Iraqi Cartoon

Climate change skeptics call out marchers’ ‘hypocrisies’

Manhattan’s flood of green protesters had climate-change skeptics seeing red Sunday.
“Their love for the Earth is so real, they couldn’t even use a trash can,” tweeted a disgusted @chelsea_elisa, along with a photo of an overflowing trash can in Manhattan, after tens of thousands of marchers invaded the city on fleets of smog-producing buses.
David Kreutzer, a research fellow at the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation, shared a similar photo of the marchers’ refuse trashing the city’s streets.
“Somehow this doesn’t seem too green 2me,” Kreutzer tweeted.
He and other critics of the People’s Climate March called the protesters hypocrites for wasting paper and burning fossil fuel in getting to the big event.
“The hypocrisy varies from person to person,” economist Kreutzer, 61, told The Post. “The ones that fly in on private jets are the most hypocritical.”
He was referring to celebrity A-listers who joined Sunday’s march.
Stars such as Leo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo, an outspoken opponent of fracking, paraded through Midtown with people from around the country.

Number of ObamaCare enrollees appears to be dropping

President Obama’s claim last spring that 8 million people had enrolled in ObamaCare recently got a significant downgrade from the head of the agency overseeing the plan.
Marilyn Tavenner, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, told a congressional committee that "as of August 15, this year, we have 7.3 million Americans enrolled in Health Insurance Marketplace coverage and these are individuals who paid their premiums."
A key part of her statement was Tavenner's reference to those who paid, because just signing up isn't enough to be counted as enrolled.
As Doug Holtz-Eakin, former Director of the Congressional Budget Office, explained,"it’s not enough to sign up. You have to sign up and pay on a regular basis to really be enrolled."
That is one reason both state and private insurance officials have been saying their enrollments were shrinking.
"They've deteriorated quite a bit, this was anticipated to some degree, but I think it's exceeded expectations in some cases," said Jim Capretta of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
For instance, state officials in Florida say their enrollments are now 220,000 lower than the administration's count in April, going from some 983,000 to just over 762,000, a drop of more than 20 percent.
A state official said some may have been duplicate enrollments because ofwebsite problems on healthcare.gov. The others, he said, just didn't pay their premiums and lost their coverage, a problem insurance companies are also reporting.
Robert Laszewski, of Health Policy and Strategy Associates, said,"I've talked to a number of insurance companies around the industry and they're indicating that they're down as low as 70 percent of the original enrollments they had."
In fact, Mark Bertolini, the CEO of Aetna, the nation's third largest insurer, said recently that his companyhad 720,000 people sign up for exchange coverage as of May 20, but only 600,000 turned out to be paying customers.
He added he expects that number to fall to "just over 500,000" by the end of the year. That would leave Aetna's paid enrollment down some 30 percent from its original sign-up numbers.
Many analysts think enrollments across the industry will continue to erode.
"So the enrollment that the administration was touting in March and April," Capretta said, "I think you could bring that down by at least 20 percent going into the end of the year."
The Congressional Budget Office is predicting 13 million total enrollments at the end of the next open enrollment in February 2015. So the number they're starting from makes a big difference:
"If we've got closer to 6 million enrolled," Laszewski said, "they'd have to enroll more people in 2015 than they did this past year."

US, Arab allies launch first wave of strikes in Syria

The United States, joined by five Arab allies, launched an intense campaign of airstrikes, bombings and cruise-missile attacks against the Islamic State and other militant groups in Syria Monday night – marking the first U.S. military intervention in Syria since the start of that country’s civil war in 2011. 
U.S. Central Command (Centcom) said in a statement released early Tuesday that 14 Islamic State targets were hit, including the group's fighters, training compounds, headquarters and command and control facilities, storage facilities, a finance center, supply trucks and armed vehicles. The statement said that the operation involved 47 Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles launched from the USS Arleigh Burke and USS Philippine Sea operating in the Red Sea and the North Arabian Gulf. Officials told Fox News that B-1 bombers, F-16 and F-18 fighters, and Predator drones were also used. The F-18s flew missions off the USS George H.W. Bush in the Persian Gulf.
Centcom said that U.S. aircraft also struck eight targets associated with another terrorist group called the Khorasan Group, made of up Al Qaeda veterans. Those strikes, near the northwestern Syrian city of Aleppo, targeted training camps, an explosives and munitions production facility, a communication building and command and control facilities.
Centcom said the Khorasan Group was involved in "imminent attack plotting against the United States and Western interests."
U.S. officials said that said the airstrikes began around 8:30 p.m. Eastern Time, and were conducted by the U.S., Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates. The first wave of strikes finished about 90 minutes later, though the operation was expected to last several hours. Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. John Kirby said the military made the decision to strike early Monday. 
Syria's Foreign Ministry told the Associated Press that the U.S. informed Syria's envoy to the U.N. that "strikes will be launched against the terrorist Daesh group in Raqqa." The statement used an Arabic name to refer to the Islamic State group, which is more commonly known as ISIS or ISIL.
The military strikes come less than two weeks after President Obama, on Sept. 10, authorized U.S. airstrikes inside Syria as part of a broad campaign to root out the militants.
In a nod to his plans to go into Syria, Obama said then, “I have made it clear that we will hunt down terrorists who threaten our country, wherever they are. That means I will not hesitate to take action against ISIL in Syria, as well as Iraq."
The following day, at a conference with Secretary of State John Kerry, key Arab allies promised they would "do their share" to fight the Islamic State militants. The Obama administration, which at a NATO meeting in Wales earlier this month also got commitments from European allies as well as Canada and Australia, has insisted that the fight against the Islamic State militants could not be the United States' fight alone.
Until now, U.S. airstrikes have been limited to specific missions in northern Iraq, where 194 missions have been launched since August 8. Lawmakers and military advisers, though, had stressed for weeks that any campaign against the Islamic State would have to include action in Syria, where the militant network is based.
"To defeat ISIS, we must cut off the head of the snake, which exists in Syria," Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, said in a statement late Monday. "I support the administration’s move to conduct airstrikes against ISIS wherever it exists."
A senior official told Fox News that President Obama was being briefed by military officials on the operation throughout the night. Earlier in the evening, the president spoke to House Speaker John Boeher, R-Ohio, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. A White House official also updated House Majority Leader Kevin McCarty, R-Calif., on the progress of the airstrikes.
Because the United States had stayed out of the Syria conflict for so long, the Obama administration had spent the last several weeks scrambling to gather intelligence about possible targets in Syria, launching surveillance missions over the country last month.
Syrian activists reported several airstrikes on militant targets in the northern city of Raqqa, ISIS's main base. One Raqqa-based activist, speaking on condition of anonymity, told AP that the airstrikes lit the night sky over the city, and reported a power cut that lasted for two hours.
The head of the main Western-backed Syrian opposition group, Hadi Bahra, welcomed the commencement of airstrikes in Syria.
"Tonight, the international community has joined our fight against ISIS in Syria," he said in a statement.  "We have called for airstrikes such as those that commenced tonight with a heavy heart and deep concern, as these strikes begin in our own homeland. We insist that utmost care is taken to avoid civilian casualties."
Centcom said that other airstrikes hit ISIS targets near the Syrian cities of Dayr az Zawr, Al Hasakah, and Abu Kamal. Also, the U.S. carried out four airstrikes against ISIS in northern Iraq, southwest of the city of Kirkuk. 
Military leaders have said about two-thirds of the estimated 31,000 Islamic State militants were in Syria.
Some officials have expressed concern that going after Islamic State militants in Syria could inadvertently help Syrian President Bashar Assad, since the militants are fighting in part to overthrow Assad.
Urged on by the White House and U.S. defense and military officials, Congress passed legislation late last week authorizing the military to arm and train moderate Syrian rebels. Obama signed the bill into law Friday, providing $500 million for the U.S. to train about 5,000 rebels over the next year.
The militant group, meanwhile, has threatened retribution. Its spokesman, Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, said in a 42-minute audio statement released Sunday that the fighters were ready to battle the U.S.-led military coalition and called for attacks at home and abroad.