"I have not yet begun to fight!"

Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976?Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use. Unless you are in this field of investigative journalism, especially covering extremely sensitive subjects and potentially dangerous subjects as well, you simply cannot understand the complexities and difficulties involved with this work that I face every day.

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Valerie Jarrett: 'Best and brightest' tech leaders praised White House for fixing Obamacare website

By CHARLIE SPIERING | DECEMBER 18, 2013 AT 2:55 PM

Topics: Beltway Confidential White House Obamacare Healthcare.gov Technology

White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett claimed that some of the "best and brightest" tech leaders who met with President Obama on Tuesday praised White House officials for fixing the Obamacare website.
During the meeting, Jarrett revealed, Obama's outgoing point man for fixing the website, Jeff Zients, gave a presentation on the work they did to fix the plagued website after its disastrous Oct. 1 launch.
"One of the very positive feedback that we received from the technology folks — and we clearly had the best and the brightest technology in the room yesterday — and after they heard the presentation from Jeff (Zients), the feedback that they gave him was that he had done everything that they would have done once he came in to try to fix the site," Jarrett said during a Politico Playbook Breakfast interview on Wednesday morning.
Obama met with 15 officials representing major tech companies, including Google chairman Eric Schmidt, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer, and Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg.
Jarrett explained that Zients began the meeting with a presentation on the work they had done to fix the healthcare.gov website and had a "constructive conversation" about the process.
Jarrett responded to reports that some of the tech leaders complained that the White House meeting was more about Obamacare than their privacy concerns surrounding the National Security Agency.
According to the Guardian, several senior executives pushed back against White House officials for trying to connect the event with healthcare.gov.
One official who met with Obama told CNN, "We didn't fly across the country for a discussion on healthcare.gov."
After the White House event, the group issued a short joint statement that made no mention of the Obamacare website.
"We appreciated the opportunity to share directly with the president our principles on government surveillance that we released last week and we urge him to move aggressively on reform," the statement read.

New Hampshire State Rep. JR Hoell Suggests Armed Resistance Against US Government (Audio)

By Michael Allen, Mon, December 16, 2013

New Hampshire State Rep. JR Hoell (R) recently predicted that conservatives may need to rise up in armed resistance against the Democratically-elected US government.
Hoell was discussing former Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA), whom Hoell thinks is too liberal to run for New Hampshire's U.S. Senate seat, on the Internet radio show GrokTALK, reports MiscellanyBlue.com (audio below).
According to RightWingWatch.org, Hoell was promoting an anti-Brown rally, which includes a raffle of an AR-15 assault rifle. The rally is co-sponsored by Gun Owners of New Hampshire and the New Hampshire Firearms Coalition.
"We’re not here to threaten anybody," claimed Hoell. "We’re here standing on our soapbox as opposed to standing with our ammo box in hand to make a point politically. The message needs to get out that Scott Brown does not represent New Hampshire."
"If things continue the way they are, there may be a day or a time where firearms and ammo are necessary," predicted Hoell. "It happened in the Revolutionary War. I’d like to think we’re not there yet, but as things continue to unravel, that may be the next step."
Sources: GraniteGrok.com, RightWingWatch.org, MiscellanyBlue.com

POLITICO: Obamacare Website Failure Could Doom Immigration Reform

by Tony Lee 18 Dec 2013, 1:43 PM PDT post a comment

The botched Obamacare rollout may threaten the fate of comprehensive immigration reform, as Americans are frustrated with the disastrous Healthcare.gov website and may also be skeptical of the federal government's ability to deliver on various border security and E-verify measures reliant on computer technology.

Even Politico had to ask, "If the government can’t build a website, how can it be trusted to correctly process millions of undocumented immigrants and require every employer to verify the status of their workers?"
That is the question to which Americans will be demanding answers when the House likely takes up comprehensive immigration reform at the beginning of next year. Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a Democrat, said Americans have lost more confidence with the government after Obamacare. "Our experience with Affordable Care Act does not help when you look at other big things like immigration reform.”
The Senate bill that passed, in addition to lowering the wages of working class Americans, would purportedly have measures in place to expand the country's temporary worker program and the E-Verify system--criticized as unreliable--and enact more border security measures.
As Breitbart News has reported, border security measures proposed in the House have been criticized for their "meaningless metrics" that would rely on government's use of various technologies and would be susceptible to manipulation for political purposes.

Is Barack Obama Using a Fake Soc. Sec. Number? Gov’t May Be Forced to Answer

Warner Todd Huston

December 18, 2013 1:58pm PST

Get ready birthers, Orly Taitz has won a small victory for those of you who think Obama is not a U.S. citizen. It seems that the US government may have to answer to why it seems that the Social Security number the President is using doesn’t quite seem legitimate.
(See also: Was Fainting Woman In Rose Garden Just Another Obama Fake, Kind Of Like His Birth Certificate Is Fake?)
Birther queen Orly Taitz has been filing one lawsuit after another to try to “learn the truth,” she says, of Obama’s true background. Is he a U.S. citizen? Taitz says no and has been trying for years to find the smoking gun that proves it.
But this time she has a small opening toward that end. Taitz contends that Barack Obama is using the Social Security number of a man named Harry Bounel. Taitz has filed with the Social Security Administration to get these records but the SSA has stonewalled Taitz when she has filed for Freedom of Information Act requests saying there is “no information” in their records to send to her.
(See also: Jay Leno Slams Obama’s Feckless Syria Policy)

Taitz went to court over the SSA’s stonewalling and has found a judge who has ruled that the government must respond to her requests on Obama’s and this Harry Bounel’s SS number records.
In a press release, Taitz reports the following:

Judge Hollander in Maryland gives Attorney Orly Taitz 21 days to file a second amended complaint and add allegations in regards to an improper withholding by the Social Security Administration of records of Harry Bounel, whose Social security number is being illegally used by Barack Obama. When Taitz filed the complaint, SSA did not respond at all. After the law suit was filed, SSA responded by fraudulently claiming that the records were not found. Taitz responded that this is a fraudulent assertion, since the records were found before and denied to another petitioner due to privacy concerns, however Social Security has no right to claim privacy as according to their own 120 year rule they have a duty to release the records. The judge stated that the plaintiff Taitz might be correct, however at this time she cannot rule in her favor as her original complaint was filed before SSA responded, so the judge gave Taitz an opportunity to refile a second amended complaint and add new allegations, stating the SSA responded but improperly hidden the records . This is a great development. This all but assures that the judge will order the SSA to release the SS-5, Social Security application of resident of CT, Harrison (Harry) Bounel, whose CT SSN 042-68-4425 was stolen by Obama and used in Obama’s 2009 tax returns, which initially were posted on WhiteHouse.gov without proper redaction, without flattening of the file . Taitz will be very careful not to be Breitbarted or Fuddied in the next 21 days.

(See also: 4 Questions Every American Needs To Ask About Obama’s Birth Certificate)
Well, what do you guys think? Is Taitz finally close to the first step in proving something? Ot is this just another birther pipe dream? Tell us your thoughts in the comments.
(H/T The Free Patriot)
Please Sign The Petition To Repeal Obamacare: CLICK HERE.

Fine print: State can seize your assets to pay for care after you’re forced into Medicaid by Obamacare

posted at 9:41 pm on December 16, 2013 by Mary Katharine Ham

My, this is an unpleasant consequence of Obamacare. I’m not going to call it unintended because in its current form, it potentially earns a bunch of money for states, so I’m pretty sure that’s intentional. What I think is unintentional is anyone noticing this is what they’re up to.
But the Seattle Times noticed:

It wasn’t the moonlight, holiday-season euphoria or family pressure that made Sophia Prins and Gary Balhorn, both 62, suddenly decide to get married.
It was the fine print.
As fine print is wont to do, it had buried itself in a long form — Balhorn’s application for free health insurance through the expanded state Medicaid program. As the paperwork lay on the dining-room table in Port Townsend, Prins began reading.
She was shocked: If you’re 55 or over, Medicaid can come back after you’re dead and bill your estate for ordinary health-care expenses.
The way Prins saw it, that meant health insurance via Medicaid is hardly “free” for Washington residents 55 or older. It’s a loan, one whose payback requirements aren’t well advertised. And it penalizes people who, despite having a low income, have managed to keep a home or some savings they hope to pass to heirs, Prins said.

So, here’s the deal. There used to be a provision whereby the state could recuperate funds spent on a Medicaid patient post-55 years old from whatever assets he owned. So, a low-income individual in nursing home care after age 55 might pass away and his kids would find out the family home or car of whatever he had to his name had to be bought back from the state if they wanted it. It’s called estate recovery, and sounds pretty shady if it’s not boldly advertised as the terms for Medicaid enrollment, which is most definitely is not.
Before the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, there weren’t that many people in Medicaid who had much in the way of assets for seizing. But now that Medicaid enrollment requirements have been relaxed, more people with assets but low income are joining the program or being forced into it. For instance, a couple in their 50s who, say, retired early after losing jobs in the bad economy may have assets but show a very low income. Under Obamacare, if their income is low enough to qualify for Medicaid, they must enroll in Medicaid unless they want to buy totally unsubsidized coverage in the now-inflated individual market. As teh Times notes, this is no small difference:

People cannot receive a tax credit to subsidize their purchase of a private health plan if their income qualifies them for Medicaid, said Bethany Frey, spokeswoman for the Washington Health Benefit Exchange.
But they could buy a health plan without a tax credit, she added.
For someone age 55 to 64 at the Medicaid-income level — below $15,856 a year — it’s quite a jump from free Medicaid health insurance to an unsubsidized individual plan. Premiums in King County for an age 60 non-tobacco user for the most modest plan run from $451 to $859 per month.

The couple in the Times story was able to marry, combine their incomes, and get out of the Medicaid trap. Others will not be so lucky, and may not even read the fine print:

Prins, an artist, and Balhorn, a retired fisherman-turned-tango instructor, separately qualified for health insurance through Medicaid based on their sole incomes.
But if they were married, they calculated, they could “just squeak by” with enough income to qualify for a subsidized health plan — and avoid any encumbrance on the home they hope to leave to Prins’ two sons.

For no one else in the world is it a-okay to give low-income people a loan that might endanger their family’s assets and not even clearly inform them they’re getting a loan.
This Daily Kos diarist has a nice write-up (I know) on the toll this could take on lower and middle-class people looking for relief and getting what amounts to a surprise predatory loan instead:

We haven’t had lots of people younger than 65 on Medicaid, because in most states simply earning less than the Federal Poverty Level did not qualify one for Medicaid.
And we haven’t had many people with lots of assets on Medicaid, because in most places you have to have less than around $2400 to your name before Medicaid will cover you. You can keep your house and your car, but Medicaid reserves the right to put liens on them and take them when you die.
But now we have the Affordable Care Act, and its expectation that everyone in the lower tier of income will end up in the Medicaid system. To accomplish this, they have dropped the asset test. So now we will have lots of people ages 55-64, who have assets but not a lot of income right now, for whatever reason, on Medicaid.
The kicker of it is, if you make the right amount to qualify for a subsidized health insurance plan, your costs are going to be shared and subsidized by the government. But if you go on Medicaid, you owe the entire amount that Medicaid spends on you from the day you turn 55…
How will this play out? No one knows, as far as I can tell. But it is easy to see how this could become a real problem. If someone is low income and goes on Medicaid, will Medicaid put a lien on their house? If they need to sell their house and move, will they then lose all their equity in paying off the lien? Will people get hit with bills and liens for many thousands of dollars, even if they were healthy and hardly ever went to the doctor?

The fact that this is being treated with seriousness at Kos is an indication of how large a liability it could be for this government program. Washington is scrambling to change the law. No doubt other states will start looking at their implementation of this part of Obamacare. But there will be people caught unaware that their houses effectively belong to the government because the government forced them into Medicaid coverage. You’re welcome!

Obama’s extreme use of executive discretion

By George F. Will, E-mail the writer

“To contend that the obligation imposed on the president to see the laws faithfully executed implies a power to forbid their execution is a novel construction of the Constitution, and is entirely inadmissible.”
— U.S. Supreme Court, 1838

George Will

Will writes a twice-a-week column on politics and domestic and foreign affairs.

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Congressional Republicans’ long-simmering dismay about Barack Obama’s offenses against the separation of powers became acute when events compelled him to agree with them that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) could not be implemented as written. But even before he decreed alterations of key ACA provisions — delaying enforcement of certain requirements for health insurance and enforcement of employers’ coverage obligations — he had effectively altered congressionally mandated policy by altering work requirements of the 1996 welfare reform; and compliance requirements of the No Child Left Behind education law; and some enforcement concerning marijuana possession; and the prosecution of drug crimes entailing mandatory minimum sentences; and the enforcement of immigration laws pertaining to some young people.
Republicans tend to regard Obama’s aggressive assertion of enforcement discretion as idiosyncratic — an anti-constitutional impatience arising from his vanity. This interpretation is encouraged by his many assertions that he “can’t wait” for our system of separated powers to ratify his policy preferences. Still, to understand not only the extravagance of Obama’s exercises of executive discretion but also how such discretion necessarily grows as government does, read Zachary S. Price’s “Enforcement Discretion and Executive Duty” forthcoming in the Vanderbilt Law Review. Price, a visiting professor at the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law, demonstrates that the Constitution’s “text, history, and normative underpinnings” do not justify the permissive reading Obama gives to its take care clause, which says the president “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”
It is, says Price, part of America’s “deeply rooted constitutional tradition” that “presidents, unlike English kings, lack authority to suspend statutes” or make them inapplicable to certain individuals or groups. Indeed, the take care clause may have been intended to codify the Framers’ repudiation of royal suspending prerogatives. Hence the absence of an anti-suspension provision in the Bill of Rights.
Congress’s excessive expansion of the number of federal crimes, however, has required the husbanding of scarce prosecutorial and judicial resources, which has made enforcement discretion central to the operation of today’s federal criminal justice system. But Obama’s uses of executive discretion pertain to the growth of the administrative state.
The danger, Price says, is that the inevitable non-enforcement of many federal criminal laws will establish “a new constitutional norm of unbounded executive discretion” beyond the criminal justice system. Price says the enforcement discretion exercised in the context of the resource-constrained criminal justice system provides “no support for presidential authority to decline enforcement with respect to any other given civil regulatory regime, such as the Affordable Care Act.”
The difference is between priority-setting and policy-setting, the latter being a congressional prerogative because of Congress’s primacy in lawmaking. Absent “a clear statutory basis, an executive waiver of statutory requirements” is “presumptively impermissible.”
It has, however, become “a nearly irresistible temptation” for presidents to infer permission from the courts’ abandonment of judicial review that limits Congress’s power to delegate essentially legislative powers to the executive branch. So, Price asks: “If President Obama may postpone enforcement of the ACA’s insurance requirements and employer mandate, could a subsequent president ignore the Affordable Care Act altogether?”
In 1998, the Supreme Court held that “there is no provision in the Constitution that authorizes the president to enact, to amend, or to repeal statutes.” But by claiming a power to revise laws through suspension of portions of them, Obama is exercising what Price calls a “second veto.” Actually, he is wielding what the Constitution forbids and no statute can grant — a line-item veto, which violates the presentment clause. The Constitution says “every bill” passed by Congress shall be “presented” to the president, who shall sign “it” or return “it” with his objections. The antecedent of the pronoun is the bill — all of it, not bits of it.
The sprawl of the modern administrative state requires vast delegations of powers, often indistinguishable from legislative powers, to an executive branch whose scale defies even adequate congressional oversight. Fortunately, in the Newtonian physics of our constitutional system, wherein rivalries among the three branches are supposed to trend toward equilibrium, actions often produce equal and opposite reactions. Obama’s aggressive assertions of executive discretion are provoking countervailing attention to constitutional proprieties. His departures from the norms proper to the take care clause may yet cause Congress to take better care of its prerogatives.

Read more from George F. Will’s archive or follow him on Facebook.

CIA nominee snubs Senate on legal memos

By JOSH GERSTEIN |

12/17/13 3:55 PM EST

President Barack Obama's nominee to be general counsel of the Central Intelligence Agency indicated at her confirmation hearing Tuesday that she opposes giving members of Congress access to Justice Department legal memoranda that govern CIA activities such as interrogation and drone strikes.
The nominee who rebuffed Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, Caroline Krass, has served as a top lawyer in the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel and at times as the acting director of that office.
Feinstein opened her questioning of Krass by asking her if she would commit to sharing OLC opinions with the Senate panel.
"This isn't just idle curiousity. It is really to understand the direction and rules under which certain programs operate," Feinstein said. "We have found that these opinions are actually indispensable to effective oversight." She said that an inspector general report found the CIA waterboarded 9/11 suspect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a manner inconsistent with the OLC opinion on waterboarding.
Krass responded initially by saying she was committed to making sure senators on the panel understood the legal framework CIA is working in, but she stopped short of committing to share the written opinions.
"I do believe the committee needs to fully udnerstand the legal basis for any activities, intelligence acitvities, in which the CIA is engaged, including covert action," Krass said.
Feinstein was unsatisfied and pressed Krass for a "yes or no" answer on access to the opinions. What the senator got sounded pretty much like a "no."
"The OLC opinions represent predecisional, confidential legal advice that’s been provided. Protecting confidentiality of that legal advice preserves space for their to be a full and frank discussion among clients, policymakers and their lawyers within the executive branch and really furthers the rule of law and allows for effective functioning of the executive branch," Krass said, repeating her offer to help the committee understand the administration's legal thinking and saying she has "an almost unique ability to do that."
"I think we do understand it," Feinstein replied. "I think it has been explained to us but every OLC opinion has been a fight to obtain and we have obtained very few of them, only those that relate to U.S. citizens."
Feinstein didn't immediate explain what she meant, but she may have been referring to a battle the committee had earlier this year to get opinions on targeting terrorism suspects for deadly force in drone attacks. The confirmation of CIA Director John Brennan was held up for a time until President Barack Obama agreed to share legal memos on the subject with Congressional committees.
Joining Feinstein, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said she was "troubled" by Krass's answer. Collins noted that the Office of Legal Counsel often releases unclassified opinions.
"They go through an extensive review process....We try to publish opinions when we can to promote transparency," Krass said, before saying there would be some merit to considering that for classified legal opinions. "I do think it's worth exploring whether there could be some kind of similar process with respect to classified OLC opinions."
Pressed by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), Krass said she does not believe Congress has a right to Office of Legal Counsel opinions.
"I do not think so, as a general matter," she said.
Last month, the Justice Department pressed a federal appeals court to preserve the Office of Legal Counsel's ability to keep legal opinions from the public.
Collins also raised a 2011 episode in which Obama rejected a legal interpretation advanced by Krass and the Pentagon's top lawyer at the time, Jeh Johnson, which would have curtailed U.S. operations in Libya. Obama sided with his White House counsel and State Department lawyers in deciding to continue the operation.
In an indirect way, Collins suggested Krass might have quit if she thought what the president proposed doing was illegal.
"What I don't like seeing is the administration shopping around until it gets a legal opinion with which it agrees and that seems to have happened in the case of Libya," Collins said.
UPDATE (Tuesday, 4:05 P.M.): This post has been updated with the exchange with Levin.
Read more about: Transparency, Justice Department, Senate Intelligence Committee, Office Of Legal Counsel, Central Intelligence Agency, Caroline Krass, Legal Opinions