Sebelius, ObamaCare and More Spin…

Probably the most disappointing part of the entire Congressional Committee Hearing on the PPACA (ObamaCare) Implementation Failures was when HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius was questioned, more than once, about if it were possible for her to drop her first class federal healthcare coverage and go into the exchanges under ObamaCare, would she… She refused to answer directly… She refused to say, “Yes”. Like the restaurant where the owners, chef, workers and their families refuse to eat… but now you are forced to…

The Blaze: Things didn’t go well for Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius during a congressional hearing Wednesday, and it became pretty clear when she was caught muttering, “Don’t do this to me”:

It’s unclear the exact context of the remark. Washington’s CBS station says it was said to an aide, but it’s unclear if she was speaking to the aide or about someone else.

Sebelius’ unscripted comment came immediately after an intense exchange with Rep. Billy Long (R-Mo.) who repeatedly asked her if she planned to enroll in the health care law she oversees.

The secretary avoided answering the answer head-on, saying she would “take a look at it.”

She also stated that it would be illegal for her to enroll in Obamacare because of her status within the federal government. This is inaccurate; Sebelius is eligible to enroll, she just is not eligible for specific subsidies.

When Sebelius muttered, “Don’t do this to me,” it was after conferring with one of her colleagues. It seems pretty clear she wasn’t addressing Long, but it’s unclear what, exactly, was said to prompt her flustered muttering.  You can here the entire exchange HERE

Video: Mike Rogers Slams Secretary Kathleen Sebellius At Obamacare Hearing - 10/30/13

10/30/13 - On his radio show this afternoon, Rush Limbaugh criticized the Republicans for what he believed to be a lackluster performance during Wednesday morning's hearing with Health & Human Services Sec. Kathleen Sebelius. "It's very frustrating for me," Limbaugh said. "[Sebelius] was clearly the punching bag" but "I don't know that the Republicans did much damage. It's like they're afraid to. It's like there's still a fear of going after Obama."

He wondered whether there is instruction "from on high" within the GOP instructing Republican committee members to "not be mean" and not tear into Sebelius.

"That's such a mistake," he lamented, "because with every day of chaos, Obama and the Democrats are getting closer to what they want and that is single-payer."

Limbaugh also suggested the Republicans are "afraid of success" and perhaps "talk themselves out" of being more aggressive "because they don't think they can win."

Video: Rush Limbaugh: Republicans Seemed 'Afraid' to Go After 'Punching Bag' Sebelius

 

Video: Full Congressional Committee Hearing - "PPACA Implementation Failures: Answers from HHS Secretary Sebelius" Oct 30, 2013 (3:34:01)

Obamacare Website Company CGI Federal Contributed to Obama Campaign

The fun just doesn’t stop… not only did the contract for the $634 Million Dollar website ObamaCare website that doesn’t work go to a non-American company (guess we don’t need the jobs?) and a sorority sister of Michelle Obama’s (cronyism) that was already under investigation… but now we find out that they also contributed to Obama’s campaign…

Freedom Outpost: Have you heard of CGI Federal? It's the company that received a $678 million no-bid contract to develop the disaster that is healthcare.gov. It is also the company whose officials are now coming under scrutiny for the roll out of the Obamacare exchange web portal. But it also seems like those officials are also buddy-buddy with the Obama administration.

According to The Daily Caller, Toni Townes-Whitley, a senior vice president at CGI Federal, is a Princeton classmate of First Lady Michelle Obama. Townes-Whitley and Mrs. Obama are both members of are both members of the Association of Black Princeton Alumni.

As reported by the Washington Examiner in early October, the Department of Health and Human Services reviewed only CGI's bid for the Obamacare account. CGI was one of 16 companies qualified under the Bush administration to provide certain tech services to the federal government. A senior vice president for the company testified this week before The House Committee on Energy and Commerce that four companies submitted bids, but did not name those companies or explain why only CGI's bid was considered.

According to Federal Election Commission Records, Toni Townes-Whitley gave $500 in 2011 and 2012 to Obama's reelection, and another $1,000 to the Obama Victory Fund.

The Washington Examiner reports that senior officials at CGI Federal had White House access. Before being granted the no-bid contract, CGI Federal officials attended several invitation only addresses by President Obama. White House visitor logs show that "CGI Federal President Donna Ryan visited the White House six times prior to her company being selected to do the IT design work behind the high-profile website."

Two of the meetings attended by CGI executives were with Vivek Kundra, Obama's chief information officer. Kundra was a key figure in Obama administration information technology initiatives across the government.

Ryan met Kundra on June 21, 2010, in the latter's Old Executive Office Building office, according to the White House visitor logs.

In addition to the $88 million contract awarded to CGI Federal for the health-insurance exchange website, the company has received a total of $422 million in contracts related to Obamacare since the legislation was signed into law, according to Bloomberg News.

Fox News reported a number of occasions in which the company had failed to meet deadlines or experienced botched launches similar to that seen with the launch of healthcare.gov.

"In projects stretching from Canada to Hawaii, parent company CGI Group and its subsidiaries ran into complaints about its performance," Fox reported.

"The morning I heard CGI was behind [Healthcare.gov], I said, my God, no wonder that thing doesn't work," said James Bagnola, a Texas-based corporate consultant who was hired by the Hawaii Department of Taxation (DOTAX) in 2008, to Fox News.

Bagnola suggested that CGI has been shrewd politically, giving to both Democrats and Republicans at both the state and federal levels. In the case of Hawaii, Bagnola said the company was able to continue to work on the DOTAX contract despite repeated complaints from management and a "corrosive" environment in which government employees felt pitted against CGI staff. This was noted in the final 2010 audit.

"I don't have an ax to grind here, except I was just trying to do my job for this team and stop the state of Hawaii from being ripped off," he said.

According to campaign records at OpenSecrets.com, CGI Group contributed $345,600 to federal candidates and parties — both Democratic and Republican — during the 2011-12 cycle. Some $147,000 went to the Republican Governors Association; and $35,000 to the Democratic Governors Association. The company spent $400,000 in lobbying expenditures between 2011 and 2012.

Technorati Tags: Sebelius,PPACA,ACA,CGI,Affordable Care Act,Linbaugh,Rush,Congressional Hearing,Wake-up America,HHS,Obamaland,cronyism,double standards,ruling elite

No Bid Contract For ObamaCare Website Was Given To Michelle Obama's Pal And Sorority Sister

Joshua Pundit – Cross-Posted at AskMarion: There's an interesting thing that's surfaced regarding the disastrous $678 million ObamaCare website.

The company that built it, CGI Federal received a no bid contract to build the site, even though four other companies submitted bids which were never reviewed. Only CGI’s bid was considered.

And wouldn't you know it, there are a couple of other interesting coincidences.

As the Daily Caller reported, Toni Townes-Whitley, Princeton class of ’85, is the senior vice president at CGI Federal...and not only a classmate and friend of the First Lady, who graduated from Princeton the same year, but a sister at the all black sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha and a fellow member of the Association of Black Princeton Alumni.

And to add to the mix, there's George Schindler, president of CGI, who became an Obama Campaign donor after CGI won the lucrative contract.

Even more interesting, there are rumors that CGI Technologies and Solutions, Inc. PAC – CGI Group’s political action group that donates to the campaigns - made a significant swing in donations to Democrats at around the same time.

Now, no bid contracts have come up before. Democrats threw a huge tantrum over no bid contracts awarded to Halliburton for services they performed in Iraq because of former Vice President Dick Cheney's past employment with them. Those services included saving Iraq's oil wells after Saddam Hussein set them on fire after we invaded.

The difference was that for most of the work Halliburton performed in Iraq, they were the only game in town and no other bids were submitted. Few companies had the expertise and/or the equipment to do what Halliburton contracted to do... observers who credited Halliburton with saving Iraq's oil wells while avoiding an ecological disaster characterized it as a miracle. Not only that, but few if any competitors were willing to send their equipment and employees into a war zone or pony up for the huge insurance costs involved.

What happened with CGI was very different, with four other companies submitting bids that were never even looked at.

It's the Chicago way...and always done using other people's money.

The Dirty Secret Behind ObamaCare No One’s Talking About

Technorati Tags: CGI,Obamaland,Chicago,Chicago Way,Michelle Obama,Cronyism,ObamaCare rollout,ObamaCare,Halliburton,smoke and mirrors,Corruption,taxpayers,double standards,Website,No-Bid,Moochelle,Princeton

ObamaCare… Like a Restaurant Where the Owners, Chefs, Workers and Their Families Refuse to Eat…

ObamaCare… Like a Restaurant Where the Owners, Chefs, Workers and Their Families Refuse to Eat…

By Marion Algier – Ask Marion

Would you really eat in a restaurant, trusting their food or service, where the owners, chefs, workers and their families refuse to eat?  Of course you wouldn’t.  Nobody would, but that is what the Democrats, some GOP establishment career politicians and the Obama administration and their staffs are asking you to do.

They are asking, no mandating, that you to sign up and subject yourself and your family’s health, and in many cases losing better coverage, for healthcare coverage that they refuse to sign up for and be covered by themselves.

The so-called tea party Republicans, who are following their constituents wishes, but have now pretty much backed away from all their demands about the budget and upcoming debt ceiling raise, in what seems like their 20th compromise when the left has refused to negotiate or compromise on anything, were willing to pass and extend the budget and debt ceiling negotiations for several months with a clean bill, except for one provision… The Republicans attached the Vitter amendment (DeSantis bill in the House) which would demand that the House of Representatives, the Senate, the White House and their staffs and federal appointees would have to sign up for and live under the same ObamaCare bill that we all will have to suffer under, without any extra provisions or exemptions.  The Democrats’, RINOs’ and administration’s response:  NO…!

Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) (KEVIN DIETSCH/UPI/Newscom)

The Vitter Amendment on Obamacare: Senate Liberals’ Curious Complaint

The Foundry:

Last week (mid-September) Senator David Vitter (R–LA) proposed an amendment that would end exemptions for White House political appointees and stop illegal taxpayer subsidies for Congress and staff enrolled in Obamacare’s new health insurance exchanges. In other words, political appointees, Members of Congress, and their staffs would receive the same coverage and be eligible for subsidies available to every other American enrolled in the exchanges. No special deals.

On September 17, Senator Dick Durbin (D–IL) charged that Vitter’s proposed amendment was “unfair” because it would eliminate the employer payment for Members of Congress and 16,000 congressional staffers.

But this is a curious complaint. In 2010, Senator Durbin and all other Senate Democrats voted—lockstep—for final passage of Obamacare, which included Section 1312, which ended Members’ access to the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program and instead placed them into the Obamacare health insurance exchanges. Without access to employer coverage, there is no employer subsidy—not for Congress and not for any other worker dumped out of job-based coverage into the exchanges. That’s the law.

Durbin also tries to use Vitter’s vote for an amendment (Amendment No. 3564) offered by Senator Chuck Grassley (R–IA) during debate over Obamacare to undermine his current efforts. Yes, Vitter voted for the amendment. The amendment would have put the President, his appointees, Congress, and staff into the exchanges but would have preserved the government contributions for Congress and staff in the new exchanges.

Here’s the catch: Senator Durbin voted against the Grassley amendment, as did Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D–NV), Senator Barbara Boxer (D–CA), and 53 other Senate Democrats. (See The Congressional Record, March 24, 2010, p. S1996.) In other words, these Senators voted to protect the President and his appointees from their own law but also voted to remove the employer contribution to Congress and their staff. Yet these Senators now oppose it.

Senate liberals say they like Obamacare. If that’s the case, it is only reasonable for them to want to make sure they get what they like on the same exact terms and conditions as every other American enrolled in the exchanges, as put forth by Senator Vitter.

So why wouldn’t the Democrats from both Houses of Congress (as well as the Establishment RINO GOP) vote for the Republican’s compromise and embrace ObamaCare on the same terms the American people are getting… the terms they voted for?  And if they aren’t why should the American people?

Why?  Because our politicians know it is a bad plan, bad coverage, certainly worse and more expensive if you compare apples to apples, than they have now, and it opens them up to the same IRS mandates and access into all their records and information.  It also opens them up to having a non-medically trained review board tell them which services they will and will not get… essentially death panels.  But although they don’t want it, it is good enough for the rest of us in their book.  After all what better advertisement for his signature program would there have been than President Obama and Vice President Biden signing themselves and their families up for all to see for the ObamaCare exchanges the day the program opened on October 1st?

Don’t be fooled by the propaganda being fed us through the mainstream media. ObamaCare was never about healthcare, and definitely not about better healthcare, it was always about ideology and control… about the federal government controlling you… all of us!

Just like President Obama and Harry Reid’s refusal to negotiate with the Republicans has nothing to do with what is good for the country or even the budget, or even the truth for that matter, it is about demonizing the Republicans so that the Progressive Democrats win the next election… so they can maintain their control of you!!

Do your homework and then you be the judge… But in my kitchen, the cook eats his own food and no matter how the present shutdown ends... Our politicians still don't want to eat theirs!

Technorati Tags: CR,Vitter,ObamaCare,Politicians,Congress,Healthcare,Restaurant,Democrats,Obamaland,Division,DeSantis,Sheeple,Common Sense,Low-Informed,Voters,Americans,RINOs,MSM,Exchanges,double standard,Reid,Control,Let Them Eat Cake,Congressional Record,Progressives,Washington D.C.

ObamaCare’s Hierarchy of Privilege

No one who favors the law wants to be bound by it…

NationalReview.com – By Mark Steyn: 

On his radio show the other day, Hugh Hewitt caught me by surprise and asked me about running for the United States Senate from New Hampshire. My various consultants, pollsters, PACs, and exploratory committees haven’t fine-tuned every detail of my platform just yet, but I can say this without a doubt: I will not vote for any “comprehensive” bill, whether on immigration, health care, or anything else. “Comprehensive” today is a euphemism for interminably long, poorly drafted, and entirely unread — not just by the people’s representatives but by our robed rulers, too (how many of those Supreme Court justices actually plowed through every page of Obamacare when its “constitutionality” came before them?). The 1862 Homestead Act, which is genuinely comprehensive, is two handwritten pages in clear English. “The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” is 500 times as long, is not about patients or care, and neither protects the former nor makes the latter affordable.

So what is it about? On Wednesday, the Nevada AFL-CIO passed a resolution declaring that “the unintended consequences of the ACA will lead to the destruction of the 40-hour work week.” That’s quite an accomplishment for a “health” “care” “reform” law. But the poor old union heavies who so supported Obamacare are now reduced to bleating that they should be entitled to the same opt-outs secured by big business and congressional staffers. It’s a very strange law whose only defining characteristic is that no one who favors it wants to be bound by it.

Meanwhile, on the very same day as the AFL-CIO was predicting the death of the 40-hour week, the University of Virginia announced plans to boot working spouses off its health plan beginning January 1 because the Affordable Care Act has made it unaffordable: It’s projected to add $7.3 million dollars to the university’s bill in 2014 alone.

As Nancy Pelosi famously said, “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what’s in it.” But the problem with “comprehensive” legislation is that, when everything’s in it, nothing’s in it. The Affordable Care Act means whatever President Obama says it means on any particular day of the week. Whether it applies to you this year, next year, or not at all depends on the whim of the sovereign, and whether your CEO golfs with him on Martha’s Vineyard. A few weeks back, the president unilaterally suspended the law’s employer mandate. Under the U.S. Constitution, he doesn’t have the power to do this, but judging from the American people’s massive shrug of indifference he might as well unilaterally suspend the Constitution, too. Obamacare is not a law, in the sense that all persons are equal before it, but a hierarchy of privilege; for example, senators value their emir-sized entourages and don’t want them to quit, so it is necessary to provide the flunkies who negotiated and drafted the Affordable Care Act an exemption from the legislation they imposed on the citizenry. Once again, the opt-out is not legal. As the Wall Street Journal trenchantly observed, “OPM has no authority to pay for insurance plans that lack FEHBP contracts, nor does the Affordable Care Act permit either exchange contributions or a unilateral bump in Congressional pay in return for less overall compensation.”

OPM has no authority to pay for plans that lack FEHBP? Who knew?

Despite being the presumptive next senator from New Hampshire, I am in fact an immigrant, and, although I do my best to assimilate, I never feel more foreign than when discussing health care reform… “health” “care” “reform”.

Across the planet, my readers from Tajikistan to Tuvalu are wondering: Is an OPM a new kind of procedure? Is it the latest high-tech stent or prosthetic? But, no. Nothing in the health-care debate is anything to do with medicine or surgery, only with OPMs and FEHBP and the death of full-time employment.

What does your employer or (for the discarded husbands of the University of Virginia’s Women’s Studies Department) your spouse’s employer have to do with health care? For most of modern history, your health care was a matter between you and your doctor. Since World War II, in much of the developed world, it’s been between you, your doctor, and your government. In America, it’s now between you, your doctor, your government, your insurer, your employer, your insurer’s outsourced health-care-administration-services company . . . Anybody else? Oh, let’s not forget Lois Lerner’s IRS, which, in the biggest expansion of the agency in the post-war era, has hired 16,500 new agents to determine whether your hernia merits an audit.

All third-party systems are crappy and inefficient. But socialized health care has at least the great clarifying simplicity of equality of crappiness: liberté, égalité, merde. It requires a perverse genius to construct a “health” “care” “reform” that destroys everything from religious liberty to full-time employment, while requiring multitudes of new tax collectors and other bureaucrats and ever fewer doctors and nurses. The parallel public/private systems of Continental Europe cost about 10 percent of GDP. The Obamacare monstrosity blends all the worst aspects of a private system (bureaucracy, restricted access, co-pays) with all the worst aspects of a government system (bureaucracy, restricted access, IRS agents) and sucks up twice as much GDP, ever less of which is spent on “health care” and ever more on the intervening layers of third, fourth, fifth, and sixth parties.

But, as the AFL-CIO’s resolution emphasizes, that hardly begins to state the distorting effects of Obamacare. In my part of the world, a common employment profile is for the husband to have his own one-man business, doing construction all summer and snowplowing all winter, while the missus does an administrative job with the school district or some other government or quasi-government racket in order to get health coverage. In my experience, most of the people who do the latter don’t terribly enjoy it: They take the job mostly for the health care. So it’s un-American, in the sense that it requires them to sacrifice the pursuit of happiness for the certainty of low-deductible plans.

But it also has a broader destabilizing effect: As I noted a couple of weeks ago, at the low end, about 40 percent of Americans now do minimal-skilled service jobs — the ones that, in the wake of Obamacare, are becoming neither full-time nor part-time but kinda-sorta two-thirds-time in order not to impose health-insurance obligations on the employer. In the middle, a similar number of Americans are diverted into those paper-shuffling jobs that do provide health benefits — say, in the “human resources” department of the bureaucracy; the kind of job in which you pass the time calling someone in Idaho to say you need them to fill in a W-9 before you can send them a 1099, or vice versa. And, at the top end, privileged Americans spend six-figure sums acquiring college degrees that admit them to an homogenized elite that tells itself Obamacare makes perfect sense for everyone except them. The U.S. economy can never recover until more of its real “human resources” are engaged in genuine wealth creation. Yet Obamacare instead incentivizes the diversion of more and more manpower into the Republic of Paperwork.

The cynical among us have always assumed Obamacare was set up to be so unworkable a grateful populace would embrace any 2016 Democrat promising single-payer health care. The way things are going the entire system may collapse first. If any Republicans are trying to devise a health system that doesn’t involve employers, the IRS, and paperwork without end, they’re keeping awfully quiet about it.

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon

Obamacare Becoming Boehnercare? – On The Record… Pull the Plug on Obamacare Rally – Group Demands Speaker Defund Health Care Law [Pictures]

RPV Chairman Pat Mullins Responds to ‘ObamaCare Medicaid Expansion in Virginia’ – A Susan Stimpson Email

Obamacare’s Hierarchy of Privilege

Cruz To Conservatives: “Don’t Blink” – Urges GOP To Fight Obamacare Rollout – On The Record

Obama Taps Former ACORN Lobbyist To Head Obamacare Youth Video Contest…

Time to put an end to special privileges for government officials

Another OBAMACARE PROVISION: "FORCED" HOME INSPECTIONS

Americans petition Congress to Defund Obamacare

Technorati Tags: ObamaCare,double standards,elites,ruling elite,Unconstitutional,watch the other hand,Obamaland,Mark Steyn,ACA,Affordable Care Act,divide and conquer,stand-up America,Privilege,single payer,wake-up America

Obamacare Desperation: Meeting With Celebs Who’ll Never Use It To Push It

Pirate’s Cove: And then Hollywood and other entertainment will be surprised when their shows tank because people come to be entertained, not bombarded with political propaganda

(CNN) President Barack Obama, hoping to pitch his signature health care law to younger Americans, will get some help from a cadre of Hollywood stars who have volunteered to help promote Obamacare’s insurance exchanges that open on October 1.

One has to wonder why he and others have to “pitch” it at all. Isn’t it “The Law”? The young folks, who mostly voted “Obama”, have no choice but to either enroll or pay a fine/tax.

At a meeting at the White House Monday, a group that included singer Jennifer Hudson and actors Kal Penn and Amy Poehler heard Obama extol the benefits his health care law offers young people, whose participation in the exchanges is seen as essential for their long-term viability.

“The President stopped by the meeting to engage artists who expressed an interest in helping to educate the public about the benefits of the health law,” a White House official said. “The reach of these national stars spreads beyond the beltway to fans of their television shows, movies, and music – and the power of these artists to speak through social media is especially critical.”

The meeting, which was led by Obama’s senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, also included representatives for Oprah Winfrey, Alicia Keys, Bon Jovi, YouTube Comedy, Funny or Die and the organizations that put on the annual Grammy and Latin Grammy awards.

Does anyone think that any of these people will actually sign up in the Exchanges themselves? Or do they have their own Cadillac plans?

And when they start pushing O-care people will tune out. The movies and shows with specific liberal politics tend to bomb. No one wants to be patronized, especially by celebs who’ll never enroll in O-care and will do all they can to avoid that “Cadillac tax” on their own high end health insurance plans. If they push this in TV shows, movies, YouTube, you can bet people will avoid those forms of entertainment, particularly since over 50% of the nation is still dead set against Obamacare.

Same goes for the NFL and NBA, along with any other sports, if they decide to push O-care.

Technorati Tags: ObamaCare,Obamaland,Hollywood,manipulation of the public,Cadillac tax,celebrities,propaganda,indoctrination,watch the other hand,O-Care,sheeple,Cadillac health plans,socialized medicine for the masses,double standard

New York school drops Michelle Obama lunch standards: Kids too hungry

By Marion Algier  -  Cross-posted at AskMarion

WashingtonTimes:  New York's Burnt Hills-Ballston Lake school district has become the latest casualty in first lady Michelle Obama’s preferred lunch plan, dropping the menu after too many students complained of hunger.

“[Food service manager Nicky] Boehm and her staff worked hard to implement the new regulations, but there were just too many problems and too many foods that students did not like and would not purchase,” said Assistant Superintendent Chris Abdoo about the National School Lunch Program in a statement reported by EAGNews.org. “Students complained of being hungry with these lunches and the district lost money.”

More Fruit, Fewer Fries: Michelle Obama Might Have Taken the ‘Happy’ Out of McDonald’s Happy Meals

Side Note:  Obama Says Broccoli Is His Favorite Food… Launching Broccoli-Gate

(Reuters) - President Barack Obama likes burgers, hot dogs and such, but when it came time to answer a kid journalist's question about his favorite food, broccoli was the first word that sprang from his lips.

This revelation came on Tuesday at a White House event that recognized children who won a healthy recipe contest, as part of first lady Michelle Obama's anti-obesity campaign.

Having fun with the children, Obama agreed to take two questions from the journalists among them. The first asked what was Obama's favorite food. Broccoli was the presidential reply, according to a White House aide.

This from a politician who has literally eaten his way across the country: Burgers in a Washington suburb with Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev; ribs in Asheville, North Carolina; hot dogs at a basketball game in Dayton, Ohio; and a tasty pastry called a kringle in Wisconsin.

Obama's disclosure puts him starkly at odds with the culinary tastes of George H.W. Bush, who as president famously declared his dislike for broccoli.

"And I haven't liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it. And I'm president of the United States, and I'm not going to eat any more broccoli!" Bush said in 1990.

Steamed broccoli growers shipped thousands of pounds of broccoli to the White House in protest, and the vegetable was farmed out to homeless shelters.

Obama was clearly enjoying the spirit of the anti-obesity event, called the "Kids' State Dinner," which recognized winning recipes like "picky eater pita pizza pockets" and "sweet potato turkey sliders."

"Food can be fun. It can be healthy," Obama said. "You are setting up habits that are going to be great your entire life."

He joked that he's not much of a cook. "(In) my family, when they cooked vegetables, they were all boiled." Since then, he said, he has learned that healthy food can also taste good.

(Reporting by Steve Holland; Editing by Stacey Joyce)

Related: 

A Photographic History of President Obama Eating Junk Food During Photo Ops  

Video:  Stop Junk Food Marketing to Kids

Technorati Tags: Food,food choices,school lunches,Big Brother,New York,National School Lunch Program,Michelle Obama,Obamaland,food police,double standard,junk food,broccoli,Fast-Food,healthy choices,parental rights,example-leadership,Broccoli-Gate,intrgrity