Casting the 2013 Victoria's Secret Fashion Show

The show's coming up one month from today!

Secretary of State John Kerry Has 'Doubts' Lee Harvey Oswald Acted Alone in Assassination of President John F. Kennedy

How bloody stupid.

This reminds of 22 years ago and the wild conspiracies of Oliver Stone's "JFK."

I swear leftists are the freakin' worst conspiracy theorists. And John Kerry's a flaming ghoul.

At CNN, "Kerry doubts Warren Commission report." (Via Memeorandum.)

He's clamming up now, the asshole, "Kerry won't talk about Kennedy conspiracy" (at Memeorandum).

And for a reminder, Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. There is no conspiracy except in the minds of radical leftists. See Gerald Posner's book, Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK.

Fresno State Moves to #16 in AP's Top 25 College Football Rankings

And they're doing even better in USA Today's poll of coaches.

At the Fresno Bee, "Fresno State up to No. 14 in USA Today Coaches poll":

.@lamblock Turns out I've been sending my kid to school w/ a gang symbol t-shirt! #FresnoState #Bulldogs pic.twitter.com/jKzkOZTQIc
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) November 10, 2013

Fresno State moved to No. 14 in the new USA Today Coaches Top 25 football poll Sunday, a leap of three spots in one of the components that determine berths in the big-money postseason games of the BCS.

Louisville of the American Athletic Conference remained one spot ahead of the Bulldogs, with the full BCS standings due out later Sunday.

Northern Illinois, another would-be BCS buster along with the Bulldogs, fell one spot among the coaches to No. 21 while on a bye week.

Fresno State is guaranteed a berth in one of the BCS games if it remains ranked at least No. 16, is the highest from a non-automatic-qualifying conference, and ahead of a champion from an AQ conference such as the AAC.

Last week's BCS standings had the Bulldogs 16th with a .3675 average, ahead of key BCS rivals in No. 18 Northern Illinois (.3169), No. 20 Louisville (.2510) and No. 21 Central Florida (.2151).

The Bulldogs are No. 16 in the latest Associated Press Top 25, a day after they improved to 9-0 with a 48-10 victory at Wyoming.

I watched last night's game at Wyoming. It was a 48-10 blowout. See, "Fresno State football: Bulldogs skip field goal, go for glory," and "Fresno State Postgame Wrap: No. 17 Bulldogs 48, Wyoming 10."

And at the tweet above, I'm thinking perhaps my 6th-grader should retire his Fresno State Bulldogs t-shirt he's been wearing to school this semester. We don't have a big gang presence in Irvine, but sheesh, you never can be too careful these days. See, "Fresno State's Fearsome Bulldog Mascot Is Street Gang Symbol."

Chris Christie: Time Magazine's Savior for the 2016 GOP

Here's Moe Lane on Time's fat-shaming cover story, "Time Magazine attempts to fat-shame Chris Christie*."

*Hey. This is the Left’s own sensitivity rulebook. One that they expect us to follow even though they happily abandon it the second that they can go after a conservative. You have to make them live up to their own rules, which they don’t want to do and will avoid whenever possible.

I get the magazine in hard copy, and I'm more perplexed by this meme of Christie as the GOP's 2016 savior:

New Jersey voters never got to hear Chris Christie's most important speech this year, because it took place behind closed doors at a Westin hotel in Boston, where the governor laid out his not so veiled pitch for the party's 2016 nomination. "I'm in this business to win," he told the crowd of Republican leaders, according to an audio recording smuggled out of the room. "I don't know why you're in it."

It was pure Christie, combat bundled in cliche. Ever since he ousted Democratic incumbent Jon Corzine in 2009, he has run the Garden State with combustible passion, blunt talk and the kind of bipartisan dealmaking that no one seems to do anymore. He doesn't claim to be an ideas man or a visionary. He's a workhorse with a temper and a tongue, the guy who loves his mother and gets it done.

All year long, Christie has presented this character he has created as the savior for the Grand Old Party. At the Boston meeting in August, he said ideologues had begun to edge out the winners in Ronald Reagan's Big Tent. (He meant you, Tea Party, Ted Cruz, Sarah Palin.) They acted like college professors, just spouting ideas. "College professors are fine, I guess," he joked, before driving it home. "If we don't win, we don't govern. And if we don't govern, all we do is shout into the wind."

Christie then went out and won, and he won big. In a blue state, he got 61% of the vote for governor on Nov. 5. "If we can do this in Trenton, New Jersey," Christie thundered, "maybe the folks in Washington, D.C., should tune in their TVs right now, see how it's done."

It's awful early to be anointing the GOP frontrunner, and I cringe at the thought of yet another doomed Republican presidential campaign in 2016. The GOP will be crushed if they keep nominating these mealy-mouthed moderates. Damn. I checked with Dan Riehl on Twitter the other night, after I finished reading the cover story. Christie's not very conservative at all:

@AmPowerBlog his rhetoric is that of a progressive. Not libertarian on social issues, not very conservative on fiscal issues. what's 2 like?

— DanRiehl (@DanRiehl) November 10, 2013

The country's ready for conservative leadership in the Ronald Reagan mold. Obviously, Chris Christie's not it. Although, sadly, the JournoList media will be all too happy to foist him off on a hoodwinked electorate. Grassroots conservatives will have their job cut out keeping that from happening.

Happy 238th Birthday to the U.S. Marine Corps

At the Daily Caller, "Happy 238th Birthday Marines: A message From the Commandant of the Marine Corps":

For 238 years, The United States Marine Corps has proudly served our great Nation with unfailing valor – bolstered by the enduring fortitude of our fellow Marines, our families, and our friends. This is why each year on November 10th, Marines from all generations gather together, in groups large and small, to celebrate the birthday of our Corps and to reflect on the proud legacy and warrior ethos we share. This is what unites us as Marines. From our first battle at New Providence to today in Afghanistan, Marines have always shown that they were made of tougher stuff – that when the enemy’s fire poured in from all angles, and the situation was grim, Marines unequivocally knew that their fellow Marines would stay behind their guns, fight courageously, and drive the enemy from the battlefield. We have always known hardship, fatigue, and pain…but we have never known what it is to lose a battle!

Continue reading.

The Best Blogs Now and Some Smokin' Holly Eriksson

Ima try'n get some Rule 5 posted today. My mom visited yesterday and I'm grading semester writing projects, so my weekend blogging's been thrown off. Hopefully I can get the full babe-blogging roundup posted in a little bit.

Meanwhile, Gator Doug rounds up some of the hottest blogs happening right now, "The 25 Best Blogs Now."

That's a roundup of culture warriors, and I'm honored to be included at the list.

I'll have more of my brand blogging throughout the day and beyond.

Meanwhile, Holly Eriksson's here to help celebrate, at Egotastic!, "Holly Eriksson Topless Calendar Sneak Peek Will Fill Your Days With Smiles."



Photo via Twitter.

Name and Shame: 100 Leftist Celebrities Who've Made Millions and Billions Off the Free-Enterprise System

This is great.

Because you know leftists don't really believe their own ideological bullshit.

At Independent Journal Review, "Wall of Shame: Net Worths of 100 Left-Wing Millionaire and Billionaire Celebs":

These 100 left-wing supporters of wealth redistribution made millions and even billions off the free enterprise system. Many supported the Celebrity President himself Barack Obama, who has ironically gotten quite wealthy preaching against ‘evil’ rich people. This is just a taste of left-wing hypocrisy.

See photos of the Hypocrite 100 at the link (via Instapundit).

At Least 10,00 Feared Dead in Philippines Typhoon

At LAT, "Typhoon may have killed nearly 10,000 in Philippines."

At at WSJ, "Thousands Feared Dead in the Philippines in Wake of Typhoon: Red Cross and Authorities Fear Toll Could Rise to the Thousands":

MANILA—The Philippine National Red Cross said Sunday that the death toll from supertyphoon Haiyan could run into the thousands, adding that it is difficult to perform the grim calculations because the massive storm left bodies scattered over wide areas.

Photographs and video taken Sunday in Tacloban—a city especially hard hit—showed dead people being pulled from rubble and mud, cars and boats tossed into piles and homes shredded.

"This is a monumental disaster. As of now, there's no time to count the bodies. The dead bodies are not in one place like what happened in Ormoc," Richard Gordon, chairman of the Philippine Red Cross, told The Wall Street Journal.

Mr. Gordon, a former senator, was referring to the 1991 flash floods caused by a typhoon in Ormoc City on the island of Leyte which claimed more than 5,000 lives—the most on record caused by a storm in the Philippines.

Health Assistant Secretary Eric Tayag, who was with a medical team deployed to set up three mobile hospitals in Tacloban, said the government is considering digging a mass grave to bury the dead there.

The National Disaster and Risk Reduction Management Council said the typhoon has affected more than 4.5 million people in the 36 provinces in the central Philippines and in the southern part of the main island of Luzon. It said more than 477,000 people were displaced by Haiyan and 400,000 of them are in evacuation centers.

Haiyan, locally known as Yolanda, pounded three dozen provinces in the central Philippines and the southern section of the main island of Luzon with gale-force winds that stirred five-yard-high storm surges that flooded coastal towns.

More Business Graduates Opt for Tech Over Wall Street

This is interesting.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Elite Grads in Business Flock to Tech: Harvard and Other Elite Schools Look Elsewhere as Finance Loses Its Lustre":

Elite business-school graduates are increasingly heading to work in technology over finance as the lingering aftereffects of the financial crisis—along with Wall Street's long hours and scaled-back pay—sends newly minted M.B.A.s elsewhere.

At Harvard Business School, 18% of job-seeking students landed tech-sector spots this year, up from 12% in 2012. A similar shift is under way at the business schools at Yale University and Cornell University, where the share of graduates going into tech more than doubled over the past two years.

Meanwhile, just 27% of Harvard Business School graduates took jobs in finance this year, down from 35% last year. That figure dropped to 16% from 27% at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

And at Stanford Graduate School of Business, historically a haven for digitally minded graduates, tech companies overtook financial services for the first time this year, with 32% of the class accepting tech jobs and just 26% heading into finance. Two years ago, those figures were 13% and 36%, respectively.

I thought I'd go into business and finance if I didn't get accepted to grad school in political science. Everything's all turned around nowadays. I don't consider myself a tech geek Who knows what I'd do now?

More at that top link.

Philippine Leader Fears 'Substantially' Higher Death Toll

At the Wall Street Journal, "Typhoon Death Toll to Rise 'Substantially': Philippine President: Haiyan Is the Strongest Tropical Cyclone to Strike the Philippines Since 1991":

MANILA—Philippine President Benigno Aquino III said Saturday that the death toll from supertyphoon Haiyan will be "substantially more" than officials have so far confirmed, a grim prediction as eyewitnesses reported bodies being pulled from rubble in one town where cars and trees had been tossed about.

Speaking at a televised news conference, the president declined to answer questions seeking an estimate of the number of people who had been killed.

The confirmed count is four, but one city—Tacloban, which has 220,000 residents—was hit especially hard, and one government official said at least 100 were dead. The Philippine National Red Cross said Saturday it received reports suggesting around 1,000 people died in Tacloban and about 200 in neighboring Samar province.

"It is only an estimate from the field, not validated," said Philippine Red Cross Secretary General Gwen Pang.

A Hong Kong-based cameraman and storm chaser who has been filming typhoons for nine years reported seeing dead bodies and looting in Tacloban.

Enlarge Image

Tacloban city, in Leyte province, central Philippines Saturday. Associated Press

"There are people pulling bodies out of the rubble, basically," said James Reynolds from Cebu on Saturday.

Mr. Reynolds said he saw people looting drugstores and electronics stores.

"It's a lawless situation," he said. "It's only going to get worse because people are going to get hungrier or thirstier, and there's not enough aid getting in."

Supertyphoon Haiyan, which had the strength of a Category 5 hurricane, is headed to Vietnam, where it is expected to make landfall in the morning.

A mother and her son walked under damaged electric cables after super Typhoon Haiyan battered Tacloban city. Reuters

The typhoon hit the eastern seaboard of the Philippines on Friday, with its heavy rain and winds uprooting trees, shredding homes, and causing five-yard high storm surges that flooded coastal towns.

"The last time I saw something of this scale was in the aftermath of the Indian Ocean Tsunami," said Sebastian Rhodes Stampa, head of the United Nations Disaster Assessment Coordination team.

"This is destruction on a massive scale. There are cars thrown like tumble weeds, and the streets are strewn with debris ," he said, adding that relief efforts will be challenging because roads between the airport and the central city were "completely blocked." The U.N. team arrived in Tacloban on Saturday.

Continue reading.

Obama Now Faces Disasters of His Own Making

At some point you just can't keep blaming everyone else.

From Dan Balz, at the Washington Post, "For Obama, and Democrats, it’s crunch time":

President Obama likes to say he will never again be running for office, but every Democrat knows he will be on the ballot figuratively in 2014, and 2016, as well. Right now they are rightly nervous about that prospect.

A month ago, political Washington was transfixed by the errors committed by congressional Republicans. Those missteps led to a partial shutdown of the government, which in turn has brought approval of the GOP to record lows in many public opinion surveys.

Nothing about that has changed. But today, it’s Obama in the spotlight. A president famous for his unflappability, he is now struggling to square assurances that he is on top of the problems confronting his administration with assertions that he was unaware of the problems as they were developing.

The president’s apology for misleading people about whether they could keep their health insurance under the terms of the Affordable Care Act, which came during an interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd, was a remarkable step, underscoring just how concerned he and his advisers are about the damage caused by the chaotic rollout of the new law.

Obama long has been among the most self-confident of politicians and has not often been willing to acknowledge error in such a straightforward way. Where he has acknowledged shortcomings or disappointments, he has rarely included the kind of contrition he expressed to the people who took him at his word and have since seen their health-care policies canceled.

His mea culpa was all the more notable because it came only a few days after he had attempted to put a retrospective asterisk on those original assurances, enunciated as he sought to sell his controversial health-care plan to a skeptical public....

Obama is dismissive of the crisis-an-hour mentality that often grips the political chattering class. He has endured low moments throughout his political career and has found a way to ride them out. He is famously patient. But he is now in a hole of his own making...

Continue reading.

Balz argues that the president's biggest test is credibility, and it's hardly guaranteed that he'll be able to keep it, what, with all the gargantuan lies that just now biting him in the ass.

IMAGE CREDIT: The Looking Spoon, "When Obama says 'sorry' for Obamacare it's not the kind of sorry you think it is..."

Email to Bret Baier Puts #ObamaCare Disaster Into Perspective

At Jammie Wearing Fools.

And Zoey Connor.

L.A. Times Front-Page: 'No Quick Fix for Health Law' — #MyHealthPlanDied

I've got it screen capped, but the Times changed the headline at the website.

It reads, "White House seeks quick fix to health policy cancellations."

Hey, the subtle politics of media framing. And I'm not sure why, though. I mean, if the bad news is making it to the front-page of the paper, it's not much help to downplay the poor prognosis online.

At least the editors aren't burying the bad ObamaCare news altogether, like the disgusting Obama-shills at the New York Times. See NewsBusters, "NYT Puts Michael Shear's Pathetic Coverage of Obama's 'You Can Keep Your Plan' Excuse-Making on Page A14."

Megan McArdle on #ObamaCare

I read this astonishing piece by McArdle on Thursday, "Obamacare Shouldn't Have Been Managed Like a Campaign."

RTWT. (And "read the whole thing" certainly isn't an urgent enough exhortation to read that piece, but you definitely should read it all.)

I don't read McArdle very much; she's never been on my blogroll. But I was blown away at how good a writer she is. The article's a real piece of explanatory reporting. So good, in fact, that it earned the "flaming skull" at AoSHQ.

More from Robert Stacy McCain, "The Shocking (But Actually Predictable) Stupidity of ObamaCare Bureaucrats":

Ace of Spades gave the “Flaming Skull” alert to a quote from a Washington Post article about the ObamaCare botch that had been included in a summary by Megan McArdle at Bloomberg.

On Twitter last night, Ace seemed genuinely astonished by this. But really, who had any illusions that a bunch of liberal bureaucrats were competent to be trusted with the implementation of such a thing?

And more from McArdle, "Obamacare Is Running Out of Bullets," and "The Rise of the Obamacare Scams."

Nazi Art Cache

An outstanding commentary, from Christopher Knight, at the Los Angeles Times, "Lift the veil from the Nazi art cache."

The Secret Diary of Abu Zubaydah

At the Independent UK, "The secret diary of al-Qa’ida’s No 3 - Abu Zubaydah, from student to hardline jihadi and CIA torture":

The private diaries of Abu Zubaydah, formerly thought to be the third in command of al-Qa’ida and one of the most prominent remaining detainees in Guantanamo Bay, have been released by the US government.

They offer a remarkable and personal picture of how al-Qa’ida grew from its origins in the mujahedin struggle against the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan into the organisation that carried out the 2001 attacks against the US.

They track Zubaydah’s journey from a student to a hardened jihadi.

The diaries, obtained by a freedom of information request by Al Jazeera, cover more than a decade. They start in 1990 when Zubaydah – a Saudi-born Palestinian – was a 19-year-old student in computer sciences in Mysore, India, a few months before he travelled to join the Afghan civil war that followed the Soviet departure. They end days before his capture in Faisalabad, Pakistan, in March 2002.

At the time, he was regarded by the CIA as the third-ranking figure in al-Qa’ida, behind only Osama Bin Laden and the group’s current leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Zubaydah was held to be one of the planners of the 9/11 attacks and of virtually every other major attack perpetrated by al-Qa’ida before that, including the 1998 US embassy bombings in East Africa.

He was taken to a CIA  “ghost site” in Thailand and waterboarded 83 times in a bid to extract information about future terrorist operations.

He was among the first al-Qa’ida detainees subjected to the “enhanced interrogation techniques” that had just been approved by George W Bush’s Justice Department.

Later the Bush administration revised its view of Zubaydah’s importance as it became clear he was more of a bureaucrat within al-Qa’ida than a frontline operative. Even so, he was mentioned no less than 52 times in the final report of the 9/11 Commission on the 2001 attacks, published in 2004.

The secret and highly personal dairies, with their  numerous mentions of bin Laden and other al-Qa’ida figures, suggest a meticulous record keeper. Their contents, which are being revealed for the first time, provided the basis for holding many of the prisoners at Guantanamo, of whom 160 remain.

According to Al Jazeera America, the documents – a copy of the government’s English translation of the diaries – were obtained from a former US intelligence official who worked with the CIA and FBI on al-Qa’ida issues.

There are six volumes of the 1990-2002 diaries, excerpts from the first of which were published by Al Jazeera.

Zubaydah is believed to have compiled more diaries while being held by the CIA, in which he is said to describe in detail his torture. Since 2006 he has been held at Guantanamo Bay, although he has not been charged with any crime.

The loss of his diaries, now formally the property of the Pentagon, appears to have affected him deeply. In March 2007, he told a review tribunal that the CIA’s refusal to honour what he claimed was a promise to return them had caused him to have 40 seizures. That mental anguish, Zubaydah said, “is bigger than what the CIA (did to) me”...

Screw the f-ker.

Continue reading.

#ObamaCare, Sluggish Economy Boost GOP Chances in 2014

From Lawrence Kudlow, at IBD:

There's no question the catastrophic debut of ObamaCare — including the website breakdown and the millions of pink-slip cancellations — will be a great card for Republicans to play on the way to the 2014 midterm elections. No question.

The president lied about his lies about keeping your health plans and doctors. And when he did finally apologize, he didn't really say he was sorry.

It's also possible that we'll see 10 million more insurance cancellations, leading to much higher premiums, bigger deductibles, and more cutoffs between patients and their doctors. And employer-based cancellations will compound this disaster, with the whole process stretching across most of next year. It will be a killer for the Obama Democrats.

But while my conservative-pundit colleagues are out thrashing ObamaCare, I want to raise a critical point: Don't forget economic growth.

The Pew Research Center's Andrew Kohut recently wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled "The GOP Is in Better Shape Than You Think." It provides an unbelievable statistic: Independents favor the GOP on handling the economy by 46% to 30%. Unbelievable.

Overall, according to Pew Research, a plurality of all voters gives the GOP a 44% to 37% edge on the economy.
So I want to make a pitch that Republicans not lose sight of the importance of economic growth in the months leading up to next year's midterms. And that suggests the importance of a program of pro-growth tax reform and simplification.

More at that top link.

PREVIOUSLY: "Independents Favor #GOP on the Economy by Whopping 46%-30% Margin."

Candice Swanepoel Displays Bedazzled Bra Worth $8 Million

On Good Morning America.

They fitted the bra specifically to Ms. Swanepoel's body. She's the only one who can wear it.

Democrats Who Voted for #ObamaCare Debacle Now Scrambling for Cover

At the Wall Street Journal, "The ObamaCare Dozen":

The torrents of Affordable Care Act monsoon season aren't letting up, so Democrats are scrambling to help the victims: namely, their own careers. The Senators up for re-election in competitive states in 2014 are starting to panic, though they still aren't offering solutions for anything other than their own growing political jeopardy.

Fifteen Senate Democrats plus Colorado's Michael Bennet who chairs the Senatorial Campaign Committee sat down at the White House Wednesday, and they want all and sundry to know that they let President Obama have it. Alaska's Mark Begich put out a statement saying he chewed out the big cheese for "absolutely unacceptable" mismanagement and "an understandable crisis in confidence." He must have drafted it in advance.

Oregon's Jeff Merkley chimed in to report that even after the two-hour encounter session that was not on the public schedule, he was still "very frustrated" and "I remain deeply convinced that this is a 'show-me' moment." Asked by Politico if Democrats were losing credibility, an anonymous attendee said, "You got to have it, to lose it."


Mr. Obama held their hands and told them not to worry. But that's also what he, Bill Clinton and other horse whisperers said in 2010. The "moderates" who made the Nancy Pelosi majority went on to be wiped out in the largest turnover of House seats since 1938.

Mr. Obama then comforted the party regulars that all would be well once the exchanges launched. That day arrived, sort of, since the website doesn't work. He's now urging Democrats to keep calm because the public will love it once the subsidies start to roll out. Yet insurance is being cancelled, premiums are surging and patients like Edie Sundby can't keep their doctors.

Meanwhile, the Salesman in Chief has been exposed for his fraudulent promises. Before October Mr. Obama's rhetoric seemed desperate like Shelly Levene in "Glengarry Glen Ross," repeating discredited assurances that few believed. Now it seems somewhat sinister as he tries to falsify his history of false claims.

All of which has the ObamaCare Dozen—the Democrats who each cast the decisive 60th vote and are running for re-election in 2014—fleeing for political cover. We offer a list of the dozen nearby, and they're right to worry that voters might punish ObamaCare's implementation as they did its passage. But so far the 12 are trying to pull off nothing more than confidence tricks...

Continue reading.

Democrats are screwed. I can't wait until next November. We're talking wipeout!

Combined 52 Million Americans Could Lose Insurance When #ObamaCare Hits Grandfathered Employer-Based Plans

This was the plan all along.

At McClatchy, "Analysis: Tens of millions could be forced out of health insurance they had":

WASHINGTON — Even as President Barack Obama sold a new health care law in part by assuring Americans they would be able to keep their insurance plans, his administration knew that tens of millions of people actually could lose those their policies.

“If you like your private health insurance plan, you can keep your plan. Period,” Obama said as he pitched the plan, the unqualified promise he made repeatedly.

Yet advisers did say in 2010 that there were large caveats and that anyone whose insurance plan changed would lose the promised protection of being able to keep existing plans. And a report in 2010 said that as many as 69 percent of certain employer-based insurance plans would lose that protection, meaning as many as 41 million people could lose their plans even if they wanted to keep them and would be forced into other plans. Another 11 million who bought their own insurance also could lose their plans. Combined, as many as 52 million Americans could lose or have lost old insurance plans.

Some or much of that loss of favored insurance is driven by normal year-to-year changes such as employers changing plans to save money. And many people could end up with better plans. But it is not what the president pledged.

Caught in the firestorm of his broken promise, Obama on Thursday apologized.

“I am sorry that they are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me,” he told NBC News Thursday evening. “We’ve got to work hard to make sure that they know we hear them and we are going to do everything we can to deal with folks who find themselves in a tough position as a consequence of this.”

The shifting narrative started as Obama worked to sell the entire health care overhaul to a skeptical nation and Congress. To win support from those who already had insurance, he made the promise that no one who liked their plan would lose it. The key was that millions of plans would be “grandfathered” in the new law, thus protected from any new requirements.

Yet as insurance companies started notifying hundreds of thousands this fall that their current policies were being canceled in preparation for new ones, it became clear that many were not guaranteed to keep their plans.

The White House and Congress have focused on cancelations of plans in the individual market, where people buy their own policies.

Obama insisted anew Thursday that the problem is limited to people who buy their own insurance. “We’re talking about 5 percent of the population who are in what’s called the individual market. They’re out there buying health insurance on their own,” he told NBC.

But a closer examination finds that the number of people who have plans changing, or have already changed, could be between 34 million to 52 million. That’s because many employer-provided insurance plans also could change, not just individually purchased insurance plans

Administration officials decline to say how many employer-sponsored plans could change. But those numbers could be between 23 million to 41 million, based on a McClatchy analysis of estimates offered by the Department of Health and Human Services in June 2010.

Obama aides did acknowledge around the time the law was enacted in 2010 that some people could lose their coverage if their plans changed after the law was passed. Those people would in turn receive what the administration described as superior coverage. But in the years since the law’s passage, HHS officials have downplayed that consequence of the hard-fought law.

“If health plans significantly raise co-payments or deductibles or significantly reduce (them) . . . they’ll lose their grandfather status and their customers will get the same full set of consumer protections as new plans,” Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said at a June 15, 2010, news conference.

Yeah, "HHS officials have downplayed" the consequences --- of reaming tens of millions of Americans!

More from Pejman Yousefzadeh, "Obamacare: The Trainwreck Continues" (via Memeorandum).