Costco Gets BLASTED on Facebook for Yanking ‘America’ from Shelves

Costco’s Jim Sinegal and Barack Obama

Costco has a real public relations nightmare on its hands, and it’s spreading like wildfire throughout social media. 

WND’s Jerome Corsi has confirmed that the popular discount warehouse giant “has issued an order to remove all copies of Dinesh D’Souza’s bestselling book, America: Imagine the World Without Her,  from the shelves of its stores nationwide.” 

D’Souza’s book, released on June 2, is ranked #1 in Amazon’s Commentary and Opinion subsection of Politics and Government, and the #3 hardcover book overall in Amazon’s Politics and Government section.

Corsi points out that Costco co-founder and director Jim Sinegal is a huge leftist, a major Democrat donor, and even spoke at the 2012 Democrat convention that nominated Obama. Ironically, Sinegal has prospered from the same capitalist system Barack Obama is trying to destroy through controlist policies. 

The book, like the movie, logically smashes the Obama Democrat Party meme that America is a force for evil in the world. 

“If true, this would be very odd,” D’Souza told WND. 

Needless to say, the company is understandably getting obliterated on the company’s publicFacebook page.  Here are of the posts, taken “in order” from an unrelated post on the page by the company, with several followers using words like “communist” to describe the company’s attempt to censor the pro-American book.

The BIG threat to Obamacare (that you've never heard of)

If you wake up tomorrow and hear a top U.S. court has issued a ruling that could end up effectively destroying much of Obamacare, don't say we didn't warn you.

At stake are the subsidies that more than 5 million people have already received to help them buy health insurance through HealthCare.gov, the federal Obamacare exchange that sold insurance in 36 states this year.

In a nutshell, plaintiffs in the case Halbig v. Sebelius claim those often-valuable subsidies are illegal because the Affordable Care Act only authorized such tax credits for people who bought insurance through one of the exchanges originally set up by an individual state or the District of Columbia—not the federal exchange. Nearly 90 percent of the people who enrolled in plans via the federal exchange qualified for those subsides because they had low or moderate incomes.

Take away those subsidies and many, if not most, of the enrollees on HealthCare.gov might not buy insurance next year because they will find it unaffordable at the full premium price. That, in turn, could create a much-feared "death spiral," where insurance pools have too many sick enrollees and not enough young healthy ones, and premium rates skyrocket.

Read MoreObamacare views will skew votes for Congress: Poll 

And if those subsidies are not available to individuals in the states served by HealthCare.gov, it would also mean that businesses in those states could not be mandated starting next year to offer affordable health insurance to their workers or pay a fine. That's because the so-called employer mandate is linked to the availability of those subsidies for workers who opt to buy individual insurance.

"If the courts were to decide that the Halbig plaintiffs were right, it would be a huge threat to the ACA," said Timothy Jost, a professor at the Washington and Lee University School of Law, and leading Obamacare expert. "This is a real bomb-thrower."

Mark Wilson | Getty Images News

President Barack Obama, then-outgoing Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, and Vice President Joe Biden at an event in the Rose Garden at the White House, on April 11, 2014.

As early as Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit could issue a decision in that case, which is well-known among Obamacare experts, but largely unheard of by the general public.

Oral arguments heard by a three-judge panel on that court in March—when two of the judges appeared sympathetic to the plaintiffs—gave Halbig supporters renewed hope that their claim will prevail.

"This has been under the radar for so long," said Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, one of the architects of the argument used in the Halbig case and in three other similar, pending federal court challenges to Obamacare. Halbig is expected to be the one decided at the appellate level first, although another one that was originally filed in Virginia federal court is also on the verge of being decided in the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Cannon's argument focuses on several sections of the law, particularly one phrase saying subsidies can be issued "through an Exchange established by the State under (section) 1311 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act."

Read MoreWhat we really think about that wellness program 

At the time the ACA was passed into law, many expected that most, if not all, states would set up their own Obamacare exchanges—but when most states didn't, the federal government stepped in and set up HealthCare.gov to sell insurance in those states.

In studying the law three years ago, Cannon focused on the language detailing an exchange run by a "state" being able to sell subsidized insurance. He then argued that because the federal government is not a "state," it is not empowered to sell subsidized plans through its own exchange.

The Obama administration and its supporters "are claiming powers that Congress never gave them, the powers to tax millions of employers and individuals" to fund billions of dollars of subsidies distributed through the federal exchange, Cannon said.

"Supporters of the law have said that this will pose an 'existential threat' to the law" if that claim prevails, Cannon said. "If that's true, what that means is that Obamacare cannot survive unless it has a buy-in from the states that it never has had."

But, Cannon said, "no one really knows what the impact will be."

However, even Cannon's staunchest opponents agree that a decision that accepted his claim would seriously harm Obamacare if it survived further legal scrutiny.

Read MoreObamacare autopilot: Making it easy could cost you 

"It's a very big deal," said Ron Pollack, founder of the health-care consumers advocacy group Families USA, and Enroll America, the group that was a major force in pushing people to sign up for Obamacare.

Getty Images

People sit with an insurance agent from Sunshine Life and Health Advisors as they try to purchase health insurance under the Affordable Care Act at the Mall of the Americas in March 2014 in Miami.

Pollack noted that the more than 5 million people who have received subsidies via HealthCare.gov "would have them taken away!" 

"It certainly would cause a lot of people to rejoin the ranks of the uninsured," Pollack said. "The provision of the tax credit premium subsidy makes a huge difference in terms of whether people considering enrollment or enrolling in coverage will find such coverage affordable."

ACA supporters strongly disagree with the claims made in the Halbig case, saying they focus on a narrow part of the law.

Read MoreThe underworld of cheap drugs

"It's a selective reading of the statute," said Jost, the health law professor at Washington and Lee University. "If you just take the four words, completely out of context ... you can read it the way they do, but that's frankly not the way courts read statutes."

"You look at the entire statute, you look at the purpose of the statute, you don't cherry pick," Jost said. "They just made this stuff up."

Getty Images

Jost said the record of debate over the law shows that both Republicans and Democrats understood the ACA would allow the establishment of Obamacare exchanges, both state and federal, and that there would be subsidies granted to enrollees.

In other words, he said, the intent of the overall statute was to provide subsidies on Obamacare exchanges to help people comply with the mandate requiring most Americans to have some form of health insurance by 2014 or face a tax penalty.

Jost also said there is no evidence, at any point, that it was said or that states understood that if they did not set up their own exchange then the residents of their states would be ineligible for subsidies to buy insurance.

And he pointed out that congressional leaders involved in passing the law filed a legal brief saying it was never their intention to have the federal exchange be barred from having subsidies used by customers.

Pollack said, "It's not a narrow reading" of the law, "it's a total misreading of it."

Read MoreHobby Lobby outrage? A simple fix

But for Cannon, the language is clear, and subsidies can only be issued through state-run exchanges, not a federal exchange.

He said the Obama administration could seek to fix the problem by asking Congress to amend the law, but "they are afraid" what will happen if Congress reopens debate over the ACA.

"The only way you're going to get a fix through is major revision, and that might include a major scaling back of the law," Cannon said. "And that's democracy. And that's what the Obama administration's vision of the law is trying to subvert."

While Pollack and Jost don't agree with Cannon's analysis of the ACA, they do agree with him that the oral arguments in the D.C. Circuit Court in March seemed to offer the Halbig case a renewed chance to stay alive, and thus to continue threatening Obamacare.

"You get two judges on the judicial panel in the second highest court in the land asking some really hard questions about how you're violating the intent of the law," Cannon said of those arguments.

A split decision seems likely, all sides agree. Cannon and his allies are hopeful it will break their way.

But while their opponents think that is possible, they don't believe the Halbig arguments will prevail in the long run and result in the end of HealthCare.gov subisides.

"I feel rather confident about that," Pollack said.

Read MoreThis drug became kosher (but it doesn't matter)

That confidence is partly based on an analysis of the tough legal path the case would have to cross before its claim became accepted as the law.

If the Halbig plaintiffs win their appeal, Pollack and Jost both said they expect the Obama administration to immediately request a review of the decision by the entire 11-active judge lineup of the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Columbia—a so-called en banc review.

And of the three judges who heard oral arguments in the cases in March, two of them—the ones considered most likely to side with Halbig—will not be part of an en banc review because they have senior judge status, as opposed to active status on the court.

At the same time, another similar case is pending before a panel of judges in the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, where Cannon said, "I'm not optimistic" of the claim winning there.

Plaintiffs in the cases based on Cannon's claim could, if they lose at the appellate level, ask the Supreme Court to hear their claim. But there is no automatic right to appeal to the high court, and if the circuit courts aren't split in their decisions, it makes it less likely that the Supreme Court would take the case to resolve the dispute.

Jost, for one, is skeptical that even if the Supreme Court took the cases, it would rule that the subsidies on the federal exchange are illegal.

Read MoreData flaws dog US health law sign-ups: Report

"I think they've done this once, and they don't want to do it again," Jost said.

He noted that in 2012, the court split 5-4 in voting to uphold most of Obamacare, including the individual mandate. In that decision, Chief Justice John Roberts, a conservative, shocked and angered many Obamacare opponents when he voted to uphold the law.

—By CNBC's Dan Mangan

UK Systematically Denies Surgery to Seniors

Royal College of Surgeons issued a report that the British National Health Services (NHS) is denying life-saving operations because of age discrimination in defiance of the law. New datadocuments for the first time that across large areas of the United Kingdom no patients above the age of 75 are “receiving surgery for breast cancer or routine operations such as gall bladder removal and knee replacements.” 

Under the British socialized medicine system, a national board called NICE has made financial decisions regarding healthcare access that assigns less value to treating seniors.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) provides national guidance and advice to supposedly improve health and social care in the UK. Because of budget considerations, NICE issued a report on May 6, 2005 that “patients could be denied certain health treatments because of their age.”

The report caused an uproar at the time. Jonathan Ellis, health policy manager at the “Age Concern” charity, said: “To suggest that anyone should receive less care and attention simply because they happen to be older is blatant discrimination.” He added that about 80% of physicians in general practice now believed there is discrimination against older people within the NHS system. "It also runs contrary to the government's stated aim of tackling the prejudice against older people that exists in health care services,” he stated.

Tim Kelsey, director for patients and information at NHS England, the central body in charge of the provision of healthcare services, reported on July 6, 2013 that, “We are about to run out of cash in a very serious fashion.” NHS England projected that NHS would be facing a $56 billion annual funding gap by 2020. Senior NHS doctors and managers said the system was considering closing 20 hospitals across the country.

The 144 separate local councils in England that administer the NHS collectively spent $23.5 billion last year for “adult social care” on the 11 million people 65 years or older in the UK. That population is expected to grow by about 250,000 per year thru 2050.

The London Telegraph on July 2^nd quoted a confidential survey of budget chiefs for the 144 councils which showed that total spending on adult social care dropped by $458 million or 2% over the last year ending in June. The survey reveals that budgets have shrunk by 12% since the 2011 financial crisis, but the number of people needing care has risen by 13% because of an ageing UK population and an increase in the number of disabled.

The Royal College of Surgeons (RCS) study release on July 3^rd “analyzed rates of surgery in England for six of the most common operations among different age groups. It exposes a major postcode lottery in practice across the country – with a 37-fold variation in rates of surgery for breast cancer for women aged 65 and over, depending on where they live. Hip replacements were 10 times as common in some parts of the country as others, with a 6-fold variation in rates of surgery for bowel cancer in 2011-12, the figures show.”

The RCS report found dramatic differences in council area surgery rates for those aged 65 and above. Twenty-nine council areas provided “zero surgery” for those aged 75 and over in the six categories analyzed. For beast surgery to remove cancerous tumors, there was an average of 37 per council area, and in some regional parts of the nation the numbers were “so low that they were calculated as a rate of zero” in other parts. 

RCS President Professor Norman Williams said the scale of the differences was “extremely worrying,” raising suspicions that some parts of the NHS were operating covert blanket bans against procedures on age grounds. The controversy in the UK over this type of suspected “discrimination” caused the government to pass anti-age discrimination laws regarding denial of beneficial medical procedures based on age.

In response to media pressure, the British Health Secretary said: “We expect the NHS to make sure that all patients can access the treatment they need – discrimination of any kind is unacceptable.”

Acceptable or not, the British National Health Service is rapidly becoming financially insolvent. The cost of NHS now takes an average of 35% of councils’ overall budgets, up from 30% just four years ago, and the proportion is predicted to continue growing.

President Obama promised seniors that they would not suffer as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) moves to nationalize healthcare when it is fully implemented in 2015. But the UK’s experience demonstrates that nationalized care will still go bankrupt even if access to necessary surgical procedures is systematically denied to seniors.

VIDEO: Joan Rivers Says Obama is Gay; Michelle a ‘Tranny’; ‘We All Know’

http://www.tpnn.com/2014/07/03/video-joan-rivers-says-obama-is-gay-michelle-a-tranny-we-all-know/?utm_source=feedly&utm_reader=feedly&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=video-joan-rivers-says-obama-is-gay-michelle-a-tranny-we-all-know

June Full-Time Jobs Plunge By Over Half A Million, Part-Time Jobs Surge By 800K, Most Since 1993

Is this the reason for the blowout, on the surface, payroll number? In June the BLS reports that the number of full-time jobs tumbled by 523K to 118.2 million while part-time jobs soared by 799K to over 28 million!

Looking at the breakdown of full and part-time jobs so far in 2014, we find that 926K full-time jobs were added to the US economy. The offset: 646K part-time jobs.

Something tells us that the fact that the BLS just reported June part-time jobs rose by just shy of 800,000 the biggest monthly jump since 1993, will hardly get much airplay today. Because remember: when it comes to jobs, it is only the quantity that matters, never the quality.

... just in case there is any confusion why there is zero real wage growth (for two months in a row now), and why it will take a few more months before experts start tossing the word stagflation a little more casually.

Source: BLS

How Wall Street Manipulates The Buy-To-Rent Housing Racket

Private equity firms are the ultimate smart money on Wall Street; they know how to wring out the last dime from their own clients, such as pension funds and rich individuals, through hidden fees, obscure expenses, elaborate expense shifting, lackadaisical disclosure, and “zombie advisers,” to the point where SEC Inspection Chief Andrew Bowden singled them out in a speech in May. Now the lawyers are circling.

And these PE firms invented a whole new business: buying vacant homes out of foreclosure and from banks and renting them out. Flush with the Fed’s nearly free money, Blackstone Group ended up spending $8.6 billion in two years on 45,000 homes, spread helter-skelter across 14 cities. Another PE product, American Homes 4 Rent, which went public last summer as a highly leveraged REIT, bought 25,000 homes. Firms sprouted like mushrooms, spending $50 billion to acquire 386,000 homes.

And home prices soared. Year-over-year increases of over 20% suddenly appeared in the data. Housing Bubble 2 was born. That’s how the Fed “healed” the housing market. Yet numerous economists claimed that buying 386,000 homes over two years in a market where about 5 million existing homes change owners every year could not possibly have had much impact on price. Turns out, that meme is awfully close to propaganda.

The smart money on Wall Street had a goal.

And a system – aided and abetted by the banks. Homebuyers today are, literally, paying the price. The goal was to progressively drive up home prices to book near-instant paper profits on the units they had already bought. According to a source at one of the GSEs (Government Sponsored Enterprise), whose work is focused on residential real estate, they did it by constantly laddering their purchases. And in some markets, like Las Vegas, they achieved price increases of 100%. The multiplier effect. He explains:

A multiplier of roughly 60 times is placed on one sale in a market. In other words, one sale affects the value of 60 homes. So the 386,000 homes adjusted the price on roughly 23 million homes. There are 78 million homes in America with 35 million first-lien mortgages. This happened in about 8-12 markets nationwide. The West Coast was leading the charge back up.

Last fall, two investment houses announced they were going to sell out of their inventory and today three others announced the same. Reason: prices have more than met their goal. Since real estate is a commodity, the rule of price elasticity applies. A very small number of sales can have extreme consequences in price for the rest.

The problem with that strategy? It drove up prices so far and so fast that the business model of buying these homes, fixing them up, and renting them out at a profit has hit a wall. So the dynamics of the market are changing. From gobbling up and finding renters to...

Selling, securitizing, and consolidating.

But selling them to first-time buyers at these prices – well, forget it. So Waypoint Real Estate Group is trying to “quietly” unload half its inventory of 4,000 homes in California to another company. It also manages another 7,000 homes that an affiliated REIT owns. Och-Ziff Capital Management Group and Oaktree Capital Management have already started selling their homes. Other firms, including Blackstone Group and American Homes 4 Rent have pulled back from buying homes as prices have soared.

Instead of trying to sell their tens of thousands of homes, Blackstone and American Homes are selling synthetic structured securities that are backed, not by mortgages like the toxic waste that contributed to the financial crisis, but by something even worse: rental payments, based on the flimsy hope that these homes will stay rented out. The already sold $3 billion of this stuff. Wall Street is jubilating. The fees are going to be huge: the market for this type of synthetic concoction is estimated to be $1.5 trillion.

Now that they have to focus on making the business model work with what they’ve got, they have to do the grunt work of fixing up tens of thousands of far-flung homes and renting them out one at a time, and keep them rented out, and they have to come to grips with American mobility where strung-out renters wander in and out and are late paying their rent if they can pay at all, and it’s hard, tedious work.

With buying more homes in overheated markets no longer a priority, or even an option, American Homes is embarking on the next step: buying competitors. It just announced that it would acquire Beazer Pre-Owned Rental Homes, a REIT backed by Beazer Homes, PE firm KKR, and others. It now owns 1,300 homes. Everyone had jumped into this Fed-sponsored game, even home builders like Beazer. American Homes CEO David Singelyn put it this way during the earnings call in May: “We will be one of the players in the consolidation of this sector.”

The goal: manipulate the market to their liking. Through consolidation, the biggest players will try to raise valuations – or at least keep them from collapsing – and control the smaller players that are desperate to take their profits by dumping homes on the market and thereby opening the floodgates. All heck would re-break loose in the housing market. It would reverse the flow, and all the paper profits PE firms have already bragged about to their clients would suddenly evaporate. And that must not be allowed to happen.

“Asset prices have reached stunning levels, obviously out of line with ‘fundamentals.’ The “most dangerous” are housing bubbles; when they burst, they “wreck whole economies.” 

HHS Security Force Call Themselves the Nazi-associated Name “Brown Shirts”

A peek into Obama America’s future? In a Drudge linked article on Fox News it was reported that not only are Department of Health and Human Services security personnel threatening medical workers with imprisonment for talking to the media about potential contagious threats at a Texas refugee camp housing illegal alien children, but they have also taken to calling themselves the Nazi-associated name “Brown Shirts”.

“It was a very submissive atmosphere,” one counselor told Fox News. “Once you stepped onto the grounds, you abided by their laws – the Brown Shirt laws.”

It is impossible to imagine that HHS security personnel don’t know that the term “Brown Shirt” is historically associated with rise of the Nazi Party in Germany, which culminated in the horrendous destruction of World War II.

In the 1920s and 1930s the Brownshirts were the brawlers of the Nazi Party. They would often fight communists in the streets for supremacy and were the perpetrators of the Nazi terror campaign that helped Hitler take power in 1933. They were also known for their crimes against the Jews.

In November 1938 the Brownshirts of the SA attacked Jewish homes, synagogues and businesses throughout Nazi Germany in what would become known as Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. 91 Jews were killed and 30,000 dragged off to concentration camps, most of whom would be murdered during the Holocaust.

While it is disgusting that U.S. government security personnel are using Nazi terminology to describe themselves, perhaps it is not entirely inappropriate. The HHS “Brown Shirts” are also being used to cover up crimes by our government.

Many of the Central American children pouring over the border are being transported on domestic charter buses and airplanes even though they are littered with infectious diseases, including scabies and lice. The HHS “Brown Shirts” have been tasked with keeping this vital public health information secret.

Whenever Germans would complain that street violence was getting out of control, Hitler would claim his innocence and blame it on isolated “excesses” by the Brownshirts. If asked,  Obama will also no doubt pretend he had no idea that his HHS “Brown Shirts” were covering up the tremendous public health risk his immigration policies have created for the American people and blame it on a few bad apples.