Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers on 'The Real Story with Gretchen Carlson'

She's weeks away from having another baby!

What a great lady.

The #ObamaCare Implosion is Real — And it's Spectacular!

From Director Blue, "HEADLINE O' THE DAY: ClusterCare":

The cover of today's New York Post, subtle as always. pic.twitter.com/peF0g6ejpL

— Tom Bevan (@TomBevanRCP) November 15, 2013

BONUS: From Johah Goldberg, "Obamacare Schadenfreudarama":

If you can’t take some joy, some modicum of relief and mirth, in the unprecedentedly spectacular beclowning of the president, his administration, its enablers, and, to no small degree, liberalism itself, then you need to ask yourself why you’re following politics in the first place. Because, frankly, this has been one of the most enjoyable political moments of my lifetime. I wake up in the morning and rush to find my just-delivered newspaper with a joyful expectation of worsening news so intense, I feel like Morgan Freeman should be narrating my trek to the front lawn. Indeed, not since Dan Rather handcuffed himself to a fraudulent typewriter, hurled it into the abyss, and saw his career plummet like Ted Kennedy was behind the wheel have I enjoyed a story more.

Jean-Claude Van Damme Epic Volvo 'Split' Ad

From Mary Katharine Ham, at Hot Air, "Video: Jean-Claude Van Dammmmmnnnn."

Socialist Kshama Sawant Wins Seattle City Council Seat

Well, it's Seattle.

I doubt this is a bellwether, especially considering how socialism's taking a beating at the national level.

At the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, "Socialist Sawant wins City Council seat."

Seattle City Council candidate Kshama Sawant, a “Socialist Alternative” insurgent, has unseated four-term incumbent Richard Conlin, with the latest batch of mail-in ballots nearly tripling Sawant’s lead to 1,148 votes.

A year ago, Sawant was running against the Legislature’s most powerful Democrat, House Speaker Frank Chopp, charging that the “Democratic Party-majority government” had slashed billions from education programs while bestowing tax exemptions on “rich corporations.”

On Thursday evening, however, the victorious “working class activist” Sawant was headed for a 36th District Democratic fundraiser sponsored by State Sen. Jeanne Kohn-Welles. Sawant’s tireless journalist booster, Stranger news editor Dominic Holden, is appearing on a post-election panel at the event.

The Sawant victory comes exactly 97 years after Seattle voters put their first outspoken radical into office, Seattle School Board member Anna Louise Strong. Strong would write about the Wobblies, oppose U.S. entry into World War I and eventually end her days in China, where she was on friendly terms with Mao Zedong.

While the Occupy Seattle organizer is about to occupy an office in the council chambers, ballots are still being counted in several close races. One big ballot measure is still hanging, while other contests appear narrowly decided.

The $15-an-hour minimum wage proposal in SeaTac, already under legal challenge, leads by exactly 53 votes. The margin was cushioned by 12 votes in Thursday’s count.

The proposal for taxpayer-financed elections in Seattle, Proposition 1, has climbed in the late vote count. Unlike Sawant — who overcame a 6,193-vote election night deficit — Prop. 1 hasn’t quite climbed enough. The “No” side still has a lead of 2,656 votes.

So, an "Occupy Seattle" organizer wins a seat on the city council. Maybe she can personally clean the defecation off the city's police cars, the idiot.

And wouldn't you know it, but the folks at Democracy Now! are down with it, to say nothing of Katrina vandenHeuval at the Nation.

Again, thank goodness the left's socialist agenda is imploding at the national level. You'll always have the local communist kooks, but folks are finally waking up to the socialist nightmare that's darkly enveloped the country since at least 2008.

IMAGE CREDIT: Kshama Sawant on Twitter.

39 House Democrats Vote for Upton Bill

At LAT, "Dozens of House Democrats back Republican healthcare bill":

WASHINGTON — Dealing a blow to President Obama’s effort to fix problems with his healthcare law, more than three dozen House Democrats voted Friday to support a Republican-sponsored bill to address the crisis, brushing aside White House warnings that the legislation would only make matters worse.

Thirty-nine Democrats joined Republicans in a 261-157 vote  to approve the legislation, offered by Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), which would allow insurers to continue selling individual policies that do not meet new federal standards.

The Democratic defections, which the White House and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) had hoped to prevent, highlighted the growing unease among House Democrats over the botched rollout of the program and dissatisfaction with the administration's proposed fix, announced by the president on Thursday.

Both the Upton bill and the president's administrative fix were crafted to respond to the number of cancellation notices being sent to customers in the individual insurance market, despite repeated promises by Obama that Americans would be allowed to keep their plans if they wanted.

The GOP-controlled House was always expected to approve the bill, which Republicans described as the first step in a campaign to kill the Affordable Care Act.

“The president repeatedly said that if you liked your healthcare plan you could keep it,” said House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.). “We knew this was a promise he could not keep, and now it’s a promise he has broken.”

The vote was seen as a critical test of Democratic unity. The president sought to tamp down a revolt from congressional Democrats by announcing the administrative remedy, which gave insurance companies federal permission to renew policies for one year.

Also at NYT, "House Passes Bill Letting People Keep Their Health Plans."

Democrats Won't Apologize for Destroying America's Healthcare System

From John McCormack, at the Weekly Standard, "House Democratic Leaders: We Will Not Apologize to Americans Losing Their Health Insurance":

One week ago, President Obama apologized for giving millions of Americans false assurances that they could keep their health care plans if they liked them. At a press conference Thursday evening, House Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, Xavier Becerra, and Jim Clyburn were asked if they would like to apologize for making the same false claim. All of them declined.

"I don't think there's anything for us to apologize for," said Clyburn.

"There is nothing in the Affordable Care Act that said that your insurance company should cancel you," said Minority Leader Pelosi.

In fact, the Affordable Care Act says that plans created after March of 2010 must be cancelled, and the law also gave the administration the authority to write regulations that forced the cancellation of some policies that existed prior to March 2010.

"Did I ever tell my constituents that if they liked their plan they could keep it?" Pelosi asked. "I would have if I'd ever met anybody who liked his or her plan. But that was not my experience."

In fact, Pelosi said in 2009: "If you like what you have, you can keep it." Pelosi's website still states: "Keep your doctor, and your current plan, if you like them."

"As far as the Affordable Care Act is concerned, what the president said was completely accurate," Pelosi said.

More at the link.

Mitt Romney on CBS 'This Morning': 'The Real Problem the President Has' Isn’t a Website, 'It’s Dishonesty...'

I caught this earlier --- and was reminded of how much better things would be if Romney'd have won last year.

Instapundit has it, "Related: Romney’s Uncanny Predictions About Obama’s Second Term Make Him Look Like He Had Psychic Superpowers."

#ObamaCare Implosion Signals Collapse of Radical Progressivism

There's lots and lots of coverage of the implosion of the president's signature legislation.

I'll be posting as much as I can throughout the day, but certainly the biggest story is now, whatever happens with the law, Obama has personally crossed a political threshold over which he'll never return. He's just not the same old ego-driven big-talker, with his chin stuck up high in the air like a pompous know-it-all. Nope. Now he's a mumbling dishonest groveler struggling to appear reasonably competent in the face of the biggest government debacle in decades. It's been an absolutely stunning political defeat. But of even bigger significance is what the president's collapse means for modern progressivism --- not "liberalism," mind you, but "progressivism," as the left adopted that term to escape the disastrous political baggage of modern liberalism and reinvent leftist ideology as big-government socialism with a wink and a nudge. With enough race-baiting and political demonization of the right, the ruse worked well enough to earn the presidential impostor a second term. But the jig is up. The bloom is off the progressive rose.

Charles Krauthammer offers a devastating autopsy, "Why liberals are panicked about Obamacare":

At stake ... is more than the fate of one presidency or of the current Democratic majority in the Senate. At stake is the new, more ambitious, social-democratic brand of American liberalism introduced by Obama, of which Obamacare is both symbol and concrete embodiment.

Precisely when the GOP was returning to a more constitutionalist conservatism committed to reforming, restructuring and reining in the welfare state (see, for example, the Paul Ryan Medicare reform passed by House Republicans with near-unanimity), Obama offered a transformational liberalism designed to expand the role of government, enlarge the welfare state and create yet more new entitlements (see, for example, his call for universal preschool in his most recent State of the Union address).

The centerpiece of this vision is, of course, Obamacare, the most sweeping social reform in the past half-century, affecting one-sixth of the economy and directly touching the most vital area of life of every citizen.

As the only socially transformational legislation in modern American history to be enacted on a straight party-line vote, Obamacare is wholly owned by the Democrats. Its unraveling would catastrophically undermine their underlying ideology of ever-expansive central government providing cradle-to-grave care for an ever-grateful citizenry.

For four years, this debate has been theoretical. Now it’s real. And for Democrats, it’s a disaster.

It begins with the bungled rollout. If Washington can’t even do the Web site — the literal portal to this brave new world — how does it propose to regulate the vast ecosystem of American medicine?

Beyond the competence issue is the arrogance. Five million freely chosen, freely purchased, freely renewed health-care plans are summarily canceled. Why? Because they don’t meet some arbitrary standard set by the experts in Washington.

For all his news conference gyrations about not deliberately deceiving people with his “if you like it” promise, the law Obama so triumphantly gave us allows you to keep your plan only if he likes it. This is life imitating comedy — that old line about a liberal being someone who doesn’t care what you do as long as it’s mandatory.

Lastly, deception. The essence of the entitlement state is government giving away free stuff. Hence Obamacare would provide insurance for 30 million uninsured, while giving everybody tons of free medical services — without adding “one dime to our deficits,” promised Obama.

This being inherently impossible, there had to be a catch. Now we know it: hidden subsidies. Toss millions of the insured off their plans and onto the Obamacare “exchanges,” where they would be forced into more expensive insurance packed with coverage they don’t want and don’t need — so that the overcharge can be used to subsidize others.

The reaction to the incompetence, arrogance and deception has ranged from ridicule to anger. But more is in jeopardy than just panicked congressional Democrats. This is the signature legislative achievement of the Obama presidency, the embodiment of his new entitlement-state liberalism. If Obamacare goes down, there will be little left of its underlying ideology.

And realize that it's not just people like Krauthammer who recognize the impact of ObamaCare's implosion on the entire leftist project. Ezra Klein, perhaps the progressive left's biggest ObamaCare booster outside of the White House, grudgingly acknowledges how this disaster is crushing modern progressivism, even if he's loathe to express it in so many words. See, "Wonkbook: Obamacare’s troubles threaten Obama’s core political project":

Like many Democrats of his generation, Obama believes that the government is necessary — but that the government must be redeemed if it's to be trusted. He thinks the American people are rightly suspicious that the government doesn't do big things well. He venerates the market's capacity for innovation and efficiency even as he struggles against its ruthlessness and cruelty. And he ran for office convinced that if the American political system was going to be able to address the country's problems going forward, it would require an end to the old ideological battles and the forging of a new policy consensus.

The Affordable Care Act is the purest incarnation of these theories. It's meant to protect Americans from the predations of both the job market and the health-insurance market by making sure the poorest Americans can afford coverage, the sickest Americans can't be denied it and no one is tricked into plans that prove inadequate when health crises strike.

But it's also meant to avoid the pitfalls — both substantive and political — of big-government programs by relying on private insurers competing in tightly regulated, highly transparent, government-structured marketplaces. That's why Obama modeled the plan off of Mitt Romney's largely successful health reforms in Massachusetts. What better way to absorb Republican ideas and generate Republican buy-in then to adopt an idea from one of the GOP's leading lights?

Obamacare's success would've affirmed the theories underlying Obama's presidency — theories that could then be picked up by future presidents. Instead, Obamacare is systematically blowing apart the very premises it's based on.

Of course we'll be seeing last gasp efforts on the left to spin the ObamaCare collapse as the fault of Republicans or the insurance companies, but at this point the most common word I'm hearing on television news is "panic." It's indeed a turning point.

Now there's lots of shadenfreude on the right, and for good reason. This is a wholly owned Democrat debacle. The important thing for conservatives is to avoid acceding co-ownership of the sundry healthcare fixes now being floated on Capital Hill. Sure, constituents need relief. But short-term fixes to the law aren't smart. We need to repeal and replace ObamaCare in toto, and despite the meme that Republicans haven't offered alternatives, the fact is market-based healthcare reforms have been in wide circulation throughout the entire past five years of the Obama interregnum. What matters is for Republicans to win majority control of Congress and the presidency. Then they'll have the institutional political power to unwind the plague of progressivism that's been destroying America for these last few sorry years.

BONUS: At Hot Air, "Krauthammer: Obama’s insurance “fix” just another example of him “rewriting a law unilaterally”."

Obama Offers Fake Solution to #ObamaCare Crisis

At IBD, "Obama's Phony Cancellation Solution":

Fraud: President Obama's attempt to fix the insurance cancellation problem that his own law created isn't meant to help anyone. It's an attempt to shift blame for the mess onto the backs of insurance companies. Some fix.

Even a cursory glance at Obama's "plan" shows that it won't solve anything. Obama says state insurance commissioners could, if they want, let insurance companies extend existing individual plans another year. But they don't have to.

Obama would also leave it up to the insurance companies whether they'd extend these policies, while requiring them to send letters to millions who've already gotten cancellation notices explaining why their current plans suck — thereby loading still more costs onto the backs of insurance companies.

Let's put aside for the moment the question of whether Obama can even do this legally.

This is a president who, after all, has already arbitrarily changed and postponed various parts of ObamaCare — such as the congressional opt-out, the employer mandate, various enforcement rules, cuts to Medicare Advantage, out-of-pocket caps — when they would have proved politically hazardous.

The question is: Why should anyone trust Obama's latest "you can keep your plan" promise?

It turns out, no one should.

Even if Obama's proposal were legal — and he hasn't even convinced liberal stalwarts like Howard Dean, who wonders whether Obama "has the legal authority to do this, since this was a congressional bill that set this up" — it is logistically impossible. And Obama knows it.

Continue reading.

Democratic Lawmakers Running for Cover

At WSJ, "As Her Poll Numbers Drop, Sen. Kay Hagan of North Carolina Steps Up Pressure on President Obama to Fix Health Law":

WASHINGTON—After President Barack Obama outlined his health-law retreat Thursday, Sen. Kay Hagan, a Democrat from North Carolina, joined some colleagues in expressing misgivings. "A one-year fix is not enough and we need to do more," she said.

To understand why Democrats are increasingly nervous about the health law, and why Mr. Obama rushed through a patch to calm their anxieties, look no further than Mrs. Hagan, who defeated Sen. Elizabeth Dole in 2008 when the president carried North Carolina.

Up for re-election in 2014, and with her poll numbers tumbling, Mrs. Hagan has emerged as a leader of the Democratic caucus openly criticizing the botched rollout of the Affordable Care Act. In the past month, she has called for extending an enrollment deadline, requested a formal investigation and vented her frustrations personally to the president. She took the rare step of publicizing that exchange after a White House meeting with other Senate Democrats.

Many of the vocally critical Democrats are up for re-election next year, including Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu. She's leading an effort to ensure that people can keep insurance that was canceled as a result of the law, the problem Mr. Obama sought to fix Thursday when he announced a one-year reprieve for that category of plan. Mrs. Hagan backs the Landrieu plan.

The imperative for Mrs. Hagan, however, is particularly acute, and is a warning sign for other incumbents facing voters in the midterms. A new poll this week showed a dramatic narrowing of the North Carolina Senate race that hadn't been particularly close. Americans for Prosperity, an outside group aligned with Republicans, is spending $1.7 million on a television ad criticizing Mrs. Hagan for supporting the health law.

President Obama said that Americans who received insurance cancellation letters will be able to keep those plans, though he urged people to look at other options availble on state and federal marketplaces.

Enrollment Under the Affordable Care Act
See the number of people who have selected a private health insurance plan sold on the new federally run or state-run exchanges in their first month of operations, as well as the number of people deemed eligible for Medicaid, the federal-state health program for the poor that is being expanded in some states.

"If we can get [the health law] rectified between now and the spring, Kay Hagan may be all right," said state Rep. Marvin Lucas, a Democrat from Spring Lake who supports the senator. "If not, she'll be in trouble."

Despite her consistent support for the health law, Mrs. Hagan also has been pushing for years to make changes. She backed a repeal of the 2.3% tax on the sale of medical-devices and co-sponsored a bill to eliminate the 15-person panel to find savings in Medicare.

"My focus has always been working to fix this law, rather than turning the issue into a political football," Mrs. Hagan said in a statement Thursday, responding to a Wall Street Journal request for comment.

Mr. Obama acknowledged the headaches the law was creating for his party. "There is no doubt that our failure to roll out the [Affordable Care Act] smoothly has put a burden on Democrats, whether they're running or not, because they stood up and supported this effort through thick and thin," he said Thursday.

Republicans seeking to topple Mrs. Hagan in next year's midterm elections said she is simply trying to distance herself from a law she helped pass and has supported since.

"Democrats like Kay Hagan weren't being honest when they promised everyone could keep their health plans," said Brook Hougesen, a spokeswoman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the chamber's campaign arm. "Now, in an act of pure political desperation, Hagan is attempting to hide the fact that she was the deciding vote on Obamacare."

A poll released this week by Public Policy Polling, a Democratic firm based in North Carolina, showed that the Republicans vying for the chance to face Mrs. Hagan next year are locked in a statistical dead heat with her. For much of the year, they were trailing by double digits.

The poll also found that 49% of North Carolina voters disapprove of Mrs. Hagan's performance, up 10 percentage points from September. Noting the torrent of attack ads, Tom Jensen, of Public Policy Polling, said, "Watching TV in North Carolina right now, you'd think it was September 2014 instead of November 2013."

Janie Benson, the head of the Democratic Party in Haywood County, acknowledged that the health-law implementation woes have given Republicans ammunition despite some unpopular bills passed by the Republican-controlled state legislature.

Like most other incumbents, Ms. Hagan enters 2014 with a sizable war chest. She had $5.4 million in her campaign account at the end of the September, according to the Federal Election Commission. Her next closest rival, GOP statehouse Speaker Thom Tillis, had $838,000.

Diana Vickers

At FHM, "Why we went old school on Diana Vickers' FHM cover."

'Because admitting that their god, the Lying King Obama, has lied is just too much to ask of their fine, libtard, nuanced minds...'

From Emperor Misha, "New York Slimes, the Grey Meth Whore, Digging Desperately for New Euphemisms":

The more we observe the desperate contortions our so-called “press” twist themselves into in order to protect their village idiot president, the more we realize how wrong we were to shake our heads at the blatant lies of Pravda and Izvestiya that we monitored in our youth. Those guys were the very epitome of honesty compared to the “free press” of the United States of America.

And still it says less about the propaganda-spewing weasels of papers such as the New York Times than it says about the drooling idiots who subscribe to them. Who’s the bigger idiot? The publisher or the fucktards who pay for his propaganda?

Meanwhile, the Liberal Fascist Party members in DC are scrambling for the life boats, realizing all of a sudden that perhaps playing the part of the band on the Titanic while Obama sails off into the sunset for a life of ease isn’t all it’s been cracked up to be.

RTWT.

The 100 Things Every 20-Something Needs to Realize

From Elite Daily, "If you don’t work to improve yourself every day then you are wasting your life" (via Instapundit).

Adrift, Confused, and Over His Head: President's Statement on 'Fix' for #ObamaCare (VIDEO)

From Jennifer Rubin, at the Washington Post, "The Obama-disaster news conference" (via Memeorandum):

President Obama’s just-completed press conference was arguably worse than the Obamacare rollout. Alternately confessing, apologizing and blame shifting, he inadvertently made the case against his own executive skills, Obamacare and big government in general.

His announced fix is aimed at remedying the mass cancellation of individually-purchased insurance plans by letting insurance companies re-offer non-compliant policies. This makes clear that contrary to the statements from Jay Carney and Valerie Jarrett, Obamacare and not the insurers were the cause of the cancellations. Obama let slip that this is one big blame-shifting exercise when he announced that no one would be able to say Obamacare caused them to lose insurance. It is of course false because it is unlikely all the canceled policies can be restored.

The fix undermines the essential premise of Obamacare, namely that young, healthy people need to be herded into the  exchanges. Not only will this explicitly encourage many people to stay out but also will communicate that the entire program is in flux. Don’t sign up now — the deal may improve as the president gets more desperate!....

This is a president adrift, confused and entirely over his head. He has, in essence, confirmed what his harshest critics have long been arguing: he is incompetent and unknowledgable about how the world operates.  And we have three more years left of this.

More at the link.

Repeal: It's the Only Cure

At Dianny's Rants:

Those of us who reside on planet earth and not in Hopey/Changey Land knew this would be the outcome of passing Obamacare. We shouted it from the rooftops all through 2009 and into 2010 before the law passed. We continued to warn about the damage it would do, most recently, during Ted Cruz’s 21-hour filibuster at the end of September.

And here it is.

Everything we told you would happen is happening.

You didn’t listen to us then, please listen to us now.

There is no “fix” to “problems” that are arising with Obamacare. The problems are built in to the very structure of the law. What is happening is exactly what they wanted to have happen. Destroy the private insurance industry. Collapse the healthcare system. Then, proclaim that the only solution is complete government control in the form of single-payer, socialized medicine.

In a phrase: Medicaid for America.

The Republicans in the House and Senate: You too need to be reminded of that fact. Because if you lose sight of the reason Obamacare became law, you too will fall for the idea of “fixing” it.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was never meant to “work” in the sense that it will protect patients or make healthcare affordable.

I’m going to repeat myself here. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is doing exactly what they wanted it to do. It is destroying the private health insurance market. It is stripping the individual of any sovereignty over his or her own life, health and well-being. It is creating a vacuum in which these scurvy Liberals can then declare the need for a single-payer, government-run healthcare system.

There is nothing to “fix” because Obamacare is working exactly the way it was designed to work.

These Liberal Democrats who are proposing to “fix” it, have no interest in changing any aspect of the law. Their only hope is to change your opinion of them.

The only solution, the only cure to this law and the mess it has made is to repeal it.

Continue reading.

Health Insurance Industry Slams White House #ObamaCare Fix!

That sound you're hearing is the swirl of the #ObamaCare death spiral.

Here's the lead headline at Memeorandum, "Insurance Industry Rips White House Obamacare Fix."

And at Hot Air, "Scapegoated insurers fire back at Obama over “administrative fix”: You’re not pinning this ObamaCare mess on us."

Also at AoSHQ, "Insurance Industry: Obama's 'Fix' Is Entirely Unworkable."

And the statement of Karen Ignagni, CEO of America’s Health Insurance Plans, is at the Wall Street Journal, "Insurance Group Skeptical of Obama Plan."

Wolf Blitzer has an Inagni interview at the clip.

'Lord of the Flies' at Spurgeon Intermediate School in Santa Ana

Another harsh look at public education in America, this time close to home.

At the Los Angeles Times, "A hostile work environment, but 'these are not bad kids'":

On the first day of school at Spurgeon Intermediate, after the first bell had rung and administrators swept the halls for stragglers, new Principal Todd Irving faced dozens of parents in a room near his office. A translator stood at his side.

Eliazar Arines, whose son is in the eighth grade, told Irving that last year her boy was ridiculed so mercilessly that he was hospitalized for depression.

"I came to complain five times, and no one paid attention to me," she said, her voice cracking.

Edelmira Rodriguez told Irving her son's ID was snatched and marked up with slurs. She too complained, and nothing was done.

One woman, who recently moved to Santa Ana from Tustin, said what many in the room were thinking:

"When someone says Spurgeon, it's like the worst thing in the world."

Spurgeon Intermediate in Santa Ana sits squarely in the center of one of the poorest ZIP Codes in Orange County. For years, it has consistently ranked one of the lowest-performing schools in the region. But early this year, things got even worse.

In March, 36 teachers and employees took the unusual step of filing a hostile work environment complaint against the administration and students. Children were accosting adults, smoking marijuana, making sexual noises in class, the complaint said. By the end of the school year, more than 40% of the students had been suspended for a total of more than 800 days.

Things were so bad, one teacher said, it was like "Lord of the Flies."

Continue reading.

Lara Logan Hammered on Botched Benghazi Report

Her "60 Minutes" Benghazi segment ran during the World Series and I never did get a chance to blog it.

Turns out that's probably for the better.

At the Washington Post, "CBS News and reporter Lara Logan face brutal criticism on flawed Benghazi report":

Lara Logan, CBS News’ hard-charging chief foreign correspondent, has repeatedly risked her life in pursuit of the story. She’s been shot at, arrested, blindfolded by militiamen, and physically assaulted by a mob while reporting from some of the most troubled places on earth.

But her mistaken “60 Minutes” report about a supposed eyewitness to the Benghazi consulate attacks has put Logan under a different kind of pressure. Despite two on-air apologies, including one Sunday night on “60 Minutes,” Logan, 42, has come in for widespread criticism and demands for a more complete explanation of how her Oct. 27 report went so wrong.

Until last week’s unpleasantness, the Washington-based journalist has lived an almost made-for-TV idea of a foreign correspondent. Glamorous and intense, she has reported — and reported well — from combat zones in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and across the Middle East for years. Among other reporting triumphs, she was the only journalist from an American TV network to broadcast live from Firdos Square in Baghdad in 2003 when American soldiers pulled down the statue of Saddam Hussein.

She has been amply recognized for her work, having won an Emmy Award, an Overseas Press Club Award and the duPont Award, among others.

At the same time, Logan’s globetrotting lifestyle and striking looks have occasionally made her tabloid fodder. Her relationship with a security contractor in Iraq, Joseph Burkett, became the subject of gossip columns in 2008; Logan and Burkett were married to others at the time, although both were separated from their spouses when their relationship began. They married in 2008 and live in Cleveland Park.

Logan’s feminity often attracts as much attention as her reporting; virtually every profile of her mentions that she was once a swimsuit model. On Halloween, people who live in Logan’s neighborhood were startled to see the famous TV correspondent trick-or-treating with her children while dressed in a hot-pink bodysuit costume, set off with high heels.

Logan has also been outspoken about some of the stories she has covered. After Rolling Stone published a story by Michael Hastings in 2010, in which aides to Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal criticized Washington’s civilian leadership of the war in Afghanistan, Logan rushed to defend McChrystal. “Michael Hastings has never served his country the way McChrystal has,” she told CNN.

Last year, she offered some unusually blunt public comments about the American response to the Benghazi attack. Speaking to a civic group in Chicago a month after the compound was assaulted on Sept. 11, 2012, Logan scoffed at the Obama administration’s initial statements about the incident as a spontaneous protest that spun into violence.

“When I look at what’s happening in Libya, there’s a big song and dance about whether this was a terrorist attack or a protest,” she said. “And you just want to scream, ‘For God’s sake, are you kidding me?’ The last time we were attacked like this was the USS Cole, which was a prelude to the 1998 embassy bombings, which was a prelude to 9/11. And you’re sending in the FBI to investigate? I hope to God that you are sending in your best clandestine warriors who are going to exact revenge and let the world know that the United States will not be attacked on its own soil, its ambassadors will not be murdered and the United States will not stand by and do nothing about it.”

Continue reading.

And at CBS News, "60 Minutes apologizes for Benghazi report."

'Palestinian' Teenager Kills Israeli Soldier on Bus in Afula, Northern Israel

He was stabbed to death.

At the Times of Israel, "Palestinian youth stabs sleeping soldier to death on Afula bus":

An Israeli soldier died after he was stabbed multiple times in the neck Wednesday morning by a Palestinian youth on a bus at the central bus station in Afula.

The soldier, 18-year-old Eden Atias of Nazareth Illit, was evacuated to the city’s Haemek Hospital. Doctors operated on him in an attempt to stabilize his condition but he succumbed to his injuries a few hours later.

His funeral was due to be held Wednesday evening at 23:00pm at the Nazareth Illit military cemetery.

Eyewitnesses said Atias was sleeping in his seat on the bus when he was attacked.

Also at the New York Times, "Attack on Israeli Worsens Tensions With Palestinians":

JERUSALEM — A Palestinian teenager fatally stabbed a 19-year-old Israeli soldier on a bus in northern Israel on Wednesday, according to the police, shocking Israelis who have grown unused to such killings in their cities and further clouding a peace process that was already severely strained by Israeli settlement plans in the West Bank.

Infuriated by news of long-term planning for more settlement housing, the Palestinian leadership is expected to meet on Thursday to discuss the future of the American-backed negotiations, which began this summer and were supposed to continue for nine months.

The latest crisis was set off by reports on Tuesday that Israel’s housing minister, Uri Ariel, had started planning for about 20,000 new settlement homes. But some officials suggested that talk of a possible collapse of the negotiations amounted to posturing, especially after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered Mr. Ariel to “reconsider” his new settlement plans, essentially putting them in suspension.

“If the Palestinians want to create an artificial crisis, that’s unfortunate,” a senior Israeli official said on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the peace talks in public. Dismissing Mr. Ariel’s plans as having no legal standing or practical significance, the Israeli official said the Palestinians were “going through the motions.”

Arik Ben-Shimon, an aide to Mr. Ariel, said on Wednesday that the new settlement planning was “frozen” but not canceled. Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, who offered his resignation two weeks ago, along with his fellow negotiator Muhammad Shtayyeh, in frustration over a lack of progress in the talks and the continuing settlement activity, said Mr. Ariel “needs to revoke the orders,” indicating that the issue was far from resolved.

The president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, confirmed in an interview with Egyptian CBC television this week that the Palestinian negotiating team had resigned, though it was never clear if the resignations had been accepted. Mr. Abbas said he was trying to persuade the negotiators to continue, adding, “If they don’t accept, I will form another team.”

The interview was recorded two days before the Palestinians learned of the latest settlement plans, according to Mr. Erekat.

The stabbing of the soldier on Wednesday also prompted calls for a rethinking on the Israeli side. Right-wing Israeli politicians have demanded a re-examination of Israel’s agreement to release 104 long-serving Palestinian prisoners from Israeli prisons in four batches as part of a deal to resume peace talks. Two of the four groups have already been released.

In a post on her Facebook page, Tzipi Livni, the minister leading the negotiations for the Israeli government, wrote: “I wrote here earlier and harshly criticized the damage in announcing settlement construction, but I took the post off because the profound political debate about the future of our life here will certainly continue, but not now. Now I would like to pay my respects to the memory of the soldier and express sorrow to the family and to clarify one more thing: violence will not bring political achievements. And we will fight terrorism and extremists decisively and without compromise.”

The stabbing took place when the bus, traveling from Upper Nazareth to Tel Aviv, pulled into a station in the northern town of Afula.

The elusive peace. Sigh.

Seriously, the murder is so shocking because they're so infrequent since Israel put up the wall. And this 19-year-old terrorist didn't even have a legal visa to be in the country. The so-called Palestinians just want the Israelis dead and buried so they can take over all of historic Palestine. Screw 'em.

Alternative to #ObamaCare

From Ramesh Ponnuru and Yuval Levin, at the Wall Street Journal, "A Conservative Alternative to ObamaCare":

As ObamaCare's failures and victims mount by the day, Republicans have so far mostly been watching in amazement. They expected the law to fail, but even among its most ardent opponents few imagined the scale and speed of the fiasco.

Seeing the pileup, Republicans might be tempted to step aside and let ObamaCare continue to disappoint and infuriate Americans. After all, the GOP doesn't have the power to repeal the law, or even to make meaningful changes to undo its worst effects. So why not just watch the Democrats pay the price for their folly?

But such passivity would actually protect the Democrats from paying that price. What Republicans can and should do is offer the public something better. Now is the time to advance a conservative reform that can solve the serious, discrete problems of the health-care system in place before ObamaCare, but without needlessly upending people's arrangements or threatening what works in American medicine. That the Democrats are now making things worse doesn't mean the public wants to keep that prior system, or that Republicans should.

The biggest Republican misconception about health care is that the system before ObamaCare was a free-market paradise. On the contrary: It has consisted chiefly of massive and inefficient entitlements that threaten to bankrupt the nation; the lopsided tax treatment of employer-provided coverage that creates incentives for waste and overspending; and an underdeveloped individual market struggling to fill the gaps.

Exploding health-care costs and millions left needlessly uninsured are a result of misguided federal policies. Solutions require targeted reforms to those policies.

The outlines of such reforms have been apparent for years. The key is to enable all Americans to purchase coverage and to approach health care as consumers: with an interest in quality and an eye on cost.

The first step of a plan to replace ObamaCare should be a flat and universal tax benefit for coverage. Today's tax exclusion for employer-provided health coverage should be capped so that people would not get a bigger tax break by buying more extensive and expensive insurance. The result would be to make employees more cost-conscious; and competition for their favor would make insurance cheaper.

That tax break would also be available—ideally as a refundable credit sufficient at least for the purchase of catastrophic coverage—to people who do not have access to employer coverage. This would enable people who now choose not to buy insurance to get catastrophic coverage with no premium costs. It also would give those who want more-comprehensive coverage in the individual market the same advantage that people with employer plans get.

Medicaid could be converted into a means-based addition to that credit, allowing the poor to buy into the same insurance market as more affluent people—and so give them access to better health care than they can get now.

All those with continuous coverage, which everyone could afford thanks to the new tax treatment, would be protected from price spikes or plan cancellations if they got sick. This guarantee would provide a strong incentive to buy coverage, without the coercion of the individual mandate. People who have pre-existing conditions when the new rules take effect would be able to buy coverage through subsidized, high-risk pools.

By making at least catastrophic coverage available to all, and by giving people such incentives to obtain it, this approach could cover more people than ObamaCare was ever projected to reach, and at a significantly lower cost.

The new alternative would not require the mandates, taxes and heavy-handed regulations of ObamaCare. It would turn more people into shoppers for health care instead of passive recipients of it—and encourage the kind of insurance design, consumer behavior and intense competition that could help keep health costs down. Redesigned and directed this way, the flow of federal dollars and tax subsidies would do much less to distort health markets than it has for the last several decades, while getting far more people insured...

Click through at Google to read the whole thing.