nineteen non-energy firms — including Yahoo!, Starbucks and Sprint — also sent a letter to Congress urging them to extend the tax credit.

Via: Daily Caller

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Van Jones Blames Obamacare Problems on Media, Richard Nixon, Heritage Foundation, and GOP

Perhaps the Obamacare apologists are running out of people to blame for the failed Obamacare rollout and the President's "you can keep your insurance, period" lie.

During the panel discussion on Sunday's State of the Union with Candy Crowley, Van Jones blamed the launch issues first on the mainstream media misinformation, then on a long list of usual and not-so-usual suspects, including former President Richard Nixon, the Heritage Foundation, and the tried and trite, Republican Party.

Of course, Jones left one conspicuous name off his increasingly desperate list...

Fellow panelist and CNN Commentator Ross Douthat asked Jones if there will be a moment where the left-wing of the party demands a presidential candidate "who will push not to fix Obamacare which was always a compromise, but for single payer."  That's when Jones launched into his shameless blame gaming:

It's conceivable, but I think we're a long way from there. What it's going to come down to is, does the media get tired of pretending that Obamacare is just a website that didn't work and these cancelation notices? If the media were going to be fair, here's what they would do: For every one story about a cancelation notice, there would be three stories about people benefiting from Obamacare right now. Even with the website broken, every woman across American is benefiting because they can't be discriminated against. Even with the website broken, you have every kid under the age of 26 being benefited. We don't tell stories of successes right now. Maybe we get bored with this. We only talk about the downside. The minute that Democrats get it together to promote the incredible successes --

Douthat interrupted Jones by jokingly asking if he was going to run against Hillary Clinton as champion of single-payer in 2016. Jones replied by cramming more villains into his blame list:

I'm for single-payer. Part of the problem is we gave up on single-payer without a fight. Now it looks like this moderate Romneycare thing is a left-wing plot, when in fact this Romneycare thing that Obama is putting in place came from Richard Nixon, the Heritage Foundation, and the Republicans.

Via: True Revolt
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Obama-contra Column: Obamacare isn’t Katrina. It’s Iran-contra

Reagan's televised address apologizing for the Iran-contra scandal and Obama apologizing for the Obamacare rollout / AP

BY: Matthew Continetti
November 15, 2013 4:59 am

Of all the analogies being drawn between the calamitous rollout of Obamacare and other government muck-ups throughout history, one deserves a closer look. What’s happening to Obamacare right now isn’t this president’s Iraq war, or his Hurricane Katrina, or his Lewinsky moment. It’s his Iran-contra scandal: a complicated and controversial policy dispute that involves deception, a hostile Congress, and the bludgeoning of presidential credibility. Iran-contra marked the end of the Reagan Revolution, and it’s not hard to see how the implementation of Obamacare might mark the end of the Obama Revolution as well. A boy can dream.

The analogy rests on the following similarity between presidents Reagan and Obama: For much of their time in office, the two men were more popular than their policies, and enjoyed higher personal approval than job approval. Ronald Reagan was always more popular than tax and spending cuts, and Barack Obama has been more popular than Obamacare and the stimulus. Reagan was hard to dislike. Obama is too, or so I’ve been told.

The news in 1986 that the Reagan administration had violated the arms embargo against Iran and traded weapons for hostages, with the proceeds of the weapons sales going to the anti-Sandinista insurgency in Nicaragua, threw the White House into disarray. The subsequent investigations into what exactly happened distracted Reagan and his team and damaged the president’s reputation. It’s hard to recall, especially as Reagan himself was never fully implicated in the scandal, but his approval ratings fell to a second-term low of 47 percent in the Gallup poll and his personal favorability fell as well.

Via: WFB

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ONE-PARTY RULE LEADS TO CORRUPTION IN CALIFORNIA

Paul Krugman, the liberal Nobel Prize-winning columnist for the New York Times, thinks California is making an economic comeback. 

He attributes this mostly to the Republican party’s steady decline in the state, which left Governor Jerry Brown “free to push an agenda of tax hikes and infrastructure spending that sounds remarkably like the kind of thing California used to do before the rise of the radical right.”  

But the results of Brown’s most recent tax increases are hardly relieving economic pressures on the nearly two million Californians that remain unemployed in the Democrat-dominated state, whose numbers are growing, not declining.

The truth is that the Democrats, who totally control policies in the state by virtue of "supermajorities" in both houses of the State Legislature, are making California increasingly poorer; the Census Bureau announced last week that California has the highest poverty rate in the nation for the second year in a row. Yet despite California's dreary economic conditions, some of California's Democratic lawmakers are making themselves or their campaign committees richer in a personal sort of "economic comeback," and, in some cases, they are doing so by breaking the law.

One recent investigation into payoffs in the State Capitol has been breathtaking. Powerful liberal Democratic State Senator Ron Calderon recently had his office in the state capitol building raided by the FBI’s Public Corruption Squad. According to the FBI’s search warrant, which was obtained and released by the Al Jazeera American Network, probable cause for the raid included allegations that the Senator had received hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes in exchange for legislative favors, including: $60,000 in bribes from an undercover FBI agent; another $28,000 in bribes from a hospital executive; and tens of thousands of dollars more in bribes paid to the State Senator’s brother through a nonprofit organization.   

Via: Breitbart

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PENNSYLVANIA TOWN GIVES ANTI-GUN MAYOR THE BOOT

Chambersburg, PA residents voted Mayor Pete Lagiovane (D) out of office on November 5th after he signed up to be part of former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's Mayors Against Illegal Guns (MAIG).

According to Salena Zito on RealClearPolitics.com, the anti-gun influence of Bloomberg made Chambersburg hunters and gun owners feel like they were under attack. And the combination of Bloomberg and "Washington [trying to regulate] gun ownership with more background checks" caused Chambersburg residents "to react in the only respectful way they know: [by voting] out of office those who are infringing on their way of life." 

Mayor-elect Darren Brown (R) says that once he is sworn into office in January 2014, "the very, very first thing [he'd] like to do is get Chambersburg off the [MAIG] list."

According to Brown, "a mayor should focus on such issues as curbing crime and drugs, or keeping the sidewalks clean—not on the issues of outside groups that don't understand a town's way of life."

Via: Breitbart

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Caught in unemployment's revolving door

Getty Images

Job seeker holds an employment application at a job fair on November 7, 2013 in West Palm Beach, Florida.

On a cold October morning, just after the federal government shutdown came to an end, Jenner Barrington-Ward headed into court in Boston to declare bankruptcy.

It took weeks to put the paperwork together, given that her papers and belongings were scattered across the country — there was a broken-down car and boxes of paperwork in Virginia Beach, clothes in Colorado and personal possessions at a friend's house in Somerville, Mass. She managed to estimate her income — maybe $5,000 last year, but maybe half that this year — from odd jobs. Soon, she would officially have nothing.

It has been a painful slide. A five-year spell of unemployment has slowly scrubbed away nearly every vestige of Ms. Barrington-Ward's middle-class life. She is a 53-year-old college graduate who worked steadily for three decades. She is now broke and homeless.

(Read more: Job creation soars in October)

Ms. Barrington-Ward describes it as "my journey through hell." She was laid off from an administrative position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2008; she had earned about $50,000 that year. With the recession spurring employers to dump hundreds of thousands of workers a month and the unemployment rate climbing to the double digits, she found that no matter the number of résumés she sent out — she stopped counting in the thousands — she could not find work.

Via: CNBC

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Rep. Kinzinger: Obamacare 'Failing Much Faster than Expected'

Rep. Adam Kinzinger said Sunday the failure of the Obamacare website to function is symptomatic of a larger problem with the new healthcare system that will cost consumers more money and rob them of their current health plan.

"This thing is failing, but this is failing much faster than they expected," the freshman Republican from President Barack Obama's home state of Illinois told ABC's "This Week" program.

The website will eventually be fixed, Kinzinger said, but the bigger issue is that deductibles will go up by thousands of dollars.

"I'm not celebrating this because this hurts real Americans, but from a political perspective, we came out of a government shutdown where I think undoubtedly Republicans took the brunt of the hit and we had an immensely, amazingly quick change of fortunes," Kinzinger said.

Former Vermont Governor and Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean also appeared on the program, and described the failings of the website as an initial setback that will be forgotten once the program is in place for all Americans. 

"I think the greatest fear of the Republican Party is that this works, and I think it will work," Dean said.

But Kinzinger responded that one of the few issues Republicans are united on is that Obamacare is a flawed system. 

"We've been saying from the beginning this plan doesn't work," Kinzinger said. 

"It's beyond the website, and when the website gets fixed, I think Americans are going to be shocked to see that there is still a problem."


Via: Newsmax

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If You Like Your Insurance, You Can Rent It... Maybe

The main reason I left the insurance industry years ago was the fatigue of marketing a product that is misunderstood by the vast majority of its customer base, not to mention the majority of functionaries inside the industry. I was a lousy agent frankly, but for some reason, the concepts were very intuitive to me. I was the high scorer in of all of those licensing and continuing-ed type classes, but those don't pay the bills, so for reasons of money and sanity, I left.

Alas, this escape was only temporary, as we all now live in a country where the industry is being seized by a president who remains totally oblivious to its realities. Yet he insists on occupying the position as grand poobah CEO of all of it, and ruling by edict. And his epic "fix" can be translated this way:

If you like your coverage, you can rent it. Maybe.

There are so many problems with what he said, it's hard to know where to start -- so let's start with the absurdity of a one-year fix. That's no fix. Even terminal cancer caregivers score being "fixed" in terms of a five-year survival. Besides, Obama's 29 public pronouncements that you can "keep your insurance" were never mitigated with a "sell by" date. He hasn't fixed Obamacare, and in fact, he hasn't even fixed his "incorrect promise" by this. That promise depends, I guess, on what the meaning of "period" is.

Via: American Thinker

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