Tag Archives: President Obama

Border, Foreign Policy, Gangsta Govt, Lies, Millhouse, Obama, Treason, True Talking Points, Uncategorized

Reactions to Obama’s Illegal Amnesty Speech (videos)

November 22, 2014 Chuck Norton 1 Comment

The polling on this isn’t good – LINK.

The first person President Obama is in conflict with is President Obama who has stated no less than 22 times himself that the action he took tonight was illegal and unconstitutional. We have posted a transcript of each one below at the bottom of this post, but here is some of the video so you can see for yourself courtesy of the Washington Post fact Checker who called Obama’s action “a royal flip flop:

Senator Ted Cruz:

Obama’s 22 times via Speaker.gov:

With the White House poised to grant executive amnesty any day now despite the American people’s staunch opposition, on Sunday President Obama was asked about the many, many statements he made in the past about his inability to unilaterally change or ignore immigration law. His response was astonishingly brazen: “Actually, my position hasn’t changed. When I was talking to the advocates, their interest was in me, through executive action, duplicating the legislation that was stalled in Congress.”

This is a flagrant untruth: “In fact, most of the questions that were posed to the president over the past several years were about the very thing that he is expected to announce within a matter of days,” reported The New York Times. “[T]he questions actually specifically addressed the sorts of actions that he is contemplating now,” The Washington Post’s Fact Checker agreed, awarding President Obama the rare “Upside-Down Pinocchio,” which signifies “a major-league flip-flop.” Even FactCheck.org piled on.

President Obama is once again trying to mislead Americans, but he can’t run from what he’s said over and over (and over) again. Not only are Americans not stupid – they can read:

In June 2012, President Obama unilaterally granted deferred action for childhood arrivals (DACA), allowing “eligible individuals who do not present a risk to national security or public safety … to request temporary relief from deportation proceedings and apply for work authorization.” He then argued that he had already done everything he could legally do on his own:

– See more at: http://www.speaker.gov/general/22-times-president-obama-said-he-couldn-t-ignore-or-create-his-own-immigration-law#sthash.Ouj3Nb8W.dpuf

Uncategorized

2014 Election Thoughts and Reactions

November 7, 2014 Chuck Norton Leave a comment

UPDATE – Wow, this is a very interesting piece from Jon Stewart on the 2014 shellacking. It is also a good lesson in strategic political deception. See the video HERE.

Congratulations to Mia Love, the first black Republican woman in Congress and to Tim Scott the first black Senator from the South since Reconstruction. Congratulations to Joni Ernst, the first female Senator from Iowa. Has President Obama called them yet?

Meet 18-year-old Saira Blair — a Republican from West Virginia — who just became the youngest elected lawmaker in the country!

78% Say Politicians Play ‘Race Card’ Just to Get Reelected…

All newly elected GOP Senators campaigned on repealing Obamacare.

Obama does not feel repudiated…. no kidding.

Krauthammer: The worst wall to wall shellacking you will ever see in an election.

Democrats who ran on more gun control crushed.

Immigration a losing issue for Democrats even in liberal states.

Cruz: ‘The era of Obama lawlessness is over‘

Liberal media trashes female voters who turned out for Republicans…MORE…MORE….MORE.

More liberal media reaction:

More stupid reactions from the liberal media elites.

Sarah Palin: It wasn’t a vote for the GOP, it was a vote against Democrats…

Mitch McConnell is a pinhead. Why? In an absurd statement and immediate capitulation on spending and borrowing, Mitch McConnell just surrendered Congress’s power of
the purse to Obama: “Let me be clear,” McConnell said, “there will be no government shutdown and no default on the national debt.”

Point 1 – There is no default on the debt because every day the Treasury brings in more than enough to service the debt.

Point 2 – McConnell has already surrendered to the Democrats. All they have to do is threaten a government shutdown and McConnell will give them what they want.

Point 3 – This already undermined the Constitution. The “Power of the Purse”, the power to defund certain projects and agencies, is the primary “check and balance” power given to Congress in the Constitution.

Mitch McConnell is still a pinhead. Remember this? “Shutting down 17% of the government would be disastrous for Republicans in the 2014 mid terms.”

“Old Guard” Republicans who trashed conservatives got fewer votes.

Veronique de Rugy: Democrats have nothing to fear from GOP victory.

What should Republicans do now?

Well, that didn't take long… http://t.co/XQGxLVDES3—
Dr. Milton Wolf (@miltonwolfmd) November 06, 2014

In the Great Lake States “union retribution” fizzles.

The Democratic Party and leftist union leadership threw everything they had against Gov. Scott Walker in Wisconsin:

Rush Limbaugh analyzes the Wisconsin race:

Game show TV legend Chuck Woolery weighs in:

Democrats predicting Election Day victory!

Health Law, Lies, Millhouse, Obama, True Talking Points

Forbes: Obamacare Has Increased Non-Group Premiums In Nearly All States

October 31, 2014 Chuck Norton Leave a comment

Via Forbes Magazine:

Now There Can Be No Doubt: Obamacare Has Increased Non-Group Premiums In Nearly All States

Remember this categorical assurance from President Obama?

“We’ll lower premiums by up to $2,500 for a typical family per year. . . . We’ll do it by the end of my first term as president of the United States”

OK, it’s probably a little unfair to take some June 2008 campaign “puffery” literally–even though it was reiterated by candidate Obama’s economic policy advisor, Jason Furman in a sit-down with a New York Times reporter: “‘We think we could get to $2,500 in savings by the end of the first term, or be very close to it.” Moreover, President Obama subsequently doubled-down on his promise in July 2012, assuring small business owners “your premiums will go down.” Fortunately, the Washington Post fact-checker, Glenn Kessler, honestly awarded the 2012 claim Three Pinocchios (“Significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions”).

Unfortunately, this has never settled the debate. When the Society of Actuaries estimated spring 2013 that the ACA would result in increasing claims costs by an average of 32 percent nationally by 2017, such estimates could be dismissed as “projections” since at the time of this study, actual premiums in the Exchanges had not yet been announced. A subsequent plethora of studies showed there had been double-digit increases in premiums (when comparing actual Exchange premiums to previously-prevailing premiums in the non-group market). However, virtually all of these studies focused only on Exchange premiums rather than premiums in the entire non-group market (only half of which consists of Exchange coverage). As a consequence, Obamacare proponents tended to dismiss these studies either as partisan attacks or methodologically limited, making what amounts to apples-to-oranges comparisons.

However, a new study from the well-respected and non-partisan National Bureau of Economic Research (and published by Brookings Institution), overcomes the limitations of these prior studies by examining what happened to premiums in the entire non-group market. The bottom line? In 2014, premiums in the non-group market grew by 24.4% compared to what they would have been without Obamacare. Of equal importance, this careful state-by-state assessment showed that premiums rose in all but 6 states (including Washington DC). It’s worth unpacking this study a bit to understand the ramification of these findings.

Non-Group Premiums Rose in 45 States Due to Obamacare

The non-group market can only be accurately assessed on a state-by-state basis. Obamacare. The law creates a single risk pool in each state for non-group coverage. That is, health insurers can sell policies inside or outside the Exchanges but they all are part of the same risk pool. Unlike virtually all other studies that have been conducted to date, this new study examined premium data from both Exchange and non-Exchange plans, i.e., providing a picture of the complete non-group market rather than one segment. This is crucially important since in nearly one third of states (16), Exchange coverage constitutes 40% or less of the entire non-group market (Table 1).

Of equal importance, unlike prior studies which simply compared pre-Obamacare premiums in 2013 to actual premiums offered on Exchanges in 2014, this new study isolates the causal impact of Obamacare statistically by using trend data in each state to figure out what non-group premiums in 2014 would have been in the absence of Obamacare. Thus, critics could dismiss many other so-called “pre-/post” studies by effectively saying “Well, premiums in the non-group have always gone up by a large amount, so what’s happening under Obamacare is no different.” Such criticisms cannot be levied at this study. All of the percentage changes shown in the chart below represent the net change attributable to Obamacare after accounting for all the other factors that would have made premiums go up.[1]

PremiumIncreasesKowalski

Clearly, the adverse impact of Obamacare on non-group premiums varies sizably across states. The law is estimated to result in lower premiums in only 6 states. However, it should be noted that while the author presented premium estimates for California and New Jersey, the data for these two states is incomplete due to anomalous data reporting requirements. Thus, the large estimated premium decline of 37.5% in New Jersey likely would be different were full data available, but there is no way of telling by how much.

What is disturbing is to see premium increases in excess of 35% in 9 states, including some of the nation’s largest states (Florida and Texas). Remember, these are increases above and beyond normal premium trends. No one can credibly claim that these massive premium increases would have happened anyway since the study was specifically designed to isolate the law’s impacts from all the other factors that have driven up premiums in recent years.

Taxpayers Will Pay About 24% More for Exchange Subsidies Due to Obamacare-induced Premium Increases.

Continue Reading HERE.

Border, Jobs, True Talking Points, Vote Fraud

House Democrat Leader Pelosi: Obama must stop deportations, allow entry to millions more illegal immigrants

October 30, 2014 Chuck Norton Leave a comment

With schools and resources stretched to the limit and foreign workers now getting most new jobs and one working aged adult in four is not working the only reason to do this is to try and import a new poverty class that Democrats can buy votes with using welfare….that is until they stop lending us money and it all crashes.

Washington Examiner:

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi called on President Obama to issue a “bold” executive order that would stop the deportation of millions of illegal immigrants, including farm workers, families of people allowed to remain in the country under the administration’s “Dream Act” policy, and many others.

In an op-ed published by Univisión, Pelosi, along with Reps. Zoe Lofgren and Luis Gutiérrez, called on Obama to legalize immigrants who would have benefited from a comprehensive immigration reform bill the U.S. Senate passed in 2013.

The trio of lawmakers said the president should go even further by permitting close relatives of citizens and lawful permanent residents to gain entry into the United States, and blocking the deportation of relatives who are here illegally.

Uncategorized

Hourly Earnings Down Under Obama While Rich Get Richer

October 29, 2014 Chuck Norton Leave a comment

A great reminder that leftism, as a philosophy, was designed expressly for the purpose of eliminating the middle class, who in publications they used to call the “bourgeoisie.”

Senate Finance Committee:

For Immediate Release
October 08, 2014

Fact Sheet: Obama Economy Boosts Wall Street, Not Main Street

Middle-Class Americans Continue to Struggle Under President’s Misguided Economic Policies

Since the President took office in January 2009, middle-class Americans have been saddled with slow economic growth, weak job markets, and smaller paychecks.

Following is an analysis, prepared by the Senate Finance Committee Minority Staff, on the Obama economy:

WEAK JOB MARKETS:
When President Obama came into office, the national unemployment rate was 7.8 percent and rose to as high as 10 percent in October 2009. Today it is 5.9 percent, however:

The number of people who are not in the labor force has grown, despite a growing working-age population, by 12.1 million.
The number of people who are not in the labor force who want a job has grown by more than 640,000 during the Obama Administration. Many simply gave up on trying to find a job in the Obama economy.
The employment-to-population ratio has remained consistently below 60 percent during Obama’s tenure and has barely budged and has been at 59.0 percent since June of 2014; in contrast, the ratio averaged 62.9 percent between the beginning of the year 2000 through when Obama assumed office.
The labor force participation rate has continued to trend downward during Obama’s tenure, from 65.7 percent when he took office to its current low of 62.7 percent.
Payroll job growth has been tepid over Obama’s tenure: it has averaged only 135,000 per month since the end of the recession.
While over 7.4 million payroll jobs were lost during the recession, there has only been a net 4.7 million jobs created over Obama’s tenure.

SMALLER PAYCHECKS:
Middle-class Americans’ take home pay has shrunk under the Obama Administration’s economic agenda:

Earnings have barely budged during President Obama’s tenure. Average hourly earnings, adjusted for inflation, were $10.38 when the president took office; nearly six years later and a full five years and two months after the National Bureau of Economic Research declared that the recession ended (June 2009), average hourly earnings are now (August, 2014) down to $10.34.
Inflation-adjusted median household income has fallen during President Obama’s tenurefrom $54,423 in 2008, the year before the president took office, to only $51,939 in 2013 (the last year of data availability), putting a squeeze on middle-class American families.
Inflation-adjusted per capita income has fallen from $29,173 in 2008 to $28,829 in 2013.
The number of people in poverty has risen over President Obama’s tenure. As a percent of the total population, 13.2 percent of Americans were in poverty in 2008, before the President took office. In 2013, 14.5 percent of Americans were in poverty.

SLUGGISH ECONOMIC GROWTH:
The tax-and-spend agenda of the Obama Administration has led to record high debt and anemic economic growth:

Annualized growth in the inflation-adjusted gross domestic product (GDP) has averaged a meager 1.7 percent over President Obama’s tenure (and averaged a tepid 2.2 percent since the end of the recession), in contrast to the long-run (1948 Q1-2014 Q2) average of 3.3 percent.
The Obama-era deficits have been as high as 10.2 percent of the size of the entire economy—deficit levels not seen since the years surrounding World War II.The federal budget deficit ballooned to $1.47 trillion in fiscal year (FY) 2009, fueled by the failed $800 billion-plus stimulus law that ended up costing American taxpayers close to $1 trillion, without any meaningful return to Americans in terms of improved economic outcomes.
Despite claims that budget austerity and the slashing of spending were the drivers of deficit reduction, the deficit reduction that has occurred since the outsized deficit in 2009 is entirely accounted for by higher federal revenues; not by spending reductions.
- Since the high-water mark of deficits in FY 2009, deficits have fallen. In August of FY 2014 the fiscal-year-to-date deficit was $590 billion, a $670 billion decline in the deficit of $1,260 deficit at the same time in FY 2010. Yet the deficit reduction was more than accounted for by higher federal revenue—up $747 billion for the fiscal-year-to-date in 2014 through August relative to the same period in 2010. Despite continuous claims of budget austerity and spending cuts, federal outlays were also up—by $76 billion for the fiscal year-to-date in 2014 through August relative to the same period in 2010.
- For the fiscal-year-to-date in August of 2014 relative to the same period in 2010, increased federal receipts more than account for (111 percent) of the deficit reduction of $670 billion that occurred; increased federal outlays account added nothing and, in fact, detracted from deficit reduction.
- Gross federal debt outstanding has risen by an unprecedented $7.2 trillion since President Obama took office, and currently stands at $17.9 trillion, which is over 111 percent of the size of the entire United States economy.

WALL STREET GAINS; MAIN STREET LOSES:
The low interest rate environment engineered by the Federal Reserve and the Obama administration were designed partly to boost stock markets, rewarding Wall Street while punishing savers on Main Street and nest eggs of retired Americans:

Stock have soared, rewarding Wall Street—between the time President Obama took office and September of this year: the NASDAQ stock index is up by more than 198 percent; the Standard & Poor’s 500 composite is up by more than 127 percent; and the Dow is up by 99 percent.
Rates on Main Street savings accounts have plummeted to near-zero—for example, the average deposit rate on a 12-month, $10,000 minimum Certificate of Deposit has fallen more than 90 percent, from an average of 2.1 percent in December of 2008 to 0.2 percent in September of 2014, which is not even enough to keep up with inflation.
Social Security Trust Funds have also received lower returns—the average interest rates paid by the U.S. Treasury to the Social Security Trust Funds on special-interest Treasury securities held by the funds has fallen by more than 36 percent during President Obama’s tenure in office: The rate was: 3.635 percent in 2008, prior to President Obama taking office, but has fallen: to 2.917 percent in 2009; 2.760 percent in 2010; 2.417 percent in 2011; 1.458 percent in 2012; 1.875 percent in 2013; and 2.313 percent in 2014 through October.
Big Banks Have Gotten Bigger— total assets of the 10 largest banks in the U.S. have grown since President Obama took office, to more than $11 trillion, more than the $9.5 trillion of assets held by American households and nonprofit organizations as of the second quarter of this year.

Dirty Tricks, Millhouse, NSA, Obama, True Talking Points, Uncategorized

Former CBS reporter: Govt bugged my computer, planted classified docs in operating system

October 27, 2014 Chuck Norton 3 Comments

[Note: This post is pinned to the top of the page. Please scroll down for the latest posts and updates.]

See part one of Sharyl Atkisson’s revelations HERE. Buy her book HERE. Read every word below.

UPDATE – USA Today: Obama administration most ‘dangerous’ to media in history

UPDATE II – Elite Media Reporters Ignore Story

UPDATE III – Sharyl in a two minute video summarizing her experience at CBS:

New York Post:

A former CBS News reporter who quit the network over claims it kills stories that put President Obama in a bad light says she was spied on by a “government-related entity” that planted classified documents on her computer.

In her new memoir, Sharyl Attkisson says a source who arranged to have her laptop checked for spyware in 2013 was “shocked” and “flabbergasted” at what the analysis revealed.

“This is outrageous. Worse than anything Nixon ever did. I wouldn’t have believed something like this could happen in the United States of America,” Attkisson quotes the source saying.

She speculates that the motive was to lay the groundwork for possible charges against her or her sources.

Attkisson says the source, who’s “connected to government three-letter agencies,” told her the computer was hacked into by “a sophisticated entity that used commercial, nonattributable spyware that’s proprietary to a government agency: either the CIA, FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency or the National Security Agency.”

The breach was accomplished through an “otherwise innocuous e-mail” that Attkisson says she got in February 2012, then twice “redone” and “refreshed” through a satellite hookup and a Wi-Fi connection at a Ritz-Carlton hotel.

The spyware included programs that Attkisson says monitored her every keystroke and gave the snoops access to all her e-mails and the passwords to her financial accounts.

“The intruders discovered my Skype account handle, stole the password, activated the audio, and made heavy use of it, presumably as a listening tool,” she wrote in “Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama’s Washington.”

Attkisson says her source — identified only as “Number One” — told her the spying was most likely not court-authorized because it went on far longer than most legal taps.

But the most shocking finding, she says, was the discovery of three classified documents that Number One told her were “buried deep in your operating system. In a place that, unless you’re a some kind of computer whiz specialist, you wouldn’t even know exists.”

“They probably planted them to be able to accuse you of having classified documents if they ever needed to do that at some point,” Number One added.

In her book, Attkisson says CBS lost interest in her coverage of the deadly attack on the US Embassy in Benghazi, Libya, and killed her stories of the federal “Fast and Furious” gun-running scandal.

Both CBS and the White House declined to comment.

Uncategorized

USA Today: More Obamacare Policy Cancelations Coming Again

October 24, 2014 Chuck Norton Leave a comment

USA Today:

Last fall, millions of Americans breathed a sigh of relief when Obamacare didn’t cancel their health care plans. Now they’re holding their breath once again.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans will soon receive cancellation letters affecting their 2015 health care plans — and that number may quickly rise into the millions. This wave of cancellations will fall into two categories. The first group hit will be in the individual market, the same group that suffered through at least 6.3 million cancellation letters last year. They will almost certainly be joined by millions of people in the small-employer market, which has 40 million plans and will be under Obamacare’s control starting next year.

That’s right: President Obama’s now-infamous promise, “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it” — Politifact’s 2013 “Lie of the Year” — is still being broken, potentially worse than before.

Most of the individual market cancellations will be for plans that were supposed to be canceled last year, when Obamacare first went into effect. After the fallout from last year’s fiasco became too politically toxic, President Obama unilaterally changed the law so that some non-compliant policies could continue for at least another year. That 12-month period is now up.

Virginia will be hit the hardest — up to 250,000 Virginians will receive a cancellation notice by the end of November. Another 30,000 New Mexicans will have their plans discontinued in 2015. In Kentucky, another 14,000 individuals will receive notices in the coming weeks. Elsewhere, Colorado, Alaska, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Maine are expecting thousands of cancellations — after almost half a million notices went out last year. Other states, some of which either don’t count or don’t publicly release details on discontinued plans, will likely add to the tally.

But that’s still only the tip of the cancellation iceberg. A far greater threat looms for the 40 million Americans who receive health insurance through small business employers, also known as small-group plans.

Anticipating the crippling costs of Obamacare, many small businesses opted for early renewals at the end of 2013. This enabled them to continue their existing policies into 2014, avoiding Obamacare’s onerous mandates for another 12 months. All small-group renewals this year, however, must comply with all of Obamacare’s regulations and mandates for next year.

In Colorado, small-group plans covering 143,000 people are being cancelled this year. In New Hampshire, as many as 70,000 small-group policyholders are being forced into new plans. It’s a double whammy for these unfortunate Granite State residents: Their new policies only cover 60% of the state’s acute-care hospitals, limiting access to care.

Northeastern small-group policies will be hit especially hard. In New Jersey, 650,000 people with small-group coverage had their policies disrupted this year, according to the state association of health plans. And Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield — covering Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Delaware — estimate Obamacare is affecting nearly every one of the 5.3 million people covered under its individual and small-group policies.

Just like last year, the administration knew these cancellations were coming all along. As far back as June 2010, the Obama administration estimated, 66% of small employer plans will face cancellation.

Despite all this, the president and Obamacare’s supporters still can’t seem to understand why more Americans say the law is hurting rather than helping. . Here’s a hint: Obamacare is taking away people’s health care policies and replacing them with plans that often cost more and cover less.

The irony is that President Obama and the politicians who voted for Obamacare are now declaring that the law is working as intended. They’re right — and the millions of Americans anxiously checking their mailboxes for cancellation notices are learning it the hard way.

Tim Phillips is the president of Americans for Prosperity.

Uncategorized

Obama’s pick for Ebola Czar a population control freak… (video)

October 22, 2014 Chuck Norton Leave a comment

First of all, the fact that President Obama picked such an infamous political fixer such as Ron Klain speaks volumes of how the administration views this problem; namely as a political one, not a medical one.

UPDATE: Congressman Trey Gowdy questions qualification of Ebola Czar. This video is priceless:

Klain was a lobbyist for Fannie Mae of mortgage collapse fame. The corruption at Fannie Mae caused the worst economic collapse since the great depression. Klain was also the Chief of Staff for Al Gore. He was the “mastermind” behind Al Gore’s attempt to overturn the Constitution and throw the 2000 election into the courts, which is prohibited in the Constitution:

Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress

As you can see, the state legislature has total authority when it comes to electors in a presidential election. The courts have no authority here and the Founders did that for a reason. If it was done any differently everyone who lost would sue. The courts as a result would become even more blindly partisan than they are now. Courts would routinely overturn elections for partisan reasons if the system wasn’t designed that way.

Klain was also a part of the successful effort to throw out military ballots in Florida, which has become a staple of Democrat election strategy since.

Editor’s Note:Obama Administration Sues To Stop Military From Voting (video) – Epidemic of Democrat Controlled Cities Failing to Mail Military Ballots…

Klain was a player in the Solyndra Scandal (See more on the Obama Administration steering money into green junk bond companies owned by political donors HERE).

Perhaps most disturbing of all, Klain is one of those population control freaks:

“I think the top leadership challenge issue in our world today is how to deal with the continuing, growing population in the world and all the resource demands it places on the world and burgeoning populations in Africa and Asia that lack the resources to have a healthy, happy life,” Klain said.

Notice how he zeroes in on Africa and Asia for his appeal for population control and not white people?

Propaganda, Thugs

Video: Alinsky Trained Agitator Shuts Down CNN News Crew (video)

October 21, 2014 Chuck Norton Leave a comment

This is a textbook example of Saul Alinsky style agitation via trained “community organizers”. See how he speaks about “the narrative”. Notice how the agitator hits on various talking points, some having to do with Ferguson and some not, and repeats them. This man is a trained agitator and most likely with Chicago Black Panthers who follow Jesse Jackson around.

It is also important to keep in mind that the Chicago Black Panthers have a long relationship with the church President Obama attended for years. Also remember that in multiple times when Black Panthers showed up to polling stations armed the Obama Justice Department saw to it that all charges were dropped.

October 20, 2014 – Ferguson protesters shut down CNN live broadcast & chase away reporter and camera:

Here is how it looked on CNN:

Uncategorized

Barney Frank: President Obama Lied About Obamacare

October 16, 2014 Chuck Norton Leave a comment

Daily Signal:

It’s one thing for President Obama to win an award for “Lie of the Year” for promising Americans “if you like your [health insurance] plan, you can keep it.” It must sting a bit more when a political ally like Barney Frank, the former congressman, flat out says the president “just lied to people.”

In an interview with Huffington Post, the veteran Massachusetts Democrat said he was “appalled” at the “bad” rollout of Obamacare last October.

“I don’t understand how the president could have sat there and not been checking on that on a weekly basis,” Frank said, then added:

But, frankly, he should never have said as much as he did, that if you like your current health care plan, you can keep it. That wasn’t true. And you shouldn’t lie to people. And they just lied to people.

Before passage and implementation of the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare, the president repeatedly promised Americans that they would be able to keep their current insurance plans and doctors if they so chose.

But the Obamacare rollout brought cancellation notices from insurance companies to more than 10 million Americans, who learned their plans didn’t meet minimal requirements outlined in the new law.

According to several reports, the Obama administration was aware millions would lose their plans. The president’s broken “if you like your plan, you can keep it” promise earned him the dubious honor of “Lie of the Year” from the fact-checking journalism project PolitiFact.

Although Frank supports the law and voted to pass Obamacare in 2010, he said Obama should have told Americans that the plans required under the health care law would be better than their old ones:

He should have said, ‘Look, in some cases the health care plans that you’ve got are really inadequate, and in your own interests, we’re going to change them.’ But that’s not what he said.

Lies, True Talking Points

Desperate Democrats Run Ads Blaming Republicans for Ebola (video)

October 14, 2014 Chuck Norton 2 Comments

UPDATE – Chuck Wooldery blasts Democrats’ phony Ebola claims:

The lies are getting pretty desperate.

Aside from the fact that the CDC has been blowing millions on non-disease related nonsense such as:

$3.2 Million to see if monkeys drink too much.

$835,000 on software that could make a flight simulator feel like it was being flown by a drunk.

$295,000 too see if male fruit flies find younger or older females more attractive.

$155,000 to study if drinking while gambling causes you to lose more money.

$1.0 Million to study the impact of stress on monkeys who are addicted to cocaine.

Their ad blames the “sequestration cuts” on Republicans when in fact the so called sequestration budget deal was Obama’s idea and he signed it into law.

It gets better. The “sequestration cuts” were not cuts at all, they were merely a reduction on the proposed increase in spending. The facts are that the CDC budget has gone up year after year after year just like most everything else in government has.

It gets better. Guess who submitted a budget to genuinely cut the CDC? From the Center for Infectious Disease and Research Policy website:

(April 10, 2013) “The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) takes a hit of about $270 million in the Obama administration’s proposed fiscal year 2014 budget, including significant cuts to biodefense and emergency preparedness programs, officials revealed today. CDC Director Tom Frieden, MD, speaking at a Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) press conference, said the “overall program budget would come down by about $270 million” under the budget proposal, compared with spending in fiscal year 2012.”

That was President Obama’s budget proposal.

It gets better.

Miserly GOP-Controlled House Passed Budget Increasing CDC Spending 8.2% in January http://t.co/xJaGfOeJFI pic.twitter.com/VuDWuQI0dK

— Jim Geraghty (@jimgeraghty) October 13, 2014

Uncategorized

Obamacare results so far: Less competition, increased costs…

October 13, 2014 Chuck Norton Leave a comment

Via The Daily Signal:

On November 15, open enrollment in the Obamacare exchanges begins again. Before the second act of our national healthcare drama commences, let’s review what we’ve learned in Act I.

1. Health costs jumped—big time. Huge increases in deductibles in policies sold through the exchanges were a big story in Florida, Illinois and elsewhere. While the average annual deductible for employer-based coverage was a little over $1,000, the exchange deductibles nationwide normally topped $2,000.

Notwithstanding President Obama’s specific promise to lower the typical family premium cost by $2,500 annually, premium costs actually increased. D2014 data for the “individual market” shows that the average annual premiums for single and family coverage rose in the overwhelming majority of state and federal health-insurance exchanges all around the country. In eleven states, premiums for twenty-seven-year-olds have more than doubled since 2013; in thirteen states, premiums for fifty-year-olds have increased more than 50 percent. For the “group market,” the Office of the Actuary at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) estimated on February 21, 2014, that 65 percent of small firms would experience premium-rate increases, while only 35 percent were expected to have reductions. In terms of people affected, CMS estimated 11 million Americans employed by these firms would experience premium-rate increases, while about 6 million would see reductions. So much for “bending the cost curve down.”

2. The law reduced competition in most health-insurance markets. A limited analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that in 2014, large states like California and New York were more competitive, but Connecticut and Washington were less competitive. The Heritage Foundation conducted a national analysis and found that between 2013 and 2014, the number of insurers offering coverage on the individual markets in all fifty states declined nationwide by 29 percent. On a county level, 52 percent of U.S. counties had just one or two health-insurance carriers. In 2014, at least, the law did not deliver on its promise of more personal choice and broader competition.

3. We still don’t know for sure how many people are actually insured. Following the disastrous October 2013 Obamacare “roll-out,” the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that about 6 million (rather than 7 million) would enroll in the exchanges. Last April, administration officials reported that they reached and surpassed their goal, enrolling over 8 million people in the health-insurance exchanges. They then declared the health-care debate, like the Iraq War, “over.”

That declaration appears to be premature. The administration now concedes that there are 700,000 fewer persons in the exchanges. Of course, we can expect some attrition. But exchange enrollment is not the same as insurance coverage. CBO said it best: “The number of people who will have coverage through the exchanges in 2014 will not be known precisely until after the year has ended.” Exactly.

Beyond the seemingly endless surveys, estimates and guesstimates, we do have some raw data. Between October 1, 2013, and March 31, 2014, there was a net increase in individual coverage of 2,236,942, but there was a net decrease in group (employment-based) enrollment: it fell by 1,716,540. Enrollment in Medicaid and the Childrens’ Health Insurance Program (CHIP) increased by about 5 million over that same period. We’ll know more later, as CBO said, especially how many Americans are losing their employment-based coverage.

Who enrolls is also crucial. In 2013, Obama administration officials said that their goal was for young adults between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four to account for 40 percent of exchange enrollments. On April 17, 2014, the White House announced that only 28 percent of those enrolled through the federally administered exchanges were between eighteen and thirty-four years of age—the crucial age bracket for a robust and stable insurance pool—but that 35 percent of the total enrollees were under the age of thirty-five. That made it sound as though the program was fairly close to reaching its target. But thanks to excellent reporting by Politico, we learned that the bigger number included children enrolled in the exchanges. Nice try.

Econ, Editorial, Elections have Consequences, Elite Media, Health Law, History, Lies, Millhouse, Obama, Pay to Play, Treason, True Talking Points

Government shutdown veiling an assault on separation of powers, oversight, and the budgetary authority of Congress

October 6, 2013 Chuck Norton 3 Comments

by Chuck Norton

UPDATE – Just as we predicted, Democrats in the Senate are floating a bill to allow the President to raise the debt limit in direct violation of Article I of the Constitution. The Democrats have written the bill so that it would take a super majority in both chambers to block the President from giving himself an unlimited credit card.

Congress is not a rubber stamp. What President Obama and the Democrats are doing is a frontal assault on separation of powers, Congress’s power and responsibility of oversight of the Executive Branch, and the budgetary authority of Congress

The Democratic Party is pining for a powerful post-constititional Executive Branch that can illegally line item veto, pick and choose who laws will and wont apply to – Chicago style, and seize power to legislate on its own.

Legislating On His Own

Since the passage of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, President Obama has taken it upon himself to change the law in ways he sees fit, a power that only Congress has under the Constitution. President Obama has given over 1,400 waivers to political allies be it groups or businesses which is illegal and corrupt.

The Grassley Amendment mandates that the Affordable Care Act apply to Congress just as it would to regular citizens; a law the President has waived under no constitutional authority whatsoever. He has done this in collusion with some in the congressional leadership and over the objection of some Republicans who believe doing so is unfair.

If a Republican president had behaved such a way Democrats and their friends in the praetorian media would be screaming for impeachment and enough Republicans would likely agree to get it done. Until this recent assault on the constitutional authority of Congress, Republicans have been somewhat timid in fear of being called “racist” by the praetorian media.

While Democrats would claim that Obama’s actions fall under the regulatory authority granted to the Executive Branch by Congress, regulatory authority is for the purpose of creating due process in carrying out the laws passed by Congress. It is not license to change the law or invent new laws unilaterally, nor is such authority permission to pick and choose winners and losers by deciding what parts will apply to who and who it will not. The President is seizing the power to legislate on his own and has been doing this more and more be it immigration laws, voting laws, domestic spying, and the list goes on.

UPDATE – Newt Gingrich: The President has decided that he wants to be “Legislator In Chief” – http://tiny.cc/wrtw4w

Many things are negotiable, equality under the law is not.

Assault on the Oversight and Budgetary Authority of Congress

Normally, under the regular order of appropriations and budgeting, committees in Congress will hold hearings on and then vote on how your money is spent, how much is spent, and review the stewardship of that spending after the fact with its constitutionally mandated power of oversight. This is how government is accountable to you and the representatives in Congress that you elect.

Through the committee and appropriations process the separate segmented appropriations measures are put together into a budget which sets the taxing and spending limits of various parts of the government. Next, the parts of the budget are reviewed and combined by certain standing committees in Congress such as the Budget Committee; that budget is then voted on by the entire House and Senate. Once passed the Budget is published and anyone can examine it. This is the process that Congress has generally used for the last 200 years and is why this process is called “regular order“.

Regular order makes sense. When you look at your budget at home, you look at each line item, see where your expenses are going and you make priorities to adjust your expenses so that you don’t over spend, right?

When President Obama was elected the Democrats began to refuse to even consider passing a budget, abandoning all regular order. Since the Democrats control the Senate no budgets have been passed.

The Democratic Party Majority Leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, has said again and again that the House of Representatives has no right to pick and choose what it will fund and what it will not. Then Harry Reid and the Democrats started calling Republicans in the House hostage takers, anarchists, arsonists, terrorists, and every other “ists” you can think of. At the same time the Democrats have said they want an all or nothing blank check in the form of a continuing resolution instead of a budget.

The Constitution of the United States says:

Article I Section VII – All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives

Article I Section VIII – The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States; To borrow Money on the credit of the United States;

Article I Section IX – No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.

The Constitution is clear that all bills dealing with revenue must originate in the House of Representatives; which also must pay the debts, set taxes, borrow money and as Section IX makes clear that the records must all be in a budget for the people to see.

By claiming that the House of Representatives does not have the right to do exactly what the Constitution instructs in plain English, the Democrats are trying to make an unconstitutional “new normal” where there are no budgets, no oversight as we have known it for two centuries, and just write gargantuan blank checks in the form of massive continuing resolutions(CR) for President Obama to spend as he sees fit.

It is for these reasons that there is nothing clean about the Democrat’s demand for a “clean CR”.

Senator Mike Lee, who is well-known to be one of the top lawyers in the country, speaks of this:

Now Democrats are combining the two power grabs above by saying that Congress has no right to revisit Obamacare because it was passed (without a single republican vote) after Obama was elected and that only President Obama has the right and the power to (illegally) change the law on his own.

Of course the very idea Democrats and their friends in the praetorian media are pushing, that Congress can never revisit a law, is silly on its face. Social Security and Medicare are laws that have been on the books for decades and Congress has changed those programs many times.

It is the job of each new Congress to look at existing law and make changes where the people’s representatives see fit. The very notion that one Chief Justice or one President can decide Obamacare’s fate and that the Congress cannot is laughable and yet the praetorian media has been advocating this very point of view every night since the partial government shutdown.

In an effort to keep members of his own party in line President Obama has illegally changed the law by executive fiat to give Members of Congress and their staff a 72% subsidy if they buy the expensive coverage on the Obamacare Exchange, other portions of the law do not apply to Congress as well.

Strong Arm Tactics

Aside from constant smear tactics, name calling, and lies crafted in such a way to sound oh so reasonable, the President has ordered his administration to cause as much pain and disruption on the American people as possible.

The Obama Administration ordered federal police to close the open air WWII Memorial and went so far as to rent “barrycades” to keep visiting WWII vets out.

Republican Members of Congress assisted the aged vets in “storming” their own memorial. Park Rangers, who are veterans themselves, refused to lay a hand on our WWII heroes:

The Obama administration ordered Park Police to close even privately funded memorials, private businesses adjacent to them, and even ordered elderly couples to be ejected from their homes which are adjacent to Lake Mead. In doing so Democrats have blamed Republicans for these outrages and for the most part the praetorian media has gone along with it. None of these parks or memorials were closed in the 17 previous government shutdowns since 1976.

The administration has threatened military priests who attempt to give Mass during the partial shutdown with arrest, and the administration has ordered that thousands of Department of Defense workers be furloughed in spite of the fact that the Defense Department has already been paid for with a separate continuing resolution. Of course President Obama has ordered the military to keep his personal retreat at Camp David open while cutting football and baseball coverage from the Armed Forces Television.

Speaker Boehner is outraged by the administration’s behavior:

President Obama has deliberately tried to spook the markets which affects the savings of millions of Americans in hopes to damage the economy even worse so that he can also blame that on Republicans.

The latest attempt to spook the markets is to threaten default on the national debt if the House of Representatives doesn’t give him all of the power that he wants. The 14th Amendment demands that the President make the scheduled payments on the debt. The Treasury takes in almost $240 billion a month which is much more than enough to pay the debt, Social Security etc. President Obama would have to willingly decide to default on the debt.

President Obama has also said that it is unprecedented for the Congress to attach strings to a raising of the debt ceiling. In fact, Congress has done so dozens of times as that is their enumerated power under the Constitution. When Obama was a Senator he favored just such a tactic himself. The President’s lie was so over the top that McClatchy News, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, Politico, and Fox News have all reported that the President’s claims are bunk.

The New Republic, a political magazine that favors the Democratic Party, has suggested that President Obama use the military against TEA Party activists. Other media outlets who have historically slanted reporting to favor the Democratic party have found President’ Obama’s rather obvious falsehoods a threat to their own credibility and thus are sending messages that their willingness to spin for him has limits.

NBC’s Chuck Todd grilled Jay Carney on why the White House won’t accept some of these individual continuing resolutions passed by the House to fund portions of the government that will put some people back to work:

A New York Times reporter has said that the Obama admin is, “most closed, control-freak administration I’ve ever covered.”

While Obamacare may offer an expensive policy, which is implemented more like a massive tax, in exchange for “deductible not met”, “claim denied”, & “procedure not covered”; this fight is about much more than Obamacare, it is about power. A massive swing of power from the representatives of the people to the President. This is genuine third world style authoritarian power play.

One might not feel the authoritarian chill as of yet, but just wait until the next debt ceiling or government spending fight that leads to a partial shutdown and the President decides to abuse the power of Obamacare to halt payments for medical visits and prescription drugs as leverage to get his way. It is not a matter of if, it is a matter of when.

Editor’s Note: A reader sent a note asking, “What about the budgets that President Obama proposed and what about the budget that Harry Reid put up in March 2013?”

These are good questions but the answer is well known to those who have followed politics.

President Obama’s budgets got next to no support from his own caucus in the Senate as they were so outrageous that Democrats did not want to sign their name on it or be associated with it. Since the Senate Democrat Caucus would not back the House GOP budgets or the President’s budgets they died in the Senate.

After taking criticism for the abandonment of Regular Order for not passing any budgets for four years, Senate Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid put up an outrageous budget last March (2013) that was completely unserious, was opposed by four Democrat Senators, violated the Sequestor Law, and amounted to a political gag – as explained by The Hill:

The Senate-passed budget has $975 billion in new taxes, does not balance, and does not cut spending when the fact it turns off sequestration is taken into effect.

The Constitution is clear that tax bills MUST start in the House. Any tax increase that is not approved by the House first is a non-starter. Harry Reid putting up a budget that violated the Sequestor Law and imposes almost a trillion in new taxes was out of Regular Order. Of course Reid knew it, and so did those four Democrats who voted against such a stunt. Reid put up that “budget” to create the illusion of supporting Regular Order when the heat was on. This was no secret as press reports and political blogs reported as much.

UPDATE – Obama campaign manager David Plouffe accuses House Republicans of TREASON for not handing Obama a blank check CR http://tiny.cc/cs7q4w

UPDATE – Obama Administration hires private armed thugs to ring Independence Hall http://tiny.cc/9ybr4w

UPDATE – ‘Gestapo’ tactics meet senior citizens and foreigners at Yellowstone as armed men on orders from the Obama Administration round them up and lock them up – http://www.eagletribune.com/local/x1442580353/Gestapo-tactics-meet-senior-citizens-at-Yellowstone

UPDATE – Senator Mike Lee: The best argument against Obamacare is the behavior of the Obama administration during the “shutdown”; DO WHAT I SAY OR ELSE:

“If you are not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” – Malcolm X