It’s Wednesday, October 30th, 2013…and here’s The Gouge!
First up, though it’s only the 30th, as Mark Tapscott reveals in the Morning Examiner, for taxpaying Americans, Trick or Treat came early this year:
NBC says Obama knew three years ago millions would lose coverage
Uh oh. Mention “Obamacare” and most Americans are likely to think of President Obama’s May 2009 declaration that “if you like your present health plan, you can keep it.” Now it turns out “millions of Americans are getting or are about to get cancellation letters for their health insurance under Obamacare, say experts, and the Obama administration has known that for at least three years.”
That’s according to an NBC News investigation by reporters Lisa Myers and Hannah Rappleye. Myers is a widely respected senior investigative reporter with NBC who covered the White House for the Washington Star before moving into broadcast journalism. Rappleye is an independent investigative journalist who lists on her LinkedIn page her membership in the George Soros-funded Open Society Foundation.
As significant as where it comes from, however, what makes the NBC report especially significant is its substance, which undermines Obama’s credibility on the central claim in his campaign for Obamacare:
“Four sources deeply involved in the Affordable Care Act tell NBC NEWS that 50 to 75 percent of the 14 million consumers who buy their insurance individually can expect to receive a ‘cancellation’ letter or the equivalent over the next year because their existing policies don’t meet the standards mandated by the new health care law.
“One expert predicts that number could reach as high as 80 percent. And all say that many of those forced to buy pricier new policies will experience ‘sticker shock,’” according to Myers and Rappleye.
Myers and Rappleye found an estimate buried in Department of Health and Human Services Obamacare regulations that as many as 67 percent of people who buy their health insurance through the individual market would lose their coverage. Yet, until this week neither Obama nor any of his spokesmen qualified the claim that people would be able to keep coverage they like.
Imagine that, a Washington professional politician claiming one thing all the while knowing that virtually the exact opposite was the truth?
As Jonathan Strong details at NRO‘s The Corner, the rest of the Dimocratic leadership knew it too:
Top Dem Admits: ‘We Knew’
House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer conceded to reporters today that Democrats knew people would not be able to keep their current health care plans under Obamacare and expressed qualified contrition for President Obama’s repeated vows to the contrary. “We knew that there would be some policies that would not qualify and therefore people would be required to get more extensive coverage,” Hoyer said in response to a question from National Review.
Asked by another reporter how repeated statements by Obama to the contrary weren’t “misleading,” Hoyer said “I don’t think the message was wrong. I think the message was accurate. It was not precise enough…[it] should have been caveated with – ‘assuming you have a policy that in fact does do what the bill is designed to do.’”
Hoyer noted that people losing access to their current plans are mostly in the individual market, which is a small segment of the overall market. He also argued requiring those plans to follow new mandates and regulations was important for ensuring those plans included “adequate coverage so the public would not have to be on the hook for serious illnesses or other illnesses.”
And so the patent prevarication begins, as every leading Lib and MSM shill attempts to follow the White House line by offering the same, tired talking points about how a lie isn’t really a lie, as long as The Dear Misleader’s telling it.
For more on this latest Progressive assault on common sense, we turn to Joel Gehrke and the Washington Examiner:
Obamacare team offers multiple self-contradictory explanations for coverage cancellations
Chris, please tell us again who the full-time liars are?!?
Government proponents of Obamacare are offering incoherent and sometimes self-contradictory explanations for why insurance companies are canceling plans, despite President Obama’s promise that people would be able to keep their plans.
“There’s nothing in the health care law that makes insurers force people out of plans that consumers were enrolled in before the law,” Julie Bataille, communications director at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, told reporters during a conference call Tuesday. “The fact is that companies are starting to upgrade the quality of their plans to put in place the new benefits and protections that all consumers will have available to them moving forward,” she said.
Those two sentences, uttered in one breath, cannot both be true. It’s not possible to maintain honestly that “there’s nothing” in Obamacare that makes companies change plans and then take credit for the companies deciding to “upgrade the quality of their plans.”
If you thought signing up was great, wait until the government’s overseeing your life-saving surgery!
Bataille’s argument is at odds with White House press secretary Jay Carney’s admission that “it’s true that there are existing health care plans on the individual market that don’t meet those minimum standards and therefore do not qualify for the Affordable Care Act.”
And Rep. Sander Levin, D-Mich., argued Tuesday that insurance companies aren’t really sending out “cancellation notices,” they’re just trying to “help people transition to a new policy.” Levin’s argument is contradicted by the same insurance executive whom he cited while making the claim.
Florida Blue CEO Patrick Geraghty contradicted Bataille and Levin by telling NBC that “what we’ve been doing is informing folks that their plan doesn’t meet the test of the essential health benefits [in Obamacare], therefore they have a choice of many options that we make available through the exchange.”
James Tiberius Kirk wanted us to pass on a few more selected quotes from the devoted disciples of Kenya’s missing Village Idiot:
Time magazine’s Kate Pickert was unfazed by the revelation that President Obama lied to the American people when he promised that folks would be able to keep their existing insurance plans.
Sure, “President Obama has broken his promise that Americans who like their health insurance plans can keep them under the Affordable Care Act,” Pickert offered in her Monday evening post, “The Bright Side of Obamacare’s Broken Promise,” “[b]ut the truth is that only a small percentage of Americans will have their health insurance choices narrowed because of the ACA.” What’s more, Pickert insisted, the plan that folks will have to buy (quite often at an inflated cost over the plans they liked but lost) will be better, because, well, the government is mandating all sorts of new, costly goodies in them”…
Sure…like prenatal and pregnancy care for seniors and drug treatment for those who’ve never even smelled weed!
National Journal reports that in testimony today before the House Ways and Means Committee, Marilyn Tavenner, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicare Services (known as CMS and the agency that gave us that brilliant Web launch), “defended President Obama’s repeated claim that ‘if you like your plan, you can keep it.’ “
“Half of the people in the individual market prior to 2010 didn’t stay on their policies,” Tavenner explained. “They were either kicked off for pre-existing conditions, they saw their premiums go up at least 20 percent a year, and there were no protections for them. And sometimes they were in plans that they thought were fine until they actually needed to hospitalization, and they found out it didn’t cover hospitalization [sic] or it didn’t cover cancer.” The report adds that Tavenner “maintained that premium increases were occurring long before Obamacare.”
As Best of the Web‘s James Taranto noted, “Tavenner’s (obviously nonsensical) implication is that because ObamaCare didn’t cause all rate increases and policy cancellations, it didn’t cause any of them. It is actually more reasonable to count all post-ObamaCare cancellations, even those that didn’t result from changes in the law, against the president, whose promise that “you can keep it” was unqualified.
It was caveated just fine, claims Jay Carney the White House press secretary. “What the president said and what everybody said all along is that there are going to be changes brought about by the Affordable Care Act to create minimum standards of coverage, minimum services that every insurance plan has to provide,” NBC quotes him as saying. “So it’s true that there are existing health-care plans on the individual market that don’t meet those minimum standards and therefore do not qualify for the Affordable Care Act.”
Taranto replies, “We don’t remember the president’s saying that, but it’s possible that he did. The (stipulated) fact that Obama said something true does not change the fact that he repeatedly and memorably said something untrue.”
We don’t remember him saying that at all…EVER! But we report, you decide; listen to this next video clip and tell us if YOU detect any ambiguity:
Bottom line, as Neil Cavuto correctly asserts…
…no question whatsoever; he…
Period…end of statement.
Next up, writing at NRO, the great Victor Davis Hanson asks…
His cadences soar on, through scandal after fiasco after disaster.
We are currently learning whether the United States really needs a president. Barack Obama has become a mere figurehead, who gives speeches few listen to any more, issues threats that scare fewer, and makes promises that almost no one believes he will keep. Yet America continues on, despite the fact that the foreign and domestic policies of Barack Obama are unraveling, in a manner unusual even for star-crossed presidential second terms.
…In the age of Obama, we just ran up a $700 billion annual deficit and called it restraint, as if success were to be defined as not adding another $1 trillion each year to the national debt. The strange thing is that after the end of the Iraq War and the winding down in Afghanistan, forced sequestration, new taxes on high earners, and a supposedly recovering and revenue-producing economy, we are still running up near-record deficits. Stranger still, Obama is bragging that the deficit has been cut by billions — as if the 400-pound heart patient can be content that he lost 50 pounds in record time and so trimmed down to a manageable 350 pounds.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/362404/obama-still-president-victor-davis-hanson
Not in any sense the Founding Fathers would either understand or deem appropriate, as the WSJ‘s Bret Stephens notes:
The Unbearable Lightness of Obama
The president didn’t know the NSA was spying on world leaders, but he’s found time for at least 146 rounds of golf.
Is there a method to President Obama’s style of leadership, his methods of decision-making, his habits of attention, oversight and follow-through? In recent months I’ve been keeping a file of stories that might suggest an answer. See what you think.
“President Barack Obama went nearly five years without knowing his own spies were bugging the phones of world leaders. Officials said the NSA has so many eavesdropping operations under way that it wouldn’t have been practical to brief him on all of them.
“They added that the president was briefed on and approved of broader intelligence-collection ‘priorities,’ but that those below him make decisions about specific targets.”
—The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 28, 2013
“HealthCare.gov is the highest-profile experiment yet in the Obama administration’s effort to modernize government by using technology, with the site intended to become a user-friendly pathway to new health insurance options for millions of uninsured Americans.
“‘This was the president’s signature project and no one with the right technology experience was in charge,’ said Bob Kocher, a former White House aide who helped draft the law.”
—The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 28, 2013
“Tensions between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia have grown sharply in recent months. President Barack Obama authorized the CIA to provide limited arms to carefully vetted Syrian rebels, but it took months for the program to commence. . . .
“One Western diplomat described Saudi Arabia as eager to be a military partner in what was to have been the U.S.-led military strikes on Syria. As part of that, the Saudis asked to be given the list of military targets for the proposed strikes. The Saudis indicated they never got the information, the diplomat said.”
—The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 21, 2013
“Besides the Syrian government’s gains, there was mounting evidence that Mr. Assad’s troops had repeatedly used chemical weapons against civilians.
“Even as the debate about arming the rebels took on a new urgency, Mr. Obama rarely voiced strong opinions during senior staff meetings. But current and former officials said his body language was telling: he often appeared impatient and disengaged while listening to the debate, sometimes scrolling through messages on his BlackBerry BB.T -0.58% or slouching and chewing gum.”
— New York Times, NYT +0.07% Oct. 22, 2013
“On Saturday, as the shutdown drama played out on Capitol Hill, President Obama played golf at Fort Belvoir in Virginia.”
— Washington Post, WPO -1.58% Sept. 28, 2013
“For French President François Hollande, it seemed like the perfect response: a lightning-quick strike on Syria to punish the government for an alleged chemical weapons attack.
“But with President Obama’s surprise decision to ask Congress for a go-ahead on military action, Hollande has found himself embroiled in political controversy abroad and at home. Instead of vaunting Hollande as a warrior charging off to do battle, critics say he now looks more like a sidekick who was left in the lurch by his American ally.”
—Washington Post, Sept. 6, 2013
“The essence of Eisenhower’s hidden hand, of course, is that there was real work going on that people didn’t know at the time. If that’s true now, then Obama really is emulating Ike. If, on the other hand, he’s simply doing nothing or very little, that would be passivity, not hidden-hand leadership.”
—Eisenhower biographer Jim Newton, quoted in New York Times, July 15, 2013
![obama-you-lie_thumb[7]](http://www.thedailygouge.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/obama-you-lie_thumb7.jpg)
“In polo shirt, shorts and sandals, President Obama headed to the golf course Friday morning with a couple of old friends, then flew to Camp David for a long weekend. Secretary of State John Kerry was relaxing at his vacation home in Nantucket.
“Aides said both men were updated as increasingly bloody clashes left dozens dead in Egypt, but from outward appearances they gave little sense that the Obama administration viewed the broader crisis in Cairo with great alarm.”
—New York Times, July 5, 2013
“The president had a truly disturbing habit of funneling major foreign-policy decisions through a small cabal of relatively inexperienced White House advisors whose turf was strictly politics. Their primary concern was how any action in Afghanistan or the Middle East would play on the nightly news, or which talking point it would give Republicans.”
— Vali Nasr, “The Dispensable Nation,” April 2013
“Mr. Obama’s reluctance to put American forces on the ground during the fight, and his decision to keep America’s diplomatic and C.I.A. presence minimal in post-Qaddafi Libya, may have helped lead the United States to miss signals and get caught unaware in the attack on the American mission in Benghazi. Military forces were too far from Libya’s shores during the Sept. 11 attack to intervene.”
—New York Times, Nov. 17, 2012
“For the people who go out, on to the edge, to represent our country, we believe that if we get in trouble, they’re coming to get us, that our back is covered. To hear that it’s not, that’s a terrible, terrible experience.”
— Gregory Hicks, former deputy chief of mission in Libya, on “60 Minutes,” Oct. 27, 2013
Call Mr. Obama’s style indifferent, aloof or irresponsible, but a president who governs like this reaps the whirlwind—if not for himself, then for his country.
No, The Obamao’s sowing the wind; it’s we and our children who’ll reap the whirlwind.
But if The Great Prevaricator’s not at the helm, who on earth is steering the Ship of State?!? Courtesy of John Fund and NRO‘s The Corner, meet the scion of Socialists,…
Obama’s Valerie Jarrett: Often Whispered about, But Never Challenged
President Obama’s aides went to extraordinary lengths to uncover the identity of a senior official who was using Twitter to make snarky comments about White House staffers. Suspicion gradually centered on Jofi Joseph, the point man on nuclear nonproliferation at the National Security Council. So at a meeting in which everyone was in on the scam an inaccurate but innocuous news tidbit was revealed. When Joseph used his anonymous Twitter handle #natlsecwonk to broadcast the tidbit he was caught and promptly fired. He was not fired for revealing any secrets, but for making disparaging comments about thin-skinned administration players ranging from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel.
What apparently intensified the campaign to identify the “snarker” was a comment about Valerie Jarrett, the senior Obama adviser who has her own Secret Service detail and appears to exercise an inordinate amount of power behind the scenes. Joseph tweeted “I’m a fan of Obama, but his continuing reliance and dependence upon a vacuous cipher like Valerie Jarrett concerns me.”
Jarrett, an old Chicago friend of both Barack and Michelle Obama, appears to exercise such extraordinary influence she is sometimes quietly referred to as “Rasputin” on Capitol Hill, a reference to the mystical monk who held sway over Russia’s Czar Nicholas as he increasingly lost touch with reality during World War I.
Darrell Delamaide, a columnist for Dow Jones’s MarketWatch, says that “what has baffled many observers is how Jarrett, a former cog in the Chicago political machine and a real-estate executive, can exert such influence on policy despite her lack of qualifications in national security, foreign policy, economics, legislation or any of the other myriad specialties the president needs in an adviser.”
The scariest part? She knows as little as they do!
Delamaide believes the term “vacuous cipher” that was applied to Jarrett stung so much because it could be used as a metaphor for the administration in general. He writes that what “has remained consistent about the Obama administration is that vacuity — the slow response in a crisis, the hesitant and contradictory communication, a lack of conviction and engagement amid constant political calculation.” The stunning revelation that President Obama wasn’t kept properly apprised of problems with Obamacare’s website is just the latest example of how dysfunctional Obama World can be.
Whether Jarrett’s influence is all too real or exaggerated is unknowable. What is known is the extent to which she has long been a peerless enabler of Barack Obama’s inflated opinion of himself. Consider this quote from New Yorker editor David Remnick’s interview with her for his 2010 book The Bridge:
“I think Barack knew that he had God-given talents that were extraordinary. He knows exactly how smart he is. . . . He knows how perceptive he is. He knows what a good reader of people he is. And he knows that he has the ability — the extraordinary, uncanny ability — to take a thousand different perspectives, digest them and make sense out of them, and I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually. . . . So what I sensed in him was not just a restless spirit but somebody with such extraordinary talents that had to be really taxed in order for him to be happy. . . . He’s been bored to death his whole life. He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do.”
Up against a court flatterer of that caliber it’s no surprise that Jarrett has outlasted almost everyone who was in Obama’s original White House team — from chief of staff Rahm Emanuel to political guru David Axelrod to Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. All are known to have crossed her, and all are gone. As one former Obama aide once told me: “Valerie is ‘She Who Must Not be Challenged.’”
When the revealing histories of the Obama White House are written it will be fascinating to learn just how extensive her role in the key decisions of the Obama years was.
Both Jarrett and Der Obafuhrer reminds us of something Generaloberst Alfred Jodl once observed of another would-be messiah with a decidedly totalitarian bent, Adolf Hitler:
“He did not care to hear any other points of view; if they were even hinted at he would break into short-tempered fits of enraged agitation.”
“A dictator, as a matter of psychological necessity, must never be reminded of his own errors – in order to keep up his self-confidence, the ultimate source of his dictatorial force.”
Moving on, Balls Cotton forwarded this recent Gallup poll which reveals…
Personal Safety Top Reason Americans Own Guns Today
Second Amendment rights, job with police or military are lower on list
President Barack Obama has made strengthening gun control one of his top priorities this year, focusing on expanding background checks and a partial assault weapons ban. Gallup finds that those who already own firearms mention personal safety/protection most frequently as a reason for ownership (60%), followed by hunting, at 36%.
Americans who say they personally own a gun were asked this open-ended question in Gallup’s Oct. 3-6 annual Crime poll. These 309 gun owners were allowed to provide up to three reasons they own guns.
After personal safety and hunting, general mentions of recreation or sport are third (13%) among the reasons gun owners chose to own a firearm, with 8% citing target shooting. Only 5% of American gun owners cite “Second Amendment rights,” despite its frequent use as an argument against gun control. Three percent say they own a gun related to their line of work in the police or military. Collecting guns as a hobby and euthanizing sick animals or pest control had few mentions.
Gallup asked gun owners in 2000 and 2005 whether they owned a gun for each of three explicit reasons: for protection, for target shooting, or for hunting. The responses then were mostly similar to those found today, particularly if recreation is combined with hunting. While not strictly comparable, the 2000 and 2005 surveys show that the desire to own a gun for protection is not a new phenomenon resulting from recent U.S. mass shootings.
Personal protection is the top reason Americans own a gun, as was true in 2000 and 2005. This, rather than views on the Second Amendment, may explain why moving toward greater gun control, as Obama and many Democrats have sought to do, is so difficult. Those who own firearms for protection may feel that their own personal safety is a vital need on which they do not wish to compromise.
Even a simple-minded, gun-loving, Bible-toting Conservative such as we can see Gallup, a decidedly Liberal organization, has conflated why people need or want guns with what enables them to possess them. Gallup asked the former, and interpreted the answers as responding to the latter. It’s the 2nd Amendment…and ONLY the 2nd Amendment…which allows gun ownership in America today. Feeling naked without one is a different story.
On the Lighter Side…
Then there’s this bit of 2nd Amendment humor from Balls Cotton…
and the Great One, Carl Polizzi:
Finally, we’ll call it a day with yet another titillating tale torn from the pages of the Crime Blotter, as we introduce you to the Progressive version of the American dream:
Man who stabbed mother, 4 children reportedly was jealous of their lifestyle
“I deserve what they’ve got…without actually working for it!”
Authorities believe a Chinese immigrant who fatally stabbed a mother and her four children in their Brooklyn home Saturday night was jealous that the family had been so much more successful in America than him. “The family had too much. Their income (and) lifestyle was better than his,” a police source told the New York Post Sunday.
The New York Police Department said the suspect, 25-year-old Ming Don Chen, implicated himself in the stabbings late Saturday in the Sunset Park neighborhood. Chief of Department Phil Banks said the victims “were cut and butchered with a kitchen knife.” The Post, citing a police source, reported that Chen showed “no remorse” as he confessed. “He made a very soft comment that since he came to this country, everybody seems to be doing better than him,” Banks said.
Chen is a cousin of the children’s father and had been staying at the home for the past week or so, Banks added. The Post reported that his last known address was in Chicago. He was unemployed after being fired from a string of restaurant jobs he couldn’t hold down for more than a few weeks at a time, according to neighbors and relatives.
Yun Gao, a cousin of the mother, said the man had recently moved to the area and had been staying with different people. Yun said that she had met Chen in the past and described him as a “crazy” man who had failed to hold down a job as a cook. “He’s lazy,” Yun said Sunday. “He doesn’t work too hard.”
God gave Moses the 10th Commandment for a reason; and Dimocrats violate with their class-warfare strategy every damn day!
Magoo
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