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Since taking office in 2009, it has been tough sledding for the economy. Congress and the administration have increased the federal debt held by the public from $7.5 trillion to $11.2 trillion in 2012. To clarify, in terms of percent of gross domestic product-a measure of the nation's total output-the federal debt has grown from 54 percent of GDP in 2009 to 72 percent of GDP in 2012, according to the Congressional Budget Office. But sector by sector, the administration appears bent on imposing the regulations that thwart entrepreneurial activity and economic growth. ObamaCare, the jewel of Obama presidency, is...

HONOLULU — He won’t use it, and he didn’t actually sign up for it himself, but President Barack Obama has enrolled for health coverage through the new insurance exchanges. Announcing his enrollment Monday, the White House called it a symbolic show of Obama’s support for the fledgling exchanges where millions of Americans must buy insurance or face a penalty. Ironically, it also served as a reminder of just how complex and sometimes daunting the process can be. Obama, like so many other Americans, couldn’t use the website. “The complicated nature of the president’s case required an in-person sign-up,” the White...

(Reuters) - President Barack Obama's healthcare law could have a "meltdown" and make it difficult for his Democratic Party to keep control of the U.S. Senate next year if ongoing problems with the program are not resolved, a Democratic senator said on Sunday. Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who has urged delaying a penalty for people who do not enroll for health insurance in 2014 under the law, told CNN that a transitional year was needed for the complex healthcare program, commonly known as Obamacare, to work. "If it's so much more expensive than what we anticipated and if...

Gibbs: 'This Is the Worst Year of the Presidency' Daniel Halper December 22, 2013 9:33 AM Robert Gibbs, President Obama's former press secretary, declared 2013 the worst year (so far!) of the Obama presidency: "This is the test, Robert, of big progressive government solving a big societal problem," said NBC host David Gregory. "That's what he took on. That is the big project of his presidency." "No doubt about it," Gibbs responded on Meet the Press. "I would say this is the worst year of the presidency. It does beat out 2011. But -- well, and especially given sort of...

Okay, I admit that Morning Joe is probably not exactly the target audience for the White House’s latest attempt to hijack a holiday for its flailing ObamaCare system, but MSNBC is certainly the target network. Clearly, this strategy isn’t selling even with the more sympathetic members of the Morning Joe panel. Giggles abound as Mika Brzezinski described the onesie-wearing figure in the ad a “hipster-ish model,” while the rest of the panel seemed amusingly appalled (via Jammie Wearing Fool): Described as a “hipster-ish model” by co-host Mika Brzezinski, the appearance of the bespectacled, sideways-glancing, cocoa-drinking, onesie-wearing manchild drew guffaws from...

Everyone is doing thoughtful year-end pieces on President Obama. Writers and reporters agree he’s had his worst year ever. I infer from most of their essays an unstated but broadly held sense of foreboding: There’s no particular reason to believe next year will be better, and in fact signs and indications point to continued trouble. I would add that in recent weeks I have begun to worry about the basic competency of the administration, its ability to perform the most fundamental duties of executive management. One reason I worry is that I frequently speak with people who interact with the...

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Some people who have managed to complete the burdensome and glitch-filled process of signing up for Obamacare are learning they are not really enrolled at all. "Obama administration officials acknowledged today that some of the roughly 126,000 Americans who completed the torturous online enrollment process in October and November might not be officially signed up with their selected issuer, even if the website has told them they are."

Second-term presidents in the past 30 years have had some pretty embarrassing news conferences, full of frank admissions of failure, submissive spasms of shame and groveling, grieving apologies. Bill Clinton had to admit that he actually did have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky; George W. Bush finally thought of something he might have done wrong; his dad had to explain all those new taxes after his unequivocal pledge; and even Ronald Reagan ate crow over the Iran-Contra affair. But there has never, ever, been a more pitiful presser than the one conducted last week by President Obama. In a...

CBS and the Wall Street Journal report that roughly 50,000 have signed up using the federal exchange which covers enrollment in 36 states. That's in addition to the 49,100 which Reuters reports have signed up in 12 states with their own individual exchange websites. The official numbers for the federal site will be released sometime this week by the Department of Health and Human Services. If the new estimates are accurate, the numbers reported by CBS, the WSJ and Reuters demonstrate that the administration is far behind expected enrollment numbers.

It’s been a rough fifth year in office for President Obama, with overwrought sequestration scare tactics, Scandalpalooza, and the Syrian debacle all chipping away at his leadership street cred, among other things — but this disaster of an ObamaCare rollout is really hammering the heightened disapproval home with what’s starting to look like a majority of Americans. During past job-performance dips, O’s job approval rating has been reliably bolstered by his personal favorability ratings and Americans’ sense of trust in him — but the health care law is helping to erode those usual go-to’s, and quickly. Via the WSJ:

Mika Brzezinski channeled the frustration of many liberals this morning when she gave what has to be the best reaction yet to New York Magazine’s supercut of President Obama telling Americans that if they like their current health care plan they can keep it. Joe Scarborough set up the clip, in which the president says repeatedly over the course of four years that under the Affordable Care Act people who already have health insurance and want to keep their plans will be able to. As we have learned over the last few weeks, insurance companies have been terminating plans that...

It’s been a disastrous couple of weeks for President Barack Obama. His signature legislation, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, is a slow-motion train wreck. His poll numbers have tanked. Now, things have gotten so bad for Obama that former president Jimmy Carter has called President Obama incompetent in the family-friendly pages of Parade magazine. “He’s done the best he could under the circumstances,” Carter said of Obama in an interviewed published on Thursday. “His major accomplishment was Obamacare, and the implementation of it now is questionable at best.” Carter presided over what was, until the current recession, the...

October 28, 2013 Democrat on Obamacare: ‘We Will Own This Problem Forever.’ Jim Geraghty Ron Fournier, of National Journal, formerly of the Associated Press: “Dem Party is F****d.” That was the subject line of an email sent to me Sunday by a senior Democratic consultant with strong ties to the White House and Capitol Hill. The body of the email contained a link to this Los Angeles Times story about Obamacare “sticker shock” . . . The Democratic consultant said none of this is news to him, but he wonders why Obama wasn’t honest with Americans. He predicted surprise and...

Consumers want to know how much more they are going to pay for insurance under Obamacare in 2014 than what the pre-Obamacare market offers them today. The Heritage Foundation has carefully looked at this question, and the results are dismaying. The average family of four will see a premium increase in the exchanges of 10 to 30 percent. For young Americans, the premium hikes are much worse, in the range of 50 to 100 percent or more for 27-year-olds, including 71 percent in Nebraska and 170 percent in Georgia. And these premiums are for plans with, in most cases, very...

Amid mounting criticism, the White House said Wednesday that it plans to soften the deadline for when Americans are required to purchase health insurance. The date by when Americans would be penalized for not having signed up for health insurance could be “slid” back by as much as six weeks, administration officials told NBC News. But it was not immediately clear Wednesday whether the adjustment to a cornerstone of the Affordable Care Act would need to be approved by Congress or could be done by the Department of Health and Human Services administratively. As the law stands now, individuals are...

Chuck Todd, with NBC, did what few reporters seem to do in the White House Press Corp when he injected a moment of honest journalism into the Obama-groupie press corps. Asking Jay Carney a tough question is like playing a frame of “the Charleston” for Fred Astaire: Carney laces up his tap dancing shoes for a series of evasions, accusations, and distractions. NBC’s Chuck Todd asked a simple question: Five days before the launch, the president said it’s a website where you can compare and purchase affordable health care plans, the same way you shop for a plane ticket on...

Now that the president has lost the “Morning Joe” crowd, ObamaCare may be in even deeper political trouble than we thought. Mark Halperin, the “Game Change” coauthor and a regular on Joe’s show, called the rollout “unacceptable” and added that “the secrecy is unacceptable,” accusing the administration of withholding information about how many people have signed up. His fellow panelist, liberal commentator Mike Barnicle, ratcheted up from there: “They’re lying about it now,” he said. “They’re not depriving us of information, they are outright lying.” On “CBS This Morning,” the network’s political director, John Dickerson, calls the rollout “a total...

At the top of his radio program today, Sean Hannity called in to an Obamacare call center. Hannity was able to get through to an operator after only several moments of waiting. He spoke to the operator for nearly 10 minutes about Obamacare, what her thoughts of it are and what kind of response she has received so far. The operator was very friendly and had no problem answering all of Hannity's questions. HANNITY: They're really telling you to tell us to check back in on the website in off-hours. Does that mean that I should go on at like...

The much-anticipated Windows 8.1 update was finally released on Thursday. Since then, however, early reports of bricked devices and lost data from some users indicate that the release may have been premature. In response, Microsoft took its Windows 8.1 update offline until further notice on Saturday. The Redmond, Wash. company posted the following a message to its website: Microsoft is investigating a situation affecting a limited number of users updating their Windows RT device to Windows RT 8.1. As a result, we have temporarily removed the Windows RT 8.1 update from the Windows Store. We are working to resolve the...