Bank Failure Wednesday

Bank of Jackson County, Graceville, Florida, is bank failure number 23 in 2013, costing the FDIC $5.1 million.

FDIC insured institutions now number 6,940.

Obama Lied About His Own Mother's Insurance History, So Why Be Surprised He's Lied To You?

Byron York, back in 2011, here:

Dunham unquestionably had health coverage. "Ann's compensation for her job in Jakarta had included health insurance, which covered most of the costs of her medical treatment," [Janny] Scott writes. "Once she was back in Hawaii, the hospital billed her insurance company directly, leaving Ann to pay only the deductible and any uncovered expenses, which, she said, came to several hundred dollars a month." ... the story Obama told, Scott writes, was "abbreviated" -- the abbreviation was to leave out the fact that Ann Dunham had health insurance that paid for her treatment. "Though he often suggested that she was denied health coverage because of a pre-existing condition," Scott writes, "it appears from her correspondence that she was only denied disability coverage."

Former Rep. Barney Frank's Favorite Guaranteed Benefit In Obamacare

Free mammograms, even for "men"!

The Anger Will Spread: 80 Million Won't Be Able To Keep Their Employer-Based Insurance, Either

The hubbub over the loss of health insurance coverage in the individual market, affecting some 13 million, will grow into quite a wail when 80 million additional people lose their employer-based healthcare plans, which is why Obama delayed the employer mandate, dummy. Better to let the country get used to the idea by screwing the few, the proud, the responsible, you know, the ranks where the Tea Party comes from, first. But the rest of you are going to get it in the shorts later, no question about it.

From Avik Roy at Forbes, here:

Obamacare’s disruption of the existing health insurance market—a disruption codified in law, and known to the administration—is only just beginning. And it’s far broader than recent media coverage has implied. ...

60 percent of Americans have private-sector health insurance—precisely the number that Jay Carney dismissed. As to the number of people facing cancellations, 51 percent of the employer-based market [80 million of 156 million Americans] plus 53.5 percent of the non-group market (the middle of the administration’s range) [13 million of 25 million Americans] amounts to 93 million Americans.

President Obama’s famous promise that “you could keep your plan” was not some naïve error or accident. He, and his allies, knew that previous Democratic attempts at health reform had failed because Americans were happy with the coverage they had, and opposed efforts to change the existing system. ...

Obamacare forces insurers to offer services that most Americans don’t need, don’t want, and won’t use, for a higher price. 

You can keep your insurance, healthcare.gov hasn't crashed, and . . .

. . . blackwhite.

"The Mechanism That Ended The Crisis"

John Hussman, here:

Rather, the crisis ended – and in hindsight, ended precisely – on March 16, 2009, when the Financial Accounting Standards Board abandoned mark-to-market rules, in response to Congressional pressure by the House Committee on Financial Services on March 12, 2009. The decision by the FASB gave banks “substantial discretion” in the values that they assigned to assets. With that discretion, banks could use cash-flow models (“mark-to-model”) or other methods (“mark-to-unicorn”). ... The misattribution of cause and effect in 2009 created the Grand Superstition of our time – the belief that Federal Reserve policy was responsible for ending the financial crisis and sending the stock market higher. By 2010, this narrative was so fully accepted that the Fed’s announcement of further “quantitative easing” was met by equally great enthusiasm by investors.

The People Who Most Need ObamaCare

The people who most need ObamaCare are the designers of it, who will now be able to (and should) get their heads examined under it for making sure people who are almost 60 pay four times the cost of their old plans and get maternity coverage and pediatric dental care in the bargain.

So-Called Conservative Supporters Of Illegal Alien Amnesty To Meet Tonight In DC

Bloomberg has the story, here, naming the following so-called conservatives and right of center groups in attendance to launch a lobbying bomb on Washington for an illegal immigration amnesty bill from the Senate which is dead in the US House:

US Chamber of Commerce

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg

NY Mayor Michael Bloomberg

Marriott CEO Arne Sorenson

News Corp's Rupert Murdoch

Southern Baptist Convention

American Conservative Union

Americans for Tax Reform's Grover Norquist.

You have met the enemy, and it ain't us.

NBC News Suddenly Discovers Obama Has Known For Three Years He's Been Lying

NBC isn't fooling anybody who's been paying attention to its long record of shilling for Obama, but now that he's safely in place for his second term what are people going to do about bad news for the president, impeach him? NBC has already moved on to 2016. 

For what it's worth, from the top:

[M]illions 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.

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.” ...

[T]he administration knew that more than 40 to 67 percent of those in the individual market would not be able to keep their plans, even if they liked them.

Yet President Obama, who had promised in 2009, “if you like your health plan, you will be able to keep your health plan,” was still saying in 2012, “If [you] already have health insurance, you will keep your health insurance.” 

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"Tea Party" never comes up in this story. That's who's being targeted in the individual market under ObamaCare, the responsibles who buy their own coverage. Just think of it as IRS intimidation, but in a different form.

Article The First, The Never-Adopted First Amendment, Sought To Increase Federal Representation Naturally

Your Congressman doesn't even know your name? Maybe there aren't enough of them, which is to say he or she represents too many people to represent you, so that we have representation without representation.

The first first amendment, Article I., sought to prevent this:

"After the first enumeration required by the first article of the Constitution, there shall be one representative for every thirty thousand, until the number shall amount to one hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less than one hundred representatives, nor less than one representative for every forty thousand persons, until the number of representatives shall amount to two hundred; after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less than two hundred representatives, nor more than one representative for every fifty thousand persons."

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Ratified by many states but never adopted, the constitution ended up with different, open-ended language, which a later act of the Congress of the United States interfered with in the 1920s, fixing representation instead of letting it continue to grow with population:

"The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand . . .."

On this language we should have 10,490 representatives, not a fixed 435 (one for every seven hundred twenty-three Thousand at present). But on the language of Article the First, we might have had only 6,294 representatives.

The anti-federalists, however, who insisted on a bill of rights, couldn't imagine such numbers to be at all adequate to represent the people, and some of them called for one for every fifteen Thousand, which would have meant an astounding 20,979 federal representatives today.

Contrast such levels of representation with actual total representation in state legislatures in the US today (as of March 2013): 5,411, which represents a ratio of one for every fifty-eight Thousand. Clearly state government representation today, taken overall, most clearly approximates the levels of representation called for by the un-adopted Article the First for federal representation.

That said, residents of New Hampshire, with 400 representatives, are the best represented in the nation, at a ratio of one for every 3,302!

And Californians are among the worst represented with just 80 representatives to the state legislature, a ratio of one for every 475,518.

Libertarian Freaks In Virginia Hate Cuccinelli's Social Conservatism, Funded By Former Cato Institute President

Tim Carney reports, here:

Purple PAC, a political action committee headed by Libertarian Ed Crane, former president of the Cato Institute, announced Oct. 25 it would spend $300,000 to back Sarvis. And many Beltway politicos with libertarian leanings are backing Sarvis and expressing disgust for Cuccinelli.

Why are libertarians working so hard against Cuccinelli, who is probably the most libertarian statewide official in Virginia in recent history?

I suspect identity politics plays a role.

I asked Sarvis why a libertarian should oppose Cuccinelli, and the first words out of his mouth were “social issues.” Crane’s only critique of Cuccinelli when announcing the $300,000 buy for Sarvis: “Ken Cuccinelli is a socially intolerant, hard-right conservative with little respect for civil liberties.”

Cuccinelli is undoubtedly conservative. He’s an observant Catholic with seven children and a home-schooling wife. He’s a hero to the pro-life cause and an opponent of gay marriage.

Healthcare.gov is down in Michigan tonight if you want to apply for coverage online

Looks like ObamaCare is still experiencing delays different from the ones the president has imposed on his own law.

Deb Saunders Helpfully Assembles The Blame-Republicans-For-ObamaCare Charges Made By Democrats

Here, concluding:

Now, I won't deny that two decades ago, some conservative think tank swell came up with the term "individual mandate" -- which allowed other wonks to try to pin the tail on the elephant. But if liberals have to fish for a 1989 Heritage Foundation policy paper that had no Republican support in 2008, 2009 or 2012 to establish Republican paternity for the Affordable Care Act, that tells you one thing: They think Obamacare won't work.

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That's right. If it works it's a Democrat idea.

Robert B. Reichhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh-a Pretends ObamaCare Was Rammed Through On A Completely Partisan Vote In 2010 . . . By Republicans

Robert B. Reich pals around with conservative sell-out

In HuffPo, here, where he makes a great case for blaming Republicans for the idea of ObamaCare in the first place, but fails to mention the inconvenient truth that not a single Republican voted for it and that it was Democrats who rammed it down our throats on a completely partisan vote under the extreme circumstances of procedure in the Congress:

There's a deep irony to all this. Had Democrats stuck to the original Democratic vision and built comprehensive health insurance on Social Security and Medicare, it would have been cheaper, simpler, and more widely accepted by the public. And Republicans would be hollering anyway.

LA Times Floats ObamaCare Weasel Word Excuse: We Only Meant SOME Could Keep Their Insurance

Here:

Still, many are frustrated at being forced to give up the plans they have now. They frequently cite assurances given by Obama that Americans could hold on to their health insurance despite the massive overhaul.

"All we've been hearing the last three years is if you like your policy you can keep it," said Deborah Cavallaro, a real estate agent in Westchester. "I'm infuriated because I was lied to."

Supporters of the healthcare law say Obama was referring to people who are insured through their employers or through government programs such as Medicare. Still, they acknowledge the confusion and anger from individual policyholders who are being forced to change.

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The fact is, the 40 million who have private insurance acquired either individually or through their own small businesses are being thrown under the bus first for political reasons. They are not an afterthought, but the key target.

To really understand why, however, one must realize that the oft-stated goal of providing health insurance through ObamaCare to benefit the 30 million uninsured is just a smokescreen, as if sacrificing the one group for the other roughly represents a fair trade. The reality is that ObamaCare is specifically designed to benefit women, a key fact about the law which shows its political meaning in the context of what the Democrats name the Republican war on women and doesn't get enough attention even among conservative opponents of the law.

Employer plans will have to conform to ObamaCare guidelines later, it is true. But since they represent a much larger constituency, Obama has unilaterally and unlawfully delayed key provisions of his own law which affect them in an attempt to phase in the draconian changes to health insurance slowly until after it's too late. The last thing Obama wanted as the poorly crafted law took effect was everyone up in arms at once. Better to boil the frogs slowly, and start with the most important opposition first, which is the Tea Party, which has been the most sensitive group to Obama-inspired federal interventions in American life, beginning with opposition to the mortgage forgiveness schemes in February 2009 which gave birth to the Tea Party and culminating in mobilization efforts to oppose health insurance reform schemes in the House and Senate late that same year. When ObamaCare became a fait accompli in March 2010, all the energy went in to retributive political action, which reached its crescendo with the history-making Republican take-over of the US House in November 2010.

Since then the effete who still constitute the majority in the Republican Party have done nothing to challenge the incremental imperial assaults of the president against the powers reserved to the Congress by the constitution. Looking back at them all now, one might even say that Obama's many transgressions against the separation of powers were all calculated to inure the people to the fact of them in order to smooth the way for more of the same when he needed it the most with respect to ObamaCare. Some older Republicans like Larry Kudlow, instinctively if not self-consciously, have recoiled from this, laughably calling for all provisions of ObamaCare to take effect as scheduled in the law, in the hope that the political consequences would be so profound that Republicans would win in 2014 and be able with large majorities to overturn a presidential veto of a law scrapping ObamaCare.

Seeing more acutely the threat to their very existence, however, the Tea Party has wanted the funds to ObamaCare cut off NOW. But neither camp has exerted enough influence among Republicans as a whole even as Obama methodically racked up that impressive record of tyrannical offenses against Congressional prerogatives, from the Libyan intervention without Congressional consultation to recess appointments when Congress wasn't in recess. In the face of all that the most contemptible members of the Republican establishment like David Frum instead have gone to war against these voices within their own party, in effect helping Democrats turn up the heat on the frog pot.

In political terms, ObamaCare is a key element in the larger class war being phased in first on the constituency which primarily makes up the Tea Party, the independent-minded traditionalist Americans who fend for themselves and support themselves without help from the nanny state or from a nanny employer, people who are more likely to start businesses, get married, and pay their own way and raise their own children. In a word, what has historically been the Republican base. All the rhetoric from Democrats over the period has been aimed at the these people by design, for a political reason, in order to freeze, personalize, and polarize them, painting them in the most horrific terms as the party of violence (January 2011 Giffords shooting), racism (March 2010 protests in DC), and terrorism (government shutdown in October 2013), among other things. As usual, the complete opposite of what they are, in keeping with what we used to call liberal projection syndrome and which still shows up in inaptly named government programs like the Affordable Care Act, which will not be affordable, will provide insurance but not care, and which was passed more as a partisan assault than a traditional act of Congress.

Health insurance reform under ObamaCare, by contrast, primarily benefits women as a class, whose health care costs are by nature higher and constitute the most obvious first inequality which shows up under health insurance. ObamaCare seeks to alienate women further from their natural condition by simply decreeing that this reality no longer exists. ObamaCare first and foremost puts their premiums on an equal footing with men's, craftily supplanting men as providers of health coverage to their wives through their employer plans and masking the costs women would otherwise have to absorb by themselves if they were paying for them. And then ObamaCare does much more, paying for their maternity care, and without coverage caps, their mammograms, their birth control and abortions, their lactation services and breast pumps, and letting baby mamas everywhere keep their kids on their plans until they reach the age of 26 (their kids reach 26, not the baby mamas). In effect ObamaCare seeks to solidify women as a natural Democrat Party constituency as dependent on the Democrats who provided it as the poor are who support them now because of massively expanded social welfare transfer payments.

If ever there was a public program designed to drive a stake through the heart of the traditional family, ObamaCare is it. That's why it is striking first at the people most likely in our society to take responsibility for themselves and where the idea of the traditional family is strongest. And to the extent that many within the Republican Party sympathize more with the transformational idealisms of female equality than with the realistic conceptions taught by history and nature explains better than anything why we are where we are.

The political party the Tea Party decided to support, unfortunately, hasn't proved itself worthy of them. There's still a little time left for Republicans to prove otherwise, but it is fast running out.

Average Hourly Earnings Up For Everyone 7% Since ObamaCare Passed

If ObamaCare has been cutting earnings for the workforce in sectors which have witnessed a trend toward part time work, it's not showing up overall. Average weekly earnings for all employees are up 7% since March 2010, when the bill was rammed down our throats in a completely partisan vote. The sectors impacted, like retail and fast food, simply aren't big enough to drag down the overall picture.

Average Weekly Hours For Everyone Up 1.5% Since ObamaCare Passed

If ObamaCare has been cutting hours for the workforce in sectors, it's not showing up overall. Average weekly hours for all employees are up 1.5% since March 2010, when the bill was rammed down our throats in a completely partisan vote. The sectors impacted, like retail and fast food, simply aren't big enough to drag down the overall picture.

Looks Like A Libertarian Is About To Spoil Another Race For The Republicans

In the Virginia race for governor the Libertarian's support is the margin of difference between Cuccinelli and McAuliffe.

Moochelle's 1985 Princeton Classmate An Executive At Firm Which Designed Failed Healthcare.gov

From the story here:

Toni Townes-Whitley, Princeton class of ’85, is senior vice president at CGI Federal, which earned the no-bid contract to build the $678 million Obamacare enrollment website at Healthcare.gov. CGI Federal is the U.S. arm of a Canadian company.

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Of four bids submitted, only the one from the firm of Moochelle's classmate was considered by the Obama regime.

Foreclosed New Jersey Homeowners Staying In Their Homes Rent-Free For YEARS!

From the story here:

"Its happening all over new jersey with Hudson & Cape May ranking the highest, 80% of people remaining in the home for years during foreclosure."