RedState Briefing 11/20/2013

Morning Briefing For November 20, 2013 Good Morning from London. I'm over here to participate in Thursday night's Oxford Union debate.  In the meantime, two housekeeping items for you.  First, I'll be sending out the Morning Briefing the rest of the week even though I'm here.  It actually works out well.  I can get up here by 9am and its still 4am in Macon.  Second, as we do each year Thanksgiving week, we will be running the Morning Briefing as needed.  If there's big news, you'll get the Morning Briefing, but otherwise all of you and I are traveling and cooking this week and the news slows down.  I will brief you on anything important that happens, otherwise enjoy your family next week. Take care, Erick >> Today's Sponsor 1.  Collapse of the Leviathan 106,000 Americans have put an Obamacare plan in their shopping cart on one of the state or federal Affordable Care Act websites. It is not that 106,000 people have paid for a healthcare plan. The federal government has decided to tabulate those who have paid for an account and those who have merely selected an account without checking out from the website as having gotten a healthcare plan. Less than 27,000 have actually checked out from the federal government’s own healthcare exchange website. Meanwhile, 5 million Americans have lost healthcare coverage thanks to the Affordable Care Act. It will, we now know, take longer to get the website fixed than it took to win World War II — and even then the Obama Administration intends to consider it a success if only 80% of Americans can log on. Imagine if Amazon.com considered it a success if only 80% of its customers could check out. . . . please click here for the rest of the post → 2.  Senator Mike Lee Critiques the War on Poverty If you haven’t read Utah Senator Mike Lee’s remarks [Bring Them In] at the Heritage Foundation’s Anti-Poverty Forum you really owe it to yourself to do so. It is probably the most succinct conservative critique of modern government anti-poverty programs in recent decades. When President Lyndon Johnson declared an “unconditional war on poverty” in his 1964 State of the Union address it represented, arguably, the high water mark for the acceptance on liberal ideology in America. The essence of the speech was a singleminded devotion to the “the perfectability of man”: the notion that perfection can be achieved on Earth through the efforts of man, or in the case, the federal government. Never mind that some famous guy, his name escapes me at the moment, warned us all that the poor will always be with us.  . . . please click here for the rest of the post → 3.  Special Pleading: Don’t Dismiss a Conspiracy Because it is a Conspiracy Now that we’ve had about 12 hours for the article to sink in, the potential bombshell dropped at the NY Post is starting to find its naysayers. This is a wholly expected turn of events but all together remains disappointing. For those of you that missed it, there is an anonymous source claiming that the drop in unemployment reported prior to the 2012 election contained falsified data intended to make President Obama look good. Look, I have no idea if the anonymous source for the Post is legitimate or if he’s just some guy with a chip on his shoulder because he thought he was the hardest working guy around and everyone should’ve recognized that. But if I’ve learned anything from the last few years, it is this: never assume something is beyond the corruptive nature of this regime. . . . please click here for the rest of the post → >> Today's Sponsor Sincerely yours, Erick Erickson Editor-in-Chief, RedState Forward This Email to a Friend Take me to RedState