1-800-ObamaCare-Denial, Website problems don't matter when your intentions are good

'More than a website" is the latest defense of the Affordable Care Act's painful rollout, and liberals are partly right. ObamaCare has larger ambitions than the basket case called Healthcare.gov and the 36 federally run insurance exchanges. But building the website was supposed to be the easy part. The health law's fiasco of a debut doesn't inspire confidence in those other ambitions, such as re-engineering how U.S. medicine is provided, but it does help explain the modern liberal project. But the exchanges fiasco is revealing the larger truth that ObamaCare's claim to technocratic expertise was always a political con. It won over the New Yorker and made ObamaCare designer Peter Orszag a celebrity. But it was all a veneer for ObamaCare's real goal, which is to centralize political control over health care.

Read more at the Wall Street Journal Read More......

Dick Cheney: "The Extremist In Washington Is Barack Obama"

FMR VICE PRES. DICK CHENEY: I'm not unsympathetic to the frustration, I think, that's led many Americans to sign on for or become part of the tea party. I'm as frustrated as anybody else can be, but I think we have a situation where the circumstances in Washington, the inability and the unwillingness of the this administration to come to grips with our basic long-term debt problem, for example. The frustration out there is very, very high. And so when I see people talking about the tea party, I don't think of the tea party as extremists the way some of the folks in Washington want to describe them. The extremist in Washington is Barack Obama. He's the guy that wants to fundamentally transform our health care system. He's the guy who has done enormous damage to America's standing in the world. To the extent there is an extremist or radical political view in Washington these days, I believe it is the president of the United States.

See the video at Real Clear Politics Read More......

FOX: Oregon launching new program to tax drivers per mile

(Hat tip: Linda Bartcher) - Oregon is moving ahead with a controversial plan to tax motorists based on the number of miles they drive as opposed to the amount of fuel they consume, raising myriad concerns about cost and privacy. ✧ The program, springing out of a recently signed bill, is expected to launch in 2015 on a volunteer basis. But it’s charting relatively new territory, and other states aching for additional tax revenue are sure to be watching closely to see whether to imitate the model. Read more at Fox News...

(Hat tip: Kristie Hernandez) - See video with Neil Cavuto on Fox Business Read More......

IMPRIMIS: Football and the American Character

By John J. Miller
Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.

When we talk about football, we usually talk about our favorite teams and the games they play. The biggest ongoing story in the sport right now, however, is something else entirely. It’s not about the Bears vs. the Packers or Michigan vs. Ohio State, but rather the controversy over concussions and the long-term health effects of head injuries.

On August 29, 2013, the National Football League agreed to pay $765 million to settle a lawsuit involving more than 4,500 players and their families, who had claimed that the league covered up data on the harmful effects of concussions. Although medical research into football and long-term effects of head injuries is hardly conclusive, some data suggest a connection. A number of legal experts believe the NFL, which will generate about $10 billion in revenue this year, dodged an even bigger payout.

Football, of course, is much bigger than the NFL and its players, whose average yearly salary is nearly $2 million. Football’s ranks include about 50,000 men who play in college and four million boys who play for schools or in youth leagues whose pockets aren’t nearly so deep. A Colorado jury recently awarded $11.5 million to a boy who suffered a paralyzing injury at his high school football practice in 2008. How long will it be before school districts begin to think football isn’t worth the cost?

Earlier this year, President Obama waded into the debate. “If I had a son, I’d have to think long and hard before I let him play football,” he said. He also called for football “to reduce some of the violence.” Others have called for a more dramatic solution: Malcolm Gladwell, the bestselling author of The Tipping Point and other books, thinks football should go the way of dogfighting. He would like to see America’s favorite sport run out of polite society.

(This is paragraph 5) So football’s future is uncertain. But the past may offer important lessons. After all, football’s problems today are nothing compared to what they were about a century ago: In 1905, 18 people died playing the sport. Football became embroiled in a long-running dispute over violence and safety—and it was almost banned through the efforts of Progressive-era prohibitionists. Had these enemies of football gotten their way, they might have erased one of America’s great pastimes from our culture. But they lost—and it took the efforts of Theodore Roosevelt to thwart them.

On November 18, 1876, Theodore Roosevelt, a freshman at Harvard who had just turned 18, attended his first football game. Destined for great things, he was enthusiastic about athletics in general and eager to see the new sport of football in particular. So here he was at the second game ever played between Harvard and its great rival Yale.

As Roosevelt shivered in the cold and windy fall weather, he watched a game that was quite different from the sport we know today. There were no quarterbacks or wide receivers, no first downs or forward passes. Before play began, the teams met to discuss rules. What number of men would play? What would count for a score? How long would the game last? They were like school kids today who have to set up boundaries, choose between a game of touch or tackle, and decide how to count blitzes.

Harvard’s veterans agreed to a couple of suggestions proposed by Yale. The first would carry a lasting legacy: Rather than playing with 15 men to a side, as was the current custom, the teams would play with eleven men. So this was the first football game to feature eleven players on the field per team.

The second suggestion would not shape the sport’s future, but it would affect the game that afternoon: Touchdowns would not count for points. Only goals—balls sailed over a rope tied between two poles—kicked after touchdowns or kicked from the field during play would contribute to the score.

In the first half, Harvard scored a touchdown but missed the kick. By the rules of the day, this meant that Harvard earned no points. At halftime, the game was a scoreless tie.

After the break, Yale pushed into Harvard territory and a lanky freshman named Walter Camp tried to shovel the ball to a teammate. It was a poor lateral pass that hit the ground and bounced upward, taking one of those funny hops that can befuddle even skilled players. In a split second, Oliver Thompson decided to take a chance on a kick from about 35 yards away and at a wide angle. The ball soared into the air, over the rope and through the uprights, giving Yale a lead of 1-0. No more points were scored that afternoon.

In a letter to his mother the next day, Roosevelt gave voice to the frustration that so often accompanies defeat in sports. “I am sorry to say we were beaten,” he wrote, “principally because our opponents played very foul.”

More about Teddy Roosevelt and what he did for football in a moment. But first, let me discuss briefly why football matters.

Love for a college football team, whether it’s the Texas Longhorns or the Hillsdale Chargers, is almost tribal. In some cases the affiliation is practically inherited, in others chosen. Whatever the origin, football has the power to form lifelong loyalties and passions and has supplanted baseball as America’s favorite pastime. Yet it almost died 100 years ago. Over the course of an ordinary football season in those days, a dozen or more people would die playing it, and many more suffered serious injuries. A lot of the casualties were kids in sandlot games, but big-time college teams also paid a price.

Football isn’t a contact sport—it’s a collision sport that has always prized size, strength, and power. This was especially true in its early years, when even the era of leatherheads lay in the future: Nobody wore helmets, facemasks, or shoulder pads. During the frequent pileups, hidden from the view of referees, players would wrestle for advantage by throwing punches and jabbing elbows. The most unsporting participants would even try to gouge their opponents’ eyes.

The deaths were the worst. They were not freak accidents as much as the inevitable toll of a violent game. And they horrified a group of activists who crusaded against football itself—wanting not merely to remove violence from the sport, but to ban the sport altogether. At the dawn of the Progressive era, the social and political movement to prohibit football became a major cause.

The New York Evening Post attacked the sport, as did The Nation, an influential magazine of news and opinion. The latter worried that colleges were becoming “huge training grounds for young gladiators, around whom as many spectators roar as roared in the [Roman] amphitheatre.” The New York Times bemoaned football’s tendency toward “mayhem and homicide.” Two weeks later, the Times ran a new editorial entitled “Two Curable Evils.” The first evil it addressed was lynching. The second was football.

The main figure in this movement to ban football was Charles W. Eliot, the president of Harvard and probably the single most important person in the history of higher education in the United States. Indeed, Eliot hated team sports in general because competition motivated players to conduct themselves in ways he considered unbecoming of gentlemen. If baseball and football were honorable pastimes, he reasoned, why did they require umpires and referees? “A game that needs to be watched is not fit for genuine sportsmen,” he once said. For Eliot, a pitcher who threw a curve ball was engaging in an act of treachery. But football distressed him even more. Most of all, he despised its violence. Time and again, he condemned the game as “evil.”

One of Eliot’s main adversaries in the battle over football was Walter Camp, one of the players in the game Teddy Roosevelt watched in 1876. A decent player, Camp made his real mark on football as a coach and a rules-maker. Indeed, he is the closest thing there is to football’s founding father.

In the rivalry between Eliot and Camp, we see one of the ongoing controversies in American politics at its outset—the conflict between regulators bent on the dream of a world without risk, and those who resist such an agenda in the name of freedom and responsibility. Eliot and other Progressives identified a genuine problem with football, but their solution was radical. They wanted to regulate football out of existence because they believed that its participants were not capable of making their own judgments in terms of costs and benefits. In their higher wisdom, these elites would ban the sport for all.

Into this struggle stepped Theodore Roosevelt. As a boy, he had suffered from chronic asthma to the point that relatives wondered if he would survive childhood. His mother and father tried everything to improve his health, even resorting to quack cures such as having him smoke cigars. Ultimately they concluded that he simply would have to overcome the disease. They encouraged him to go to a gym, and he worked out daily. The asthma would stay with Roosevelt for years, but by the time he was an adult, it was largely gone. For Roosevelt, the lesson was that a commitment to physical fitness could take a scrawny boy and turn him into a vigorous young man.

This experience was deeply connected to Roosevelt’s love of football. He remained a fan as he graduated from Harvard, entered politics, ranched out west, and became an increasingly visible public figure.

In 1895, shortly before he became president of the New York City police commission, he wrote a letter to Walter Camp that read as follows:

I am very glad to have a chance of expressing to you the obligation which I feel all Americans are under to you for your championship of athletics. The man on the farm and in the workshop here, as in other countries, is apt to get enough physical work; but we were tending steadily in America to produce . . . sedentary classes . . . and from this the athletic spirit has saved us. Of all games I personally like foot ball the best, and I would rather see my boys play it than see them play any other. I have no patience with the people who declaim against it because it necessitates rough play and occasional injuries. The rough play, if confined within manly and honorable limits, is an advantage. It is a good thing to have the personal contact about which the New York Evening Post snarls so much, and no fellow is worth his salt if he minds an occasional bruise or cut. Being near-sighted I was not able to play foot ball in college, and I never cared for rowing or base ball, so that I did all my work in boxing and wrestling. They are both good exercises, but they are not up to foot ball . . . .

I am utterly disgusted with the attitude of President Eliot and the Harvard faculty about foot ball . . . .

I do not give a snap for a good man who can’t fight and hold his own in the world. A citizen has got to be decent of course. That is the first requisite; but the second, and just as important, is that he shall be efficient, and he can’t be efficient unless he is manly. Nothing has impressed me more in meeting college graduates during the fifteen years I have been out of college than the fact that on the average the men who have counted most have been those who had sound bodies.

As this letter indicates, Roosevelt saw football as more than a diversion. He saw it as a positive social good. When he was recruiting the Rough Riders in 1898, he went out of his way to select men who had played football. The Duke of Wellington reportedly once said, “The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.” Roosevelt never said anything similar about football fields and the Battle of San Juan Hill, but when he emerged from the Spanish-American War as a national hero—and as someone talked about as being of presidential timber—he knew how much he owed not just to the Rough Riders, but to the culture of manliness and risk-taking that had shaped them.

Like Roosevelt, our society values sports, though we don’t always think about why—or why we should. My kids have played football, baseball, hockey, soccer, and lacrosse. As a family, we’re fairly sports-oriented. It has forced me to think about a question that a lot of parents probably ask at one time or another: Why do we want our kids to participate in athletics?

Many parents will point to the obvious fact that sports are good for health and fitness. They’ll also discuss the intangible benefits in terms of character building—sports teach kids to get up after falling down, to play through pain, to deal with failure, to work with teammates, to take direction from coaches, and so on.

It turns out that there really is something to all of this. Empirical research shows that kids who play sports stay in school longer. As adults, they vote more often and earn more money. Explaining why this is true is trickier, but it probably has something to do with developing a competitive instinct and a desire for achievement.

Roosevelt was surely correct in believing that sports influence the character of a nation. Americans are much more likely than Europeans to play sports. We’re also more likely to attribute economic success to hard work, as opposed to luck. It may be that sports are a manifestation—or possibly even a source—of American exceptionalism.

When Roosevelt ascended to the presidency, football remained controversial and Harvard’s Eliot continued his crusade for prohibition. In 1905, Roosevelt was persuaded to act. He invited Walter Camp of Yale to the White House, along with the coaches of Harvard and Princeton. These were the three most important football teams in the country. “Football is on trial,” said Roosevelt. “Because I believe in the game, I want to do all I can to save it.” He encouraged the coaches to eliminate brutality, and they promised that they would.

Whether they meant what they said is another matter. Walter Camp didn’t see anything wrong with the way football was played. Harvard’s coach, however, was a young man named Bill Reid. He took Roosevelt more seriously, because he took the threat to football more seriously. Indeed, within weeks of meeting with Roosevelt, he came to fear that Eliot was on the verge of success in having Harvard drop the sport, which would have encouraged other schools to do the same.

At the end of the 1905 season, therefore, Reid plotted with a group of reform-minded colleges to form an organization that today we know as the NCAA and to approve a set of sweeping rules changes to reduce football’s violence. In committee meetings, Reid outmaneuvered Camp while receiving critical behind-the-scenes support from Roosevelt.

As a result, football experienced an extreme makeover: The yardage necessary for a first down increased from five to ten. Rules-makers also created a neutral zone at the line of scrimmage, limited the number of players who could line up in the backfield, made the personal foul a heavily penalized infraction, and banned the tossing of ballcarriers.

These were important revisions, and each was approved with an eye toward improving the safety of players. Yet the change that would transform the sport the most was the introduction of the forward pass. Up to this point, football was a game of running and kicking, not throwing. There were quarterbacks but not wide receivers. It took a few years to get the rule right—footballs needed to evolve away from their watermelon-like shape and become more aerodynamic, and coaches and players had to figure out how to take advantage of this new offensive tool. But on November 1, 1913, football moved irreversibly into the modern era.

Army was one of the best teams in the country, a national championship contender. It was scheduled to play a game against a little-known Catholic school from the Midwest. The headline in the New York Times that morning read: “Army Wants Big Score.” The little-known Catholic school was Notre Dame. Knute Rockne and his teammates launched football’s first true air war, throwing again and again for receptions and touchdowns. And they won, 35-14. Gushed the New York Times:

"The Westerners flashed the most sensational football that has been seen in the East this year. The Army players were hopelessly confused and chagrined before Notre Dame’s great playing, and their style of old-fashioned close line-smashing play was no match for the spectacular and highly perfected attack of the Indiana collegians."

A West Point cadet named Dwight Eisenhower watched from the sidelines. He was on Army’s team but didn’t play due to injury. “Everything has gone wrong,” he wrote to his girlfriend. “The football team . . . got beaten most gloriously by Notre Dame.”

With that game, football’s long first chapter came to a close. It had reduced the problem of violence, and the game that we enjoy today was born.

The example of Roosevelt shows that a skillful leader can use a light touch to solve a vexing problem. As a general rule, of course, we don’t want politicians interfering with our sports. The only thing that could make the BCS system worse is congressional involvement.

At the same time, our political leaders help to shape our culture and our expectations. They can promise a world without risk, or they can send a different message. As a father myself, I can sympathize with President Obama’s cautious statements about football. At the same time, his comments would have benefited from some context: Gregg Easterbrook, who writes a football column for ESPN, has pointed out that a teen who drives a car for an hour has about a one in a million chance of dying—compared to a one in six million chance for a teen who spends an hour practicing football.

Americans are a self-governing people. We can make our own judgments about whether to drive or play football—and when we make these choices, we can make them in recognition of the fact that although sports can be dangerous, they’re also good for us. They not only make us distinctively American, they make us better Americans.

JOHN J. MILLER is director of the Herbert H. Dow II Program in American Journalism at Hillsdale College and national correspondent for National Review. A graduate of the University of Michigan, where he served as editor of the Michigan Review, he has also worked on the staff of The New Republic. A contributing editor of Philanthropy magazine, he writes regularly for newspapers and journals including the Detroit News, the Wall Street Journal, and National Review. He is the author of several books, including The First Assassin, a novel set during the Civil War, and most recently The Big Scrum: How Teddy Roosevelt Saved Football. The article above is adapted from a luncheon speech delivered at Hillsdale College on September 9, 2013. Read More......

Alan Greenspan: What Went Wrong

Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, goes to a lot of parties. He and his wife, the TV journalist Andrea Mitchell, "sort of get invited everywhere," he says, sitting in front of the long bay window in his office on Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C. Lately, though, cocktails and dinners seem to have guest lists drawn almost exclusively from one political party or the other. "It used to be a ritualistic 50-50 at parties—the doyennes of culture and partying were very strict about bipartisanship," he adds. "That doesn't exist anymore."

Read more at the Wall Street Journal Read More......

Top public schools demand more than Common Core

By Joy Pullmann (Hat tip: Kristie Hernandez) - The best U.S. public schools — including those with high numbers of poor and minority kids — require more of students than state standards and Common Core, and school leaders attribute their success partly to these high expectations.

The Common Core lists what its creators think students should know in K-12 math and English. Forty-five states agreed to it under pressure from the Obama administration in 2010. The Core calls itself “rigorous” and “internationally benchmarked,” but investigation into actually rigorous and internationally competitive standards within the United States casts doubt on these claims. Read more at Watchdog.org... Read More......

How NOT to argue with parents about Common Core

By Michelle Malkin - As an outspoken critic of the federal academic standards scheme known as Common Core, I’d like to offer some friendly advice to opponents. Stop insulting. Stop digging. Stop projecting. Start listening. ✧ Central planners in Washington have been caught off-guard by the grassroots revolt against the national standards/testing/curriculum juggernaut. Real input from the hoi polloi was never a part of the grand implementation process. So when parents and educators in dozens of states started challenging the privacy intrusions posed by and the constitutionality, cost, quality and validity of Common Core, its architects went on the attack. ✧ And now, the education control freaks are freaking out. Read More at Michelle Malkin... Read More......

Oregon has lost a great Republican: June Hartley

June Hartley 1929 – 2013

Oregon has lost a great Republican – June Hartley. June served the Republican Party for more than six decades and when she served, she served with all her heart. ✧ June started serving the Republican Party at a very young age in Malheur County, and she went on to serve the Republican Party at the state and national level. ✧ June became the Republican chair of precinct #10 (PCP) in Malheur County at the age of 21 – a position she held for more than six decades. She served as chair of the Malheur County Republican Party and she was the founding President of the Treasure Valley Republican Women. Read more at Oregon Catalyst....

Photo shows June Hartley, Oregon Republican National Committeewoman, speaking at the 2006 Oregon Federation of Republican Women's District IV Meeting hosted by Benton County Republican Women in Corvallis.

See obituary for June Savage Hartley at The Argus Observer. Read More......

Poll: Grimes Edging McConnell in Kentucky

Voters in the Bluegrass State aren't pleased with the state of affairs in Washington, and they appear to be taking it out on Mitch McConnell. The Senate minority leader narrowly trails Kentucky's Democratic secretary of state, Alison Lundergan Grimes, in his 2014 re-election bid, according to a new survey conducted by the Democratically affiliated Public Policy Polling for progressive group Americans United for Change. Lundergan Grimes leads McConnell by a two-point margin (45 percent to 43 percent), which is within the poll’s margin of error (plus or minus 2.8 percent). Twelve percent of respondents remained undecided.

Read more at Real Clear Politics Read More......

Oregon driver card bill headed to the November 2014 ballot

Note: Jeff Kropf was extremely unhappy with the highlighted sentence below. The numbers of verifiable signatures were higher than shown in this report. He asks supporters of the initiative to read the article and comment if they believe the reporting was biased.

Voters will weigh in next year on a bill granting “driver’s cards” to Oregonians unable to prove they are in the U.S. legally. ✧ The Oregon Legislature passed Senate Bill 833 earlier this year, but opponents, led by Oregonians for Immigration Reform [OFIR] and Protect Oregon Driver Licenses [PODL], vowed to refer it to the ballot, hoping voters would overturn the law. ✧ Earlier this month the groups submitted nearly 71,000 signatures to refer the measure to voters and Friday morning Secretary of State Kate Brown announced on Twitter that the referral qualified for the ballot. ✧ The measure barely qualified for the ballot. Of the 70,973 unverified signatures submitted to the Secretary of State’s office, 58,291 were validated. Supporters of the referral needed 58,142 valid signatures to qualify. Read more at OregonLive... Read More......

Cruz Warns Senate GOP: ‘Consequences’ for Supporting ‘Lousy Deal’

According to Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, it’s his colleagues, more than anyone, who should be blamed for the failure of the defund-Obamacare campaign — and he expects conservatives to remember come primary season.

“Unfortunately, rather than supporting House Republicans, a significant number of Senate Republicans actively, aggressively, and vocally led the effort to defeat House Republicans, to defeat the effort to defund Obamacare,” Cruz says, in an interview with National Review. “Once Senate Republicans did that, it crippled the chances of this effort, and it caused the lousy deal.”

Read more at National Review Read More......

Lindbergh, Nazism, and Environmental Fascism

Although Charles Lindbergh (1902-1974) is known as the first pilot to cross the Atlantic solo in 1927 piloting the Spirit of St. Louis, his Nazi sympathies are often downplayed, and few know that he was an extreme environmentalist. Strangely enough, the very man who helped kick-start the space age became less interested in aviation late in life. In fact, he came to believe that technology and machines were the enemies and destroyers of the natural world.

The man who became a notorious recluse due to the political firestorm he created by becoming a national spokesman for an isolationist organization with Nazi sympathies called "America First," finally began to open up to the public late in life over environmental issues.

Read at American Thinker Read More......

Public School Teachers Go Private With Their Kids

By Larry Elder - Guy walks into a restaurant and orders "scrambled eggs and some kind words." Waitress brings the eggs. He smiles, "Now how about the kind words?" Waitress whispers, "Don't eat the eggs." ✧ Which brings us to the fact that urban public school teachers are about twice as likely as non-teachers to send their own children to private schools. That is, many public school teachers whisper to parents, "Don't eat the eggs." ✧ About 11% of all parents — nationwide, rural and urban — send their children to private schools. The numbers are much higher in urban areas... Read more at Investor's Business Daily Read More......

Democrats' Failures Render Victory On Shutdown Hollow

Government: "We won! We won!" cry Democrats on both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue, parroted by their media collaborators. The public haven't forgotten these "winners'" policies are an abject failure. So the Democrats won on the shutdown and the champagne corks are popping all over Washington. Does their victory change the fact that the national debt is over $17 trillion — having climbed $328 billion in one day last Thursday? Does their win change the fact that 11 million Americans are out of work and that the unemployment rate is well above 7% four years and nine months into the Obama presidency?

Read more at Investor's Business Daily Read More......

U.S. debt jumps $300 billion — tops $17 trillion for first time

U.S. debt jumped more than $300 billion on Thursday, the first day the federal government was able to borrow money under the deal President Obama and Congress sealed this week.

The debt now equals $17.075 trillion, according to figures the Treasury Department posted online on Friday. The $328 billion increase is an all-time record, shattering the previous high of $238 billion set two years ago.
Read more at the Washington Times Read More......

GOP-Leadership-Backed CR Funds Reg Forcing Christians to Act Against Faith

You know that line liberals love to lob at the Tea Party: you're stupid.  Well, obviously that's not the case, nor has it ever been true.  Now, a Yale professor has released some new research showing that the so-called "Tea Party radicals" are actually scientifically literate.

Professor Dan M. Kahan of the psychology department at Yale says he was surprised to discover a positive correlation between science comprehension and members of the Tea Party:

"Identifying with the Tea Party correlates positively (r = 0.05, p = 0.05) with scores on the science comprehension measure."

Read more at CNS News Read More......

Democrat Cory Booker wins US Senate election in New Jersey

NEWARK, N.J. (AP) — Newark Mayor Cory Booker won a special election Wednesday to represent New Jersey in the U.S. Senate, giving the rising Democratic star a bigger political stage after a race against conservative Steve Lonegan, a former small-town mayor and director of NJ Americans for Prosperity. Booker will complete the 15 months remaining on the term of Frank Lautenberg, who died in June at age 89. Read more at the Examiner... Read More......

Budget Deal Passed: Final House Vote Tally

October 16. 2013 - Every Democrat voted for the Senate-approved budget deal, along with 87 Republicans; 144 Republicans voted no (including Rep. Walden (R-OR)). See how the House members voted. The deal ends the partial government shutdown and provides back-pay for furloughed workers, sequester remains and government, including Obamacare, is funded through Jan. 15. The debt ceiling is raised through Feb. 7th. As usual, bipartisan committees to be formed to present a fix for money problems. The draconian medical device tax remains but a provision to verify the income of those receiving ObamaCare subsidies is included.

Related:
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX): When half of Senate Republicans are firing cannons at House Republicans, it sabotages the House effort
Rep. John Fleming (R-LA): Rep. 'This fight didn't end last night' Read More......

Hume: Tea Party pushed budget stand-off because GOP 'utterly failed' to restrain bloated gov't

Fox News senior political analyst Brit Hume explained on "Special Report With Bret Baier" Monday night why Tea Party Republicans originally started their confrontation with Democrats over the bid to defund ObamaCare. He argued that they're taking an unconventional approach, because the mainstream GOP has "utterly failed" to stop the growth of government.

Brit Hume [excerpt]:

In conventional terms, it seems inexplicable, but Senator Cruz and his adherents do not view things in conventional terms. They look back over the past half-century, including the supposedly golden era of Ronald Reagan, and see the uninterrupted forward march of the American left. Entitlement spending never stopped growing. The regulatory state continued to expand. The national debt grew and grew and finally in the Obama years, exploded. They see an American population becoming unrecognizable from the free and self-reliant people they thought they knew. And they see the Republican Party as having utterly failed to stop the drift toward an unfree nation supervised by an overweening and bloated bureaucracy. They are not interested in Republican policies that merely slow the growth of this leviathan. They want to stop it and reverse it. And they want to show their supporters they'll try anything to bring that about. ✧ And if some of those things turn out to be reckless and doomed, well so be it.

See video and full article at Fox News/Heard on Fox... Read More......

The Architect of Destruction

By Maureen Scott
Obama appears to be a tormented man who is filled with resentment, anger, and disdain for anyone of an opinion or view other than his. He acts in the most hateful, spiteful, malevolent, vindictive ways in order to manipulate and maintain power and control over others. Perhaps because, as a child, he grew up around family members and mentors who instilled him with an abiding bitterness toward the U.S. That bitterness seems not to have left him. ✧ It is not the color of his skin that is a problem – for anyone in America. Rather it is the blackness that fills his soul and the hollowness in his heart where there should be abiding pride and love for this country. Read more at Renew America... Read More......

MISSISSIPPI REPUBLICANS CENSURE THAD COCHRAN

We’ve written extensively of late regarding the widening divide between fiscally conservative Republicans and the “neoconservative” fiscally liberal wing of the party – led by U.S. Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham and John Cornyn. In fact according to the website Mississippi PEP, they’ve censured him. For those of you unfamiliar with this aging RINO, Cochran is one of several Southern “Republicans” who habitually caves to U.S. President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats (along with Graham, North Carolina’s Richard Burr, Tennessee’s Lamar Alexander and Georgia’s Johnny Isakson). “When any official continues to engage repeatedly in a course of conduct that violates fundamental principles of the Mississippi Republican Platform, even after such actions have been publicly called to his attention, it is the responsibility of all Republicans, including this body, to take such remedial measures as are reasonably available to them,” a censure resolution against Cochran reads.

Read more at Fitsnews.com Read More......

Obama's Curious Purge Of The Military Continues

Defense: The firing of two nuclear commanders in a week adds to a body count that suggests we have either the most corrupt and incompetent general staff in history or our military is being reshaped for other purposes. The Obama administration, which has fired no one over scandals such as its Fast and Furious Mexican gun-running operation, its criminal negligence in the terrorist attack on our Benghazi diplomatic mission, or the use of the IRS to target and intimidate political foes, seems to have a curious obsession lately about ethics and competence in the U.S. military. Last week the Air Force's two-star general in charge of the units responsible for its 450 nuclear missiles was fired "due to a loss of trust and confidence in his leadership and judgment," an Air Force statement said.

Read more at Investor's Business Daily Read More......

Rand Paul: Proud to be a Republican

Published on Oct 13, 2013 by the Washington Free Beacon - As a guest on CNN's 'State of the Union', Sen. Rand Paul laughed off Candy Crowley's question Sunday about whether he'd consider leaving the Republican Party and even becoming a Democrat.

Rough Transcript -

CC: Do you see yourself, at any point in the future, being anything other than... politically... a member of the Republican Party?

RP: Hmm. (small laugh) You mean... you're implying a third party or some other party?

CC: ...Or if you wanted to become a Democrat. There are lots of... lots of other parties out there. Do you see yourself as being anything other than a Republican?

RP: (Laugh) No. I've always been a Republican and I'm one of those people who is actually a real lover of the history of the Republican Party from the days of abolition, to the days of civil rights. The Republican Party has a really rich history. In our state, I'm really proud that the ones who overturned Jim Crowe in Kentucky were Republicans fighting against an entirely unified Democrat Party. So I am proud to be a Republican. I can't imagine being anything else.

Link: http://youtu.be/VhN9XuBFvzM Read More......

With Obamacare, It's Now Or Never In Terms Of Fully Shutting It Down

The “I agree with his goals but not his tactics,” crowd has been out in force since Ted Cruz’s made his historic and courageous stand on the U.S. Senate floor against Obamacare’s destruction of the American health care system.  What these Republican quislings fail to mention is what realistic tactics they would recommend.

For now it seems their main tactic is for the GOP in the House and Senate to roll over and fund Obamacare , the President’s signature blunder.  Republicans should do this they advise while making all the requisite meaningless noises about how much they oppose the program.

Read more at Forbes Read More......

U.S. Supreme Court Agrees To Look At Forced Unionization

The United States Supreme Court will hear a case involving the forced unionization of "personal care providers" in Illinois that the Mackinac Center Legal Foundation and two other groups asked the Court to hear.  If the high court rules against the Illinois forced unionization, the decision could outlaw such schemes nationwide. In Michigan, the Service Employees International Union took more than $34 million from tens of thousands of home-based caregivers who were forced into the union. That scheme officially ended this year.

Read more at Capitol Confidential Read More......

NYT Coverage of Obamacare System Fiasco Blames Republicans, Cites Key March Warning It Originally Failed to Report

Three New York Times reporters' coverage of HealthCare.gov's systemic failures is inadvertently funny. Its opening paragraph quotes Henry Chao, described as "the chief digital architect for the Obama administration’s new online insurance marketplace," as "deeply worried about the web site's debut" way back in March, and hoping that "it’s not a third-world experience." The Third World, many of whose developers have shown that they can design functional interactive web sites, should feel insulted.

The inadvertent humor comes from the fact that Chao's statement received quite a bit of coverage at center-right outlets and blogs (e.g., Washington Examiner, Forbes, Hot Air, PJ Tatler, Townhall, American Thinker, Gateway Pundit, and many others) when he originally made it in March, and was widely known in the industry. But, as seen in a date-sorted Times search on Chao's name, the Old Gray Lady originally didn't consider it fit to print. Read more at News Busters... Read More......

One Million Vet March: Veterans standing up for their country once again

American Military News (pictures and videos): UPDATED: Vets March on DC Memorials & White House, Met By Riot Police
Beautiful photo/slideshow of Million Vet March by Katherine Cresto on Flickr (double click on first photo for slideshow) Read More......

Another flawed poll, another reason to expect Republicans to cave in the shutdown battle?

If reports of Republican panic on Capitol Hill are accurate, a big reason is likely the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal survey, which purports to show the public overwhelmingly disapproves of the GOP's role in the government shutdown.

And on the surface, the news does indeed look grim for the GOP, as explained by NBC's political editor, Mark Murray:

"The Republican Party has been badly damaged in the ongoing government shutdown and debt limit standoff, with a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finding that a majority of Americans blame the GOP for the shutdown, and with the party's popularity declining to its lowest level.
  
"By a 22-point margin (53 percent to 31 percent), the public blames the Republican Party more for the shutdown than President Barack Obama – a wider margin of blame for the GOP than the party received during the poll during the last shutdown in 1995-96."

Read more at the Washington Examiner Read More......

Privacy breaches in VA health records wound veterans

Karen Santoro heard co-workers chattering about her psychological care in 2010.

 

An Air Force veteran and surgical services scheduler at the Veterans Affairs Pittsburgh hospital in Oakland, Santoro asked officials with the VA and the Department of Health and Human Services to investigate the source of the gossip. It seemed to violate the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, that prohibits release of medical information.

 

Advised by her physician, Santoro begged her bosses to transfer her or let her work from home until investigators finished their work. They refused. She resigned in mid-2011, disgusted with VA's disregard of privacy laws. She is convinced that officials were retaliating against her and concerned by “inaction” by Health and Human Services, which enforces HIPAA at all health care facilities.

 

Read more at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

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WND: Teen pregnancy drops as Planned Parenthood vanishes

New study reveals abstinence more popular without abortion industry influence - The study comes from the pro-life American Life League (ALL), but it uses government figures to reach its conclusions. It analyzed one section of the nation – the Texas Panhandle region – where over the course of several years 19 Planned Parenthood businesses closed or left. ✧ The result? Teen pregnancies dropped from 43.6 per 1,000 girls to 24.1 among a stable population of about 13,000 teen girls aged 13-17. ✧ “People don’t realize that Planned Parenthood must work hard to replace the 43 percent of its customers it loses each year,” said Rita Diller, national director of ALL’s STOPP International project. “It normally does this by promoting sexual promiscuity to teens. This study suggests that when Planned Parenthood leaves, teens are more likely to embrace chastity.” Read more at WND... Read More......

Park Service Paramilitaries

If a government shuts down in the forest and nobody hears it, that’s the sound of liberty dying. The so-called shutdown is, as noted last week, mostly baloney: Eighty-three percent of the supposedly defunded government is carrying on as usual, impervious to whatever restraints the people’s representatives might wish to impose, and the 800,000 soi-disant “non-essential” workers have been assured that, as soon as the government is once again lawfully funded, they will be paid in full for all the days they’ve had at home.

But the one place where a full-scale shutdown is being enforced is in America’s alleged “National Park Service,” a term of art that covers everything from canyons and glaciers to war memorials and historic taverns.

Read more at the National Review Read More......

Healthcare Law to Fine Hospitals That Provide Free Services to Poor

President Obama’s healthcare law is full of increased costs to taxpayers, in the form of taxes, higher premiums, and of course, fines. In fact, the healthcare law may punish charitable hospitals for treating uninsured Americans by issuing large fines to those institutions that continue to provide treatment to uninsured Americans.

The Daily Caller reported, “A new provision in Section 501 of the Internal Revenue Code, which takes effect under Obamacare, sets new standards of review and installs new financial penalties for tax-exempt charitable hospitals, which devote a minimum amount of their expenses to treat uninsured poor people.”

Read more at the New American Read More......

Committee to Protect Journalists issues scathing report on Obama administration

It's hardly news that the Obama administration is intensely and, in many respects, unprecedentedly hostile toward the news-gathering process. Even the most Obama-friendly journals have warned of what they call "Obama's war on whistleblowers". James Goodale, the former general counsel of the New York Times during its epic fights with the Nixon administration, recently observed that "President Obama wants to criminalize the reporting of national security information" and added: "President Obama will surely pass President Richard Nixon as the worst president ever on issues of national security and press freedom."

Still, a new report released today by the highly respected Committee to Protect Journalists - its first-ever on press freedoms in the US - powerfully underscores just how extreme is the threat to press freedom posed by this administration.

Read more at the UK Guardian Read More......

Legislative Sessions Report from Sen. Betsy Close

Sen. Betsy Close has written a summary of key votes from the 2013 Regular Session and all votes from the September Special Session. Let's help Sen. Close circulate this document. Please share with any person or group you think would be interested. Thank you!

Sen. Close: 2013 Regular and Special Sessions Report Read More......

Federal government to let states pay to open national parks

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration said Thursday it will allow states to use their own money to reopen some national parks that have been closed because of the government shutdown.

 

Governors in at least four states have asked for authority to reopen national parks within their borders because of the economic impacts caused by the park closures.

 

Interior Secretary Sally Jewell said the government will consider offers to pay for park operations, but will not surrender control of national parks or monuments to the states.

Read more at Triblive.com Read More......

The Threat We Face

Below is a speech given by David Horowitz at the Kohler conference of the Bradley Foundation. It has been revised and edited for publication as an article.

I was born at the beginning of the Second World War into a family of high school teachers who were members of the Communist Party, and therefore were actually part of a vast conspiracy dedicated to the destruction of this country, although they would never have looked at it that way, and so-called liberals would be the first to deny it. In those days, the schools were old fashioned enough that my parents did not use their classrooms to indoctrinate students as tens of thousands of university professors and even more K-12 teachers regularly do today. It is also an unhappy but hugely important fact that the conspiracy to which my parents belonged has steadily migrated into the heart of the Democratic Party until it now occupies the Oval Office in the person of our president, Barack Obama, and his closest advisors.

Read more at Front Page Read More......

White House, IRS exchanged confidential taxpayer info

Top Internal Revenue Service Obamacare official Sarah Hall Ingram discussed confidential taxpayer information with senior Obama White House officials, according to 2012 emails obtained by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and provided to The Daily Caller.

Lois Lerner, then head of the IRS Tax Exempt Organizations division, also received an email alongside White House officials that contained confidential information.

Read more at the Daily Caller Read More......

Tea party radiologist to primary Kansas Republican for Senate seat

President Barack Obama’s second cousin has confirmed to The Daily Caller that he will challenge Republican Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas in the 2014 primary.

Speculation that Dr. Milton Wolf, a diagnostic radiologist aligned with the tea party, would challenge the 77-year-old Roberts from the right has been rising in recent weeks, after Wolf sent emails to GOP activists inviting them to contact him. On Monday night, Wolf’s blog promised a major announcement Tuesday.

“I really am concerned about our country, the direction our country is going,” Wolf told The Daily Caller Monday. “The reality is that the career politicians of both parties have failed us. That much is clear and you look around and you think, ‘Somebody has gotta do something,’ and I keep looking for somebody to do something, and no one is. I realized at one point that I’m somebody. I gotta do something. If I want to call myself an American, if I want to think of myself as a patriot, I have to step up.”

Read more at The Daily Caller
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

Will Fast And Furious Justice Finally Befall Eric Holder?

Serial abuses of justice by America’s top law enforcement official should be enough to make just about any tinhorn banana republic dictator blush. Yet regarding any embarrassment evidenced by the leader of the free world… not so much. Despite the fact that our attorney general has been indicted for contempt of Congress on both felony and civil charges, has repeatedly lied under oath, and has routinely turned a blind eye to laws that he is duty-bound to enforce, Mr. Holder continues to serve at the behest of his presidential mentor. At least he has so far.

Read more at Forbes Read More......

Tea Party loosens K Street's stranglehold on the GOP

How did the Republican Party become so splintered and so infused with hard-line conservatives? Don't blame redistricting. Don't chalk it up to anti-Obama fervor. Republicans have become an unruly bunch of scorched-earth conservatives because the Tea Party smashed the business lobby's monopoly on GOP fundraising.  Read more at the Washington Examiner
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How Kansas Governor Brownback Schooled Missouri On Tax Cuts, And Showed The Region How To Grow

I am sitting atop a limestone bluff overlooking the Osage River at my home in Folk, Missouri, and it seems as if the only way to get Congress to reform this country’s tax code is to ask for an intervention by the Great and Powerful Oz. But, here in the nation’s heartland, results from an experiment in state income tax policy just might provide other states with a roadmap to real growth.

You may recall from a past Forbes column by me that laid out the landmark legislation signed into law one year ago by the forward thinking Kansas Governor Sam Brownback.  Brownback’s tax plan flattened and simplified the tax code, cut personal income tax rates for most earners from 6.45% to 4.9%, and got rid of small business income taxes.

Read more at Forbes Read More......

California’s New Feudalism Benefits a Few at the Expense of the Multitude

California has been the source of much innovation, from agribusiness and oil to fashion and the digital world. Historically much richer than the rest of the country, it was also the birthplace, along with Levittown, of the mass-produced suburb, freeways, much of our modern entrepreneurial culture, and of course mass entertainment. For most of a century, for both better and worse, California has defined progress, not only for America but for the world.

As late as the 80s, California was democratic in a fundamental sense, a place for outsiders and, increasingly, immigrants—roughly 60 percent of the population was considered middle class. Now, instead of a land of opportunity, California has become increasingly feudal. According to recent census estimates,  the state suffers some of the highest levels of inequality in the country. By some estimates, the state’s level of inequality compares with that of such global models as  the Dominican Republic, Gambia, and the Republic of the Congo.

Read more at the Daily Beast Read More......

Norway Breaks with Social Democracy

Largely uncommented on in the US press, Europe’s long-standing social democratic tilt has changed. During recent years, almost all Western European nations have seen a dramatic fall in support for the traditional Social Democratic parties, which for so long have dominated the political landscapes. In response, the centre-left parties have morphed, moving towards greater emphasis on the benefits of free markets and individual responsibility. In several countries the former communist parties now claim that they fill the role of traditional Social Democrats. A new breed of modernized centre-left parties is likely to replace several centre‑right governments during coming years. The third consecutive loss for the German Social Democrats illustrates the continuing difficulties for Europe’s labor movements to gather the strong support that they previously almost took for granted.

Read more at New Geography Read More......

TII: Let’s Privatize the Welfare State

By John C. Goodman
Have you ever given money to the food stamp program? Do you know anyone who has? ✧ Actually, some people do occasionally make gifts to federal entitlement programs. But gifts to the entire federal government were a paltry $241 million in 2010, the last year for which statistics are available. ✧ By contrast, Americans donated almost $300 billion last year to private sector charities in addition to volunteer time valued at $158 billion. ✧ The money we spend on food stamps (technically called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) almost all comes from coercive taxation, rather than charitable contributions. EXCELLENT ARTICLE! Keep reading at the Independent Institute... Read More......

Idaho County commissioner: Shutdown proves state should manage public lands

Idaho County Commissioner Skip Brandt isn’t pointing fingers at Democrats or Republicans in Washington for the fact that national wildlife refuges, Bureau of Land Management campgrounds, boat ramps, visitor centers and other developed recreation sites, national forest developed areas and all national parks are closed. ✧ “Federal employees have decided to make their furloughs as painful as possible for the public,” Brandt wrote in an email. ✧ “So apparently the ‘Federal’ lands/ facilities are not 'true public' lands/ property after all, but rather are the bureaucracy’s property,” Brandt wrote in a email. “Thus if the bureaucrats/ Federal employees do not have a pay check the properties are off limits to the ‘subjects’” ✧ Brandt has a solution: “It is time that the Federal lands become managed/ accountable State lands.” Read more at Idaho Statesman
(Hat tip: Jo Rae Perkins for U.S. Senate) Read More......

Steyn: Shutdown Simulacrum

By Mark Steyn - Just because it’s a phony crisis doesn’t mean it can’t be made even phonier.
Way back in January, when it emerged that Beyoncé had treated us to the first ever lip-synched national anthem at a presidential inauguration, I suggested in this space that this strange pseudo-performance embodied the decay of America’s political institutions from the real thing into mere simulacrum. But that applies to government “crises,” too — such as the Obamacare “rollout,” the debt “ceiling,” and the federal “shutdown,” to name only the three current railroad tracks to which the virtuous damsel of Big Government has been simultaneously tied by evil mustache-twirling Republicans. Read more at NRO... Read More......

Samuelson: Here comes the spoils society

By Robert J. Saluelson (Hat tip: John H. Detweiler)
We are, I fear, slowly moving from “the affluent society” toward a “spoils society.” In 1958, Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith published his bestseller, “The Affluent Society,” which profoundly influenced national thinking for decades. To the Great Depression’s survivors, post-World War II prosperity dazzled. Suburbia offered a quiet alternative to crowded and noisy cities. New technologies impressed — television, frozen foods, automatic washers and dryers. Never, it seemed, had so much been enjoyed by so many.

This explosive abundance, Galbraith argued, meant the country could afford both private wants and public needs. It could devote more to schools, roads, parks and pollution control. Economic growth became the holy grail of government policy. Production was paramount. It muted social conflict.

The “spoils society” reverses this logic. It de-emphasizes production and fuels conflict. Here’s why:

Read more: Washington Post Read More......

Democrats Pay Union Members to Protest World War II Vets

It appears that the Obama administration is violating the First Rule of Holes. Yesterday the administration looked awful when it “closed” and barricaded the World War II memorial on the Mall. The memorial is, by its nature, open. There is nothing to close. And the administration knows that every day, tour groups consisting of WWII vets, now mostly in their late 80s or early 90s, come to Washington to visit the memorial. So the administration couldn’t resist closing the WWII memorial by putting up barricades, as part of their effort to dramatize how terrible the government “shutdown” is.

Read more at Powerline Blog Read More......

Kropf: Why I oppose the grand bargain

Jeff Kropf at Oregon Catalyst:

It’s because it doesn’t solve the PERS problem that is robbing teachers from classrooms, taking cops and firefighters off the streets and causing criminals to be released, all of which hurts Oregonians. This back room deal only kicks the can down the road. ✧ This is especially true when you consider that Democrats and their union bosses are counting on Oregon judges, (enrolled in PERS) throwing out the savings in this deal, leaving the damage to Oregonians continuing into the future.

Read more at Oregon Catalyst... Read More......

House Republicans Work Immigration Behind Scenes

AP - Immigration overhaul legislation has been dormant in the House for months, but a few Republicans are working behind the scenes to advance it at a time the Capitol is immersed in a partisan brawl over government spending and President Barack Obama's health care law. ✧ The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Bob Goodlatte, has been discussing possible legal status for the estimated 11 million immigrants living in the U.S. illegally. He's also been working with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, a fellow Virginia Republican, on a bill offering citizenship to immigrants brought illegally to the U.S. as children. ✧ Reps. Raul Labrador, R-Idaho, and Ted Poe, R-Texas, are working on a plan to create a visa program allowing more lower-skilled workers into the country. Read more at ABC News...

Comments are interesting. --bc Read More......