Category Archives: Obamacare

House Suing Obama? YES, Really

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Earlier this year, Speaker of the House, John Boehner called the White House, got Barack Obama on the phone and told him he was suing him. Obama’s reply was, ‘You’re suing me?’.

Now the explanation of how this lawsuit is coming to pass.

More than once, the Solicitor General in the Obama administration has represented cases before the Supreme Court. The most contested case(s) have been those relating to the Affordable Care Act and this is the case that John Boehner is using to sue Barack Obama.

A few facts:

Obama has signed several executive orders that either amend, annex, suspend, alter or edit the Affordable Care Act. When the Solicitor General argues a case on behalf of the government at the behest of Barack Obama, the president and his pen cannot have it both ways with both sides of the law.

The House has passed several laws to stop the most damaging and destructive law in the history of America, the Affordable Care Act. But all the bills regarding the ACA passed by the House have been stuffed and ignored on Harry Reid’s desk, the Senate Majority Leader.

So, Boehner led the House to approve a bill that would represent the House only in a law suit against Barack Obama. Now we need to know what is next. Is this lawsuit moving forward? YES   Boehner has hired a lawyer to move forward on the lawsuit and if you have paid attention, you know his own politics are quite secondary to defending the Constitution, law and the process. His name is Turley.

Turley has even gone to far as to say Barack Obama’s action on amnesty is also a threat to the Constitutional powers of the president.

We have an honest broker and a real defender of the rule of law and a protector of the Constitution.

TURLEY AGREES TO SERVE AS LEAD COUNSEL FOR HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES IN CONSTITUTIONAL CHALLENGE

As many on this blog are aware, I have previously testified, written, and litigated in opposition to the rise of executive power and the countervailing decline in congressional power in our tripartite system. I have also spent years encouraging Congress, under both Democratic and Republican presidents, to more actively defend its authority, including seeking judicial review in separation of powers conflicts. For that reason, it may come as little surprise this morning that I have agreed to represent the United States House of Representatives in its challenge of unilateral, unconstitutional actions taken by the Obama Administration with respect to implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). It is an honor to represent the institution in this historic lawsuit and to work with the talented staff of the House General Counsel’s Office. As in the past, this posting is meant to be transparent about my representation as well as my need to be circumspect about my comments in the future on related stories.

On July 30, 2014, the House of Representatives adopted, by a vote of 225-201, H. Res. 676, which provided that

the Speaker is authorized to initiate or intervene in one or more civil actions on behalf of the House of Representatives in a Federal court of competent jurisdiction to seek any appropriate relief regarding the failure of the President, the head of any department or agency, or any other officer or employee of the executive branch, to act in a manner consistent with that official’s duties under the Constitution and laws of the United States with respect to implementation of any provision of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, title I or subtitle B of title II of the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010, including any amendment made by such provision, or any other related provision of law, including a failure to implement any such provision.

I have previously testified that I believe that judicial review is needed to rebalance the powers of the branches in our system after years of erosion of legislative authority. Clearly, some take the view of a fiat accompli in this fundamental change in our constitutional system. This resignation over the dominance of the Executive Branch is the subject of much of my recent academic writings, including two forthcoming works. For that reason, to quote the movie Jerry Maguire, the House “had me at hello” in seeking a ruling to reinforce the line of authority between the branches.

As many on this blog know, I support national health care and voted for President Obama in his first presidential campaign. However, as I have often stressed before Congress, in the Madisonian system it is as important how you do something as what you do. And, the Executive is barred from usurping the Legislative Branch’s Article I powers, no matter how politically attractive or expedient it is to do so. Unilateral, unchecked Executive action is precisely the danger that the Framers sought to avoid in our constitutional system. This case represents a long-overdue effort by Congress to resolve fundamental Separation of Powers issues. In that sense, it has more to do with constitutional law than health care law. Without judicial review of unconstitutional actions by the Executive, the trend toward a dominant presidential model of government will continue in this country in direct conflict with the original design and guarantees of our Constitution. Our constitutional system as a whole (as well as our political system) would benefit greatly by courts reinforcing the lines of separation between the respective branches.

After I testified earlier on this lawsuit, I was asked by some House Members and reporters if I would represent the House and I stated that I could not. That position had nothing to do with the merits of such a lawsuit. At that time, in addition to my other litigation obligations, I had a national security case going to trial and another trial case in Utah. Recently, we prevailed in both of those cases. Subsequently, the House General Counsel’s Office contacted me about potentially representing House. With the two recent successes, I was able to take on the representation.

It is a great honor to represent the House of Representatives. We are prepared to litigate this matter as far as necessary. The question presented by this lawsuit is whether we will live in a system of shared and equal powers, as required by our Constitution, or whether we will continue to see the rise of a dominant Executive with sweeping unilateral powers. That is a question worthy of review and resolution in our federal courts.

Jonathan Turley

 

 

CommonCore = CommonCrap

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Much has been written about the CommonCore educational system being pushed on state education systems nationally. While more than 60% of states push back after really learning what the syllabus is about, it has been proven what the system is about but few are listening.

CommonCore was created by leaders of global corporations to indoctrinate students into a very narrow channel of choices when it came to what they could study for the sake only of the future of business enterprise.

But now we have even more companies vying for a slice of the money via no bid contracts as a result of studies, marketing and database analysis of student performance.

CommonCore is yet another platform for fraud, collusion and abuse where most sadly students and parents are the pawns. C’mon parents get involved for the sake of your children, for the sake of their education and for the sake of taxpayers and for the sake of a viable and sound future of America.

Fight Is On for Common Core Contracts

Testing Companies Jockey for a Growing Market, Protest States’ Bidding Process

By

Caroline Porter

Caroline Porter
The Wall Street Journal
CANCEL

29 COMMENTS

As states race to implement the Common Core academic standards, companies are fighting for a slice of the accompanying testing market, expected to be worth billions of dollars in coming years.

That jockeying has brought allegations of bid-rigging in one large pricing agreement involving 11 states—the latest hiccup as the math and reading standards are rolled out—while in roughly three dozen others, education companies are battling for contracts state by state.

Mississippi’s education board in September approved an emergency $8 million contract to Pearson PLC for tests aligned with Common Core, sidestepping the state’s contract-review board, which had found the transaction illegal because it failed to meet state rules regarding a single-source bid.

When Maryland officials were considering a roughly $60 million proposal to develop computerized testing for Common Core that month, state Comptroller Peter Franchot also objected that Pearson was the only bidder. “How are we ever going to know if taxpayers are getting a good deal if there is no competition?” the elected Democrat asked, before being outvoted by a state board in approving the contract.

ENLARGE

Mississippi and Maryland are two of the states that banded together in 2010, intending to look for a testing-service provider together. The coalition of 11 states plus the District of Columbia hoped joining forces would result in a better product at a lower price, but observers elsewhere shared some of Mr. Franchot’s concerns.

The bidding process, which both states borrowed from a similar New Mexico contract, is now the subject of a lawsuit in that state by a Pearson competitor.

For decades, states essentially set their own academic standards, wrote their own curricula and designed their own tests. In a bid partly to help the U.S. education system keep up with overseas rivals, state leaders began working on shared benchmarks.

With financial and policy incentives from the Obama administration, 45 states and D.C. initially adopted Common Core. But the standards have faced pushback from some parents and conservatives who say they represent federal overreach. Two states have pulled out and are writing their own standards.

Still, most states are implementing Common Core and accompanying testing this year. The sheer size of that effort and this year’s deadline heighten the stakes and exacerbate the difficulty of hiring test suppliers.

“Winning the policy battle was not even half the battle,” said Michael McShane, a research fellow in education policy at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, who is skeptical about Common Core. “It was more like 10%, and 90% of the battle is implementation.”

The $2.46 billion-a-year U.S. testing market is seeing more competition beyond the three traditional powers of Pearson, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Co. and McGraw-Hill Education CTB, according to Simba Information, a market-research firm. While McGraw-Hill recently got a $72 million contract for assessment services with several states, meanwhile, midsize vendors such as AIR Assessment and Educational Testing Service are winning big states like Florida and California.

Amplify, the education subsidiary of News Corp, which owns The Wall Street Journal, also provides assessment products.

Some experts say legacy companies are best able to meet states’ demands and offer familiar relationships during this period of flux. At the same time, the move to new standards coincided with a switch to digital and online learning that has forced vendors to rethink their strategies.

Maryland’s contract with Pearson was built off the one in New Mexico, which took the lead in writing the bidding documents for a four-year, roughly $26 million contract that applied to that state. But other states in the coalition were meant to copy the contract and competition, meaning its full value could balloon to $1 billion.

In the spring, New Mexico field-tested new state exams. The state relied on Pearson for a piece of software that delivers the test. AIR Assessment, a rival company to Pearson, protested over the bidding process last year and filed a lawsuit in the Santa Fe First Judicial District this past spring alleging that only Pearson could fulfill the bid requirements.

This summer, Judge Sarah M. Singleton ruled that state administrators had to review AIR Assessment’s concerns. New Mexico officials subsequently found the concerns invalid.

AIR Assessment is appealing that finding and asking that New Mexico reopen the bidding process with new specifications for the next school year—potentially reopening the contracts in all 11 states and D.C. Judge Singleton could rule as soon as this month, according to Jon Cohen, president of AIR Assessment, a division of the American Institutes for Research, a not-for-profit organization.

“We just want a fair bid,” Mr. Cohen said, whose company recently won a $220 million contract to provide Common Core-related testing products over six years to Florida. A spokesman for New Mexico’s education department called AIR’s allegations “frivolous.” Pearson declined to comment on the suit.

“You’re seeing a whole ecosystem transform,” said Shilpi Niyogi, a Pearson official. “There’s new players and new innovation, and we’re constantly looking at the relationship between innovation and scale.”

 

 

Gruber-gate, the Gift that Keeps Giving

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Jonathon Gruber should not be the villain. He is an expert on how to finesse government and he made money doing it. The villains are ONLY the Democrat lawmakers and powerbrokers as it is exclusively the Democrats that forced the deal-making and cunning objective to pass the law known as the Affordable Care Act.

Several government agencies paid Gruber for his consulting, including the Department of Justice paying $1.7 million for his expert witness testimony. Then a handful of states paid Gruber for his services.

It is remarkable that it took so long for Gruber’s presentations and truths to bubble to the surface. The Democrats punked America and the costs into the hundreds of millions continue to be tabulated. Gruber WAS NOT the only one to profit in this historical and epic conspiracy.

 

Grubergate shines spotlight on Obamacare profiteers

Remember when Nancy Pelosi declared that Obamacare was a jobs bill? “It’s about jobs,” Pelosi said in 2011, during a news conference to mark the first anniversary of passage of the Affordable Care Act. “Does it create jobs? Health insurance reform creates 4 million jobs.”

Like many other promises about Obamacare, that hasn’t worked out. But there is no doubt that Obamacare created a lot of work for at least one American — MIT professor Jonathan Gruber. Gruber’s frank admissions that he and others deceived the public about Obamacare have drawn a lot of attention in recent days. But the money that Gruber made from Obamacare raises yet another issue about his involvement in the project. Throughout 2009 and 2010, he energetically advocated a bill from which he stood to profit. And when it became law, the money rolled in.

In 2009, as Obamacare was moving its way through Senate committees, Gruber, who had achieved a measure of fame as the architect of Romneycare in Massachusetts, was a paid consultant to the Department of Health and Human Services. In March of that year, he received a contract for $95,000 to work on the project, and in June he received a second contract to continue that work; it was worth $297,600. Together, they comprise the “nearly $400,000” that critics have said Gruber received to work on Obamacare.

But after the bill became law, Gruber made a good deal more from it. The Affordable Care Act provided for states to set up exchanges to sell taxpayer-subsidized insurance coverage. For those states that chose to do so, exchanges would have to be built from the ground up. Studies would have to be done. Contracts would be let.

In 2010, the state of Wisconsin, under Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle, paid Gruber $400,000 to do a study of the impact of healthcare reform. By the time Gruber finished his report, Republican Scott Walker had been elected governor and wasn’t much interested in using Gruber’s study. “State officials did not invite Gruber to Wisconsin for the release of his study nor did they set up a conference call with him for reporters or even provide them with his contact information,” the Madison, Wis., Capital Times reported. “That is unusual for an important report like this, which cost $400,000.”

In the two years between March 2011 and March 2013, the state of Minnesota paid Gruber $329,000 to study how to make its exchange conform with Affordable Care Act requirements.

In 2012, the state of West Virginia signed a contract with Gruber to study its healthcare system. “The state will pay MIT professor Jonathan Gruber $121,500 to understand the states health insurance landscape and revisit key assumptions about state health care policy,” the Charleston Daily Mail reported in September of that year. “Gruber is a policy rock star of sorts. He’s advised more than a half dozen states on health care reform.”

In November 2011, the state of Vermont hired a consulting firm that used Gruber to study the state exchange. Gruber was paid at least $91,875 for his work.

In 2012, the state of Michigan included Gruber in a multi-firm, $481,050 contract to study its exchange system. It’s not clear how much of that went to Gruber himself.

The bottom line is that Obamacare has been very, very good to Jonathan Gruber. Now that he is in the news for other reasons, the public is also learning how much he profited from the bill he did so much to promote.

Of course others profited from Obamacare, too, and still are. Republican Mike Leavitt, a former governor of Utah and Mitt Romney adviser, has a consulting firm that has made millions off the exchanges. But Gruber’s recent admissions might put him in a special category. He is, by his own account, a man who intentionally deceived the public in order to pass a measure from which he stood to profit handsomely.

Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber has billed federal and state governments at least $5.9 million for advice, as more videos surface showing him undercutting the landmark law

Four U.S. states and the federal government have padded Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber’s wallet to the tune of $5.9 million since 2000, including millions connected to his work on the Affordable Care Act.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist has been pilloried for collecting $392,600 from the Obama administration’s Health and Human Services Department while the law was being written, but that was just the tip of the iceberg.

Gruber’s consulting contracts give states and the feds access to a proprietary formula that can determine how changes in a health care system’s structure will affect costs.

The ‘Gruber Microsimulation Model’ is what he sold to the White House. It helped Obama’s team anticipate what the influential Congressional Budget Office (CBO) would say about various features of the final plan – and whether their costs would officially be considered ‘taxes.’

You MUST read more here and videos of Gruber-gate are included.

 

 

 

Refugee Status, Free of Charge

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From the White House website: 

Creating an Immigration System for the 21st Century

Our nation’s immigration system is broken. Fixing it is an economic and national security imperative. That’s why President Obama is working to pass a common sense, comprehensive set of reforms that ensures everyone plays by the same rules.

Yeah sure thing White House. And then there is an associated video promoted by the White House:

Barack Obama has touted in recent weeks his assertion that he will proceed within all his presidential power executive action in spite of Congress. Sure there is a Senate bill that the House never took up and there were many reasons most of which it did not secure the border in advance to stop the illegal insurgency.

So the Obama 10 point plan that he threatens to sign before the end of the year includes:

The plan reportedly contains 10 initiatives that include everything from boosting border security to improving pay for immigration officers. The most controversial pertain to the millions who could get a deportation reprieve under what is known as “deferred action.”

Deferred action will include illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children, as well as parents of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents. The latter could allow upwards of 4.5 million illegal immigrant adults with U.S.-born children to lawfully remain.

Senators who oppose deferred action say those who benefit from it will receive work authorization in the United States, Social Security numbers and government-issued IDs.

Sure to cause consternation among anti-“amnesty” lawmakers is a plan to expand deferred action for young people. Obama created such a program for illegal immigrants in June of 2012. For those who came to the U.S. as children, entered before June 2007 and were under 31 as of June 2012. The change would expand that to cover anyone who entered before they were 16, and change the cut-off from June 2007 to January 1, 2010, making nearly 300,000 illegal immigrants eligible.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers also would see a pay raise in order to “increase morale” within the ICE workforce.

DHS also is planning to “promote” the new naturalization process by giving a 50 percent discount on the first 10,000 applicants who come forward, with the exception of those who have income levels above 200 percent of the poverty level.

Tech jobs though a State Department immigrant visa program would offer another half-million immigrants a path to citizenship, including their spouses as well.

Obama has vowed to act in the absence of congressional action and has claimed that congressional action could still supersede his executive steps.

Just in case you need to understand what is in process already, this is a need to know and it is chilling as it is going on presently in the background.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. government will launch a program in December to grant refugee status to some people under the age of 21 who live in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador and whose parents legally reside in the United States.

U.S. officials say parents can ask authorities free of charge for refugee status for their children in the Central American countries, which are plagued by poverty and vicious gang violence. The program does not apply to minors who have arrived in the U.S. illegally.

Vice President Joe Biden announced the program Friday at the Inter-American Development Bank, where the presidents of the three Central American countries will present a plan to stem child migration from their countries.

U.S. officials said that children deemed refugees will be able to work immediately upon arrival in the U.S., opt for permanent residency the following year and for naturalization five years later. They did not say how long the process of receiving refugee status will take.

Central American children who meet the requirements will be part of a quota of 4,000 people from Latin America receiving refugee status each fiscal year, officials said. The U.S. quota of Latin America refugees currently consists of Cubans and Colombians.

Applicants who don’t meet the requirements will be evaluated to see if they can be admitted conditionally under a non-permanent migratory status that allows them to work temporarily in the U.S.

Biden’s announcement comes as President Barack Obama is poised to unveil a series of executive actions on immigration that will shield possibly around 5 million immigrants living in the country illegally from deportation, according to advocates in touch with the White House.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., criticized the plan, which he described as “government-sanctioned border surge” if Obama acts as expected.

“The policy announced today could open Pandora’s box, allowing potentially even more people to come to the United States. This is bad policy and undermines the integrity of our immigration system,” Goodlatte said in a news release.

The program aims to be a legal and safe alternative to the long and dangerous journey some Central American children take north to reach the U.S. and to reunite with their parents in the U.S. Tens of thousands of unaccompanied child and teenage migrants showed up at the U.S. border earlier this year.

On Wednesday, Salvadoran Foreign Minister Hugo Martinez said the plan includes measures to stimulate economic growth, improve public safety, improve government agencies and provide better education and training opportunities.

Heritage Foundation has their own 10 point measure and it does make huge sense.

Consider this, how much money does it really cost taxpayers, the economic landscape, the government, the education system, the healthcare and the culture to accommodate and financially support illegals? No study has been ordered for such a financial review, but whatever it may be, it is far larger than going in fact to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador and building a infrastructure in those countries to keep people there with great success. This is yet another platform where USAID and the State Department foreign affairs has failed.

In closing, President Reagan worked with Congress and Congress authorized amnesty, yet Barack Obama is NOT using Congress.

 

Death of Speech ‘Truthy Project’

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Alright, it has been proven that the NSA is mining our data, that includes friends, purchases, internet activity and more. Now sadly the government is providing earmarked money for data mining on thoughts and categories of thought and opinion.

A friend that I have had as a guest on radio show, C. Steven Tucker who is a subject matter expert on healthcare and most especially Obamacare had his Twitter account deleted under the ‘Truthy Project”. There were several more accounts that met with the same thought demise. What happened to Freedom of Speech, whether it is true and proven in words with evidence or even partially true or perhaps even false due to misunderstandings or poor assumptions? Demerits and deletions abound in all cases.

What has happened to America and how did we get here?

House Committee Demands Answers on Truthy Project  

Taxpayer-funded initiative collected 600,000 political tweets in its ‘database,’ bragged about having conservative Twitter accounts suspended
BY:

The House Science, Space, and Technology Committee sent a letter to the head of the National Science Foundation (NSF) on Monday, demanding answers about the origins of the nearly $1 million taxpayer-funded project to track “misinformation” on Twitter.

The Truthy project, being conducted by researchers at Indiana University, is under investigation for targeting political commentary on Twitter. The project monitors “suspicious memes,” “false and misleading ideas,” and “hate speech,” with a goal of one day being able to automatically detect false rumors on the social media platform.

The web service has been used to track tweets using hashtags such as #tcot (Top Conservatives on Twitter), and was successful in getting accounts associated with conservatives suspended, according to a 2012 book co-authored by the project’s lead researcher, Filippo Menczer, a professor of Informatics and Computer Science at Indiana University.

Menczer has also said that Truthy monitored tweets using #p2 (Progressive 2.0), but did not discuss any examples of getting liberal accounts suspended in his book.

“The Committee and taxpayers deserve to know how NSF decided to award a large grant for a project that proposed to develop standards for online political speech and to apply those standards through development of a website that targeted conservative political comments,” wrote Chairman Lamar Smith (R., Texas) in a letter to NSF Director France Cordova.

“While some have argued that Truthy could be used to better understand things like disaster communication or to assist law enforcement, instead it appears Truthy focused on examples of ‘false and misleading ideas, hate speech, and subversive propaganda’ communicated by conservative groups,” he said.

Smith is asking for the original application for the study, and “every internal and external e-mail, letter, memorandum, record, note, text message or other document” sent or received by the NSF about Truthy since the study began in 2011.

Smith’s letter references a publication co-written by Menczer which explains how the project was used to track tweets before the 2010-midterm elections.

In “Abuse of Social Media and Political Manipulation,” a chapter for the book The Death of the Internet, released in 2012, Menczer writes how his team successfully had Twitter accounts suspended.

“With the exploding popularity of online social networks and microblogging platforms, social media have become the turf on which battles of opinion are fought,” the chapter begins. “This section discusses a particularly insidious type of abuse of social media, aimed at manipulation of political discourse online.”

Truthy tracked up to 8 million tweets per day in the run up to the 2010 midterms, and stored 600,000 political tweets in their database, contrary to Menczer’s claim that Truthy does not “have a database.” This section of the Truthy website was recently deleted, following an editorial by FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai warning the project could be misused.

“The streams provided our system with up to 8 million tweets per day during the course of the study,” the paper said. “These were scanned in real time by our system. In total, our analysis considered over 305 million tweets collected from September 14 until October 27, 2010.”

“Of these, 1.2 million contained one or more of our political keywords; detection of interesting memes further reduced this set to 600,000 tweets actually entered in our database for analysis,” the paper added.

“We don’t have a database,” Menczer said when attacking the Washington Free Beacon’s initial story on Truthy.

The database was used to identify “several Truthy memes, resulting in many of the accounts involved being suspended by Twitter,” the chapter said.

Truthy was able to suspend the account of C. Steven Tucker, a health insurance broker, who often used the hashtag “American Patriots,” or #ampat, from his two Twitter accounts.

“This activity generated traffic around this hashtag and gave the impression that more people were tweeting about it,” the chapter said. “These two accounts had generated a total of over 41,000 tweets.”

Another account, @PeaceKaren_25, was suspended after tweeting in support of Speaker of the House John Boehner (R., Ohio) over 10,000 times in four months. “A separate colluding account @HopeMarie_25 retweeted all the tweets generated by @PeaceKaren_25 supporting the same candidates and boosting the same websites,” the paper said.

Smith said it is troubling that the project was able to delete and suspend Twitter accounts.

“Whether by amazing coincidence or on purpose, it appears that several social media accounts highlighted by Truthy were subsequently terminated by the owners of the social media platforms, effectively muzzling the political free speech of the targeted individuals and groups,” he said. “In presenting and publishing the findings of their work, the Truthy research team proudly described how the web service targeted conservative social media messages.  Their presentations featured examples of what they found to be online political speech ‘abuses’ by supporters of these groups.”

A spokesman for Indiana University said that they are “aware of the letter but have no comment.”

Pathetic condition in America without so much as a whimper from informed patriots.