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JON KARL: On Monday the president said that f you had one of these plans before the Affordable Care Act came into law, you really like that plan, what we have said is that you can keep it if it hasn't changed since the law was passed. I'm wondering, could you give me a citation of when the president ever said such a thing. JAY CARNEY: Sure, we went through this the other day, the president was referring to the law, and I can obviously point you to the law, and people who covered it and wrote it. KARL: But...

The Department of Energy withheld troubling cost and performance data on a major stimulus award from a federal watchdog before the company servicing the award went bankrupt, according to a report released on Tuesday. The report focuses on the department’s handling of a pair of federal awards worth about $126 million for ECOtality, a San Francisco-based green energy company that declared bankruptcy in September. DOE’s inspector general, which authored Tuesday’s report, released an audit in July that expressed concerns about the department’s management of ECOtality’s $100 million stimulus award for the installation of electric vehicle charging stations. The report revealed...

The White House is pressuring insurance companies not to speak publicly about Obama administration policies that could eliminate the existing health insurance plans of millions of Americans. The administration made “clarifications” to the 2010 Affordable Care Act after it was passed that have already wiped out hundreds of thousands of existing health plans. “Basically, if you speak out, if you’re quoted, you’re going to get a call from the White House, pressure to be quiet,” said CNN investigative reporter Drew Griffin on Anderson Cooper 360 Wednesday night. Insurance companies executives, Griffin said, ask heads of consulting firms not to criticize...

President Obama in his weekly address Saturday said he was proud to be a “salesman” for Obamacare despite criticism over the glitch-filled rollout of the law’s insurance exchanges.“Some people have poked fun at me this week for sounding like an insurance salesman. And that’s okay,” said Obama. “I’d still be out there championing this law even if the website were perfect.”Obama’s comments came after another week of withering criticism over the administration’s rollout of a new website designed to enroll consumers in the health care law’s public insurance exchanges.Obama said at an event Monday that he is frustrated with the...

Why does the White House need a private-sector "tech surge" to repair its wretched Obamacare website failures? Weren't all of the president's myriad IT czars and their underlings supposed to ensure that taxpayers got the most effective, innovative, cutting-edge and secure technology for their money? Now is the perfect time for an update on Obama's top government titans of information technology. As usual, "screw up, move up" is standard bureaucratic operating procedure. Let's start with the "federal chief information officer." In 2009, Obama named then 34-year-old "whiz kid" Vivek Kundra to the post overseeing $80 billion in government IT spending....

The ranking member on the House Energy and Commerce Committee downplayed the mounting concerns about the efficacy and integrity of the Healthcare.gov website because he was able to log on while fiddling around on his mobile device during today’s hearing. Contractors including CGI Federal appeared before the committee today to answer questions about the failure of the Obamacare exchange website, but no administration officials testified. “We are disappointed that the system is not in place and running the way we envisioned. But the contractors have given us assurances that they think everything will be every day better to the point...

Discussing the Obamacare disaster in the Rose Garden on Monday, President Obama led with a phrase to which we have become accustomed: “Nobody,” the president emoted, “is madder than me” about this mess. Along with “let me be clear” and “make no mistake,” this is a favorite construction. Obama, you see, is more concerned for and correct about everything than everybody else at all times. “Nobody shares the frustrations of the American people more than I do,” he told WABC earlier this month; “nobody is more frustrated” than he about the IRS scandal; “no person,” the president affirmed during the...

A proposal to end the government shutdown and avoid default orchestrated by Republican Leader Mitch McConnell and Democratic Leader Harry Reid includes a $2 billion earmark for a Kentucky project. Language in a draft of the McConnell-Reid deal (see page 13, section 123) provided to WFPL News shows a provision that increases funding for the massive Olmsted Dam Lock in Louisville from $775 million to nearly $2. 9 billion.

Above: Maria Marroquin: Illegal alien...and ObamaCare "Navigator"- by John HillStand With ArizonaAmericans were outraged after the Obama Administration denied access to the WWII memorial for veterans  - but allowed illegal aliens to hold a rally for amnesty on the "closed" National Mall. Americans were also angered last week after the Healthcare.gov ObamaCare website, which cost $634 million to build (half a billion dollars over budget), utterly failed to work. Now it has emerged that an illegal alien in New York is serving as an Obamacare navigator, according to the Center for Immigration Studies. According to the CIS report, Maria Marroquin — identified as an illegal...

Embattled IRS official Sarah Hall Ingram made 155 visits to the White House to meet with a top Obama White House official with whom she exchanged confidential taxpayer information over email. Of Ingram’s 165 White House meetings with White House staff, a staggering 155 of them were hosted by deputy assistant to the president for health policy Jeanne Lambrew, according to a June Watchdog.Org analysis of White House visitor records. Ingram exchanged confidential taxpayer information with Lambrew and White House health policy advisor Ellen Montz, according to 2012 emails obtained by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. (RELATED: White...

It is outrageous enough that the IRS and The White House were working in tandem so that the IRS shared confidential taxpayer information with the president and/or his aides. What makes the law-breaking doubly contemptible is that the information was shared in the context of a lawsuit against the despicable, unconstitutional ObamaCare abortifacient/contraceptive mandate: [Top ObamaCare official Sarah Hall] Ingram attempted to counsel the White House on a lawsuit from religious organizations opposing Obamacare’s contraception mandate. Email exchanges involving Ingram and White House officials — including White House health policy advisor Ellen Montz and deputy assistant to the president for...

Rep. Darrell Issa, Chair of the House Oversight Committee, recently informed the IRS that the committee's investigation has revealed that senior IRS officials were using their private emails to transmit confidential tax information. The investigation was sparked by the agency's alleged targeting of conservative organizations seeking tax-exempt status. "[W]e have uncovered a troubling pattern of IRS officials sending official documents to non-official email accounts as well as the use of non-official email accounts to conduct official business," the September 30th letter to acting IRS Commissioner Dan Werfil reads. "In some instances, IRS officials have sent taxpayer protected information to non-official...

This is a new low. Obama SPENT money to close natl parks but shut down the Amber Alert website. Look for yourself: http://1.usa.gov/190aIeP

October 5, 2013 Shutdown Theater: Lord Obama Moves Against Florida and the Fish of the Sea If the feds aren't "working," there will be no chartered fishing. Obama is wrecking the Florida fishing industry now. Thursday back in South Florida, a day after limits for the National Institutes of Health made headlines, it was the fear of food drying up and a prohibition on fishing in waters of Florida Bay that took center stage.Charter guides received a message from the National Park Service this week informing them that they are not permitted to take clients fishing in Florida Bay until...

A staggering 127 state prison inmates have been caught stealing unemployment pay while behind bars in the past three years, labor department officials revealed yesterday after days of Herald inquiries — then admitted some of the cases were never passed on to the Attorney General’s office for prosecution. The Herald began inquiring about prisoners pulling jobless pay after a front-page story Tuesday reported that Kevin Smith, 42, of Mattapan, a laid-off construction worker and convicted robber, scored $58,000 in unemployment dough while serving a two-to-three-year prison sentence at MCI-Cedar Junction.

A Canadian tech firm that has provided service to that country's single-payer health care system is behind the glitch-ridden United States national health care exchange site healthcare.gov. CGI Federal is a subsidiary of Montreal-based CGI Group. With offices in Fairfax, Va., the subsidiary has been a darling of the Obama administration, which since 2009 has bestowed it with $1.4 billion in federal contracts, according to USAspending.gov. The "CGI" in the parent company's name stands for "Conseillers en Gestion et Informatique" in French, which roughly translates to "Information Systems and Management Consultants." However, the firm offers another translation: "Consultants to Government...

On Thursday, the Pisgah Inn, which holds a concession on the Blue Ridge Parkway in Asheville, North Carolina, announced that it would defy the National Park Service’s order to close up, and would open doors for business on Friday. On Friday morning, NPS rangers showed up, lights swirling, to close down the business and turn away its customers, supposedly thanks to the government shutdown. Pisgah Inn receives no federal money, and according to owner Bruce O’Connell, who spoke exclusively to Breitbart News, “All we do is pay the government money. We don’t take anything from them.” It is located on...

Regulations issued by the Obama administration this week would require members of Congress to buy one of the top-tier insurance plans from the ObamaCare exchanges. The Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) of the House sent guidance to members of Congress this week, based on a directive from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), that says they must choose plans from the "gold" level of insurance coverage, not "bronze" or "silver" plans. "Platinum" is the only higher level of coverage under the exchanges. "For plan year 2014, Members of Congress and designated congressional staff will choose from 112 options in the Gold...

This week, Ben Carson said that shortly after he gave a much-publicized speech criticizing ObamaCare at the National Prayer Breakfast, he found himself audited by the Internal Revenue Service. It makes him suspicious. There was a day when we might have written off a claim like this. But given what we’ve learned about the IRS and its targeting of right-of-center organizations, the burden of proof has shifted. Though the scandal is no longer making headlines, the questions about what was going on with IRS official Lois Lerner and her pals have never been answered. Meanwhile, the storyline fed keeps changing.

International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde said Thursday that a failure to raise the U.S. debt ceiling could "very seriously damage" the global economy. "The government shutdown is bad enough, but failure to raise the debt ceiling would be far worse, and could very seriously damage not only the U.S. economy, but the entire global economy," Lagarde said in a speech at George Washington University ahead of the 2013 World Bank-IMF Annual Meetings. "So it is 'mission-critical' that this be resolved as soon as possible," she added. Referring to the anticipated tapering of Federal Reserve's quantitative easing program, Lagarde...