Look who was behind the Jeff Flake elevator setup

By John Fund

AP

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JEFF FLAKE

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Sex assault survivor who confronted Jeff Flake speaks out

On Friday morning, two women raced past reporters and security officers and blocked a senators-only elevator in the US Capitol. They cornered Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, who had just announced he was going to vote yes on moving Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination out of the Judiciary Committee and onto the Senate floor for a full debate.

The women wouldn’t let Flake leave until had they yelled at him, face to face, for several minutes. Anyone who thinks the two left-wing activists acted without a well-thought-out plan hasn’t read “The Intimidation Game” by Kim Strassel of the Wall Street Journal.

A CNN camera broadcast the event live, and from there it went viral. “Thank you,” Flake said, as he was finally allowed to exit after one of the women revealed, apparently for the first time, that she’d been sexually abused: “I was sexually assaulted, and nobody believed me. I didn’t tell anyone, and you’re telling all women that they don’t matter . . . That’s what you’re telling all of these women. That’s what you’re telling me right now. Look at me when I’m talking to you! You are telling me that my assault doesn’t matter . . . Don’t look away from me. Look at me.”

The New Yorker reported that, after the incident, Flake “looked more withdrawn than ever, eyes wet, voice a little frayed, chin tucked down in the somber knot of his tie.” Shortly afterward, Flake voted to refer Kavanaugh’s nomination to the full Senate but with a sudden proviso: He wouldn’t vote for the judge on the floor unless the vote were delayed to do an FBI investigation, “limited in time to no more than one week,” into “current allegations that are already there.” Democrats rejoiced.

A reporter for the Washington Examiner asked Flake, “Did the women who confronted you this morning, did they have any role in changing your mind?”

“No, no,” Flake said as he shook his head. Fair enough, but liberals certainly have convinced themselves to believe that the in-your-face strategy worked. So no doubt we’ll see more of it in these uncivil times.

Ana Maria Archila and Maria Gallagher were the two women who confronted Flake inside the elevator. Perhaps because they expressed such raw emotion, few media outlets dug into their political activism. Archila is an executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy; she had spent the previous week in Washington engaged in protests against Kavanaugh. Gallagher is a 23-year-old activist with the group. The center is a left-wing group heavily funded by George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. Indeed, as of 2014, Open Society was one of the three largest donors to the group.

Make no mistake. The Center for Popular Democracy is at the heart of the effort to stop Kavanaugh. A source forwarded to me an email sent from the organization: “Last week, you saw protestors interrupting the Kavanaugh hearings, trying to slow it down and show the Judiciary Committee how much they/we care. Those protests were organized by the Women’s March and the Center for Popular Democracy and other groups.”

Archila has another role beyond her duties as co–executive director of the center. She is also a member of the national committee of the New York-based Working Families Party. The WFP was founded in 1998 by the leaders of ACORN, the now-disbanded and disgraced group of community organizers.

In 2009, ACORN finally ran off the rails. Guerrilla videographer James O’Keefe secretly recorded employees in its offices in Brooklyn, Baltimore, Washington and San Bernardino, Calif. O’Keefe and a colleague posed as a prostitute and a pimp and said they were planning to import underage women from El Salvador for the sex trade. They asked for and received advice on getting a housing loan and evading federal taxes.

The US Senate quickly voted 83-7 to strip ACORN of more than $1.6 million in federal housing money meant to help low-income people obtain loans and prepare tax forms. Within weeks, ACORN’s donors fled the group and it was forced to close its doors, with many of its affiliates reforming under new mismanagement and new names — such as the WFP.

I have no doubt that the vast majority of protesters who want to stop Brett Kavanaugh are sincere and are merely exercising their constitutional rights. But imagine if two women had cornered a Democratic senator in an elevator and demanded an investigation of who had leaked to the media Christine Blasey Ford’s letter alleging that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her. (Sen. Lindsey Graham said Sunday that he planned to investigate the leak.) There would have been sputtering outrage in media circles, and reporters would have breathlessly hunted down any ties between the women and outside groups.

It’s a sign of media bias that the people from the well-funded groups behind the anti-Kavanaugh protests are described merely as “activists” and that their political motives and origins are largely unexplored.

John Fund is national affairs reporter for National Review, where this was first published.

https://nypost.com/2018/10/01/look-who-was-behind-the-jeff-flake-elevator-setup/?utm_source=facebook_sitebuttons&utm_medium=site%20buttons&utm_campaign=site%20buttons

Obama Warns Against Income Inequality While Delivering $7,700-a-Minute Speech

Dario Ayala / Reuters

by PENNY STARR

Former President Barack Obama spoke to the Chamber of Commerce in Montreal on Tuesday, warning against income inequality and the concentration of wealth—remarks from a man who reportedly commanded $400,000 a speech, or $7,700-a-minute at that rate, for his Canadian speech.

Obama said the world must do more to combat income inequality, noting that the concentration of wealth fans fears that governments exist solely to benefit the powerful, NBC reported.

“That’s a recipe for more cynicism and more polarization, less trust in our institutions and less trust in each other,” Obama said.

“And it’s part of what leads people to turn to populist alternatives that may not actually deliver,” Obama said in a thinly disguised jab at President Donald Trump without naming his successor specifically.

According to the Toronto Star, not everyone could afford to see the man calling for the end of income inequality.

“A dim-lit hall laid out for a rock star, a red-carpet stroll for giddy VIPs and video screens for the rest of the roughly 6,000 who were neither sufficiently wealthy nor connected to get a front-row seat,” the Star reported.

“This was the scene here at a 70-minute appearance nine months in the making: Barack Obama’s first post-presidency address on Canadian soil—one of the few appearances he’s made anywhere since handing power to U.S. President Donald Trump in January,” theStar reported.

“Hotly contested, planned and negotiated until the final days and beamed across North America, it was a strategic investment that may have topped half a million dollars and was meant to put on the map a city in the throes of its 375th anniversary celebrations,” the Star reported.

The Star speculated Obama may have been persuaded to speak through his friendship with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who tweeted about the former president’s visit:

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Other dignitaries attending Obama’s speech included the federal cabinet minister and former astronaut Marc Garneau, Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre, and Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard.

“All were seated at the table of honour, surrounded captains of Quebec’s business world, sipping wine at corporate tables,” the Star reported. “The more reasonably priced $375 seats started at a distance where Obama was just a well-lit spec on a faraway stage.”

Michel Leblanc, president of the Montreal Chamber of Commerce, “refused to say how much they paid for Obama’s visit or what other conditions might have led to their winning bid,” according to the Star.

“Obama has reportedly demanded a $400,000 (U.S.) speaking fee for at least two other speeches,” the Star wrote.

“One Canadian source, who was unaware of the payment details, said such a price tag—which works out in Canadian dollars to roughly $7,700 for every minute Obama spent on the Montreal stage—would not be a great surprise,” the outlet continued.

Meanwhile, NBC’s report reveals Obama is now striving to be an international community organizer.

“Obama said that in times of economic uncertainty it can be tempting to turn to isolationism and ‘the politics of us-vs.-them’ and said World War I and World War II were the result,” NBC reported.

“He said the U.S. and other nations showed there was a better way “in creating an international order that was based not just on self-interest but also on principles.”

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/06/07/obama-warns-income-inequality-delivering-7700-minute-speech/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social

Hillary’s Divisive, Reckless Rhetoric on Voting Rights

Hillary’s Divisive, Reckless Rhetoric on Voting Rights

By John Fund 

The late Saul Alinsky, the father of the community-organizing model that inspired both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, would be delighted. The man who championed moral relativism in tearing down the establishment (“In war, the end justifies almost any means”) is calling the tune of the Democratic party on voting issues.

Last March, President Obama rhapsodized about what would happen under mandatory voting: “If everybody voted, then it would completely change the political map in this country.” Obama once served as the lawyer for the disgraced and defunct voter-registration group ACORN, and he is still toeing its line.

Then last week, Hillary Clinton demanded that the federal government override state laws and automatically register everyone to vote and then offer at least 20 days of early voting, turning Election Day into an Election Month. Both would dramatically complicate the job of already-overburdened voter registrars and make it harder to catch potential fraud. In the case of New York v. United States (1992) and other cases,  the Supreme Court has clearly ruled that it is beyond Congress’s power to do what Hillary wants.

RELATED: We Just Don’t Need Section 5 Anymore

But her policy proposals were merely a way station on the path to Clinton’s goal: lambasting Republicans as inheritors of the Southern Democratic tradition of Jim Crow and firing up a liberal base that isn’t yet enamored of her. She accused Republicans of “fear-mongering about a phantom epidemic of voter fraud” and accused Jeb Bush, Rick Perry, and Scott Walker by name of taking part in “a sweeping effort to disempower and disenfranchise people of color, poor people, and young people.”

Ohio governor John Kasich wasn’t amused. While Marc Elias, the Clinton campaign’s general counsel, is participating in legal challenges to Ohio’s voter laws, his candidate doesn’t seem to follow the news in Ohio much. In discussing Clinton’s call for an early-voting period of 20 days, Kasich told Fox News:

If she wants to sue somebody, let her sue New York, In Ohio, we’ve got, like, 27 days of early voting, 27 days, a couple hundred hours. And In New York . . . the only voting that occurs is on Election Day. . . . And she’s going to sue my state? . . . Why don’t you take care of business at home before you run around the country using these demagogic statements that we don’t want people to vote.

Hillary won’t do that because her “business” is to turn out the maximum possible number of votes in 2016. The election-integrity measures being pushed in many states — such as showing photo ID at the polls — are enormously popular. A recent Rasmussen poll showed that 76 percent of likely voters support photo ID, including 58 percent of Democrats. Such measures guard against the disfranchisement of voters that occurs when someone cancels out their vote through fraud, but Clinton dismisses the very notion of voter fraud, despite numerous recent examples and the virtual impossibility of detecting fraud once it has been committed using a secret ballot. “I went to the polls to vote last year, and was told someone had already voted in my name,” Dennis Miller, an economist from Akron, Ohio, told me this week. “The officials said there was no way to detect who had done it.”

RELATED: Loretta Lynch Should Stand Up for the Voting Rights of Every Citizen, Regardless of Race

It’s not surprising that Mrs. Clinton denies the existence of fraud — she has a long history of encouraging measures that undermine election integrity. In 1993, President Bill Clinton made the passage of the Motor Voter Law his first legislative priority. Even though he had just been elected in a race that saw the largest increase in turnout in a generation, Clinton declared there was a “crisis” in voting and rammed the bill through Congress. It severely limited states from pruning “dead wood” (people who had died, moved, or been convicted of crimes) from their rolls. States had to permit mail-in voter registration, which made phantom voter registrations much easier. States could no longer ask anyone for identification or proof of citizenship when registering. Welfare, DMV, and other government offices were ordered to promote voter registration. Joe Madison, the former head of voter registration for the NAACP and now a radio talk-show host, said such measures would have a clear political effect. “When people are standing in line to get cheese and butter or unemployment compensation, you don’t have to tell them how to vote. They know how to vote.”

The Motor Voter Law was the brainchild of two radical academic allies of Saul Alinsky, Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, who believed that poor people had every moral right to game the electoral and political system to deliver radical change. Bill Clinton, with Hillary at his side, acknowledged the role Cloward and Piven had played in passing the legislation when he signed it into law in their presence in 1993. In 1996, Cloward defended  Motor Voter, telling CBS News, “It’s better to have a little bit of fraud than to leave people off the rolls who belong there.”

The Alinsky Left has actively promoted measures to expand the voting rolls by any means possible while they’ve opposed any and all ballot-security measures.

Since then, the Alinsky Left has actively promoted measures to expand the voting rolls by any means possible while they’ve opposed any and all ballot-security measures. “Liberal foundations, public-interest law firms, and advocacy groups have created a permanent network of experts and organizations devoted to an arcane but critical task — monopolizing the narrative on election laws and procedures,” Christian Adams told Breitbart News. A former Justice Department attorney, Adams is now in the private sector and has brought lawsuits to force several counties to clean up their rolls — including counties with more registered voters than they have adults. “Cloaking their actions in the rhetoric of civil rights and the right to vote, they seek to affect the outcome of the election.”

Indeed, a tenet of the Alinsky Left is that there are no limits to how far activists will go to expand the voting rolls. Bill de Blasio, the radical New York Mayor who served as manager for Hillary Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign, has privately supported allowing aliens who have legal residency papers to vote in New York City elections. The City Council is likely to pass such a law and send it to his desk in time for his 2017 reelection battle.

None of Hillary Clinton’s proposals are likely to become law before she faces the voters in 2016. But it won’t be for lack of trying or because she’s too ethical to use Alinsky-style tactics to demagogue the issue.

— John Fund is national-affairs correspondent for National Review Online.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/419432/hillarys-divisive-reckless-rhetoric-voting-rights-john-fund

Newsmax

Ferguson Protesters Now Protesting Over Not Getting Paid

By: John Blosser

At least some of the protesters who looted, rioted, burned buildings and overturned police cars in Ferguson, Missouri, last year were promised payment of up to $5,000 per month to join the protests.

However, when the Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment (MORE), the successor group to the now-bankrupt St. Louis branch of ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), stiffed the protesters, they launched a sit-in protest at the headquarters of MORE and created a Twitter page to demand their money, the Washington Times reports.

Former U.S. Rep. Allen B. West noted on his website, "Instead of being thankful for getting off the unemployment line for a few weeks and having a little fun protesting, the paid rioters who tore up Ferguson, MO, are protesting again.

"First of all, can you even imagine getting paid $5,000.00 a month for running around holding a sign and burning down an occasional building? That's around $1,250.00 per week. Try making that at McDonald's or Starbucks."

The Kansas City Star estimates that the Ferguson riots, characterized as a spontaneous eruption of anger over the shooting of unarmed black criminal Michael Brown by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, cost the county $4.2 million.

Millennial Activists United (MAU) posted a letter on their website stating, "On May 14, 2015 many individuals and organizations of the protest movement that began in Ferguson, Missouri, organized a sit-in in the office of Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment (MORE). The demand was simple: Cut the checks. The protesters say they are unable to pay their bills after taking time to travel to Ferguson.

"Questions have been raised as to how the movement is to sustain when white non-profits are hoarding monies collected of off (sic) black bodies? When we will (sic) hold the industry of black suffering accountable? The people of the community are fed up and the accountability begins here and now," the letter continues.

"There is an insidious strand of racism and white supremacy that exists in this movement. This money is typically in the hands of white people who oversee the types of services that the non-profit provides, while having select token black people to spearhead the conversations within and to the community."

MORE is funded by liberal billionaire George Soros, the Times notes, through his Open Society Foundations (OSF).

The OSF, the Times states, paid for activists from various protest groups to travel to Ferguson and take part in the demonstrations.

Akiba Solomon of Colorlines stated, "More than 500 of us have traveled from Boston, Chicago, Columbus, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Nashville, Portland, Tucson, Washington, D.C., Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and other cities to support the people of Ferguson and help turn a local moment into a national movement," the Times noted.

"There's absolutely no doubt that part of the reason that Ferguson flared up was because protesters were being paid to be there. That makes you wonder how many are being paid in Baltimore? How many more will be paid in the future?" The Right Scoop asked.

Protesters directed much of their anger against MORE director Jeff Ordower, former Missouri head of ACORN and ACORN's Midwest operations, FrontPage Mag reports.

"The unpaid rent-a-mob operatives complain that MORE stiffed them the same way ACORN did to hired protesters throughout its 40 years of radical left-wing rabble-rousing," FrontPage Mag reports.

http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Ferguson-Missouri-paid-protesters/2015/05/25/id/646587/

HOLDER CUTS LEFT IN ON $17 BILLION BANK OF AMERICA SETTLEMENT

HOLDER CUTS LEFT IN ON $17 BILLION BANK OF AMERICA SETTLEMENT

BY PAUL MIRENGOFF IN HOLDER JUSTICE DEPARTMENT, LEFTISM,OBAMA ADMINISTRATION SCANDALS

Radical Democrat activist groups stand to collect millions from Attorney General Eric Holder’s record $17 billion deal to settle alleged mortgage abuse charges against Bank of America, Investors’ Business Daily reports:

Buried in the fine print of the deal, which includes $7 billion in soft-dollar consumer relief, are a raft of political payoffs to Obama constituency groups. In effect, the government has ordered the nation’s largest bank to create a massive slush fund for Democrat special interests.

The deal requires billions of dollars in debt forgiveness payments to delinquent borrowers. It also requires Bank of America to make billions in new loans and to build affordable low-income rental housing.

The remaining money will go to a slush fund for leftists:

If there are leftover funds in four years, the settlement stipulates the money will go to Interest on Lawyers’ Trust Account (IOLTA), which provides legal aid for the poor and supports left-wing causes, and NeighborWorks of America, which provides affordable housing and funds a national network of left-wing community organizers operating in the mold of Acorn.

NeighborWorks of America has been a major supporter of ACORN, the left’s most favored radicals. According to Investors’ Business Daily, in 2008 and 2009 NeighborWorks awarded a whopping $25 million to Acorn Housing.

Moreover, an Acorn Housing spinoff is directly eligible for BofA slush funds. It’s an outfit called Mutual Housing Association of New York. HUD lists its contact person as Ismene Speliotis, who previously served as New York director of Acorn Housing.

But Acorn isn’t the only left-wing beneficiary:

In 2011 alone, NeighborWorks shelled out $35 million in “affordable housing grants” to 115 such groups, according to its website. Recipients included the radical Affordable Housing Alliance, which pressures banks to make high-risk loans in low-income neighborhoods and which happens to be the former employer of HUD’s chief “fair housing” enforcer.

Bank of America gets “extra credit” if it makes at least $100 million in direct donations to IOLTA and housing activist groups approved by HUD. Who are these HUD-approved housing activist groups? Investors’ Business Daily identifies some of them:

• La Raza, which pressures banks to expand their credit box to qualify more low-income Latino immigrants for home loans;

• National Community Reinvestment Coalition, Washington’s most aggressive lobbyist for the disastrous Community Reinvestment Act;

• Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America, whose director calls himself a “bank terrorist;”

• Operation Hope, a South Central Los Angeles group that’s pressuring banks to make “dignity mortgages” for deadbeats.

Coercing banks to provide “dignity mortgages” to people who are unlikely to pay them? That was a big part of how we found ourselves in the financial crisis.

Not only is Eric Holder not letting that crisis go to waste, he seems bent on generating a new one.

As Investors’ Business Daily concludes:

In effect, lenders are bankrolling the same parasites that bled them for the risky loans that caused the mortgage crisis. With new cash, they can ramp back up their shakedown campaign, repeating the cycle of dangerous political lending that wrecked the economy.

These settlements have little, if anything, to do with “justice” or restitution for innocent victims. In its 30-page “statement of facts,” Justice couldn’t provide a single shred of evidence of fraud against BofA. Nor could it ID a single “victim” by name.

The attorney general is actually perverting justice by extorting billions of dollars from the largest banks in the country and giving it away to the president’s political friends and favorite political causes.

We knew that, if elected, Barack Obama was going to spread the wealth around. We should have realized he would spread it to the left-wing “community organizing” world from which he sprang.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/08/holder-cuts-left-in-on-17-billion-bank-of-america-settlement.php

Minimum wage hypocrites: James Varney

Demonstrators in support of fast food workers protest outside a McDonald's as they demand higher wages and the right to form a union without retaliation Monday, July 29, 2013, in New York's Union Square. Activists say hundreds of workers have walked off their jobs. They are demanding a minimum wage increase and calling for better benefits. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

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By James Varney, NOLA.com | The Times-PicayuneThe Times-Picayune
 

Fast-food workers News

• Speak Out: Should fast food workers make $15 an hour? (poll)
• Fast food strikes & minimum wage rallies: Images from across the nation
• Fast-food workers strike, push for $15 per hour
• Minimum wage hypocrites: James Varney

All Stories | All Photos | All Videos

As we celebrate the effort today to get every hard-working American a better paying job by not working, it might be appropriate to look at some other low-paying jobs. Or, better yet, jobs that don't pay at all.
That's right! If you're a high school kid working a minimum wage job, why should you see that as any kind of ladder rung? Why should a pittance in the pocket provide you with any skill that might help you down the road?
So take this day of proposed striking at fast food outlets and look at some other opportunities.
Why not join one of the many groups laboring on your behalf? They won't pay you a nickel, of course - these are groups that favor other people paying higher labor costs, just as they generally favor other people paying everything.
For example, Organizing For Action, that kind of creepy newfangled 4H political arm of President Obama, is looking for talented, hard-working, ambitious folks to fill 14-week unpaid intern positions.
Among the work you might perform there free of charge? Agitating for an increase in the minimum wage!
Similarly, among those fabled dens of journalistic rabble rousing that do so much to stoke the rage against evil huge employers like Wal-Mart, Subway, McDonald's and so many others, there are plenty of outlets looking for bright young people to man the barricades.
Again, for little or no pay.
The left-wing heroes at Mother Jones, bothered by the appearance of having unpaid interns, raised the job status to "fellows" and began paying them the royal wage of $1,000 a month. Assuming a normal work-week, alas, that's well below the minimum wage mandated in its California editorial home.
Across country, in the cheap space of Manhattan, editorial interns at Salon are, alas, unpaid. That hasn't stopped the magazine from publishing pieces excoriating the allegedly underpaid masses.
Well, at least former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich is one man who won't stand for that sort of thing. At the left-wing American Prospect magazine he helped found, interns get a healthy $100-per-week stipend. That's less than a third of what some exploited slob would get working 40 hours at minimum wage, but, hey, are you only in it for the money?
Some of the folks who have long pushed for a so-called "living wage" were the good people of the now defunct ACORN. In fact, they were successful enough to help push through minimum wage increases in California.
Unfortunately, the higher wages carried a price for the noble community organizers: they couldn't hire as many people. So they sued. They lost in California courts.

UPDATE: As of Jan. 1, Mother Jones has announced it will pay its fellows $1,500 a month, which will remove them from this list. At that pay, the magazine said, its fellowships will pay slightly more than the California minimum wage.

 

http://www.nola.com/opinions/index.ssf/2013/12/minimum_wage_hypocrites_james.html

Second O’Keefe video exposes more Obamacare Navigators telling people to commit fraud

by Joe Schoffstall

James O’ Keefe’s Project Veritas has released a second video showing even more Obamacare Navigators in Texas suggesting fraud and deceit to undercover reporters — despite some in the mainstream media calling the first exposé an “isolated incident.”
“Today, Project Veritas released a second investigation exposing more Obamacare navigators counseling applicants to lie and cheat the health care system by erroneously reporting income status, health history, and more,” Project Veritas wrote.
They continue, “Critics said the first video was an isolated incident so we decided to visit with even more navigators funded by your American tax dollars. What we found was disturbing and showed a clear pattern of fraud through the Obamacare navigator program.”
Within the new video, Obamacare Navigators in Texas yet again counsel the reporters to lie in order to avoid higher premiums.
“To get a lower premium, I wouldn’t include it…that’s my money,” Obamacare Navigator Kris McCray from Change Happens in Houston, Texas, advises the reporter of the cash she ‘earned’ on the side but failed to report in her taxes. “I would just try to get that number as low as you can. It would help you qualify for more stuff as far as aid and stuff like that.”
WATCH:

“Do you report this on your taxes?” asks Claudia Flamand of the North Texas Area Community Health Center in Fort Worth, Texas. After the reporter says that he does not, she responds by telling him not to worry. “So if you don’t report it…It’s the same with people who clean houses…Yeah, they don’t report the taxes, they don’t report that income,” she says.
That’s not all.
“So if you don’t claim the income, you don’t have to,” a Navigator from the Community Health Centers of South Central Texas advises. “Are you sure they won’t find out?” asks the undercover reporter. The Navigator reassures that no one will find out.
From the looks of it, these are hardly the isolated incidents that some have claimed.
*To see the full unedited Project Veritas videos, click here. To see the first video in their investigation, click here.

http://capitolcityproject.com/second-okeefe-video-exposes-more-obamacare-navigators-telling-people-to-commit-fraud-and-deceit/

Obamacare’s Branch of the NSA

Obamacare’s Branch of the NSA
Community organizers will use a Federal Data Hub to sign up people for subsidies — and even ballots.

By John Fund                 

HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius stands behind President Barack Obama

 

inShare21

John Fund

President Obama has had a poor record of job creation, but at least one small economic sector is doing well: community organizing.
The Department of Health and Human Services is about to hire an army of “patient navigators” to inform Americans about the subsidized insurance promised by Obamacare and assist them in enrolling. These organizers will be guided by the new Federal Data Hub, which will give them access to reams of personal information compiled by federal agencies ranging from the IRS to the Department of Defense and the Veterans Administration. “The federal government is planning to quietly enact what could be the largest consolidation of personal data in the history of the republic,” Paul Howard of the Manhattan Institute and Stephen T. Parente, a University of Minnesota finance professor, wrote in USA Today. No wonder that there are concerns about everything from identity theft to the ability of navigators to use the system to register Obamacare participants to vote.
HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius wasn’t satisfied with the $54 million in public funds allocated for navigators this year, so she tried to raise money from health-industry executives for Enroll America, the liberal nonprofit group leading the PR push for Obamacare. She had to retreat under withering criticism that she was shaking down companies that were dependent on government, a clear conflict of interest.
Because 34 states have declined to set up their own insurance “exchanges,” the job of guiding exchange enrollees in those states has been left to Washington. The identity of the groups who will get the Sebelius grants isn’t yet known, but Politico reports they are likely to include Planned Parenthood, senior-citizen advocacy organizations, and churches.
So far everything we’ve learned indicates the navigators will be flying blind, or could well be “unsafe at any speed.” In June, the Government Accountability Office reported that HHS is considering allowing navigators to assist with outreach and enrollment tasks even before completing their formal training. The reason? Like so much of Obamacare, the navigators program is behind schedule and drowning in its own complexity.

This spring, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee lawyers were also told by HHS that, despite the fact that navigators will have access to sensitive data such as Social Security numbers and tax returns, there will be no criminal background checks required for them. Indeed, they won’t even have to have high-school diplomas. Both U.S. Census Bureau and IRS employees must meet those minimum standards, if only because no one wants someone who has been convicted of identity theft getting near Americans’ personal records. But HHS is unconcerned. It points out that navigators will have to take a 20–30 hour online course about how the 1,200-page law works, which, given its demonstrated complexity, is like giving someone a first-aid course and then making him a med-school professor. “I want to assure you and all Americans that, when they fill out their [health-insurance] marketplace applications, they can trust the information they’re providing is protected,” said Marilyn Tavenner, head of HHS’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, at a congressional hearing last week. In the age of Wikileaks and IRS abuses, somehow that isn’t very comforting. “The standards proposed by your department could result in a convicted felon receiving federal dollars and gaining access to confidential taxpayer information,” a group of nine Republican senators led by Utah’s Orrin Hatch wrote to Secretary Sebelius last month. “The same standards allow any individual who has registered with the exchange and completed two days of training to facilitate enrollment, as if the decision to purchase health insurance is similar to the decision of registering to vote.”
Indeed, voter registration is among the goals of the folks hawking Obamacare. The People’s World newspaper reports: “California’s Secretary of State Debra Bowen is designating the state’s new Health Benefit Exchange, Covered California, as a voter registration agency under the National Voter Registration Act. That means Covered California will be incorporating voter registration into every transaction — online, in-person and by phone — it has with consumers.” It seems as if some Obama supporters have found a new way to fill the void left by the bankruptcy of ACORN, the notorious left-wing voter-registration group that saw dozens of its employees in multiple states convicted of fraud.
At least the pay will be better. ACORN was infamous for stiffing its employees and even once sued the state of California to ask for an exemption from its minimum-wage law. But early reports are that the federal government will be offering navigators between $20 and $48 an hour. In many states, that’s far more than many private-sector workers with corresponding responsibilities earn.
If there is a silver lining in all of this, it is that the potential failure of the navigators program could further convince voters that Obamacare is simply unworkable. “The Obama administration wants something the federal government has never done: a computer system that connects HHS, the Internal Revenue Service, the Social Security Administration, Homeland Security and perhaps other departments,” John Goodman, a health-care expert with the National Center for Policy Analysis, wrote in the Wall Street Journal in May. “For perspective, consider that the Veterans Administration converted to electronic medical records in 1998 and the VA and the Defense Department tried without success to share records until February [2013] when then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta announced that the plan would be abandoned.”
But the consensus is that, if Obamacare isn’t repealed, the government can, with enough effort and money, get the Data Hub up and running. That concerns many members of Congress.
“Giving community organizers access to the Federal Data Hub is bad policy and potentially a danger to civil liberties,” House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan told me recently. “But it’s one of the most underreported stories I’ve seen. If people only knew about this Data Hub program, it would touch off a huge public outcry.”
— John Fund is national-affairs columnist for NRO. 

http://nationalreview.com/article/354031/obamacares-branch-nsa-john-fund