So In Your Face!

War on Christmas

The Baby Jesus has been kicked off Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina, according to an organization who relishes any opportunity to eradicate Christianity from the U.S. military.
The Military Religious Freedom Foundation praised officials at Shaw Air Force Base for removing a Nativity scene located near Memorial Lake on Friday. The traditional Nativity included plastic statues of Mary, Joseph, the Baby Jesus and an assortment of animals.
Apparently, an undisclosed number of Airmen were so emotionally troubled by the sight of a manger scene that they immediately notified the MRFF.

I can only imagine the psychological damage they must have suffered as a result of glancing at the plastic statues.

I can only imagine the psychological damage they must have suffered as a result of glancing at the plastic statues. I hope no one needed hospitalization, God forbid.
The MRFF’s Paul Loebe wrote in a statement that since the display was not erected near a chapel, it was illegal.
“It was very sectarian in nature and a direct violation of the U.S. Constitution as well as a blatant violation of Air Force Instruction 1-1, Section 2.11,” he said.
So the Newborn King is a violation of Air Force regulations? Who knew?
Loebe swiftly alerted MRFF President Mikey Weinstein who then called his BFF’s at the Pentagon. That led to an immediate investigation and more than two hours later, the Nativity had been removed.
“To the Air Force’s credit, it agreed with MRFF’s arguments to remove the Nativity scene swiftly and apparently found this scene to be as much a violation of all the pertinent regulations and the United States Constitution as MRFF did,” he stated.
He praised the Air Force for “acting so swiftly to reverse this egregious violation.”
So why did the Air Force unceremoniously boot the Son of God and why are they so terrified of Mikey Weinstein?
The public affairs office at Shaw AFB did not return three telephone calls and an email seeking comment. They must have been preoccupied hauling away the donkey and the sheep.
Hiram Sasser, the director of litigation for Liberty Institute, told me the military’s actions were unconstitutional.
“This was private speech,” he said. “The military can say no displays on a base but it cannot allow a display and then ban it simply because of its religious viewpoint.”
Sasser said the Supreme Court has ruled in the past that viewpoint discrimination even in a non-public forum such as a military base in unconstitutional.
“It appears that Mikey Weinstein has a special hotline to call his friends in leadership at the Pentagon to alert them to engage in unnecessary and, in this case, unlawful censorship of private religious speech,” he said.
Fox News commentator Sarah Palin, the author of the new book, “Good Tidings and Great Joy,” said what happened at Shaw Air Force base is not surprising.
“We see stories like this every day and yet leftwing pundits still claim that the so-called ‘War on Christmas’ is a figment of the imagination,” Palin told me. “The War on Christmas is just the top of the spear in a larger battle to marginalize expressions of faith and make true religious freedom a thing of the past.”
Palin’s book is a call to arms for Americans to “stand strong on America’s faith-filled foundation.”
“Never let these scrooges strip away the true meaning of Christmas,” she told me.
The Military Religious Freedom Foundation bragged that it only took the Air Force two hours and 15 minutes to remove Jesus, Mary and Joseph.
Sasser doubted the military would respond with such speed to correct what he called “unconstitutional religious viewpoint discrimination.”
He said he was surprised the Pentagon responded so swiftly to Weinstein’s demands - “as if he were under attack in a foreign country in need of rescue from a deadly mob.”
“Apparently if you are ever in trouble and need a quick response from the Pentagon, tell them a plastic Baby Jesus is at the gates.”
Maybe that’s what they should’ve done in Benghazi.

Congress

Maryland official who led problematic, state-run ObamaCare site resigns

The top Maryland official in charge of the state-run ObamaCare exchange resigned this weekend amid major efforts to fix the problematic website.
Rebecca Pearce, executive director of the Maryland Health Benefits Exchange, resigned Friday, according to several news sources.
She appears to be the first official to lose a job as a result of problems with ObamaCare exchanges since they went live Oct. 1.
Critics of the federal exchange have called for the resignation of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and other administration officials in charge of the problem-plagued HealthCare.gov. But President Obama has yet to accept a resignation.
The Maryland exchange’s board of directors released a statement saying it has accepted Pearce’s resignation and that she “worked tirelessly and with tremendous dedication to build Maryland Health Connection over more than two years.”
The group has not said exactly why Pearce resigned. But a source told The Washington Post is was related to leadership changes made by Gov. Martin O’Malley, a strong political ally of Obama and a potential 2016 Democratic presidential candidate.
Maryland is one of 14 states running its own exchange and has struggled with the same kind of technical problems that have plagued the federal site that the 36 other states use to sign up Americans for insurance under Obama’s signature health care reform law.
O’Malley has been a strong supporter of ObamaCare, and his Democratic-leaning state was among the first to get started on a state-run exchange.
However, the site, MarylandHealthConnection.gov, crashed soon after the October rollout and has sputtered along over roughly the past nine weeks, enrolling just 3,000 residents.
However, state officials indicated earlier Friday that the site has shown some improvement, signing up roughly 700 more people in the week ending Nov. 30.

Ills of HealthCare.gov

Errors in ObamaCare website forms spark concerns

 

The Obama administration announced Friday that enrollment records for one in four Americans who selected health plans on HealthCare.gov in October and November could contain errors, raising concerns that consumers who think they have coverage won't actually be enrolled on Jan. 1.
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services spokeswoman Julie Bataille said recent fixes to HealthCare.gov have brought the error rate on forms sent to insurance companies down to about one in 10 for files generated after Dec. 1, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The electronic files, known as 834 forms, give insurance companies basic information about would-be customers, including their name, address, contact information and Social Security number. Insurance companies have reported issues with the files since the law's rollout.
"The new process put in place this week is making a difference. The enrollment files are getting better, but there is more work to do to ensure consumers are covered," Karen Ignani, the chief executive officer of insurance industry trade group, America’s Health Insurance Plans, said in a statement obtained by the New York Post on Friday.
CMS is reaching out to hundreds of thousands of consumers who have tried to enroll for health coverage but aren't enrolled, according to Bataille, who said consumers should be contacted by the insurance company for a payment after selecting a plan.
"Our clear priority is fixing any remaining bugs causing problems and working to make sure every 834 form past and present is resolved," Bataille said, according to The Journal.
Ms. Bataille said errors with the enrollment forms include duplicate files, lack of a file altogether, or a file with mistaken data such as a child incorrectly being listed as a spouse.
AHIP spokesman Robert Zirkelbach told FoxNews.com last week that insurance companies have received duplicative and inaccurate forms, and "in some cases, plans are not getting the enrollment files at all." Getting that fixed, he said, is "critical."
Though the administration has given people until the end of March to sign up for coverage if they want to avoid a fine, coverage for many is supposed to start on Jan. 1. That leaves less than 30 days to fix the remaining glitches.
The administration announced last week it is working on a system to pay insurers its portion of premiums and cost-sharing payments. A temporary workaround has been proposed that would allow insurers to estimate how much they are owed, and submit the bill to the government.
Bailey Comment: " This is what happens when you put your trust in a bunch of idiots"!

Thor

Department of Homeland Security Stacked With Pro-Amnesty Attorneys Ahead of Illegal Immigration Fight | Katie Pavlich

• Posted by Kevin Fobbs on December 5, 2013 at 3:51pm
• 

Sometimes wading through the new America according to Obama where everything is about race and nothing is about uniting as Americans is as difficult as it is tiring. So one can only imagine the utter frustration and even anger that White students had to feel sitting through class after class where a Black Professor made them the convenient targets of her inner demons.

This seemed to be the common practice of English Professor Shannon Gibney who turned her class at Minneapolis Community and Technical College into a frequent diatribe about alleged White privilege, according to the Daily Caller. Is it racism in reverse or is it the actions of an out of control teacher who is searching for fake racial victimization?

Imagine the reality of having a target painted on your back in an English class which has precious little to do with racism or racial issues. The class was turned on its head and used as a personal crusade against non-minorities: i.e. White people. Even if oppression occurred in the nation’s past, the reality that this professor and many of the civil rights pimps of today who continue to cling to divisive racist instigation is disturbing yet acceptable by leaders like Barack Obama. Remember who he inserted himself into the criminal trial of George Zimmerman by asserting that if he had a son, “He would look like Trayvon Martin”?
Professor Gibney is clearly caught in a time warp where her comfort zone is not complete unless she can raise the shadows of past racial injustices and create a whole new imagined racism stew today in modern Minneapolis, Minnesota.
One truly has to wonder did the English Department or the college even scrutinize her teaching credentials to see if she is really certified, because something is surely amiss here. She claims according to the Daily Caller that she was not, “talking about all white people, or you white people in general.” Professor Gibney instead suggested that, “We are talking about whiteness as a system of oppression.”

Obamacare's Perilous Protection Plan for Debtors

"Uh-oh." That's the sound being uttered in doctors' offices and hospitals across the country as medical providers realize they're getting stuck with another bottomless Obamacare bill. While the White House desperately tries to pivot from the havoc wrought by the "Affordable Care Act," its hidden regulatory bombs keep exploding.

I heard about the latest problem this week from an eye doctor friend who received a letter from a Colorado-based insurer informing her that she's essentially on the hook for Obamacare's payment grace period for debtors. The optometrist is bracing for a flood of similar letters from other insurers. Like countless other independent providers, she's extremely concerned about the potential liability, uncertainty and fraud the rule imposes on her business.
Here's the raw deal: The Affordable Care Act created a 90-day grace period before insurers can drop patients who fall behind on premiums. So, delinquents who obtain tax-subsidized health insurance through an Obamacare health insurance exchange have three months to settle up their bills prior to their policy being canceled. As written, the law puts insurers on the hook for the grace period.
But the bureaucrats at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services decided to issue a rule in March making insurers responsible only for paying claims during the first 30 days of the debtors' grace period. Who's on the hook for the other two months? Well, customers are entrusted to foot the bills for additional services. But if they blow off the payments, it's up to physicians and hospitals to collect.
In real-world practice, this means providers will be eating untold costs. Several large hospital associations raised red flags over the issue this summer. In August, the Missouri Hospital Association noted that the regulatory shift "unduly burdens physicians, hospitals and other health care providers" by making them directly collect payments from patients, which "puts them at an unfair and significant risk for providing uncompensated care to patients."
Emillie J DiChristina of Practicefirst Medical Management Solutions spelled out the financial risks for clients on the company's blog: "This leaves providers in a potentially bad place as they have a high potential for accruing bad debt on services provided between 31 and 90 days of the allowed grace period." Can you spell f-r-a-u-d? People could "go on and off" insurance plans, Tampa Bay health care lawyer Bruce Lamb told me, and game the system by bailing on payments and exploiting Obamacare protections against denial of coverage.
Or as MHA officials put it: "We also are very concerned that some disreputable individuals will learn they can manipulate the system and win a full year's insurance coverage on only nine months of premiums. Knowing they are entitled to three months of grace period coverage, dishonest persons could stop paying premiums on the ninth month, enjoy free coverage during the 90-day grace period, have their coverage terminated, and then re-enter the exchange market where the Affordable Care Act's guaranteed issue mandate would prohibit another plan from denying them coverage."
Think such nefarious behavior won't occur? Then you haven't been paying attention to the data manipulators and con artists in the Obamacare navigator program. As I reported earlier this year, the seedy nonprofit Seedco secured multimillion-dollar navigator contracts in Georgia, Maryland, Tennessee and New York to recruit Obamacare recipients into the government-run exchanges — despite settling a civil fraud lawsuit for faking at least 1,400 of 6,500 job placements under a $22.2 million federally funded contract with New York City a year ago.
Additionally, investigative journalist James O'Keefe and his Project Veritas team have caught Obamacare navigators on tape advising health insurance exchange customers to under-report their income and lie about their health status in order to cheat the system.
CMS has made no effort to repeal its cost-shifting rule or to do anything to address the concerns of providers who will be left holding the bag. As one hospital rep told me: "It's potentially catastrophic." Private practices are already being hit hard with slashed reimbursements, the electronic medical records mandate, ICD-10 medical diagnostic code changes, and increasing federal intrusions on how they provide care. In yet another entry on the laundry list of Obamacare's unintended consequences, this regulation will hurt patients by dissuading doctors from participating in exchange plans.
In short: less choice, higher prices, increased potential for fraud, more bureaucratic headaches and more disincentives to enter or stay in the medical profession. When the government grants "grace," everyone must watch their wallets. It's always easy to afford compassion when someone else is paying for it.
Michelle Malkin is the author of "Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks and Cronies" (Regnery 2010). Her e-mail address is malkinblog@gmail.com.