Obama's OMB Director Can't Confirm That Health Exchanges Will Be Up-and-Running by December

The entire ObamaCare facade will come crashing down if these dolt's can't get the stupid exchanges going by the end of the year.

From Erika Johnsen, at Hot Air, "OMB director: Er, no, I can’t gaurantee that HealthCare.gov will be running smoothly by mid-December."

Obama to Speak Monday on #ObamaCare Rollout Debacle

At the Hill, "ObamaCare enrollees to join president in Rose Garden (Video)."

Also, at the Wall Street Journal, "‘Tech Surge’ Planned to Fix Obamacare Exchanges," and Moe Lane, "White House bringing in “*Top* Men” to ‘fix’ #Obamacare exchanges."



IMAGE CREDIT: 90 Miles From Tyranny, "The Cynical Tactics Of The Great Deceiver..."

#Rule5 Sunday Roundup

At the Other McCain, "Rule 5 Sunday: Rubycon."

More at Daley Gator, "Daley Gator DaleyBabe: Marlina Moreno."

And from Bob Belevedere, "Rule 5 Saturday: Amber Campisi."

Soylent has "Morning Coffee."

At Pirate's Cove, "Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup," and "If All You See…… is a tiny home that would be perfect for Everyone Else, as long as they aren’t pulled by fossil fueled vehicles, you might just be a Warmist."

Proof Positive has "Friday Night Babe: Sarah Rafferty!"

And at Randy’s Roundtable, "Thursday Nite Tart - Sandra Brec."

At Odie's, "I'm In Trouble ~OR~ Rule 5 Woodsterman Style."

More from Drunken Stepfather, "STEPLINKS OF THE DAY."

And at Egotastic!, "Alessandra Ambrosio and Camilla Bell Headline the Cleavage Goodness at Beverly Hills Gala."

At EBL, "Rocky Horror High School."

Also at Blackmailers Don't Shoot, "Some Saturday Notes with Hot Chicks and Metal," and "Pretty Girls on a Thursday, Random Hotness Edition."

Plus, at 90 Miles From Tyranny, "Girls With Guns." And, "Graphic Art: Women With Weapons." 

Check Wine, Women, and Politics as well, "Saturday Sweeties."

At Animal Magnetism, "Rule Five Friday News."

See also, the Hostages, "Big Boob Friday."

And at a View From the Beach, "Rule 5 Saturday - Mischa Barton Back From the Brink."

And In a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World has the "Friday Pinups."

More at Postal Dogs, "Taylor Momsen's new song better than you might think."

Good Stuff has "Elvira and Karen Nyberg."

See Dana Pico, "Rule 5 Blogging: Back in the US of A!"

And from Yankee Phil, "Real Sarah vs. Photoshopped."

And from Subject to Change, "Solid Gold."

More at Knuckledraggin', "Your Good Morning Girl."

Drop you links in the comments if I've missed your Rule 5 entry!

Mainstream Democrats Now Openly Call for Arrests of Political Opponents

From Doug Ross, "THINKING OF SITTING THINGS OUT IN 2014? Consider That Mainstream Democrats Now Openly Call for Arrests of Political Opponents":

For those of you as disgusted as I am with GOP leaders, consider the ramifications of sitting out the midterms. Should Nancy Pelosi regain the Speakership, well, in six words, they'll be coming for your guns. That's a guarantee.

For the first time in American history, mainstream Democrats are openly calling for the arrests of their political opponents. Yes, the hard left Democrat Party's tactics come straight out of the playbooks of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Castro, Pol Pot, and Mugabe.

They will be coming for anyone who expresses dissent against their Marxist policies, but before they do, they'll be coming for your guns.

Continue reading.

More from Byron York, "Left demands: Charge Ted Cruz with sedition."

And the Kos Kiddies are on the case, "No Republicans you didn't win, people want to try you for sedition."

Turncoat Senate Republicans Staged 'Intervention' to Stop Ted Cruz on #ObamaCare Defunding

My admiration for this man is growing daily and exponentially.

I listened to the entire Ted Cruz interview with CNN's Dana Bash. The Right Scoop has the full video, "FULL INTERVIEW: Ted Cruz tells CNN’s Dana Bash he isn’t giving up fight to stop ObamaCare."

Click on Right Scoop and scroll to 9:45 minutes. CNN's Bash presses Cruz on GOP divisions over the defunding strategy. She says that Senate Republicans told her that their luncheons with Senator Cruz were so angry and intense it was "like an intervention." Here's the passage from CNN's transcript:

CRUZ: No. What I'm choosing sides with is the American people. And what I think the focus should be is on Obamacare. Is it working? You know what's striking? In the last two months in the course of this debate over Obamacare, Democrats aren't defending Obamacare. They're not saying, hey, these things working great. They're not saying, hey, it's not killing job.

They're not saying, hey, it's not forcing people into part time work. It's not driving up health insurance premiums. It's not taken away people's health care. And the reason is you can't defend it. On the merits, I mean, there's a reason, Dana, the unions are jumping ship. They're saying let us out, it's not working. There's a reason Democratic senators went to the president and said we want a special exemption for members of Congress because it's not working.

And so, I understand you want to draw me into the back and forth with other Republican senators and that's fun to cover. I'm not interested in playing that game. Do you know what many of the elected officials in Washington are most upset about is that their constituents were calling and holding them accountable.

I can't tell you how many of my colleagues have expressed outrage to me that my constituents are calling me. Dana, we work for our constituents. That's our job.

BASH: But the reason they're frustrated, the constituents, they're calling them is because senators have said this to me, because they thought you were selling them snake oil. It was never going to happen.

CRUZ: You know, they can insure we can't win this fight by going on television constantly and attacking everyone who's standing up to win this fight. That made certain we couldn't win.

BASH: Let's chill down on what some of your colleagues seem to be most upset about. First of all, you referred to the fact that your colleagues were yelling at you red faced about their constituents calling. There were a lot of very animated private lunches with you and your colleagues, correct?

CRUZ: Look, I'm not interested in focusing on the disagreements between politicians in Washington –

BASH: Let me just ask you about this, because one of your colleagues told me it was like an intervention, that there were so many of your colleagues saying, you know, why are you doing this? And really angry at you. And I'm just wondering even on a human level, they told me that you really didn't flinch.

On a human level, that's got to bother you, to be sitting in an institution like the Senate and having your, not Democrats, fellow Republicans, so angry at you.

CRUZ: Dana, not remotely.

BASH: Why?

CRUZ: Because the people I work for are the women and men you just saw. I work for 26 million Texans. That's my job to fight for them. I don't work for the party bosses in Washington. I work for the people of Texas, and I fight for them. The reason people are frustrated all over country is that far too many people get elected and they think they're there to be part of the club.

You know what was very interesting about some of those closed door discussions? What I said in those closed door sessions, I would have said the exact same thing if CNN's camera were sitting in the room. What I say privately to my colleagues is the same thing I say publicly. And you know what's interesting?

Virtually, every person in that room that was criticizing what Mike Lee and I were doing would have said very different things if the camera was in this room, because what they're telling their constituents is very different from what they're saying behind closed doors.

BASH: Do you think Mitch McConnell has been a good leader?

CRUZ: I think Senate Republicans should have united. Senate Republicans should have united and supported House Republicans. The one hypothetical that I really think is worth thinking about is how would this have played differently if when the House stood up and led Senate Republicans had marched into battle side-by-side and said we are united and saying we should fund government.

But we should not fund Obamacare. Now, one of the things that might have played out differently, one of the most revealing exchanges and an exchange you were a part of when you asked Harry Reid about the funding for NIH. When the government was shut down, the House passed 14 bills to fund vital government priorities. The Democrats objected to all of them. They sat on Harry Reid's desk. He wouldn't allow a vote. Every one of them was a clean bill. So you had a bill to fund the veteran's administration.

You have to think about this for a minute, breaking it down.

When friends or family "stage an intervention" it's because a loved one is sick. The classic example is the alcoholic whose family life is being destroyed by drink and family members want to confront their loved one's denial and disease with "caring and compassion." Or perhaps it's a family member who's got a gambling addiction. A loved one's entire life revolves around going to casinos to the point that all of life's other priorities are rationalized away for the sake of generating the thill of the slots or the roulette wheel. Out of concern for the health of their loved one, family members organize an intervention to help the addict cope with the devastating consequences of their problem.

In both cases, the "intervention" is staged to help someone who's sick, someone with the disease of alcoholism or the clinically irrational addiction of gaming.

And now here we have Senate Republicans holding luncheons with the Texas Senator to literally hound and harass him on his "hopeless" ObamaCare defunding agenda. These meetings, according to "Senate colleagues," were confrontational and angry.

And Ted Cruz "didn't flinch." He didn't cave to the pressure from his craven and yellow-bellied establishment GOP pols. He resisted Senate Republicans' calls for "collegiality" in abandoning his crusade to protect the American people against the ObamaCare monstrosity.

Ted Cruz is not sick. He doesn't need an intervention to save him from pathologically diseased behavior. It's the Republican establishment that's sick. The establishment GOP has joined forces with the JournoList media to demonize the one person speaking the concerns of everyday Americans. Ted Cruz has gone to Washington to represent the interests of his constituents. He's doing the people's work. And members of his own party want him destroyed!

They're "really angry at you," Bash says to Cruz. And he doesn't flinch!

The entire establishment is attacking Ted Cruz as this crazed Frankenstein of the tea party. And he doesn't flinch. He's being flayed by the Obama-alled press as a "tea party deadender" out to normalize "the new crazy" in American politics.

But who's crazy? Seriously?

We now have a budget deal that's eliminated any caps on borrowing until 2014, and Democrats will push to make the removal of those borrowing limits permanent. We blew past $17 trillion within hours of the announcement of the budget deal. And there's no end in sight. And who's crazy? We have a national healthcare debacle in which insurance premiums are skyrocketing around the country, with 45 states documenting surges in insurance rates. American healthcare is crashing down the path to single-payer. And who's crazy?

Republicans fear losses in upcoming elections. Senate Republicans especially fear that Democrats could win a filibuster-proof majority, and individual senators are angling, at all costs, to keep their seats. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell will be next year's poster boy for the Senate GOP's Obama-shoe-shine coterie.

But the one constant on display through all this craven partisan protection will be Senator Ted Cruz's courage and commitment. He's committed to the values that have made this country great and prosperous --- and he's got the crosshairs firmly affixed between his shoulders for it. But his analysis is the correct one: We simply need more members of Congress committed to the limited government agenda, members who are willing to leverage their institutional power to stop this healthcare train wreck dead in its tracks. There's gonna be a reckoning on ObamaCare soon enough. It's simply not working and it won't be fixed in time for people to get enrolled. The White House is going to be forced to delay the law, and when it does it will be heroes like Ted Cruz who are vindicated.

UPDATE: Linked at Blazing Cat Fur. Thanks!

Maria Bartiromo on #ObamaCare: 'We Are Becoming Something of a Part-Time Employment Country...'

Via Gateway Pundit:

Young Intellectuals Resurrect Marxism

I found this Michelle Goldberg piece pretty interesting, "A Generation of Intellectuals Shaped by 2008 Crash Rescues Marx From History’s Dustbin." (Via Maggie's Farm.)

Actually, though, I think the piece --- and this movement to dig up Marx --- underestimates how thoroughly leftist thought today is marinated in Marxist class-struggle epistemology. The central hurdle for an resurrection of Marxism is the historically problematic case of Stalinism in the Soviet Union. So we see in the Goldberg piece that it's apparently possible for new Marxists to be anti-capitalist and anti-Stalinist simultaneously. This isn't a new position, of course, as the piece mentions. Folks pushing a politics of a "new left" have always had to grapple with the totalitarian legacy of the Soviet Union. But since the left's longings for utopia never end, the program of collective amnesia toward socialism Stalinist crimes can only deepen. It's fundamentally a monstrous program of collective lies, because to deny the genocidal evil of Soviet communism is to mount an enormous project of Orwellian deception. This is the fatal flaw of all leftist ideological programs.

Skulls From the Caucasus Spark Debate on Origins of Early Human Ancestors

This is cool.

At LAT, "Scientists rethink humans' family tree," and "A new family portrait."

Candice Swanepoel Meets the Royal Fantasy Bra

Well, the show's coming up in December!

#RedSox Head to World Series With Spectacular Come-From-Behind Victory Over #Tigers — #ALCS

Well, after the Dodgers' elimination yesterday, it goes without saying that I'm pleased with Boston's win tonight.

At NBC Sports, "Shane Victorino's grand slam puts the Red Sox back on top in the seventh inning of Game 6."

Started from the bottom now the @RedSox are going to the #WorldSeries: http://t.co/wKI5ta5VEm pic.twitter.com/asfTllyXtV

— MLB (@MLB) October 20, 2013

BOSTON WINS THE PENNANT. It’ll be Red Sox-Cardinals in the World Series. Game 1, Wed. night at Fenway Park. pic.twitter.com/pMuEeWKQIp

— BuzzFeed Sports (@BuzzFeedSports) October 20, 2013

It's Simple Math: People Will Pay More Under #ObamaCare

Anyone who can do math understands that ObamaCare's a total disaster. Our freedoms are being taken away.

From Dave Ramsey's program a couple of weeks back, via Heritage, "Dave Ramsey Says People Will Pay More for Obamacare — It’s Simple Math."

Kelly Brook 2014 Calendar (PHOTOS)

Wow.

She's still hot as ever.

At Egotastic!, "Kelly Brook 2014 Calendar Preview Forecasts a Future Year of Hotness," and at Hollywood Celebrity News, "Enjoy the complete Kelly Brook 2014 calendar."

'12 Years a Slave'

Unlike the professor interviewed by Jake Tapper at the clip, I don't think we need to have a new national debate over slavery. On the other hand, a new movie bringing the reality of that horrid institution to new generations is an awesome thing. I was thinking of going to catch this flick today, but it's in limited release, now playing up in L.A. Maybe next weekend it'll be playing in the O.C., or soon thereafter.

In any case, Kenneth Turan reviewed it yesterday, "Review: '12 Years a Slave' impressive, and hard to watch."



Some trailers here, "12 YEARS A SLAVE: 'What'd You Say to Pats?'" and "12 YEARS A SLAVE: 'Where You From, Platt?'" (And more at the Fox Searchlight YouTube page.)

Maybe I'll try and catch it tomorrow?

Obama Completely Ignores #ObamaCare Rollout Disaster in White House Weekly Address

He's such an asshole.

A loser and partisan asshole --- and the country's worse off for it.

At Weasel Zippers, "Obama’s Weekly Address Shockingly Makes No Mention of Obamacare…"

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."