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Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion

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The repeated promises that you could keep your doctor and health plan never had a basis. These were false promises of historic magnitude, and the ramifications are that the "Dem Party is F****d" and Democrats "will own this problem forever." One of the benefits of Ted Cruz's defund effort is that most Republicans can say we tried our best, but the Democrats and the Democrats alone are the reason your life has been messed up. Our hands are clean. The loss of health plans was not just a coincidence, however, or a mere byproduct of health plan mandates requiring people to buy coverage they don't want or need (although that was a root cause). Rather the Obama administration passed regulations that guaranteed people would lose their health plans.  As I've always said, watch the regs. The mechanism was to eviscerate so-called grandfathering of older plans. If there was even the slightest change in the plan, even an change in a co-pay, the grandfathering was lost under the regulations. Since details of plans change all the time, and people buy new plans, the regulations guaranteed that millions, and likely tens of millions, of people would not be able to keep their plans, and as a result in many cases, lose their doctors from networks. NBC reports, Obama admin. knew millions could not keep their health insurance [original link dead, new url here, see Update No. 2]:
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.”

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The account for a link shortening service connected to the Obama support organization Organizing for Action (OfA) was reportedly compromised today.  Shortened links in President Obama's Facebook and Twitter postings were in turn briefly redirecting readers to a video with pro-Syrian regime propaganda.  The pro-Assad...

A UK man has been charged in connection with hacking into multiple US government computer systems, causing personal data of US military personnel to be compromised and millions of dollars in losses, according to US Attorney Paul Fishman in NJ. From Reuters:
A British man has been arrested in England and charged by the United States and Britain with infiltrating U.S. government computer systems, including those run by the military, to steal confidential data and disrupt operations, authorities said. U.S. prosecutors said the alleged hacker, Lauri Love, infiltrated thousands of computer systems including those of the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. space agency NASA and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Love, 28, and three unnamed co-conspirators, believed to live in Australia and Sweden, intended their activity to "disrupt the operations and infrastructure of the United States government," according to a U.S. indictment unsealed on Monday. "Such conduct endangers the security of our country and is an affront to those who serve," U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman in New Jersey, who announced the charges, said in a statement. Love was charged in Britain with violating the Computer Misuse Act, and charged in the United States with accessing a U.S. government computer without permission and conspiracy, authorities said. Fishman said the hacking took place from October 2012 until this month. He said it compromised personal data of U.S. military personnel, and information on defense budgets, contract bidding, and the demolition and disposal of military facilities, and caused millions of dollars of losses.
The indictment in New Jersey alleges that, once inside the systems, Love and the unnamed co-conspirators also installed “back doors” that would allow them to return at a later time to steal additional confidential information. Additional details from a press release from the US Attorney's office in NJ:
Love and his conspirators planned and executed the attacks in secure online chat forums known as Internet relay chats, or IRC. They communicated in these chats about identifying and locating computer networks vulnerable to cyber attacks and gaining access to and stealing massive amounts of data from those networks. They also discussed the object of the conspiracy, which was to hack into the computer networks of the government victims and steal large quantities of non-public data, including PII [personally identifiable information], to disrupt the operations and infrastructure of the United States government.

Note: You may reprint this cartoon provided you link back to this source.  To see more Legal Insurrection Branco cartoons, click here. Branco’s page is Cartoonist A.F.Branco...

In a Slate article entitled "Canada has death panels, and that's a good thing," Yale law student Adam Goldenberg applauds the idea.

Canada Death Panels Slate Title Only

The "experts and wise community members" (Goldenberg's words) who make up Ontario's Consent and Capacity Board have the final say and can overrule a family's decision about whether to continue life support for an ill member if there is a dispute between the family and the patient's doctors. Who are these people, and why are they given that power? The group is a government-appointed board heavy with lawyers (and not necessarily those whose practice involves relevant areas of law), psychiatrists, and an assortment of others from the community with a great range of professions, many of them seemingly unrelated to the task at hand. All the physicians on the board appear to be psychiatrists, which is most likely a reflection of the fact that the bulk of its business (80%) involves issues of involuntary commitment to mental institutions and/or decisions about mental capacity to consent to or refuse treatment, rather than its work as a "death panel." Goldenberg notes that at present in Canada and the US, many disputes over end of life care are decided by judges:
When these family members disagree with a patient’s doctors, and when the doctors are nonetheless determined to act, the dispute generally goes to court, where it can take months or even years to resolve. That is how it works in other Canadian and American jurisdictions, anyway.
But in the US such disputes have mostly been between family members about end-of-life decisions, a la the Schiavo case.

By now the statements are legion. You can keep your doctor and your insurance plan if you want to.  Guaranteed. It was more of a "lie" than George W. Bush's statements regarding Iraq having WMD stockpiles, which were in reliance on faulty intelligence that most Democrats and others in the world believed too. With Obama, there was no bi-partisan cheering section as there was with Iraq. There never was a basis for the categorical sales pitch. To the contrary, a loud chorus of voices insisted that there was no basis for Obama's statements and that the result would be what it is today: Millions and eventually possibly tens of millions of American will not get to keep their doctor and their insurance plan. Obama himself played the central role in the creation of BernieMadoff.healthcare.gov. Jonah Goldberg calls it possibly the greatest policy lie by any President ever.  It's hard to dispute that.

The launch of healthcare.gov, the Obamacare website, continues to be extremely unpopular due to glitches and long wait times. According to Pew Research, only three-in-ten Americans responded favorably to its launch. The glitches are even turning-off many liberals. Some top Democrats insist on making excuses and down-playing the failures of the website as just "glitches."  Here are 5 of the website glitchers:

1. Pres. Obama

During the week following the failed launch of the Obamacare website, Obama defended the policy and went after Republican critics in his weekly address. But even liberals are not buying the president's hyper-positive rhetoric. On Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show," Stewart compares clips of Obama speaking at a press conference to the character of Gill, a desperate and unsuccessful salesman from "The Simpsons". The clips, which are from 5:02- 5:25, reveal Obama enthusiastically proclaiming things like, "the health insurance that is available to people is working just fine," "The product is good," and "I want people to be able to get this great product; and that product is working, it's really good!" (language warning)

Update 11-8-2013: 60 Minutes backs off Benghazi witness story. ------------------------- 60 Minutes had an absolutely devastating report on the Obama administration's failure to protect Ambassador Chris Stevens and other Americans in Benghazi. I'll post the video when available (update - available and added), but the heart of the report is that there were clear and unequivocal warnings which were ignored, and the Obama administration lied about these warnings after the attack. Hillary and Obama blamed a video and stood by the caskets perpetuating that lie. And remember how almost all of the media obsessed with Mitt Romney's statement over Benghazi, and colluded to ask Romney gotcha questions while downplaying and obfuscating what really happened. 60 Minutes said its investigation took almost a year. (Transcript here) https://twitter.com/60Minutes/status/394603707167686656 https://twitter.com/60Minutes/status/394603520760221696 https://twitter.com/60Minutes/status/394604224753184768

While looking for something else, I stumbled up this interview by Prof. Glenn Reynolds and the Insta-Wife of Andrew Breitbart from February 2010. It may be the best interview of Andrew I've ever seen. And it's as relevant, if not more so, now as it was back then. There's...

This upcoming week is going to be an interesting one, as more hearings are scheduled on the Hill to address the troubled rollout of the Obamacare website. From the StarTribune:
Republicans said Sunday they intend to press Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on the Obama administration's troubled launch of healthcare.gov, the online portal to buy insurance, and concerns about the privacy of information that applicants submit under the new system. The Obama administration will face intense pressure next week to be more forthcoming about how many people have actually succeeded in enrolling for coverage in the new insurance markets. Medicare chief Marilyn Tavenner is to testify during a House hearing on Tuesday, followed Wednesday by Sebelius before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The officials will also be grilled on how such crippling technical problems could have gone undetected prior to the website's Oct. 1 launch. "The incompetence in building this website is staggering," said Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., the second ranking Republican on the panel and an opponent of the law.
Democratic Senator Jeanee Shaheen of New Hampshire, a supporter of the Affordable Care Act, told Face the Nation on Sunday that “The rollout has been a disaster,” and proposed that the enrollment period be extended beyond the March 31st deadline. (h/t Washington Free Beacon) Indeed, other Senate Democrats have joined Shaheen in support of such a proposal. Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia has also joined with Republicans in calling for a one-year delay of the individual mandate.

Recently, after the first round of nuclear talks with Iran had concluded one of the American negotiators said: "... I have never had such intense, detailed, straightforward, candid conversations with the Iranian delegation before." The word that bothered me most in that declaration was "candid." How did Iranian foreign minister start kick of the negotiations? He started it with a widely reported PowerPoint presentation titled "An End to the Unnecessary Crisis and a Beginning for Fresh Horizons." There's a word that sticks out there too, "unnecessary."

I have been following the disturbing news from Egypt closely; while it was hoped that a new president and a ban on the Muslim Brotherhood might stem more violence against its Coptic Christians, it looks like that is not to be:
The wedding party stood outside the church, eagerly awaiting the ceremonious arrival of the bride. Instead, drive-by shooters killed four, including two children and the groom's mother, and injured 18. Beyond its poignancy, the attack in Cairo's industrial neighborhood of Warraq was significant for being one of the first to target Egypt's Christians specifically, versus the now-common attacks on their church buildings. "Since the revolution, this is the first instance Coptic people were targeted randomly in a church, with weapons," said Mina Magdy, general coordinator for the Maspero Youth Union, a mostly Coptic revolutionary group formed in response to church burnings in 2011 after the fall of President Hosni Mubarak.
Interestingly, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul spoke about the issue of Muslim violence against Christians at a Value Voters summit earlier this month:
“Christians are being attacked around the world, but you won’t hear much about it on the evening news because the answer’s not convenient,” Paul continued. “It doesn’t fit the narrative we have been told about radical Islam. The president tries to gloss over who’s attacking and killing Christians. The media describes the killings as sectarian. But the truth is, a worldwide war on Christians is being waged by a fanatical element of Islam....”

David Frum at The Daily Beast, and Alex Pareene at Salon.com, each write about Elizabeth Warren and Ted Cruz, and 2016. Frum sees a Warren run ending in defeat at the hands of the Clinton machine, How Ted Cruz Can Win in 2016: Democrats liked Hillary personally. But...

Meghan McCain says her Arizona senator dad is “depressed” and “frustrated” with the tea party faction of the Republican Party, which she called “the hyper-conservative wing.” The comments were part of Meghan's promo for her new show, which no one will watch, Raising McCain. As a Tea Party activist, I am all for making both McCains even more frustrated. One of the most important developments in the new conservative movement has been encouraging regular Americans to participate directly in politics. In California, that has meant many have gotten involved in local Republican groups and have become versed in the ways of state party politics and its Byzantine rules. Recently, the Tea Party California Caucus  formed in response to the state Republican Party's continued lack of enthusiasm for formulating and implementing conservative policy. On Canto Talk, I recently had a chance to interview its founder Randall Jordan, as well as California Tea Party coordinator Dawn Wildman.  The caucus recently participated in the California Republican convention in Anaheim; Jordan says they met with "100 % more success" than they were anticipating and now the GOP establishment "can't ignore us and knows we are not going away."

From Henry, taken in Ojai, CA: I hope this one is a bit more clear. Upper left sticker says, "Vote Obama" Sticker below plate says, "The Bush Legacy: No Child Left A Dime." I should have jumped out and offered to scrape off the Bush sticker for $20.  LOL  ...

Dick Durbin's Facebook comment that a senior House Republican told Obama "I cannot even stand to look at you" was exposed as a lie. The lie did not originate with Durbin, he merely passed on what Harry Reid told the Senate Democratic caucus based on information provided to Reid by The White House. That White House lie, now admitted but chalked up to a "miscommunication," inspired Chris Matthews and guests David Corn and Cynthia Tucker, to lash out at Republicans for demonizing the President:

Hardball -  A Pattern Of Disrespect Screen Shot

A main focus was the disrespect shown by Republicans by repeatedly calling Obama a liar, which the panel agreed was because of hatred of Obama for the "other" and not one of us, and in the case of Tucker, coming right out and calling it racist:

California Governor Jerry Brown's had a mixed reaction to several pieces of gun control legislation that recently hit his desk:
California Gov. Jerry Brown split the difference Friday on the pile of gun-control bills sitting on his desk, opting to sign five but veto seven, including a bill that would have banned the sale of many popular hunting rifles. “The state of California already has some of the strictest gun laws in the country, including bans on military-style assault rifles and high-capacity ammunition magazines,” said Mr. Brown in his veto message. “While the author’s intent is to strengthen these restrictions, this bill goes much farther by banning any semi-automatic rifle with a detachable magazine.”
Yet, Brown still managed to sign bills that prohibit the use of lead ammunition for hunting, ban kits that convert ammunition magazines to hold more than 10 rounds, make it a crime to leave a loaded gun in an area where it may be accessed by a minor without permission, and a bill that prohibits gun ownership by people who make serious threats to psychoanalysts. Dawn Wildman, President of San Diego's SoCal Tax Revolt Coalition, noted that without the help if the National Rifle Association working with Californians, the results could have been much more restrictive. She cites a list of items that were defeated before hitting Brown's desk, including:
Assembly Bill 174: This bill would have banned the possession of any firearm, magazine, or ammunition that was previously “grandfathered in” by previous legislation. Assembly Bill 108: This bill would have placed criminal liability on gun owners for failing to lock their firearms away every time they left the house, regardless of whether anyone would be present in the home.
In response to the legislation that did garner Brown's signature, a California Assemblyman is using Colorado's recent recall elections as a model for sending a message to elected advocates of excessive gun restrictions.