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New Jersey next Friday will suspend enrollment in an insurance program for people with preexisting medical conditions mandated by the new federal health care law, officials said. The state was directed to do so by the federal Department of Health and Human Services, which received limited funding from Congress to provide coverage in each of the 50 states. Without the suspension, the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan would be in danger of running out of money to cover those currently enrolled, according to a message posted on the program’s website. “Those who have been considering purchasing health coverage … need to...

ObamaCare will act as a neutron bomb on employment in the U.S. for two basic reasons. Longtime readers know I have repeatedly explained why healthcare, i.e. sickcare, will bankrupt the nation. Here are two of the dozens of entries I've written on sickcare: America's Hidden 8% VAT: Sickcare (May 10, 2012) Can Chronic Ill-Health Bring Down Great Nations? Yes It Can, Yes It Will (November 23, 2011) I have also explained why ObamaCare's "fixes" are simulacra reforms that don't even address the systemic costs arising from the cartel-fiefdom structure of sickcare: Why "Healthcare Reform" Is Not Reform, Part I (December...

Park rangers in the Bay Area and throughout California would be laid off, interpretive programs would be cut and Yosemite's bears might end up with a perpetual trash banquet if the federal government does not find a deficit-reduction plan, according to a National Park Service document leaked this week. The lack of a long-term financial plan would mean a $1.2 trillion across-the-board cut in federal spending and a 5 percent hit to the budgets of the 398 national parks, including Yosemite National Park, the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and Point Reyes National Seashore. The cuts would be necessary in...

[Summary: To dumb down the public schools, our elite educators often rely on sophistry.] Disingenuous. Paradox. Counterintuitive. Sophistry. Counterproductive. These five words always fascinated me. They suggest unexpected warps in a common-sense grasp of the world. Something is out of kilter, weird, defective, or whacko. American public education in the 20th century--which has been characterized as “deliberate dumbing down”--is impossible to discuss without constant recourse to these quirky words. They point to deception, but done with art and flair. Rod Sterling captured the resulting sense of disorientation: “You unlock this door...Beyond it is another dimension....You’re moving into a land of...

Children who were in the federal Head Start program do worse in math and have more problems with social interaction by the third grade than children who were not in the program, according to a large-scale study by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. … The Obama administration has recently warned that if the automatic spending adjustments in the sequester occur on March 1, 70,000 children will lose a place in Head Start. Further, in his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama called for universal pre-school for all children. …

Although Senate Democrats will take cues from the White House on how to proceed after the sequester kicks in, they are set this week to vote on a plan that replaces one year of the sequester, or $110 billion of cuts, with a 50-50 split of targeted cuts and new revenue. That includes eliminating direct payments to farmers — a provision that received bipartisan support in the Senate in 2012. Although Democrats feel confident about their bipartisan approach, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., already stripped the direct payment provision from legislation during the fiscal-cliff debate, and he likely would...

In just one week our nation faces yet another manufactured fiscal crisis. This time a refusal to compromise by conservative leaders in Congress would lead to massive, damaging across-the-board spending cuts on March 1, potentially dragging the economy back into recession and hurting American families by slashing critical investments in job training, public health, and public safety. The spending cuts, also known as the “sequester,” are a direct result of a long push by conservatives to take the nation’s economy hostage in order to secure massive, harmful spending cuts. In the summer of 2011, in exchange for agreeing to pay...

Barack Obama is warning America of the devastation that the sequester will visit upon the country, including Furloughs of 800,000 civilian Pentagon employees; Meat inspector furloughs from which food shortages will result; Air Traffic Controller furloughs resulting in three-hour waits at airports to clear security; Reductions in embassy protection and border patrols; Cutting the Persian Gulf Naval presence from two aircraft carriers to one; Diminished emergency services; fewer police and firefighters on the streets; Reduced military readiness; Criminals going free because federal prosecutors will have to close cases; Thousands of teacher and educator layoffs Tens of thousands of parents will...

WASHINGTON, DC—President Obama used this week's address to urge Congress to stop the harmful automatic cuts that threaten thousands of jobs and affect our national security—called the sequester—from taking effect on March 1st. The President and Congressional Democrats have already put forward solutions to avoid these cuts and reduce the deficit in a balanced way, and now it's time for Congressional Republicans to compromise by closing some loopholes that protect the wealthiest Americans so that we can reduce the deficit in a balanced way and create jobs for the middle class. The audio of the address and video of the...

President Obama has been on a blitz while pushing what seems to be an evergreen priority for Democrats these days: "infrastructure investment." In his State of the Union speech, President Obama spoke of Merica's "deteriorating roads and bridges" and proposed what he called a "Fix-It-First" program that would see the government hire construction workers to work on America's infrastructure. This worry is overblown. The Reason Foundation put out a report this week that found America's infrastructure is in fine shape, though there's certainly work to be done. All 50 states lowered their highway fatality rates from 1989 to 2008...

Success may have a thousand fathers, and failure be an orphan, but don’t doubt the parentage of the sequester. After yet another week of White House denials of paternity and a new layer of hysteria over the nature of the cuts involved, Bob Woodward reminds us again who came up with the plan in the first place. As he reported in his book The Price of Politics more than a year ago from on-the-record interviews with the players involved, the sequester was proposed by then-Chief of Staff Jack Lew and personally approved by President Barack Obama, before Harry Reid presented...

Misunderstanding, misstatements and all the classic contortions of partisan message management surround the sequester, the term for the $85 billion in ugly and largely irrational federal spending cuts set by law to begin Friday.What is the non-budget wonk to make of this? (who is responsible)? What really happened? The finger-pointing began during the (third presidential debate) last fall, on Oct. 22, when (President Obama blamed congess) “The sequester is not something that I’ve proposed,” Obama said. “It is something that Congress has proposed.”[snip] This was an acknowledgment that the president and Lew had been wrong. Why does this matter?

The Sequester is not a cut.

The president's sequester strategy is like Howard Beale in "Network": "Woe is us. . . . And woe is us! We're in a lot of trouble!" It is always cliffs, ceilings and looming catastrophes with Barack Obama. It is always government by freakout. That's what's happening now with the daily sequester warnings. Seven hundred thousand children will be dropped from Head Start. Six hundred thousand women and children will be dropped from aid programs. Meat won't be inspected. Seven thousand TSA workers will be laid off, customs workers too, and air traffic controllers. Lines at airports will be impossible. The...

On Pennsylvania Avenue, right near the end, there lived a President who wanted to spend. He knew spending meant power, so hour by hour, he thought up more spends from his Washington tower. “I’ll spend without limits; I’ll spend without blame! Raising taxes to pay—that’s the name of the game.” Down the street, though, a House filled with thriftier folk had a budget to pass, or the country’d go broke. “We can’t spend all day; we’ve got bills to pay! Let’s keep deficits and higher taxes away.” The Senate next door to the House just refused. “We don’t like your...

We are just days away from a cataclysm of biblical proportions. The cuts foretold in the Budget Control Act of 2011 are young as far as prophecies go, but apparently they are every bit as terrifying as rivers of blood and plagues of locusts. Any day now we can expect White House spokesman Jay Carney to take to the podium and read a prepared statement: "And when he opened the seventh seal, there was a small decrease in the rate of increase in federal spending." The great game in Washington is who will get the blame for something both House...

Hypocrite? He said that any short term fixes that would derail automatic spending cuts on both domestic spending and the military spending would be vetoed by him. Does he not realize that videotape exists of this - at Youtube and all over the net? Does he think that he can say anything and that anything and everything he says somehow has an expiration date?

<p>Short CNN articles must be excerpted to 50% of content.</p>

That's the question Politico asks, but it's really only half of Barack Obama's problem in this standoff: President Barack Obama’s greatest adversary in the latest budget battle isn’t the Republican leadership in Congress — it’s his confidence in his own ability to force a win.He has been so certain of his campaign skills that he didn’t open a line of communication with House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell until Thursday, a week before the spending ax hits. And when they did finally hear from Obama, the calls were perfunctory, with no request to step up...