Neoconservatism: The idea that won't quit.

What's Obamacare going to cost me?

State department whistleblower says she's being bullied.

Surprise, surprise: Iran moving forward on nuclear program despite sanctions.

Scott Brown lying low in Massachusetts special election.

Rubio's lack of candor.

"Why I am a Republican."

At least for now (although a statewide referendum may be pending), Arizona governor Jan Brewer, a Republican, has succeeded in her efforts to implement a key part of Obamacare in her state.  Brewer has very aggressively — and entirely voluntarily — spearheaded the charge to implement Obamacare’s massive Medicaid expansion on her watch.  She now claims, however, that she’s not really implementing Obamacare — or at least not any significant portion of it.  In a recent interview reported by the Associated Press, Brewer said, “This business that this is Obamacare is a little bit interesting.”  She added, “It is a very, very, very tiny portion of the Obama health care.”  

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that what Brewer calls a “very, very, very tiny portion” of the health care overhaul will result in an estimated 11 million new people being dumped into Medicaid under Obamacare, where they’ll receive subpar care at taxpayer expense.  Of the net 30 million that the CBO projects will become newly insured under Obamacare, those dumped into Medicaid will account for more than a third.  (The CBO projects that, even after ten years of Obamacare, another 30 million people will remain uninsured.)  Some of these 11 million people have employer-sponsored insurance today, but the CBO projects that roughly 4 million people will lose such coverage under Obamacare. 

Brewer was under absolutely no legal obligation to implement this key aspect of Obamacare.  As A.P. writes, “Brewer was an early critic of [Obamacare] and among a group of governors who lost the Supreme Court case that fought it, so it was a surprise when she announced she supported [its] Medicaid expansion.”  In fact, it was the Obamacare Supreme Court case that gave Brewer and her state the choice to opt out of the Obamacare Medicaid expansion.  The Court struck down the Obamacare provision that threatened states with the loss of their existing Medicaid funding if they refused to implement the Obamacare Medicaid expansion. 

So Brewer sued and won — at least on this point.  But instead of subsequently working to repeal Obamacare, she has instead worked to implement it.  She fought the Republican-controlled state legislature and succeeded in converting a few Republicans to her — and the Democrat’s — side.  Rather unrepentantly, she now says, “I've led the charge from Arizona to oppose it [Obamacare] — sued, we lost, they won, it’s the law of the land.”

The CBO projects that Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion will cost federal taxpayers about $750 billion over the next decade (2014 to 2023). 

At the other end of the spectrum of Republican gubernatorial leadership, late last night, Maine governor Paul LePage vetoed an effort by both houses of the Maine legislature to implement Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion in the Pine Tree State.

Senator Claire McCaskill has endorsed Hillary Clinton for president in 2016 and this is all the buzz (that is the right word, isn't it?) at Morning Joe and other places where the insiders gather and do careful, elaborate dissections of the day's essential news.  

This development may have as much to do with the senator's career plans as anything else. Secretary of labor, maybe? Or education. One of those pointless bureaucracies with a multi-billion dollar budget and a car and driver.

But that would be the cynical take.  After all, this is not the only high profile endorsement Ms. Clinton has captured in the last week.  She received, also, the blessing of Chelsea Clinton (yes, relation) and CNN was quick to report this urgent news.

It is going to be a long, long run up to 2016.

What was the lesson of the Kermit Gosnell trial? Since the Philadelphia doctor was convicted last month of murdering three born-alive infants, two competing viewpoints have emerged.

For some, like Senate majority leader Harry Reid and national abortion-rights organizations, the Gosnell case highlighted the need for "clean and sterile" late-term abortion clinics.

For others, the real atrocity of the Gosnell clinic wasn't simply its squalor, but the horror of killing babies old enough to "jump" and "scream" when stabbed in the neck with a pair of scissors, regardless of their location.

"[T]here's almost no difference between killing a baby accidentally born alive in a late-term abortion, as Gosnell stands accused of, and killing the same baby in the womb, as more skilled doctors can do," wrote liberal, pro-choice Bloomberg columnist Margaret Carlson. 

"What we need to learn from the Gosnell case is that late-term abortion is infanticide," wrote liberal, pro-life Daily Beast columnist Kirsten Powers. "Legal infanticide."

Though Gosnell was convicted, thousands if not tens of thousand of elective late-term abortions, or legal infanticides, occur every year in America.  

Just take the example of what's happening in Maryland. Dr. LeRoy Carhart says he will perform "purely elective" abortions 28 weeks into pregnancy. Another late-term abortionist named James Pendergraft has suggested he'll perform even later abortions under Maryland's health exception if a mother was experiencing "anxiety and stress."

In August 2010, police searched a Maryland abortion clinic owned by a man named Steven Brigham after a woman was severely wounded during an abortion procedure. Police officers were shocked when they found a "chest freezer in the facility, which contained approximately 35 late term fetuses," according to a report by the Maryland State Board of Physicians. "The latest fetal age is measured as being 36 weeks."

36 weeks. That's nine months.  

"The forms list other later term abortions involving fetal ages of 28, 20, 33 and 35 weeks," the report continued.

The House of Representatives is scheduled Tuesday to consider a bipartisan bill to add new seasonal flu vaccines to the IRS definition of taxable vaccines.  The Senate has already reached an agreement to vote on its version of the bill without further debate if the House passes an identical version.  If passed into law, all new flu vaccines would become subject to the 75¢ per dose vaccine tax, and also become eligible to be included in the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP).  A summary of the bill provided by the House Republican Conference explains:

The VICP is a federal program designed as a no-fault alternative to traditional tort law for resolving vaccine injury claims arising from covered vaccines.  The program is funded through a 75¢ excise tax on each dose of specified vaccines.  However, current law only covers “trivalent” (three-strain) vaccines against influenza.  Recently, many manufacturers have begun producing more effective “quadrivalent” (four-strain) vaccines, but have held off on bringing the vaccines to market until the statute is updated.  H.R. 475 amends the statute to cover all seasonal influenza vaccines under the VICP, ensuring that new, more effective vaccines are made available to the greater public.

The balance in the VICP fund as of May 2013 was about $3.4 billion. The fund has paid out only $2.7 billion since it was established in 1988 for cases involving all vaccines; about 17 percent of those cases involved a flu vaccine. At that payout rate, the $3.4 billion balance could last another 25 years with no new revenue.  However, in response to initial reports on the legislation in April, Julia Lawless, GOP press secretary of U.S. Senate Finance Committee, issued the following statement:

First off, the Joint Committee on Taxation is clear this bill is not a tax increase.  Secondly, the legislation is about ensuring vaccine manufacturers produce vaccines for the next flu season – not past flu seasons.  Thirdly, the threat of litigation has been so severe against these manufacturers that this compensation fund had to be created or they would not have produced these vaccines.  That threat of litigation still exists and so does the need for vaccines.  We need to be careful how that fund is financed, because having it run a deficit could be dangerous when our goal is to ensure the production of safe vaccines.

A representative of the Biotech Industry Organization emailed to weigh in as well, and largely echoed the response of Ms. Lawless, concluding with:

This is an extremely important public health matter. 

The authors of the Senate immigration bill are now openly admitting that citizenship for illegal immigrants — already a bridge too far — is no longer even being linked to strengthening the border.  As Byron York writes in the Washington Examiner, Sen. Richard Durbin (D.-Ill.), a member of the Gang of Eight, told National Journal, “We have de-linked a pathway to citizenship and border enforcement.”

This comes on the heels of Sen. Marco Rubio’s recent admission on Univision that illegal immigrants would be legalized before the border is secured (which, in turn, would incentivize even more illegal immigrants to arrive and hence become legalized before the border is secured).  Rubio said, “First comes the legalization.  Then come the measures to secure the border.”

One can only imagine the reaction to a Republican presidential candidate in the primaries who had backed this legalization-first, border-later, citizenship-for-all (except for felons) approach.  In the most recent primaries, Newt Gingrich sensibly proposed granting legalized status — not citizenship — to some well-established illegal immigrants (if they had a local sponsor who was an American citizen and if their application was approved by a community board perhaps modeled after those apparently used during the WWII Selective Services drafts).  But Gingrich didn’t support granting citizenship, and he didn’t support granting legal status until after the border was secured. 

Then Mitt Romney ran a terrible campaign (complete with infamously advocating “self-deportation”), and the Republican establishment — loathe to admit Romney’s unique political weaknesses or the abysmal failure of his strategy of neglecting Obamacare and nearly everything else of substance — immediately starting pushing the narrative that he (and hence they) were merely the passive victims of shifting demographics. 

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Senator Dan Coats accuses his congressional colleagues of "grandstanding" about the NSA:

Last week, Edward Snowden, a National Security Agency contractor, attempted to make a political point by leaking several documents that have seriously harmed America's ability to identify and respond to terrorist threats. As damaging as Mr. Snowden's disclosures are to public safety, I am also troubled by the decision of several members of Congress to mischaracterize this leak to advance their personal and political agendas.

I don't blame citizens for their concern about these secretive NSA programs. Personal privacy and civil liberties are important to all Americans and are protected by the Constitution. Unfortunately, the Obama administration—especially of late—has fueled people's distrust of government, which has made the reaction to Mr. Snowden's leak far worse.

The recent IRS scandal, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder's contradictory statements regarding his role in the Justice Department's investigations into journalists, and the administration's inadequate and inconsistent responses to the attacks on our diplomatic facilities in Benghazi, Libya, are just a few examples of how the Obama administration has widened the trust deficit plaguing the country.

Though it is more difficult to quantify than the fiscal deficit, the trust deficit is just as profound, providing plenty of reason for many Americans to believe reports about the NSA's intrusiveness in their private lives. Fortunately, the reports are almost uniformly distorted or false.