Jonathan ("stupid voters") Gruber, the Obama health adviser with a penchant for telling the plain truth, said at the time the Affordable Care Act was being written that the reform definitely would not be affordable. The Daily Caller reported Gruber made the statement in a 2009 policy brief in which he said Obamacare had no cost controls in it.

Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., faces demands that he resign his House leadership post because he once spoke to a white supremacy group. The late Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., was a member of such a group, holding a high position in the Ku Klux Klan, and he was elevated to a position third in line of succession to the presidency.

Some end-of-year statistics to ponder:
The Obama administration created 75,000 pages of new federal regulations in 2014.
Federal student loan debt now tops $800 billion.
The U.S. deported 52,701 fewer illegal aliens in FY 2014.

Army captains Edward Mallue Jr. and Natalie Heimel sent a courtesy invitation to President Obama to attend their wedding near the 16th hole of the Kaneohe Klipper Golf Course in Hawaii. He politely declined, then decided he wanted to play the course, forcing the couple to change well-laid plans and move their ceremony to another location.

The ACLU was delighted with a Christmas Eve document dump by the NSA in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. But how juicy was information such as this: "On (redacted) (redacted) used the US SIGINT System (USSS) to locate (redacted) believed to be kidnapped (redacted).

How Your Taxes Are Spent
The U.S. State Department made a $450,000 grant to support women's cricket in Afghanistan. It's uncertain whether any of the money was spent since the Islamic nation opposes development of the sport.

Press pool reports on President Obama's vacation time in Hawaii are essential to full news coverage, if often not newsy and, in fact, boring. The report for the day after Christmas read, in part: "POTUS has finished playing five-and-a-half hours of golf at the Royal Hawaiian Golf Club. Pool did not see POTUS except briefly at 4:38 pm when he headed towards the men's room, past the pro shop ..." blah, blah, blah ...

Conservatives might be glad that indigents in a Central Texas county are expected to bear a share of the burden of paying taxes. The downside is that they are allowed to hire defense attorneys at taxpayer expense.

The nomination of investment banker Antonio Weiss to a top post in the Treasury Department is drawing opposition from both left and right sides of the political spectrum because if he's approved for the job he'll receive a $20 million-plus bonus from his bank. Foes of big spending object on principle. Liberals charge it's Wall Street's attempt to buy off someone who's regulating them.

Blogger Bob is taking a Christmas break.
Season's Greetings to one and all!

How Your Taxes Are Spent
The federal government is spending more than $33,000 to find out if same-sex couples live close to tobacco shops -- theoretically making them more likely to be smokers.

Poor Al Sharpton. His racist rhetoric stirring up hate for white cops after black lawbreakers were killed resisting arrest in Missouri and New York has backfired on him. He's now worried that the backlash over ambush killings of two New York police officers will stall his protest movement.

Here's an alarming statistic: Since President Obama took office in 2009, the Environmental Protection Agency has issued 3,120 new regulations equaling 27,854 pages in the Federal Register and totaling approximately 27,854,000 words. That makes the new regulations 43 times as long as the Bible.

Not that it will discourage anyone with burning ambition to be president from running, but campaign experts say winning the White House in 2016 is expected to cost more than $1 billion.


President Obama began his 16-day winter vacation in Hawaii by -- guess what? -- playing a round of golf.

Your Government at Work
Since 1979 suspected Nazi war criminals have been receiving U.S. Social Security benefits. Congress passed legislation ending the practice after an Associated Press investigation showed dozens of former Nazis collected millions of dollars in retirement benefits after being forced to leave the United States. President Obama signed the measure into law.

If you like your Obamacare health insurance plan, you won't mind a delay in your income tax refund, right? Implementation of Obamacare tax credits and penalties is one reason given for IRS considering a temporary shutdown next year.

It's the duty of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson to protect the United States and its citizens, but apparently he doesn't consider it a patriotic duty. In a recent speech, Johnson admitted that on occasion he has forgotten the pledge of allegiance.

The People for Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) named New York Mayor Bill de Blasio as their "2014 Person of the Year" for proposing a ban on horse drawn carriages. The animal rights group obviously forgot that de Blasio during a local celebration dropped a groundhog, and the animal later died.

President Obama's Christmas gift to Communist Cuba: normalization of relations between the Castro dictatorship and the U.S. What's next, statehood?

"America has lost its first cyberwar. This is a very, very dangerous precedent." - Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich on Sony's cancellation of movie about North Korea amid hacker threats of violence.


How Your Taxes Are Spent
Another example of government spending out of control: Air Force records show that fundraising trips by President Obama in October to California cost taxpayers $1,176,120 in flight expenses alone. Transportation to Los Angeles for a fundraiser hosted by Hollywood star Gwyneth Paltrow cost $1,011,051 and a trip to San Francisco shielded from the public cost $165,069.

"The country does not need another Bush." - Donald Trump, reacting to former Gov. Jeb Bush, R-Fla., announcement that he plans to "actively explore" a campaign for president in 2016.

"... sex isn't a real problem for me ..." - Potential Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum, giving a candid (if somewhat curious) response in an interview.

Barack and Michelle Obama want you to know they're just regular folks. In a People magazine interview, President Obama said he had been mistaken for a waiter and a car parking valet. The first lady said that on a trip to a Target store, a woman asked her to help take something off a shelf.

More than a year after President Obama nominated a new Surgeon General, the Senate confirmed Vivek Murthy for the job, which had been vacant during the Ebola threat and other critical periods. Murthy's nomination had been stalled because he believes guns are bad for your health. (Actually, he tweeted, "Guns are a health care issue."

How Your Taxes Are Spent
The Pentagon spent $700 million to help develop Afghanistan's gem industry and wasted much of it sending Afghan jewelers on lavish "training" trips to Paris, Milan and India.

"She's not taking many positions on many things." - Former Democratic National chairman Howard Dean, who added that's "one of the nice things" about Hillary Clinton. With friends like these ...

Did Al Gore forget to pack his speech when he went to the United Nations summit in Lima, Peru? When it came time for him to show support for an international global warming treaty, he recited poetry from China, Spain and the United States.

New federal regulations on school lunches championed by First Lady Michelle Obama have caused a big problem for schools across the country. The kids won't eat what's good for them. School officials in Jefferson County, Colorado found a solution: they bribe the children with prizes.

Your taxpayer dollars are paying for a federal government program to create robots to assist the elderly and monitor their eating habits. The project, costing nearly $800,000, would produce machines that would deliver glasses of water and other services to elderly people because soon there won't be enough young people to take care of them.

A new word has crept into the Capitol Hill lexicon: "cromnibus." It refers to legislation to avoid a government shutdown that is part "continuing resolution" and part "omnibus spending" bill.

"Running for the presidency is not an IQ test." - Gov. Rick Perry, R-Texas answering a reporter's question, "are you smart enough to be president of the United States?"

President Obama ended the widely-hated practice of waterboarding and other types of "enhanced interrogation" of terrorist suspects and substituted using drones to kill them, along with innocent children and their families who might be in range.

MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, the man who called American taxpayers stupid, received $2.2 million from them for helping Democrats impose Obamacare on them.  He apologized in a congressional committee hearing ... but he didn't give the money back.

A complicated and unwieldy tax code results in the loss of an estimated $500 billion annually -- "more than enough to balance the federal budget," according to Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla. That's a good case for tax reform.


It has been almost six years since Congress passed President Obama's economic stimulus package and taxpayer dollars are still finding their way into "shovel-ready" projects. The Bureau of Land Management has contracted to pay $58,650 to remove wild horse manure off of public lands in Oregon.

In the face of White House admission that a so-called torture report would endanger U.S. facilities and individuals "all around the world" and despite pleadings by Secretary of State John Kerry that release of the report be delayed, Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, who compiled the findings, seemed bent on going ahead with their foolish plan.

The report deals with  intelligence-gathering practices on terrorist suspects following the 9/11 attacks. Those who have read the report said it includes new details about the CIA's use of such techniques as sleep deprivation, confinement in small spaces, humiliation and having water poured over their faces. How many survivors of the 3,000 victims of the terrorists' cowardly attacks would rather their loved ones had endured these measures rather than sacrifice their lives?

"You're as smart as any guy." - Vice President Joe Biden to females in a group of middle-
school students attending a session with President Obama urging them to learn computer programming and coding basics. Noah Rothman of hotair.com, reporting the incident, wrote: "It's striking that the feminist community, which occupies itself being offended by the 'tyranny' of home cooked meals, an artist's depiction of Spider-Woman's posterior, or the patriarchy associated with a scientist's colorful shirt, has somehow overlooked these inartful comments from the person next in line to serve as leader of the free world."

The U.S. President receives the finest health care, and rightfully so. But does it take a CT scan at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., which followed a fiber optic exam by ear, nose and throat specialists, to  diagnose a sore throat? The tests determined acid reflux was causing his throat to be sore. Did the doctors rule out excessive smoking?

The Democratic National Committee is conducting a "top-to-bottom" review of what went wrong in the 2014 election. That's really not necessary. The mid-term congressional defeats, such as the most recent one by Rep. Bill Cassidy, R-La., who saddled Democratic incumbent with President Obama's policies, point to the blame lying right at the top in the White House.

What were the Democrats thinking in deciding to release a Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA's post-9/11 detention and interrogation program that exposes the involvement of partner countries in the pursuit of al-Qaeda? House Intelligence Commitee chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., and former CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden warned the planned release could cause violence against American citizens and interests abroad as well as reduce the likelihood of further cooperation of those countries in U.S. counter-terrorism efforts.

What's wrong with this picture? Koch Industries, frequent target of harsh attacks by Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid and other liberals, has joined in a lobbying effort by some conservative groups against a package of tax breaks for business. "We oppose all subsidies," a Koch spokesman said, "including programs that benefit us."

White House security officials apparently have found a solution to the recent flurry of fence jumpers: build a bigger fence. Blogger Keith Koffler reports on whitehousedossier.com he saw workers replacing the current fence with one two to three feet higher. Koffler advocated a taller fence in a Sept. 23 blog entry. His new suggestion is for a moat with man-eating alligators.


Another leading Obamacare supporter has seen the light. Retiring Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, joins Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., in branding President Obama's signature law a mistake. Instead of simplifying health care and making it more efficient and less costly, "What we did is we muddle through and we got a system that is complex, convoluted ... and still rewards the insurance companies extensively," Harkin said.

Here comes another Obamacare authority calling Americans stupid. Former Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius wasn't quite as plainspoken as Obamacare planner Jonathan Gruber, but her point was clear: "A lot of Americans have no idea what insurance is about," she told USA Today. "I think the financial literacy of a lot of people ...is very low."

With headlines and news shows screaming about a Republican congressional staffer who expressed a negative opinion about the Obama daughters' attire and attitude, former Democratic Senate aide Donny Ray Williams Jr. pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting two women in 2010. Mary Katharine Ham of hotair.com writes: "I'm betting he doesn't make the nightly newscasts."

"You have to know when to leave." - Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, a New York Democrat, airing the feeling of many of her colleagues that it's time for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to step down after the sweeping defeats in the midterm elections.

If you want to make the outlay for your Christmas gift purchases look small, take a look at the size of the national debt. Under President Obama the debt has increased 70 percent and surpassed $18 trillion, an alltime record.

What a difference a year (and an election) makes. Then it was Republicans in Congress threatening a government shutdown. Now it's President Obama, warning he will shut down the government with a veto if the GOP tries to block his executive action on amnesty for illegal immigrants.

It's anybody's guess how many Americans saw a quarterback sneak play while watching football over the Thanksgiving holiday. But it appears the Obama administration pulled a huge and costly sneak by ordering stricter standards for ozone levels while the public was distracted. The new Environmental Protection Agency regulation, costing an estimated $270 billion per year, is said to be the most expensive ever imposed.

The White House has digital age holiday decorations this year. Visitors will continue to see the Neapolitan creche that has been part of the scene for almost four decades as well as the traditional gingerbread version of the executive mansion. Added to that will be an interactive digital snowscape and robot versions of the first family's dogs, Bo and Sunny.

President Obama has had so much trouble finding a replacement for Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, maybe he should wrap up the appointment and put it under the National Christmas Tree.

Ferguson protesters introduced a new form of Washington gridlock when they blocked traffic by commuters on the 14th street bridge during rush hour as government employees returned to their jobs after the Thanksgiving holiday weekend.