Back to Basics

Obamacare’s Patient-Dumping, Privacy-Meddling Scheme
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2012

The stench of Chicago cronyism over the White House just got fouler. Inhale this:

A shadowy $10 billion Obamacare agency with zero oversight just awarded first lady Michelle Obama’s pet patient-dumping scheme at the University of Chicago Medical Center a $5.9 million taxpayer-funded grant. It will enable Mrs. Obama’s cronies to build a government-sponsored electronic medical record-sharing system.

The Chicago program, known as the Urban Health Initiative, is run by one of President Obama’s closest golfing buddies, scandal magnet Eric Whitaker, who has been entangled with Illinois corruption celebrities Rod Blagojevich and Tony Rezko over the past decade.

Fun fact: Whitaker recently was named by author Edward Klein as the man who purportedly offered hate-mongering Rev. Jeremiah Wright $150,000 in hush money during the 2008 campaign. (More here.)

The nearly $6 million grant was announced last week by the “Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation” at the Department of Health and Human Services. White House watchdog journalist Keith Koffler notes that “some 3,000 applications were received for a share on the $1 billion in 3-year grants available. Only 26 programs were included in the first batch of awards doled out.” The administration grants circumvent any and all congressional deliberation as part of Team Obama’s election-year “We Can’t Wait” initiatives.

The grant recipients will help fulfill the mandated Obamacare vision of a centralized patient-record database with unprecedented federal oversight. The provision is being challenged in court by the Goldwater Institute for forcing Americans to share “with millions of strangers who are not physicians confidential private and personal medical history information they do not wish to share.”

HHS denies any favoritism, citing a “competitive, objective” process. But as I first reported in March, a Congressional Research Service analysis concluded that Obamacare’s Innovation Center is subject to no administrative or judicial review. The Innovation Center director is, in effect, a super-czar without any checks or balances on his grant-making decisions, methods or results.

I warned two months ago that the Obamacare Innovation Center and its multibillion-dollar slush fund smacked of “another pipeline for political payoffs and Chicago-style boodle that will result in less patient autonomy, fewer health-care choices, more government intrusion and lower-quality care.”

The University of Chicago Medical Center grant walks and talks like just such a political payoff. I have reported extensively on how Mrs. Obama helped engineer the Urban Health Initiative’s plan to offload low-income patients with non-urgent health needs. With consulting help from Obama senior adviser David Axelrod’s Chicago-based PR firm and the blessing of fellow Chicago pal Valerie Jarrett (who chaired the hospital’s board of trustees), Mrs. Obama sold the scheme to outsource low-income care to other facilities as a way to “dramatically improve health care for thousands of South Side residents.”

The program guaranteed “free” shuttle rides to and from the outside clinics. In truth, it was old-fashioned cost-cutting and favor-trading repackaged by a nonprofit, tax-exempt hospital as minority aid. Clearing out the poor freed up room for insured (i.e., more lucrative) patients.

Put on your shocked faces: The first Catholic college has announced it is dropping its student health insurance plan in the wake of the White House refusal to repeal the religious liberty-sabotaging Obamacare birth control/abortion mandate.

Life News has the scoop:

Franciscan University appears to be the first casualty of the new Obama HHS mandate that requires Catholic colleges, groups and businesses to pay for drugs that may cause abortions and birth control for their employees.

Although President Barack Obama declared “If you like your health care coverage you can keep it,” when it came to passing Obamacare, a Catholic college in Ohio has determined it will no longer offer a student health insurance plan.

“The Obama Administration has mandated that all health insurance plans must cover “women’s health services” including contraception, sterilization, and abortion-causing medications as part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA),” the university says in a new post on its website. “Up to this time, Franciscan University has specifically excluded these services and products from its student health insurance policy, and we will not participate in a plan that requires us to violate the consistent teachings of the Catholic Church on the sacredness of human life.”

More from the school’s website:

Due to these changes in regulation by the federal government, beginning with the 2012-13 school year, the University 1) will no longer require that all full-time undergraduate students carry health insurance, 2) will no longer offer a student health insurance plan, and 3) will no longer bill those not covered under a parent/guardian plan or personal plan for student health insurance. The current student health insurance plan will expire on August 15, 2012.

Destroying private health insurance was always the goal of health care “reform“.

Always.

Fraud? What voter fraud? While progressives continue to deny, deny, deny, investigative journalist James O’Keefe and Project Veritas continues to expose, expose, expose.

The latest target: North Carolina.

Project Veritas pulled up jury refusal forms and voter history documents to show that non-citizens and dead people there are registered to vote.

Watch as a man posing as a non-citizen with a passport is stubbornly encouraged by NC officials — who refuse to examine his ID — to vote. Listen to a conversation with election officials who joke about running over Supreme Court justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Listen to the election judge who only wants to uphold certain parts of the state constitution. And witness a University of North Carolina official chuckling as a “student” brags about voting in two different states to infiltrate GOP primaries.

As I wrote last week in my column on voter fraud:

Over the past five months, investigative journalist James O’Keefe and his Project Veritas team have exposed systemic lapses at precincts in New Hampshire, Minnesota, Vermont and Washington, D.C. The ballots of famous public figures have been forked over to complete strangers; disenfranchisement of legitimate voters is routine. While Minnesota and New Hampshire legislators have passed new voter integrity/identification laws, O’Keefe now has been targeted for investigation and possible prosecution for blowing the whistle. And Attorney General Eric Holder is striking his usual see-no-evil, shoot-the-messenger, play-the-race-card pose.

The solution isn’t to sit back and bemoan a fantastical global conspiracy. The solution is to get off the couch, support election integrity activists like O’Keefe, and turn out in force on Election Day to eject Obama’s voter fraud coddlers. Like the old saying goes: If it ain’t close, they can’t cheat.

Donate to Project Veritas here and support the voter integrity investigations that the MSM won’t do.

How the Gay-Marriage Mob Slimed Manny Pacquiao
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2012

Boxing champion Manny Pacquiao is guilty — of being true to his Catholic faith. The gay-marriage mob is guilty — of the very ugly bigotry it claims to abhor. And left-wing media outlets are guilty — of stoking false narratives that shamelessly demonize religion in the name of compassion.

The attempted crucifixion of Pacquiao this week was fueled by an online army of cultural shakedown artists, generously funded by billionaire George Soros and other so-called progressive philanthropists.

On Tuesday, a freelance writer for the Examiner.com published an interview with Pacquiao conducted at his Los Angeles residence. Journalist Granville Ampong asked the pugilist his views on gay marriage in light of President Obama’s flip-flop-flip on the issue. “God’s words first,” Pacquiao said. “Obey God’s law first before considering the laws of man.”

After suggesting that Obama should consult the Bible as his “manual for life,” Pacquiao added in earnest: “It should not be of the same sex so as to adulterate the altar of matrimony, like in the days of Sodom and Gomorrah of Old.”

The interview then included a scriptural reference to Leviticus 20:13, which states: “If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.”

Publications including USA Today, LA Weekly and Village Voice all ran outraged pieces on Pacquiao’s “homophobic” calls for violence.

But it was the interviewer, not Pacquiao, who made the citation. Ampong demanded apologies on behalf of Pacquiao. Feckless professional journalists blamed Ampong for their own biased reading and then grudgingly “clarified” the truth in buried updates.

“I didn’t say that, that’s a lie,” Pacquiao told anyone who would listen on his website. “I didn’t know that quote from Leviticus because I haven’t read the Book of Leviticus yet.” Too late. The politically correct bloodhounds were in full hunting mode.

The Courage Campaign, a community-organizing outfit that claims to have 750,000 members and is funded by the radical Tides Foundation, immediately called on Pacquiao-sponsor Nike to drop him over his “hate speech against gays.” The group took to Twitter to demand that the athletic shoe company “Drop Manny,” the “homophobic boxer.” The call was amplified by Think Progress, an online character assassination squad backed by George Soros.

L.A. bigwig developer Rick Caruso, who has mayoral aspirations, squeezed himself into the Catholic-bashing clown car. He announced on Twitter that Pacquiao would be banned from his trendy shopping complex, The Grove. The mall, Caruso wrote, “is a gathering place for all Angelenos, not a place for intolerance.”

Except for intolerance of completely mainstream views on gay marriage held by millions of practicing people of faith.

While L.A. media outlets reported that The Grove has retracted its ban, Caruso had failed as of late Thursday evening to apologize on Twitter or acknowledge the false smears against Pacquiao that prompted the Soros goon squad’s boycott demands. Caruso also refused to answer questions about his own rancid double standards:

Did he ban President Obama from his retail developments for publicly opposing gay marriage before he supported it?

Would Caruso be banning devout anti-gay Muslims from The Grove?

Turncoat former Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter is on the Tea Party-bashing book tour circuit. So, naturally he showed up on MSNBC this weekend to nurse his lingering electoral wounds and speak up for the nation’s endangered RINOS, squishes, and Beltway barnacles.

As I first noted on Twitter yesterday, Specter spoke — whined — to MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry as they bemoaned how voters are booting out entrenched moderate incumbents. Specter complained that “Cannibals are devouring senators. If you don’t follow orthodoxy, vote the party line right down the line, if you have a 93 percent conservative voting record like Bob Bennett in Utah — that is not conservative enough.” Specter then lamented (a la John Kerry) Indiana’s grass-roots victory of Richard Mourdock over three-decade-plus incumbent GOP Sen. Dick Lugar. Tellingly, Specter used Lugar’s defeat to plead to MSNBC’s audience (all three dozen of them or whatever) to keep endangered Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch in office.

“Orrin Hatch is in jeopardy in Utah,” Specter wheedled. “I hope that people in Utah — and I know you have a big listening audience, viewing audience there, Melissa — will read this book and come out and vote to make sure that Orrin Hatch is not cannibalized.”

Watch:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

As noted here on April 21, despite amassing a giant, $6 million campaign war chest and calling in every last chit with Republican friends and cronies, 77-year-old GOP Sen. Orrin Hatch faces upstart conservative entrepreneur and renowned state pension reformer Dan Liljenquist (with campaign coffers of about $200,000) in Utah’s June 26 primary.

Hatch is running scared and refusing to debate Liljenquist in any major venue. The Salt Lake Tribune called out the cowering Hatch this weekend:

Orrin Hatch is not the first entrenched politician to try to deny a challenger the spotlight and credibility that come with a chance to debate the incumbent. And he won’t be the last.

But the senior senator from Utah is being particularly cynical with his grudging agreement to a single joint appearance with his rival in the June 26 Republican primary — former state Sen. Dan Liljenquist. After weeks of claiming that pressing Senate business makes such a debate impossible, Hatch has deigned to a joint appearance with Liljenquist on KSL radio’s Doug Wright Show, sometime in late June.

Meaning no disrespect to the multitalented Mr. Wright, or to his popular radio broadcast, but this is not what the voters of Utah need and deserve. Even KSL, in cooperation with its corporate siblings at The Deseret News, had offered to host a prime-time radio and TV broadcast debate with the two candidates, with Deseret/KSL executives handling all the complicated details.

But Hatch refused.

A radio broadcast can allow for some extended discussion of complicated topics. And candidates and serious voters alike might prefer the focus to remain on those issues, rather than being shifted to such trivia as whether a candidate is looking at his watch (like losing candidate George H.W. Bush) or emitting a frustrated sigh (like losing candidate Al Gore).

But radio lacks the impact of the televised debates that voters have become accustomed to over the past 50 years.

Elizabeth Warren has this much credibility left…

Earlier this month, I told you about progressive heroine Elizabeth Warren’s shady claim to Native American heritage. The saga of Sacaja-whiner doesn’t end. Michael Patrick Leahy at Breitbart.com — who first reported Friday that Warren’s Cherokee claim is based on a family newsletter and not on a purported marriage license — follows up again:

On May 1, according to a Boston Herald article, the Warren Campaign offered two pieces of evidence they said supported Ms. Warren’s claim of Native American ancestry. The first, a statement by genealogist Chris Child of the New England Historic Genealogical Society has now been thoroughly debunked in an article that ran Friday here at Breitbart, and another article that same day at Legal Insurrection.

The second piece of evidence was equally suspect. The Warren Campaign offered reporters an undated article from the Muskogee Phoenix about the contributions of Elizabeth Warren’s first cousin, Mrs. James P. Rowsey, to the Five Civilized Tribes Museum in Muskogee, Oklahoma as proof of Ms. Warren’s Native American ancestry:

The campaign also hastily produced an undated newspaper clip last night from the Muskogee Sunday Phoenix detailing a “Mrs. James P. Rowsey” — who they said is Warren’s cousin — and her involvement with the Five Civilized Tribes Museum, which is dedicated to preserving Native American art.

“Mrs. James P. Rowsey was Elizabeth’s first cousin — shared the grandparents in question,” a campaign official said in the statement.

A little research confirmed that Mrs. James P. Rowsey – Janyne “Candy” Carnes Rowsey (1932-2002)—was indeed Ms. Warren’s first cousin. Both are grandchildren of Harry Gunn Reed and Bethanie Elvina Crawford. Further research showed that Mrs. Rowsey’s most well known contribution to the Five Civilized Tribes Museum involved editing and publishing a cookbook in 1984 — Pow Wow Chow: A Collection of Recipes from Families of the Five Civilized Tribes: Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek & Seminole.

Add half-baked oppression claims to the Warren family recipe book.

My column today follows up on yesterday’s House Natural Resources Committee release of internal Interior Department Inspector General e-mails detailing the continued White House obstruction and cover-up of Team Obama’s drilling moratorium data manufacturing. I’ve attached relevant e-mails below the column. Note especially the warning from the DOI IG senior agent to his bosses that the “chickens may be coming home to roost” and that he expects the issue to rear its head in a big way “when the R’s take over the House.” Make it happen.

As I write below, the 2012 election is not just about the jobs, jobs, jobs. It’s about the lies, lies, lies — and culture of corruption that permeates every corner of this destructive administration.

Related:

The high priests of eco-destruction
One measly deepwater drilling permit: Hoo-freaking-rah
Culture of contempt: Interior Department spanked yet again
The Interior Department’s culture of contempt
Obama jobs death toll: Coal, oil, gas workers on the chopping block
Obama jobs death toll: Killing the drilling industry
Omnibus double whammy: The Dems’ lame-duck land grabs
Another Obama stealth land grab: Salazar and the NLCS
Throw Carol Browner under the bus; Update: Senate GOP calls for probe
Confirmed: Obama job-killlers Salazar, Browner lied about drilling ban rationale
Another ass-kicking: Judge rejects Obama drilling ban again
Obama’s Beltway Chainsaw Massacre
The White House War on Jobs
Pushing back: Thousands of Obama’s drilling moratorium victims rally in La.
Why does Ken Salazar hate our economy? Update: Western Energy Alliance calls for reinstating oil leases
Ken Salazar needs another ass-kicking
Another ass-kicking: 5th Circuit rejects White House drilling ban appeal
Ken Salazar gets an ass-kicking. Over to you, Capitol Hill. 6/24 update: Judge refuses White House drilling ban stay request; judge gets death threat
Breaking: Judge rules against Obamatorium on drilling; link to decision added; Interior Secy Salazar roasted
***

White House lied, jobs died
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2012

While the White House and its media water-carriers try to distract the American public with gay-marriage talk and half-century-old tales of Mitt Romney’s prep school pranks, the inconvenient truth remains: President Obama is responsible for perpetrating jaw-dropping, job-killing scientific fraud. And his minions are still trying to cover it up.

New internal e-mails disclosed by the House Natural Resources Committee this week show that a supposedly exculpatory report on the administration’s doctored drilling moratorium analysis — issued by the Department of Interior’s Inspector General’s office — was itself incomplete, misleading and unsubstantiated. Even more damning, the documents reveal that the White House actively blocked investigators and refuses to comply with subpoenas.

Now, as one senior IG agent warned his bosses, “the chickens may be coming home to roost.”

A quick refresher: After the BP oil spill in 2010, the White House imposed a radical six-month moratorium on America’s entire deepwater drilling industry. The overbroad ban — inserted into a technical safety document in the middle of the night by Obama’s green extremists — cost an estimated 19,000 jobs and $1.1 billion in lost wages.

The anti-drilling administration based its draconian order on recommendations from an expert oil spill panel.

Read this:

House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Doc Hastings (WA-04) today sent a letter to Department of the Interior’s Acting Inspector General Mary Kendall expressing deep concern with the thoroughness of the Office of Inspector General’s (IG) investigation into whether an Obama Administration report that recommended a six-month drilling moratorium was intentionally edited to incorrectly state the views of peer reviewers, and with the IG’s explanation for refusing to comply with a Congressional subpoena for further information.

Chairman Hastings today also released documents the Committee has received to date from the Interior Department and the Office of Inspector General. This includes emails from the IG’s lead investigators that details how they were not able to obtain all DOI documents that may have been relevant to their investigation or interview White House staff involved in the editing of the report. Chairman Hastings has already requested additional emails from the IG’s office so that the Committee can continue to look into this matter. Click here to view documents.

“The IG report is being used by the Obama Administration and others as a defense that this matter has already been investigated and resolved. These emails contradict that claim and raise new questions on whether the IG’s investigation was as thorough and complete as it should have been,” said Chairman Hastings. “To date, the Interior Department has never had to disclose documents to the IG or to Congress. Despite the President’s pledge of transparency, this Administration has not answered questions by anyone on how this decision was made that forced thousands of Americans out of work and cost millions of dollars in lost economic activity.”

And stay tuned because I will have much more on this in my column tomorrow. I am not going to be distracted by the Washington Post anti-GOP School Safety Patrol.

Scytl: Voter Fraud Facts and Fiction
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2012

With six months until Election Day, conspiracy theories are percolating on the Internet like bubbling mud pots at Yellowstone: Left-wing billionaire George Soros is going to rig the election for Barack Obama. Foreigners will oversee the nation’s entire vote-counting system. The fix is in, and all is lost.

Before conservatives go all Michael Moore-moonbatty, let’s calm down and separate voter fraud facts from fiction. There’s no time to waste worrying about manufactured scares. And there are plenty of legitimate threats to electoral integrity without having to inflate or concoct them.

FACT: Scytl is a Spain-based business that specializes in “electoral security technology” and electronic voting applications. Its cryptographic research initially was funded by the Spanish government’s Ministry of Science and Technology and later was spun off as a private-sector e-voting venture.

FACT: In January 2012, Scytl acquired U.S.-based SOE Software. SOE writes “election management” programs that assist officials with everything from “Internet voting to election night reporting and online poll worker training.”

FICTION: According to alarmists, Scytl’s acquisition of SOE amounts to a complete takeover of America’s election system. No, not really. While SOE boasts of a presence “with 900 jurisdictions as customers in 26 states,” there is no single contract that the federal government has entered into, or could, with Scytl to count the 2012 presidential election votes. Much of the work Scytl/SOE analysts do is number-crunching and graphics software work after local and state officials have done the vote-counting.

Scytl does have a contract with the feds to use its technology to help overseas and military voters participate in elections. In 2009, the Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment Act mandated that U.S. jurisdictions allow uniformed and overseas citizens to receive and track their ballots electronically. Scytl’s online ballot program was used in 14 states during the 2010 midterms.

FACT: The security risks of e-voting are still a legitimate concern. University of California at Berkeley computer science professor David Wagner wrote a critical report for the Pentagon about the privacy and accuracy shortcomings of Scytl’s military voting program in 2004 — which prompted the feds to cancel the initial program, according to PBS.

In October 2010, the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics encouraged outside parties to try to find security holes in their online balloting infrastructure operated by Scytl. A group of University of Michigan students successfully hacked into the system, commandeered passwords, doctored ballots and programmed audio of the school’s fight song to play whenever an e-ballot was submitted.

Hackers from Iran and China also came close to breaking in. “After the hack,” according to AOLNews.com, “(D.C.) administrators decided to relaunch under a download-only format, allowing users to access ballots but forcing them to fax or mail them rather than cast a vote online.” The D.C. official who oversaw the system, Paul Stenbjorn, now works for Scytl.

FICTION: Chain e-mails about Scytl claim that George Soros owns, operates or controls Scytl. In reality, the company’s investors are Nauta Capital, Balderton Capital and Spinnaker SCR. Soros doesn’t “own” any of these international venture capital firms — and as far as my research shows, he has no involvement whatsoever with any of them. Moreover, Scytl’s board of directors doesn’t include anyone with Soros financial or management ties.

I was in Indianapolis over the weekend for the Tea Party/Freedomworks rally for Richard Mourdock — and the energy and excitement were palpable. Tonight’s the night to retire three-decade entrenched incumbent Dick Lugar. Twitter’s been buzzing all day with reports from grass-roots activists taking the fight to the GOP old guard — not just at the Senate level, but all the way down the ballot.

Repeating again what I said in February:

The GOP needs just four seats to take control of the Senate. With inspired and inspiring free-market candidates like Dan Liljenquist, Richard Mourdock and Ted Cruz, 2012 bodes well for the tea party footprint on Capitol Hill. Remember: Entrenched incumbency is the disease. Fresh blood is the cure.

I love how Mourdock took Lugar’s whine about outside special interests and knocked the charge on its backside:

“To the charge that there is a special interest group that has been supporting us from outside the state, that’s true and the special interest group is called conservatives,” Mourdock said. “That’s why they came together behind this campaign. They recognize that it’s time to put a more conservative voice in the U.S. Senate.”

In Wisconsin, Democrats are picking their recall primary challenger against GOP Gop. Scott Walker. Latest updates here.

Reminder of my call to arms in March:

President Obama, the AFL-CIO, SEIU, AFSCME and left-wing operatives know that Wisconsin is Ground Zero in their battle against limited-government activists. Their demagogic propaganda war against Wisconsin GOP Rep. Paul Ryan, who is leading entitlement reform and budget discipline efforts in Washington, is of a piece with the campaign to overturn the popular elections that put Walker, Kleefisch and the GOP majority in place. If they can chill fiscal responsibility and free market-based reforms in Wisconsin, they can chill it everywhere. Will movement conservatives let them?

Donate:

Gov. Scott Walker

Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch

Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald

Sen. Van Wanggaard

Sen. Terry Moulton