"There is much to be learned still about what happened at Benghazi and how to be better on guard against such events in the future. But about what happened in Washington regarding Benghazi there is no doubt: The Obama administration intentionally misled the American public for political purposes, shamefully distorting the facts about an attack in which American citizens and public servants were murdered, for its own narrow political ends. One needn’t think that Benghazi is the next Watergate to be disturbed by the administration’s behavior, and by its continued resistance to providing a full and honest accounting of its actions that day."

"The Ben Rhodes memo revealing the duplicity of this administration on the subject of Benghazi reminds us about the character of those involved. That President Barack Obama could lie so evenly and so passionately (remember the second presidential debate?) is not perhaps surprising at this stage. But let's not forget what it took for Hillary Clinton to lie to the grieving father of an American hero. ...

"As the Rhodes memo makes clear, the president sent his U.N. ambassador to the Sunday shows to lie. Susan Rice was 'to underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy.' Rice did as she was told. The election was less than two months away. A foreign policy failure would not be politically convenient, so it would be made to go away. It's one of the minor injustices of this sorry story that Rice has received more condemnations than the president or secretary of state, who pulled the strings."

"WH won’t release enrollment data, tells GOP to ask insurers. GOP asks insurers, WH disputes data. GOP asks WH for data, WH won’t release."

'"The point is, the repeal debate is and should be over. The Affordable Care Act is working,' the president said while announcing the enrollment of more than 8 million Americans. That is not the point. The debate is not over. ... 

"A new Washington Post-ABC poll shows that Americans aren't buying Obama's latest spin, his closing the door on debate, especially when it comes to the quality and cost of their own health care.

• By a two-to-one margin, more people think the quality of care they receive is getting worse rather than better under Obamacare (29 percent to 14 percent). A majority says the quality has stayed the same.

• By a two-to-one margin, more people think the nation's health care system is getting worse, not better (44 percent to 24 percent). Less than a third say the quality of U.S. health care is about the same.

• Nearly half of Americans say their personal health care costs are increasing under Obamacare (47 percent). Just 8 percent report decreases."

"Last night Texas Senator Ted Cruz took to the Senate floor to call for Secretary of State John Kerry's resignation over his closed door comments about Israel becoming an 'apartheid' state if its leaders don't come to a two-state solution with the Palestinians.  

"'There is no place for this word in the context of the State of Israel. The term ‘apartheid’ means ‘apart’ -- different, isolated -- the state of the victims of apartheid with which the Jews are all too familiar. The notion that Israel would go down that path, and so face the same condemnation that met South Africa, is unconscionable. The United States should be aggressively asserting that Israel can never be made an apartheid nation while America exists, because America will be with Israel regardless of the status of any diplomatic process,' Cruz said in a statement. 'The fact that Secretary Kerry sees nothing wrong with making such a statement on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day demonstrates a shocking lack of sensitivity to the incendiary and damaging nature of his rhetoric. It is my belief that Secretary Kerry has thus proven himself unsuitable for his position and that before any further harm is done to our alliance with Israel, he should offer President Obama his resignation and the President should accept it.'"

"Last year, as the launch date for Obamacare's insurance exchanges drew closer, Oregon was held up by the law's supporters as a model of a state that was doing things right. Liberals touted the Oregon's whole-hearted embrace of Obamacare and its effort to recruit young participants with an ad featuring a folk singer with an acoustic guitar. A Washington Post article described Cover Oregon as 'the White House's favorite health exchange.' But a funny thing happened on the way to nirvana. Oregon's health insurance exchange turned out to be the most dysfunctional one in the United States, and last Friday the board of the state's exchange threw in the towel. 

"After spending $248 million of the $303 million in federal money allocated for the exchange, Oregon officials determined the best course of action would be to scrap the website altogether and simply default to the federal healthcare.gov website. ... 

"What’s breathtaking is that not only has the state wasted so much federal money due to utter incompetence but, according to the Oregonian newspaper, the Obama administration will not be asking Oregon to return the money. And it is estimated that it will cost roughly $5 million more to make the transition to the federal exchange. In other words, if the administration gets its way, federal taxpayers are going to have to foot the bill for the entire fiasco."

"Every once in a while a great, conflicted country gets an insoluble problem exactly right. Such is the Supreme Court’s ruling this week on affirmative action. It upheld a Michigan referendum prohibiting the state from discriminating either for or against any citizen on the basis of race. 

"The Schuette ruling is highly significant for two reasons: its lopsided majority of 6 to 2, including a crucial concurrence from liberal Justice Stephen Breyer, and, even more important, Breyer’s rationale. It couldn’t be simpler. 'The Constitution foresees the ballot box, not the courts, as the normal instrument for resolving differences and debates about the merits of these programs.'"

"If foot-dragging were a competitive sport, President Obama and his administration would be world champions for their performance in delaying the approval of the Keystone XL pipeline. ... 

"Last Friday afternoon, the time when officials make announcements they hope no one will notice, the State Department declared that it is putting off a decision on Keystone XL indefinitely — or at least, it seems, well past November’s midterm elections. This time, the excuse is litigation in Nebraska over the proposed route, because that might lead to a change in the project that various federal agencies will want to consider. The State Department might even decide to substantially restart the environmental review process . This is yet another laughable reason to delay a project that the federal government has been scrutinizing for more than five years.  

"The administration’s latest decision is not responsible; it is embarrassing. The United States continues to insult its Canadian allies by holding up what should have been a routine permitting decision amid a funhouse-mirror environmental debate that got way out of hand. The president should end this national psychodrama now, bow to reason, approve the pipeline and go do something more productive for the climate."

"Justice Sotomayor argues explicitly that Michigan’s voters would have been within their rights to, for example, lobby university authorities to adopt race-neutral admissions standards but that by adopting a constitutional amendment insisting on race neutrality, thereby transferring the decision from the education bureaucrats to the people themselves and their constitution, they 'changed the rules in the middle of the game.' Her opinion is legally illiterate and logically indefensible, and the still-young career of this self-described 'wise Latina' on the Supreme Court already offers a case study in the moral and legal corrosion that inevitably results from elevating ethnic-identity politics over the law. Justice Sotomayor has revealed herself as a naked and bare-knuckled political activist with barely even a pretense of attending to the law, and the years she has left to subvert the law will be a generation-long reminder of the violence the Obama administration has done to our constitutional order. 

"The Court came to the right decision, but its fractured conclusions and the rigorous political activism of its left wing are alarming."

"Our problems from the ACA have only just begun. Excessive regulations for health insurance, such as fixing prices and profit margins while requiring bloated coverage that most people never wanted, and then minimizing the fundamental considerations of risk in pricing insurance, is a recipe for increasing premiums and reducing coverage choices. Major insurers all across the country are already declining to participate in the exchanges or limiting their offerings to plans that severely restrict choice of doctors and exclude many of America’s best hospitals. These trends are certain to worsen after the expiration of the administration’s ad hoc deadline delays. 

"Longer term, even if Obamacare doesn’t lead to an overt single payer system run by the government -- the admitted preference of the president and leading Democrats -- the future is quite predictable unless this law is drastically revised. Just as in the United Kingdom and all systems where everyone is 'insured' by government-defined health insurance, we too will soon be plagued with problems unheard of in our pre-Obama system. It’s only a matter of time until we see unconscionable waits for care, overt restrictions on access to tests, drugs, and treatments, worse treatment outcomes -- all proven by the data and the facts from floundering nationalized health systems, as we see reported in the news all over the world."