‘Saved us money’: Rubio wins conservative cred for ObamaCare change

Marco Rubio's Republican presidential bid is getting a surprisingly big boost from a little-known legislative tweak he helped tuck into last year's spending bill — one that ObamaCare critics are crediting with shielding taxpayers from jittery health insurance companies that may be eyeing shaky bottom lines.
The provision, similar to one he’s pushing this year, prohibits billion-dollar bailouts for private insurers under the Affordable Care Act.
It's now being touted by Rubio’s camp and others as a key factor that is protecting taxpayer dollars -- while also disrupting the law itself.
Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., former chairman of the House oversight committee, cited the provision in announcing his endorsement of Rubio on Monday.
“He saved us money on ObamaCare where others have simply wanted to repeal it,” Issa told Fox News. “He has already saved $2.5 billion by eliminating an unreasonable backstop by the taxpayers for a failed program.”

Rep. Darrell Issa endorses Marco Rubio for president

The program Rubio targeted is known as “risk corridors” – pricy provisions that allow the government to use taxpayer dollars to compensate insurance companies for losses suffered during the first few years of ObamaCare.
In 2013, the senator pushed legislation to repeal the risk corridor provision. Though the standalone bill failed, he had a hand in getting a rider into the “must-pass” omnibus federal spending bill last year that prevents the government from making up shortfalls in the program by tapping other funds.
Last year, insurers asked for nearly $2.87 billion in government payments from the program; though the Department of Health and Human Services had only $362 million available. Issa and others say the rider, then, helped save $2.5 billion.
Concern about a backstop for losses has been renewed amid continuing financial uncertainty in the market -- which has led to more than a dozen folded co-ops and prompted UnitedHealth, the country’s largest insurer, to threaten to pull out of the exchanges next year.
Rubio's campaign is claiming some credit for the turmoil, sending out a recent tweet that said: “Q: Did Marco Kill Obamacare? A: You bet he did.”
UnitedHealth’s CEO announced $425 million in losses and warned it may walk away from the health care exchanges altogether. It’s a threat Rubio believes will resonate with other insurers who he thinks may follow suit.
“I think it’s only going to accelerate now, because once these companies can’t get bailed out, many of them are deciding they no longer want to participate in the ObamaCare exchange,” he said in an interview with Breibart News.
Rubio wants to keep his restrictions in place going forward, as they are set to expire if not renewed.
In a Nov. 24 letter to Republican leadership, he argued that ObamaCare might not be worth saving if such deep safety nets are needed to keep private insurers interested.
He added, “It is our responsibility to completely shield the U.S. taxpayer from a deal in the omnibus that might reimburse health insurers retroactively for these losses or any other future losses.”
America’s Health Insurance Plans President and CEO Marilyn Tavenner, who played a key role in launching the health care overhaul in the Obama administration, recently defended the risk corridors.
“Stable, affordable coverage for consumers depends on adequate funding of the risk corridor program,” she said in an October statement. “It’s essential that Congress and CMS act to ensure the program works as designed and consumers are protected.”
Dan Holler, vice president of communications at Heritage Action for America, disagrees.
Holler told FoxNews.com his organization strongly supports eliminating bailouts for insurance companies and believes a similarly worded measure by Rubio will easily pass this year.
While Rubio’s social media team is claiming credit for delivering a death blow to ObamaCare, others argue it only did surface-level damage to the program.
Still, most agree Rubio’s efforts have had some impact on ObamaCare.
“It did draw some blood,” Tim Jost, a health law professor at Washington and Lee University School of Law, told Bloomberg News. “The restriction on funding is probably the most effective thing Republicans have done so far to limit the Affordable Care Act, other than the Supreme Court decision and subsequent decisions by Republican states not to expand Medicaid.”

School district bans the word 'Christmas' from flyer

The school superintendent in Marlborough, New Hampshire issued a Yuletide edict to the local American Legion post: you can’t call a Christmas tree a Christmas tree.
John Fletcher, the commander of the local American Legion post, said he was banned from using the word “Christmas” to promote the town’s upcoming Christmas tree lighting.
Click here to join Todd’s American Dispatch – a must-read for conservatives!
The event is sponsored by the American Legion and the Monadnock Lions Club.

Superintendent Robert Malay’s decision went over about as well as replacing Santa’s milk and cookies with tofu and a shot of wheatgrass.

“He wanted to change it to say ‘holiday tree lighting’ instead,” Mr. Fletcher told FOX25 in Boston.
Needless to say, Supt. Robert Malay’s decision went over about as well as replacing Santa’s milk and cookies with tofu and a shot of wheatgrass.
“It’s not a holiday tree, it’s a Christmas tree,” said Mr. Fletcher.
For years the American Legion commander, who also portrays Santa Claus, had been allowed to post flyers in the public school to promote the annual Christmas event.
But this year, Mr. Fletcher said the superintendent called to tell him he would need to “revise” the flyer and remove the word “Christmas.”
“I was very upset, I really was,” he told the television station.
He was so upset he wrote a letter to the Sentinel Source – the newspaper of record in that neck of the woods.
“As commander of the American Legion it offends me,” he wrote. “I respect all rights; always have. But do not take away our rights because you may offend someone else.”
Still, Mr. Fletcher followed the superintendent’s directive – well sort of.
Armed with a bottle of white-out, he and his wife blotted out the offending word – Christmas. However, he did not include the word “holiday.”
“In this case, this political correctness has just gone too far,” he said. “It’s just getting out of hand.”
I called Superintendent Malay to find out why the word “Christmas” needed to be deleted, but he did not return my message.
Folks, I chatted with at the local school are pretty upset at how Mr. Fletcher was treated. They say the superintendent really ruffled some feathers.
No doubt.
If they can’t call Christmas, Christmas, I wonder what the school district will call Ramadan or Hanukkah or Kwanzaa?

US announces more special ops forces to fight ISIS, Iraqi PM says 'no need'

The U.S. is sending more special operations forces to help Iraqi and Kurdish forces battling ISIS, as well as capture or kill senior leaders of the terror network in Iraq and Syria. 
A U.S. official told Fox News that approximately 200 troops would be sent to Iraq within the next few weeks part of a "specialized expeditionary targeting force" announced by Defense Secretary Ash Carter in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee Tuesday.
The official said the force's remit would include targeted assassinations of senior ISIS if their specific mission requires. A second U.S. official told Fox News that capturing senior ISIS leaders would be an important component of the new assault force’s mission to learn more about the group's structure and any affiliates.
"This intel gathering mission is just as important, if not more important, than killing bad guys," said the official, who added that the number of troops "could grow" beyond 200.
The U.S. military conducted similar operations in Iraq to take out senior Al Qaeda leadership, such as the mission led by Gen. Stanley McChrystal which killed Al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in June 2006.
Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi reacted to Carter's announcement with a statement saying in part, "there is no need for foreign ground combat troops" in Iraq.
Abadi's statement did call for more weapons, training and support for Iraq's military from Baghdad's international partners. He also warned that any special operations against ISIS in Iraq "can only be deployed subject to the approval of the Iraqi Government and in coordination with the Iraqi forces and with full respect to Iraqi sovereignty."

"The raids in Iraq will be done at the invitation of the Iraqi government and focused on defending its borders and building the Iraqi security force's own capacity," Carter said in his testimony Tuesday. "This force will also be in a position to conduct unilateral operations into Syria."
"This is an important capability because it takes advantage of what we're good at," Carter added later in the hearing. "We're good at intelligence, we're good at mobility, we're good at surprise. We have the long reach that no one else has. And it puts everybody on notice in Syria. You don't know at night who's going to be coming in the window. And that's the sensation that we want all of ISIL's leadership and followers to have."
A U.S. official familiar with the composition of special operations forces told Fox News that approximately 75 percent of the group bound for Iraq would provide support. The latest force includes intelligence personnel, aircraft pilots and mechanics in addition to a quick reaction force. The official added that the group was separate from the 50 special operations forces that will be sent to Syria.
There currently are about 3,500 U.S. troops in Iraq.
At the same hearing, Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, raised eyebrows when he said that ISIS had not been contained by the U.S.-led coalition, contrary to President Obama's assessment earlier this month.
"What is true is that from the start our goal has been first to contain, and we have contained them. They have not gained ground in Iraq. And in Syria, they'll come in, they'll leave, but you don't see this systematic march by ISIL across the terrain," Obama said in an interview with ABC, using another acronym for the group.
The remarks were aired a day before ISIS militants carried out a series of coordinated attacks in Paris, killing 130 people and injuring more than 350 others.
"We have not contained ISIL currently," Dunford said in response to a question from Rep. Randy Forbes, R-Va.

latino political cartoon

US reportedly supplying Ukraine military with obsolete equipment

The U.S. has been supplying Ukrainian forces with obsolete equipment, some of which dates back almost thirty years, according to a published report.
The Washington Post reported that Ukrainian government forces battling Russia-supported rebels in the east of that country have called into question Washington's commitment to them based on the shoddy gear. The paper also reported that the lack of sufficient equipment has bred distrust and lowered Ukrainian morale.
The Pentagon has provided Kiev with more than $260 million in non-lethal military equipment since the start of the conflict last year. However, the Post report says that some of the gear is "secondhand stuff", in the words of one Ukrainian special forces commander.
Among the outdated supplies are Humvees dating from the late 1980s and early 1990s, according to the Post, which cited the vehicles' serial numbers in its report. In another case, an infantry unit of 120 soldiers received a single bulletproof vest, of a type that U.S. forces stopped using in the mid-2000s.
The Post reported that the Pentagon had no official comment on the condition of the equipment. However, one anonymous U.S. defense official told the paper that because the U.S. was unprepared for Russia to get involved in the conflict, they had to respond to Ukraine's requests for aid "as fast as possible."
"We had no money appropriated for this crisis," the official said, according to the Post. "Does that means everything was perfect? Of course not."
Another Pentagon official described a second shipment of Humvees authorized to be sent to Ukraine as "the stuff that’s sitting around somewhere that no service can use ... They’re not good enough to drive, but you can tear them apart [for spare parts]."
The report comes as the war in eastern Ukraine grinds on with no end in sight.
Russia's annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in March 2014 and its support for the rebels has brought relations between the two countries to a post-Soviet low. Ukraine has since been trying to cut its dependence on Russian gas.
Last week, Ukraine announced that it would stop buying Russian natural gas — hoping to rely on supplies from other countries — and closed its airspace to its eastern neighbor. Ukraine last month banned all Russian airlines from flying into Ukraine but Russian planes have been allowed to fly over its territory.

'Hispandering' or just campaigning? Some try to give Latino outreach negative spin

When Hillary Clinton rolled out a Spanish-language campaign website and when Jeb Bush featured Latino music and, yes, spoke some Spanish at his campaign launch in Miami, many people criticized their efforts as pandering.
The same has happened when elected officials or political candidates have expressed support for more lenient immigration policies.
As Latinos become an increasingly important part of the electorate, efforts to court them and the ensuing cries about pandering – or, as some say, “Hispandering" – have grown.
Defenders of efforts that have been targeted as pandering say critics unfairly are implying that it’s somehow wrong to talk to Latinos about their concerns and show support for policies and solutions that a majority of them favor.
“With 54 million Hispanics in America, you have to wonder why anyone would question their role in our democracy,” said Pablo Manriquez, the director of Hispanic media for the Democratic National Committee. “And every candidate seriously wanting to represent them should reach out, talk about the issues that matter to us like college affordability, and ask for our vote. That’s as American as apple pie.”
Allert Gort-Brown, a professor at the University of Notre Dame, told Fox News Latino that pandering is often a pejorative way to describe a core practice of political campaigns.
“In general, it’s just political campaigning,” Gort-Brown said. “People said that Marco Rubio was pandering to the tea party. Is Hillary Clinton pandering to labor when she says she’s against [the Trans-Pacific Partnership]? Well, yes.”
He pointed out that social conservatives like “Mike Huckabee and Ben Carson stress their faith-based outlook in order to make sure they capture those votes when they’re in the primary.”
Where it gets unsavory, experts admit, is when candidates treat a bloc as a monolithic group, or when they appear to contradict themselves in their effort to reach a new sector of the electorate.
“It’s what someone called ‘Hispandering,’ taking an advertisement and throwing some mariachis in there to 'reach out' to Hispanics,” Gort-Brown tolld FNL.“It’s not wrong to reach out to Latinos or any discernable voting bloc. It’s when they treat Latinos as if they’re all Mexicans and all listen to mariachis.”
“The broader issue is, 'Should they be reaching out to Latinos?,'" he said. "You want to win an election, and you want to get as many people as you can on board. And Latinos are just growing too fast, and are too big [a segment of the population], to safely ignore.”
Clinton was accused of pandering, even by some Latino groups she was trying to woo, for sitting down with young undocumented immigrants – known as Dreamers – in Nevada earlier this year and pledging to, if elected president, give them broader protections and push for comprehensive immigration reform.
In large part that is because the year before, she had supported sending back unaccompanied minors who were part of a surge that had appeared at the U.S.-Mexican border asking to stay in the United States.
That remark led to protests and heckling at her speaking events.
Rubio has also appeared to reverse himself. A couple of years ago, he played a pivotal role in drafting and pushing for a bipartisan Senate comprehensive immigration reform bill that sought to tighten border security, while also allowing undocumented immigrants who met a strict set of criteria to legalize their status.
The junior senator from Florida came under fire from conservatives – who had been a base of support – who accused him of embracing amnesty and pandering to Latinos and immigrant advocacy groups. After the bill failed in the House, Rubio began backing away from its tenets, increasingly focusing more on strict enforcement and deportation.
Now he’s being accused of pandering to conservatives.
Political opponents often seize on a rival’s change of tune and label it pandering, hoping that the group being courted by the candidate whose rhetoric has changed won't be won over by it, experts say, seeing it as hypocritical and opportunistic instead.
The GOP and Democratic debates have been full of moments in which one candidate accuses the other of putting the interests of a small group over those of the larger electorate.
Sen. Ted Cruz, the conservative Texas firebrand who hopes to ride his tea party support to the GOP nomination, has begun challenging Rubio, who is also vying for that conservative base, for his former position on immigration.
“Cruz has Rubio right in his sights” Gort-Brown said, in terms of whether he is a true conservative.
Political pandering is such part and parcel of the election process that experts and campaign officials have their own insider terms for it – “dog-whistle politics” and “microtargeting,” are two of the more known ones.
The soccer-mom vote was coveted in the 1990s, and NASCAR dads were courted in 2004.
“On the one hand, they’re pandering not just to one set of voters, but to polls generally,” said D. Sunshine Hillygus, a professor at Duke University who has authored books on political campaigns and elections. “I’ve always found it surprising that it’s considered a bad thing to want to represent the views of voters or constituents.”
Designing a message for a certain group, Hillygus said, is not necessarily a superficial gesture.
Although it sometimes “appears [politicians] are not sincere if it looks like they’re catering to the needs and desires of a particular group,” Hillygus said, “a candidate can be representing their principles and views, as opposed to behaving in a [purely] strategic fashion.”
Bush has been criticized – most vociferously by Donald Trump – for launching into Spanish at press conferences when responding to a reporter for a Spanish-language media outlet, or for speaking it at times in his campaign.
That very visible effort to court Latino voters gets noticed far more easily than other, off-the-radar wooing that takes place out of the public eye.
“Candidates often send messages to some groups that other people won’t recognize, using language, sometimes, that most people pick up on,” Hilllygus said.
That is called dog-whistle politics, because, like a dog whistle, it is audible only to a certain target.
It can happen at private fundraiser, where a candidate’s message can bring not just votes but large contributions.
“They sometimes give a sense to a group, such as Latinos, that the issues important to them will be a priority,” Hillygus said. “But then they’ll speak to a group of small business owners, emphasizing a different set of issues, and tell them their issues will be a priority. Every little group is told their pet issue is priority.”
Poorly executed, this tactic can, and has many times, backfired on a candidate.
A whole new weapon – trackers – in political campaigns is designed around making sure that a rival’s private pandering or dog whistle politics targeting a select group is outed when it is deemed something that would be unpalatable to the larger electorate.
In the 2012 presidential election, a video went viral of GOP contender Mitt Romney telling those attending a private fundraiser, which was priced at $50,000 a plate, that “47 percent” of Americans saw themselves of victims and wanted the government to provide for them.
Rivals used the video – filmed by a bartender at the event who released it to Mother Jones magazine – to portray Romney as elitist who was out of touch with the struggles of many Americans.
Though the bartender was not a tracker, the moment he captured was what people who are planted by campaigns at rivals’ events hope to record.
“Most politicians look at the polls,” said Gort-Brown, “they put their finger to the wind, and say, 'There’s the crowd, and I must follow them.'”

Donald Trump meets with black pastors at 'amazing meeting'

Donald Trump met with a group of black pastors for several hours Monday, calling the session an "amazing meeting" that went longer than planned because "we came up with lots of good ideas."
 But there was no wide-ranging endorsement from the group, some of whom had said they were surprised when the gathering was advertised as such by Trump's Republican presidential campaign.
"We had a wonderful time in the meeting," said Darrell Scott, the senior pastor of New Spirit Revival Center in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, who helped to organize the meeting. "We made a lot of progress. It's not the last one."
After many of the religious leaders invited to the meet-and-greet objected over the weekend to its description as an endorsement event, Trump's campaign decided to keep the meeting private and canceled a press conference afterward meant to announce the support of the pastors.
Instead, a few of the meeting's participants met with reporters in the lobby of Trump Tower, with the billionaire businessman and reality TV star uncharacteristically waiting patiently for his turn to speak.
"We actually didn't think we were going to be having a press conference, but we all thought it was such a good meeting that we would do that," Trump said. "And we have many, many endorsements that came out of the meeting."
When asked, neither Trump nor Scott would not say how many of those who attended had now decided to back his campaign.
"Some committed. I don't know the number," Scott said. "The rest are praying about it. They said, `We have to go pray about it.' They'll come back and endorse at a future time."
Trump has been courting the support of evangelical black clergy members as he works to broaden his appeal in a crowded Republican field.
Scott said more than 100 preachers from across the country attended the meeting, despite criticism in an open letter in Ebony magazine from more than 100 black religious leaders.
 In the letter, the group wrote that "Trump's racially inaccurate, insensitive and incendiary rhetoric should give those charged with the care of the spirits and souls of black people great pause."
They also expressed concern that the meeting Monday would "give Trump the appearance of legitimacy among those who follow your leadership and respect your position as clergy."
 Earlier this month, a black protester was roughed up by Trump supporters at a rally in Birmingham, Alabama. Trump said after the incident, "Maybe he should have been roughed up because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing."
Trump also drew criticism recently for retweeting an image of inaccurate statistics that vastly overrepresented the number of whites killed by blacks, among other errors.
Trump said after Monday's meeting that he would not change his tone as a candidate, which he said had taken him to "first position" in preference polls.
"The beautiful thing about the meeting is that they didn't really ask me to change the tone," Trump said. "I think they really want to see victory, because ultimately it is about, we want to win and we want to win together."

Nearly 1,000 Clinton emails had classified info

The State Department’s latest release of Hillary Clinton documents brings the total number of Clinton emails known to contain classified material to nearly 1,000.
The department on Monday released its largest batch of emails yet, posting 7,800 pages of the former secretary of state’s communications.
The latest batch contains 328 emails deemed to have classified information. According to the State Department, that brings the total number with classified information to 999.
The emails in question were deemed classified before their release by the department – and the former secretary of state has said all along she never sent emails with material marked classified at the time.
But the large number of emails containing now-classified material further underscores how much sensitive information was crossing her private server, a situation her critics have described as a security risk.
Shortly after the release, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus released a statement saying, "With the number of emails containing classified information now numbering nearly one thousand, this latest court-ordered release underscores the degree to which Hillary Clinton jeopardized our national security and has tried to mislead the American people."
Her email practices are also the subject of a federal investigation.
The documents in Monday’s release were largely sent or received in 2012 or 2013.
State Department spokeswoman Elizabeth Trudeau described it as the department's largest production to date as part of the court-ordered disclosure of emails from the personal server Clinton used while leading the department.
The emails also cover the tumultuous period before and after the Sept. 11, 2012, Benghazi terror attacks. On the night of the attacks, the communications show Clinton notifying top advisers of confirmation from the Libyans that then-Ambassador Chris Stevens had died.
Early the next morning, Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills tells Clinton they “recovered both bodies” and were looking to get out a statement; Sean Smith, information management officer, was the other State Department employee killed that night.
Another exchange from early 2013 shows retired diplomat James Jeffrey appearing to do damage control over a Washington Post piece from him titled, “How to Prevent the Next Benghazi.”
Jeffrey starts the conversation by warning Mills he’d been contacted by the Post regarding his views and reluctantly agreed to comply. He warns it would be posted and “you may see this piece as critical of expeditionary diplomacy. It's not; I've risked my life practicing it. But having lost over 100 personnel KIA and WIA (and two ARBs judging me) in my time in Iraq (and a son going back to Afghanistan on Department assignment this summer) I feel very strongly that we have to be prudent. If the media ask me if there is any daylight between me and you all I will cite the Pickering Mullen ARB and the Secretary's testimony and say absolutely not.”
Forwarding the article, he adds, “(Title is not what I gave them and stupid as I state explicitly at the end that being in Benghazi was the right policy call).”