Munich 2; Deal Reached On Iran's Nukes

Iran and the P5+1 have reportedly reached an agreement on Iran's illegal nuclear weapons program.

The European Union’s Foreign Policy Chief, Catherine Ashton, announced early Sunday morning that an agreement has been reached between Iran and the group known as the P5+1.

France's Foreign Minister, Laurent Fabius, confirmed as well that a deal has been reached. Iran's Foreign Minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, tweeted as well that "we have reached an agreement."

Details are sketch, possibly because some details still need to be worked out. But here's what's leaked out so far.

The agreement runs for six months, and reportedly Iran has agreed to freeze some of its nuclear activities in exchange for partial and limited relief of the sanctions. The reality of course is that the sanctions are pretty much history. Actually, President Obama has been relaxing the enforcement of sanctions for the past six months , and this is simply the final removal as countries rush in to trade with the Ayatollahs.

Under under the deal, Iran will be able to continue to enrich uranium to a level of  5%, but will not be allowed to add to its stockpile of its 20% enriched uranium. Even 5% enriched uranium is 60 % of the way there, by the way. The Iranians would also have to move some of its enriched material to a third country. The amount and the country remain unspecified (probably Russia), as does and verification process on whether any uranium was actually moved, to how much. If the P5+1 and John Kerry are relying on the Russians to do this, I think we can safely assume that this part of the deal is a joke.And probably a mechanism to boost President Obama's sagging approval rate here in America when he announces Peace in out Time. 


Especially since the Iranians have already received significant sanctions relief and a 3 month window to continue their illegal nuclear weapons program in exchange for absolutely nothing.

While President Obama in his remarks made a huge deal about how the sanctions could be revved up again,  both he and the Iranians know very well that there won't be any  return to the status quo.President Obama and the West have just decided to accept a nuclear armed Iran,

The Iranians, for their part, received some other interesting concessions. They get up to $7 billion in economic sanctions relief from unfreezing some of Iran's  assets. And they get the right to continue to enrich uranium. That's always been a red line for Iran, for obvious reasons. The Iranian line now it that while they're going to continue to insist on their right to enrich uranium, they don't insist on anyone else recognizing it!

Who knew the Iranians had such a sense of humor? Now that they're able to hang on to some of their 20% uranium, a nuclear breakout to get to weaponization is only a few weeks away. And the agreement says absolutely nothing about Iran halting research on ballistic missiles or nuclear triggers.

The Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader once again threatened what he referred to as "the Zionist Regime" with annihilation, saying Israel was "doomed to extinction" and that Zionists "cannot be called human."

As you might expect, not one of Israel's concerns was addressed in the slightest when it came to crafting this deal.

Naftali Bennett, Israel's economic minister, who heads the Bayit Yehudi party and is a member of the Israel's inner Security responded in an interesting way in an interview on Israeli TV , saying that if a deal leaves Iran with the ability to "break out" and produce nuclear weapons in a period of six weeks, "we will not be able to sit quietly." 

Well, the deal certainly leaves Iran with break out ability. And it's obvious that Israel is definitely on its own. This is a seminal, game changing event in U.S./Israeli relations.

Stay tuned...

Who Really Killed JFK?

 

Today being the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, there's the usual florid prose out there (and of course, the usual Leftist conspiracy theorie about how Kennedy was murdered by 'Right wingers') .

While most of the conspiracy theories are pretty easily dismissed, one thing that isn't is the apparent whitewashing of the facts by the Warren Commission.

Yet that itself is pretty easily explainable.

As I explained to one of my correspondents earlier, the first thing in solving any murder is to look at motive.

There were two groups who had motive to kill off JFK, who by the way was dying of Addison's disease and might not even have finished his term out anyway.

One was the Mob. Because of the help given JFK by Frank Sinatra and others whom were 'connected' during the 1960 campaign,the Mob expected a quid pro quo in certain areas. Instead, Sinatra ended up having zero influence (when Kennedy went to Palm Springs, he stayed at Republican Bing Crosby's house), Attorney General Bobby Kennedy bore down heavily on the Mob and JFK did nothing to get back the Mob's purloined properties in Havana.

In edition, Kennedy was sleeping with Mob boss Sam Giacana's girlfriend, Judith Exner, which made Giacana look foolish when he found out about it.

The second group was the Castro brothers and the Cubans themselves.Kennedy had made a number of amateurish efforts to bump off Castro, even trying to get him to smoke poisoned cigars...not to mention the aborted attempt to overthrow him in the Bay of Pigs invasion.

I would think the Cubans are more likely to have done it. (A) Because Lee Harvey Oswald was heavily involved in pro-Castro groups like the Fair Play For Cuba committee and may even have been a Soviet agent (B) because when he was captured, Oswald repeatedly asked to talk to Hoover and the FBI before he was murdered and (C) This would explain the continued U.S. blockade and isolation of Castro's Cuba, which I believe will end once Fidel is dead. It also explains the Warren Commission whitewash..because to retaliate against Castro might have meant nuclear war with the Soviets.

There may or may not have been a second shooter. Oswald was a trained Marine marksman. It really doesn't matter in the long term.

A third possibility - a long shot,but not out of the question - would have been a joint effort by the Mob and Castro. I say this mainly because of mobbed up nightclub owner Jack Ruby's involvement.

Ruby had terminal cancer, and there's certainly a possibility he might have been leaned on to do the job, and perhaps even promised a lil' somethin' somethin' for his family if he successfully did the deed.

Oswald's death certainly tied up a lot of loose ends, didn't it?

At any rate, that's what I think happened.

Roundup: Reactions To The Nuclear Option

 

Well, Majority Leader Harry Reid pulled the trigger on the Nuclear Option, destroying the filibuster and taking away the rights of the Republicans to have any input at all on judicial appointments 'except the Supreme Court' as Reid was quick to add. That will last until there's a vacancy President wants to fill with a young, far Left radical,who can now be appointed by a simple majority. Even Vice President Joe Biden can provide the winning vote if the senate is split.

Making Legislation passable with a simple majority will likely come next.

This is a major historic change far more than many people realize, and the reactions have been interesting and even surprising in some quarters.

While he's apparently forgotten how Democrats behaved over George W. Bush's judicial nominees like Janice Rogers and was careful to utter the mantra of how the Republicans brought this on themselves by 'being obstructionist, reliably left Dana Milbank over at the pro-Obama Washington Post was surprisingly prescient on what a bad development this move is,calling it 'the Democrat's naked power grab' :

If Congress wasn’t broken before, it certainly is now. What Reid (Nev.) and his fellow Democrats effectively did was take the chamber of Congress that still functioned at a modest level and turn it into a clone of the other chamber, which functions not at all. They turned the Senate into the House.

Here’s what then-Sen. Joe Biden said in 2005 when a Republican Senate majority threatened to use a similar “nuclear option” to allow a simple majority to carry the day: 

“The nuclear option abandons America’s sense of fair play . . . tilting the playing field on the side of those who control and own the field. I say to my friends on the Republican side: You may own the field right now, but you won’t own it forever. I pray God when the Democrats take back control, we don’t make the kind of naked power grab you are doing.” 

Sen. Carl Levin (Mich.), one of just three Democrats who opposed his colleagues’ naked power grab, read those words on the Senate floor Thursday after Reid invoked the nuclear option. The rumpled Levin is not known for his oratory. But he is retiring next year and free to speak his mind — and his words were potent.

“We need to change the rules, but to change it in the way we changed it today means there are no rules except as the majority wants them,” Levin said. “This precedent is going to be used, I fear, to change the rules on consideration of legislation, and down the road — we don’t know how far down the road; we never know that in a democracy — but, down the road, the hard-won protections and benefits for our people’s health and welfare will be lost.”

Levin's right about that. The Republicans are only six seats shy of a simple majority and getting there is not exactly a huge or impossible task given President Obama's fading numbers and given how the incumbent's party normally loses seats in the midterms anyway,particularly in a second term. Should the Republicans win that simple majority in the senate, they will have absolutely no incentive whatsoever to work with Democrats on anything. And this is not a healthy development.

Of course, aside from the pressure put on him by the president and the Congressional Black Caucus, the chance of losing the Senate was Reid's real motive for this.They can now go ahead and appoint a whole slew of radical Leftist judges to the bench to keep their agenda alive even after the American people have rejected it electorally.

Needless to say, this sort of thing is applauded by the Left generally, given the totalitarian nature of most self-styled 'progressives'

The New York Times referred to this as 'Democracy returns to the Senate', which is exactly the reverse of what Pravda-on-the-Hudson had to say back in 2005 back when GOP Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist mulled over pulling the Nuclear option when he was faced by hysterical opposition to former President George W. Bush's appointments. Back then it was, "The Senate, of all places, should be sensitive to the fact that this large and diverse country has never believed in government by an unrestrained majority rule. Its composition is a repudiation of the very idea that the largest number of votes always wins out."

Another interesting reaction came from Senator John McCain, who was instrumental in undercutting Frist back in 2005 by assembling the so-called Gang of 14 who pledged not to vote for a nuclear option no matter what. Now I haven't checked myself, but it wouldn't surprise me if some of the Gang of 14 Democrats who were on board with McCain back then were among the Democrats who voted with Harry Reid this time, who of course, back in 2005 was quite vocal on what a horrible idea the Nuclear option was and how it would destroy the Senate.

McCain, with all the stuttering rage of an unpaid prostitute who forgot that age old rule about getting the money in hand first before putting out angrily said that the Democrats were going to pay a heavy price for this.

I'm tempted to provide a link to the Soros-funded Talking Points Memo story on this to let you read how brutally the Lefties flogged him over this,but I'll let you find it for yourself. I would almost say that it couldn't have happened to a more deserving recipient. Almost,but not quite.

The bottom line is that McCain and his fellow 'moderates' stupidly trusted Harry Reid and got screwed hard without any lubricant.I would hope some of them learned a lesson from this, but I'm not holding my breath. People in abusive relationships do seem to go back to them many times, no matter how badly they get hurt.



At the end of it, this has made our government a lot less stable, leading to fast and dramatic policy changes based on one of two votes, a lot less of an atmosphere of compromise, and a lot more hi-octane partisanship. The Democrats who voted for this not only voted to poison the well for a short term political advantage,but to lessen their own power.Holds by an individual senator who wants to negotiate something or prolong deliberations to gather additional facts before a vote are no longer possible.

Another reason this was a bad idea, at least for Democrats is because it has, to a degree, united the Republican caucus in a way they weren't united before. Even Maine's Senator Susan Collins, about as close to a Democrat as a Republican can be without changing her party affiliation is making angry noises about this.

I have a feeling that the Democrats are going to look back on this in the future and wish they hadn't done this. It was bad for the sneate, worse for the country and possibly worst of all for them.

The Council Has Spoken!! This Week's' Watcher's Council Results

 

Once again, the Council has spoken, the votes have been cast, and we have the results  for this week's Watcher's Council match up.


You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.- Abraham Lincoln

There's a sucker born every minute, and some of them are twins - P.T. Barnum

These are rare, valuable magic beans, I say! - from "Jack In The Beanstalk"






This week's winner, Joshuapundit's  Roundup - ObamaCare's Epic Fail    is my roundup and analysis of the continued unfolding of the ObamaCare debacle and th epresident's 'fix,  undoubtedly the biggest and most expensive scam ever foisted on the American public.  Here's a slice:

 This gets funnier and funnier the longer it goes.

After the president's pathetic performance last week, the blowback is almost sit-com worthy.

As you now know, what the president actually said yesterday is that he's not giving individuals the same delay he gave corporations or the same subsidies and waivers he gave congress and certain favored corporations and government bureaucracies, he's merely prepared to wink and look the other way and indulge in what he called 'selective enforcement' ...and just until after the 2014 midterms.

The president is trying to pretend that insurance companies are free to offer the old policies, but, they aren't. And aside from the financial impact and the bureaucratic snafu involved inturning the clok back, they don't wish to break the law...which has not been repealed. What President Obama is hoping is that the anger of the low information voters will be directed on to the insurance companies and that people will still be forced into the expensive, hidden-subsidy exchanges. After which, he can say 'hey it isn't my fault.' That's his thinking, but I have doubts it will fly. Three years ago, maybe but not now.

The insurance companies were, to be polite about it, not exactly pleased. They spent millions of dollars complying with ObamaCare, antagonized a number of their customers and now the Prevaricator-in-Chief expects them spend millions more to rewrite and recreate insurance plans that no longer exist and are still illegal policies under the law and expose themselves to litigation! Given this president's credibility and his tendency to change his mind depending on which way the wind is blowing, they'd be fools to trust his word and expose themselves legally.

Only an arrogant and not particularly bright you know what would expect that.And the industry is reacting as you might expect. Chris Wallace read this statement from the trade association of American insurance companies:


Changing the rules after health plans have already met the requirements of the law, Obamacare, could destabilize the market and result in higher premiums for consumers. Premiums have already been set for next year, based on assumptions of when consumers will be transitioning to the marketplaces.

If now fewer younger and healthier people choose to purchase health coverage in the exchanges, premiums will increase, and there will be fewer choices for consumers.

And the state insurance commissioners aren't thrilled either:


"For three years, state insurance regulators have been working to adapt to the Affordable Care Act in a way that best meets the needs of consumers in each state," the National Association of Insurance Commissioners said in a statement. "It is unclear how, as a practical matter, the changes proposed ... by the president can be put into effect."

Thus far, the insurance commissioners of Washington state, D.C., Arkansas, and Vermont, all Democrats, have rejected Obama's attempt to gut the exchanges with his 'fix' .

More at the link


.In our non-Council category, the winner was the one and only Mark Steyn with Thus Spake Obama  submitted by The Noisy Room. It's hard to top Mr. Steyn when he's on top of his game, and he certainly is here, commenting  on President latest attempt to rule by diktat. Do read it.


OK, here are this week’s full results. Only Bookworm Room was unable to vote this week, but was not subject to the normal 2/3 vote penalty:

Council Winners

• *First place with 3 2/3 votes! Joshuapundit -Roundup - ObamaCare's Epic Fail


• Second place with 2 1/3 votes – Simply Jews - NYT mockery of Bibi's stance on negotiations with Iran: an opinion or a message?


• Third place with 2 votes – Nice Deb -  Latest ObamaCare Ads Are Sexist and Demeaning #DemocratWarOnWomen


• Fourth place  with 1 2/3 votes – Bookworm Room - Charles Murray taught me libertarianism in a hurry


• Fifth place with 1 1/3 votes – The Right Planet -  Patriot Games


• Sixth place  with 1 vote – Liberty's Spirit - The Gettysburg Address, 150 Years of Meaning


• Seventh place *t* with 1/3 vote – The Noisy Room -Seattle Makes a Gesture to the Citizenry


• Seventh place *t* with 1/3 vote –GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD-Imperial Iran


• Seventh place *t* with 1/3 vote – The Razor -Nurse Practitioners Aren'’t the Solution to the Collapsing American Medical System


• Seventh place *t* with 1/3 vote – Rhymes With Right -Hey Hey! Ho Ho! Arne Duncan Has Got To Go!


• Seventh place *t* with 1/3 vote – The Political Commentator-You my friend are substandard!


• Seventh place *t* with 1/3 vote – The Mellow Jihadi -Becoming A Military Linguist!

Non-Council Winners

• First place with 2 2/3 votes! – Mark Steyn -Thus Spake Obama -submitted by The Noisy Room


• Second place  with 2  votes – Andrew McCarthy - Obama's 5 Percent Con Job -submitted by The Watcher


• Second place with 1 2/3 votes – LetVent -A Black Reporter Summarizes Barack Obama - submitted by The Watcher


• Third place *t* with 1 1/3 votes -Victor Davis Hanson -Obama's Noble Lies - submitted by Bookworm Room


• Third  place *t* with 1 1/3 votes - Jonah Goldberg - Obamacare Schadenfreudarama-submitted by Joshuapundit


• Fourth place  with 1 vote - Daniel Hannan/WSJ-The World of English Freedoms -   submitted by Liberty's Spirit


• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 vote -The Contentious Centrist-Yea, the NYT is biased in favour of Israel -  submitted by Simply Jews


• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 vote -War Is Boring -US Navy: 5 Questions to Ponder -submitted by GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD 


• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 vote -Taki's Magazine -The Boycott On Normalcy - submitted by The Colossus of Rhodey


• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 vote -KausFiles - What’s the Obamacare line today? -     submitted by The Glittering Eye


• Sixth place *t* with 1/3 vote -Joel Pollack/The Conversation- So, When Does Ted Cruz Get His Apology?-   submitted by Nice Deb


• Sixth place *t* with 1/3 vote -Thought Catalog - 16 People On Things They Couldn’t Believe About America Until They Moved Here - submitted by The Razor


• Sixth place *t* with 1/3 vote -Policy Mic  - Montana's Plan to Set Gender Quotas For State Legislature Could Be a Model For the Nation - submitted by Rhymes With Right


• Sixth place *t* with 1/3 vote -Boudicabpi -Chamberlain, Munich 1938: How… Incredible It Is . . via Joseph Wouk -  submitted by The Political Commentator

See you next week! Don't forget to tune in on Monday AM for this week's Watcher's Forum, as the Council and their invited special guests take apart one of the provocative issues of the day with short takes and weigh in...don't you dare miss it. And don't forget to like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.....'cause we're cool like that!

Congressional Black Caucus Pressured Harry Reid To Use Nuclear Option

 

Now this is interesting. It appears that the Congressional Black Caucus was one of the factors putting pressure on Harry Reid to trash the Senate rules and use the nuclear option.

Apparently Melvin Watt (D-NC), one of their members was up to head the Federal Housing Finance Agency which overseas the FHA, and become another Franklin Raines. And Robert L. Wilkins. who is also black, was nominated by President Obama to serve as a judge on the DC Court of Appeals.

Wilkins, just by coincidence, was a classmate of Barack Obama's at Harvard Law school. He was a appointed by the president in 2010 to to a judgeship on the DC District Court and confirmed by a solid Democrat majority in the Senate less than a month before the new Ssenate elected in the 2010 midterms took over. His views on racial politics and other matters are about what you'd expect from an Obama nominee.

Watt is a well established time server in congress thanks to a racially gerrymandered district, and was formerly the chairman of the CBC. He now belongs to the Progressive Caucus as well as the CBC. Before getting into congress, he was a lawyer who specialized in gaming the federal and state governments for minority set asides and contracts.

He's on record as being instrumental in stopping a bi-partisan bill calling for an audit of the federal reserve, HR 1207..and apparently he's not adverse to using racist epithets against white people either, even when it's one of his fellow 'progressives'.

He was also formally investigated by the Office of Congressional Ethics for serious ethics violations in 2009 over a series of fundraising events he was involved in, after which he suddenly withdrew proposals he had introduced to subject auto dealers to more stringent regulations. He was cleared on a strictly partisan vote, after which his response was to introduce a bill to slash funding of the Office of Congressional Ethics. In other words, a real credit to congress.

The Republican say their objections to Wilkins are based on legitimate concerns about the need for additional judges on the D.C. Circuit, which is actually overstaffed right now. In the case of Watt, they're concerned about his qualifications for the job and the belief that oversight of FHA is not the place where any politician should be employed, and especially not one like Watt, since it can, shall we say, be a real moneymaker if you're not adverse to feathering your personal nest.

The CBC? Oh, it's racism of course.

“It’s not the controlling point but it’s a factor, no question about it,” Butterfield said. “The fact is, no sitting member of Congress in 150 years has been denied an up-or-down vote on a confirmation. Race has got to be a factor here.”

“It goes without saying,” added Rep. Charles B. Rangel, D-N.Y., another senior member of the CBC. He called Republicans the descendants of Confederates.

“No one makes a big deal of it, but if you’re a fly on the wall in any of their homes — I’ll tell you what: If you track the Confederate Army to the Dixiecrats, to the conversation of the Republicans, to the districts that were affected, you may be dealing with different labels, but if they were ever able to track down their ancestors, there’s a Confederate general in every damn living room.”

Charming. But race - and racial politics - trumps everything for these people. Note what I emphasize here:

Following the Wilkins filibuster, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-D.C., chairwoman of the CBC’s Judicial Nominations Working Group, released a statement saying she would “lead a strategy discussion at the CBC meeting on Wednesday on moving African American judicial nominees through the Senate.”

One tactic could be an extrapolation of what CBC members are already doing: attack Republican obstruction of Obama’s nominees — particularly African-Americans. That could boost turnout from a critical Democratic voting bloc in 2014 and undercut the GOP’s “big tent” rebranding efforts.

“One of the severe impacts of [the filibusters], and in large part you see this in the Judiciary, is that the Obama administration has been working tirelessly to diversify the bench, and that means women and people of color on the bench,” said Marge Baker, executive vice president of People for the American Way, a liberal advocacy group that tracks judicial nominations. “I think regardless of the motivation, it’s having a disproportionate effect on minorities and people of color, and that’s something to be upset about, and I do think it’s going to have an impact in 2014.”

Yes, it's all about ginning up turnout in the Democrat's urban strongholds, withotu which they can't win elections.Harry Reid understands that.

As for Ms.Baker, apparently she and the rest of her far Left cohorts over at People For the American Way strongly disagree with Dr. King's dictum that people should be judged - and appointed to office - on the content of their character, not the color of their skin. That sounds pretty racist to me.

And inconsistent, since Clarence Thomas certainly didn't get a pass from these people during what he referred to, appropriately, as 'a high tech lynching'.

So apparently, it's only certain blacks, like Mel Watt or Robert Wilkins who merit unqualified support based on their race.Thanks to Harry Reid and the CBC, it looks like they've achieved it, too.

Larry Elder was right.

Reid Going Nuclear; McConnell: If I Were Responsible For Obamacare, I'd Change The Subject Too

Well, Harry Reid is destroying the Gang of 14 compromise as I write this  and using the nuclear option to push through Obama's radical choices for the DC circuit court by simple majority.

Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has moved to adjourn the senate.

This is going to ignite all-out partisan war in the future, but on the plus side, we now know it's only going to take 51 votes to repeal ObamaCare...and the rest of the Left's poisonous agenda.

Here's McConnell's speech, and it's not bad: (hat tip Drew M. over at Ace's place)

“Over the past several weeks, the American people have been witness to one of the most breathtaking indictments of big-government liberalism in memory. And I’m not just talking about a web site.

 “I’m talking about the way in which Obamacare was forced on the public by an administration and a Democrat-led Congress that we now know was willing to do and say just about anything to pass it into law.

“The President and his Democrat allies were so determined to force their vision of health care on the public that they assured them up and down that they wouldn’t lose the plans they had, that they’d save money instead of losing it, and that they’d be able to keep using the doctors and hospitals they were already using. 

“But of course now we know that rhetoric just doesn’t match reality.

“And the stories we’re hearing on a near-daily basis now range from heartbreaking to comic. “Just yesterday I saw a story about a guy getting a letter in the mail saying his dog had qualified for insurance under Obamacare. So yeah, I’d probably be running for the exits too if I had supported this law.

“I’d be looking to change the subject just as Senate Democrats have been doing with their threats of going nuclear and changing the Senate rules on nominations. If I were a senator from Oregon, which hasn’t enrolled a single person yet for its Obamacare exchange, I would probably want to shift the focus too.

 “But here’s the problem with this latest distraction. It doesn’t distract people from Obamacare. It reminds them of it. It reminds them of all the broken promises. It reminds them of the power grab. It reminds them of the way Democrats set up one set of rules for themselves and another for everybody else.

“It’s basically the same debate.

“And rather than distract people from Obamacare, it only reinforces the narrative of a party that is willing to do and say just about anything to get its way. Because that’s just what they’re doing all over again.

“Once again, Senate Democrats are threatening to break the rules of the Senate in order to change the rules of the Senate. And over what? Over a court that doesn’t even have enough work to do.

“Millions of Americans are hurting because of a law Washington Democrats forced upon them – and what do they do about it? They cook up some fake fight over judges that aren’t even needed.

“Look: I get it. As I indicated, I’d want to be talking about something else too if I had to defend dogs getting insurance while millions of Americans lost theirs. But it won’t work. And the parallels between this latest skirmish and the original Obamacare push are just too obvious to ignore. “Think about it: The Majority Leader promised over and over again that he wouldn’t break the rules of the Senate in order to change them. On July 14 he went on ‘Meet the Press’ and he said: ‘We’re not touching judges.’ “He may as well just have said ‘If you like the rules of the Senate you can keep them.’

"And this Democrat strategy of distract, distract, distract is getting old. Because the American people aren’t fooled. “If our colleagues want to work with us to fill judicial vacancies that actually need to be filled, then let’s do it. “If our colleagues want to work with us to spare the American people from the pain of Obamacare, then let’s do that.

“But if they want to play games and set yet another precedent that they will no doubt come to regret, well…that’s a choice only they can make. “Let me be clear: the Democrat playbook of broken promises, double standards, and raw power…the same playbook that got us Obamacare…it has to end.

“That’s why Republicans are going to keep their focus where it belongs: on the concerns of the American people. It means we’re going to keep pushing to get back to the drawing board on health care – to replace Obamacare with real reforms that do not punish the middle class. And we’ll leave the political games to our friends on the other side.”

Harry Reid is going to be remembered as the man who wrecked whatever collegiality and bi-partisanship existed in the senate, to the detriment of the country. And the Democrats going along for the ride are going to regret this.

It's that Golden Rule thing, you know. And this isn't  going to be forgotten.

Obama: "ObamaCare's Failure is The Republican's Fault!'

Yes, he really went there:

President Obama on Tuesday sought to redirect some of the political blame for the botched rollout of the federal health insurance exchange to Republicans, characterizing GOP lawmakers as rooting for the law’s failure.

Obama said that fixes to the HealthCare.gov Web portal are underway and that the exchange will function for a majority of people by the end of November. But the president said staunch opposition from congressional Republicans is inhibiting the law’s implementation.

“One of the problems we’ve had is one side of Capitol Hill is invested in failure,” Obama said at the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council meeting in Washington. “We obviously are going to have to remarket and rebrand, and that will be challenging in this political environment.”

Let's see now...ObamaCare was passed-or shoved through,more accurately- without a single Republican vote and no Republican input using procedural antics that broke rules that have governed congress and how it operates for over a century. In fact, the Republican members of congress were literally locked out of the room when this was being stitched together.

It wasn't the Republicans who appointed Kathleen Sebelius or hired CGI in a no bid contract. Nor were they the ones who repeatedly and knowingly lied to the American people, saying "if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor. If you like your insurance, you can keep it."

It wasn't the Republicans who consistently gamed the figures, or spent over $5 billion to put together 15 websites for ObamaCare. And it wasn't the GOP who insisted on rolling out the website even when they were told it wasn't tested, completed or ready. Nor was it the Republicans who scattered waivers around to favored political allies, or postponed the company mandate while retaining the individual one.

And it certainly wasn't the Republicans who ignored the impact this was going to have on their fellow Americans, even though they all knew what that impact would be.

President Obama's signature achievement was created in a partisan vacuum, arrogantly pushed through congress and sold to the American people with deliberate lies and falsehood.

And he has the nerve to blame Republicans for opposing it because they realized what a train wreck waiting to happen it was? Because their constituents hated the bill and they were actually representing their concerns?

And then, there was this laugher:

The president also voiced frustration with the toxic political atmosphere endangering his signature legislative achievement. He said Washington needs to “break through the stubborn cycle of crisis politics and start working together.”

Who was it, Mr.President that created the 'permanent campaign'? Who created the current political atmosphere? Who was it that started out by saying he was going to be the president of all the people and then veered sharply Left, using his office to attack and demonize private citizens and ruling by executive order diktat?

I can't think which is more puerile and disgraceful, President Obama for whining away like this or the Washington Post printing it as 'news'. Although at least the WAPO had the inate shame to indirectly discredit this nonsense by printing a few facts about how the administration was briefed before hand that the website wasn't ready for action...another lie that was told to congress over and over again while this fiasco was in the making.

Man up Mr. President, for once. ObamaCare is all yours. You own it. And there's no running away from it:

Harry Reid Ready To Destroy 'Bi-Partisan' Agreement, Go Nuclear On The Filibuster

With Harry Reid as Democrat Senate Majority leader, it was easy to predict that the bi-partisan agreement John McCain, Lindsay Graham and the other RINOs who constituted the Gang of 14 back in 2005 when Republicans controlled the Senate would fall apart as soon as the Democrats felt like it and had a majority.

The deal back then was that Bill Frist,then the  GOP Senate Majority leader wanted to change the Senate rules to allow the confirmation of judges by simple majority. McCain and his playmates undercut him with a bi-partisan group of senators that pledged not to use the Nuclear option and change the rules, but to compromise and not filibuster except 'under extraordinary circumstances'. The Republicans figured that someday they would be in the minority and would want their rights similarly respected.

Harry Reid,the Minority leader at that time thought this was a dandy idea and praised  the compromise  as a true example of bipartisan cooperation.With a straight face, and without busting out laughing.

As soon as the Democrats got the senate majority all that kumbaya stuff went out the windowq of course. Aside from changing procedural rules to shove through ObamaCare, Reid used the nuclear option in October of 2011 to kill a a post-cloture amendment by a simple majority on the president's Jobs bill....even though he had to ignore the Senate parliamentarian's ruling to do it.

Reid is now threatening to use the nuclear option again to permanently change the senate rules and cut off all filibusters by the minority party, in this case, the Republicans.

The reason is that the Republicans are filibustering   judicial appointments to the DC Court of Appeals, which the president wants to pack with radical appointees because its rulings have a significant impact on federal regulatory policy. Even though that court is currently split between Republican and Democrat appointees, our Dear Leader has suffered more than a few defeats there and wants to, shall we say, eliminate the uncertainty.

Is Reid serious? I have a feeling he's just throwing the threat out there to see if the Republicans cave in, but if he goes there it's not exactly smart policy. President Obama's numbers are rapidly plummeting and as unpopular as ObamaCare is now, it's going to be even worse next year when the ObamaCare mandates gut the employer-provided group insurance policies the way its hit the individual policies this year. There are 21 Democrat senate seats up for re-election this year,and a lot of them are in Red States, held by incumbents who joined the president in lying to their constituencies about ObamaCare.

Things could change, and change significantly. I find it hard to believe that Reid doesn't realize that if the filibuster isn't honored as a check and balance, a GOP majority could treat the Democrats exactly the way they're being treated now, with presidential appointments and legislation being subject to a simple up or down majority vote..which could lead to the undoing of ObamasCare and pretty much everything else Harry Reid and this president have shoved through.

And hyper-partisanship will definitely ramp up, even worse than now.

We'll see what happens...

The Rift Between Obama And Israel Widens

Two examples of how President Obama's non-actions on Iran are destroying the relationships between America and not just Israel but our other long term allies in the region.

 Mark Regev, a spokeman for Israeli Prime minister Netanyahu and the Israeli government makes it quite plain to Jake Tapper how the Israelis feel betrayed by the president..although I can't think for the life of me how they could have expected anything else. As it is,the Iranians have already received significant sanctions relief and a 3 month window to continue their illegal nuclear weapons program in exchange for absolutely nothing.

 Regev reminds us that the U.S. is not a disinterested party here. "The Iranians are building intercontinental ballistic missiles. They're not building them for us. They already have missiles that can hit Israel. They are building them for you."

Regev said that while Israel wants "to see the Iranian nuclear crisis resolved peacefully," the only good way to do that effectively short of military action is "a good agreement that actually effectively dismantles Iran's military nuclear program." Of course, this is anathema to President Barack Obama, who has done everything possible to thwart the Iran sanctions he now takes credit for. Just ask Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) about the president's opposition to the Kirk-Menendez amendment (which passed in the senate 100-0) implementing them :



Here's another signal, sent by none other than Israel's Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman,who says flatly that Israel needs to look for other allies other than America because the U.S. is "dealing with too many other challenges:

 "The Americans have a lot of problems and challenges around the world that they need to solve and they have problems at home. We need to understand them and our place in the global arena," Lieberman stated a week after returning to the ministry following his acquittal on corruption charges. During a speech given at the Sderot Conference, Lieberman stressed the importance of not putting too much focus on America as Israel's main ally. "For many years Israel's foreign policy was one directional towards Washington, but my policy has many more directions."

Barack Hussein Obama was quite plain when he came into office that his goal was to "create daylight" between America and Israel, and he's succeeded, to the detriment of both countries. Eventually, as I've written before on these pages, he intends to destroy the relationship completely if he can. His long history of having close relations with a whole slew of anti-Semites and 'anti-Zionists' like Al Sharpton, Khalid al-Mansour, Edward Said, Rashid Khalidi, Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan means it's practically in his DNA.

Of course, on our side of the pond, the White House has already given talking points to its anti-Israel apologists and flacks, as my friend Snoopy at Simply Jews reports.
 
In any event, the Israelis cannot allow an Iran with nuclear weapons. It is an existential threat to them, and I have no doubts they're going to do something about that .

Supreme Court Upholds Texas Abortion Law

The Supreme Court of the United States today upheld the abortion laws passed by the State of Texas by a 5-4 vote.The majority refused to set aside a federal appeals court’s order permitting the law to take effect on October 31.

The law, opposed by Planned Parenthood and of course a number of Democrats was voted into law by a two thirds majority by the legislature in Texas after a number of Dr. Gosnell type abortion 'clinics' surfaced in the state. Th new law, in an effort to stop these chamber of horror sites from operating requires that any doctor in the state who is going to perform an abortion have professional privileges to admit patients to a hospital within thirty miles of the site where the abortion will take place.

A federal judge in Austin, District Judge Lee Yeakel, (a Bush appointee, so this was hardly partisan politics at work) had ruled last month that this requirement was unconstitutional, saying that it put a “substantial obstacle” in the path of women in Texas to terminate a pregnancy. The Fifth Circuit overturned that order, and cleared the way for the law to become effective while the Fifth Circuit is reviewing the constitutionality of the law.

Needless to say, Planned Parenthood is upset. They and and several other Texas abortion clinics said in their lawsuit to stop the measure that it would force more than a third of clinics in the state to stop providing abortions...and that meant that there was a lot of Federal money st stake for them.

I fail to see how merely requiring an abortionist to have admitting privileges in a hospital (which means he or she has gone through a certain amount of vetting) restricts anyone from having an abortion. And a clinic should have admitting privileges to a hospital within 30 miles in case something goes wrong.

Not only that, but as Justice Scalia argued successfully, this is a huge assault on federalism.

Odd how the Left absolutely salivates at the idea of restrictions and regulations on everything and anything except to right to kill babies on demand.

This isn't over yet, but it's a good precedent, and will effect laws in Tennessee and Utah, the other states enforcing their laws on admitting privileges as well as similar laws under temporary court injunctions in Alabama, Kansas, Mississippi, North Dakota and Wisconsin.

Of course, there's always Albuquerque, New Mexico, where a bid to ban abortions performed after 20 weeks unless a woman's life was at stake was defeated 45% to 55% after a well financed campaign by Planned Parenthood and others.

By 20 weeks ( 5 months) a baby has a fully developed nervous system and can feel the excruciating pain that results from having the skull punctured by surgical scissors and the brains vacuumed out to collapse the head as the baby is ripped from the womb. That's the usual method by which late term abortions are performed.

Watcher's Council Nominations - The Big Fix Edition

Welcome to the Watcher's Council, a blogging group consisting of some of the most incisive blogs in the 'sphere, and the longest running group of its kind in existence. Every week, the members nominate two posts each, one written by themselves and one written by someone from outside the group for consideration by the whole Council.Then we vote on the best two posts, with the results appearing on Friday.

Council News:

This week, Ask Marion and The Independent Sentinel took advantage of my generous offer of link whorage and earned honorable mention status with some great articles.

You can, too! Want to see your work appear on the Watcher’s Council homepage in our weekly contest listing? Didn’t get nominated by a Council member? No worries.

Simply head over to Joshuapundit and post the title a link to the piece you want considered along with an e-mail address ( which won't be published) in the comments section no later than Monday 6PM PST in order to be considered for our honorable mention category. Then return the favor  by creating a post on your site linking to the Watcher’s Council contest for the week when it comes out Wednesday morning

Simple, no?

It's a great way of exposing your best work to Watcher’s Council readers and Council members. while grabbing the increased traffic and notoriety. And how good is that, eh?

So, let's see what we have this week....

Council Submissions

• The Noisy Room – Seattle Makes a Gesture to the Citizenry


• Liberty's Spirit – The Gettysburg Address, !50 Years of Meaning


• Simply Jews – NYT mockery of Bibi's stance on negotiations with Iran: an opinion or a message?


• The Political Commentator – You my friend are substandard!


• Joshuapundit-Roundup - ObamaCare's Epic Fail


• The Right Planet – Patriot Games


• GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD – Imperial Iran


• The Mellow Jihadi – Becoming A Military Linguist!


• The Colossus of Rhodey – Be dumb as a brick, get your own MSNBC show


• VA Right! - Freeloading Democrat Obamacare Navigators Encourage Fraud and Lying


• Bookworm Room – Charles Murray taught me libertarianism in a hurry


• The Glittering Eye -The Business of America is Business Compliance


• The Razor – Nurse Practitioners Aren'’t the Solution to the Collapsing American Medical System


• Rhymes With Right – Hey Hey! Ho Ho! Arne Duncan Has Got To Go!


• Nice Deb – Latest ObamaCare Ads Are Sexist and Demeaning #DemocratWarOnWomen

Honorable Mentions

• Ask Marion - 1 in 3 Seniors Dies with Alzheimer’s or Other Dementia


• The Independent Sentinel - White House Warned About Healthcare dot Gov Crisis in April

Non-Council Submissions

• Mark Steyn –Thus Spake Obama submitted by The Noisy Room


• Daniel Hannan/WSJ – The World of English Freedoms submitted by Liberty's Spirit


• The Contentious Centrist – Yea, the NYT is biased in favour of Israel submitted by Simply Jews


• Boudicabpi -Chamberlain, Munich 1938: How… Incredible It Is . . via Joseph Wouk submitted by The Political Commentator


• Jonah Goldberg – Obamacare Schadenfreudarama submitted by Joshuapundit


• Via Meadia – The Most Shocking Obamacare Revelation submitted by The Right Planet


• War Is Boring – US Navy: 5 Questions to Ponder submitted by GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD


• View From The Porch –If schadenfreude had calories, I'd weigh 300 pounds. submitted by The Mellow Jihadi


• Taki's Magazine – The Boycott On Normalcy submitted by The Colossus of Rhodey


• Watchdog.org – 30 to 40 percent of Obamacare tech not built submitted by VA Right!


• Victor Davis Hanson-Obama's Noble Lies submitted by Bookworm Room


• KausFiles – What’s the Obamacare line today? submitted by The Glittering Eye


• Thought Catalog – 16 People On Things They Couldn’t Believe About America Until They Moved Here submitted by The Razor


• Policy Mic – Montana's Plan to Set Gender Quotas For State Legislature Could Be a Model For the Nation submitted by Rhymes with Right


• Joel Pollak/The Conversation -So, When Does Ted Cruz Get His Apology? submitted by Nice Deb


• LetVent.com – A Black Reporter Summarizes Barack Obama submitted by The Watcher


• Andrew McCarthy – Obama's 5 Percent Con Job submitted by Watcher

Enjoy! And don't forget to like us on Facebook and follow us Twitter..'cause we're cool like that!

Today's WAPO Poll, Obama's Poor Numbers And What It All Really Means

One thing that was very much in the news today was a WashingtonPostt/ABC News poll showing that the president's approval ratings, that of ObamaCare and of politicians supporting ObamaCare has taken a nasty turn south.

Opposition to the new health-care law also hit a record high in the survey, with 57 percent saying they oppose the president’s most significant domestic initiative. Forty-six percent say they are strongly against it. Just a month ago, as the enrollment period was beginning, the public was almost evenly divided in its assessments of the law.

Disapproval of Obama’s handling of the health-care law’s rollout stands at 63 percent, with a majority saying they strongly disapprove. Last month, 53 percent disapproved.

The findings are the first since Obama’s news conference last week in which he repeatedly acknowledged his and the administration’s mistakes in handling the legislation. He also sought to assuage the anger among millions of Americans whose individual policies were canceled because they did not meet the new requirements.

With all the controversy surrounding the implementation of the law, Americans are evenly divided on whether the Affordable Care Act can be fixed.

Responses to that question differ dramatically depending on party identification, with Democrats overwhelmingly confident that the legislation can be made to work and Republicans overwhelmingly pessimistic about its viability. A majority of independents say it cannot be made to work

The health-care law has become a political burden for elected officials who support it. Almost four in 10 Americans say they are more likely to oppose a politician who backs the legislation, while just over a fifth say they would be more likely to support such a politician. That’s the biggest gap recorded in Post-ABC polling during the entire debate over the law.

[...]
On three measures of leadership and empathy that have been tested repeatedly in Post-ABC polls, Obama now is underwater on all three for the first time. Half or more now say he is not a strong leader, does not understand the problems of “people like you,” and is not honest and trustworthy. Perceptions of the president as a strong leader have dropped 15 points since January, and over the past year the percentage of registered voters who say he is not honest and trustworthy has increased 12 points.

The new survey also asked people whether they consider Obama a good manager. In what appears to be a direct link to the problems of the health-care rollout, 56 percent say no and 41 percent say yes.

The president's job approval rating? On average, 40.6 per cent.

So what does all this mean?

First off, as far as I'm concerned I take most of this poll with a grain of salt.The Washington Post is a very pro-Obama paper,and as we've discussed before, polls depend a great deal on whom you sample,what percentage of your sample they are, and how you phrase the questions you ask.

Back in 2012,before the WAPO stopped publishing their mechanics so you could actually see what they were doing, I used to bust them routinely for ridiculously oversampling Democrats to get a pro-Obama result. 17% was not uncommon. And yes, when it comes to Barack Obama, oversampling black voters also helps queer the numbers:



As Muhammed Ali once told me, the funniest joke is the truth.

The WAPO says that President Obama's overall approval numbers are well over 42%, something that puts him enough above the other polls out there to raise his overall average, but not too much, so it doesn't totally destroy their credibility.

I'd bet my dollar to your dime they had to work pretty hard to skew things to get the president's numbers up even this much.

But then there's the question of what this means.

To me, the most significant parts of the poll are the lowering of Obama's number on the so-called 'three measures of leadership and empathy' and the numbers when it comes to voting against politicians who support ObamaCare.

For years, most of the media have been telling us how smart, how empathetic and how wonderful Our Dear Leader is, and by and large the low information voters bought it, even when this president was stealing them blind and raping their freedoms with impunity. By and large, a lot of them are dependent on government and benefit in some way from the status quo. What the collapse of ObamaCare did was to bring the war home so to speak. It was something they could directly see and feel the pain of in a way that Benghazi, IRS-Gate,NSA-Gate, Fast and Furious and all the other scandals bubbling around the cesspool in Washington didn't. After all, when you personally pay no taxes, what does it matter if somebody else's money is wasted?

Except now, it's personal. The low information voters see that it isn't the Ruling Class whose hours are being cut or whose spouses and children are being tossed off of their health plan. These people notice now that it isn't the Ruling Class screaming in frustration at their computer monitors trying to get health insurance, now that what they were promised by the Prevaricator-in-Chief they could keep has been cancelled.The Ruling class screamed and were heard immediately, and got themselves a waiver.The rest of us are still reeling at what it's going to cost for less coverage with higher deductibles and co-pays.

In fact, ObamaCare's poster girl, the one the White House was pushing as the successful example, one of the few who actually signed up successfully has now informed the world that after getting a look at the price, she's opting for the penalty. She won't be the only one. It's the height of irony that ObamaCare, which is still being sold to us as a device to see to it that more Americans have healthcare is actually going to see to it that a lot more Americans don't.

Oh, and by the way, the White House, which proudly embraced 'ObamaCare' as its own, very special achievement is now running away from that name like the bubonic Plague. The White House is actually issuing talking points to Democrats instructing them to refer to it as the Affordable Care Act.

We have always been at war with East Asia.Just ask Big Brother.

My point here is simple. The pain is going to resonate. But whether that's going to translate into actual numbers at the polls in a year is another question. President Obama, after all, isn't running for anything. And a year is a very long time in politics. Remember, by nature a great many people have trouble concentrating on politics for any length of time. In fact, politics is slowly becoming not a forum to discuss ideas and pick leadership but almost a new form of Roman Circus, with new diversions and spectacles constantly demanded to keep people's interest at the rare times the Ruling Class wants them to pay attention.

The president has already shown that he has no problem breaking the law for the sake of partisan politics, and there's no telling what might be in store. ObamaCare, as toxic as it is won't be going to go away until its repealed, and even if the Republicans take the Senate and retain the House by sufficient numbers to do that in 2014, ObamaCare will not be able to be repealed until January 20th, 2015. A great deal can happen between now and then, and Obama and what Michael Barone, the usually even tempered dean of American political analysts called to my surprise 'that lawless gang' will lie, cheat, manipulate, steal and propagandize to keep it in place, assisted by their ever helpful minions in the media.

Here's a great example of the latter. Politico runs this story with the headline: President Obama to insurers: No bailout. It's subject is the meeting the president had with the CEO's of the major health insurance companies he just screwed over to the tune of millions of dollar. Your immediate impression is that here's our gutsy president standing toe to toe with those bad apple insurers, as he called them. And telling them that they'll take it and like it. No bailouts for you..they don't poll well as they used to.

The whole beginning part of this story is all about that. But a funny thing happens when you hit the bottom part of the story, when most people have stopped reading.

By paragraph 6, after 5 paragraphs about how a bail out isn't going to happen, we get this in paragraph 6:

“As the president emphasized, there is not an unlimited amount of money out there for the government to do that [make up for extra costs],” said Jim Roosevelt, CEO of Tufts Health Plan, one of more than a dozen insurance company leaders who attended the 90-minute meeting.

'amount of money'? Wait a minute, I thought there was no bail out going to happen?

By paragraph 11..well what do you know:

The 2010 health law had several tools aimed at helping insurers through some of the fiscal bumps in the new markets. To address the industry concerns about additional costs if they revive the canceled plans, administration officials said last week they would tweak one of those tools — called “risk corridors” — to give them more help.But Obama made clear that the financial support has a limit, according to the two health executives and several other industry sources who were briefed on the meeting.

Well, well..."risk corridors", AKA increased costs incurred because of ObamaCare, is the euphemism they're using for " bailout due to losses suffered from ObamaCare." And 'financial support' is a bribe using your tax dollars to pay insurance companies to compensate them for the extra costs they're now going to incur from the larger 'risk corridors' of President Obama's bogus fix.

In other words, B-a-i-l-o-u-t.

That's a 180 degrees from the headline saying 'no bailouts'. But our friends at Politico were willing to aid and abet this president's messaging, sticking the information about the offers to bribe the insurance companies at the very end of the article, long after the casual reader has clicked on something else.

I use this fairly egregious example just to show you what we're up against in terms of the PR battle. A lot of this stuff is a lot more subtle.

Of course, the insurers might balk at exposing themselves to criminal liability for writing policies that are against the law, no matter what Barack Obama says.But when you have a president willing to use the IRS as his own personal political goon squad, other things come into play that can influence that decision.

The president and his minions will not let go of this easily. They will continue to try to spin crap into gold, and they'll happily spend your last dime and sacrifice your freedom to do it, if you let them.

The solution, of course is a strategy designed to keep this in front of the low information voters while energizing the anti-Obama base. After all, no one can vote against Barack Obama again, but they can vote against ObamaCare and take revenge on the tools that supported it who are up for re-election.

So the Opposition, if they're smart, will shout "no bail out for ObamaCare" at the top of their lungs early and often. They will remind people again and again of how they were deliberately and knowingly lied to, and warn them against trusting anything this president says. They will take steps to unite their caucus, now that Ted Cruz and Mike Lee have been proven right about what a nightmare ObamaCare is. Apologies are in order. And they will avoid the Democrat's attempt to smear them with the same ordure by attempting to trick them into being part of a 'bi-partisan fix'.

There is no fixing ObamaCare.In fact, any attempt to fix it needs to be avoided at all costs, with the simple mantra that we now know what's in the bill,we don't like it and neither do the American people. The word that needs to be repeated over and over again is 'repeal'.

If the Republicans do that, there's a decent chance they may be able to repeal this monstrosity called ObamaCare come 2015.

But that's what it will take.

Henry Chao: 30-40% of Healthcare.gov Still Remains to be Built!

Unbelievable.

Here, we have Rep. Cory Gardner (CO-4) questioning Henry Chao, Deputy Chief Information Officer and Deputy Director of the Office of Information Services Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services about the ObamaCare website...in which Chao admits that 30-40% of Healthcare.Gov., the website that's going to have all our personal data and that we're going tobe dependent on to steer through the mess ObamaCare has created has yet to be created!

REP. CORY GARDNER: Well how much do we have to build today, still? What do we need to build? 50 percent? 40 percent? 30 percent?

HENRY CHAO: I think it's, uh, just an approximation, we're probably sitting somewhere between 60 and 70 percent because we still have to build...

GARDNER: Wait, 60 or 70 percent that needs to be built, still?

CHAO: Because we still have to build the payment systems to make payments to insurers in January.

GARDNER: Let me get this correct. Sixty to 70 percent of Healthcare.gov still needs to be built?

CHAO: It's not really about Healthcare.gov -- it's the federally-facilitated marketplace.

GARDNER: The entire system that the American people are being required to rely upon...

CHAO: Healthcare.gov -- the online application, verification, determination, plan compare, getting enrolled, generating the enrollment transaction -- that's 100 percent there.

Note that Chao didn't mention this tidbit in his opening remarks - it has to be pried out of him during questioning.

My favorite line occurs starting at about 4:15, where Gardner asks Chao how the remaining 40% of the ObamaCare website that still needs to be completed is going tobe tested. Chao's reply? "Oh, about the same way we tested everything else."

They've got 11 days to build 30-40% of the site they spent over half a billion dollars on and 3 1/2 years. And they're going to 'test' it the same way they tested the other 60%! I can't wait to enter my financial data and credit card numbers into the system, can you?

And by the way, without the payment system which still isn't there, it's impossible to purchase insurance. But they rolled it out anyway.

Comedy gold.Or it would be if so many innocent people who believed their president was telling them the truth weren't being hurt so badly by this fiasco.

Speaking of the website, it turns out the White House was specifically warned in March that the website was in bad shape and was likely not to function properly by the rollout date:

The Obama administration brought in a private consulting team to independently assess how the federal online health insurance enrollment system was developing, according to a newly disclosed document, and in late March received a clear warning that its Oct. 1 launch was fraught with risks.

The analysis by McKinsey & Co. foreshadowed many of the problems that have dogged HealthCare.gov since its rollout, including the facts that the call-in centers would not work properly if the online system was malfunctioning and that insufficient testing would make it difficult to fix problems after the launch.

Of course, this is the exact opposite of what HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told congress when she testified.

Now you see why Henry Chao's inadvertent belly laugher about how they're going to test the parts of the website they still haven't built yet the same way they tested everything was so funny.

Really, Sebelius and the rest of the Obama Administration just take their cues and their direction from the man and the top. They lie repeatedly and shamelessly. They lie when the truth might actually help, because it's such second nature to them.

Man Buys House Next To Ex-wife..And Erects Giant Middle Finger Statue

Now this is interesting.

A Detroit metro area man, one Alan Markovitz had a nasty divorce with his ex-wife, who's now living there with the man Markovitz alleges she cheated on him with while they were still married. Knowing how these things work, the house his ex is sharing with her lover was probably paid for by the ex-husband too.

Now, a lot of men would probably just say the heck with it and move on with their lives. But Alan Markovitz apparently sees things differently.

First, he bought a house right next door to his ex-wife. Then he erected the above 12-foot statue representing a well known gesture...complete with a flood light to keep it visible 24-7.

As FOX Detroit reported, Markovits intended to keep this little matter between him, his ex-wife and her new boy toy, but a 12-foot statue like that is going to get some attention, and especially after his ex-wife's daughter posted a picture of the statue on twitter.

What's more, since the statue contains no obscene language or pornographic images, it's not even certain the statue can be legally removed.

Let's just call it a message suited for the digital age and leave it at that. Not all poems are written with a pen.

27 Democratic Senators Who Promised You Could Keep Your Health Insurance If You Liked It

 

Here's a little something of interest, especially in view of New York Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand's admission on the Sunday shows that she and her fellow Democrats knew the president was lying when he repeatedly promised Americans that if they liked their healthcare, they'd be able to keep it. That means they knowingly aided and abetted criminal fraud.


Via Byron York over at the Washington Examiner, here's a list of twelve Democrat Senators as compiled by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's office who not only aided and abetted but actively helped in a deception that cost Americans millions of dollars and caused them to suffer real pain and suffering, with some of them even losing their jobs or having their hours and income slashed:


SEN. HARRY REID (D-Nev.): “In fact, one of our core principles is that if you like the health care you have, you can keep it.” (Sen. Reid, Congressional Record, S.8642, 8/3/09)

SEN. RICHARD DURBIN: “We believe — and we stand by this — if you like your current health insurance plan, you will be able to keep it, plain and simple, straightforward.” (Sen. Durbin, Congressional Record, S.6401, 6/10/09)

SEN. CHUCK SCHUMER (D-NY): “If you like your insurance, you keep it.” (U.S. Senate, Finance Committee, Bill Mark-Up, 9/29/09)

SEN. PATTY MURRAY (D-Wash.): “Again, if you like what you have, you will be able to keep it. Let me say this again: If you like what you have, when our legislation is passed and signed by the President, you will be able to keep it.” (Sen. Murray, Congressional Record, S.6400, 6/10/09)

SEN. MAX BAUCUS (D-Mont.): “That is why one of the central promises of health care reform has been and is: If you like what you have, you can keep it. That is critically important. If a person has a plan, and he or she likes it, he or she can keep it.” (Sen. Baucus, Congressional Record, S.7676, 9/29/10)

SEN. TOM HARKIN (D-Iowa): “One of the things we put in the health care bill when we designed it was the protection for consumers to keep the plan they have if they like it; thus, the term ‘grandfathered plans.’ If you have a plan you like — existing policies — you can keep them. … we said, if you like a plan, you get to keep it, and you can grandfather it in.” (Sen. Harkin, Congressional Record, S.7675-6, 9/29/10)

THEN-REP. TAMMY BALDWIN (D-Wis.): “Under the bill, if you like the insurance you have now, you may keep it and it will improve.” (Rep. Baldwin, Press Release, 3/18/10)

SEN. MARK BEGICH (D-Alaska): “If you got a doctor now, you got a medical professional you want, you get to keep that. If you have an insurance program or a health care policy you want of ideas, make sure you keep it. That you can keep who you want.” (Sen. Begich, Townhall Event, 7/27/09)

SEN. MICHAEL BENNET (D-Colo.): “We should begin with a basic principle: if you have coverage and you like it, you can keep it. If you have your doctor, and you like him or her, you should be able to keep them as well. We will not take that choice away from you.” (Sen. Bennet, Press Release, 6/11/09)

SEN. BARBARA BOXER (D-Calif.): “So we want people to be able to keep the health care they have. And the answer to that is choice of plans. And in the exchange, we're going to have lots of different plans, and people will be able to keep the health care coverage they need and they want.” (Sen. Boxer, Press Release, 2/8/11)

SEN. SHERROD BROWN (D-Ohio): “Our bill says if you have health insurance and you like it, you can keep it…”(Sen. Brown, Congressional Record, S.12612, 12/7/09)

SEN. BEN CARDIN (D-Md.): “For the people of Maryland, this bill will provide a rational way in which they can maintain their existing coverage…” (Sen. Cardin, Congressional Record, S.13798, 12/23/09)

SEN. BOB CASEY (D-Pa.): “I also believe this legislation and the bill we are going to send to President Obama this fall will also have secure choices. If you like what you have, you like the plan you have, you can keep it. It is not going to change.” (Sen. Casey, Congressional Record, S.8070, 7/24/09)

SEN. KAY HAGAN (D-N.C.): ‘People who have insurance they're happy with can keep it’ “We need to support the private insurance industry so that people who have insurance they're happy with can keep it while also providing a backstop option for people without access to affordable coverage.” (“Republicans Vent As Other Compromise Plans Get Aired,” National Journal’s Congress Daily, 6/18/09)

SEN. MARY LANDRIEU (D-La.): “If you like the insurance that you have, you'll be able to keep it.” (MSNBC’s Hardball, 12/16/09)

SEN. PAT LEAHY (D-Vt.): “[I]f you like the insurance you now have, keep the insurance you have.” (CNN’s “Newsroom,” 10/22/09)

SEN. BOB MENENDEZ (D-N.J.): “If you like what you have, you get to keep it” “Menendez is a member of the Senate Finance Committee, which is expected to release a bill later this week. He stressed that consumers who are satisfied with their plans won't have to change. ‘If you like what you have, you get to keep it,’ he said.” (“Health Care Plan Would Help N.J., Menendez Says,” The Record, 6/19/09)

SEN. JEFF MERKLEY (D-Oreg.): “[E]nsuring that those who like their insurance get to keep it” “The HELP Committee bill sets forward a historic plan that will, for the first time in American history, give every American access to affordable health coverage, reduce costs, and increase choice, while ensuring that those who like their insurance get to keep it.” (Sen. Merkley, Press Release, 7/15/09)

SEN. BARBARA MIKULSKI (D-Md.): “It means that if you like the insurance you have now, you can keep it.” (Sen. Mikulski, Press Release, 12/24/09)

SEN. JAY ROCKEFELLER (D-W.Va.): “I want people to know, the President's promise that if you like the coverage you have today you can keep it is a pledge we intend to keep.” (U.S. Senate, Finance Committee, Hearing, 9/23/09)

SEN. JACK REED (D-R.I.): “If you like the insurance you have, you can choose to keep it.” (Sen. Reed, Town Hall Event, 6/25/09)

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS (I-Vt.): “‘If you have coverage you like, you can keep it,’ says Sen. Sanders.” (“Sick And Wrong,” Rolling Stone, 4/5/10)

SEN. JEANNE SHAHEEN (D-N.H.): ‘if you have health coverage that you like, you get to keep it’ “My understanding … is that … if you have health coverage that you like you can keep it. As I said, you may have missed my remarks at the beginning of the call, but one of the things I that I said as a requirement that I have for supporting a bill is that if you have health coverage that you like you should be able to keep that. …under every scenario that I’ve seen, if you have health coverage that you like, you get to keep it.” (Sen. Shaheen, “Health Care Questions From Across New Hampshire,” Accessed 11/13/13)

SEN. DEBBIE STABENOW (D-Mich.): “As someone who has a large number of large employers in my state, one of the things I appreciate about the chairman's mark is — is the grandfathering provisions, the fact that the people in my state, 60 percent of whom have insurance, are going to be able to keep it. And Mr. Chairman, I appreciate that. That's a strong commitment. It's clear in the bill … I appreciate the strong commitment on your part and the president to make sure that if you have your insurance you can keep it. That's the bottom line for me.” (U.S. Senate, Finance Committee, Bill Mark-Up, 9/24/09)

SEN. JON TESTER (D-Mont.): “‘If you like your coverage, you'll be able to keep it,’ Tester said, adding that if Medicare changes, it will only become stronger”. (“Tester In Baker To Discuss Health Care,” The Fallon County Times, 11/20/09)

SEN. TOM UDALL (D-N.Mex.): “Some worried reform would alter their current coverage. It won't. If you like your current plan, you can keep it.” (“What I Learned: About Health Care Reform This Summer, By Your Lawmakers In Congress,” Albuquerque Journal, 9/8/09)

SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE (D-R.I.): “…it honors President Obama’s programs and the promise of all of the Presidential candidates that if you like the plan you have, you get to keep it. You are not forced out of anything.”(Sen. Whitehouse, Congressional Record, S.8668, 8/3/09)

They knew. And they lied,shamelessly, to promote the agenda.Remember in November, when a number of these swine are going to ask you to trust them with your vote.

23 Dead As Massive Blast Levels Iranian Embassy In Beirut

Two blasts near the Iranian embassy in Beirut killed at least 23 people and injured 146 today.The death toll is expected to go higher. Six buildings were destroyed in the embassy compound.

It appears that one bomb was set off by a bomber with an explosive belt while the second blast was a fairly sizable car bomb.

The Iranians, of course, blamed Israel, but the Israelis were quick to deny any involvement, which makes sense. The embassy is deep in South Beirut which is Hezbollah territory.When I first heard about this, I doubted the Mossad would risk personnel to take out an embassy target, especially in this fashion...nor do they use suicide bombers.

Sure enough, Sheikh Sirajeddine Zuraiqat, the religious guide of the Sunni Abdullah Azzam Brigades, said the group had carried out the attack in a Twitter post. "It was a double martyrdom operation by two of the Sunni heroes of Lebanon," he wrote.

So I think we can chalk this up to the current Sunni vs. Shi'te war now enveloping the Middle East.
In any case, this w3as a devastating strike.

I must say though, it's darkly amusing to see a major fomenter of terrorism like Iran screaming about being victimized by tactics like these.

Roundup - ObamaCare's Epic Fail

This gets funnier and funnier the longer it goes.

After the president's pathetic performance last week, the blowback is almost sit-com worthy.

As you now know, what the president actually said yesterday is that he's not giving individuals the same delay he gave corporations or the same subsidies and waivers he gave congress and certain favored corporations and government bureaucracies, he's merely prepared to wink and look the other way and indulge in what he called 'selective enforcement' ...and just until after the 2014 midterms.

The president is trying to pretend that insurance companies are free to offer the old policies, but, they aren't. And aside from the financial impact and the bureaucratic snafu involved inturning the clok back, they don't wish to break the law...which has not been repealed. What President Obama is hoping is that the anger of the low information voters will be directed on to the insurance companies and that people will still be forced into the expensive, hidden-subsidy exchanges. After which, he can say 'hey it isn't my fault.' That's his thinking, but I have doubts it will fly. Three years ago, maybe but not now.

The insurance companies were, to be polite about it, not exactly pleased. They spent millions of dollars complying with ObamaCare, antagonized a number of their customers and now the Prevaricator-in-Chief expects them spend millions more to rewrite and recreate insurance plans that no longer exist and are still illegal policies under the law and expose themselves to litigation! Given this president's credibility and his tendency to change his mind depending on which way the wind is blowing, they'd be fools to trust his word and expose themselves legally.

Only an arrogant and not particularly bright you know what would expect that.And the industry is reacting as you might expect. Chris Wallace read this statement from the trade association of American insurance companies:


Changing the rules after health plans have already met the requirements of the law, Obamacare, could destabilize the market and result in higher premiums for consumers. Premiums have already been set for next year, based on assumptions of when consumers will be transitioning to the marketplaces.

If now fewer younger and healthier people choose to purchase health coverage in the exchanges, premiums will increase, and there will be fewer choices for consumers.

And the state insurance commissioners aren't thrilled either:


"For three years, state insurance regulators have been working to adapt to the Affordable Care Act in a way that best meets the needs of consumers in each state," the National Association of Insurance Commissioners said in a statement. "It is unclear how, as a practical matter, the changes proposed ... by the president can be put into effect."

Thus far, the insurance commissioners of Washington state, D.C., Arkansas, and Vermont, all Democrats, have rejected Obama's attempt to gut the exchanges with his 'fix' .

In a rare bit of opera comique, the insurance commissioner of DC, one William White was summarily fired and had his remarks critical of the president's fix removed from the department’s website for daring to voice criticism, where he wrote, "The action today undercuts the purpose of the exchanges, including the District’s DC Health Link, by creating exceptions that make it more difficult for them to operate". Even worse, he concurred with the above statement by the insurance commissioners' national association above. So he had to go.

But it's worth noting that White’s initial opposition to the president's “fix” was that it would ultimately undermine the very goals that the ACA is supposed to be working towards, the successful corralling of all Americans into the exchanges. White's firing, of course just underlines that President Obama's little 'fix' was nothing more than sheer politics, just something to direct the the public’s rage away from Obama and the Democrats.

Obama has summoned the CEOs of several insurance companies to the White House for a meeting today, presumably on the Obamacare "fix." Apparently, checking with the insurance companies before enlisting them in a scheme with major practical and legal consequences didn't occur to the White House. My suspicion is that he's promising them so kind of bailout, but again, why would they trust anything he says at this point?

"'I don’t know how he f—-ed this up so badly,' said one House Democrat who has reportedly been very supportive of Obama in the past.

The Upton bill, AKA the 'You Can Keep Your Health Plan' bill which would have done exactly what president promised but would actually have amended the law to make it legal and would have allowed people whose policies were cancelled to renew them and keep them for longer than the president's one year period if they wished passed in the House by a bi-partisan vote of 261-157, including 39 Democrats.

Needless to say,President Obama has already threatened to veto it, although Majority Leader Harry Reid will probably just table it in committee, as he has with every other proposed fix to ObamaCare.

Among other things, The Upton bill would not only let existing policies continue, but insurers could sell individual policies to new customers without the necessity of them going to those pricey, high deductible exchanges, and it is a permanent amendment to the law, not just a one-year-nod-and-wink-let's -get-past-the-elections can of horse manure.

The president's angry threat to veto this is just another sign that actually 'fixing' this or keeping his word to the American people is the last thing on our Dear Leader's mind..it's all about politics and the upcoming midterms.

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) made an interesting admission yesterday appearing on ABC's This Week with fill-in host Martha Raddatz. The senator admitted that she and her senate colleagues all knew that the president was lying when he repeatedly said that if Americans like their healthcare plan, they could keep it.

“We all knew,” she said,referring to the cancellations that would occur.“He should’ve just been specific. No, we all knew.”

She then made a big pitch based on the redistribution of wealth aspect of ObamaCare (although she didn't put it in those words) essentially endorsing the soaking of the middle class to pay for those the Obama Administration deem more deserving.

Now, if the president knew he was lying ( and there's really no way he couldn't have) and the Democrat congress members knew he was lying, as Senator Gillibrand admitted, that's actually a criminal offense in the real world known as fraud and collusion to commit fraud. People lost jobs, lost income when their hours were cut, and experienced pain and suffering based on choices they made because they were informed by this president that keeping tyheir health plans would be no problem. Former federal prosecutor and noted author Andrew McCarthy puts it quite well:

Let’s quickly recap the lawlessness and cynical politics behind Thursday’s pathetic press conference. Obama, who poses as a constitutional-law expert, knows full well that a president has no legal authority to waive statutory mandates. Even if he had such power, moreover, he knows that there is no practical possibility of undoing — within the next few weeks, as the ACA would require — the new arrangements that insurance companies and state regulators spent the last three years structuring to comply with Obamacare mandates. In sum, Obama is well aware that his proposed “fix” is frivolous. His hope is that the country overwhelmingly consists of dolts who are too uninformed to realize that this is the case, and who, with a little help from his media courtiers, can be convinced to blame the insurance companies, rather than the president, for the fact that millions of Americans are losing their coverage under his “reform.”

Now, having covered Thursday’s con job, let’s get back to the overarching Obamacare scheme perpetrated by the president for more than four years — a fraud that, I contend, the Justice Department would not hesitate to prosecute had it been committed by a private-sector executive. I’ve related the standards for criminal and civil enforcement that would militate in favor of prosecution in a case involving the dimension of fraud and breach of fiduciary duty we find here. In addition, NRO’s Andrew Stiles had a superb report on Friday showing the sundry ways the administration’s dysfunctional Obamacare website, HealthCare.gov, runs afoul of various consumer-protection laws. Again, when such infractions are committed by private businesses, the government punishes them quite severely. {...}

The president well knew that, in implementing the “grandfathering” provision, his administration wrote regulations so narrow that tens of millions of existing plans would be eliminated. Congressional Democrats knew this, too: When Republicans endeavored in 2010 to enact legislation that would have broadened the regulation into a meaningful safe harbor, Democrats closed ranks and voted down the proposal – including Democrats such as Senator Mary Landrieu, who now pretends to be a crusader in the cause of letting Americans keep their insurance.

I would also point out that since the president's 'fix' is highly unconstitutional (there is no provision in the Constitution to selectively alter the laws unilaterally by the executive branch, and none to allow 'selective enforcement' either on that same basis) President Obama is, once again in violation of his oath of office.

Obviously, while it can be proven easily that the president willfully deceived the American people, we do not indict and jail sitting presidents. The political remedy for this sort of thing is impeachment and removal from office.

The political climate isn't right for that now, but in 2014, when people start losing their employer provided healthcare and co-pays and deductibles skyrocket, you may very well see a change, especially if the Republicans take the Senate and retain the House in the midterms. Infact, you could very well see more Democrats jumping ship to save their own skins.



Oh, one more thing...the tab for all this. Aside from the $678 million cost to put up the dysfunctional website, paid in a no bid contract to  a company run by an Obama donor and with one of Mooch-elle's pals and ex-sorority sisters  as senior vice president, there's also the matter of a mere $4.4 billion given to 14 state exchanges to put up their own websites...which means, of course, a lot more palm greasing and crony capitalism.Some of the states even took federal money, then decided to let the federal site handle enrollment.

Top of the list? California of course, ($910 million) followed by New York ($401 million).

And remember, this $5 billion plus is just for websites...15 websites.