U.S. Debt Levels Surge After GOP Caves to Democrat Budget Deal

At the Wall Street Journal, "U.S. Debt Jumps to $17.076 Trillion":

Well, that didn’t take long. Congress’s deal to suspend the government’s borrowing limit on Wednesday night led to a sharp spike in total U.S. debt on Thursday. This is largely because the Treasury Department had been using emergency steps to prevent the debt from increasing since mid-May. Total government debt had hovered at close to $16.7 trillion for around five months.

Actually, right now we don't even have a debt ceiling. Things can just keep spiraling out of control.

More at iOWNTHEWORLD, "U.S. debt jumps a record $328 billion — tops $17 trillion for first time."

Bill O'Reilly Slams 'Scandalous #ObamaCare Rollout 'Disaster'

A great talking points memo. O'Reilly hits the administration on Benghazi stonewalling as well.



PREVIOUSLY: "The #ObamaCare Omertà."

Emily Yoffe: Rape More Likely for College Women Who Drink (VIDEO)

Sounds like common sense, right?

Well, the idiot left went into meltdown mode with a "blame the victim" smear campaign against Ms. Yoffe, who's a columnist at the left-wing Slate website.

I saw this first at Instapundit, "SEXUAL ASSAULT PREVENTION ADVICE FROM EMILY YOFFE: College Women: Stop Getting Drunk: It’s closely associated with sexual assault. And yet we’re reluctant to tell women to stop doing it":

Of course, the men are often drunk, too. But when a drunk woman couples with a drunk man, the drunk man is somehow still responsible, while the woman is a victim, because she’s drunk. “Educating students about rape, teaching them that by definition a very drunk woman can’t consent to sex, is crucial.” Double standard much?

Well, yeah. Leftist ideology is all hypocrisy and double-standards.

Also at iOWNTHEWORLD, "The Kneejerk Idiotic Non-Thinking Irritatingly Stupefying Left."

And see the "stupefying left" in action, at Lawyers, Girls and Rape, "The Sexual Assault of Women Isn’t a Problem of Women Drinking." (Almost five hundred comments of pure stupefying regressive outrage.)



More preening feminist stupidity from Katie McDonough, at the communist webzine Salon, "Sorry, Emily Yoffe: Blaming assault on women’s drinking is wrong, dangerous and tired."

And from Ms. Yoffe, "Emily Yoffe Responds to Her Critics."

The #ObamaCare Omertà

A devastating editorial at the Wall Street Journal, "Sebelius on the Run" (via Memeorandum):

The Affordable Care Act's botched rollout has stunned its media cheering section, and it even seems to have surprised the law's architects. The problems run much deeper than even critics expected, and whatever federal officials, White House aides and outside contractors are doing to fix them isn't working. But who knows? Omerta is the word of the day as the Obama Administration withholds information from the public.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is even refusing to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in a hearing this coming Thursday. HHS claims she has scheduling conflicts, but we hope she isn't in the White House catacomb under interrogation by Valerie Jarrett about her department's incompetence.

The department is also refusing to make available lower-level officials who might detail the source or sources of this debacle. Ducking an investigation with spin is one thing. Responding with a wall of silence to the invitation of a duly elected congressional body probing the use of more than half a billion taxpayer dollars is another. This Obama crowd is something else.

Continue reading.

Also at Power Line, "ADVENTURES IN OBAMACARE."

BuzzFeed Goes Viral

The viral-content website is itself looking to go viral.

At LAT, "BuzzFeed aims to up its viral-video volume with L.A. office":

Jonah Peretti, founder and chief executive of the wildly popular website BuzzFeed, is trying to choose his favorite online video.

"'Drunk vs. Stoned' was pretty fun," he finally says, singling out a BuzzFeed video in which a staffer tests whether it's easier to function on alcohol or on marijuana by getting really drunk and, on a different night, getting really baked. The three-minute video, featuring side-by-side comparisons of dancing, ball catching, drawing and Lego building, has scored more than 3.1 million views since its debut two months ago.

BuzzFeed itself is riding high these days. "Drunk vs. Stoned" was just the latest monster hit in its arsenal of viral social content, which altogether attracted record traffic of 85 million unique visitors in August, three times the number it had a year earlier. By this time next year, Peretti predicts, BuzzFeed will be one of the world's most visited websites.

Peretti and BuzzFeed's staff members, self-described Internet nerds, have an uncanny ability to predict what will blow up online. The Manhattan company measures success not by page views but by shareability — the number of people who like a post enough to pass it on to their friends via Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and other social media channels.

"We would rather someone get to a post because a friend suggested it to them," said Doree Shafrir, BuzzFeed's executive editor. "No one wants to share something crappy, because then they look like idiots. We're very cognizant of that."

Launched in 2006, BuzzFeed is dominated by lighthearted, frothy fare: the funniest cat GIFs of the week, scandalous Miley Cyrus photos, 19 Reasons Why Pants Are the Enemy.

But Peretti, who also co-founded the Huffington Post, is determined to turn BuzzFeed into more than just a site known for funny lists and has been vocal about his ambitious plans to grow the company into an all-around media juggernaut for the mobile social age.

To do so, the 39-year-old hired Ben Smith from Politico to be BuzzFeed's editor in chief, beefed up the site's hard news coverage and invested in long-form journalism. To reach international readers, BuzzFeed on Monday announced that it would add Spanish, French and Portuguese versions of the site.

His latest push: A major video initiative that has brought BuzzFeed, naturally, to Los Angeles, where it has converted a former beauty supply store on Beverly Boulevard into a bureau largely devoted to conceiving and producing viral videos. It also leased a smaller production facility a couple of miles away in Hollywood.

"Video was a huge missing piece," Peretti said during a recent visit to L.A., where he discussed his plans while shuffling a stack of yellow stickers printed with "omg," "lol" and "cute." "We wanted to do for video what we did with other kinds of content."

They're too leftist for me, but I frequently enjoy their content.

More at that top link.

Texas Backs Ted Cruz

We need more like him in Congress, lots more.

At the New York Times, "Texans Stick With Cruz Despite Defeat in Washington":

HOUSTON — Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas and the face of the angry right, has been criticized, lambasted and lampooned for putting the nation through a 16-day government shutdown and the prospect of a financial default.

Bloomberg Businessweek put him on its cover as a mad hatter who defines how “crazy is the new normal.” Representative Peter T. King, a Republican from New York, has said Republican leaders need to go after Mr. Cruz and accused him of bringing the country “to the edge of ruin.”

In Texas, it is a different story.

Drivers speeding down a busy highway about 70 miles outside Houston have been greeted with two blunt messages that Bruce Labay put up at his oil field services business. One declared that Mr. Labay was tired of softhearted Republicans, though he used a more colorful adjective. The other read, “We Need More Republicans Like Ted Cruz.”

Mr. Labay, 55, made his signs by sticking 1,200 plastic foam cups, one by one, into the loops of his chain-link fence, a 90-minute project that filled much of the fencing around BL Oilfield Services in the town of El Campo.

“I was proud of him,” Mr. Labay said of the state’s junior senator. “I was proud he was a Texan. I wish they would have held firm, and we’d still be shut down.”

Home states and districts are usually loyal to their senators and representatives in times of political crisis. But the continued support for Mr. Cruz among Texas Republicans illustrates something larger: the cultural and political divide that continues to widen between a red state that President Obama lost by nearly 16 points in the 2012 election and the blue or even purple parts of the country where Mr. Cruz’s tone and tactics have caused outrage and consternation.

“Texas is not America,” said Matt Mackowiak, a Republican political consultant in Austin and the former spokesman for Mr. Cruz’s Republican predecessor in the Senate, Kay Bailey Hutchison. “It’s in America, but it’s not America. National polls don’t mean anything. Democrats haven’t won a statewide office in Texas since 1994. There are no Peter Kings in Texas.”

Continue reading.

I posted on the Bloomberg cover here, "The Crazy 'Deadender' Tea Party."

Added: From Twitchy, "‘Take down Ted Cruz’: Capitol Police investigate threat against Senator; Haters add fuel to fire."

You know, that's not some isolated incident. The leftist press is fueling some Jacobinism. And leftist eliminationism is accelerating. For example, "MoveOn hosts petition calling for arrest of Boehner, Cantor for sedition."

#ObamaCare Disaster Deepens as Insurers Get Wrong Data

At WSJ, "Health Website Woes Widen as Insurers Get Wrong Data: New Errors Indicate Technological Problems Extend Issues Already Identified":

Insurers say the federal health-care marketplace is generating flawed data that is straining their ability to handle even the trickle of enrollees who have gotten through so far, in a sign that technological problems extend further than the website traffic and software issues already identified.

Emerging errors include duplicate enrollments, spouses reported as children, missing data fields and suspect eligibility determinations, say executives at more than a dozen health plans. Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Nebraska said it had to hire temporary workers to contact new customers directly to resolve inaccuracies in submissions. Medical Mutual of Ohio said one customer had successfully signed up for three of its plans.

The flaws could do lasting damage to the law if customers are deterred from signing up or mistakenly believe they have obtained coverage.

"The longer this takes to resolve…the harder it will be to get people to [come back and] sign up," said Aetna Inc. Chief Executive Mark Bertolini. "It's not off to a great start," he said, though he believes the marketplaces are "here to stay."

The new troubles for the Affordable Care Act arrive as Washington's attention is expected to sharply shift toward scrutiny of the site's rocky rollout, whose problems had been overshadowed by a two-week brawl over the government shutdown and debt ceiling.

Pressure is rising on the Obama administration to fix the problems. A number of Republicans have urged Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, to resign. Prominent Democrats, including House Ways and Means ranking member Rep. Sander Levin (D., Mich.), have called for fixes to be accelerated. The White House has said it has full confidence in Ms. Sebelius.

HHS, which is running all or part of the marketplaces in 36 states, has repeatedly declined to answer specific questions about its handling of the rollout, including specific glitches, enrollment figures, or its plans to fix the problems.


"We know that people are enrolling in coverage and the system works. As individual problems are raised by insurers, we work aggressively to address them," HHS spokeswoman Joanne Peters said Thursday.

Health-department officials have pressured insurers to refrain from commenting publicly about the problems, according to executives at four health plans, who asked not to be named. The HHS declined to comment.

In prolonging the battles over the budget and debt ceiling, "all Republicans did was give [President Obama] great cover for the complete screw-up on the opening of the exchanges," said Gail Wilensky, a Medicare director in the administration of George H.W. Bush and UnitedHealth Group Inc. UNH +0.28%  board member.

But the persistence of the technological problems could force a steeper political price for the Obama administration as Republican lawmakers redirect their focus. The GOP-led House Energy and Commerce Committee announced Thursday night it would hold a hearing next week on the rollout of the law and called on HHS to "voluntarily" make officials available after the secretary's staff said she couldn't come. Ms Peters, the HHS spokeswoman, said the department intended to be "responsive" to the request.

More at the click through.

And from Yuval Levin, at National Review, "Assessing the Exchanges." And at the Weekly Standard, "Obamacare Website Violates Licensing Agreement for Copyrighted Software."

#ObamaCare: More Than a Glitch

Via John Hawkins on Twitter.

Peyton Manning Still Tops in Indianapolis

At USA Today, "Emotions run high in Indianapolis before Manning return":

INDIANAPOLIS -- Kill the fatted calf. The all-pro-digal son returns.

OK, Peyton Manning is no prodigal. The 12-time Pro Bowl pick didn't choose to leave Indianapolis, and he didn't squander his money, as in the parable. In fact, he helped raise so much money for a children's hospital here that it's named for him.

But the calf half of the metaphor is apt. The phrase comes from biblical times, and it means to break out the very best for the most special of special occasions — in this case, as in that one, the return home of a favorite son.

Manning, who was released by the Indianapolis Colts in March 2012 amid uncertainty over his surgically repaired neck, isn't back for good, of course. No. 18 plies his trade in a new home now, for the Denver Broncos. This season, at 37, he is on pace for the best year any NFL quarterback has ever had.

And Sunday night on NBC, when the 6-0 Broncos play the 4-2 Colts in the Dome that Peyton Built, the good people of Indianapolis will offer one last roar for the greatest athlete in their city's history, before they go back to rooting for the guy they hope will be even better someday.

The Crazy 'Deadender' Tea Party

Even Business Week's attacking grassroots conservatives with the "cray cray" smear.

See "The Tea Party's Pyrrhic Victory" (via Tyler Durden).

Shutdown Showdown Is Win for the Tea Party

Scottie Nell Hughes' comments are particularly interesting, but also the segment includes excerpts from Sarah Palin's interview with Megyn Kelly yesterday, and also Brit Hume's rant from earlier this week.

Excellent commentary:

Dana Loesch Rips #ObamaCare as 'Biggest Bait-and-Swith I've Ever Seen'

Since Social Security, lol.

A great segment.

Democrats cannot defend this law. This Steve McMahon dude gets his ass handed to him.

Erick Erickson Nails the Analysis of Post-Shutdown Conservative Politics

I don't post Erickson often (he's a jerk, if you ask me), but he's an extremely talented analyst, and I really like this piece.

At Red State, "Advancing. Ever Advancing":

The establishment has given conservatives a brilliant opportunity to advance against them and then against the Democrats. As Obamacare now goes into full swing, conservatives can show that they tried to stop it while Mitch McConnell and so many others sat and watched from a cozy booth the Capitol Hill Club leaving the fighting to others while they did everything possible to undermine the fight.

As more Americans watch Obamacare fail them through the Republican primary season, conservatives will be able to put the focus on Republicans who funded Obamacare instead of fighting it. Whether they like it or not, Republicans in Congress will find their names on ballots in 2014. They cannot hide or escape fate.

Conservatives must advance — ever advancing against the Republicans who have folded in the fight against Obamacare. We will not win all the fights. But Ted Cruz and Mike Lee show we do not have to win them all. We just need reinforcements.

RTWT.

Backlash After Kim Kardashian Posts Skeezy Side-Boob Selfie to Instagram

Man, that woman must be hurtin' bad.

Now a mom and she's posting photos of herself practically nude to Instagram? Jonesin' to get back in the media limelight? Hey, that's the culture these days. Nude gets the page views.

At London's Daily Mail, "'Put on some mom jeans!': Now Kim Kardashian receives BIG online backlash over 'inappropriate' swimsuit selfie... four months after becoming a new mother."

Number of Visitors to Disastrous #ObamaCare Website Crashes

Visitor counts are crashing just like ObamaCare's crashing.

At the New Counter-Culture, "VISITS TO OBAMACARE EXCHANGE SITE PLUMMET."

#ObamaCare's Black Box

At WSJ, "Why the exchanges are worse than even the critics imagined":

The White House set low expectations for the Affordable Care Act's October 1 debut, so anything remotely competent should have seemed like a success. But three weeks on, the catastrophe that is Healthcare.gov and the 36 insurance exchanges run by the federal government is an insult to the "glitches" President Obama said were inevitable.

This isn't some coding error, or even the Health and Human Service Department's usual incompetence. The failures that have all but disabled ObamaCare are the result of deliberate political choices, which HHS and the White House are compounding with secrecy and stonewalling.

***

The health industry and low-level Administration officials warned that the exchanges were badly off schedule and not stress-tested despite three years to prepare and more than a half-billion dollars in funding. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and her planners swore they'd be ready while impugning critics and even withholding documents from the HHS inspector general for a routine performance audit this summer.

Yet the launch has been worse even than critics predicted. The rare users who weren't locked out experienced crashes, delays and error messages. Mrs. Sebelius initially claimed this was merely servers crashing under unexpectedly high demand. She called it "a great problem to have."

Now that traffic has abated, HHS concedes there were built-in information technology and structural defects. Some of Healthcare.gov's automatic operations mimic hacker denial-of-service attacks meant to disable a site. These can be fixed, though press reports suggest they're due to a programming rush because HHS delayed key regulations and IT specifications until after the election to avoid Republican criticism.

Then instead of rolling out the program in stages or delaying it as HHS has so many other parts of the law, the department simply dumped a bad product on the public to meet a self-created deadline.

Other failures have the same political character. Consumers must set up a complex account with sensitive personal information like Social Security numbers before they are allowed to browse health plans. The government wants to show consumers only their net out-of-pocket premiums minus subsidies, not the true underlying cost of insurance. That's because those all-in quotes are so much higher than what's available on the individual market.

HHS continues to claim that the exchanges are all about competition—they're even trying to rebrand them as "marketplaces." But real marketplaces are transparent and let consumers know what they get for what price. ObamaCare's exchanges are intended to obscure price and service options.

HHS still refuses to disclose how much taxpayers shelled out for this exchange lemon. The money came from several ObamaCare, general HHS and Medicare accounts and flowed to more than 50 outside vendors, with several no-bid contracts awarded outside the normal procurement process.

Mrs. Sebelius also refuses to reveal basic data about ObamaCare enrollment even as she brags about the millions of people who have supposedly visited Healthcare.gov. Information that would allow outsiders to evaluate the exchanges includes how many people have applied and qualified for coverage so far, what types of health plans they're selecting and what their health risks are.

Continue reading.

The genuinely surprising thing is that public opinion hasn't crashed on this yet. The true measure of public support, of course, will be the congressional elections next year. It's not going to go well for the Dems. Of course, the president couldn't give a f-k. He's not on the ballot, and he's laughing at the socialist monstrosity he's sloughed off on a sheepish electorate.

Congress Sends Obama Bill to End Shutdown

At WaPo:

Sixteen days after a federal shutdown began and one day before the United States would have exhausted its ability to borrow money, Congress approved a bill to reopen the government and raise the debt ceiling until Feb. 7. President Obama has promised to sign the legislation immediately, meaning hundreds of thousands of federal workers will be back at work Thursday.

“Now that the bill has passed the United States Senate and the House of Representatives, the President plans to sign it tonight and employees should expect to return to work in the morning,” Sylvia Mathews Burwell, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, said in a statement late Wednesday night. Burwell directed employees to check news outlets and OPM’s Web site for further updates.

By a vote of 81 to 18, the Senate sent the 35-page bill to the House of Representatives, where it was approved 285-144 just a little over two hours later. All 198 Democrats present in the House voted yes, and 87 Republicans voted yes as well. All 144 no votes were Republicans.

“We fought the good fight; we just didn’t win,” House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said in an interview with conservative radio host Bill Cunningham.

At the White House, Obama hailed the Senate’s deal. “Once this agreement arrives on my desk I will sign it immediately and we will begin reopening the government immediately, and we can begin to lift this cloud of uncertainty and unease from our businesses and the and the American people.”

Obama said he hopes to move forward on other domestic priorities, including immigration reform and the farm bill. “We could get all these things done if everybody comes together in a spirit of ‘how can we move this country forward’ and put the last three weeks behind us.”

More at that top link.

Senate Passes Debt Deal

At WaPo, "Senate passes bipartisan bill to raise debt limit, end government shutdown."

Comparing Costs of Buying Health Insurance

Things are looking up.

Way up, lol!

Sky high health insurance rates.

At Heritage, "How Will You Fare in the Obamacare Exchanges?"

Dodgers Beat Cardinals in Game 5 to Extend #NLCS

I caught the last 1 and 1/2 innings. Turns out Dodgers' bats got hot. Let's see if they can keep hope alive this weekend.

At LAT, "Dodgers take the solo route to stay alive with 6-4 Game 5 victory."

We will see you in St. Louis. @Dodgers blast 4 HRs to muscle past @Cardinals in Game 5: http://t.co/3IkwHKglgm pic.twitter.com/5IuUteccfr
— MLB (@MLB) October 16, 2013

Seems the Dodgers want to keep playing.

Using the sudden power of the solo home run and a terrific turnaround pitching performance from Zack Greinke, the Dodgers lived to fight another day with their 6-4 victory Wednesday afternoon over the Cardinals in Game 5 of the National League Championship Series.

The victory staved off elimination, but still leaving the Cardinals up three games to two in the best-of-seven series.

After taking a day off Thursday, the series is scheduled to resume Friday with Game 6 in St. Louis.

The score was tied 2-2 when the Dodgers suddenly discovered their new love affair with the solo home run.

More at that link.

Clayton Kershaw will start Game 6. I think the Dodgers have a pretty good chance. Kershaw's the best in the majors.