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Obama shut down Judicial Watch whistleblower organization

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Is Barack Obama focused on protecting the American people?
Is Barack Obama focused on protecting the American people?

This story is from the Washington Times.

Excerpt:

Political operatives within the Obama administration wrongly punished conservative legal group Judicial Watch, stripping it of “media” status and trying to force it to pay higher fees for its open records requests, the General Services Administration inspector general said in a letter released Thursday.

The GSA botched several high-profile open records requests, delaying them for months while political appointees got involved, Inspector General Carol F. Ochoa said. The findings were released while the administration was facing charges of slow-walking open records requests for Hillary Clinton’s emails, as well as other requests.

In the case of Judicial Watch, the order to strip it of media status came from political operatives with long ties to Democratic causes — and even from the White House.

 The inspector general said the decision came at the behest of Gregory Mecher, a former Democratic campaign fundraiser who at the time was liaison to the White House. He is married to Jen Psaki, a longtime spokeswoman with the Obama administration and its election campaigns.

[…] Judicial Watch ended up suing over the request, the agency finally agreed to waive all fees and even ended up paying Judicial Watch $750 as part of the settlement.

Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, questioned the agency’s decision to fight a losing case that ended up costing it money.

Let’s recall what Obama confidently promised his naive supporters during election campaigns:

Just remember the confidence sound of the words – the confidence is what caused so many people to vote for him. Just his handsome face and confident words.

But the reality after he won the election was quite different, of course.

And this is not an isolated case – it’s a pattern of deliberate concealment of government abuse of power:

Last year, the administration spent $31.3 million to fight FOIA cases — more than twice the $15.4 million the administration spent in 2008, the final year under President George W. Bush.

So the intention was never to be more transparent. The words were put out as bait to catch voters who didn’t want to dig into the man’s record before choosing him. And it worked! And it worked again in 2012, even after the truth was known. This is the problem with choosing men based on confident words, rather than based on demonstrated ability. The word “transparency” sounds so good, but there was no passion for transparency anywhere demonstrated in his actions prior to campaigning. Some people just don’t have the self-control to override their feelings and intuitions. We can’t be like that – we have to insist on seeing demonstrated ability before voting.

Unfortunately, the voters who believed the confident words will not see this story about Judicial Watch on CNN or MSNBC or the Comedy Channel, and so they will probably never learn from their mistakes. Or maybe they just don’t care to vote based on evidence, when they can vote based on feelings, intuitions and first impressions. Vote based on self-delusion, in short. Or maybe they just vote out of a greedy desire to be transferred more of their neighbor’s earned money. It certainly isn’t because of a desire for more transparency in government.

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Police charge gay rights activist for faking hate crime against himself

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Young people seem to like gay marriage more than they like individual liberties
It’s fun! And if you don’t celebrate it, we’ll sue you for defamation!

This story is from CBS News Los Angeles.

Excerpt:

The  LA County District Attorney’s office has filed a felony vandalism charge against an online personality they said filed a fake police report and told authorities he had been beaten and attacked by three men in West Hollywood last June.

Calum McSwiggan, who is known for his online posts and videos, has been charged with vandalism for suggesting the men also damaged a Lexus which they said he damaged.

The DA said original charges were dismissed Thursday to make way for a newly filed felony case.

On Monday, the 26-year-old McSwiggan, pleaded not guilty to one felony count of vandalism over $400 damage and one misdemeanor count of [filing a] false report to a peace officer.

[…]According to the felony complaint, McSwiggan damaged the car mirror and bumper of a vehicle on June 27. The defendant then is alleged to have falsely reported to police that he had been beaten by the vehicle’s driver and two other men, the DA said.

McSwiggan had several broken teeth in the “attack” and said three men gay bashed him outside the popular bar, The Abbey.  Officials said his wounds — he also needed stitches in his head — were self-inflicted. They said he used a pay phone inside the sheriff’s station to cause the damage to his face.

The defendant — a YouTube star and gay rights activist — faces a possible maximum sentence of three years and six months in county jail if convicted of the charges.

I’m sure that the lawyers at the Human Rights Campaign will be able to get him out of these charges, lest their noble cause be drawn into disrepute.

Let’s recall a few more recently committed fake hate crimes.

This one is from the radically leftist New York Times, of all places.

Excerpt:

The case of the chocolate cake slur, it seems, was simply a hoax.

An openly gay Texas pastor who had accused Whole Foods of defacing his cake with an anti-gay slur dropped his lawsuit against the grocery chain on Monday, issuing an apology that said he was wrong to “perpetuate this story.”

“The company did nothing wrong,” the pastor, Jordan Brown, said in a statement. “I was wrong to pursue this matter and use the media to perpetuate this story.”

[…]Mr. Brown’s apology represented a remarkable about-face from his remarks last month, delivered at a news conference alongside his lawyer, during which he choked back tears as he told the story.

[…]But a day after Mr. Brown’s legal salvo, Whole Foods denounced the pastor as a fraud, vowing to press a countersuit that sought $100,000. At the same time, the grocery chain released surveillance footage of Mr. Brown’s purchase that it said proved that the cake had not been tampered with.

I doubt that stories like these will be the basis of a plot on Glee or Will and Grace or the other TV shows that seek to change public opinion on gay rights issues. Or maybe Law and Order will do a show on it, but make it a real hate crime where some patriotic Christian homeschooling family actually does commit the hate crime.

I blogged before about several other fake hate crimes in this post, this post and this post. It happens a lot. It might be a good idea to assume that hate crimes committed against the secular left are false unless they are proven true. There is a lot of mental illness in the secular left crowd. A lot of attention-seeking. A lot of wallowing in victimhood and bullying others for sympathy.

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Two Blue Cross plans out of Obamacare, Obama wants taxpayer bailout for insurers

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Investors Business Daily reports on the latest big health insurer to drop out of Obamacare.:

Two Blue Cross plans made the stunning announcement in the past week that they were dropping out of ObamaCare markets. If even the Blues — the backbone of the individual insurance market for decades — can’t make it, ObamaCare is truly on the road to ruin.

[…]Despite getting approval on an eye-popping rate hike of nearly 60% for 2017, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee announced that it was quitting three of the largest ObamaCare markets in the state, which will leave 100,000 enrollees to scramble for an alternative coverage next year.

The state’s Blue Cross had lost half a billion dollars in ObamaCare’s first three years, and the company’s spokesman said “there are too many uncertainties to continue participating on a statewide level as we have before.”

That decision came shortly after Blue Cross Blue Shield of Nebraska’s announcement that it was pulling out of ObamaCare entirely in that state — stranding some 20,000 ObamaCare enrollees — after losing $140 million. “We can’t take another hit,” said CEO Steve Martin last Friday. The decision came after the company had won approval for a 42% premium increase.

These dropouts are on top of the June announcement that Minnesota’s Blue Cross was abandoning the states individual market entirely in the wake of $500 million in losses, which means more than 100,000 people in the state will be looking for a new insurer for next year.

That same month, Arizona’s Blue Cross announced that it was dropping out of two counties — Maricopa and Pinal. It later decided to get back into Pinal County after Aetna fled the state, which would have left Pinal with zero insurers in the ObamaCare exchange.

In North Carolina, Blue Cross was contemplating an exit until other insurers dropped out, leaving it the sole carrier in much of the state.

[…]Even before the latest pullbacks, 974 counties in the U.S. — which represent 31% of all counties — were down to one ObamaCare insurer after Aetna, UnitedHealth, Humana and others pulled out of various states, and after most of the ObamaCare-created insurance co-ops failed, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Another 31% of counties will be stuck with just two insurers.

Fewer choices means less competition means higher prices for consumers.

Bloomberg News explains:

Minnesota will let the health insurers in its Obamacare market raise rates by at least 50 percent next year, after the individual market there came to the brink of collapse, the state’s commerce commissioner said Friday.

The increases range from 50 percent to 67 percent, Commissioner Mike Rothman’s office said in a statement. Rothman, who regulates the state’s insurers, is an appointee under Governor Mark Dayton, a Democrat. The rate hike follows increases for this year of 14 percent to 49 percent.

[…]On average, rates in the state will rise by about 60 percent, said Shane Delaney, a spokesman for MNSure, the state’s marketplace for Obamacare plans.

Wow, this is a lot different than what Obama promised in his campaign speeches, isn’t it?

A lot of young people believed Obama’s promises in 2008 and again in 2012:

And you can keep your doctor! And you can keep your health plan! Because Obama! Everything will be fine, don’t ask for evidence that he has ever achieved anything in his life. He’s handsome! He has a nice voice! He’s confident!

Should we pick a candidate based on our emotional response to his confidence?
Should we pick a candidate based on our emotional response to his confident words?

Yes, OK. But what about this problem of health insurance companies taking huge losses and pulling out of Obamacare? I don’t think that the program works as well, if all the health insurance providers stop selling health insurance.

Well, don’t worry! Because Obama has a plan to give all his insurance company friends a big bailout from his private stash of taxpayer dollars.

The Weekly Standard explains:

Obamacare’s “risk corridor” program was designed to redistribute money in the Obamacare exchanges from health insurers who made money to those who lost money. Profitable insurers would pay in; unprofitable insurers would get paid out. With so many insurers losing money under Obamacare, however, the program was positioned to become a bailout, as there was no guarantee in Obamacare’s text that the money paid out wouldn’t exceed the money paid in.

[…][I]n late 2014, congressional Republican leadership took action. Congress put an end to Obamacare’s insurer bailout, as it added language to the CRomnibus spending package stipulating that the risk corridors must be budget-neutral: No more could be paid out to insurers than was paid in by insurers. Taxpayers would no longer be on the hook for bailing out insurance companies. In December of 2014, Obama signed that legislation into law.

Congress had acted just in time. Whereas the Obama administration and the CBO both claimed the risk-corridor program would pay for itself, insurers paid $362 million into the program in 2014 and—if not for Congress’s having stopped the bailout—would have been paid out a cool $2.87 billion. For every $1 that was paid in, about $8 would have been paid out. Instead, insurers received only $362 million, and Congress saved taxpayers $2.5 billion.

Obama now seems determined to change that. He is reportedly planning another end-run around Congress—and the Constitution—by bailout out insurers with taxpayer money that Congress hasn’t appropriated. The Post reports, “Justice Department officials have privately told several health plans suing over the unpaid money that they are eager to negotiate a broad settlement, which could end up offering payments to about 175 health plans.” […]In other words, the administration is “eager” to settle with insurers and provide them the bailout that Congress, with Obama’s signature, expressly denied.

Oh, that’s fine then. Obama is going to give the big insurance companies the bailout they deserve. He is such a generous man!

Obama already doubled the national debt from $10 trillion to $20 trillion in 8 years. We have another $1 trillion in student loan debt, thanks to his nationalization of the student loan administration. And another housing bubble of unknown value on the horizon. When will voters understand that they need to vote for competent people?