Tails News Complaints topic

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The new politics topic. I blame Laharls for the last closure acting on silly grounds that make no sense.

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www.politico.com/story/2013/10/collins-budget-plan-government-shutdown-98231.html?hp=l1

On Friday, it seemed that a proposal being spearheaded by Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) could potentially be the key that would relieve the fiscal crisis stymieing the Capitol.

By Saturday, the plan fell flat on its face.

Senate Democratic leaders rejected the approach that had been drafted by the moderate from Maine — although Collins’s plan had attracted interest from several Democratic senators eager to strike a bipartisan deal...Murray, the No. 4 in Senate leadership, pointedly told Collins that it was unacceptable to lock in cuts at the sequestration spending levels.

"Derp derp Republicans did that" -Jen

www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/10/13/vets-march-on-washington-roll-into-wwii-memorial-protest-outside-white-house/

Veterans marched on Sunday in Washington in protest of the partial government shutdown that has kept them and other Americans from visiting war memorials across the country, with support from several star conservatives.

“This is the people's memorial,” Texas Sen. Ted Cruz told a crowd of several hundred gathered near the WWII Memorial on the closed National Mall, which has become a national symbol of the shutdown and the country’s response. “Simple question: Why is the federal government spending money to keep veterans out of the memorial? Why did they spend money to keep people out of Mount Vernon, Mount Rushmore? Our veterans should be above political games.”

Veterans, including many in wheelchairs, took down police barricades and entered the memorial at about midday as others took the protest to the edge of the White House South Lawn.

“Today somebody’s wife [or] husband is dead in Afghanistan. Is somebody going to pay her husband [or] his wife or their children?” one protester shouted at the White House, referring to the partial shutdown cutting off benefits for the survivors of military personnel.

A man was arrested at the event in connection with bringing at least one gun in a bag.

Protesters shouting “U.S.A.” and “Tear down these walls” are putting the blame squarely on President Obama and Democratic congressional leaders.

“In a mean-spirited fit of selfish anger, Barack Obama has shut down our nation’s war memorials,” march organizers said in a press release. “And he has declared open war on our honored veterans. The World War II memorial, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Korean War Veterans Memorial, Obama has shut them all down to force his will on the House of Representatives and, frankly, to get revenge on the American people who oppose ObamaCare and his other naked power grabs.”

www.politico.com/blogs/politico-live/2013/10/rand-paul-the-sequesters-the-law-of-the-land-174926.html?hp=r2

Rand Paul: Sequester's the law of the land

"It's funny," the Kentucky Republican said of Democrats. "They're all about Obamacare being the law of the land, but so's the sequester. If we exceed that, it's real big step in the wrong direction."

www.breitbart.com/InstaBlog/2013/10/12/WA-State-98-of-UFCW-Union-Vote-to-Strike-Because-of-Obamacare

WA State: 98% of UFCW Union Vote to Strike Because of Obamacare

Approximately 30,000 workers could walk picket lines as early as next week...This could be the beginning of strikes around the country as the consequences of Obamacare become apparent.

blog.heritage.org/2013/10/13/banned-from-handing-out-constitutions-on-constitution-day/

Banned from Handing Out Constitutions on Constitution Day

On Constitution Day this year, Robert Van Tuinen, an Army veteran and a student at Modesto Junior College (MJC) in California, was trying to pass out copies of the United States Constitution and drum up support for his proposed Young Americans for Liberty chapter on campus. School administrators at MJC didn’t like this and decided to shut him down in spite of the fact that MJC is a public university that must comply with the First Amendment.

Van Tuinen filed suit yesterday in federal court, alleging violations of his First and Fourteenth Amendment rights. Van Tuinen has some First Amendment heavyweights in his corner, including the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and the case appears to be a slam dunk. It is well-settled law that students don’t give up their First Amendment rights as soon as they enroll. Other, similar “free speech zones” have been struck down by federal courts before.

Cases such as these should not ever have to get to court; school administrators should know to respect the First Amendment. But as commissioner Abigail Thenstrom of the United States Commission on Civil Rights has said before, universities are “island of repression in a sea of freedom.”

Today, we might say the same thing about our National Parks. Citizens have a right to speak their minds in traditional public fora, something World War II veterans and Robert Van Tuinen know.

www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2013/10/11/MSNBC-Pres-Spins-Conspiracy-Theory-About-Fox-Ratings

MSNBC President Spins Conspiracy Theory About Fox Ratings

On October 8, Fox News' Megyn Kelly topped MSNBC's Rachel Maddow so badly in the ratings that MSNBC President Phil Griffin is sure that something is "fishy" with the ratings. He's even calling for some sort of investigation.

lol Jake News folks upset no one likes watching a mentally-challenged lesbian

[Chromeo]

hardballtalk.nbcsports.com/2013/10/08/applying-government-shutdown-logic-to-the-baseball-playoffs/

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Laharl's fault

washingtonexaminer.com/obamacare-shock-12600-deductible-40-percent-co-pay-zero-competition/article/2537200

Obamacare shock: $12,600 deductible, 40 percent co-pay, zero competition

Many Americans shopping for better health insurance deals promised by the two-week-old Obamacare system are instead being slapped with rate shock, including savings-sapping deductibles and co-pays, according to multiple reports from around the country...The huge cost increases that some Obamacare applicants are seeing are feeding the effort in Congress to change the system and delay implementation until January 2014.

"This is why we've been working so hard to dismantle and repeal this bill, so that we can begin to pass step-by-step reforms that transform the health care delivery system by putting patients in charge, giving them more choices, and reducing the cost of health care so that more people can afford it,” said Tennessee Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander.

www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/10/13/Experts-Obamacare-Tech-Failures-Only-Beginning

Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius had three-and-a-half years to build the Obamacare exchanges. Now, GOP House members in charge of oversight want answers as to how the online system that cost taxpayers over half-a-billion dollars has failed on such a grand scale.

On Thursday, House GOP members of the Committee on Energy and Commerce sent a letter to Sebelius requesting an oversight briefing to occur no later than October 16th. The letter says Sebelius's staff told lawmakers that the Obamacare exchanges were "proceeding on schedule and did not identify any problems like the ones now being experienced on HealthCare.gov."

Technology experts have panned the federal government's Obamacare website, which handles 36 state exchanges. Anti-virus software creator John McAfee says the Obamacare website is a "hacker's wet dream." And numerous others have rejected the Obama Administration's excuse that heavy traffic caused system malfunctions.

"Any modern Web company would be well prepared for a launch of this scale," RackSpace chief technology officer John Engates told the Washington Post. "We’re not talking about hundreds of millions of people and we’re not talking about complex transactions.”

"It looks like nobody tested it," said Chung. "It's not even ready for beta testing for my book. I would be ashamed and embarrassed if my organization delivered something like that."

On Saturday, Politico reporters Brett Norman and Jason Millman warned that Obamacare's technical woes are far from over. "The glitch-plagued Obamacare rollout might be just the beginning: A series of potential technology problems could thwart the Obama administration's goal of getting 7 million people enrolled in the new exchanges by the end of March," reported Norman and Millman.

Tech expert Dan Schuyler helped build the Utah Obamacare exchange. He told Politico that if HHS does not fix the federal healthcare.gov website within three or four weeks, "those at the back of the line will not have coverage."

Obamacare, which became law three-and-a-half years ago, will cost taxpayers $2.6 trillion over the next 10 years.

www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2013/10/14/standing_with_our_veterans_is_crazy

Over the weekend there was this massive rally at the World War II Memorial, and Sarah Palin showed up, Ted Cruz showed up, Rand Paul showed up. There were people that clashed with the cops. They took down barricades blocking the World War II Memorial and they dumped them outside the White House. Now, this group was upset with the closure of memorials in Washington due to the shutdown stalemate and it was organized by something called the Million Vet March, but it soon took on a more political tone.

According to NBC News, the president was in the White House at the time the protestors arrived. Video from cameras on the White House lawn showed people carrying barricades. You know, everybody's asking what were Ted Cruz and Palin doing showing up over there? The real question is how in the name of Sam Hill does this happen in the United States? How in the world does the National Mall get shut down to World War II vets but opened to illegal aliens to have an amnesty rally? The big news is that American veterans sought to protest this and did take it to the White House. That is the news. Now they're being excoriated for being kooks and freaks, and so are Palin and Cruz...So on MSNBC this morning on the famous Morning Joe show, F. Chuck Todd showed up, the former political director for NBC, and he described it as "odd," the decision that Cruz and Palin made to attend this rally on Sunday. He said, "Yesterday it was Cruz and Palin doing this odd protest and you're just sitting there going, 'What planet are you guys on? What planet are you living on?'" F. Chuck's talking about himself. He says, "I'm sitting here watching this, and thinking, 'What planet are these people on?'"

Now stop and think: Chuck Todd thinks it's odd that a former governor and a sitting senator would join World War II vets protesting the fact that their memorial is closed. He can't understand what in the world they would be doing. It's just confusing. "What planet are they on?" He can't for the life of him understand it. So what does this mean? Lending your support to World War II veterans is odd? In whose mind? Fascinating.

www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/10/14/us-army-defines-christian-ministry-as-domestic-hate-group/?intcmp=latestnews

Several dozen U.S. Army active duty and reserve troops were told last week that the American Family Association, a well-respected Christian ministry, should be classified as a domestic hate group because the group advocates for traditional family values.

The briefing was held at Camp Shelby in Mississippi and listed the AFA alongside domestic hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan, Neo-Nazis, the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam.

A soldier who attended the briefing contacted me and sent me a photograph of a slide show presentation that listed AFA as a domestic hate group...“I had to show Americans what our soldiers are now being taught,” said the soldier who asked not to be identified. “I couldn’t just let this one pass.”

Later in the briefing, the soldiers were reportedly told that they could face punishment for participating in organizations that are considered hate groups.

That considered, the soldier contacted me because he is a financial contributor to the AFA ministry.

“I donate to AFA as often as I can,” he said. “Am I going to be punished? I listen to American Family Radio all day. If they hear it on my radio, will I be faced with a Uniformed Code of Military Justice charge?”

The soldier said he was “completely taken back by this blatant attack not only on the AFA but Christians and our beliefs.”

www.politico.com/story/2013/10/tk-98259.html

As the budget and debt ceiling-standoff continues in Washington, many are asking the wrong question: Which party will pay a political price for the government shutdown? Democrats are comparing Republicans to “hostage-takers”; Republicans complain that Democrats refuse to negotiate.

Here’s the right question: Can we afford not to have this fight? With federal expenditures running 30 percent higher than revenues, debt at nearly twice the historical average, and no significant improvement in sight, is it any wonder that a contingent of conservative legislators is willing to ignore political expediency and stand on principle instead?

Over the past 10 years, federal spending has grown twice as fast as GDP. Despite a top marginal tax rate higher than the rate under the Clinton administration, this level of spending has opened up a projected $650 billion-a-year deficit...Because of the size of this annual deficit, America’s publicly held debt – currently an unprecedented $12 trillion — continues to grow relative to GDP with no end in sight. Interest payments on the debt and entitlement growth will gradually eat the U.S. economy alive. With 2.5 percent-a-year growth, debt will grow relative to GDP if deficits are greater than $300 billion. With the debt already at nearly 75 percent of GDP, nearly twice the 40-year average, it’s clear America needs reduction.

Despite these realities, the president and his party have refused to discuss fundamental changes to entitlement spending. Instead, they have campaigned relentlessly for more spending. In 2009, for example, Democrats passed Obamacare — another major entitlement program – on a narrow, party-line vote after liberal Massachusetts, of all states, elected a Republican to fill Ted Kennedy’s vacant Senate seat. Today, Democrats refuse to allow discussion of ways to better target sequestration-mandated cuts because they fear that doing so would make the reduced spending levels more palatable and thus permanent.

Fortunately, America’s system of government forces the majority to negotiate with any minority that garners at least a 40-percent share of the representational vote. And in today’s situation, the minority was given additional negotiating leverage because Democratic lawmakers chose to fund popular spending increases with debt rather than unpopular tax increases. Under the circumstances, agreeing to increase the debt limit and pass the continuing funding resolution are the House Republican majority’s only hand to play against the president and Senate Democrats.

Despite these realities, the president and his party have refused to discuss fundamental changes to entitlement spending. Instead, they have campaigned relentlessly for more spending. In 2009, for example, Democrats passed Obamacare — another major entitlement program – on a narrow, party-line vote after liberal Massachusetts, of all states, elected a Republican to fill Ted Kennedy’s vacant Senate seat. Today, Democrats refuse to allow discussion of ways to better target sequestration-mandated cuts because they fear that doing so would make the reduced spending levels more palatable and thus permanent.

Fortunately, America’s system of government forces the majority to negotiate with any minority that garners at least a 40-percent share of the representational vote. And in today’s situation, the minority was given additional negotiating leverage because Democratic lawmakers chose to fund popular spending increases with debt rather than unpopular tax increases. Under the circumstances, agreeing to increase the debt limit and pass the continuing funding resolution are the House Republican majority’s only hand to play against the president and Senate Democrats.

www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2013/10/13/Greenpeace-Willing-to-Let-Children-Go-Blind-or-Die

The environmentalist group Greenpeace is waging war against the production of Golden Rice, a genetically modified rice that could save more than half a million children around the world from disease and 250,000 from dying each year.

Dr. Patrick Moore, one of the original founders of Greenpeace, condemned Greenpeace in The Globe and Mail. He wrote that Golden Rice, created by Dr. Ingo Potrykus and Prof. Peter Beyer, has been maligned with misinformation and even had the field trials of its product at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines threatened with violent destruction.

Moore concludes:

"The real reason Greenpeace is opposed to Golden Rice is because it is generically modified and they can’t seem to imagine that even one beneficial crop might result from this technique. They are willing to put their zero-tolerance ideology ahead of a critical humanitarian mission. Every major science and health organization supports Golden Rice."

Moore wrote, “I left [Greenpeace] because they had drifted from a humanitarian effort to save civilization from all-out nuclear war to an organization that sees humans as the enemies of the earth.”

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Continuing argument

1. you're dumb

2. you're dumb

3. you're dumb

4. you're dumb

5. you're dumb

6. you're dumb

7. you're dumb

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So Jen, now that people in the liberal bubble are criticising Obamacare too, will you hear them or continue to remain willfully ignorant?

Don't answer that question if you don't want to, better to say nothing than do another one of those trademark dodges. Maybe you can just listen this time instead of shutting someone down over messages you don't happen to like. Autocratic witch.

www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/10/15/obamacare-rollout-disasster

"Train wreck." "Fundamentally flawed." “Not ready for primetime.” This is the rollout of Obamacare.

Constant “glitches” keep people from logging into the exchanges. Humiliating live video of reporters normally favorable to Obamacare simply giving up in frustration because they cannot sign up. Consumers who are lucky enough to get through the system are stunned to learn that their premiums have skyrocketed by thousands of dollars.

Extremely personal information has already leaked from the system in Minnesota. Software security experts from McAfee predict millions of identity theft victims. And one of the healthcare exchanges was forced to acknowledge that information collected from patients will be shared with law enforcement.

Tom Bevan at RealClearPolitics wondered why Kathleen Sebelius still has a job. Jon Stewart invited her onto The Daily Show and mocked that he could “download every movie ever made” before she could log onto her own website. Her home state senator called for her to resign for "gross incompetence," as exactly “zero” residents of Kansas were able to successfully enroll in the program.

The rollout has been such a nightmare that it is abundantly clear now that members of Congress really did not, as then-Speaker Pelosi admitted, even read the Obamacare bill before they passed it. In fact, the program's launch has been such an unimaginable disaster that it raises an alarming new question that would have been unthinkable amid the exaggerated claims of health utopia from three years ago: Did President Obama even read this legislation before he signed it into law?

This is the single most complex piece of legislation in U.S. history, and we citizen-patients have a right to know. Did anyone in the notoriously cozy establishment Washington press corps even ask him this basic question?

Obamacare is a disaster and the American people know it. Republicans have never had a more teachable moment than the one they have now, between the shutdown of the government and the disastrous rollout of Obamacare.

Which begs the question: where are the Republicans anyway?

I know the Republican establishment never wanted a shutdown fight over Obamacare. But this is a fight we must win. Where is Minority Leader Mitch McConnell? Where is the RNC? Why aren’t Republicans telling the very real human stories of people losing their jobs and their doctors because of Obamacare? The president guaranteed that by 2013 the average family would see premiums reduced by $2,500. In reality, the average family has seen their premiums jacked up by $2,900, an eye-popping $5,400 miscalculation. What other predictions will prove to be horribly off?

Why don’t Republicans have a strategy to hammer this message every day?

When this debate began, President Obama guaranteed Americans that if we like our current insurance policies, we can keep them. If we like our current doctors, we can stay with them.

Since then, millions have been kicked off their company insurance. More than 750,000 New Jersey residents have been notified that their former policies no longer meet new government mandates and will be discontinued. Thousands more have seen hours reduced and their coverage evaporate, as employers struggle to deal with incomprehensible new federal rules. Most alarmingly, almost one-third of doctors report their unwillingness to accept patients from newly expanded governmental programs.

Most nefarious of all is that this entire European socialist centralized scheme does what massive bureaucracies always do: hurt young people and punish healthy behavior while rewarding reckless people and bankrolling unhealthy behavior. Today, a truly terrifying concept unspools as we watch the administration punish Americans across the country by unnecessarily barricading national parks and veterans' memorials to make certain people "feel the pain" of the government shutdown.

To quote a rural Nebraska pharmacist I met this past week: “What will these people do in the next government shutdown when they are also in control of every aspect of our healthcare? Withhold medication that people need? Postpone surgeries? Close emergency rooms?”

www.politico.com/story/2013/10/its-time-to-fire-secretary-sebelius-98320.html?hp=l11

It's time to fire Secretary Sebelius

“If Apple launched a major new product that functioned as badly as ObamaCare’s online insurance marketplace, the tech world would be calling for [CEO] Tim Cook’s head.”

That searing indictment of Obamacare didn’t come from a conservative. Those were the words of the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein — yes, liberal Ezra Klein —and Evan Soltas in a blog post on Oct. 4, just three days after the online Obamacare marketplace opened. They were right.

Now, two full weeks since its launch, the website healthcare.gov still isn’t functioning. One CNN reporter began trying to sign up on Oct. 1. As of the morning of Oct. 14, she still hadn’t been able to. A researcher who works for the New York Times has tried and failed to sign up for Obamacare 40 times since the website launched. But the Obama administration continues making excuses for Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and the people who spent hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on a site that does not work.

How much more money will her department waste — and how much time will Americans waste on the website — before the administration admits they have a problem? In a business, someone would be held accountable for such a large-scale disaster.

When pressed on her failures, Sebelius repeats her favorite line: “We had some early glitches.” A glitch, says Merriam-Webster, is “temporary” and “minor.” For two weeks, the Obamacare website has hardly functioned. That’s not minor or temporary. That’s not a glitch; that’s a systemic failure.

ObamaCare’s “chief digital architect” worried the site would be a “third-world experience.” The firm contracted to build the site didn’t start writing code until this past spring. “As late as the last week of September, officials were still changing features of the Web site,” reports the Times. Back in February one insurance executive said he foresaw “a train wreck.” He was right.

So there's some fancy citation. Whether you pretend it never happened for another 200 pages is up to you.

www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2013/10/15/defeatist_beltway_gop_cannot_see_the_long_term_benefits_of_an_honorable_fight

Pat Buchanan has a really good column today in which he concedes (paraphrasing), "Yeah, the Republicans are gonna lose this, but it would be wise for them to remember history and losing with honor." He cites the Goldwater era versus the RINO lib Republicans led by Nelson Rockefeller and the gang and how even back in 1964, Goldwater didn't have a prayer because they were coming off the Kennedy assassination. Kennedy had been martyred. JFK had like a 70-point advantage in the polls, and it makes the point that Nixon was even campaigning harder. And this is the point. Other than Reagan, Nixon was the only nationally known Republican at the time that stood by Goldwater and campaigned even harder for Goldwater than Goldwater campaigned for himself.

Buchanan's point is, look at what happened to Nixon versus what happened to all of those RINOs that threw in against Rockefeller. They were never heard from. Nelson Rockefeller never got the nomination. Scranton, all of these guys, George Romney, they never amounted to anything in the party. They never won anything, particularly nationally, after they abandoned Goldwater in '64. Now, I know a lot of you people, "Come on, Rush, 1964, that's long ago." You know, history, they say, repeats itself in ways. It's not necessarily true, but you certainly can learn from it. The fact is they're doing the right thing here, whether they've been dragged into it or not, they're doing the right thing.

Let's talk about the state of play right now. It looks like the Senate Republicans want to give Obama and the Democrats everything they want. They want to give an extension of the continuing resolution through the end of the year, which would then open the government. That would end the shutdown. They want to give them a debt ceiling hike through the middle of January so that we're not going through this during the holidays. Oh, they're also even offering a delay on one Obamacare tax for their union buddies. I mean, it's a total win for Obama. Did you hear how Obama reacted to it? He rejected it. He said the Republicans have offered another ransom.

"Derp derp Republicans shut things down" -Jen

From their standpoint, this is a complete rout. The debt ceiling's been raised enough to last through the middle of January. This is what the Republicans have proposed. The Republicans have proposed the debt ceiling raised enough to go through the middle of January, and without the sequester cuts being locked in, which means it looks like the sequester (contrary to what George Will says) could go bye-bye by the end of the year.

The Democrats are still gonna get a carve-out for their union soldiers (it's a detail at the bottom of this Politico story), and never mind that that will once again change Obamacare, which is "the law of the land" and you can't touch it, right? "We can't defund it, Mr. Limbaugh! We can't delay it. It's the law of the land!" It hasn't been the law of the land since it first began implemented, since Obama decided to piecemeal it.

To the Pat Buchanan piece..."the truth is the Republicans House has voted three times to keep open and to fund every agency, department and program of the U.S. government, except for Obamacare.And they voted to kill that monstrosity but once. Republicans should refuse to raise the white flag and insist on an honorable avenue of retreat. And if Harry Reid's Senate demands the GOP end the sequester on federal spending, or be blamed for a debt default, the party should, Samson-like, bring down the roof of the temple on everybody's head."

Do not give up the sequester, is what he means. Then he says, "This is an honorable battle lost, not a war. Why, after all, did Republicans stand up? Because they believe Obamacare is an abomination, a new entitlement program this nation, lurching toward bankruptcy, cannot afford. It is imposing increases in health care premiums on millions of Americans, disrupting doctor-patient relationships and forcing businesses to cut workers back to 29 hours a week. Even Democratic Sen. Max Baucus has predicted a coming 'train wreck.' Now if the Republican Party believes this, what choice did the House have except to fight to defund or postpone it, against all odds, and tune out the whining of the 'We-can't-win!' Republican establishment?" And that's exactly what a few Republican leaders did, which is the point. They believe Obamacare's bad and they stood up and said so. They did everything they could to defund or delay it. They fought against long odds, but they were making a crusade a moral stance on this. That's what they were elected to do. Every Republican, practically every Republican campaigned on the promise to do everything they could to get rid of this. But only a few stepped up at the moment of truth. And instead, the "we can't win" chorus of the Republican Party's carrying the day.

There's another citation in that last paragraph. These have become household phrases. Pretend no longer, Jen.

Now, Buchanan's point here is that the Republicans that led this fight are doing something honorable and therefore there is a payoff. There's a potential payoff. He's going back in Republican history to find it. He goes back to the Goldwater era, 1964, the Republican convention in San Francisco that year was at the Cow Palace. And at that convention liberal Republicans "demanded Goldwater rewrite the platform," just to show you none of this stuff is new... They were content to be amiable losers, and everybody got along. They won a couple things here and there. They won the White House now and then and they'd get temporary control of the budget, which was cool. But Goldwater, Reagan, to hell with those guys, they're gonna upset the applecart. So at the Cow Palace convention where Goldwater is clearly gonna get the nomination, the liberals demanded he "rewrite the platform to equate The John Birch Society with the Communist Party USA and the Ku Klux Klan," demanding all of these concessions from Goldwater.

Goldwater rejected it. And in rejecting it is when Goldwater said, "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice." And so all the liberal Republicans abandoned Goldwater. But one man stood by him, the two-time loser, Richard Nixon. This is in addition to Reagan, but for Buchanan's historical purposes here he focused on Nixon. "One man stood by Goldwater. The two-time loser Richard Nixon, who had not won a race in his own right since 1950, campaigned for Goldwater and the party longer and harder than Barry himself." Nixon was a party man. Goldwater was the nominee. Now, what became of all these people? This is the history lesson.

What happened to all these liberal Republicans that told Goldwater to take a hike? What happened to all these liberal Republicans who told Goldwater, "Look, you can't be who you are. You gotta moderate. You gotta become more liberal." What happened to everybody here?

Bill Scranton, he was one of the liberal Republicans, Pennsylvania. He packed it in in 1966, having done nothing. George Romney, trounced in 1968 by Nixon, with Goldwater's supporters at his side. George Romney got shellacked by Richard Nixon for the nomination, 1968. The people remembered Nixon helping Goldwater four years prior. That was in New Hampshire. Romney quit the race two weeks before the returns came in.

"Rockefeller, who had spent a career calling Nixon a 'loser,' lacked what it took to challenge Nixon in any of the contested primaries." Rockefeller tried to stop Reagan, 1976, Kansas City. "And, lest we forget, one other national Republican spoke up for Goldwater and conservatism in that 1964 humiliation," and that was Ronald Reagan.
"Nixon and Reagan would go on to win four of the next five GOP nominations and presidential elections. In the one convention Reagan lost, 1976, the right, as the price of its support of Gerald R. Ford, demanded that Nelson Rockefeller be dumped as vice president."

Buchanan's point here is that the equivalence of the modern day "we can't win" chorus in the Republican establishment years from now aren't gonna win anything, either. Who's gonna support 'em, on the basis of what and why? What have they done but cave? What have they done but castigate, criticize, and try to destroy their own. I'm talking about Cruz and Lee and Rubio, some of the others. They're only doing what they were elected to do. They're simply fulfilling their campaign commitments. Nixon's fortunes are evidence here to Buchanan that these people are gonna be okay down the road, in the Republican Party. They're gonna be rewarded for this. And he thinks doubly so once the general public finds out what an absolute disaster Obamacare is, and it is a worse disaster than anybody knows.

cnsnews.com/news/article/susan-jones/wasserman-schultz-all-women-team-would-get-done-few-hours

Wasserman Schultz: All-Women Team ‘Would Get This Done in a Few Hours’

Women would do a better job than men of solving the current government stalemate, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) said on Monday -- because "a woman doesn't want to ruin the person on the other side of the aisle or the table."

"If we put all the women, Republican and Democrat, in the House together, the consensus from all of us is that we would get this done in a few hours," Wasserman Schultz -- the head of the Democratic National Committee -- told MSNBC's "Morning Joe."

And if we had a black president everything would be perfect! All hail Massah Obama!

www.politico.com/politico44/2013/10/obama-would-veto-legislation-175145.html?hp=l1

President Barack Obama told House Democratic leaders Tuesday that he would veto debt-ceiling legislation if it includes a provision pushed by Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) and House GOP leaders that would cut health subsidies for congressional and senior executive branch officials, according to sources familiar with the discussion at a private White House meeting.

The version of the provision included in a bill the House is slated to consider Tuesday night would eliminate employer contributions for lawmakers’ and Hill staffers’ health insurance purchases, and require the president, vice president and political appointees to enter into Obamacare exchanges without a tax subsidy.

Why doesn't our jolly Magic Negro want to join the Obamacare cult? It solves everything!

www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2013/10/15/america_sees_the_obamacare_implosion

"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 website 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."

Now, is that incompetence or is that by design?...premiums are going to skyrocket. And I think it's that that they programmed into the site so as to make it appear that nobody can sign up yet. They're just trying to delay the realization of what this really is. But if this is due to incompetence, if they can't manage a simple website, how on earth are they gonna manage the health care for millions of Americans? This rollout is far worse than anybody even realizes. It means that Obama may have no choice but to delay the individual mandate, Mr. Thiessen suggests here, and he quotes a colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, who points out, how can Obama penalize people for not having health insurance if the government's website to provide that insurance doesn't work?

If you can't go there and buy a policy, how can they fine you or tax you for not having one? Without the individual mandate, folks, Obamacare unravels. Without the jackbooted thug on your neck demanding that you buy it, it unravels. That's why, by the way, they're not gonna get rid of the individual mandate, because that's the guts of it, and that's what the Republicans ought to be focusing on in any deal, that that has to be delayed a year or two just like the employer mandate. They've got to, in any deal that they're trying to strike.

"The only way the law works is if the government forces young, healthy people into it by threatening them with penalties for not carrying health insurance. But if there is no penalty for not signing up, then fewer Americans will sign up. Even if the administration manages to fix the website and finally implement the individual mandate, people still may not join -- because the plans being offered are so unattractive." This gets to another bit of evidence where this implosion is worse than you think.

"To entice people to join the exchanges, the [regime] forced insurers to offer low monthly premiums and cover people with preexisting conditions. Insurers have responded by increasing deductibles -- the out-of-pocket costs people must pay before insurance benefits kick in -- to stratospheric levels." You got $8,000 deductibles on the bronze plan -- $8,000 deductible, folks! That's before your policy kicks in.

So it's a debacle, folks. It's an implosion. It's another reason why the media doesn't want to talk about it. It's an absolute disaster. There's nothing to be proud of. The truth is, Obama doesn't care about any of this. Don't doubt me. He doesn't care. This is minutia to him. That's are little details for other, you know, wonks and minions to figure out. He doesn't care. All he knows is, he got "health care." He got socialized medicine, nationalized health care. He did it, it's done, he gets to control people.

That's all that matters to him.

www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2013/10/15/tea-tards-ofa-shutdonw-rally-draws-fewer-than-two-dozen

The White House attempt to turn Organizing for America into a major political force like the right-leaning Tea Party has suffered a second humiliation in just a few months. In August, not a single person showed up for a Climate Change rally. Tuesday, fewer than two-dozen OFA protestors showed up at a "Budget Shutdown Day of Action" rally on Capitol Hill.

When today's rally was first announced, Politico reported that this was OFA's "first attempt to stage a large rally at the Capitol."

[Tails82]

Thaaat's right, know your place.

www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2013/10/16/ObamaCare-obama-loses-homtown-paper

Obama Loses Hometown Newspaper

In a brutal editorial, President Obama's hometown newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, blasts Obama Care, and not just the crippling technical issues that have marred the launch. Getting to the heart of the debacle, the Tribune points to what much of the media won't: the fact that millions are going to lose the insurance and doctor Obama promised they could keep; and that Obama's signature legislation should probably cover therapy for sticker shock:

"There are more problems. People who have individual insurance coverage are finding that Obama's oft-repeated promise — 'if you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan' — is just not true. They are being told by insurers that their existing plans expire on Dec. 31 and they must choose new coverage. They're learning that insurers managed to offer lower-cost plans by narrowing the networks of hospitals and doctors that are available or by upping the out-of-pocket expenses. Unless people are careful in selecting coverage, they may be surprised to find they have to pay much more for out-of-network care to go to their doctors or get treated at the best hospitals. Federal officials argue that they'll work out the kinks in the system in plenty of time for people to sign up by Dec. 15 for coverage that begins Jan. 1. Yes, the techies might be able to work out the computer network problems by then. But that's not a given.

"The deeper problems of cost and coverage in Obamacare are going to require an admission by the administration that this government management of the health care market is extraordinarily complicated and will be very costly for many people. The law has to change."

The Chicago Tribune endorsed Barack Obama for president in 2008 and again in 2012.

www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/10/15/daily-kos-diarist-lashes-out-at-obamacare

Over at the hard-left Daily Kos, diarist Tirge Caps, who has a years-long history as a reliable left-wing Daily Kos diarist, lashed out at ObamaCare. After receiving a notice that said his monthly health insurance premiums will nearly double, Caps writes, "I am canceling insurance for us and I am not paying any fucking penalty. What the hell kind of reform is this?"

...Hard to stay happy in the Hope and Change Bubble when the bill comes due.

www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2013/10/16/the_republican_party_embraces_irrelevance

The Republicans have been hoodwinked. There are two things that have happened. A, they are literally paralyzed because Obama is African-American. They are literally paralyzed. Before that happened, the Democrats and the media ran one of the most brilliant political tricks I have ever seen pulled off. That political trick convinced Republicans, and, more importantly, their brilliant moderate consultants, that criticizing any Democrat president would anger the independents. Remember that? Because the independents, God bless the independents, oh, my God, folks, the princes and the princesses of our culture. The moderate independents, the only reasonable people out there. The only open-minded, nonbigoted, nonclosed-minded human beings in America.

Twenty percent of the voting population are independents, if you win them, you win everything. Ask Mitt Romney about that. He won big with independents. But his base stayed home. That's why we're here. Anyway. So the Republicans got hooked into this belief that any criticism would send the independents running to the mild-mannered, never critical, never extreme, never loud, never arguing, never bickering Democrats. So the Republicans agreed to tie one hand behind their back because of Obama's race. They had the other hand tied behind their back by this trick that got them to shut up, and really doubled down on that any criticism of Obama, 'cause now you're criticizing the first black president, that makes you a racist.

So they're not gonna go there, not gonna be critical. It doesn't matter if he's president. It doesn't matter if he's transforming this country in ways it was never founded to be, doesn't matter. We can't criticize him 'cause they're gonna call us racists. And then you add to it the silly notion that any criticism would send precious independents running to the Democrats. Note that there was no behavior the Democrats could engage in that would send the independents running to Republicans.

The Democrats can call Republicans hostage takers. They can accuse them of taking ransom. They can accuse them of being terrorists, and that doesn't bother the independents. But when the Republicans question Obama's Obamacare plan, "You racist pigs, how dare you!" And so the Republicans have been talked into halfway, and they agreed on the other half, to shut up. They have bought hook, line, and sinker that what the American people want is kumbaya. Everybody living together in a circle and loving each other and no acrimony, nothing but love everywhere. That's what everybody wants. And if anybody interrupts that, they're gonna pay.

So the Republicans have done everything they can to try to make everybody like them, and what they've ended up doing is creating one of the greatest political disasters I've ever seen in my lifetime, simply because they failed to show up.

www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2013/10/16/why_not_make_democrats_vote_to_exempt_themselves_from_obamacare_every_day

why is the Senate doing this first? They don't have this power. This stuff has to come from the House. Now, this is a prior arrangement, because Boehner couldn't get the House to go first on this. So the Senate Democrats take the lead on this with the help of McConnell and theoretically they take the bullet, but the real reason this happened is the underreported story on the fact that the House does have the power of the purse, and one of the great underreported stories is how the Democrats have taken that away.

Obama and the Democrats have literally usurped that power from the House, and they did it by not presenting a budget for four straight years. It is that simple. By refusing to present a budget, to even consider the budget that was produced in the House, like the Ryan budget, they never even considered it. That left as the only alternative to fund the government continuing resolutions, which, as you know, go for a month here, three months there, six months there.

Budget negotiations are essential for the checks and balances. This is why it's a constitutional requirement to have one. This is why the Democrats have sought to avoid it, it's because that's where legitimate checks and balances take place in our system, is during budget negotiations, without the power of the purse in the House. When Obama has that, he may as well be a king. When he and his party have nothing but continuing resolutions, that is what reduces the Republicans to looking like kids that won't get off your front lawn, because the only option that they have to affect spending is to make piecemeal proposals every time a continuing resolution, or in this case a debt limit increase comes up. The optics of that are not good.

It makes them look like spoiled brats who just always want their way, media helps that perception get spread. But this has all been by design. The Democrats have purposely not presented a budget for four years, A, to hide their legislative and policy agenda, they don't want you to know what their plans are. The budget would spell that out. The budget would tell us how much they want to spend on what. So they've kept that from anybody knowing. And it does piecemeal continuing resolution. And with every continuing resolution, what do we have? Somehow the media comes up with another threat to shut down the government.

So it's made to look like every three months or so these damn Republicans want to shut down the government. Damn them, damn these stupid Republicans. They hate government, hate Washington. Every three months, and that's the program, it was set in motion by the policy decision not to present a budget. The only way the Democrats can get away with this is if the Republicans don't oppose it. The Republicans ought to be screaming to high hell. Well, low hell. High heaven.

They ought to be screaming until they got no voice about this. They ought to be telling the American people what's going on. The American people ought to know the reason the Democrats don't present a budget. The American people ought to know. Now, the Republicans will tell you, "Well, they won't cover what we say." BS. They're covering Ted Cruz every damn day. Ted Cruz gets coverage any time he wants it. Why is that? They hate Ted Cruz. They despise Ted Cruz. And yet Ted Cruz has gotten his message out.

You can at least stand up and shout in opposition to this! The Constitution here is being used as toilet paper, in a sense. All of that combined is part and parcel what has so many you upset. Me, too. I just can't explain it, I cannot pound it or reiterate it enough, that there is a reason why the Republicans don't oppose. They have been spooked into not doing it. A, "The precious independents don't like it and go running back to Democrats," and B, Obama's race.

Any criticism would be called racism, and they don't just want to go there. "So let Obama have what he wants to try to limit the damage later, we'll get rid of the Tea Party and we'll come back stronger than ever as moderate Republicans; show the American people we're reasonable, and maybe by 2040 we'll be winning again. We got pledges from our donors to keep us flush with money until then so we're cool."

That must be what's going on, 'cause nothing else makes any sense.

www.nomblog.com/38328

In recent days, it has become clearer than ever that the fight to defend true marriage is a fight for the very identity and destiny of our great nation. Marriage is the foundation that supports our country, and we simply cannot have a well-functioning nation if we destroy the marriage culture. But that's what is happening before our very eyes.

In North Carolina, a lawsuit has been pending before the courts to strike down the state's Marriage Amendment — a law passed just last May and by 61% of the popular vote! But just this week North Carolina's Attorney General, tasked with defending the voters' will in this case, compromised his integrity in that role by formally announcing his support for same-sex 'marriage.' Worse, he's headlining a fundraising event for a group that wants the courts to strike down the marriage law!

As if that were not bad enough, hot on the heels of the A.G.'s reckless announcement, a County Register of Deeds in North Carolina announced that he would begin accepting same-sex couples' applications for marriage licenses — a move we've seen before in states like New Mexico and Pennsylvania. This is the lawless destruction of democracy that we can expect to see spreading around the nation if we do not act today!

Of course, orchestrations like we're seeing in North Carolina don't happen on their own — they are carefully planned and executed. A group named the Campaign for Southern Equality has been fishing for county-level officials in states like North Carolina to break their oath of office and flout the law the way D. Bruce Hanes of Pennsylvania's Montgomery County did earlier this year.

The Campaign for Southern Equality has been working tirelessly at this, and here is the fruit of those efforts: by the flagrant and irresponsible actions of two public officials, the will of the voters of North Carolina has been placed in peril. The strong majority of voters who declared last May that marriage is between one man and one woman are now in danger of being silenced by two elected politicians beholden to a well-financed special interest group.

online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303376904579137712337149266

Is the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission above the law? That's the extraordinary claim that EEOC general counsel David Lopez and his attorneys are making of late when companies challenge how the agency conciliates disputes (or in some cases, doesn't even try). Thankfully, judges aren't buying it.

The latest brushback came earlier this month in Houston, via U.S. District Court Judge Keith P. Ellison in EEOC v. Bass Pro Outdoor World. The agency accused the company of hiring too few minorities, and Bass said the EEOC tried to bully the company into a settlement. The EEOC countered that its pre-suit procedures aren't subject to judicial review, citing the Administrative Procedure Act and the Constitution's separation of powers.

What a remarkable stretch of the legal imagination. The APA protects individuals from governmental abuse, not agencies. By law, the EEOC must investigate a discrimination claim and conciliate the dispute in good faith before deciding to sue a private company. In effect, Mr. Lopez and his legal underlings want a free pass to do what they like to employers until a lawsuit is filed. This is America?

online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304106704579137431281832884.html

The Obama Administration's Environmental Protection Agency has spent the last few years stretching its legal authority, and now it will have to defend its actions before the Supreme Court. On Tuesday, the Justices agreed to review how far the agency can go in regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.

This story started in 2004, when environmentalists sued to force the EPA to regulate CO2, even though the Clean Air Act never defined it as a pollutant. The Justices nonetheless ruled 5-4 (Massachusetts v. EPA, 2007) that the agency could do so for mobile sources such as cars under Title II of the Act. Gentleman, start your regulatory engines.

The Obama EPA immediately began to stretch that logic to apply to power plants and other stationary sources with a series of 2009 rulemakings. Those sources are covered under a separate provision of the Clean Air Act's Title 1, which includes complex federal permitting.

When Congress wrote the Clean Air Act, it created numerical thresholds specifying that the government could only start regulating after a plant was shown to be putting out more than 100 tons a year of a pollutant. Congress had in mind traditional pollutants like sulfur dioxide or ozone, but in the case of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide 100 tons a year can be reached by 40 lawyers breathing. (OK, maybe a few more.)

By the EPA's own estimates, applying that 100-ton threshold to greenhouse gases would require some six million buildings to get environmental permits, including such grand polluters as churches and farms. Recognizing that such a rule would create "absurd results" like shuttering the entire economy, the EPA rewrote Congress's numbers and adjusted the threshold to 75,000 tons from 100 tons. EPA's clear political purpose was to escape a large political backlash to its new rules by unilaterally limiting their reach.

The EPA says that its rewrite is no big deal, and that plaintiffs should have no standing to sue since the agency was doing everyone a favor by lifting the thresholds. But regulatory agencies don't have the power to rewrite laws on their own without the authority granted by Congress. All the more so when that rewrite is intended to limit political accountability for a rule that could cost the economy $300 billion to $400 billion a year.

Parties to the suit include a handful of states that have been at the forefront of fighting the Obama Administration's regulatory overreach. Texas and 11 other states have taken a stand together, while Alaska joined a brief with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. State attorneys general have challenged the Administration's agenda on everything from ObamaCare to the plan to get rid of the Yucca Mountain waste depository. We're glad to see the Court stepping into the melee.

[Tails82]

Laharls is silly

www.breitbart.com/InstaBlog/2013/10/17/Rep-Gowdy-Eviscerates-NPS-Director-Jarvis-Over-Barricades

Rep. Gowdy Eviscerates NPS Director Jarvis Over Barricades

Rep. Trey Gowdy made a point of comparing Director Jarvis' response to veterans to the generous treatment he gave to Occupy protesters in 2011. He noted that in 2011 Jarvis had allowed protesters to remain in a public park for 100 days despite regulations that prevent "camping."

First of all, note that Jarvis failed to answer the question. He repeatedly cited the "antideficiency act" as if that were an answer. The antideficiency act prevents government agencies from spending money that has not been allocated by Congress. In other words, during a shutdown NPS--like every other agency--must reduce spending to essential personnel.

But the WWII memorial and the MLK Jr. memorial were open 24/7 prior to the shutdown including at night when no NPS staff were on hand. Nothing in the antideficiency act necessitated barricades at open air monuments. In fact it may have cost more money to set up and maintain the barricades than to simply leave the sites open.

Secondly, when pressed on his response to Occupy taking over McPherson Square in 2011, Director Jarvis casually replied "That was two years ago" as if the passage of time has rendered it irrelevant. But it's very relevant.

If you look back at Jarvis' prior testimony it is clear he knew Occupy protesters were sleeping on the site in violation of a regulation against camping. In fact, Republican staff presented video of Occupiers talking about sleeping on the site during the hearing...So Director Jarvis allowed Occupy to violate a clear no camping law for three months but put up barricades at open air monuments on the first day of the shutdown. In neither case was he able to offer a solid legal justification for his actions, only hand-waving and references to his own discretion.

www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/10/17/house-panel-probing-troubled-obamacare-site-launch/

A House committee is probing the widespread technical problems with the launch of the ObamaCare website, including the contractors that were paid hundreds of millions of dollars to create it.

"Despite the widespread belief that the administration was not ready for the health law's October 1 launch, top officials and lead IT contractors looked us in the eye and assured us all systems were a go," Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., said in a written statement.

He said the technical problems have reached "epidemic proportions" and the American people "deserve to know what caused this mess."

According to a Government Accountability Office report in June, Qualify Software Services received about $55 million for "related activities" on the ObamaCare exchanges. All told, the GAO reports that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services doled out $394 million between fiscal 2010 and March of this year to dozens of contractors to set up the health care "exchanges" and perform other related work.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee is also seeking enrollment figures from the Department of Health and Human Services. The administration so far has not released those figures.

online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304410204579141690140598008

Supporters of ObamaCare usually defend the law by insisting that they want to help people. I won't question their motives. I do wonder, however, if they understand what they're doing to the country.

We know that premiums are going up due to ObamaCare—Americans are getting notices in their mailboxes every day. On Wednesday, Drew Gonshorowski of the Center for Data Analysis at the Heritage Foundation published research that shows exchange premiums are going up in all but five states. In North Carolina, for example, many consumers will find their premiums almost double when shopping on the government exchanges. The hardest-hit states, such as Georgia, Arizona, Vermont and North Dakota, will see premium increases of up to 150%.

Mr. Gonshorowski's research shows that the hardest hit by the increases will be young adults. "A state that exhibits this clearly is Vermont," he writes, "where the increase for 27-year-olds is 144 percent and the increase for 50-year-olds is still 60 percent, but far less. All states exhibit this relationship."

We also know that, once established, the cost of ObamaCare's new entitlements will not fall. Historical evidence suggests the opposite. Nearly 50 years ago, at the time of Medicare's enactment, it was projected that the federal government would spend $9 billion on Part A hospital services in 1990. Actual spending in that year totaled $67 billion—an increase of 644% compared with initial estimates.

Likewise, government officials originally projected that Medicare Part B physician services would require "federal appropriations of about $500 million a year from general tax revenues." Last year, the federal outlay for that program was $163.8 billion—overshooting the original estimate by more than 4,400%.

Given this track record, the Congressional Budget Office's projection that ObamaCare will cost "only" $250 billion (you read that right: a quarter-trillion dollars) a decade from now seems far-fetched.

There's a reason Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid recently claimed that ObamaCare will lead to a single-payer health-care system: It happens to be true. Once employers drop health coverage for their low and middle-wage workers, the majority of Americans will be dumped into tightly regulated health exchanges and granted a "choice" of plans that will be more alike than different. The quality of care will suffer, access to doctors and plans you once had and liked will be reduced, and America will deteriorate into a two-tier health system—one in which the well-off can still buy quality coverage, but most Americans are consigned to poor care through the exchanges and Medicaid.

Forget the consultants, the pundits and the pollsters; good policy is good politics. If the Republicans had not fought on ObamaCare, the compromise would have been over the budget sequester. Instead, they have retained the sequester and for the past three months ObamaCare and its failings have been front and center in the national debate. Its disastrous launch was spotlighted by our defund struggle, not overshadowed, as some contend. With a revived and engaged electorate, ObamaCare will now be the issue for the next few years.

These are the reasons we fought so hard to get Washington to listen to the American people and take action to stop ObamaCare, and it is why so many are thankful for the courageous leadership of people like Sens. Ted Cruz and Mike Lee, and conservatives in the House of Representatives. The law is economically unstable, financially irresponsible and harmful to hardworking Americans.

washingtonexaminer.com/more-seniors-fewer-youth-in-workforce-since-end-of-recession/article/2537382

More seniors, fewer youth in workforce since end of recession

Gallup attributes the decreasing youth workforce participation to joblessness and continuing education...The situation for teenagers is even worse, with 22.7 percent of teens unemployed as of the end of September, compared to 19.6 percent that were unemployed in April 2010.

The young Obamba voters are probably looking up at that faded Hopey Changey poster, clutching the Obama doll in one hand and sucking her thumb with the other, holding out hope that someone will change their diaper. Your false messiah isn't coming to save you any time soon.

blog.heritage.org/2013/10/16/ted-cruz-on-senate-plan-it-is-a-terrible-deal-for-the-american-people/

Ted Cruz on Senate Plan: “It Is a Terrible Deal for the American People”

Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), a leader in the fight to defund Obamacare, spoke on the Senate floor today about the deal brokered by the Washington establishment to protect the status quo.

The deal, which locks in Obamacare’s implementation and doesn’t address the government’s spending problem, does nothing to help the American people, Cruz warned.

www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/10/16/U-S-Now-the-World-s-Number-One-Supplier-of-Oil

In a watershed moment for the United States, it has now surpassed Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest supplier of oil.

According to PIRA, an energy analysis firm, the skyrocketing oil output over the last four years is the most dizzying ascent since Saudi Arabia’s from 1970-1974. Since 2009, U.S. oil output has climbed 3.2 million barrels per day (bpd). The total includes natural gas liquids and biofuels.

The trigger for the huge expansion is the shale revolution, which has seen areas such as the Bakken in North Dakota and Eagle Ford in Texas lead the way as U.S. supplies jumped 1 million bpd in 2012 and repeated that jump in 2013.

Because of the huge jump in supplies, the U.S. is no longer the number one importer of crude oil; that spot now belongs to China. PIRA Energy Group noted, “The U.S. growth rate is greater than the sum of the growth of the next nine fastest growing countries combined and has covered most of the world's net demand growth over the past two years... The U.S. position as the largest oil supplier in the world looks to be secure for many years.”

In 2013, total liquids that are produced by the U.S.—comprised of crude oil, condensate, biofuels, and natural gas liquids—are expected to average 12.1 million bpd, ahead of Saudi Arabia. Even though Saudi Arabia’s output grew last year, the growth in U.S. output was greater.

This is a completely private development, Luddite anti-science Democrats fought progress every step of the way. Drilling on federal lands is actually down. Couldn't have done it without you.

online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304561004579136761314880906

Behind China's Prison Walls

On Saturday, a colleague and I spent almost three hours at the No. 4 Prison here in the capital of Zhejiang province, about 200 kilometers southwest of Shanghai. This is the prison where longtime dissident Zhu Yufu is serving a seven-year term for writing a poem. Not an ode to the peony or lotus, of course, but an understated call for freedom that in China qualifies as a crime.

Among its 12 lines: "It's time, people of China! It's time./ The Square belongs to everyone./ With your own two feet./ It's time to head to the Square and make your choice." For this, the Chinese government imprisoned Mr. Zhu on charges of "inciting subversion."

I am a physician and traveled to the prison at the request of Mr. Zhu's family to determine his medical condition and evaluate whether he has any life-threatening problems. Information from Mr. Zhu's family suggests that he is at risk of progressive heart failure and perhaps sudden death if not quickly evaluated and properly treated.

Since Mr. Zhu's imprisonment in 2011, prison doctors have assessed his blood pressure once a month and given him one medication for hypertension and angina, and one herbal medication for heart failure. Mr. Zhu's relatives told me months ago that he has a severe rash and has complained of chest pressure, severe headaches and back pain so acute that he was unable to walk without support.

Of further alarm were family members' reports that Mr. Zhu had expressed feelings of despondency and had made predictions that he would die in prison. I find these accounts very worrisome. In my 40-plus years practicing medicine, I have seen patients give up and die. A key motivator for my trip was to let the Chinese government and Mr. Zhu know that there are people who care about him and are watching to see how prison authorities treat him.

On Saturday I hoped to examine Mr. Zhu and encourage his jailors to arrange a full cardiac examination for him. Prison officials denied all of these requests, saying they wouldn't even inform Mr. Zhu that I had come to see him.

Professor Zhang was denied admission to the Bureau of Justice on the grounds that he needed to complete paperwork that he had already prepared...China has been and aspires again to be a great nation. But it cannot make that claim as long as those who disagree with the government are imprisoned and deprived of their physical health and will to live.

[Tails82]

More stonewalling. Sounds like someone needs to be impeached.

online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303680404579143343379804228

Sebelius on the Run

The HHS Secretary refuses to testify about ObamaCare's rollout.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is even refusing to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in a hearing this coming Thursday...The department is also refusing to make available lower-level officials who might detail the source or sources of this debacle. Ducking an investigation with spin is one thing. Responding with a wall of silence to the invitation of a duly elected congressional body probing the use of more than half a billion taxpayer dollars is another. This Obama crowd is something else.

What bunker is Henry Chao hiding in, for instance? He's the HHS official in charge of technology for the Affordable Care Act, and in March he said at an insurance lobby conference that his team had given up trying to create "a world-class user experience." With the clock running, Mr. Chao added that his main goal was merely to "just make sure it's not a third-world experience."

There's another one of those citations, the only way Jen could avoid hearing about these is if she purposefully has her head in the sand. 200 pages later she's going to pretend this never happened just like last time, calling it now.

He didn't succeed. Whatever is below third-world standards would flatter the 36 federally run exchanges as they've started up. But perhaps Mr. Chao or someone else, if not Mrs. Sebelius, can answer even the simple question of how many Americans have managed to enroll for coverage. HHS could easily resolve any confusion but it won't even talk to Democratic allies, friendly reporters and what it calls the insurance industry "stakeholders" that it will need to make ObamaCare work.

No doubt a hearing would be a spectacle—with TV cameras on hand—but Mrs. Sebelius can't hide forever...More disclosure might also help HHS preserve a scrap of credibility, given that none of its initial explanations has held up. Right now, no one trusts a word that emerges from Fortress ObamaCare.

To take one example, this week the Associated Press obtained an internal HHS memo from September 5, 2013 specifying the Administration's monthly enrollment targets—a half-million sign-ups in October, 3.3 million by December 31, and so on. Asked about this by AP, HHS not only declined to say if it is meeting its projections. The department issued a statement claiming that "The Administration has not set monthly enrollment targets." The spokesman did not cite the classic Marx Brothers line, "Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?"

Eventually Mrs. Sebelius will have to make a real accounting of this government failure to someone other than the TV comic Jon Stewart, and perhaps she can also explain why the people who can't build a working website also deserve the power to reorganize one-sixth of the U.S. economy. For now, the Administration that styles itself as the most transparent in history won't reveal the truth—perhaps because it is afraid of what the public will find.

blog.heritage.org/2013/10/18/could-obamacare-cause-more-people-to-lose-coverage-than-gain-it/

Could Obamacare Cause More People to LOSE Coverage Than Gain It?

Obamacare’s supporters have always claimed that the law will help increase the number of Americans with health insurance. But an analysis released yesterday provided persuasive data showing that the number of people losing coverage under Obamacare could exceed the number of people who gain it.

"The U.S. individual health insurance market currently totals about 19 million people. Because the Obama administration’s regulations on grandfathering existing plans were so stringent about 85% of those, 16 million, are not grandfathered and must comply with Obamacare at their next renewal. The rules are very complex...These 16 million people are now receiving letters from their carriers saying they are losing their current coverage and must re-enroll in order to avoid a break in coverage and comply with the new health law’s benefit mandates––the vast majority by January 1. Most of these will be seeing some pretty big rate increases."

In total, 16 million people who purchase insurance for themselves could lose their current health plans on January 1. And that number doesn’t even count the Americans losing employer-provided health coverage—because their firms are dropping spousal coverage or dropping coverage for part-time workers.

Earlier this year, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that in 2014, Obamacare would enroll 7 million people in exchange coverage and 9 million people through Medicaid. (Medicaid’s problems with physician access and patient outcomes are so widespread that some beneficiaries don’t consider the program “real insurance,” but that’s a separate story.)

But based on the opening weeks of Obamacare’s open enrollment period, it’s far from certain that the CBO’s estimate of 7 million exchange enrollees will be reached...Given the ongoing exchange chaos, it’s entirely likely that Obamacare could result in more people losing their current health insurance next year than obtaining new coverage. Any way you slice it, that’s not reform.

online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303680404579143462696720716

2½ weeks after the launch of the "exchanges" that are supposed to be ObamaCare's operational centerpiece, it is clear to almost everyone that they are an administrative disaster. In this crisis, there is an opportunity: to recognize an impending economic and humanitarian disaster, and to act in time to avert or at least minimize it.

That requires a willingness to face reality and a capacity for leadership. So far Obama has shown little evidence of either...Let's let longtime ObamaCare enthusiast and Journolist founder Ezra Klein answer that: "So far, the Affordable Care Act's launch has been a failure. Not 'troubled.' Not 'glitchy.' A failure."

Yesterday Obama delivered remarks at the White House, in which he made only an oblique reference to ObamaCare: "You don't like a particular policy or a particular president, then argue for your position. Go out there and win an election. Push to change it. But don't break it. Don't break what our predecessors spent over two centuries building. That's not being faithful to what this country is about."

This is galling for multiple reasons. For one, he was lecturing members of Congress, every one of whom (with the exception of three appointed senators) holds his office by virtue of having won his most recent election. Granted, Obama won his too, but with the help of an abusive IRS. And the country now faces a crisis because in 2009 and 2010, when it came to health care, Obama and his fellow Democrats failed to act in accord with the advice he now dishes out: "Don't break it."

How serious a crisis? As Megan McArdle has warned, "if the exchanges don't get fixed soon, they could destroy Obamacare--and possibly, the rest of the private insurance market." The Wall Street Journal reports today that "insurers say the federal health-care marketplace is generating flawed data that is straining their ability to handle even the trickle of enrollees who have gotten through so far."

It is wise for Jen to have given up trying to defend Obama's atrocious record.

www.truthrevolt.org/news/daily-news-reporter-bashes-blind-republican-not-recognizing-his-wife-crowded-room

Daily News Reporter Bashes Blind Republican For Not Recognizing His Wife In Crowded Room

www.truthrevolt.org/news/yale-professor-media-biased-me-against-tea-party-theyre-more-scientifically-literate

Yale elitist surprised that the Tea Party is more scientifically literate, then explains his own ignorance. Maybe he can ask some friends in East Anglia for some tricks on how to manipulate the numbers.

online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303680404579141790296396688

Stan Druckenmiller makes an unlikely class warrior. He's a member of the 1% — make that the 0.001% — one of the most successful money managers of all time, and 60 years old to boot. But lately he has been touring college campuses promoting a message of income redistribution you don't hear out of Washington. It's how federal entitlements like Medicare and Social Security are letting Mr. Druckenmiller's generation rip off all those doting Barack Obama voters in Generation X, Y and Z.

"I have been shocked at the reception. I had planned to only visit Bowdoin, " his alma mater in Maine, he says. But he has since been invited to multiple campuses, and even the kids at Stanford and Berkeley have welcomed his theme of generational theft.

"If there's something really big on the other side in terms of entitlement reform, it's worth using the debt limit. And God forbid even if you go a day or two over it in terms of interest payments," he says, the country would be better off "if and only if you got big, big progress on a long-term problem...And this president, despite what he says, has shown time and time again that he needs a gun at his head to negotiate in good faith. All this talk about, 'I won't negotiate with a gun at my head.' OK, you've been president for five years."

His voice rising now, Mr. Druckenmiller pounds his fist on the conference table. "Show me, President Obama, when the period was when you initiated budget discussions without a gun at your head."

Which brings him back to his thieving generation. For three decades until 2010, Mr. Druckenmiller ran the hedge fund he founded, Duquesne Capital. Now retired from managing other people's money, he looks after his own assets, which Forbes magazine recently estimated at $2.9 billion. And he wonders why in five years the massively indebted U.S. government will begin sending him a Social Security check for $3,500 each month. Because he earned it?

"I didn't earn it," he responds, while pointing to a bar chart that is part of his college presentation. Drawing on research by Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff, it shows the generational wealth transfer that benefits oldsters at the expense of the young.

While many seniors believe they are simply drawing out the "savings" they were forced to deposit into Social Security and Medicare, they are actually drawing out much more, especially relative to later generations. That's because politicians have voted to award the seniors ever more generous benefits. As a result, while today's 65-year-olds will receive on average net lifetime benefits of $327,400, children born now will suffer net lifetime losses of $420,600 as they struggle to pay the bills of aging Americans.

One of the great ironies of the Obama presidency is that it has been a disaster for the young people who form the core of his political coalition. High unemployment is paired with exploding debt that they will have to finance whenever they eventually find jobs.

Some of the oldsters questioned why many of his dire forecasts assume that federal tax collections will stay at their traditional 18.5% of GDP. They asked why taxes should not rise to fulfill the promises already made.

Mr. Druckenmiller's response: "Oh, so you've paid 18.5% for your 40 years and now you want the next generation of workers to pay 30% to finance your largess?" He added that if 18.5% was "so immoral, why don't you give back some of your ill-gotten gains of the last 40 years?"

He has a similar argument for those on the left who say entitlements can be fixed with an eventual increase in payroll taxes. "Oh, I see," he says. "So I get to pay a 12% payroll tax now until I'm 65 and then I don't pay. But the next generation—instead of me paying 15% or having my benefits slightly reduced—they're going to pay 17% in 2033. That's why we're waiting—so we can shift even more to the future than to now?"

America's debt-to-GDP ratio, the amount of debt compared with national income, explodes in about 20 years. That's where Greece was when it hit the skids...

online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304384104579139871559464960

At McDonald's, Salads Just Don't Sell

McDonald's Corp., trying to shed its "Super Size Me" image of a decade ago, has long since abandoned supersize portions, rolled out oatmeal and smoothies, and added apples to all its Happy Meals. Last month it said it would begin offering customers a choice of side salad, fruit or vegetable in place of fries in its value meals.

But the fast-food company hasn't had a new product become a bona fide blockbuster—a unique new product that stays on the menu and meaningfully affects business—since the 2003 introduction of the pancake sandwiches it calls McGriddles, according to analysts.

Many of its more healthful offerings don't sell well, they say. McDonald's Chief Executive Don Thompson recently told investors that salads make up only 2% to 3% of U.S. sales.

Meanwhile, rivals Wendy's Co. and Taco Bell have recently scored hits with the Pretzel Bacon Cheeseburger and Doritos Locos Tacos.

McDonald's is "focused on trying to be all things to all people, whether it's catering to health-minded people with oatmeal or to Millennials with snack wraps. They've gone so far afield from their core menu that they're not really resonating with anyone," says Howard Penney, managing director at Hedgeye Risk Management, an independent investment research firm.

"McDonald's is never going to be perceived as healthy, so for them to spend too much time on healthy items doesn't make a lot of sense to me,"...McDonald's efforts to trumpet more nutritious items haven't placated many public health advocates.

McDonald's earlier this year dropped its Fruit & Walnut Salads from the menu because, according to one franchisee, "We were throwing away more than we were selling."

The proliferation of new menu items—from oatmeal to Egg White Delight McMuffins to Premium Snack Wraps—has resulted in a crowded menu and complicated assembly process that has confounded customers and slowed service at the drive-through, where McDonald's derives the majority of its U.S. sales.

QSR Magazine, a trade publication that conducts an annual drive-through performance study, said earlier this month that McDonald's clocked its slowest average speed of service in the 15-year history of the study...Analysts and franchisees also say the company is confusing customers with its variety of price points.

washingtonexaminer.com/left-demands-charge-ted-cruz-with-sedition/article/2537416

Left demands: Charge Ted Cruz with sedition

www.politico.com/story/2013/10/police-probe-anti-ted-cruz-tweets-98551.html?hp=r2

Officials said late Friday they are investigating alleged threats against Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) on Twitter, according to a report from The Hill.

Neanderthals: say/do something they don't like, they will make grunting noises and take out their clubs.

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www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/10/19/pressure-mounts-for-sebelius-to-testify-about-obamacare-website-problems/

Pressure mounts for Sebelius to testify about ObamaCare website problems

Leaders of the chamber’s Energy and Commerce Committee are pressing for public answers after the Obama administration and companies involved in the site's development and launch said the online health care exchange was “on track” for the October 1. start.

However, the site, which provides a menu of insurance plans for Americans in the 36 states without their own site, has instead been plagued by such problems as crashing under heavy user traffic, failing to let customers register or purchase plans and reportedly logging inaccurate information.

“Secretary Sebelius had time for Jon Stewart, and we expect her to have time for Congress,”

President Obama said in the first couple of days that the problems were glitches caused by the overwhelming interest. But over roughly the first 13 days, the number of site visitors dropped by 88 percent, according to Kantar U.S. Insights, based on the findings of the Millward Brown Digital research firm.

The committee is also requesting enrollment figures, which the administration has promised to release but has so far withheld.

www.frc.org/washingtonupdate/life-vs-lawlessness

As week three of the roll out of ObamaCare ends, customers still face the log-on difficulties, glitches, privacy breaches, and lack of details that we were told would disappear shortly. More significantly, shoppers on the federally managed health care exchanges still face the challenge of how to determine whether their selected health insurance plans cover elective abortion. Despite calls by pro-life leaders in Congress like Congressman Chris Smith (R-N.J.) to make the exchanges transparent so that conscientious shoppers can avoid paying to subsidize services contrary to their religious and moral beliefs, administration officials remain tone deaf to this basic plea.

And, it's not just federal officials who have ignored transparency and the law in providing taxpayer funding for abortion. Yesterday, the Alliance Defending Freedom filed suit on behalf of a former top Colorado Department of Public Health official over Colorado's violation of the state constitutional amendment that bans direct or indirect public subsidizing of abortion. Since January 2009, Colorado has spent about $14 million of Coloradans' tax dollars in direct violation of Colorado law. Whether state tax dollars or federal tax dollars, the problem is the same: blatant disregard for the conscientious beliefs of Americans.

...

Even as Colorado spends state money to keep the state Planned Parenthood affiliate afloat, other states like Ohio continue to see a decrease in abortion clinics. According to the Columbus Dispatch, "With the closure of one abortion clinic and two more on the brink of shutting down, Ohio women will have fewer places to terminate pregnancies than perhaps anytime since the immediate years after the Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973."

While some liberals are upset about the declining list of providers (after closing three clinics, Ohio will "be reduced to nine"), this state trend is indicative of the encouraging national progression I have referenced previously. As I noted last month, "Since 2011, 58 of America's abortion clinics -- almost one in 10 -- have either pulled the plug on their abortion services or folded altogether." Through such things as ultrasound technology and the stories coming out of Kermit Gosnell's late-term abortion "house of horrors" and the gruesome late-term abortion services of Maryland's LeRoy Carhart, America's conscience is becoming more and more sensitive to the reality of what takes place in abortion clinics. That's why the American people have taken action through their elected representatives to end elective abortion in the states -- and why this movement will only grow.

www.breitbart.com/InstaBlog/2013/10/19/Obama-nomics-Homelessness-on-the-Rise

Obama-nomics: Homelessness on the Rise

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www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/10/20/Sarah-Palin-Exclusive-Op-Ed-DC-Corrupt-Bastards-Club

The Corrupt Bastards Club. They said it. I didn’t.

In Alaska we had a group of politicos who chuckled as they dubbed themselves the “CBC,” which stands for “Corrupt Bastards Club.” But it was no laughing matter. I, and many others, took them on. We won. When I served as chairman of our state’s Oil and Gas Commission, I reported on the cronyism of the chair of my own Party, who had been appointed by our governor to that same energy regulating commission. The whistle blowing resulted in him receiving the largest ethics fine in the state’s history. But that was just the tip of the oily iceberg. The FBI investigated Alaskan lawmakers for taking bribes from the oil industry in exchange for votes favorable to that industry, and politicos ended up in jail. The lawmakers actually called themselves the Corrupt Bastards Club and even emblazoned the CBC initials on baseball caps they gifted each other – that’s how untouchable they believed they were. But average, concerned citizens said, “enough is enough,” and shook things up. Though some of the CBC members ended up in horizontal pinstripes, much of the compromised party apparatus stayed in power.

I’ll never forget standing at the podium during our state GOP convention and asking delegates to stand up with me and oust the status quo because the political environment had to change for Alaska to progress toward her manifest destiny as a more productive—and ethical—state to help secure our union. Only about half stood up. The rest looked around gauging the political winds and sat on their thumbs. Our federal delegation was incensed at me. Their influence resulted in much of the party machine staying put, but I’ll never be sorry I fought it.

Today, doesn't it seem like we have a Corrupt Bastards Club in D.C.? On steroids? It might not be as oily and obvious as its Alaska counterpart, but it’s just as compromised because its members, too, are indifferent to what their actions mean for We the People.

I’m prepared to be attacked for suggesting this comparison of the D.C. political establishment with the CBC. But I call it like I see it. And lived it. The fight over defunding socialized healthcare, aka Obamacare, should have opened everyone’s eyes to call it the same.

From the very start, we knew that any health care reform could move us in one of two directions: closer to a genuine free market and patient-centered system to allow choices, affordability, and continued economic freedom, or closer to full socialized healthcare in the form of a single-payer system. President Obama and many Democrats have always openly admitted they want socialized medicine in the form of a single-payer system.

It can be argued that Obamacare isn’t full socialized medicine… yet. Right now it is a sort of corporatism, which is the collusion of big government with big business. With Obamacare, the government has taken over an industry that comprises a sixth of our economy, radically changed the way it operates, and is mandating that we purchase the services of that industry. This is unprecedented. It’s radical...Obamacare in its current corporatist form isn’t meant to last. It’s meant to push us towards full socialized medicine with a single-payer system. How do I know this? Simple. Let’s compare Obamacare with the Canadian single-payer system.

With Obamacare we have crappier health care (fewer choices, fewer doctors, and an IPAB rationing panel of faceless bureaucrats, aka the ol' “death panel” that has been admitted to existing in Obamacare), but it is very expensive for the individual American. For instance, you’ll find that the so-called Bronze Plans are just as expensive as the Platinum Plans when you factor in the $5,000-$10,000 deductible in addition to the monthly payments you’ll shell out. And those Americans who aren’t being pushed onto the Obamacare exchanges are still seeing their insurance premiums skyrocket as the industry shifts onto consumers the cost of not factoring in various conditions.

Americans, if you’re faced with a 300% increase (or even a 65% increase like my family) in your health care premiums for crappier coverage, doesn’t “free” socialized medicine all of a sudden sound appealing?

And that’s how Americans will be led down the primrose path to a single-payer system. People will be frustrated, worn out, and broke under this new government burden. Many will end up concluding they’ll settle for – then demand – full socialized medicine because they’ll see how the unworkable Obamacare will break our health care system (where, presently, no one is turned away from emergency rooms and we have many public and private safety nets for people in need), along with busting our personal bank accounts. The cry will go out, “Can’t you just put us all in a sort of Medicaid-like system? It’ll be much less confusing than these awful exchange websites and a lot less expensive!” As things stand, many who are getting slammed by Obamacare will inevitably settle for less out of necessity. And that’s the left’s declared plan: a single-payer system. They said it. I didn't.

Of course, the Canadian system isn’t really “free." It comes with high taxes and even more rationing, which is precisely why the Obama-friendly economist Paul Krugman makes a point of reminding us that we’ll only bring health care costs “under control” by employing “death panels and sales taxes.” And, of course, our already broke country will go bankrupt even faster under the unsustainable strain of this expanding welfare state, and our economy will suffer under the stagnation of permanently higher taxes.

When Harry Reid laughs and says, “Yes, yes! Absolutely, yes!” when asked if his goal was to move Obamacare to a single-payer system of full socialized medicine, he’s spilling the truth. The evidence is right before our eyes. Please open yours, GOP establishment.

The broken websites and botched Obamacare rollout help push things to that inevitable conclusion by causing frustration and confusion that only the government can “fix.” In fact, these unusable Obamacare websites make a reasonable person wonder how this administration could have made such a colossal bungle of the rollout when they are, after all, the same savvy experts who had the most sophisticated and precise campaign websites ever built. They could pinpoint voters down to a city block, but they messed up a website that cost the government over $200 million more than it cost Apple to develop the first iPhone. Purposeful?

The full implementation of Obamacare puts us firmly on the path to the left’s desire of a single-payer system of socialized medicine. That was the end game for Obama and the Democrats all along. The end is now in sight for them, and the media doesn’t even ask about it.

So what was the GOP establishment’s game plan to fight this march towards socialism? They’ve been busy denouncing Sens. Ted Cruz and Mike Lee and their supporters, along with the good House Members who fought for our one chance to defund Obamacare. But what were the wayward Republicans’ alternative plans? They thought we could ignore the implementation of Obamacare and simply focus on some future electoral victories in the hope that some day the stars will align and we’ll have super majorities in the House and Senate along with a Republican president who would hopefully repeal this disastrous soon-to-be set in stone new “entitlement.”

There’s a big problem with that scenario. It overlooks the everyday reality before our eyes. As Obamacare is being implemented, Americans can’t afford to pay for it. We can’t even sign up for it on the impossibly cumbersome websites, but the IRS will fine us for not doing so anyway! Obama gave his pals, and Congress gave themselves, tickets off this train wreck via waivers. Cruz and Lee fought for us to get the same relief the big guys got. The media and disloyal politicians turned on them and, divided, we lost. Now we little guys are stuck on this train, which will soon collide with hardship and real-world economics that don’t pencil out. Friends, by the time the electoral stars align for this hoped-for GOP hat trick the country will be out billions, if not trillions, more of our tax dollars and will have already begged D.C. to relieve us of this corporatist nightmare even if it means a socialized single-payer system. And once there, do you think we’ll ever go back and strip this “entitlement”? Unarguable history proves otherwise.

The only credible plan of action was to do everything in our power to delay the implementation of Obamacare – defund it, postpone it, whatever – while at the same time work to elect a majority to repeal it. That is what Cruz and Lee and those Tea Party aligned House Members were doing. There was no other credible alternative plan to seize the constitutionally appropriate opportunity to legislatively close the purse strings to stop the juggernaut of full socialized medicine.

You have to wonder whether the permanent political class in D.C. really wants to get rid of Obamacare at all. We’re finding out it’s good business for them.

The same lobbyists who wrote Obamacare are now busy selling their wares to anyone with enough dough who wants to get around the law. Meanwhile politicians are busy collecting campaign donations and other favors while carving out the lobbyists’ requested exemptions for various cronies. Then every election cycle they get to capitalize on fundraising off Obamacare shenanigans while telling voters back home about how hard they’re fighting to stop it. Don’t be fooled. Too many of them merely took meaningless symbolic votes that could never have repealed this, and they sat on their thumbs without standing united in the fight for us.

GOP politicians claim they’re against Obamacare and promise to repeal it. But when it came time to stand up and use the Constitutional tools they have – the power of the purse strings – to finally halt the implementation, they balked, waved the white flag, and joined the lapdog media in trashing the good guys who fought for us.

The media wants you to believe that the partial government shutdown “fractured” the Republican machine from grassroots commonsense conservatives who go by the acronym TEA Party (that stands for “Taxed Enough Already”). No, Tea Party patriots rose up because the Republican machine “fractured” itself years ago by marginalizing its conservative base. The recent “slimdown” didn’t cause the fracture. It happened because of the fracture – because wayward Republicans have refused for years to stand up and fight for economic freedom and limited government, despite campaigning on those principles every election cycle. That’s how we got into this debt-ridden mess in the first place. They campaigned one way, but governed another.

It’s the establishment’s choice whether this fracture remains unfixed because the conservative grassroots will never give up the fight for freedom. Never. Never. Generations of our sons and daughters sent off to war to protect our freedom have paid too high a price for us to ever give up the fight.

The conservative grassroots is rising up just like some did all those years ago at the GOP convention in Alaska. We’re rising up and calling on the rest of the Party to stand up with us against corruption and indifference – the twin causes of failure. Stand up, America! A great awakening is needed now more than ever. And it can happen in this most exceptional nation. By the grace of God it will happen!

President Reagan warned about socialized medicine, and ironically I quoted his warning in my closing remarks during the 2008 Vice Presidential debate: “If you don’t do this and if I don’t do it, one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.”

You deserve the best, America. And the best is God-given freedom.

washingtonexaminer.com/the-age-of-climate-alarmism-is-coming-to-an-end/article/2537417

The age of climate alarmism is coming to an end

You can be forgiven for not noticing that the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a summary of its Fifth Assessment Report late last month.

The report landed with a thud, criticized and even mocked by many leading climate scientists. The distinguished science journal Nature editorialized that this should be the last report issued by the UN body.

This is just the latest signal that the age of climate alarmism is over. Given five tries to convince the world that human activity is causing catastrophic warming of the planet, runaway sea-level rise and various weather disasters, the public still doesn’t buy it...the science simply does not back up the hypothesis. For starters, there’s been no rise in global temperatures for 15 years.

The IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report concedes for the first time that global temperatures have not risen since 1998, despite a 7 percent rise in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

To put that into perspective, global human CO2 emissions in the last 15 years represent about one-third of all human CO2 emissions since the start of the Industrial Revolution, and yet temperatures didn’t budge.

Nearly all of the UN-approved climate computer models were wrong. The IPCC finally admitted as much.

The IPCC also admits that the “hockey stick” it used to feature in past reports wasn’t accurate. Penn State professor Michael Mann has been dining out for years on his infamous "hockey stick,” a dread graph featured by Al Gore in his Oscar-winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.”

The graph looked so dramatic — like a hockey stick — only because it ignored the Medieval Warm Period, a time about a thousand years ago when temperatures were warmer than today — when wine grapes grew in England and Greenland was green.

The “hockey stick” is missing from the Fifth Assessment Report, and the IPCC admits the Medieval Warm Period was warmer and more global than it claimed in the past.

A third major admission by the IPCC: No increases in droughts, hurricanes, typhoons and other extreme weather. Every time severe weather hits the United States, you could count on IPCC-related scientists, professional climate alarmists and the media to attribute it all to man-made global warming. No more.

The latest IPCC report admits to having “low confidence” in predictions of more frequent or more extreme droughts and tropical cyclones.

While the IPCC is taking its lumps for being wrong on these and other matters, a new kid on the block of climate science is taking a victory lap: The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change released its own report, Climate Change Reconsidered II: Physical Science. Packed with 1,000 pages of peer-reviewed literature — and then peer-reviewed again by NIPCC’s team of some 50 scientists from around the world...The NIPCC report concludes that human impact on climate is very modest, especially when compared to natural cycles.

Higher levels of carbon dioxide will not cause weather to become more extreme, seas level rise isn’t accelerating and polar ice caps aren’t melting at alarming rates.

Global warming isn’t the crisis many people said it was a few years ago. That’s bad news for the IPCC and the many environmental groups and politicians that hooked their wagon to it. But it’s good news for the rest of us.

[Tails82]

Totalitarianism in NJ

www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/10/21/new-jersey-formally-recognizes-same-sex-marriages/

In Newark, Mayor Cory Booker was ["]marrying["] the first of several couples when someone attempted to disrupt the ceremony.

Booker had asked if anyone had reason to object to the marriage and a protester screamed "This is unlawful in the eyes of God and Jesus Christ."

Booker, who was elected to the U.S. Senate last week, called for the person to be removed and police dragged him out.

Universal lack of health insurance, the Obamacare goal

www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/10/21/hundreds-of-thousands-lose-insurance

NBC News: Hundreds of Thousands Lose Insurance Due to ObamaCare

If you are wondering why ObamaCare is resulting in people being booted off their health insurance plans, the answer is that ObamaCare mandates the kind of coverage you are now required to purchase. This includes coverage for mental health and substance abuse, maternity care, dental and vision care -- coverage millions neither need nor want. So if you current plan doesn’t meet these ObamaCare basics, it is being canceled and your new plan will mandate you pay for this coverage.

The irony of all this is that, by the end of next year, the number of uninsured in America could increase under ObamaCare. Out of frustration, anger, and a host of other reasons, those being thrown off their health insurance plans might decide to go without rather than sign up through ObamaCare.

www.frc.org/washingtonupdate/obamacare-stop-drop-enroll

the ObamaCare rollout is doing the Republicans' job for them: exposing the health care failure they'd opposed all along. For the Obama administration, which had three years to perfect the system, the last few weeks have been marked by political humiliation. Once loyal liberals, including the President's former press secretary Robert Gibbs, are tiptoeing away from the law that they spent so much personal capital passing. "I hope they fire some people," Gibbs said bluntly, because this has been "excruciatingly embarrassing for the White House and for the Department of Health and Human Services."

www.truthrevolt.org/news/msnbcs-chuck-todd-advises-wh-find-fall-person

MSNBC’s Chuck Todd Advises WH to 'Find a Fall Person'

www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/10/21/obamacare-failure-to-launch-and-hubris-one-party-rule/

ObamaCare's failure to launch and the hubris of one party rule

President Obama’s pious lecture to Congress after the shutdown ended was full of bizarre passages, especially his demand for civility.

“When we disagree, we don’t have to suggest that the other side doesn’t love this country or believe in free enterprise or all the other rhetoric that seems to get worse every single year,” he declared.

Rumor has it he was serious, but that’s hard to believe if you remember way back to, oh, nine days earlier. Then, Obama demonized Republicans in the harshest language possible.

As I noted then, he accused the GOP seven times of demanding a “ransom,” and of “extortion,” of threatening to “blow the whole thing up” and “burn down your house.” He called them “ideological extremists,” knocked the “Tea Party’s extremist agenda” and said they were prepared to “cause a recession.”

He also demanded they compromise — while refusing to negotiate.

His my-way-or-the-highway approach is so routine that it rarely draws attention anymore. Yet that doesn’t mean there are no consequences.

The history of ObamaCare makes the point. The signature “achievement” of his first two years came when Democrats controlled Congress and marked the first time major social legislation became law with one-party support.

The blowback came in 2010, when Republicans picked up 63 seats in the House — largely because of public opposition to ObamaCare...The law has never enjoyed majority public support, and its regulations are blamed for layoffs and the explosion of part-time jobs. The rollout of the state exchanges is a debacle that goes well beyond computer glitches. Even union allies concede it is destructive.

Someday, books will be written and classes taught showing ObamaCare as a cautionary tale on the hubris of one-party rule. But for now, we endure lectures about civility and compromise from its namesake, a man who practices neither.

online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304402104579149582888128734

The White House pitched President Obama's Rose Garden event on Monday as a new transparency, but the event amounted to an infomercial, complete with a 1-800 number. Operators are standing by and "the product is good," the President said. He even encouraged Americans to bypass the website and apply for benefits over the phone or by mail.

Too bad this infomercial lacked tangible information. Mr. Obama might have explained what went wrong, and why, and where the buck stops, or if there is even a provisional timetable for when the exchanges will function properly. Instead he minimized the severity of the problems, perhaps for political reasons. Or maybe he didn't say because the defects are so deep that no one can identify the specific solutions.

By the way, we called the hotline on Monday and the automated menu redirected us to Healthcare.gov, which in turn told us to get in touch with someone at the call center.

Insurance companies are also already sending out notices to millions of consumers cancelling individual policies because they are non-compliant with ObamaCare's new mandates. Kaiser Health News, usually a cheerleader for the law, reports that "Florida Blue, for example, is terminating about 300,000 policies, about 80 percent of its individual policies in the state." Kaiser Permanente in California has sent notices to 160,000 people, Highmark in Pittsburgh is dropping about 20% of its individual market customers, and Independence Blue Cross of Philadelphia is dropping about 45%.

Remember when Mr. Obama said you could keep your policy if you liked it?

The White House could have asked Congress for a delay to get the exchanges right and avoid this debacle. Liberals claim to be in favor of "what works and what doesn't," as Mr. Obama likes to say, and the exchanges clearly belong to the latter category.

But the exchanges fiasco is revealing the larger truth that ObamaCare's claim to technocratic expertise was always a political con. It won over the New Yorker and made ObamaCare designer Peter Orszag a celebrity. But it was all a veneer for ObamaCare's real goal, which is to centralize political control over health care.

That false front is clear now as we are told to ignore the faulty rollout because it will get fixed, eventually, and in any case the law is really about reducing inequality. At least now Democrats are being honest. The actual results will always matter less to liberals than their good intentions and expanding the reach of government.

Mr. Obama did identify one culprit on Monday—naturally, the Republicans who he claimed somehow sabotaged Healthcare.gov despite having nothing to do with its development. "I just want to remind everybody, we did not wage this long and contentious battle just around a website," he said. Yes, and that's what should really scare the public.

www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/10/21/Obamacare-phone-number-fail

Obama Tells Americans to Enroll via Phone, Phone Number Crashes

1-800-FUCKYO strikes again

www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/10/21/demographic-shift-puts-american-dream-out-reach/?intcmp=latestnews

Rising child poverty pushes American dream out of reach for many

That demographic shift was first noted in 1965, when then-Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan produced his controversial report, "The Negro Family: A Case for National Action." Since then, single parenthood (by choice, not divorce) has largely been mainstreamed through the American culture and across races. About 70 percent of African-American children are born to single mothers, as are almost 50 percent of Hispanic children, and the single parenthood rate among white families is rising faster than for the other two groups.

"The kids in single-parent families are around five times as likely to be poor as in a married couple family, " said Haskins. "That's in part because a single woman often does not earn enough to get her kids out of poverty. It’s also because a single mother is really squeezed -- especially if she tries to work, so she has less time to spend with her children."

blog.heritage.org/2013/10/21/obamacares-threat-to-marriage-and-americas-civil-society/

In addition to a tsunami of glitches in online enrollment, Obamacare is designed with a payment structure that undercuts marriage and the family—two institutions that have historically provided the foundation for a sustainable and thriving civil society.

The law is structured to provide less support to a husband and wife than it would to the same couple if they were cohabiting. In essence, it will tax married couples to fund the benefits it provides to couples who cohabit, divorce, or never marry. The impact of this discrimination will affect couples at every income level and creates a scenario in which couples’ wisest financial decision would be to divorce or forgo tying the knot.

America has already seen a 50 percent decline in the marriage rate since the 1970s and a tenfold increase in cohabitation. If Obamacare exacerbates this decline, many more Americans could miss out on the positive effects that marriage has for both men and women. Children, in particular, will suffer amidst continued family dissolution regarding poverty, physical and emotional health, and the likelihood of success.

Without the benefits of an intact family, children are 82 percent more likely to live in poverty and tend to fare worse on a wide range of economic measures. In their teens, they are more likely to engage in high-risk behaviors such as sexual activity, substance abuse, and anti-social behavior. They also tend to fare worse on emotional and psychological outcomes and have lower levels of academic achievement and educational attainment.

online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304402104579149420879742530

Fifty-four Iraqis were killed and another 70 injured Sunday when two suicide bombers blew themselves up in a Baghdad cafe. But you probably didn't catch the news.

Iraq, where 4,488 Americans recently and bravely gave their lives, and over which Washington obsessed for two decades, has effectively ceased to exist for the purposes of U.S. politics. The show has been canceled; there will be no reruns. Barack Obama's Iraq achievement is that you are now free to think of suicide bombings in Baghdad as you might a mud slide in Pakistan or a cholera outbreak in Haiti: As a bad, but remote, fact.

Except there have been a lot of suicide bombings lately in Iraq...Altogether some 7,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed so far this year, approaching levels last seen in 2008. Most of the killing has been done by al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), a group that in 2009 had been so thoroughly beaten by the combination of the U.S. surge and the Sunni Awakening that it barely existed. Now it's back, killing more people than any other al Qaeda franchise, attempting to tip Iraq toward civil war and joining ranks with its jihadist allies in Syria.

At what point does all this start to, you know, worry us?

Maybe when they start killing Americans again. Until then, the reflex political reaction regarding the return of AQI is to insist that it is a local group with mostly local ambitions, and that it is largely a reaction to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's purportedly anti-Sunni policies. Nothing in life is harder to unseat than a settled and comfortable assumption.

Still, assumptions must inevitably run up against facts. No ostensibly "local" al Qaeda branch has ever remained local for long, a point brought home last month when Somalia's al-Shabaab went on an epic killing spree at Nairobi's Westgate Mall.

By doing so little to stop the spiraling chaos in Iraq and Syria, the administration isn't keeping America out of harm's way. It is allowing the next generation of jihadists to incubate, hatch and grow, mostly undisturbed by us. For more on how that works out, think about U.S. policy toward Afghanistan, 1989-2001.

The point doesn't square with the conventional wisdom that developed about Iraq midway through the last decade. Back then, the idea was that it was America's presence in the country that strengthened AQI, and that America's departure was therefore bound to weaken it. "Without that rallying cry [of opposing U.S. occupation], what would al Qaeda have left?" the Cato Institute's Christopher Preble and Justin Logan asked in late 2005. The answer, as this year's bloody mounting toll testifies, is plenty.

Let's make this simple: What al Qaeda wants is power. It believes it can achieve power through what one of its theoreticians once called "the management of savagery." The more chaotic the Middle East, the more hospitable it is to al Qaeda's goals. That is why Mr. Obama's retreat from Iraq and his refusal to intervene in Syria in the war's early days have been such a boon to al Qaeda. The longer this goes on, the stronger al Qaeda will get.

Mr. Maliki is scheduled to visit the White House next week. Iraq has been asking the U.S. for help with counterterrorism, including the use of U.S. drones to help secure its porous border with Syria. An administration more mindful of U.S. security interests than of its campaign slogans should help the Iraqis out. Americans may think they've changed the channel on Iraq, but the grisly show goes on. Pay attention before it gets worse.

online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304410204579143350571112392

If at first you don't succeed in breaking the law, try getting a promotion. That's the formula now at work at the National Labor Relations Board, where deposed Board member and Big Labor loyalist Richard Griffin is poised to become general counsel.

Mr. Griffin was one of three non-recess recess appointments President Obama made to the NLRB while the Senate was still holding pro-forma sessions in January 2012. Those appointments have since been ruled unconstitutional by three federal appellate courts including the D.C. Circuit, and the Supreme Court will take up the issue in NLRB v. Noel Canning this term.

Mr. Griffin has a long history as a union operative, serving on the board of directors for the AFL-CIO Lawyers Coordinating Committee and as general counsel to the International Union of Operating Engineers, a union with a history of questionable behavior and brushes with organized crime.

Mr. Griffin would be the agency's top legal official, yet as a member of the Board he and the other non-recess recess appointees continued to issue decisions even after the courts had declared their appointments illegal. Altogether, the Board continued operating without a legitimate quorum for months, issuing hundreds of decisions that are presumptively invalid and will potentially have to be reconsidered after the Supreme Court's decision in Noel Canning.

Somebody needs to be impeached.

[Tails82]

www.breitbart.com/Big-Hollywood/2013/10/22/jon-stewart-obamacare-turd

Jon Stewart on Obamacare: A 'Turd' the Dems Can't Spin

If Obama's lost Jon Stewart, Oprah, etc. he's lost the base.

online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303448104579151702534955822

The Obama administration is even deeper in denial about the ObamaCare fiasco than the president's shockingly bewildered speech yesterday indicated. Witness the new ad touting HealthCare.gov, the nonfunctioning website..."The site was very easy to use," declares Deborah Lielasus, a self-employed quinquagenarian New Hampshire woman, who, according to the YouTube blurb, "will save hundreds of dollars each month" and "has better coverage, lower deductibles, and lower co-pays."

Did she really find the site "very easy to use"? We suppose this is subjective, and maybe she has preternatural patience or is some kind of computer savant. But National Review's Sterling Beard managed to track her down, and she "said it actually took her three days to enroll." The ad would be deceptive if it weren't so unbelievable to begin with...the Obama administration and at least some of its supporters remain in denial not only about the economic absurdity of ObamaCare but even about the technical problems that have been almost universally acknowledged.

On Sunday Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius penned a don't-worry-be-happy op-ed for a home-state newspaper, the Wichita Eagle...But the administration's happy talk and excuses have begun to wear thin even on normally supportive journalists. The Washington Post's Dana Milbank, elaborating on our gag from yesterday, reimagines Obama's speech as a Ronco-type infomercial. Even Michael Shear and Robert Pear of the New York Times describe the president as having performed "like a TV pitchman."

Perhaps the hardest core of ObamaCare defenders can be found at Salon.com, where a debate has broken out over the degree to which it is appropriate to deny reality. Joan Walsh favors total denial:

"On the one hand, yes, it's important for Democrats to acknowledge when government screws up, and to fix it.

"On the other hand, when liberals rush conscientiously to do that, they only encourage the completely unbalanced and unhinged coverage of whatever the problem may be. . . .

"Since I had heard Obama's Monday remarks widely previewed as an 'apology' for the problems of Healthcare.gov, I was glad to hear him take a defiant tone."

In other words, better to continue doing the wrong things and denying reality so Obama doesn't look bad than to admit a single flaw.

www.foxnews.com/us/2013/10/22/craigslist-makes-turning-food-stamps-into-cash-snap/

Food stamp recipients are turning the government handouts into quick cash with ads on Craigslist, despite efforts to stem fraud.

The federally-funded grocery assistance coupons -- which are issued by states in the form of debit cards under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) -- are being sold on the online bulletin board as well as auction sites like eBay. FoxNews.com found several offerings at Craigslist sites around the country, where the sellers offered the welfare benefits at large discounts from face value.

The coupons are not supposed to be transferred, and Craigslist's policy lists them among the items that are not allowed to be sold or bartered on the site. But unless someone flags such a post, there's little the sites, which operate in small, medium and large markets around the country, can do. Critics suspect sellers either don't need them any more because they have found work, or simply want to exchange them for cash so that they can buy drugs or other items that are not permitted under the rules of the program.

Because the cards do not include a photo ID, a recipient who is looking to sell his or her benefits for cash can simply do so and then report them stolen or lost and be issued a replacement.

With one in every seven Americans on food stamps -- up a million since June of last year -- the impetus to cut down on fraud is rising. According to reports, nearly 850,000 people were investigated for possible SNAP fraud in the United States and 1,200 stores were permanently removed from the food stamp program for illegal conduct.

"Since 2008, the cost of SNAP has more than doubled from $34 billion to $74 billion," according to Rep. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D. who said in a recent press release that the Obama administration has allowed food stamp enrollment to explode, even beyond what an ailing economy might account for, in part by not pressing states to crack down on eligibility requirements.

It would, of course, be racist to use photo ID because only blacks commit fraud dontcha know.

washingtonexaminer.com/irs-handed-out-132-billion-in-wrongful-payments-under-tax-credit-program/article/2537575

IRS handed out $132 billion in wrongful payments under low-income tax credit program

It's also "unlikely that the IRS will significantly reduce those improper payments in the future, in part because it does not want to discourage low-income earners who qualify from applying for the credit, according to the audit by the office of the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration.

The IRS failed to implement required safeguards against improper tax credits and, as of 2012, was annually handing out at least $11 billion to those who did not qualify for the benefit, the audit showed...The report found that the IRS has over the past decade wrongfully handed out as much as $132 billion in earned income tax credits, a situation not likely to improve soon.

washingtonexaminer.com/dick-cheney-the-extremist-in-washington-is-barack-obama/article/2537588

Dick Cheney: 'The extremist in Washington is Barack Obama'

Cheney said Obama is working to "fundamentally transform our health care system" and is damaging America's standing in the world with his foreign policy.

www.foxnews.com/world/2013/10/22/palestinian-authority-kids-mag-publishes-bogus-wit-and-wisdom-adolf-hitler/?intcmp=latestnews

Palestinian Authority kids' mag publishes bogus wit and wisdom of Adolf Hitler

Zayzafuna, a youth magazine whose advisory board includes Palestinian Authority Deputy Minister of Education Jihad Zakameh, published the list of quotes in its August edition in a section titled “Among Hitler’s sayings,” Palestinian Media Watch reported.

Palestinian Media Watch officials said the purpose of the list is seemingly to present Hitler as a “sharp-witted and wise” person.

“This is not the first time that the PA-associated youth magazine has presented Hitler in a positive light,” PMW’s website reads. “In 2011, PMW exposed an essay in Zayzafuna that glorified Hitler and portrayed him as a role model. The essay expressed admiration for Hitler because he killed Jews – an act presented as benefiting all of humanity. In the essay, Hitler says to a Palestinian girl in her dream: ‘I killed them [the Jews] so you would all know that they are a nation which spreads destructions all over the world.’”

Nazi sympathy among some Palestinians has made headlines twice this year, first when a flag with the swastika was flown next to a mosque in the Arab town of Beit Omar, about a half-hour south of Jerusalem. Israelis in the area notified the Israel Defense Force, which had the offensive banner removed.

"I felt we were going back 75 years, losing our hold on the land," a man identified as Uri Arnon told the Tazpit News Agency. "The Arabs no longer feel the need to hide their murderous tendencies, announcing out loud that they wish to annihilate us."

Just last week, a similar flag appeared along a major road in Beit Umar and was removed.

blog.heritage.org/2013/10/22/how-obama-is-remaking-federal-courts-in-one-chart/

President Obama and his supporters constantly claim that Senate Republicans are being “obstructionist” and preventing the confirmation of his federal court nominees. If you look at the facts, however, Obama’s confirmation record is higher than the last three Presidents—even though he hasn’t made judicial nominations a priority.

Obama has bemoaned the fact that his nominees have waited an “unprecedented” amount of time to be confirmed by the Senate. While some of Obama’s nominees have waited longer from the time they were voted out of the Senate Judiciary Committee to when they received a vote by the full Senate, the timing of that situation is almost exclusively controlled by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D–NV). Bush’s nominees, on the other hand, waited longer from the time of their nomination to when the committee scheduled a hearing, which can be affected by the actions of Senators from either party.

Regardless of the length of time between nomination and confirmation, Obama is still outpacing Bush by two to one if you compare their second terms.

www.truthrevolt.org/news/cnbcs-liesman-can-we-get-mexican-music-ted-cruz

On Tuesday morning’s CNBC Squawk Box, senior economics reporter Steve Liesman blamed the weak jobs report on Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX)...As CNBC showed a picture of Cruz, Liesman added, “There he is! There he is! Can we get some music to go along with that, some Mexican music maybe?”

Cruz (R-TX) is of Cuban extraction.

washingtonexaminer.com/after-shutdown-spotlight-ted-cruz-given-heros-welcome-in-texas/article/2537576

Ted Cruz given hero's welcome in Texas

At a Tea Party event Monday night in his hometown of Houston, Cruz was greeted with chants of "Cruz, Cruz Cruz" and "Thank you, Ted" from a crowd estimated at more than 1,000, the Houston Chronicle reported.

"I've spent the past month in Washington, D.C., and it is terrific to be back in America," Cruz told the cheering crowd.

"There are a few people in Washington saying some mean things [about me]. Who cares, because at the end of the day I don't work for the party bosses in Washington, I work for each and every one of you."

[Tails82]

Jen says none of this is happening

www.foxbusiness.com/personal-finance/2013/10/23/ahead-obamacare-deadline-health-insurers-canceling-thousands-policies-fall-short-aca-rules/

President Obama has promised people who liked their current doctor and health-care plan would be able to keep it as the Affordable Care continues to get implemented, but that’s proving not to be the case for many Americans.

Insurance companies have sent out hundreds of thousands of letters to consumers in recent months cancelling their health-care plans.

Kaiser Health News reports the cancelled policies “fall short” of the essential health benefits the ACA requires all plans include beginning Jan. 1, and are therefore not eligible for sale on the state and federally-run exchanges.

The law requires plans to include coverage for maternity care, ambulatory services, prescription medications and more, additions that critics say will drive up premium costs for policyholders who may never use them.

Among the insurance companies terminating policies are Kaiser Permanente in California, which sent notices to 160,000 policy holders; Highmark Pittsburgh, which dropped 20% of its individual market customers; and Independence Blue Cross, a major insurer in Philadelphia, eliminating 45% of its individual policies, Kaiser reports. The biggest hit comes in Florida, where insurer Florida Blue has dropped 300,000 policies.

In some cases, policies for those with pre-existing conditions were terminated while other customers faced price increases since the rollout of the new insurance exchanges, according to Kaiser. Beginning in mid-September, for example, Blue Shield of California sent nearly 119,000 cancellation notices to individuals, and nearly two-thirds of this group were notified of rate increases, the nonprofit news service reports.

While the policy termination numbers coming out of Florida are staggering, Feyman says they are likely just the start...“This will be happening across the marketplace,”

www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2013/10/23/the_dismantling_of_the_american_health_care_system

"House Speaker John A. Boehner predicted Wednesday that by the end of the month, more Americans will have lost their insurance by being kicked off existing health plans than the number who were able to sign up in the flawed online healthcare.gov website. And the early numbers may back him up,"...Once again, I'll tell you, this is so frustrating. I cannot tell you how everything that we predicted, folks, is panning out. Every bad aspect of this is happening. This is classic. Almost a half a million people, two companies, have been tossed aside because their policies are not favorable to the insurance companies, and the insurance companies have a place to send them: Obamacare. Except there's nothing at Obamacare to sign up for. The thing is, this is by design. This is what really, really frosts me.

What we are watching is the dismantling of the US health care system...We hear horror stories every week about what is happening in pharmacies. Who knows what's going on at actual pharmaceutical companies in R&D. But they are at the top of the enemies list, as far as the Democrat Party is concerned.

When the Cleveland Clinic is laying off tens of thousands of employees, the premiere heart clinic and institute in the country, this is not an accident. It's not because of the incompetence of liberalism, although it could be...this is purposeful.

online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303902404579151843080376798

90 Million Americans Not Working

The labor force participation rate stayed at its lowest level since the 1970s at 63.2%.

The U.S. now has 90.6 million "non-institutionalized" men and women over the age of 16 not working—an all-time high. That's 10 million above the 80.5 million when President Obama took office. With total employment at 144.3 million, for every three Americans over the age of 16 earning a paycheck there are two who aren't even looking for a job. That's an ugly portent for American prosperity.

Even among those in their prime working years between 25 and 64, the number not working has increased by about 1.8 million since 2008...Easy access to expanded government welfare benefits that substitute for work—unemployment insurance, disability, food stamps and soon ObamaCare—also contribute to the decline, as economists like Casey Mulligan of the University of Chicago have documented.

Our Keynesian friends chalk it up to the "fiscal drag" caused by sequester budget cuts and the government shutdown. But the September hiring figures predate the shutdown...In August and September combined, public employment rose by 54,000, with all the gains in state and local governments. Government hired more workers in those two months than did any industry other than health care and business services. The government is not hurting for money.

To get more private jobs requires faster economic growth, and the Obama Administration could do worse than listen to those who do most of the hiring in America. According to the National Federation of Independent Business, two big concerns are regulation and ObamaCare.

washingtonexaminer.com/obamacare-launch-spawns-700-cyber-squatters-capitalizing-on-healthcare.gov-state-exchanges/article/2537691

Obamacare launch spawns 700+ cyber-squatters capitalizing on Healthcare.gov, state exchanges

More than 700 websites have been created with names playing off of Obamacare or Healthcare.gov, making it likely that some Americans will mistakenly hand over private information to unknown third-parties.

Online security expert John McAfee predicted such a problem weeks ago. "There is no central place where I can go and say, 'OK, here are all the legitimate brokers and examiners, for all of the states,' and pick and choose one," McAfee told Fox News' Neil Cavuto.

"Instead, any hacker can put a website up, and make it look extremely competitive, and because of the nature of the system — this is health care, after all — they can ask you the most intimate questions and you're freely going to answer them."

Don't forget the target audience is naturally gullible: after all, they're trying to get in on Obamacare, the biggest scam out there. I have a feeling we'll be bailing these folks out sometime in the future.

www.frc.org/washingtonupdate/hobby-lobbyists-company-pitches-obamacare-fight-to-supremes

You know the ObamaCare rollout is bad when Consumer Reports, the holy grail of product reviews, warns people "to stay away from Healthcare.gov."...Steer clear, its experts say, "until its software vendors clean up the mess they've made."

Unfortunately, economists point out, the dysfunctional website may be the least of everyone's worries. Once the cyber-kinks get worked out, there's plenty more to be concerned about -- not the least of which is the collapse of the overwhelmed insurance pools. John Goodman, president of the National Center for Policy Analysis, thinks the biggest ObamaCare surprises are yet to come. "The danger from this triple threat is that too many healthy people will exit or never sign up for the exchanges, leaving only the people who are most expensive to insure," Goodman explained. "A death spiral for an insurance pool is like a normal company going bankrupt... Healthy people [will] leave the pool because they're being over-charged. Sick people remain because they are being under-charged."

While the rest of the country is focused on the technical chaos, the real panic may set in after Americans can enroll and start tipping the system into an unsustainable future...Yesterday, President Obama took his turn before the microphones, an attempt to salvage his sinking approval ratings. For the third consecutive quarter, Americans' satisfaction with the White House is plummeting -- dropping to 44.5%, an epic low that puts the commander-in-chief in some dubious company. Only two presidents have had lower 19th quarter averages than Obama: Richard Nixon (Watergate) and Lyndon Johnson (Vietnam).

He should go back to Kenya imo.

The owners of Hobby Lobby -- and a host of other businesses -- would certainly appreciate the same reprieve from the abortion-contraception mandate, which as of October 1, forces companies to pay for drugs and devices they morally oppose or face crushing fines. If the administration won't protect the First Amendment, Hobby Lobby is hoping the Supreme Court will. Monday, the owners filed papers with the justices, asking them to take their case against the Obama administration. Their fate -- and the fate of more than 230 years of religious liberty -- depend on it.

2016 predictions on Obamacare:

online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303448104579149642030106938

Obama spends his time raising money/campaigning off all of the above:

www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/10/23/obama-raising-money-off-healthcaregov-problems/

The troubled HealthCare.gov website may be having problems pulling in applicants for ObamaCare, but that's not stopping President Obama's political arm from pulling in cash off the dysfunctional site.

Through his political group Organizing for Action, Obama sent a videotaped message to supporters in an email Tuesday evening.

The email, though, also appealed for donations, saying "the other side will spend millions to maintain the status quo."

Obamacare IS the status quo...but again, Obama has to pretend it's everyone else who is the problem, not him.

www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2013/10/23/HuffPo-Obama-Press-Treatment-Dictators-Dream

HuffPo: Obama Policy Toward Press A 'Dictator's Dream'

The article details remarks made by AP CEO Gary Pruitt to the 69th General Assembly of the Inter American Press Association. He said the U.S. Justice Department's secret seizure of records of thousands of telephone calls to and from AP reporters in 2012 is one of the most blatant violations of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution the 167-year-old news cooperative has ever encountered.

www.truthrevolt.org/news/fox-news-beckel-wh-called-bludgeon-me-backing-obamacare-delay

Fox News' Beckel: WH Called to 'Bludgeon' Me for Backing Obamacare Delay

On Fox News on Tuesday morning, former Democratic campaign advisor Bob Beckel stated that after he criticized Obamacare on air, he received an angry call direct from the White House. “The other day on The Five, I called for a delay of the implementation of this from six months to a year, and I got a call from somebody at the White House who absolutely bludgeoned me over it,” Beckel explained. Beckel stood by his position, saying that the website was a portal to healthcare, and that if people did not use it, or the website was broken, they might not return.

This is hardly the first circumstance of the White House calling adverse journalists or pundits and reading them the riot act for failing to echo White House positions. Back in February 2013, iconic journalist Bob Woodward stated that the Obama administration had contacted him and told him that he would “regret” it if he did not change his position on sequestration. The National Journal’s Ron Fournier admitted to similar treatment. So did former Clinton lawyer Lanny Davis.

Dumb3094313 does it again:

online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303902404579151573907253280

Our Former Friends the Saudis

President Obama likes to boast that he has repaired U.S. alliances supposedly frayed and battered by the Bush Administration. He should try using that line with our former allies in Saudi Arabia.

As the Journal's Ellen Knickmeyer has reported from Riyadh in recent weeks, the Kingdom is no longer making any secret of its disgust with the Administration's policy drift in the Middle East. Last month, Prince Turki al Faisal, the former Saudi ambassador in Washington, offered his view on the deal Washington struck with Moscow over Syria's chemical weapons.

"The current charade of international control over Bashar's chemical arsenal," the Prince told a London audience, "would be funny if it were not so blatantly perfidious, and designed not only to give Mr. Obama an opportunity to back down, but also to help Assad butcher his people." It's a rare occasion when a Saudi royal has the moral standing to lecture an American President, but this was one of them.

On Monday, Ms. Knickmeyer reported that Saudi intelligence chief Prince Bandar has decided to downgrade ties with the CIA in training Syrian rebels, preferring instead to work with the French and Jordanians. It's a rare day, too, when those two countries make for better security partners than the U.S. But even French Socialists are made of sterner stuff than this Administration.

Bandar's decision means the Saudis will not be inclined to bow any longer to U.S. demands to limit the arms they provide the rebels, including surface-to-air missiles that could potentially be used by terrorists to bring down civilian planes. The Saudis have also told the U.S. they will no longer favor U.S. defense contractors in future arms deals—no minor matter coming from a country that in 2011 bought $33.4 billion of American weapons.

Riyadh's dismay has been building for some time. In the aborted build-up to a U.S. strike on Syria, the Saudis asked the U.S. to beef up its naval presence in the Persian Gulf against a potential Iranian counter-strike, only to be told the U.S. didn't have the ships. In last year's foreign policy debate with Mitt Romney, Mr. Obama was nonchalant about America's shrinking Navy, but this is one of the consequences of our diminishing military footprint: U.S. security guarantees are no longer credible.

Then there is Iran. Even more than Israel, the Saudis have been pressing the Administration to strike Iran's nuclear targets while there's still time. Now Riyadh is realizing that Mr. Obama's diplomacy is a journey with no destination, that there are no real red lines, and that any foreign adversary can call his bluff. Nobody should be surprised if the Saudis conclude they need nukes of their own—probably purchased from Pakistan—as pre-emptive deterrence against the inevitability of a nuclear Tehran.

The Saudis are hardly the first U.S. ally to be burned by an American President more eager to court enemies than reassure friends. The Poles and Czechs found that out when Mr. Obama withdrew ballistic-missile defense sites from their country in 2009 as a way of appeasing the Russians.

www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2013/10/23/The-Saudis-and-Obama-Weakness-Breeds-Contempt

All the bowing to the monarchy, all the Muslim outreach, all the criticism of Israel, all the help in crushing a Shia rebellion in Bahrain meant nothing to Saudi Arabia, which has let it be known that it intends to distance itself from the United States despite the obsequious efforts of President Barack Obama to cultivate a closer relationship. Once again, the "smart power" of the Obama administration has been proven a fraud.

The fact that they are speaking out publicly is a warning to the Obama administration to change course. It is also a sign that the central premise of Obama's foreign policy--that the world would like America more if it were less assertive--is fundamentally wrong.

Screw-the-poor progressivism:

online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303680404579141741399966328

The Irrational Fear of GM Food

Billions of people have eaten genetically modified food over the past two decades. Not one problem has been found.

Society, the economy and the environment have benefited enormously from GM crops. India has flipped from cotton importer to exporter because of insect-resistant cotton. Herbicide-tolerant GM crops have stimulated no-tillage farming, reducing soil erosion and greenhouse gas emissions. Insect-resistant GM crops have cut insecticide sprayings by more than 25%—and as much as sevenfold in some parts of India. In developing countries, GM crops have helped ensure food security and bolster incomes for farmers, allowing parents to focus more resources on other priorities, such as educating their children.

Such remarkable achievements are only the beginning. Dozens of better GM crops are in the pipeline from companies, universities and public agencies around the world. Crops in development include virus-resistant cassava, a starchy root otherwise known as tapioca; nutritionally enriched rice that can help prevent blindness and early death among children; nitrogen-efficient crops that reduce fertilizer runoff; and many more.

These crops will continue to reduce hunger by bringing more bountiful and nutritious harvests. They will also help the environment by mitigating the impact of agriculture by conserving our precious, finite supply of fresh water; freeing up land for other uses, like carbon-absorbing forests; preserving topsoil; and reducing the use of insecticides and herbicides, thereby enhancing biodiversity.

Biotechnology offers an unparalleled safety record and demonstrated commercial success. Remarkably, however, biotechnology might not reach its full potential. In part, that's because outspoken opponents of GM crops in the U.S. have spearheaded a "labeling" movement that would distinguish modified food from other food on grocery store shelves. Never mind that 60%-70% of processed food on the market contains genetically modified ingredients. In much of Europe, farmers are barred from growing genetically modified crops. Even in Africa, anti-biotechnology sentiment has blocked its application. In Zambia, for example, the government refused donations of GM corn in 2002, even as its people starved.

Opponents of GM crops have been extremely effective at spreading misinformation. GM crops don't, as one discredited study claimed recently, cause cancer or other diseases. GM cotton isn't responsible for suicides among Indian farmers—a 2008 study by an alliance of 64 governments and nongovernmental organizations debunked that myth completely. And GM crops don't harm bees or monarch butterflies.

In fact, people have consumed billions of meals containing GM foods in the 17 years since they were first commercialized, and not one problem has been documented. This comes as no surprise. Every respected scientific organization that has studied GM crops—the American Medical Association, the National Academy of Sciences and the World Health Organization, among others—has found GM crops both safe for humans and positive for the environment...nearly everything humans have eaten though the millennia has been genetically altered by human intervention. Mankind has been breeding crops—and thereby genetically altering them—since the dawn of agriculture. Today's techniques for modifying plants are simply new, high-precision methods for doing the same.

Resistance to biotechnology seems all the more unbelievable considering that much of it comes from the same thoughtful people who tend to dismiss climate-change skeptics as "anti-science." It seems to me that much of the resistance to GM foods isn't based on science, but may be ideological and political, based on fears of "corporate profiteering" and "Western colonialism."

To note one irony: The extreme opposition to genetic modification has led to hyper-regulation of GM crops, which has raised the cost of bringing them to market. Now only multinational companies and large research entities can afford to comply with the rules. Smaller enterprises in developing countries are ultimately hurt much more than large conglomerates.

[Tails82]

www.politico.com/story/2013/10/heckuva-a-job-sebelius-98761.html?hp=r5

Heckuva job, Kathleen Sebelius

Her explanation for why the Obamacare website doesn’t work is that she couldn’t possibly have been expected to make it work in the mere 3½ years since the law passed. She told The Wall Street Journal the website ideally needed five years of construction and one year of testing and instead had only two years of construction and almost no testing.

That means with the proper development time, HealthCare.gov would have had a flawless launch … on Oct 1, 2017. Needless to say, had Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) suggested a four-year delay in Obamacare as his fallback in the defunding fight, he would have been scorned as an unbending fanatic, although he just might have been giving Sebelius the breathing room she needed.

It wasn’t that Sebelius should have known that the website wouldn’t work; she knew it wouldn’t work, at least if a test done days before it launched was any indication. According to a report in The Washington Post, the website was crashed by a few hundred users during the test. Insurers urged that the national rollout be delayed in light of the website’s continuing unworkability, but all other considerations fell before the imperative to get under way on Oct. 1.

Sebelius says she felt the fierce urgency of now. “There are people in this country who have waited decades for affordable health care coverage,” she told CNN. Yet it does no good to the uninsured or anyone else to rush out a website that doesn’t work. The administration clearly wanted no further delays that could give fodder to opponents of the law. Perversely, it gave them, instead, the most powerful symbol of government dysfunction of the Obama era.

The bottom line is that a law sold on the promise that you can keep your insurance if you like it has almost certainly dumped, or is about to dump, more people off of insurance than it has signed up. As insurers leave the individual market for the exchanges and bring their policies in compliance with Obamacare’s new rules, they drop their old individual policies en masse. If people who had been covered under them want to stay insured, they have to go to … you guessed it … the non-functioning HealthCare.gov.

www.ncregister.com/daily-news/lawsuit-hhs-mandate-a-conscious-political-strategy-to-divide-the-church/

Lawsuit: HHS Mandate a ‘Conscious Political Strategy’ to Divide the Church

Catholic organizations in Washington, D.C., and Thomas Aquinas College in California have filed a suit against the Obama administration, demanding a reprieve from the federal contraception mandate on religious-liberty grounds.

The mandate was issued by the Department of Health and Human Services under the Affordable Care Act and requires employers to provide and pay for contraception, sterilization and abortion-causing drugs and procedures in employee health-insurance plans, even if doing so violates the employer's conscience or religious beliefs.

In June 2013, the government finalized an exemption from the mandate for certain religious organizations; however, the exemption only applies to houses of worship and not to religious nonprofit ministries, schools, hospitals or charities; nor does it apply to for-profit organizations run by religious persons.

This distinction, the organizations’ lawsuit says, “seeks to divide the Catholic Church, artificially separating its ‘houses of worship’ from its ministries.”

It adds, “As before, Plaintiffs are coerced, through threats of crippling fines and other pressure, into facilitating access to contraception, abortion-inducing products, sterilization, and related counseling for their employees, contrary to their sincerely held religious beliefs.”

The government’s reluctance to create an exemption for religious institutions or find a less restrictive means of providing the products and procedures required by the mandate “establishes that the mandate was part of a conscious political strategy to marginalize and delegitimize” Catholic and other “religious views on contraception by holding them up for ridicule on the national stage,” the organizations claim in their request for a reprieve from the law.

They explain that HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has mocked the opposition to contraception and abortion-causing drugs at a NARAL Pro-Choice America fundraiser, and plaintiffs argue that the recommendation to define contraception, sterilization and abortion-causing drugs as a “preventative service” required by federal law revealed the committee members’ “subjective determinations filtered through a lens of advocacy.”

In addition, the mandate is based upon a California law “whose chief legislative sponsor made clear that its purpose was to strike a blow against Catholic religious authorities” and coerce Catholic officials into accepting contraceptives’ use.

washingtonexaminer.com/democrats-expected-to-exempt-staff-from-obamacare/article/2537794

Democrats expected to exempt staff from Obamacare...Such a move to shield thousands of aides would be a blow to efforts to have all of Capitol Hill enrolled into the system the president and congressional Democrats created.

Said a top Senate GOP staffer: “If Obamacare is so awesome, why the hell aren't Democratic committee chairmen giving their staff the gift of losing the insurance they have and be dumped into Obamacare like the rest of us?”

According to several sources, most or all GOP committee staffers in the Senate are expected to be shifted over to Obamacare. Many Democratic staffs, however, are not expected to be moved into Obamacare, though the final decision will be made Friday.

www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/10/24/Hidden-In-ObamaCare-Applicants-Give-Up-Right-To-Privacy

Hidden in ObamaCare Site: Applicants Surrender Right to Privacy

During Thursday's congressional hearing with the contractors responsible for building the troubled ObamaCare federal exchanges, we learned that whether you end up enrolling in ObamaCare or not, no one who puts any information into the ObamaCare website can expect to have their privacy protected. Moreover, the fact that you are giving up your right to privacy is hidden in source code that reads, "You have no reasonable expectation of privacy regarding any communication of any data transmitted or stored on this information system."

The American people have been repeatedly assured that the website is HIPAA compliant; covered under the strictest of privacy regulations regarding medical and personal information.

But like absolutely everything else involving ObamaCare, our expectation of privacy was a lie...

online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303902404579152082961445984

The collapse of ObamaCare is the tip of the iceberg for the magical Obama presidency...All of a sudden, from Washington to Riyadh, Barack Obama's credibility is melting.

Amid the predictable collapse the past week of HealthCare.gov's too-complex technology, not enough notice was given to Sen. Marco Rubio's statement that the chances for success on immigration reform are about dead. Why? Because, said Sen. Rubio, there is "a lack of trust" in the president's commitments.

Sen. Rubio said he and other reform participants, such as Idaho's Rep. Raul Labrador, are afraid that if they cut an immigration deal with the White House—say, offering a path to citizenship in return for strong enforcement of any new law—Mr. Obama will desert them by reneging on the enforcement.

When belief in the average politician's word diminishes, the political world marks him down and moves away. With the president of the United States, especially one in his second term, the costs of the credibility markdown become immeasurably greater. Ask the Saudis.

Last weekend the diplomatic world was agog at the refusal of Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah to accept a seat on the U.N. Security Council. Global disbelief gave way fast to clear understanding: The Saudis have decided that the United States is no longer a reliable partner in Middle Eastern affairs.

The Saudi king, who supported Syria's anti-Assad rebels early, before Islamic jihadists polluted the coalition, watched Mr. Obama's red line over Assad's use of chemical weapons disappear into an about-face deal with Vladimir Putin. The next time King Abdullah looked up, Mr. Obama was hanging the Saudis out to dry yet again by phoning up Iran's President Hasan Rouhani, Assad's primary banker and armorer, to chase a deal on nuclear weapons. Within days, Saudi Arabia's intelligence chief, Prince Bandar, let it be known that the Saudis intend to distance themselves from the U.S.

Bluntly, Mr. Obama's partners are concluding that they cannot do business with him. They don't trust him. Whether it's the Saudis, the Syrian rebels, the French, the Iraqis, the unpivoted Asians or the congressional Republicans, they've all had their fill of coming up on the short end with so mercurial a U.S. president. And when that happens, the world's important business doesn't get done. It sits in a dangerous and volatile vacuum.

The next major political event in Washington is the negotiation over spending, entitlements and taxes between House budget chairman Paul Ryan and his Senate partner, Patty Murray. The bad air over this effort is the same as that Marco Rubio says is choking immigration reform: the fear that Mr. Obama will urge the process forward in public and then blow up any Ryan-Murray agreement at the 11th hour with deal-killing demands for greater tax revenue.

Then there is Mr. Obama's bond with the American people, which is diminishing with the failed rollout of the Affordable Care Act. ObamaCare is the central processing unit of the Obama presidency's belief system. Now the believers are wondering why the administration suppressed knowledge of the huge program's problems when hundreds of tech workers for the project had to know this mess would happen Oct. 1.

Rather than level with the public, the government's most senior health-care official, Kathleen Sebelius, spent days spewing ludicrous and incredible happy talk about the failure, while refusing to provide basic information about its cause.

www.breitbart.com/InstaBlog/2013/10/24/Flashback-Watch-Obama-Demonstrate-How-Easy-It-Is-to-Sign-Up-for-ObamaCare

Flashback: Watch Obama Demonstrate How Easy It Is to Sign Up for ObamaCare

Other than being amusing, it does show that the concept for the federal ObamaCare site was in place three years ago, which makes it all the more surprising that it wasn't anything close to ready on time. Well, surprising if you know nothing about the competency of the federal government and a president who has never run anything larger than a classroom...

www.truthrevolt.org/news/sharptons-radio-co-host-ben-carson-gops-black-racial-hit-man

Sharpton's Radio Co-Host: Ben Carson is GOP's 'Black Racial Hit Man'

www.politico.com/multimedia/video/2013/10/politicos-throwbackthursday-president-reagan-invades-grenada.html

Remembering Grenada

www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2013/10/24/congratulations_senator_cruz

Congratulations, Senator Cruz

Fox News Channel, Greta Van Susteren. They're talking about the Democrats in the Senate up for reelection who want to delay the individual mandate for a year, which was what Cruz was asking for. It's exactly what he was asking for and he was a hostage taker, ransom demander, and all that. And Greta Van Susteren said, "What about this, Senator?"

CRUZ: It's ironic, all the people that just a few weeks ago were saying there's no way you can win this fight, there's no way we can do anything to stop Obamacare, and they also said there's no way any D's are gonna flip. We're starting to see Democrats flip as this thing -- it's a train wreck. It's not working. And in any political fight, when the truth is on your side, you're in a good situation, and here the truth is this thing isn't working.

RUSH: You know, he's got to feel great. I mean, everything the Republican Party establishment told him couldn't happen has happened. They told him we couldn't win. They told him that no Democrats are ever gonna vote for what you want. And now, what is it, 12, 14, 20 Democrats up for reelection, are all demanding a delay of a year in the individual mandate. And McCain and these guys (imitating McCain), "I'm so upset. There's no way of winning, it's impossible!" Congratulations again, Senator Cruz. I think this has just been a beautiful thing.