Stewart-Webster Hospital had only 25 beds when it still treated patients. The rural hospital served this small town of 1,400 residents and those in the surrounding farms and crossroads for more than six decades. But since the hospital closed in the spring of last year, many of those in need have to travel up to 40 miles to other hospitals.
Barack Obama is secretly negotiating the largest international trade agreement in history, and the mainstream media in the United States is almost completely ignoring it. If this treaty is adopted, it will be the most important step toward a one world economic system that we have ever seen. The name of this treaty is “the Trans-Pacific Partnership”, and the text of the treaty is so closely guarded that not even members of Congress know what is in it.
Dengue hemorrhagic fever has been added to the list of diseases brought by the surge of “unaccompanied minors” who have illegally entered the U.S. this year.
The Montgomery County school district in suburban Washington, DC has voted to strip Christmas from the school calendar after complaints by Muslims, who say the move doesn’t go far enough. In a 7-1 vote, Montgomery’s Board of Education removed references to Christmas, Easter, Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah from next year’s school calendar, replacing them with ambiguous terms such as “winter break” and “student holidays.” The decision was made after complaints by Muslim parents that the Islamic holiday of Eid wasn’t being recognized.
Despite telling MSNBC that his comments were “off the cuff,” a second video has emerged of Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber saying the law was passed because Americans were “too stupid” to understand it. During an appearance on Ronan Farrow Daily, Gruber tried to explain away his initial comments by claiming he was speaking “off the cuff” when he said that a “lack of transparency” was crucial in fooling ‘stupid Americans’ during the effort to pass Obamacare. “I spoke inappropriately and I regret having made those comments,” said Gruber.
There were more than twice as many incidents involving White House complex fence- and barrier-jumping over the last five years than the U.S. Secret Service previously publicly disclosed, although the vast majority of them involved breaches of lower barriers than the main fence.
There are a lot people in America right now who are under the delusion that the Republican Party will be their savior from the perfect storm of a convergence of catastrophic events like ISIS coming through our Southern border, economic crisis or collapse, a major terrorist attack inside the U.S., skyrocketing food prices, an Ebola pandemic, American troops deployed into the Ukraine region in a conflict with Russia, American troops sent to regions like Iraq and Syria, the prospect of a regional thermonuclear war and the beginnings of World War III, Russia invading Alaska and other remote U.
The foundation of America’s nuclear arsenal is fractured, and the government has no clear plan to repair it. The cracks appear not just in the military forces equipped with nuclear weapons but also in the civilian bureaucracy that controls them, justifies their cost, plans their future and is responsible for explaining a defense policy that says nuclear weapons are at once essential and excessive. It’s not clear that the government recognizes the full scope of the problem, which has wormed its way to the core of the nuclear weapons business without disturbing bureaucracies fixated on defending their own turf.
In a newly uncovered video, Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber admits that a “lack of transparency” was key in getting the Affordable Care Act passed because “the stupidity of the American voter” would have otherwise killed the bill. From 2009-2010 Gruber, a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, served as a technical consultant to the Obama Administration during which time he helped craft the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, more commonly known as Obamacare. During a recent panel discussion, Gruber explained that the characterization of the individual mandate as a tax, which led to the Supreme Court upholding it as such, was not actually a tax at all.
Now, President Barack Obama must limp into his final two years in office. All second-term presidents lose considerable clout at this mark. But Obama’s time as a lame duck comes amid a political climate so fractured that compromise with Congress is all but impossible.
The Justice Department has handed over to House investigators 64,280 pages of documents related to the notoriously botched Operation Fast and Furious — data President Barack Obama had claimed was exempt from congressional review. Calling the information an “election eve dump,” House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa on Tuesday hailed the hand-over. “This production is nonetheless a victory for the legislative branch, a victory for transparency, and a victory for efforts to check Executive Branch power,” Issa said in a statement.
Voters in Oregon and Washington, D.C., have voted to approve sweeping pro-marijuana legalization, according to a CNN projection.
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), declaring himself “humbled” by Tuesday night’s many Republican wins, says it’s not time to celebrate, it’s time to pass jobs, energy, tax and regulatory reform bills: “It’s time for government to start getting results and implementing solutions to the challenges facing our country, starting with our still-struggling economy,” Boehner said in a statement. “Americans can expect the new Congress to debate and vote soon on the many common-sense jobs and energy bills that passed the Republican-led House in recent years with bipartisan support but were never even brought to a vote by the outgoing Senate majority, as well as solutions offered by Senate Republicans that were denied consideration.
Likely Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton actively supported more than 25 candidates in the midterms, but half of those candidates found themselves on the losing side of their races by the end of Tuesday night. In some cases, Clinton made public appearances with the candidate; in others, she attended fundraisers. The most stinging losses for Clinton were in Kentucky and Arkansas, where both Democratic Senate candidates relied on Clinton to get southern Democrats to the polls.
Internal Revenue Service Commissioner John Koskinen warned that close to half the people trying to reach the IRS by phone might not get through during the upcoming 2015 tax filing season. “Phone service could plummet to 53%,” he told an audience of tax practitioners at the AICPA National Tax Conference in Washington, D.C.
The more things change, the more things stay the same. As I write this, it looks like the Republicans are going to take control of the U.S.
An elections administrator in Bexar County, Texas, says her office is investigating a voting machine that appeared to leave off Republican gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott’s name. “We’ve had complaints that we don’t understand,” Jacque Callanen told TheBlaze. “I’m sending someone out to bring that booth into us.
The trustworthiness of electronic voting machines has once again come under scrutiny after a touch screen in North Carolina flipped a man’s vote from Democrat to Republican in a key Senate race. “Percy Bostick, 69, of Greensboro said he tried casting a vote for Democrat Kay Hagan at the Old Guilford County Courthouse, only to have the machine register Republican Thom Tillis as his choice,” reports the News-Record. Bostick was forced to vote four times before the machine accurately recorded his choice.
Cybersecurity experts have warned that a highly flawed and vulnerable electronic voting system in Alaska could, by itself, swing the entire outcome of the mid-term elections and decide whether Democrats remain in control of the Senate. A report from The Intercept highlights how easy hackers could intercept and change electronic ballots before they are counted by county elections departments in the Last Frontier State. The report notes that thousands of voters will register electronically to receive a PDF ballot on their computer.
Sharyl Attkisson is an investigative journalist who became the story when she quit CBS News after two decades amid allegations that the network refused to run some of her stories that were critical of President Barack Obama. Ahead of the Tuesday release of her book Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama’s Washington, she spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about her struggles with CBS executives and her assertion that her computers were hacked, possibly by Obama operatives.