GOP proposal would require food stamp recipients to show photo ID

Several House Republicans have introduced a proposal that would require food stamp recipients to show photo identification when making purchases -- a move they say is necessary to prevent fraud in the program that aids 1 in 7 Americans.
Rep. Matt Salmon, R-Ariz., introduced the SNAP Verify Act, which would require individuals who receive acceptance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to present a photo ID when buying products at stores that accept food stamp recipients. 
"My bill simply requires the photo identification of authorized users of SNAP electronic benefit cards at the point of transaction," Salmon said in a statement. "With over $750 million in SNAP card and food trafficking fraud each year, it is time Congress take action to address the rampant waste in this program." 
Salmon said conducting effective oversight for the program has proven difficult as food stamp spending grows. He cited a Government Accountability Office report showing that $2.2 billion in benefits were erroneously handed out in 2009 alone.
Several Republicans have signed onto the bill as co-sponsors, including Reps. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., Bill Posey, R-Fla., David Schweikert, R-Ariz., and Jack Kingston, R-Ga.
There is no federal requirement to show photo identification at the time of food purchases, though some states have the option to require a photograph of individuals using SNAP program's Electronic Benefits Transfer system. 
In Rhode Island, legislation has been filed in the state's General Assembly that would force residents trying to buy products using a food stamps to present photo ID.
The proposal by Rep. Patricia Morgan, R-West Warwick, would apply to those using electronic benefit cards to redeem other public assistance too. It would be up to retailers to check the photo ID against the name on the government-issued EBT card. 
On Friday, President Obama signed into law an agriculture spending bill that will expand federal crop insurance and ends direct government payments that go to certain farmers, while trimming the nation's  $100-billion-per-year food stamp program. 
The bill finally passed with support from Democratic and Republican lawmakers from farming states, but the bipartisan spirit didn't extend to the signing ceremony at at Michigan State University where Obama was flanked by farm equipment, hay bales and Democratic lawmakers.
Conservatives wanted much larger cuts to food stamps than the $800 million Congress finally approved in a compromise. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack told reporters he did not expect the cut of about 1 percent of the food stamp budget to have a significant impact on recipients.

James Carville joining Fox News as contributor

Veteran Democratic strategist James Carville has been hired as a Fox News contributor. 
The former Bill Clinton adviser will join the network to provide political commentary. Bill Shine, executive vice president of programming, announced the move on Thursday. 
"James' successful and storied career in politics over several decades is an enormous asset to Fox News," Shine said. "We are privileged to have him lend his breadth of experience, wit and dynamic perspective on the network." 
Carville helped lead Bill Clinton's successful 1992 presidential campaign; he continued to serve as a senior political adviser in the Clinton White House. 
Carville went on to work as a consultant, and also as a political contributor at CNN. 
Carville is currently a political science professor at Tulane University. He has written several books, including with his wife, GOP strategist Mary Matalin.

WaPost: Obamacare Computers Not Yet Equipped to Fix Errors

The HealthCare.gov website is not yet equipped to handle appeals by thousands of people seeking to correct errors the system made when they were signing up for the new federal healthcare law, the Washington Post reported on Sunday.
The newspaper, citing sources familiar with the situation, said appeals by about 22,000 people were sitting untouched in a government computer.
"And an unknown number of consumers who are trying to get help through less formal means — by calling the health-care marketplace directly — are told that HealthCare.gov's computer system is not yet allowing federal workers to go into enrollment records and change them," according to the Post.
It added that the Obama administration had not made public the problem with the appeals system.
Despite efforts by legal advocates to press the White House on the situation, "there is no indication that infrastructure . . . necessary for conducting informal reviews and fair hearings has even been created, let alone become operational," attorneys for the National Health Law Program were quoted as saying in a December letter to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, which oversees HealthCare.gov.
The Post quoted two knowledgeable people as saying it was unclear when the appeals process would become available.
The system is designed to allow people filing appeals to do so by computer, phone or mail. But only mail is currently available, the newspaper said.
Asked to comment, a CMS spokesman said: "As we work to fully implement the appeals system, CMS is working directly with consumers to address concerns they have raised through this process.
"We have found that the appeals filed are largely related to previous system errors, most of which have since been fixed. We are inviting those consumers back to healthcare.gov where they can reset and successfully finish their applications without needing to complete the appeals process," Aaron Albright said in an email.
"We are also working to ensure that consumers who wish to continue with their appeal are able to do so," he said.
The healthcare law, known as Obamacare, is designed to provide health coverage to millions of uninsured people in the United States, but was plagued by a botched rollout in October.
The Obama administration said in late January that enrollment soared in recent weeks to about 3 million.
Addie Wilson, 27, of Fairmont, W.Va., said she is paying $100 more a month than she should for her insurance. "It is definitely frustrating and not fair," she said.
In December, Wilson found herself in a bind. Her old insurance was running out and she needed surgery. The healthcare.gov site was not capable of calculating the federal subsidy due to her and Wilson did not want her coverage to lapse.
She asked a navigator at a federal call center what to do and was advised to sign up, pay the full price, and appeal later. Now, she has discovered there is no system in place to process her appeal.

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House GOP bill aims to end ‘secret science’ in EPA rulemaking

Republican lawmakers in the House are pushing legislation that would prohibit the Environmental Protection Agency from proposing new regulations based on science that is not transparent or not reproducible.
The Secret Science Reform Act, introduced Thursday by Rep. David Schweikert, R-Ariz., would bar the agency from proposing or finalizing rules without first disclosing all "scientific and technical information" relied on to support its proposed action.
"Public policy should come from public data, not based on the whims of far-left environmental groups,” Schweikert said in a statement. “For far too long, the EPA has approved regulations that have placed a crippling financial burden on economic growth in this country with no public evidence to justify their actions.”
Several of Schweikert’s fellow House Science Committee members have signed onto the bill as co-sponsors, including Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas., Rep. Jim Bridenstine, R-Okla., and Rep. Randy Neugebauer, R-Texas.
In December, members of the House Science Committee accused agency of disregarding ignoring dissenting voices on its independent science advisory review board in its push to impose carbon dioxide limits on new power plants.  
Smith said the proposal “prohibits EPA from using secret science to justify new regulations."
"The American people foot the bill for EPA's costly regulations, and they have a right to see the underlying science. Costly environmental regulations should be based upon publicly available data so that independent scientists can verify the EPA's claims,” Smith said in a statement.
Meanwhile, some states are considering legislation aimed at banning or curtailing future environmental regulations that would be costly to local energy industries.
In Idaho, Rep. Paul Shepherd, a conservative legislator, has introduced a proposal to declare restrictions handed down by the EPA unconstitutional, touting the bill as a way for Idaho to call the shots while disregarding federal regulations on air and water pollution.
In particular, his bill would help dredge miners whose work was being impeded by what they say is unnecessarily restrictive pollution rules.
Although the House State Affairs Committee voted Thursday to send the proposal to a full hearing, it was met with deep skepticism from lawmakers who questioned its legality.
The Idaho Legislature has a history of using largely symbolic legislation as a gesture of defiance against what they view as oppressive government controls.
In Indiana, the Republican-controlled Indiana House approved a bill that would bar state environmental regulators “from adopting a rule or standard that is more stringent than” corresponding federal rules or standards.
If the bill passes the Legislature, it could reportedly have numerous ramifications, including limiting what rules the Indiana Department of Environmental Management could propose to address the large amounts of manure produced by the state’s big livestock farms.

Obamacare

Insurers face pressure for limiting doctor choice for ObamaCare enrollees

Bailey Comment: " I'm thinking this is one of the reasons that the Canadians come over here for medical. Now that ours is just as crappy, where are they gonna go?"

Federal and state regulators and lawmakers are stepping up pressure on the insurance industry for offering plans under ObamaCare that limit access to doctors and hospitals -- a strategy insurers say is necessary to keep coverage prices low in the health law's marketplaces. 
The Wall Street Journal reports that some state legislatures are weighing bills that could force insurers to add more hospitals and doctors to plans, while federal regulators have proposed a tougher review process for plans to be sold next year through HealthCare.gov.
The access problem is a byproduct of the effort to drive down costs of subsidized coverage, prompting insurance companies to offer limited choices of doctors and hospitals.
Under a federal proposal announced this week, insurance companies selling plans in the federally-run marketplace would be required to submit to the government a full list of providers in a network before the plans are approved for the exchanges, The Wall Street Journal reported.
A spokesman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services told the newspaper it is "working to strengthen the network adequacy requirements that took effect for this year."
In Washington state, Seattle Children's Hospital has sued over the state insurance department's decision to approve networks that didn't include the facility. The hospital is excluded from five of seven plans on Washington’s state insurance exchange, according to Bloomberg News.
The hospital says is struggling to get paid for care given to about 125 children it has treated since Jan. 1, when ObamaCare coverage took effect. The facility will be required to pick up costs beyond the standard deductible if insurers refuse to cover their services.
"We made the decision to see all the children," Sandy Melzer, the facility's strategy officer, told Bloomberg News. "Maybe we’ll be paid, maybe we won’t. It’s completely done on faith." 
The family of 5-month-old Gabriella Blankers visited Seattle Children’s last month for a CT scan that found a rare birth defect. They said they were initially rejected by their insurer because the hospital wasn't in their network, though the insurer later made a temporary exception, according to the report.
"There’s nowhere else I could go," to get the care Gabriella needed, Rebekah Blankers, the girl’s mother, told Bloomberg News. "Unless I went out of state, out of network, or out of pocket."
Lawmakers in a Washington state Senate committee heard a proposal this week that would reportedly allow health insurance companies to keep offering insurance plans that don't meet the new federal and state requirements. But they would only be offered to people who were enrolled in such plans as of Oct. 1, 2013.
Senate Bill 6464 also would let insurers from other states sell plans to Washingtonians without requiring the carriers to meet Washington state insurance regulations.
When President Obama announced he would leave it up to the states to decide whether to continue to offer some old plans for a while, Washington's Insurance Commissioner Mike Kreidler said he would not allow it.
Meanwhile, in Mississippi, proposed legislation would bar insurers from cutting off most doctors and hospitals that agree to prices set by insurers. The bill also would prohibit insurers from charging higher copayments at certain doctors' offices or hospitals, according to The Wall Street Journal. 

The Obamacare Security Nightmare: It Gets Worse

 
Michelle Malkin | Feb 05, 2014

 Fraudsters on the inside, hackers on the outside. Here we are, stuck in the middle with the security nightmare called Obamacare. Can it get any worse? Yes, it can.
After the spectacular website crashes during last fall's federal health insurance exchange rollout, enrollees will soon wish the entire system had stayed down and dead. "404 Error" messages and convicted felon Obamacare navigators may be the least of our health care tech problems now. The latest? U.S. intelligence agencies notified the Department of Health and Human Services last week that the Healthcare.gov infrastructure could be infected with malicious code.
Who's responsible? Washington Free Beacon national security reporter Bill Gertz writes that U.S. officials have "warned that programmers in Belarus, a former Soviet republic closely allied with Russia, were suspected" of possible sabotage. A government tech bureaucrat in the Belarusian regime bragged last summer on Russian radio that HHS is "one of our clients" and that "we are helping Obama complete his insurance reform."
Gulp. When an authoritarian minion from the country known as "Europe's last dictatorship" boasts about "helping" the Obama White House, be afraid. One of our intel people spelled it out for Gertz: "The U.S. Affordable Care Act software was written in part in Belarus by software developers under state control, and that makes the software a potential target for cyber attacks."
No kidding. The friends of Vladimir Putin are not our friends. If you've been paying attention, you know that Belarus and other Eastern European hacking gangs have been at the center of several recent international cybercrimes. These aren't merely schemes to steal credit card numbers or vandalize websites with annoying graffiti. They're acts of espionage and sabotage -- like using malware in a phishing scheme aimed at White House employees to gather military intelligence and pilfer sensitive government documents.
It's not just the federal health care system's problem. Former Obamacare website contractor CGI still holds dozens of contracts with other federal agencies and state governments worth billions of dollars -- and wide access to health and financial data. In my state of Colorado, for example, CGI has a $78 million contract to "modernize, host and manage" the state's financial system. Have they checked to see whether Belarus hackers are standing by?
For their part, Obamacare officials are making their usual "don't worry about it, the problem's under control" noises. But we already know the problem is far out of control. Last month, GOP oversight hearings exposed persistent failures by Obamacare overseers to fix security lapses.

Administrators reverse ban on American celebration at high school

The sun was just beginning to rise over the Rocky Mountains, but Sheriff Justin Smith was already awake. He was standing outside Fort Collins High School – shivering in the frigid cold.
It was 12 degrees. Snow was falling. But Mr. Smith, wearing his dress blues, stood resolute, waving an American flag.
The sheriff of Larimer County, Colorado had come to school Tuesday to send a message to those responsible for educating the county’s children. The sheriff was not in a good mood.

Whoever would have thought that American teenagers would be treated as second-class citizens in their own country?

He was standing in the winter snow to protest the school’s decision to ban a celebration of American patriotism.
The student council had wanted to designate a day during Spirit Week to celebrate the red, white & blue. The young people called it “’Merica Monday.” But the school turned down their request.
“They said they didn’t want to offend anyone from other countries or immigrants,” a 16-year-old member of the student council told me. “They just really did not want to make anyone feel uncomfortable.”
But after a day of righteous Rocky Mountain outrage, the principal at Fort Collins High School reversed course and apologized. 
Principal Mark Eversole sent a letter to parents announcing that next Monday would in fact be America Day.
Following is the entire letter that was obtained by Fox News Radio affiliate KCOL:

“We apologize for our recent decision regarding My Country Monday and that it was seen as not patriotic. This could not be further from the truth. The original intent of Spread the Love week at Fort Collins High School was to unify the student body. When students first proposed "Merica Monday," we felt that it was against this unifying theme and disrespectful to our country. Merica is a slang term that is often used in a negative stereotypical way to describe life in the United States. This is what led us to discuss alternatives with students. We were surprised that our community interpreted our actions as anti-American. We are a proud public school in America and support many activities to celebrate our great nation. Due to this outpouring of sentiment and misinterpretation of our intentions, we have decided to rename the first day of Spread the Love week to "America Day" as opposed to "Merica Day." We look forward to enjoying the creativity and energy of our students as they celebrate their patriotism next week."

That’s not exactly how parents or students recall the events. They said they suggested “America Monday” but administrators rejected that idea. And members of the student council were adamant that the only reason the event was barred was to prevent non-Americans from being offended.
It seems to me that a public school administrator got caught with his hand in the multicultural cookie jar.
While  the school should be commended for doing the right thing and allowing students to celebrate America, whoever would have thought that American teenagers would be treated as second-class citizens in their own country?
And that’s why Sheriff Smith was standing in the bitter cold, waving his American flag – the one that normally flew outside his home.
“We can’t and we won’t stand for that kind of attitude in our schools,” Sheriff Smith told me in a telephone interview. “It’s our country. They’re our community schools. We will take them back and restore the values – the ones that made America the great nation it is today.”
“I realized I could not just sit on the sidelines,” he said. “I had to stand up and do something.”
Within minutes, he was joined by a dozen others – an uprising of patriots sick and tired of the anti-American venom spewing from public school administrators.
“This is really a sign of root problems we have,” he said. “A lot of us understand -- this anti-American sentiment has poisoned our schools – the ideas and beliefs that are preached to them.”
A sort of grassroots protest movement unfolded early Tuesday on KCOL, the local news radio station that carries my daily commentary. Callers unleashed their fury over the airwaves. Students from the high school emailed passionate messages.
Among them, was a young man – a tenth grader who asked not to be identified.
“I'm personally outraged at the school that we can celebrate every other culture but our own,” this young American teenager wrote. “We have activities that go on during Cinco de Mayo but we can't celebrate and honor our own country [where] we live I'm very angry.”
As Sheriff Smith and his frozen band of patriots waved their flags, drivers honked their horns, bus drivers waved and students stopped to watch.
“It was important to send a message to students,” the sheriff said. “They needed to know they are not alone and that they did the right thing by standing up. I hope when they and their parents saw their sheriff standing out in front of the school – they knew they weren’t alone.”
The sheriff is correct. These brave young men and women are not alone.
We are compelled to stand alongside our fellow countrymen at Fort Collins High School.
Patriotism must never be sacrificed on the altar of political correctness.
“This is a wake up call,” Sheriff Smith said. “We’ve been given the blessing of a wake up call as to what is going on (in our school). Now the question is -- what do we do about it?”