WATCHING THE OBAMACARE BODYCOUNT RISE.

JAMES TARANTO: Katrina and ObamaCare: The analogy is less telling than who is employing it.

Granted, it’s an imperfect analogy. So is every other analogy, but there are some particularly glaring differences here. As Karl Van Zandt observes on Twitter, President Bush didn’t push Hurricane Katrina through Congress without a single vote from the other party. And, Global-warmist superstitions notwithstanding, Katrina was a natural disaster, not a man-caused one.

Yet even if you think the analogy is a bum rap for Bush, there is a satisfaction in watching it employed by none other than the New York Times, in a Friday “news analysis” by Michael D. Shear. . . .

Shear’s passive construction reads like an effort to let Obama off the hook, but it’s damning in its own way. Being “plagued” and “threatened”–being at the mercy of events–is not leadership but its opposite.

Shear goes on to observe that “unlike Mr. Bush, who faced confrontational but occasionally cooperative Democrats, Mr. Obama is battling a Republican opposition that has refused to open the door to any legislative fixes to the health care law and has blocked him at virtually every turn.”

That’s simply inaccurate: The Republican-led House has passed several legislative fixes, including one to delay the individual mandate, one to delay the employer mandate, and one to deprive congressional staffers and senior executive branch officials of federal subsidies.

On Friday–after Shear filed his article but in keeping with previously announced intentions–the House passed the Keep Your Health Plan Act of 2013, which “allows providers to continue to offer in 2014 those health insurance plans in effect in the individual market as of January 1, 2013,” thereby partially ameliorating the effects of the ObamaCare swindle. The vote was 261-157, with 39 Democratic ayes.

Still, it’s remarkable that the New York Times, America’s most important liberal newspaper, is comparing Obama to the hated Bush.

Indeed.

ED DRISCOLL: The New Republic’s John Judis, Then And Now.

LIKE PEELING AN ONION OF FAIL: Woman Held Out By Obama As ObamaCare Success Story Can’t Afford ObamaCare Policy.

ROLL CALL: First Lady Urges Donors to ‘Max Out’ to Senate Democrats.

TRUST: Documents say NSA repeatedly promised to stop surveillance rules violations. “The Obama administration published the heavily censored files Monday night as part of an ongoing civil liberties lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the government’s collection of phone records, which the White House has said is important to countering terrorism. The files published Monday night were so heavily censored that one of the two justifications for the government to search through Americans’ phone records was blacked out.”

THIS IS INCREASINGLY BELIEVABLE: Cheating students more likely to want government jobs, study finds.

THE HILL: Keep government out of healthcare, poll finds. “A majority of voters say the federal government shouldn’t be involved in the business of healthcare, according to a Gallup survey released on Monday. The poll found that 56 percent say making sure people have health insurance shouldn’t be a government responsibility, against 42 who say that it should be. Prior to 2008, federal involvement in healthcare enjoyed strong support, but the bitter Congressional fight to pass the Affordable Care Act, and the ensuing botched rollout, seems to have soured the public on the notion.”

When does it leak out that Obama is really an Ayn Rand sleeper agent?

FIVE REASONS the IRS Scandal won’t go away.

WASHINGTON POST: Obama’s ratings tumble after health-care flaws. “The flawed rollout of the Affordable Care Act has pushed President Obama to the lowest point of his presidency, with dwindling faith in his competence and in many of the personal attributes that have buoyed him in the past, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. Opposition to the new health-care law also hit a record high in the survey, with 57 percent saying they oppose the president’s most significant domestic initiative. Forty-six percent say they are strongly against it. Just a month ago, as the enrollment period was beginning, the public was almost evenly divided in its assessments of the law. . . . His overall approval rating has fallen to 42 percent, having dropped six percentage points in a month, and equals his record low in Post-ABC polls. His disapproval rating stands at 55 percent, which is the worst of his presidency. Forty-four percent say they strongly disapprove of the way he is handling his job, also the worst of his presidency.”

HOLDER’S VICTIMS: Meet the minority youth Obama wants to stop from attending private schools.

CHRIS CHRISTIE: “ObamaCare is a failure. . . It’s failing because the people in charge have never run anything.”

LAST NIGHT’S CONFERENCE CALL: Morose Obama asks his base for psychological intervention.

LOOKING OUT FOR THE BIG CORPORATE INTERESTS: Jailbreaking and unlocking might be restricted in treaty pushed by Obama: International ban could make it difficult to change US law for the better.

IRS SCANDAL UPDATE: Emails: IRS official said Lerner threw Cincinnati office under the bus.

An IRS official blasted Lois Lerner for her attempt to blame the agency’s targeting scandal on low-level employees in Cincinnati, according to newly released emails.

“Cincinnati wasn’t publicly ‘thrown under the bus’ (but) instead was hit by a convoy of Mack trucks,” wrote Cindy Thomas, former director of the IRS exempt organizations office in Cincinnati, in a May 10, 2013 email to Lerner obtained by the House Ways and Means Committee.

Thomas wrote the email on the very day that the IRS targeting scandal broke when Lerner, a senior agency official based in Washington, D.C., admitted that her exempt organizations division engaged in improper targeting of conservative groups. Lerner initially claimed that the agency’s Cincinatti office was solely responsible for the practice. The New York Times went to bat for the administration, characterizing the Cincinatti office as a “backwater” filled with “low-level employees.”

But Thomas wasn’t having it.

“As you can imagine, employees and managers (in the Cincinnati tax-exempt division) are furious,” Thomas wrote to Lerner.

Well, it’s no fun being the first-line scapegoats.

ARNE DUNCAN apologizes for “clumsy phrasing” in racist “White moms” remark.

Background: Jay Carney won’t condemn Arne Duncan’s “white suburban moms” comment. It’s funny how under this administration “white” has become an all-purpose epithet.

Related: Duncan tries to quell uproar over Common Core comments. “The remark lit up social-media sites, prompting pointed responses from bloggers, an open letter from a school superintendent, digital images of Duncan’s official federal portrait with the word ‘bigot’ emblazoned across it, and one congressman’s call for Duncan’s firing.” He’s a putz. He should go.

ANYONE WHO SAID THAT ABOUT MICHELLE OBAMA WOULD BE OUT OF A JOB — AND IN FEAR OF BEING LYNCHED: Martin Bashir apologizes for dirty, disgusting slam at Sarah Palin.

MSNBC once suspended Ed Schultz for calling Laura Ingraham a “right-wing slut”; why on earth does it tolerate Bashir’s brand of bile?

Bashir once said that the NRA “deserves to be equated with Hitler,” so he’s practiced at incendiary comparisons.

What happened last week is that Bashir used his hatred of Palin—calling her the country’s “resident dunce” and a “world-class idiot”—to descend deeper into the gutter than I ever thought he’d go.

It’s MSNBC. They, and the bulk of their dedicated viewers, are awful, and awfully dumb, people, without even a trace of the moral and intellectual superiority they affect. That MSNBC’s audience is so minuscule is a very positive reflection on the America that Bashir despises.

“THEIR CREDIBILITY IS SHOT.”

We know Obama lied about healthcare. We know he lied about Benghazi. He tells fibs about other things in the name of politics. But, no administration should ever intentionally lie about Labor statistics, crop reports or market moving government statistics.

Lies throw the capitalistic market mechanism off its kilter because it screws up transparency.

Economists, financial institutions, people, hedge funds, state/private pension funds, and other governments base policy, predictions, expectations and invest hard earned dollars based on those numbers.

Screwing with them shakes the foundations of lots of things to their core. Your own personal savings/investments are at stake.

Yes, but — and let’s be very clear here — he doesn’t care about you. He never did.

ROGER SIMON: Barack Obama, Libertarian Manufacturing Machine. Roger: Ixnay on the ibertarianlay eeperslay agentay alktay.

ABUSE OF POWER: Warner Bros. Admits To Issuing Bogus Takedowns; Gloats To Court How There’s Nothing Anyone Can Do About That.

Remember, this industry is Obama’s biggest supporter.

TWO-FACED: Boing Boing: Obama’s secret attempt to ban cellphone unlocking, while claiming to support it.

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POLITICAL THUGGERY: Homes raided, subpoenas issued targeting conservative groups and allies of Scott Walker. “The orders reportedly began in the office of Milwaukee County Assistant District Attorney Bruce Landgraf just days before Democrat Mary Burke announced that she’d be running for governor of the state. Landgraf works for Milwaukee County Democratic District Attorney John Chisholm — who led a similar effort against Wisconsin conservatives and Gov. Walker in the past. This is the second such ‘John Doe’ investigation in just three and a half years.”

It’s designed to intimidate donors. I hope that Burke & Chisholm hear from people who are unhappy with such efforts.

THIS WILL RESONATE with every author.

WELL, NOW, THIS SEEMS LIKE A BIG STORY: Census ‘faked’ 2012 election jobs report.

In the home stretch of the 2012 presidential campaign, from August to September, the unemployment rate fell sharply — raising eyebrows from Wall Street to Washington.

The decline — from 8.1 percent in August to 7.8 percent in September — might not have been all it seemed. The numbers, according to a reliable source, were manipulated.

And the Census Bureau, which does the unemployment survey, knew it.

Just two years before the presidential election, the Census Bureau had caught an employee fabricating data that went into the unemployment report, which is one of the most closely watched measures of the economy.

And a knowledgeable source says the deception went beyond that one employee — that it escalated at the time President Obama was seeking reelection in 2012 and continues today.

“He’s not the only one,” said the source, who asked to remain anonymous for now but is willing to talk with the Labor Department and Congress if asked.

The Census employee caught faking the results is Julius Buckmon, according to confidential Census documents obtained by The Post. Buckmon told me in an interview this past weekend that he was told to make up information by higher-ups at Census.

So with this and the IRS intimidation of the opposition, the asterisk on Obama’s re-election gets bigger. . . .

UPDATE: Reminder: Obama Moved Census Control To White House Early In First Term.