Oh – Apparently The White House Was The Source For Dick Durbin’s “Top House Republican” Smear

October, 24, 2013 by nicedeb

This is an update to yesterday’s story about Little Dick Durbin’s October 20 Facebook post that had tongues wagging in Washington, this week. Durbin wrote, “in a ‘negotiation’ meeting with the president, one GOP House Leader told the president: ‘I cannot even stand to look at you.’”

Yesterday, the White House flatly denied that it happened, while Dick Durbin stood by his story.

Now, via Huffpo, we see that some sort of explanation has been hashed out:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) told his Democratic caucus last week in a private meeting that a top House Republican said to President Barack Obama, “I cannot even stand to look at you,” according to two Democratic senators who were present.

The account was confirmed by two Senate Democratic aides who said they independently learned of the exchange from other senators.

A White House official said Thursday that the administration did relay such a message to Reid, but that it was the result of a miscommunication.

“While the quote attributed to a Republican lawmaker in the House GOP meeting with the President is not accurate, there was a miscommunication when the White House read out that meeting to Senate Democrats, and we regret the misunderstanding,” the official said in a statement.

So Harry Reid was spreading lies, again, and the White House is covering his behind by saying it was a “miscommunication.” As if something like that can be miscommunicated.

Maybe what the White House really said was, the top Republican (Pete Sessions, it turns out) LOOKED like he couldn’t even stand looking at Obama.”

Moe Lane reports that Rep. Pete Sessions is demanding an apology for the lie (which is two weeks old, it turns out), but thinks it’s unlikely he’ll get one:

SML Reid, Dick Durbin, and President Obama don’t really think that people who disagree with them are worth apologizing to. Heck, I’m not certain these days whether any of them think that we’re really people. I know that that’s a horrible thing to say, but it’s based on their past behavior, so said horribleness is not exactly my problem.

And now the story is no longer operative and the White House needs to disavow it as best they can while everyone (except Republicans) keeps their integrity.

See, now the White House actually needs something from Congress, which means that it needs something from the House, which means that it needs something from the GOP. Alas, Dick Durbin had already opened his mouth and repeated an internal-consumption lie that seemed a good idea at the time. That had to be fixed. Quickly. And with no foolishness, for once. But also: no apology. Merely… “regrets.”

Streaming Live: House Energy And Commerce Committee Hearing: PPACA Implementation Failures: Didn’t Know or Didn’t Disclose?

October, 24, 2013 by nicedeb

The House Energy and Commerce Committee is holding a hearing inquiring into the breakdowns in the launch of ObamaCrash.

Via NPR:

The witness list is stocked with contractors in charge of the administration’s snake-bit health care insurance sign-up website. Here’s the lineup: Cheryl Campbell, senior vice president, CGI Federal; Andrew Slavitt, group executive vice president, Optum/Quality Software Services, Inc.; Lynn Spellecy, corporate counsel, Equifax Workforce Solutions; and John Lau, program director, Serco.

The Associated Press reports that the contractors in testimony prepared for the committee will attempt to shift blame for problems to the administration. Late changes and lack of coordination, they say, bollixed up the system.

This has been beared out in today’s testimony particularly when Republicans questioned the CGI execs on the troubling source code that The Weekly Standard discovered on the federal website.

Buried in the source code of Healthcare.gov is this sentence that could prove embarrassing: “You have no reasonable expectation of privacy regarding any communication or data transiting or stored on this information system.” Though not visible to users and obviously not intended as part of the terms and conditions, the language is nevertheless a part of the underlying code for the “Terms & Conditions” page on the site.

After creating an account on Healthcare.gov, users are asked to click an “I accept” button under some routine Terms & Conditions prohibiting unauthorized attempts to upload information or change the website. Once users click the button, they may proceed to shop for insurance and enter detailed personal information. However, when the Terms & Conditions page is visible, the hidden sentence mentioned above along with several others can be seen by using a web browser’s “View Source” feature. A screen grab below shows the visible Terms & Conditions page along with a simultaneous view of the code underlying it:

This was the Regime’s call, we’re told.

Democrats huff Republicans are just scare-mongering because they don’t want millions of Americans with pre-existing conditions to get healthcare.

A CGI exec confirmed that healthcare.gov crashed October 1 with just 2,000 users online.

Update 9:50 Central:

Horrified Americans perhaps seeing Henry Waxman for the first time, are googling “Henry Waxman’s nose” and finding this old post from 2008.

Update 10:24 Central:

Tyler Durden‘s take on the hearing so far:

As the Congressional hearing, to apportion blame for the farce that Obamacare has already become, gathers steam the overwhelming theme from the four witnesses is “it’s not our fault,”and as much as the Congressmen dive deeply into the process, the more it is clear that the left hand had no idea what the right hand was doing in yet another government-funded SNAFU. The entire discussion can be summed up by CGI’s comments that “our portion of the application worked as designed.” Indeed, all of the contractors point the finger back at the government’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid as responsible for “end to end testing,” and ultimately the #fail.

Update:

There was some fireworks during the mostly dull proceedings when Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) blurted out “I will not yield to this “monkey court!” when another congressman wanted to get a word in about the privacy issues at healthcare.gov….

Extortion: How Obama’s “Squeegee Man” Eric Holder Punishes Obama’s Political Enemies (Video)

October, 24, 2013 by nicedeb

Author Peter Schweizer was on Hannity, Tuesday night to talk about his explosive new book Extortion.

He talked about the mind-blowing corruption and political extortion that is rampant in DC, these days on both sides of the aisle but noting that it comes from the top. He compared the Regime to “the squeegee man that used to be in NYC – – they’d walk up to your car and say I want to clean your windshield – they’ve got a cloth in one hand and a brick in the other, and you’ve got to pay them or the brick’s coming through the windshield”….

He said that’s a huge problem at the DOJ. “Eric Holder is the basically the Squeegee guy holding the brick. There are companies that are being told that they are subject to DOJ investigation, criminal and civil, and then these companies are solicited for political donations to the Obama Campaign (in 2012) and now to political committees and there is statistical evidence in the book that literally, you cut your chance of going to jail in half if you make a contribution.”

He said, “the other thing they’re doing is after the 2010 midterm elections, when they had that stunning defeat in Congress, the Obama Department of Justice targeted the industries that financed the tea party candidates that got elected.”

Literally days after President Obama made that famous statement “we’re going to punish our political opponents,”[the Holder DOJ sent out an industry sweep letter to companies in the oil and gas sector which said you are subject to criminal investigation and you’d better share and cooperate….it was a clear intimidation tactic being used.”

Remember what happened to Gallup when they released some polls that weren’t pleasing to Obama, last year? All of a sudden, they were the subject of a DOJ investigation into their poll methodology…”Punish your enemies…” My God, Hannity’s right, we’re living in a Banana Republic. When are people going to wise up???

Schweizer continued to say that “the top Republican financiers in 2012 were all subject to DOJ criminal charges.” Every one. “It’s shocking really unlike anything we’ve ever seen,” he added.

“The top five positions at the DOJ beginning with Eric Holder were all campaign bundlers for the Obama Campaign. These Obama fund raisers were raising money to put Obama into power, and now are making decisions about who they are going to prosecute and who they’re not going to prosecute.” Schweizer called it ” melding of the DOJ and the campaign apparatus of the Obama campaign.”

And remember how electing this brilliant man of the left was going to elevate our standing in the world? Yeah, not so much…

Schweitzer said, “the world bank and World Economic Forum …do a study every year on competitiveness of countries. Since 2009 in both of these major studies, we’ve gone from the middle of the pack among advanced industrialized countries in perceived corruption, to now in 2013 we are at the bottom of the pack. We are now seen as most prone to corruption of any industrialized country in the world. That’s how far it slipped and how quickly it slipped.”

“And the DOJ” Schweizer claims, “is right in the middle of it.”