NANCY PELOSI THINKS SLUGGISH JOBS REPORT SIGN OF PROGRESS

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) thinksJanuary's jobs report is a sign of progress, though economic analysts believe it represents, at best, an economy stuck in place. 

Even though the report showed that the economy did not add the 150,000 jobs necessary to keep up with the growth in population, Pelosi said in a statement, “Today’s jobs report shows our recovery continuing to move forward."

She also said her colleagues in Congress could do more to "create jobs and build an economy that works for everyone." She slammed Republicans for not extending unemployment benefits and playing "politics with the lives and livelihoods of millions of Americans.”

According to Reuters, though, January was the "second straight month of weak hiring - marked by declines in retail, utilities, government, and education and health employment." In addition, the last two months represented the "weakest two months of job growth in three years, [as] December payrolls were raised only 1,000 to 75,000."

The Associated Press was not optimistic either, saying that the "surprisingly weak jobs report" will renew concerns that the "U.S. economy might be slowing after a strong finish last year" and "undermine hopes that economic growth will accelerate this year." The AP also noted that employers added 194,000 jobs last January while only adding 113,000 this January. The unemployment rates for blacks and Hispanics also increased from the previous month.

Via: Breitbart

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Roberts: NYT Residency Story Is Wrong

Kansas senator Pat Roberts hit back today at a New York Times story questioning whether the senator has a residence in his home state.

“We had an interview with Jonathan Martin where we discussed the senator’s residency, and what turned up in the story is a distortion,” Sarah Little, the Roberts campaign’s communications director, tells National Review Online.

Little says the senator is in Wichita today and goes back to the state whenever he can, and that the Times piece is a hit job.

The Times reporter, Jonathan Martin, leads his story with a man-in-the-street interview of retiree Jerald Miller held at a restaurant across the street from the address listed on Roberts’s voter registration.

“They talked to one person in Dodge City, Kansas, who is apparently empirical evidence for the senator’s trips to the state,” Little says.

The Times piece says the senator is “desperate to re-establish ties to Kansas.” Little says that statement is false, and that Roberts’ ties to Kansas are as strong as ever.

The senator, she told NRO, goes back to Kansas at least once or twice every month and has visited 72 of the state’s counties this Congress. His election began a more conservative era for the state’s politicians, she says.

In a statement provided to NRO, she writes the following:

Also false is the statement that Senator Roberts “acknowledged he does not have a home of his own in Kansas.” Senator Roberts told the reporter just the opposite, both verbally and in writing.

The statement continues, taking aim at the reporter: 

Reporter Jonathan Martin came to us with a clear agenda. In an interview with the Senator, Martin scoffed at the fact Pat is proud to call Dodge City home. Martin even told us he didn’t understand why Pat bothered to live in western Kansas when it was so far away. He suggested Pat should live in Kansas City.
Martin did not let facts stand in the way of his agenda.
The reporter found two people who said they did not know Senator Roberts. Martin did not bother to find thousands of others who know the Senator well.

Via: NRO

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DNI, HHA Urged To Shut Down ObamaCare Website Until Security Issues Resolved

President Barack Obama and two senior aides are being urged to suspend all use of the Obamacare computer network until recent U.S. intelligence warnings of potential cyber attacks from Belarus are resolved.

 

Michele Bachmann (R., Minn.), a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, called for the suspension in letters to the president, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. She warned that “the American people’s personal information submitted to Healthcare.gov could be at risk from cyber attacks across the globe.”

“Intelligence officials reportedly briefed the administration that Healthcare.gov software potentially written by a state-owned firm in Belarus could contain malware and allow surreptitious access to Americans’ health and financial information,” she stated, adding that Belarus is a close ally of Russia.

Via: Fox News

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Congressional Budget Office sends death blow to ObamaCare

The Affordable Care Act, a k a ObamaCare, became law almost four years ago. It became operational last Oct. 1. Yesterday, Feb. 4, 2014, the ACA may well have been dealt its death blow.

The Congressional Budget Office released a major study of the government’s budget and its effect on the overall economy over the next 10 years. In dull bureaucratic language, it delivers a devastating analysis of the inefficiencies, ineffectualities and problematic social costs of ObamaCare.

The one-two punch: Virtually as many Americans will lack health coverage in 10 years as before the law was passed — but 2 million fewer will be working than if the law hadn’t passed.

One killer detail comes on Page 111, where the report projects: “As a result of the ACA, between 6 million and 7 million fewer people will have employment-based insurance coverage each year from 2016 through 2024 than would be the case in the absence of the ACA.”

ObamaCare’s key selling point was that it would give coverage to a significant number of the 30-plus million Americans who lack it. Now the CBO is telling the American people that a decade from now, 6 million-plus of their countrymen won’t get health care through their employers who otherwise would have.

Via: New York Post

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Obama’s Trickle–Down Lawlessness

What Sen. Ted Cruz (R–TX) refers to as Obama’s “pattern of lawlessness, his willingness to disregard the written law and instead enforce his own policies via executive fiat” has trickled down to the new Democrat administration in Virginia.

On Saturday, January 11th Democrat Mark Herring was sworn in as attorney general of the Commonwealth. During the ceremony Herring recited his oath of office: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support the Constitution of the United States, and the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Virginia, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge all the duties incumbent upon me as attorney general according to the best of my ability (so help me God).”

Then Herring proved he was a fast Obama study by violating that oath before he had completed his second week in office.

Then Herring compounded the offense by joining the case of the plaintiffs suing the state to overturn the ban. This is breathtakingly unethical. It’s like Zimmerman’s defense lawyer deciding George violated neighborhood watch guidelines and asking to join the prosecution team. An honorable man when presented with the choice of doing his job and defending the Constitution or “being on the right side of history” would have resigned his office, but we’re talking about Mark Herring.

By way of background the Virginia homosexual marriage ban is an amendment to the Constitution passed in 2006 by a favorable vote of 57 percent. Herring was in the Virginia Senate at the time and he voted in favor of the amendment. But you can’t hold that against him because he ‘evolved.’

But now Herring says he is relying on the precedent set by former AG Ken Cuccinelli. Except the situations are entirely different. Cuccinelli did not defend a newly passed law that allowed the state to take over failing schools, because it violated Virginia’s Constitution. Herring is saying the Constitution of Virginia is unconstitutional because it violates the Democrat party platform and makes Ellen DeGeneres sad.

Via: Canada Free Press

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ObamaCare Casts White Working Class Out in the Cold

Probably everyone to the right of President Obama's liberal billionaire contributors has seen the pathetic local news video from WTAE Pittsburgh, the one showing the white working class getting the bad news on ObamaCare.

Yep, ordinary blue-collar workers are getting hammered by ObamaCare, because the small manufacturing and service businesses they work for are not the favored special interests of the modern Democratic Party and the bicoastal elite.

There they were, all sitting down in the break ,room at a small auto-repair shop, getting the bad news from their employer's insurance broker. Premiums up, big time. Deductibles and co-pays up, big time.

The workers were clearly pole-axed. Their "benefits" had become a yoke around their necks. They had no idea what they were going to do.

Here's some friendly advice: Get a clue, white working class. He isn't going to call; he doesn't love you anymore. By "he" I mean the Ruling Class, the educated elite, the Cathedral.

Once upon a time the Ruling Class absolutely loooved the white working class, back when the white working class was young and pretty and just happened to be a majority of the electorate. Wage and hour laws? Pro-union laws? Pensions, health care, unemployment, disability? Liberal sugar daddy eagerly pulled out the national credit card and paid for anything her little white working class heart desired.

Via: American Thinker

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Obamacare will push 2 million workers out of labor market: CBO

Obamacare will push the equivalent of about 2 million workers out of the labor market by 2017 as employees decide either to work fewer hours or drop out altogether, according to the latest estimates Tuesday from the Congressional Budget Office.

That’s a major jump in the nonpartisan budget agency’s projections and it suggests the health care law’s incentives are driving businesses and people to choose government-sponsored benefits rather than work.

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“CBO estimates that the ACA will reduce the total number of hours worked, on net, by about 1.5 to 2 percent during the period from 2017 to 2024, almost entirely because workers will choose to supply less labor — given the new taxes and other incentives they will face and the financial benefits some will receive,” CBO analysts wrote in their new economic outlook.

The scorekeepers also said the rollout problems with the Affordable Care Act last year will mean only 6 million people sign up through the state-based exchanges, rather than the 7 million the CBO had originally projected.

But over the long run, Obamacare will eventually catch up and by 2020 only about 30 million people will be without insurance coverage — down from 45 million this year. That will mean about 92 percent of legal U.S. residents without guaranteed access to Medicare will have insurance coverage.

Via: Washington Times
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Obama: 'Not Even a Smidgen of Corruption' in IRS Targeting of Conservatives

In a pregame Super Bowl interview, President Barack Obama told Fox News's Bill O'Reilly that there was "not even a smidgen of corruption" involved in the Internal Revenue Service's (IRS) targeting of conservative and Tea Party groups.

Obama's bold statement stands in contrast to established facts. Even the left-leaning journalism group ProPublica has admitted that the IRS office that harassed conservative tax-exempt groups during the 2012 election cycle gave ProPublica nine confidential applications of conservative groups whose tax-exempt statuses were pending. Moreover, ProPublica noted that the documents it received were "not supposed to be made public" but that "no unapproved applications from liberal groups were sent to ProPublica."

Still, Obama chalked up the IRS scandal to mere mistakes.

"There were some bone-headed decisions," said Obama.

The president then blamed O'Reilly and Fox News for the IRS scandal.

"These kinds of things keep on surfacing in part because you and your TV station will promote them," said Obama.

Via: Breitbart

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'OUTRAGEOUS': Senator rebukes IRS for reinstating 2013 employee bonuses

The IRS' announcement Monday that it will pay cancelled 2013 bonuses has infuriated Utah Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch, who wants to know why an agency with employees who “inappropriately” targeted conservative political groups would reinstate the rewards.

“The IRS is accused of targeting conservative groups, with many of its employees having conducted themselves in a manner inappropriate for government officials, and the agency decides to reinstate employee bonuses?” asked Hatch, the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee. “This is outrageous.”

The announcement was made by new IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, who said the performance bonuses were reinstated after agency employees repeatedly asked him about them during his first weeks on the job and after reaching a deal with the Union for Federal Employees.

The targeting scandal broke in spring 2013 when the agency revealed it had targeted for closer scrutiny Tea Party groups and other politically conservative organizations that were applying for tax-exempt status.

The revelations resulted in an inspector general report as well as FBI and congressional investigations. Though agency officials said originally the targeting was limited to a Cincinnati, Ohio field office, the probes revealed that higher-ranking officials at the agency’s Washington headquarters knew about the situation and that liberal groups also were targeted but to a lesser extent.

Via: Fox News

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The Controversial Legacy of Henry Waxman

Rep. Henry Waxman is retiring from Congress, in part, he says, because of the “extremism of the Tea Party Republicans.  I am embarrassed that the greatest legislative body in the world too often operates in a partisan intellectual vacuum.”  Yet the fact is that few members have contributed more to the partisanship, extremism and dysfunction of Congress than Henry Waxman in his four decades of service.

Over those years his attitude toward his political opponents has been not only that they were wrong, but that they are deserving of no respect whatsoever.  That was not how Congress worked when Waxman first arrived, but in no small part thanks to him, it is the norm for Congress today.

Waxman’s first contribution to dysfunctional politics won’t be mentioned in the fawning accounts of his career in the state and national media; his involvement in the arcane world of redistricting.  Waxman was elected to the California Assembly in 1968 and became chair of the redistricting committee in 1971.

Redistricting could be partisan, but at least people were honorable.  Waxman was not.  His main objective in the 1971 redistricting was to create a seat for his fellow Democratic and an old pal, Howard Berman.  That’s fine, but in Waxman’s case he just rolled over the Republican opposition since his scheme required collapsing Republican seats.  This set off a two year long redistricting war the likes of which California had never seen and out of that grew the partisan hatreds that colored life in the California legislature for decades.

Waxman went to Congress in 1974 and was soon joined by Howard Berman.  For years they schemed to make sure they had safe congressional districts for themselves even though that meant denying fair representation to the growing Latino population in the San Fernando Valley.  Waxman’s bleeding heart liberalism never extended to making his own political life uncomfortable.

That attitude finally caught up with Waxman and Berman in 2011 when the Citizens Redistricting Commission added a Latino seat in the Valley and gave both Waxman and Berman very bad districts.  Waxman is not retiring because he is tired of Congress; he is leaving because he no longer has a sweetheart district drawn for him by his friends.

Over his decades in Congress, Waxman was well known for showing utter contempt for his political and policy opponents, never willing to admit that they may have a legitimate argument once in a while.  That attitude led him to reshape the investigating committees which he chaired in the 1990s into star chambers, most notably when he harangued tobacco executives at a famous 1994 hearing.

Via: California Political Review

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