One of the Senate's Best, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, Ready to Retire

Today on NRO

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: How in good conscience could a commander-in-chief send troops to fight a war he wasn't serious about? Not His War.

JONAH GOLDBERG: Obama's poll numbers give Democrats the midterm blues. Rebuking the 'New' New Deal.

ANDREW STILES: Obamacare shows how little the administration is to be trusted with large-scale reform. Immigration Reform Reborn?

BETSY WOODRUFF: Asked about a ban on late-term abortion, the senator from Arkansas smiles and shuffles off. Pryor's Secret.

CHARLES C. W. COOKE: Contrary to critics, we do not choose our foes by skin color. Lone Survivor and the Racial Politics of War.

SLIDESHOW: Oscar Nominations.

Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty

January 17, 2014

Urgh. One of the Senate's Best, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, Ready to Retire

Depressing news this morning:

Serving as Oklahoma's senator has been, and continues to be, one of the great privileges and blessings of my life. But, after much prayer and consideration, I have decided that I will leave my Senate seat at the end of this Congress.

Carolyn and I have been touched by the encouragement we've received from people across the state regarding my latest battle against cancer. But this decision isn't about my health, my prognosis or even my hopes and desires. My commitment to the people of Oklahoma has always been that I would serve no more than two terms. Our founders saw public service and politics as a calling rather than a career. That's how I saw it when I first ran for office in 1994, and that's how I still see it today. I believe it's important to live under the laws I helped write, and even those I fought hard to block.

Oh, he'll almost certainly get replaced with another Republican, and probably a conservative Republican, but . . . Tom Coburn was fighting runaway spending long before it was cool.

Senate Offers Bipartisan Report That's Damning to Obama, Hillary, and the New York Times

This morning in the category of news that is only surprising to readers of the New York Times:

A Senate report on the Benghazi attack that killed a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans bolsters Obama administration critics who suspected from the start that al-Qaeda was involved and that it was not a spontaneous protest that went out of control.

The report, released Wednesday by the committee's Democratic majority, said individuals affiliated with groups such as al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula were in on the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. compound.

Whether the attack was ordered by a high-level al-Qaeda chief or planned on short notice by people on the ground remains unclear, the report said. But the report left no doubt that it was an organized terror attack — a fact denied for days after the deaths by President Obama and former secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Here's that blockbuster report from the self-proclaimed Paper of Record back on December 28:

Months of investigation by The New York Times, centered on extensive interviews with Libyans in Benghazi who had direct knowledge of the attack there and its context, turned up no evidence that Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault. The attack was led, instead, by fighters who had benefited directly from NATO's extensive air power and logistics support during the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi. And contrary to claims by some members of Congress, it was fueled in large part by anger at an American-made video denigrating Islam.

It gets worse for the Obama administration:

The White House and Clinton have said that no one was sure it was a terror attack or that al-Qaeda was involved until well after the incident. But within 24 hours the CIA station chief in Libya reported that it was a terror attack, and the CIA advised the White House that it appeared likely that al-Qaeda-linked terrorists were involved.

The report alluded to "contradictory" intelligence accounts it said came out in the immediate aftermath of the attack that may have confused the picture of how the attack happened.

But Gen. Carter Ham, head of AFRICOM at the time of attack, said Defense officials did not believe the attack was from an out-of-control demonstration and had no evidence of it, according to declassified testimony released this week by House investigators.

Ham said a U.S. military surveillance drone was sending back to Washington real-time video of the attack within minutes of its start.

"When we saw a rocket-propelled grenade attack, what appeared to be pretty well-aimed small-arms fire — again, this is all coming second- and third-hand through unclassified, you know, commercial, cellphones for the most part, initially," he told House Armed Services.

"To me, it started to become clear pretty quickly that this was certainly a terrorist attack and not just not something sporadic."

The administration keeps coming back to the "it was unclear, the evidence was contradictory, the information was confusing" excuses. Except they never seem to be able to point to much evidence that led them to believe it was a protest. It's not like there were people marching in the streets with banners and posters beforehand.

There were two explanations, one accurate, one inaccurate. The accurate explanation had all kinds of bad repercussions for the White House and State Department -- a wild overestimation of the stability of post-Qaddafi Libya, a blind dismissal of security concerns on the ground, an embarrassing inability to mount a rescue in a region adjacent to a host of NATO bases, and a humiliating refutation of Obama's reelection year boast that "al-Qaeda is on the run."

The inaccurate one put the blame on some YouTube filmmaker.

I guess it wasn't much of a contest.

The End-of-the Week Roundup of News Obamacare Fans Would Prefer to Ignore

Let's begin with some genuine good news on Obamacare: one headache-inducing issue has been resolved.

Volunteer fire departments are off the hook when it comes to providing health insurance to firefighters.

It's a sigh of relief from potential federal rules from the Affordable Care Act that some said would have been financially devastating.

The A.C.A., also known as Obamacare requires employers with 50 or more full-time workers to provide health insurance benefits, or face a tax penalty.

However, a January 10 blog post from the U.S. Department of Treasury, volunteer firefighters, emergency workers, and paramedics will be exempt. This means that taxes won't be going up and the number of firefighters in the area will stay the same.

One down, about a million more headache-inducing problems to go. Oh, you thought Healthcare.gov is fixed? Nope.

"HealthCare.gov is not secure today," David Kennedy, head of computer security consulting firm TrustedSec LLC, said at a Thursday hearing of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee.

He said "nothing has really changed" since a hearing of the same committee in November, when he and three other expert witnesses said they believed the site was not secure and three of them said it should be shut down immediately.

"I don't understand how we're still discussing whether the website is insecure or not," Kennedy told the committee. "It is insecure - 100 percent. It's not a question of whether or not its insecure, it's what we need to do to fix it."

Before the hearing, Kennedy told Reuters the government has yet to plug more than 20 vulnerabilities that he and other security experts reported to the government shortly after HealthCare.gov went live on October 1.

Sometimes the glitches are almost funny -- as long as they're not happening to you:

Some in Connecticut trying to sign up for health care coverage under the Affordable Care Act have run into trouble because they have been identified as being incarcerated.

The problem is that they aren't in prison, and for some, never have been, according to Kathleen Tallarita, a spokesperson for Access Health CT, the state exchange that administers ACA health care applications in Connecticut.

The Federal Data Services Hub is responsible for incorrectly identifying some applicants as being incarcerated, according to Tallarita.

"Look, Mrs. Needermeyer, I know you thought your age and arthritis would be the main issues with your health-insurance application, but the system here says you've got a long history of violent carjackings and getting caught in high-speed chases. Lady, from what I see here, your life is like a Grand Theft Auto game."

This doesn't quite tie to Healthcare.gov, but it's an interesting data point about that chief contractor, CGI:

North Carolina has stopped development of a multimillion-dollar tax collection computer system, and Department of Revenue officials say they will start over and re-bid the entire project.

The information technology system, which had been in the works for five years, is the latest to come up short of the state's expectations, although it's unclear exactly what caused the department to pull the plug. The system was being built by the same company responsible for the defect-riddled rollout of the federal website associated with the Affordable Care Act.

"After considerable review of the project status and direction, (the Department of Revenue) decided that a new direction for replacing our tax processing system was needed," said Trevor Johnson, a spokesman for the department.

The state and its vendor, CGI, agreed to part ways on Friday, but a formal termination agreement had not been signed as of Wednesday afternoon, Johnson said.

And now we know that the federal government finally lost all faith in CGI's abilities:

The new document indicates that officials at CMS — the agency overseeing the HealthCare.gov rollout — lost faith that CGI could complete critical behind-the-scenes construction of the Obamacare website by mid-March, a critical deadline to ensure the stability of the health law and the insurance market.

Without a working "Financial Management Platform … the entire health care reform program is jeopardized," CMS officials explained in the document. Coverage, payment and record-keeping were all affected.

"If this functionality is not complete by mid-March 2014, the government could make erroneous payments to providers and insurers," according to the document. It went on to note, "Inaccurate issuance of payments … could seriously put them at financial risk; potentially leading to their default and disrupting continued services and coverage to consumers."

The new system's raw deal is increasingly clear:

Greeted by higher premiums, less generous coverage and more paperwork, small businesses that offer health coverage to employees are choosing to renew existing plans rather than buy them through President Barack Obama's program. Complicating matters is the government's failure to complete the online exchange for small businesses; in 36 states, there will be no website offering ready information on the plans until November.

If Only Michelle Obama Had the Chance to Travel These Days…

It seems I did hear correctly; Michelle Obama is looking forward to post-White House life so she can . . . travel more.

Courtesy the good folks at Twitchy:

Partial transcript:

CNN reporter: Politics is not for her. She's never liked it although she's good at it. Um, she talked about wanting to be a mentor, wanting to travel, finally see the Hoover Dam…

Michelle Obama detailed her Hoover Dam wish in a recent interview:

And she says by 70, she'd like to be traveling — to remote castles in Ireland, on rafting trips and to the Hoover Dam, which she said she hasn't seen.
"I have flown into an airport, done an event and left, but I want to stay and have a meal, try the local dish and shop in a little shop," she said.

You'd think somebody who just spent 24 days in Hawaii could find the time and means to visit the Hoover Dam.

ADDENDUM: Ace comes up with a phrase that will stick, while discussing media criticism of Robert Gates, telling us all about the administration's flaws after he's been reelected, of course: "With Obama's minions... they are required to observe Obamerta, the Obama Code of Silence."

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