What’s interesting in the news today?

1. Why does this not surprise me? 

From TheHuffingtonPost  ” A dying former civil rights lawyer convicted in a terrorism case but released early from prison has arrived in New York City.”

“The 74-year-old Stewart was released from Federal Medical Center Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas, on Tuesday. A judge ordered her release after prosecutors and the Federal Bureau of Prisons recommended she be set free because she has less than 18 months to live. She suffers from recurrent Stage 4 breast cancer.

Stewart was convicted of helping a blind Egyptian sheik communicate with his followers from prison.”

What HuffPo neglects to mention is it’s the blind sheik responsible for the first World Trade Center bombing. They also neglected to mention how unrepentant she is for her crimes. But hey, she’s a hero to many on the left, so again, it’s not surprising.

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2. The Obama admin has responded to their court loss to a bunch of nuns. And they’ve suffered another defeat, this time to a bunch of priests.

From HotAir  “It didn’t take long for the Obama administration to respond publicly to Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s temporary injunction against HHS for enforcement of the contraceptive-coverage mandate. Expressing confidence in their position, the White House insisted that their “compromise” for religious organizations satisfied any risk to conscience objections.”

“The White House will need to argue in court that they know better how to be faithful to the tenets of Christianity than a bunch of nuns. And, for that matter, a bunch of priests, too:

In a huge victory for Priests for Life, a pro-life organization, a federal appeals court has issued a ruling saying it doesn’t have to pay massive fines to the federal government for not obeying the HHS mandate, which forces religious groups and companies to pay for birth control or abortion-causing drugs for their employees.

An emergency injunction granted late this afternoon in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit means that Priests for Life will not have to obey the contraception mandate contained in the Affordable Care Act as its appeal is being heard. It also means that, tomorrow, Priests for Life will not have to cancel health insurance for its employees.”

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3. So once again ObamaCare delivers the opposite of what they promised.

From TheNYTimes  “Supporters of President Obama’s health care law had predicted that expanding insurance coverage for the poor would reduce costly emergency room visits because people would go to primary care doctors instead. But a rigorous new experiment in Oregon has raised questions about that assumption, finding that newly insured people actually went to the emergency room a good deal more often.

The study, published in the journal Science, compared thousands of low-income people in the Portland area who were randomly selected in a 2008 lottery to get Medicaid coverage with people who entered the lottery but remained uninsured. Those who gained coverage made 40 percent more visits to the emergency room than their uninsured counterparts during their first 18 months with insurance.       

The pattern was so strong that it held true across most demographic groups, times of day and types of visits, including those for conditions that were treatable in primary care settings.       

The findings cast doubt on the hope that expanded insurance coverage will help rein in emergency room costs just as more than two million people are gaining coverage under the Affordable Care Act. And they go against one of the central arguments of the law’s supporters, that extending insurance to large numbers of Americans would reduce emergency room use, and eventually save money.”

Yeah…..

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4. And some folks are discovering that just because you signed up, doesn’t mean you’re insured, and even if you are insured, you’ve got a huge deductible to satisfy first.

From TheDailyMail  “Hospital staff in Northern Virginia are turning away sick people on a frigid Thursday morning because they can’t determine whether their Obamacare insurance plans are in effect.

Patients in a close-in DC suburb who think they’ve signed up for new insurance plans are struggling to show their December enrollments are in force, and health care administrators aren’t taking their word for it.”

‘They had no idea if my insurance was active or not!’ a coughing Maria Galvez told MailOnline outside the Inova Healthplex facility in the town of Springfield.”

“It’s unlikely that a valid insurance card would have changed Galvez’ fortunes, however. Her Carefirst plan, identified on the Obamacare website as BlueChoice Plus Bronze, carries a $5,500 per-person deductible for 2014 – an amount she would have to pay out-of-pocket before her coverage would apply to medical expenses.”

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5. The Marines have delayed the new fitness standards for women after nearly half failed to meet the new standards.

From MSNNews  “More than half of female Marines in boot camp can’t do three pullups, the minimum standard that was supposed to take effect with the new year, prompting the Marine Corps to delay the requirement, part of the process of equalizing physical standards to integrate women into combat jobs.

The delay rekindled sharp debate in the military on the question of whether women have the physical strength for some military jobs, as service branches move toward opening thousands of combat roles to them in 2016.”

“Starting with the new year, all female Marines were supposed to be able to do at least three pullups on their annual physical fitness test and eight for a perfect score. The requirement was tested in 2013 on female recruits at Marine Corps Recruit Depot, Parris Island, S.C., but only 45 percent of women met the minimum, Krebs said.

The Marines had hoped to institute the pullups on the belief that pullups require the muscular strength necessary to perform common military tasks such as scaling a wall, climbing up a rope or lifting and carrying heavy munitions.”

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