OFA announced a seven-figure ad buy on Monday for a 30-second spot touting the law’s supposed benefits. It also rolled out an activist program called “Team Obamacare” to “stand up to the conservative attacks, and tell the story of how Obamacare is working.”

The effort comes in the midst of news that Obamacare, as the Affordable Care Act is commonly known, will significantly raise insurance premiums in some states, and may increase rates for many hourly wage-earners.

Implementation of the law has proved a headache for the administration. Even some of the law’s most strident supporters have said that it is “just beyond comprehension” and could be a “train wreck” if it is not implemented correctly.

Problems with implementation and the law’s apparent failure to bring down insurance premiums, as its supporters routinely said it would, have Republicans convinced that their opposition to the law will be a political winner in next year’s midterm elections.

Experts say OFA’s aggressive attempt to defend the law is a tacit recognition of its political pitfalls.

Ben Domenech, a health care policy expert with the Heartland Institute, noted that recent polls show the law is more unpopular than it has ever been.

“OFA is nervous about more than just the poll numbers,” Domenech added in an email to the Washington Free Beacon. “They need to convince enough young and healthy people to purchase insurance, or more expensive insurance, in the coming months in order to offset the premium rate spikes actuaries anticipate.”

The law prohibits insurance companies from taking customers’ health history into account when setting insurance rates. It depends on an influx of younger, healthier insurance customers in order to offset the increased cost of insuring the less healthy.

“With the public largely disengaged from the law’s new realities, the first year of implementation could prove particularly awful if the sick sign up and the young and healthy don’t,” Domenech said.

The administration’s push to get people to sign up for health insurance has already sparked allegations by some lawmakers of official wrongdoing.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius recently pressured major health insurers to donate to a nonprofit group with deep ties to the administration that is working to support Obamacare by signing people up for health insurance.

Republicans see Sebelius’ activity as scandalous.

“It fits into that narrative Republicans are building not only about incompetence in the executive branch but also dishonesty,” GOP strategist Matt Mackowiak told Newsmax.

“This is a good issue for Republicans,” Mackowiak said. “We want to maximize it.”

OFA’s push appears to be an attempt to reverse that trend and help Democrats reclaim the health care issue ahead of the 2014 midterm elections. The group did not respond to a request for comment.

“OFA’s propaganda campaign might move the needle slightly, but it’s more likely that they’re preaching to the dedicated minority of Americans who already thought Obamacare was great,” Domenech said.

“But they’ve got to try something,” he added, “because their argument that people need to buy more insurance than they need for a higher price than they ought to pay just for the sake of the public good isn’t very convincing.”

Obama named John Emerson, the co-chair for the campaign’s Southern California finance team, as the next U.S. ambassador to Germany. HBO executive James Costos, who raised more than $500,000 for Obama, was named the ambassador to Spain. The director of Obama’s campaign finance operations, Rufus Gifford, was slated to serve as the ambassador to Denmark.

The long-expected nominations, announced by the White House late Friday afternoon, are the continuation of a quadrennial tradition after campaigns, as presidents reward their major fundraisers and donors with plum diplomatic posts. […]

The organization, which represents more than 30,000 active and retired Foreign Service employees, has called on Obama to curtail the practice.

“The appointment of non-career individuals, however accomplished in their own field, to lead America’s important diplomatic missions abroad should be exceptional and circumscribed, not the routine practice it has become over the last three decades,” the labor union said in a recent statement on its Web site. “Now is the time to end the spoils system and the de facto ‘three-year rental’ of ambassadorships.”

There are four stories harming President Obama’s approval rating, and the heirs of Tarbell and Woodward and Novak uncovered none of them. The long-simmering tale of what happened before, during, and after the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012, was all but ignored by media other than Fox until Gregory Hicks’ blockbuster testimony before the House Oversight Committee last month. It was the IRS, in a carefully planned “apology,” that revealed to the world it had targeted the applications of conservative and Tea Party groups for special scrutiny. The Justice Department, not the press, announced it had been scouring AP phone records to plug national security leaks. And Edward Snowden, the contractor who exposed secret intelligence, went to the Guardian, a left-wing British rag, with his scoop. (Only when Snowden’s anti-anti-terror accomplice Laura Poitras suggested, in the words of Guardian writer Glenn Greenwald, “It would be good to have the Washington Post invested in the leak, so it wasn’t just us—to tie in official Washington in the leak” did the three filtradors approach former Post reporter Barton Gellman.)

Four stories, four separate races in which the establishment press, the major print dailies and the heavily watched network broadcasts, are sweating to catch up. “We are getting big stories wrong, over and over again,” said Scott Pelley, the anchor of the CBS evening news, in a speech at Quinnipiac University in May. Did he, did anybody, read the June 13 Washington Post, I wonder; did Pelley’s eye scan the innocuous headline—“Media, administration deal with conflicts”—and the well-kneaded copy below? If so he would have learned much about life in the capital city.

“Conflicts” is not the best description of Farhi’s subject. His topic is marriages, unions, and blood, legal and romantic and familial connections between individuals where one party works in media and another works in politics. The extent of such links is staggering. Farhi has to interrupt his story to announce, in a parenthetical, that Post reporter Sari Horwitz, who covers the Justice Department, is married to William B. Schultz, who is Kathleen Sebelius’ top lawyer at the Department of Health and Human Services. Ben Sherwood, the president of ABC News, is brother to Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, “a top national security adviser to President Obama.” Another Obama national security aide, Ben Rhodes, is brother to David Rhodes, president of CBS News. One of CNN’s top D.C. hacks is married to Tom Nides, whose upward career trajectory has taken him from the office of Democratic congressional powerbroker Tony Coelho to, where else, Fannie Mae, Credit Suisse, and Morgan Stanley, as well as a two-year stint as an undersecretary of state for Hillary Clinton. Whose daughter is on contract with NBC.

White House spokesman Jay Carney, who worked for many years at Time magazine, is married to Claire Shipman, a correspondent for ABC News. The White House correspondent for NPR, Ari Shapiro, has been married to former White House counsel Michael Gottlieb since 2004. Longtime NPR personality Michele Norris went on leave in 2011, when her husband Broderick Johnson, a corporate lawyer who served in the Clinton White House, joined the Obama reelection campaign as a full-time adviser. Wall Street Journal political reporter Neil King is married to Shailagh Murray, who serves as communications director for Vice President Joe Biden, and who used to report on Congress for the Post. Savannah Guthrie of NBC recently became engaged to Mike Feldman, a former Gore aide who is now part of the Democratic Glover Park Group consultancy. Syndicated columnist Connie Schultz is married to Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio.

Tracing these associations is enough to keep busy any student of the caste. Assurances from mainstream media outlets that “they’ve worked out the conflicts” that might arise from deep ties between reporters, editors, and government employees, Farhi reports, “hasn’t stopped a few eyebrows from being raised.” You can guess whose eyebrows are those. Farhi quotes the great Mark Steyn, who wrote on National Review Online in May, “The inbreeding among Obama’s court and its press corps is more like one of those ‘I’m my own grandpaw’ deals.” The journalists, though, aren’t laughing. “Such insinuations make media types bristle.”

And oh, how they bristle. “There is zero evidence, zero, that [Sherwood’s relationship to his sister] has had any impact on our coverage,” ABC spokesman Jeffrey Schneider tells the Post. Employing the old reporter mind trick of using paraphrase to inject one’s viewpoint into an article, Farhi writes of “media types” who “take exception to the notion that complicated judgments about the news—often made by others within an organization—have anything to do with personal favorites or familial relationships.” Media types take precautions. Work is “closely monitored.” Recusals are sometimes demanded. Journalists can be reassigned.

The mainstream media says it goes to great lengths, then, to avoid the whiff of bias, to guard against a reputation for compromised integrity. But there are no prophylactic measures against living in a shared culture, attending the same schools, uttering the same clichéd small talk, and breathing the same atmosphere of conventional wisdom. What matters here are not the relationships themselves but the closed and impenetrable bubble in which they exist. Why would network executives and New York Times editors put resources into investigating Benghazi when their friends and relatives and trusted informants tell them the only people who care about the story are the cranks at Fox? Why would journalists adopt an adversarial relation to the government for which their spouses, relatives, romances, friends, and social betters work? No specific conflict can be easily identified because all of the bias occurs prior to the actual manufacturing of news: in the punches pulled, in what stories are selected, in what position is assumed by writers and editors, in which experts are judged knowledgeable, “objective,” “straight-shooters” and which are not.

So closed-minded is the community of right-thinkers who live in the Northeast corridor, who work at our banks and universities and media outlets and governments, that the slightest hint of alternative thinking causes them to spasm in revolt. At times the revolt can be petty and snarky and mocking, as in this recording of journalists laughing at Weekly Standard writer John McCormack’s serious questioning of Nancy Pelosi on late-term abortion. At times the revolt is furious and unrelenting, bringing political measures such as boycotts, firing, even legislation to bear to suppress dissent—as in the hysteria that has accompanied discussions of Charles and David Koch possibly buying the Los Angeles Times. What unites these reactions is the shared sense of tribal affiliation. We, the objective, the rational, the scientific, must not be tainted by the faithful, the irrational, the zealous.

Overprotective, over-solicitous, making excuses, indulgent, sympathetic, understanding, partial, antagonistic to outsiders—this is how the mainstream media has behaved during the years Barack Obama has been president. And it is exactly how you would behave, too. If your family were at stake.

The Friends of the American Latino Museum, a group that wants to see a museum in the nation’s capital dedicated to the contributions of Latinos, will receive $170,000. A portion of that — $50,000 — will go toward its own operations, but the rest will be distributed to the American Latino Heritage Fund of the National Park Foundation, the Smithsonian Latino Center, and the Kennedy Center.

The inauguration was a chance for Latinos to demonstrate that they belong “center stage,” said Latino Inaugural 2013 co-chair Henry R. Muñoz III at a Friday event in Washington, D.C.

That Latinos are donating to the nation’s performing arts center is notable. Some prominent Hispanic organizations, like the National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts, previously criticized the Kennedy Center for a lack of diversity when it comes to awarding the prestigious Kennedy Center Honors. In 35 years, just two of the 180 honorees have been Latino.

The Friends of the American Latino Museum, the group leading an effort to build the National Museum of the American Latino in Washington, D.C., distributed the $170,000 in grants to the Smithsonian Latino Center, the Kennedy Center, and other arts organizations.

Muñoz is chairman of the National Museum of the American Latino Commission, the government commission studying the potential creation of the national museum.

Muñoz said he hoped the grants would help Latinos continue to play a prominent role in the national arts, following the Latino Inaugural at the Kennedy Center in January.

“In order for us to continue to stay center stage, it is important for us to invest in future generations of artists, of historians, of curators, of mathematicians and scientists, and that is what this ceremony is about,” Muñoz told an audience of reporters, grantees, and supporters at the National Press Club last Friday.

He was joined by Andres Lopez, a San Juan activist who co-chaired the 2013 Latino Inaugural with Muñoz and actress Eva Longoria.

Longoria was initially slated to attend the grant ceremony, but was unable to make it.

Muñoz, Lopez, and Longoria are cofounders of the Futuro Fund, which served as Obama’s Latino fundraising arm during the 2012 election.

Muñoz is a prominent figure in the San Antonio art world. He previously served as chairman of the Museo Alameda, a San Antonio Hispanic cultural museum, but was criticized for throwing lavish parties that critics say sent the museum spiraling into debt. The Museo Alameda closed in 2012 due to lack of funding.

Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) appointed Muñoz to the National Museum of the American Latino Commission in 2009. The project is ongoing.

The Washington Post gave Obama two Pinocchios today for comments he made asserting that 500,000 jobs have been created in manufacturing.

The Washington Post noted:

During a speech calling on Congress to halt a hike in the student loan rate, President Obama referenced the creation of 500,000 manufacturing jobs since February 2010 as part of the opening sentence in a paragraph touting good news about the economy. […]

While the president has long preferred to point to the gain in jobs since early 2010 — the low point in employment during his presidency — the fact remains that manufacturing employment remains about 600,000 jobs smaller than when he took office. That stands in stark contrast to overall nonfarm employment — which is 2 million jobs larger.

Moreover, the growth in manufacturing jobs has basically stalled over the past year. The president’s continued use of this 500,000-job statistic, even as other job stats keep improving, suggests the news is not as good as advertised. Without some presidential acknowledgment that manufacturing job growth has slowed in the past year, it might be time to retire this talking point.

The president made similar statements touting the creation of 500,000 manufacturing jobs back in September and at his State of the Union address. As a result, they doubted the idea that these statistics would remain the same for nine months.

Obama was fact checked 92 times, with an average Pinocchio rating of 2.11 during the 2012 election.

The Washington Free Beacon has complied a list of the president’s top 3 lies of the new term.

1. At the start of the sequester, Obama claimed, “all the folks who are cleaning the floors at the Capitol… The janitors, the security guards, they just got a pay cut, and they’ve got to figure out how to manage that. That’s real.”

The Fact Checker:

Stephen T. Ayers, the architect of the Capitol, listed a number of steps being taken to reduce expenses, including limiting new hiring and postponing repairs. This line jumped out at us: “We do not anticipate furloughs for AOC employees as a result of Sequestration.”

In other words, no pay is being cut for workers at the Architect of the Capitol. […]

Indeed, Obama’s remarks at the news conference so alarmed Capitol Hill officials that an e-mail was sent by the Capitol building superintendent that comments that people who clean the building would get a cut in pay were “NOT true.”

Obama received four Pinocchios for this statement, the highest Pinocchio ranking.

2. While pushing for gun control legislation, Obama “continued” to make the claim that 40 percent of gun sales lack background checks.

The Fact Checker:

“FACT: Nearly 40% of all gun sales don’t require a background check under current law. #DemandAction”

—   tweet from @BarackObama, March 28

There are two key problems with the president’s use of this statistic: The numbers are about two decades old, yet he acts as if they are fresh, and he refers to “purchases” or “sales” when in fact the original report concerned “gun acquisitions” and “transactions.”  Those are much broader categories of data. …

The president’s failure to acknowledge the significant questions about these old data, or his slippery phrasing, leaves us little choice but to downgrade this claim to Three Pinocchios.

3. Obama claimed during the campaign that he called Benghazi a terrorist attack immediately after it occurred. At a news conference in May he reiterated that saying, “The day after it happened, I acknowledged that this was an act of terrorism.”

The Fact Checker:

Once again, it appears that we must parse a few presidential words. We went through this question at length during the 2012 election, but perhaps a refresher course is in order. […]

So, given three opportunities to affirmatively agree that the Benghazi attack was a terrorist attack, the president obfuscated or ducked the question.

In fact, as far as we can tell from combing through databases, Monday was the first time the president himself referred to Benghazi as an “act of terrorism.” […]

But the president’s claim that he said “act of terrorism” is taking revisionist history too far, given that he repeatedly refused to commit to that phrase when asked directly by reporters in the weeks after the attack. He appears to have gone out of his way to avoid saying it was a terrorist attack, so he has little standing to make that claim now.

Obama received four Pinocchios for this statement.

“As the CEO of a mobile phone company, I’m deeply disturbed by the Obama administration’s growing record of executive power grabs at the expense of constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties,” Kieschnick said in a statement to CNN Money.

Kieschnick is a member of the invite-only progressive Democracy Alliance. The exclusive group since 2005 has funneled more than $500 million into liberal organizations such as the pro-Obama Super PAC Priorities USA Action and the Center for American Progress, the influential liberal think tank.

Kieschnick has contributed millions to pro-Obama special interest groups through CREDO Mobile’s liberal activism network, CREDO Action, including the League of Conservation Voters and Planned Parenthood.

CREDO has contributed $73 million to progressive causes since its inception in 1985. The nonprofit is funded through Working Assets Funding Service, which generates revenue from a 1 percent donation from all CREDO Mobile service charges.

The telecommunications CEO now plans to use his group as a vehicle to protest the administration’s wiretapping surveillance activities. CREDO Action recently launched a public action campaign against Obama asking the American people to reject the president’s spying by signing a petition on their website. The petition reads:

“President Obama: We call upon you and demand that, as a constitutional scholar who ran on a platform of transparency in government, you justify your indiscriminate spying on Americans.”

The Democracy Alliance held their annual spring conference in Laguna Beach in April where the group decided on the portfolio of alliance-endorsed groups.

The Los Angeles Times has reported that Obama’s advocacy organization Organizing for Action (OFA) received recommended organization status and would be a priority for Democracy Alliance member donations during the 2013 cycle. According to the first quarter filing, OFA has received $50,000 donations from Democracy Alliance members S. Donald Sussman and Wayne Jordan.

1. Power called for global apology tour

AP

Power wrote that U.S. foreign policy “needs not tweaking but overhauling,” in a 2003 New Republic article. 

Power recommended that United States officials should apologize to the world for its past failures in order to enhance credibility with foreign countries.

“A country has to look back before it can move forward,” Power wrote. “Instituting a doctrine of the mea culpa would enhance our credibility by showing that American decision-makers do not endorse the sins of their predecessors.”

She reasoned that terrorists depend for their sustenance on “mainstream anti-Americanism throughout the world,” and that anti-Americanism is the fault of the United States.

“Some anti-Americanism derives simply from our being a colossus that bestrides the earth,” argued Power. “But much anti-Americanism derives from the role U.S. political, economic, and military power has played in denying such freedoms to others.”

2. Power recommended the United States intervene with a “Mammoth Protection Force” in Israel, then called the idea “weird”

Power made several recommendations on what the United States should do to alleviate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which she compared to the Rwandan genocide, in a 2002 discussion at Berkeley.

Though she stopped just short of calling it genocide, she did say that she saw “major human rights abuses” in Israel.

Power advised that the United States should stop spending money on the Israeli military, and instead invest billions in a new Palestinian state.

“It may mean sacrificing—or investing I think more than sacrificing—literally billions of dollars, not in servicing Israel’s military, but actually investing in the new state of Palestine,” Power explained.

She continued by recommending that the United States invest billions to send “a mammoth protection force” in order to create a “meaningful military presence” in Israel.

One of the few concerns for Power was that such action would alienate the pro-Israel lobby in the United States.

“Putting something on the line might mean alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import,” Power said.

Power herself recognized that her statements were problematic in 2008.

Speaking about her own comments, Power said, “This makes no sense to me.”

“Even I don’t understand it … The quote seems so weird,” Power added.

3. Power praised Obama’s willingness to meet with enemies without preconditions

Power offered praise for President Barack Obama’s statement that he was willing to meet with rogue leaders without preconditions in the first year of his administration.

According to the Huffington Post, Power saw this statement by Obama as a turning point for his campaign and talked positively of his staunch insistence on the point.

“I can tell you about the conference call the day [after Obama made the proclamation],” she recalled. “People were like, ‘Did you need to say that?’ And he was like ‘yeah, definitely.’”

4. Power lost her job with Obama for calling Hillary Clinton a “monster”

Power was forced to resign from Obama’s presidential campaign for calling Hillary Clinton a “monster” in 2008.

The comments came during an interview with a Scottish newspaper.

“She is a monster, too — that is off the record — she is stooping to anything,” Power said.

She went into depth on what she believed were deceitful tactics by the Clinton campaign.

“You just look at her and think, ‘Ergh.’ But if you are poor and she is telling you some story about how Obama is going to take your job away, maybe it will be more effective. The amount of deceit she has put forward is really unattractive.”

According to Power, she will go to her grave regretting the comment.

 5. Power on John Kerry: “He must have thought that having got shrapnel in his ass out there bought him some credibility. It didn’t.”

Power had strong words for Secretary of State John Kerry following his failed 2004 campaign for president.

Power thinks that it was a mistake for Kerry to assume his military record alone would be enough to deflect attacks on the merits of his service in Vietnam.

“The lesson we got was that the only thing worse than John Kerry being Swiftboated was his being slow to respond,” Power told the New Statesman. “God love him, he must have thought that having got shrapnel in his ass out there bought him some credibility. It didn’t.”

Gerritson recounted the invasive and intimidating requests by the IRS and said their actions indicate they were specifically attempting to stifle a particular point of view:

BECKY GERRITSON: [...] The individuals who sought to intimidate us were acting as they thought they should, in a government culture that has little respect for its citizens. Many of the agents and agencies of the federal government do not understand that they are servants of the people. They think they are our masters, and they are mistaken. I am not interested in scoring political points. I want to protect and preserve the America that I grew up in, the America of the people who crossed oceans and risked their lives to become a part of. And I am terrified it is slipping away. Thank you.

OFA executive director Jon Carson told supporters in a Thursday email that the “big issues we care about” are “gun safety, climate change, marriage equality, immigration reform, and more.”

The group’s emphasis on the four issues specifically mentioned suggest its agenda is out of step with mainstream America, according to Logan Dobson, a pollster with the Tarrance Group.

“Every single poll that comes out that features a ‘most important’ issue question tells us the exact same thing: Voters care about the economy,” Dobson told the Washington Free Beacon in an email.

“The types of issues OFA is saying are the ‘big issues they care about’ rarely exceed 10 percent in the polls, and even then in moments when they dominate the news cycle,” Dobson noted.

A May Gallup poll listed “gun violence” and “immigration” as the 11th and 12th – out of 12 – most important issues to Americans surveyed. Global warming and gay marriage were not listed.

A Pew Research Center poll the month before put addressing global warming dead last in a list of 18 political priorities. Immigration and gun control came in at 14 and 15, respectively. Gay marriage did not make the list.

A Washington Post-ABC survey in January asked about eight issues. Respondents ranked immigration and global warming as the two least important issues facing the country.

Gun control came in fourth. More than half of respondents said the December shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., made them more supportive of gun control measures, but more still listed the economy as their top priority.

Only 6 percent of respondents listed gun control as their top priority in a CNN poll the same month. Immigration garnered 3 percent, and the environment only 2 percent.

Jobs or the economy were listed as Americans’ top political priority in all four of those surveys.

Those issues fail to make OFA’s list of priorities, even though they consistently rank as Americans’ and Democrats’ most pressing political concerns, while issues such as gun control are consistently viewed as less important.

The Democratic Party appears to be shifting messages on guns in some states. The party’s Senate campaign arm emailed supporters on Friday lauding remarks by Sen. Mark Pryor (D., Ark.), who said the OFA-backed Toomey-Manchin gun control bill was not a worthwhile proposal.

Pryor voted against the legislation, which did not pass. OFA has pledged to attack the vulnerable red-state senator and three other Senate Democrats who voted against the measure.

“I think it’s very clear that even in those red states, there’s overwhelming support for background checks” for all private gun purchases, Carson told the Hill in April.

Dobson said OFA’s strategy may be tactically useful but will not likely have broader appeal with mainstream America.

“There are certainly issues that groups might want to emphasize for issues of fundraising, base excitement, or appeasing your donors,” Dobson told the Free Beacon.

“But if OFA wants to focus on the big issues that voters care about, the data’s pretty clear,” he said. “The economy isn’t just a big issue. It’s the issue.”

OFA did not respond to a request for comment.