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Watch live stream State of the Union address at 9 PM ET. President Obama will give his fifth state of the union address, calling for unilateral action on income inequality, raising the minimum wage, among other poll-tested issues that he failed to deliver on in his 2013 state of the union address.

It is a tall order for Obama, who only has the confidence of roughly one-third of the American people, according to a new poll released by the Associated Press in conjunction with GfK, while an ABC News poll found 63 percent of the American people have “little to no” confidence in his decision-making ability.

ObamaCare, or the Affordable Care Act, remains deeply unpopular among the American people, his approval numbers are terribly low, and the Republicans are leading in the Generic Congressional Ballot survey.

In his annual State of the Union address Tuesday President Obama will lay out what he calls “practical” proposals to advance the country in 2014, including ones to address “income inequality” and the nation’s immigration system.

However, President Obama will also make concerning statements, announcing his intentions to use his executive powers to achieve his liberal goals without Congress or legislation.

Obama made waves before his first cabinet meeting of 2014 when he said, “I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone,” going on to say that he would not be waiting on Congress to use them. Though he drew harsh criticism from both the left and right, it would appear the White House is now planning to announce their intention in front of Congress.

Watch Live Sen. Mike Lee Delivering Tea Party SOTU Response 10PM ET

live stream state of the union

Watch live stream State of the Union

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Z1F1cPi-Go&feature=share

tea party sotu responseWatch live stream of the Tea Party SOTU response following the president’s fifth State of the Union address. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) will deliver the official Tea Party State of the Union response starting 10:00 PM ET.

It is a tall order for Obama, who only has the confidence of roughly one-third of the American people, according to a new poll released by the Associated Press in conjunction with GfK, while an ABC News poll found 63 percent of the American people have “little to no” confidence in his decision-making ability.

ObamaCare, or the Affordable Care Act, remains deeply unpopular among the American people, his approval numbers are terribly low, and the Republicans are leading in the Generic Congressional Ballot survey.

In his annual State of the Union address Tuesday President Obama will lay out what he calls “practical” proposals to advance the country in 2014, including ones to address “income inequality” and the nation’s immigration system.

However, President Obama will also make concerning statements, announcing his intentions to use his executive powers to achieve his liberal goals without Congress or legislation.

Obama made waves before his first cabinet meeting of 2014 when he said, “I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone,” going on to say that he would not be waiting on Congress to use them. Though he drew harsh criticism from both the left and right, it would appear the White House is now planning to announce their intention in front of Congress.

Watch Live Steam State of the Union Address

Watch live stream of the Tea Party

Cancer-stricken Senator Tom Coburn revealed Tuesday that he has lost his oncologist due to his health insurance under ObamaCare. Coburn, a champion in the battle against government waste, fraud and abuse in Washington, announced Jan. 17 he would be stepping down at the end of 2014.

Though he said he was still receiving good care the revelation is raising questions about the senator’s decision to step down earlier than previously announced.

“I’m doing well from a health standpoint, got great docs,” Coburn said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Tuesday when asked about his health. “Fortunately — even though my new coverage won’t cover my specialist — I’m going to have great care, and I have a great prognosis.”

The Oklahoma Republican’s spokesman confirmed after enrolling in his new health insurance plan as mandated under ObamaCare, the quality of his coverage has been reduced, causing him to lose his cancer specialist. Coburn will continue to pay out-of-pocket and see his own oncologist, according to his office, but it underscores how millions of Americans who cannot afford to pay out-of-pocket will be negatively impacted by the law.

Coburn made public in November that he had been diagnosed with a recurrence of prostate cancer. He also had prostate cancer surgery in 2011 and has survived colon cancer and melanoma.

The Oklahoma Republican and physician has been a staunch critic of ObamaCare, recently proposing on Monday a Republican alternative with two other senators — Sens. Burr and Hatch — to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act.

“Our proposal starts with a very different set of assumptions from those who designed ObamaCare. We believe Washington, D.C. should actually reform – not try to manage – the private health insurance market,” they collectively wrote in the piece.

ObamaCare has never received majority support among the American people, and remains deeply unpopular in recent polling.

An office spokesman said Coburn’s struggles with his own doctor underscore the need for real health care reform, saying that not every American has the option to pay out-of-pocket for care.

“We hope the White House will work with us to make sure Americans who can’t afford to pay out-of-pocket don’t lose access to life-saving care,” spokesman John Hart said. “As Dr. Coburn’s experience shows, the American people are about to learn they’re going to lose access to not only their doctors and plans, but their specialists and treatments.”

oklahoma-senate-raceThe Oklahoma Senate race is rated “Safe Republican” on PeoplesPunditDaily.com, but the Republican primary to fill Coburn’s seat is proving to be an interesting race. View the OK Senate race analysis or the PPD 2014 Senate Map Predictions.

Cancer-stricken Sen. Tom Coburn revealed Tuesday that

Republican-ObamaCare-Alternative

Three senior GOP senators on Monday proposed a Republican ObamaCare alternative that would abolish the federal mandate requiring all to have health insurance.

“If a consumer does not want a plan that includes coverage for acupuncture, hair loss, maternity coverage and massage – the government shouldn’t force them to buy it,” the Republican senators wrote in an op-ed on FoxNews.com

While the proposal represents a new strategy for the Republican Party to repeal and replace the federal overhaul, a joint op-ed slammed Obama for portraying efforts to dismantle the deeply unpopular and deeply flawed law as going “back” as he tries to move the country “forward” despite the GOP.

“We expect him to claim the mantle of ‘forward’ progress and suggest that anyone who opposes the law either does not understand it or simply wants to go ‘back’ to days when insurance companies wreaked havoc on consumers,” the Republican senators wrote on FoxNews.com.

Dubbed the Patient Choice, Affordability, Responsibility and Empowerment Act, the Republican ObamaCare alternative would repeal the president’s signature health care law, while putting new reforms in place that would put states and individuals back in charge of health care, providing more flexibility and purchasing power.

“Our proposal starts with a very different set of assumptions from those who designed ObamaCare. We believe Washington, D.C. should actually reform – not try to manage – the private health insurance market,” they collectively wrote in the piece.

That is what the American people have been asking for since the debate over health care reform began, and the reason why ObamaCare has remained deeply unpopular despite millions of dollars being spent by the government to change public opinion.

“We trust the choices of individual patients and consumers, not paternalistic bureaucrats.”

Under the Republican ObamaCare alternative plan, insurances companies would not be allowed to impose lifetime limits on patients and would be required to allow dependent coverage up to the age of 26, as ObamaCare does and is one of the only popular provisions in the overhaul.

The Republican ObamaCare alternative would also address the issue of pre-existing conditions by creating a new “continuous coverage” standard, which prevents any individual moving from one insurance plan to another from being denied on the basis of a pre-existing condition.

But unlike ObamaCare, in the CARE Act, as the Republican proposal is referred to in short, those moving between insurance plans can do so only if that individual was continuously enrolled in a health plan.

“Americans deserve a real alternative, and a way out,” Coburn said.

The Republican alternative to ObamaCare proposes the use of targeted tax credits to help individuals buy health coverage. As for employees who are seeking employer-sponsored coverage working for a small business with 100 or fewer employees, they would be able to receive a credit, while those whose annual income is 300 percent of the federal poverty level could receive an age-adjusted refundable tax credit to buy health coverage.

Small businesses would also be allowed to pool together and purchase insurance, as in group coverage and across state lines, which health insurance experts and companies have said for years would substantially reduce the cost of coverage.

The proposed way to offset the costs of the plan will not be popular among elements on the right side of the aisle, as the senators proposed to keep ObamaCare’s cuts to Medicare. They also eliminate the unlimited tax exclusion of employer-provided health coverage, and instead the plan caps the employer’s tax exclusion at 65 percent of an average plan’s cost.

Because the plan was just released, no CBO estimate of the bill’s cost yet exists, though the Congressional Budget Office was grossly inaccurate when they estimated ObamaCare. The senators said it is designed to be “roughly budget neutral” over a 10-year period.

Under the plan, Medicaid reforms would enable eligible individuals to opt out and take advantage of a health credit to purchase coverage, while enrollment would be capped. Federal funds would be distributed back to the states based upon to the number of low-income individuals who are at or below 100 percent of the federal poverty line.

And those funds would have to reflect demographic and population changes, according to the senators.

Several medical malpractice reforms and disclosure rules are included in the plan, which would require insurers to list covered items and services as well as any limitations or restrictions.

“It’s critical we chart another path forward,” said Coburn, a medical doctor who announced his early retirement this month. “Our health care system wasn’t working well before ObamaCare and it is worse after ObamaCare. Americans deserve a real alternative, and a way out. I’m pleased to take this important step with my colleagues,” Coburn said in a statement.

Three senior GOP senators on Monday proposed

wisconsin budget surplus

Governor Scott Walker is making the rounds in his fight to give some of the money from the Wisconsin budget surplus back to the people of his state. Following a series of common sense reforms, the state is projected to enjoy a near $1 billion surplus.

The Wisconsin governor was thrusted into the national spotlight when he fought the powerful Wisconsin labor unions to pass his Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill, not only closing a $3.6 billion deficit, but also improving public education and infrastructure. For his efforts, labor unions led a recall effort, which failed miserably when Walker survived the recall, even defeating his Democratic challenger by a larger margin than in his successful 2010 gubernatorial bid.

Now, the Wisconsin governor is proposing $406 million in property tax relief, $100 million in income tax reduction, and $322.6 million in reduction to withholding taxes. But Democrats in Madison want to spend the surplus, already.

“I don’t run into anyone in the state who says they think Madison should have the money,” Walker said on “Fox and Friends” early Monday morning.

“And to show we are fiscally responsible, we are saying we should put $100 million in to the rainy day fund,” adding that the fund will be seven times larger under his governorship than in any other time prior.

Because of the fiscally sanity practiced in Madison under Gov. Scott Walker, the state boasts the only fully funded pension program in America, with their pension to debt ratio being among the best in the nation. But it wasn’t always like that in Wisconsin, as the debt and pension crisis was smothering the state’s economy.

Unemployment fell to 6.3 percent from a high of 9.2 percent when Walker prepared to take office, but a broad, ambitious series of reforms that were once deeply unpopular as a result of the Democratic Party attack machine, were beginning to take effect to the betterment of people’s lives.

Gov. Walker recently told Don Smith from the Don Smith Show, he knew that if they just had the courage to see those reforms through, then “we would prevail in the end,” because of the positive result they would have in people’s lives.

The reform-minded governor’s tax reform plan is projected to save the taxpayers of Wisconsin, on average, $57 monthly or $520 annually. “That’s real money,” Gov. Walker said. “And that’s on top of the property tax relief.”

Gov. Walker has also been critical of the national Republican Party, stating their is a disconnect between the reformers in the states and a national party who seems to think they can get by on anti-ObamaCare sentiment, without offering real alternatives.

For instance, when the national party was simply attacking the Democrats over ObamaCare, Walker offered a proposal that would save the people of his state — particularly the poor people of the state — from the harmful effects of the law (Read the proposal report here).

Governor Scott Walker is making the rounds

tillis_vs_hagan_nc_senate

Incumbent Democrat Kay Hagan is trailing her two leading Republican challengers by a wider and wider margin each time a new poll is released. In the first survey conducted by Rasmussen Reports on the 2014 North Carolina Senate race, in a Hagan vs Tillis matchup the incumbent trails by 7 percent.

A new statewide survey of Likely North Carolina Voters shows Thom Tillis, the Republican speaker of the state House of Representatives, leading Hagan by seven points – 47 percent to 40 percent. Three percent (3%) like some other candidate, and 10 percent are undecided.

Physician Greg Brannon, who received the much valued endorsement of Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, is also leading Hagan in a head-to-head matchup, but by a smaller 4-point margin.

The North Carolina Senate race was the eighth article in a succession of articles offering expanded analysis on the ratings for the PPD 2014 Senate Map. Vulnerable incumbent Democratic Senator Kay Hagan is running in one of two states President Obama lost in 2012 after winning in 2008, and her race is currently rated a “Toss-Up” on the 2014 Senate Map.

Sen. Kay Hagan used to say, “If you’ve got health insurance in our country, you keep it.” Now, Sen. Hagan is trying to convince those who will vote in the North Carolina Senate race she is on the case. “We need to figure out why this happened,” she said in November.

View 2014 Senate Map

In a Hagan vs Tillis head-to-head matchup,

New home sales fell 7 percent in the month of December, far missing economists’ expectations, according to the U.S. Commerce Department.

The Commerce Department reports sales of new, single-family homes dropped 7 percent in December to an annual rate of 414,000 units, considerably weaker than the 457,000-unit rate economists forecast.

However, U.S. equity markets rose early Monday following the worst week since 2012 after heavy-machinery giant Caterpillar posted strong quarterly results. Caterpillar (CAT) reported a significant better-than-expected quarterly profit result. Shares of the world’s biggest maker of heavy machinery, which is also seen as an economic bellwether, rose 5 percent.

Thus far, it seems that Wall Street is reacting to Caterpillar and ignoring the danger signs in U.S. housing markets.

Results from Apple (AAPL), the world’s No. 1 tech company, are due out after the closing bell.

 

New home sales fell 7 percent in

state of the union

In his annual State of the Union address Tuesday President Obama will lay out what he calls “practical” proposals to advance the country in 2014, including ones to address “income inequality” and the nation’s immigration system.

However, President Obama will also make concerning statements, announcing his intentions to use his executive powers to achieve his liberal goals without Congress or legislation.

Obama made waves before his first cabinet meeting of 2014 when he said, “I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone,” going on to say that he would not be waiting on Congress to use them. Though he drew harsh criticism from both the left and right, it would appear the White House is now planning to announce their intention in front of Congress.

“The Republican Congress is not going to rubber-stamp the president’s agenda,” White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer told Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday.” “And the president is not going to sign the Republican Congress’ agenda,” added Pfeiffer.

Obama is also expected in his State of the Union address to press Congress to extend long-term unemployment benefits and to assure Americans that they are better off with ObamaCare, despite a rocky start to the ObamaCare website rollout and disapproval of the law being at an all-time high.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told ABC’s “This Week” that 2014 will be an “action year” and that the president’s signature health care law is a success — “expanding access to quality and affordable health insurance to millions of Americans and reducing the growth in health care costs.”

But it isn’t a success, at all, both publicly or policy-wise, which is why the White House and Hollywood are partnering together to use television and cinema to try to change public opinion, a move many are calling straight-up propaganda.

And they will have their work cut out for them, as a recent ABC poll shows that 59 percent of them disapprove of how ObamaCare has been implemented, and a new Fox News poll last week also showed a record high 59 percent of voters surveyed oppose the law itself (view more ObamaCare approval polling).

Republicans fired back at the law itself, and the president’s assumption that he has the authority to work around Congress simply because he doesn’t seem to possess the negotiation skills seen in other presidents, both Democratic and Republican.

“If all [Obama] has to offer is more of the same, or if he refuses to acknowledge that his own policies have failed to work, the president is simply doing what many failed leaders have done before him: trying to set one group of Americans against another group of Americans,” Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO), said Saturday.

Blunt added that the 2014 Republican agenda and messaging campaign will include efforts to replace ObamaCare, calling it “a law that’s fundamentally flawed.”

On CNN’s “State of the Union” the White House’s vow to use executive power “sounds vaguely like a threat,” said Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY). “And I think it also has a certain amount of arrogance,” he added.

The annual State of the Union address is expected to garner an estimated 30 million TV viewers, roughly the same as last year. It is possible that the viewership will be lower, a reaction to a president suffering not only from falling approval number, but seemingly one who has lost the trust and confidence of the American people.

What is certain, is that President Obama does not have a lot of time left jn his presidency to reach his liberal goals, because members of Congress will soon focus on their campaigns outside of Washington, and Republicans are gearing up to expand the map in their efforts to retake control of the Senate and keep their majority in the House.

Obama is also expected to once again push for an increase in the federal minimum wage, part of his stale plan to exploit the country’s income inequality gap, which he called “the defining issue of our time.” However, income inequality will be replaced with “ladders of opportunity,” because the White House is well-aware that the American public has become wise to the issue.

A recent poll found that the vast majority of Americans view income inequality as a natural condition of the economy, and believe the government would do more harm than good in an attempt to address it.

The White House is backing a Democratic congressional proposal to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 over three years and index it to inflation, in the years that follow, a proposal that does have the support of the majority. Over the weekend, Bill Gates, the Microsoft tycoon, told MSNBC that raising the minimum wage would destroy jobs.

It is also likely that Obama will address his reforms to the government’s surveillance efforts, which earlier this month he proposed new measures to overhaul following increased pressure by his own base. Criticism was widely received from the right and left, which some on the right have provided an unlikely alliance for the president.

He is also expected to try again to get free pre kindergarten for all 4-year-olds and call attention to bipartisan legislation that would reduce criminal penalties for some drug offenders.

In his annual State of the Union

john-mccain-censured

PHOENIX (AP) — On Saturday, Arizona Republican Party formally censured Sen. John McCain, citing a voting record they say is insufficiently conservative.

Per the Arizona GOP resolution, the 2008 Republican presidential nominee has campaigned as a conservative but has lent his support to issues “associated with liberal Democrats,” including immigration reform and funding ObamaCare.

Senator John McCain, along with Senate Republican leadership, were openly critical of Senator Ted Cruz and others who supported the “Don’t Fund It” effort, or the effort to defund ObamaCare that led to the government shutdown.

The resolution to censure McCain was adopted by a voice-vote during a meeting of state committee members in Tempe, state party spokesman Tim Sifert said. It required signatures from at least 20 percent of state committee members in order to consider the resolution on the floor for debate.

McCain spokesman Brian Rogers declined to comment on the censure, but Tim Sifert said that they were considering no further action.

McCain isn’t up for re-election until 2016, when the long-serving senator will turn 80. Senator McCain was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1982 and won his Senate seat in 1986.

He announced in October that he was considering running for a sixth term.

Several Republican county committees recently censured McCain. Timothy Schwartz, the Legislative District 30 Republican chairman who co-wrote the resolution, said the censure showed that McCain was losing support from his own party, a party who once nominated him for the 2008 presidential election.

“We would gladly embrace Sen. McCain if he stood behind us and represented us,” Schwartz said.

Fred DuVal, the Democrat who plans to run for Arizona governor, responded to the news of John McCain censured an “outrageous response to the good work Sen. McCain did crafting a reasonable solution to fix our broken immigration system.”

McCain has been dogged by conservatives objecting to his views on immigration and campaign finance, which he worked on with former Democrat Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold, as well as other issues. The criticism of McCain’s record goes way back, starting since he first ran for Congress in 1982.

But conservative Republican activists were really concerned with his moderate-liberal positions during his failed bid for the 2000 presidential nomination.

PHOENIX (AP) -- John McCain censured by

WASHINGTON — As undignified as it is unedifying and unnecessary, the vulgar State of the Union circus is again at our throats. The document that the Constitutional Convention sent forth from Philadelphia for ratification in 1787 was just 4,543 words long, but this was 17 too many. America would be a sweeter place if the Framers had not included this laconic provision pertaining to the president: “He shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the union.”

“Information”? Not exactly.

The Constitution’s mild requirement has become a tiresome exercise in political exhibitionism, the most execrable ceremony in the nation’s civic liturgy, regardless of which party’s president is abusing it. You worship bipartisanship? There is not a dime’s worth of difference between the ways the parties try to milk partisan advantage from this made-for-television political pep rally.

Tuesday evening, Barack Obama probably will concentrate on inequality as a way of changing the subject from his inconvenient triumph, the Affordable Care Act. So he probably will again propose partial public financing of Democratic candidates’ campaigns, by again calling for “high-quality” universal pre-school.  This adjectival phrase is code for: Now we will do better because we will employ more certified — and unionized — teachers.

Studies of it strongly indicate that the cognitive and other effects of early preschool are slight and evanescent — gone by the third grade. The few studies of other state programs that indicate better results have possible methodological problems explained by George Mason University social scientists David J. Armor and Sonia Sousa in “The Dubious Promise of Universal Preschool” in National Affairs quarterly.

Even “high-quality” universal preschool would not measurably reduce inequality. It would, however, efficiently convey funds from the federal treasury to a new cohort of unionized teachers, then through union dues to Democratic candidates.

The president will probably again propose combating inequality with a 23rd increase (since 1938) of the minimum wage. This would have no measurable effect on inequality because few heads of household earn the minimum wage and most such earners are part-time workers from households with an average annual income of $53,000. Twenty percent are from $75,000-plus households.

Obama probably also will urge measures to increase college enrollments. For several decades, both parties simply knew that not enough people owned homes. So, federal policy — mortgage subsidies, lower lending standards — encouraged more homeownership than market rationality would have produced. One exciting result was the Great Recession. Now the federal government, which simply knows that not enough people are getting college degrees, has fueled a bubble in higher education by funneling billions in subsidies for student tuition aid. To the surprise of no one, except the government, schools have responded by raising their prices — they are up 23 percent since Obama’s first election — to capture the subsidies.

The Center for College Affordability and Productivity (“Why Are Recent College Graduates Underemployed? University Enrollments and Labor-Market Realities”) reports that about 48 percent of those college graduates who are employed are occupying jobs that the Bureau of Labor Statistics suggests require less than a four-year college education. Thirty-seven percent are in jobs that require no more than a high-school diploma, and about 5 million are in jobs that require less than a high-school education. About 14 percent of waiters and waitresses, 16.5 percent of bartenders, 18 percent of telemarketers and 24.6 percent of retail salespeople– not including the 14.5 percent of counter and sales clerks — have college degrees.

These details probably will not be information that Obama gives to Congress Tuesday evening when legislators from the president’s party will bray approval of his bromides and stillborn panaceas, legislators from the other party will be histrionically torpid or sullen, and some moral exemplars in the House gallery will be applauded.

In 2010, Chief Justice John Roberts said: “The image of having the members of one branch of government standing up, literally surrounding the Supreme Court, cheering and hollering while the court — according to the requirements of protocol — has to sit there expressionless, I think is very troubling.”

Justice Antonin Scalia no longer attends what he calls “cheerleading sessions.” Justice Clarence Thomas, who says “there’s a lot that you don’t hear on TV — the catcalls, the whooping and hollering and under-the-breath comments,” will not be there Tuesday night. Will Roberts attend? No justices or senior military officers should stoop to being props at these puerile spectacles.

George Will’s email address is [email protected].

As undignified as it is unedifying and

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