Freedom Line Blog

California’s Obamacare-aligned health insurance exchange will not bail out President Barack Obama.

Data released by Covered California, the state’s exchange, explains why.

“People between the ages of 45 and 64 have enrolled in California’s health exchange at a much higher rate than their overall portion of the state’s total population, while younger adults’ enrollment levels essentially track their overall population,” reports CNBC.

“If the trend holds up, it could mean that insurance plans are overweighted with older customers, and underweighted with younger, presumably healthier people. Since their premiums are much needed to offset the cost of benefits paid out to sicker individuals, that could lead to higher premium prices in 2015.”

In other words, Covered California – like any other Obamacare exchange – can’t afford President Obama’s costly ‘fix’ that would allow young and healthy people to keep their pre-Obamacare insurance plans and stay out of the post-Obamacare risk pools. As I explain in my column this week, doing so would lead to the dreaded ‘death spiral’ that will doom the Obamacare exchanges.

There’s no other way to say it. California’s refusal to go along with Obamacare’s latest ‘fix’ is a huge blow to President Obama. So far, the Golden State is home to the most Obamacare-related enrollments, so if it’s afraid that adopting Obama’s enforcement delay will put its fiscal sustainability in jeopardy, it’s hard to see how any other state that’s serious about the issue will disagree.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

On the White House’s official Twitter page, President Obama bragged that under his administration, “We set new fuel standards that will double the distance our cars and trucks go on a gallon of gas.”

Ignore for a moment that the Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency slapped the burdensome regulations on car makers 15 months ago, so the Tweet is obviously a pathetic diversionary tactic to shift the public’s attention away from the recent Obamacare debacle that has further tarnished Obama’s presidency.

Let’s focus instead on the reality that stricter fuel standards kill thousands of people a year.

Since the simplest way to improve a vehicle’s mileage is to reduce its weight, fuel efficiency standards turn cars into “small, underpowered death traps,” according to the National Center for Policy Analysis.

While Obama’s ridiculous miles per gallon regulations won’t fully take effect for another dozen years, previous fuel standard policies are responsible for many of the deaths we see today.

In 1999, USA Today calculated that the reduction in the size and weight of passenger vehicles necessitated by fuel efficiency standards had resulted in more than 46,000 deaths. There have been thousands more Americans killed unnecessarily in the years since that report.

Highway deaths have been spiking recently. There was a 5.3% increase in deaths on America’s roads last year alone. That’s not surprising since, in 2011, another significant increase in minimum miles per gallon for passenger cars was put in place. As drivers upgrade to newer car models, they are unwittingly putting themselves in lighter, more dangerous cars.

Judging by the White House’s tweet, it’s apparent that the President is proud to force Americans into even smaller, lighter cars. He seems disturbingly at ease with the thousands of American deaths his decision will cause.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

You could almost hear environmentalists’ jaws hit the floor this morning when they opened their newspapers and took to their phones and computers for their morning news. In a fierce 4,150-word exposé, the Associated Press dispelled any notion that ethanol is the wonder cure for what ails the environment.

The AP points out that the explosion in corn farming as a result of government ethanol mandates have damaged land, polluted drinking water from fertilizer runoff, and killed aquatic life in rivers and lakes.

To top it all off, the article notes that, “The government’s predictions of the benefits have proven so inaccurate that independent scientists question whether it will ever achieve its central environmental goal: reducing greenhouse gases.”

At best, according to the article, ethanol is only 16% better than gasoline when it came to carbon dioxide emissions. And that small 16% benefit comes at a tremendous cost to the environment:

The consequences are so severe that environmentalists and many scientists have now rejected corn-based ethanol as bad environmental policy. But the Obama administration stands by it, highlighting its benefits to the farming industry rather than any negative impact.

Farmers planted 15 million more acres of corn last year than before the ethanol boom, and the effects are visible in places like south central Iowa.

The hilly, once-grassy landscape is made up of fragile soil that, unlike the earth in the rest of the state, is poorly suited for corn. Nevertheless, it has yielded to America’s demand for it.

‘They’re raping the land,’ said Bill Alley, a member of the board of supervisors in Wayne County, which now bears little resemblance to the rolling cow pastures shown in postcards sold at a Corydon pharmacy.

All energy comes at a cost. The environmental consequences of drilling for oil and natural gas are well documented and severe. But in the president’s push to reduce greenhouse gases and curtail global warming, his administration has allowed so-called green energy to do not-so-green things.

The AP’s stunning article should send a strong message to Washington about the failure of federal ethanol policies.

About 17,500 newspapers and websites are currently featuring the piece, according to a web search.

Leave it to a former federal prosecutor to make the case for impeaching President Barack Obama over the latter’s massive fraud regarding the security of insurance policies after Obamacare.

“Fraud is a serious federal felony, usually punishable by up to 20 years’ imprisonment — with every repetition of a fraudulent communication chargeable as a separate crime,” writes Andrew McCarthy. “In computing sentences, federal sentencing guidelines factor in such considerations as the dollar value of the fraud, the number of victims, and the degree to which the offender’s treachery breaches any special fiduciary duties he owes. Cases of multi-million-dollar corporate frauds — to say nothing of multi-billion-dollar, Bernie Madoff–level scams that nevertheless pale beside Obamacare’s dimensions — often result in terms amounting to decades in the slammer.”

As everyone knows by now, President Obama has lied repeatedly since at least 2010 that Americans who like their insurance will be able to keep it.

But just because Obama won’t be prosecuted doesn’t mean that his actions should go unpunished. As McCarthy reminds us, the standard for impeachment is “high crimes and misdemeanors,” which Alexander Hamilton argued in the Federalist Papers as relating “chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.”

I agree with McCarthy that the billions of dollars lost by millions of health insurance consumers seems to qualify as a massive injury to society perpetuated by the man in the Oval Office.

Read the entire piece here.

Last night President Barack Obama issued a half-hearted apology for lying to millions of Americans.

“I am sorry that they [i.e. people who are losing their insurance plans due to Obamacare] are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me,” Obama said in an interview with NBC News Thursday night. “We’ve got to work hard to make sure that they know we hear them and we are going to do everything we can to deal with folks who find themselves in a tough position as a consequence of this.”

But even with the mea culpa, Obama couldn’t resist trying to minimize his culpability. His method was trying to make the amount of people affected seem like a rounding error.

“I mean, we’re talking about 5 percent of the population.” Of course, 5 percent of the American population is still 15 million people – enough to swing an election. More importantly, that number would be several times larger if Obama hadn’t already delayed the employer mandate.

A reasonable person in Obama’s shoes would now spend the next month or two in lock-down mode trying to fix his broken website and restore credibility to his administration’s ability to govern. But instead this president is going on the campaign trail to defend the indefensible to a skeptical public.

The president doesn’t seem to realize that achievement is what’s needed now, not tired empty rhetoric. If this keeps up, the odds look good for another Republican wave election in 2014.

It looks like the glitch-ridden federal health insurance portal Healthcare.gov isn’t the only Obama administration website in need of fixing.

A statement on WhiteHouse.gov still parrots President Barack Obama’s recently disavowed promise that “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan,” reports Fox News.

On a page labeled “health reform details” the following statement appears: “For Americans with insurance coverage who like what they have, they can keep it. Nothing in this act or anywhere in the bill forces anyone to change the insurance they have, period.”

And yet President Obama said to his supporters on Monday, “What we said was, ‘You could keep if [your plan] if it hasn’t changed since the law was passed.’”

The about-face is due to the President of the United States being caught in a multi-year, bald-faced lie.

As I explain in my column this week, the Obama administration from the president on down has known since at least June 2010 that nearly 100 million Americans would lose their pre-Obamacare health care plans if the law was implemented as written. That’s one reason they delayed the employer mandate, and with it, the vast majority – almost 80 million – of projected policy cancellations. (Consumers in the individual insurance market are the ones being hit as the law intended.)

The conflicting statement on WhiteHouse.gov is just more confirmation that President Obama and his administration can’t be trusted to tell the truth.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

The Republican National Committee has launched a humorous and biting four-part commercial series to “expose the deep flaws of Obamacare.”

In keeping with its long tradition of being on the cutting edge, the clips parody Apple’s 7-year-old “Get a Mac” ad campaign. (Apparently the GOP couldn’t figure out a way to look even more out-of-touch by criticizing Obamacare by spoofing “Where’s the beef?,” or by dusting off Spuds MacKenzie or Max Headroom to make the point.)

In the RNC’s commercials, two guys representing “The Private Sector” and “Obamacare” square off much in the same way Justin Long and John Hodgman did as Mac and PC back in the good old days when Obamacare was just a bewildering scheme floating in the vacant expanse between Barack Obama’s goofy ears.

The first commercial, “Down” will air during tonight’s Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Comedy Central.

The ads will appear primarily in the Washington, D.C. market. If you’re fortunate enough not to live in the greater Baltimore-Washington Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Area, have no fear. The videos are available online here, here, here and here.

Hopefully the ads will help spread distrust of Obamacare and represent another step in building the critical mass necessary to eliminate the program.

There is a bit of irony that the RNC is spending millions on ads trying to overturn – or, at least, overhaul – Obamacare when, if the organization had done its job in years past, Obamacare would’ve never been created in the first place.

If anyone is looking for another reason to criticize the Obamacare website rollout, here it is.

“Rather than open the contracting process to a competitive public solicitation with multiple bidders, officials in the Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Medicare and Medicaid accepted a sole bidder, CGI Federal, the U.S. subsidiary of a Canadian company with an uneven record of IT pricing and contract performance,” reports the Washington Examiner.

An open, competitive process would have revealed that CGI was fired in 2011 by the Ontario government for failing to deliver on time “a new online medical registry for diabetes patients and treatment providers.”

In other words, CGI – the firm responsible for creating a health insurance portal to service 36 American states – couldn’t deliver a much less complicated system for 1 Canadian province. The service was so bad that the Ontario government still refuses to pay any outstanding fees it owes to CGI.

Remember when liberals screamed bloody murder about the no-bid contracts awarded by the George W. Bush administration to defense contractors?

Well, it’s time to mount their high horses again and demand accountability.

I’m looking at you in particular, Jon Stewart.

Tom Bevan thinks so.

“Any corporation that allowed a COO to mismanage a new product line as important to its image as the Affordable Care Act is to Obama’s would be contemplating their severance package,” writes the Executive Editor of RealClearPolitics.

“The fact that Republicans haven’t called for Sebelius’ scalp should tell Democrats all they need to know about how much conservatives think she is hurting Obamacare’s cause. If the president cares about rescuing his signature policy initiative, he should consider putting it under new management right away.”

Though cathartic, I’m not sure Bevan’s idea helps the GOP all that much.

True, if Obama fired Sebelius it would touch off a huge confirmation battle over her successor as Secretary of Health and Human Services, the agency overseeing Obamacare’s implementation. But since Democrats control the Senate, confirmation would be won eventually.

Better, I think, to schedule a series of high-profile congressional hearings to grill Sebelius, her deputies and the contractors responsible for the glitch-heavy federal insurance exchange website. Sebelius is fast-becoming the bureaucratic face of Obamacare – let her try to defend it.

The tone coming from House GOP members should be sharp but measured. Already, Speaker John Boehner has used a line that would be devastating to repeat to every pro-Obamacare witness at every hearing:

“How can we tax people for not buying a product from a website that doesn’t work?”

Then there are the simple questions Sebelius couldn’t answer in a cringe-inducing appearance on The Daily Show.

Host Jon Stewart – an Obamacare supporter who thinks America deserves a single-payer system – got no good answers from Sebelius about why Healthcare.gov stinks and businesses get a one year mandate delay but individuals do not.

In response, Sebelius said – without a shred of evidence – that the site is getting better, and that individuals can delay the mandate, so long as they pay a fine.

If that’s the best she can do with a friendly host, imagine the possibilities under good cross-examination at a House hearing.

No, Obama shouldn’t fire Sebelius until House Republicans get a chance to turn up the heat.

Healthcare.gov, Obamacare’s federally-run, error-prone health insurance exchange, costs north of $500 million, according to the best information available.

To put this in perspective, compare that amount to the operating budgets of some of the tech industry’s biggest names:

·    Facebook operated for six years before passing the $500 million mark in 2010

·    Twitter operated for five years on $360.17 million in total funding

·    Instagram used $57.5 million before being bought by Facebook last year

·    LinkedIn has raised $200 million, while Spotify has raised $288 million

Despite the huge funding disparities, however, all of these private sector firms fielded much better online products than the glitch-filled, click-and-crash monstrosity offered by the Obama administration.

After more than a week of operation, Healthcare.gov is doing little more than waste people’s time.

Defunding never looked so good.

The Obama Administration seems happy to continue its despicable tactic of making the government shutdown seem more harsh than it actually is (including barricading access to the open-air WWII Memorial,ordering the service academies to suspend all intercollegiate athletic events and forcing a privately funded colonial living history farm to close its doors).

At the same time that the Administration is locking doors, barricading entrances and sending people home unnecessarily, the White House is staffing up its website and pleading with Americans to send in dramatic stories of how the government shutdown impacted them.

Apparently Obama and Co. are going to use the sob stories to vilify Republicans and tug at the heartstrings of Americans in the hopes ending the shutdown – or, more likely, score political points.

It’ll be interesting to see what stories are released. It’ll be even more interesting to find out if the stories that are released are actually real.

It took United Airlines offering to bailout the Pentagon, but it looks like the privately funded Navy-Air Force college football game will be played as scheduled this Saturday.

On Tuesday, Obama administration officials at the Department of Defense had suspended all athletic contests at the three service academies because of the government shutdown.

But after an outcry over the cravenly political move, United Airlines offered to fly the entire Air Force football team for free to Annapolis. That, apparently, shamed Pentagon officials into letting the game go on as scheduled.

It’s good to see that college kids training to defend our nation won’t be used as pawns by liberals trying to score political points over the funding impasse. But it’s still distasteful that this disgusting strategy was used in the first place.

First the Obama administration barricaded veterans from visiting the open-air World War II monument.

Then it ordered the forced closure of a privately-funded colonial farm.

Now comes word that the Department of Defense is ordering the service academies to suspend all intercollegiate athletic events during the government shutdown because of “optics.”

On Tuesday, a soccer game between the Naval Academy and Howard University was postponed indefinitely due to an order from DOD.

Up next may be the nationally televised football game between Navy and the Air Force Academy scheduled for Saturday.

“The potential revenue loss to the Naval Academy Athletic Association would likely exceed $4 million,” a Naval Academy spokesman told the Capital Gazette. “That money comes from ticket sales, sponsorship, parking and concession revenue. The largest revenue stream is the payout NAA receives from CBS Sports Television.”

The worst part about this – The athletic program at Navy is completely funded by private donors. Air Force could make the trip without using any government money as well.

In other words, all expenses for Saturday’s game could be held without congressionally appropriated funding, yet the political officials running the military won’t allow it to happen.

When asked for DOD’s rationale, Navy’s Athletic Director said he was told it was about “optics.” “It’s a perception thing. Apparently it doesn’t resonate with all the other government agencies that have been shut down,” he said.

This isn’t politics. It is ugliness pure and simple.

H/T: National Review Online

Unlikely? Sure. But nonetheless a group of pro-Putin Russians sent a letter to the Nobel Peace Prize committee requesting consideration for their country’s president.

“The group says Putin deserves the honor for his efforts in brokering an agreement for Syria to hand over its chemical weapons under international control, a plan the group says helped avert a ‘new world war,’” according to Breitbart.com.

Then the story stops being funny.

Drawing a contrast to President of the United States Barack Obama, the group’s leader says that Putin, “who is trying to stop the war and suggest a political solution, is more worthy of such a title.”

Now, of course Putin – the man who invaded South Ossetia during the 2008 Summer Olympics – is no peace-loving reincarnation of Ghandi. The lifeline he threw to Obama over Syria was nothing more than a canny power politics move that makes it easier for his authoritarian allies in Damascus to oppress their people with impunity.

Still, the argument that Putin deserves a fair hearing to receive the Peace Prize is at least plausible since the committee in charge of conferring it debased its standards by awarding its 2009 installment to Obama on the pretext that he might do something worthy to receive it.

Four years later, Obama was poised to start a war until Putin negotiated a European-style system of endless weapons inspections and diplomatic meetings. Had the roles been reversed, Obama supporters would be claiming their man made good on the Nobel’s committee’s prediction. But since history played out the other way, perhaps the American president can do the Norwegians a favor and mail their devalued token to Russia.

Last week, we highlighted how Obama’s hyperkinetic expansion of federal government power has only served to drive Americans’ trust in it to a record low:

Presidents like Reagan and Clinton who publicly commit to moderating federal government expansion have increased Americans’ trust in government competence.  In contrast, President Obama seeks at every turn to enlarge the federal government, but has degraded trust in it to all-time lows.  We can thank Obama for few things, but reaffirming Reagan’s observation that government has become more of a problem than a solution is one of them.”

This week, a separate Gallup poll affirms Obama’s unintended causal relationship.  Specifically, the belief that the federal government is too powerful has reached a record level:

Six in 10 Americans (60%) believe the federal government has too much power, one percentage point above the previous high recorded in September 2010.  At least half of Americans since 2005 have said the government has too much power.  Thirty-two percent now say the government has the right amount of power.  Few say it has too little power.”

When Obama entered office, the disparity between those saying the federal government possessed too much power versus those saying it possessed the right amount or too little power was just 1 point, 50% to 49%.  Today, the disparity has ballooned to 21%, proving welcome confirmation that Americans still tend to believe that limited government is the best government.

It’s a particularly strange dynamic for an attorney and politician, given those professions’ reliance upon the art of persuasion.  But the more Barack Obama talks, the more he seems to dissuade rather than persuade.  Recall the signature act of his presidency to date, ObamaCare.  The more Obama has attempted to sell it both before and after its enactment, the less popular it has become.

Today, we’re witnessing that same lack of persuasive skill with regard to the question of military intervention in Syria.  According to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey released this morning, public opinion on intervention has reversed in the past two weeks, from 50% to 44% in favor to 51% to 44% opposed:

At the end of August, and NBC News poll found that half of Americans backed a limited set of airstrikes to destroy Syrian military units in response to an alleged government-directed gas attack that killed more than 1,400 civilians.  In less than two weeks since then, support for a limited attack dropped to 44%, the new poll found.  ‘As the public hears more information, they are coming down on the side of ‘don’t do it,” said Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster who conducted the survey with Democratic pollsters Fred Yang and Peter Hart.”

I was asked yesterday on Cam & Company on NRA News whether Obama can recover politically from his current debacle.  Given his performance to date in the art of persuasion, that prospect certainly doesn’t appear likely.

Courtesy of the U.S. Census Bureau, we have yet another statistic to negatively distinguish Barack Obama and give form to his emerging legacy.  Yesterday, it reported that the percentage of adults aged 25 to 34 living with their parents rose again despite the economic “recovery” now into its fifth year.  In 2012, 13.6% of Americans in that age range lived with their parents, which was up from 13.4% in 2011.  That compares with approximately 10% throughout most of the previous decade.  So just as 2 million fewer Americans are working today than when the recession ended five months into Obama’s tenure in June 2009, more and more young adults consider it necessary to move in with Mom and Dad.  Not exactly the change for which young voters hoped in 2008.