The White House effort to blame insurance companies for lost plans  —  “The provision in the law was the manifestation of the assurance that if you have a plan you want to keep, you can keep it.  Insurance companies that chose to strip away benefits from existing plans in the interim …

Can Sen. Rand Paul handle the heat?  Some wonder  —  If the tea party favorite wants to run for president, he'll go under the microscope a lot more.  —  CONNECT  —  WASHINGTON — Sen. Rand Paul's handling of recent plagiarism charges adds doubts about his readiness for a presidential campaign, some observers said Wednesday.

G.O.P. Weighs Limiting Clout of Right Wing  —  Leaders of the Republican establishment, alarmed by the emergence of far-right and often unpredictable Tea Party candidates, are pushing their party to rethink how it chooses nominees and advocating changes they say would result in the selection of less extreme contenders.

At Obamacare hearings, governing by anecdote  —  It did not sound good for Sen. Pat Toomey.  —  “I'm a two-time breast cancer survivor and I'm facing the loss of insurance,” the Pennsylvania Republican declared Wednesday at a Senate Finance Committee hearing on the health-care law.

Jason Carter to challenge Gov. Deal next year  —  Democratic state Sen. Jason Carter will challenge Gov. Nathan Deal next year in a move that catapults the gubernatorial contest into the national spotlight and tests whether Georgia's changing demographics can loosen the Republican Party's 12-year grip on the state's highest office.

C.I.A. Is Said to Pay AT&T for Call Data  —  WASHINGTON — The C.I.A. is paying AT&T more than $10 million a year to assist with overseas counterterrorism investigations by exploiting the company's vast database of phone records, which includes Americans' international calls, according to government officials.

Report: Cuccinelli Has No Plans To Call McAuliffe  —  Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R) had not called Democrat Terry McAuliffe after losing the Virginia gubernatorial race and had no plans to do so as of late Wednesday morning, according to a report in The Washington Post.

Guns & Ammo Fires Editor After Publishing Editorial Calling for Gun Control  —  Guns and Ammo Magazine, the “world's most widely read firearms magazine,” has fired contributing editor Dick Metcalf after the publication received immense backlash for its December 2013 issue featuring his editorial advocating for gun control.

The simple question that will determine Obamacare's fate  —  BELTWAY CONFIDENTIAL OBAMACARE HEALTH CARE HEALTHCARE.GOV  —  The key to Obamacare's success or failure — provided the administration can actually learn to operate the system — is whether it helps more people than it hurts, or hurts more people than it helps.

Democrats gird for minimum-wage battle  —  Senate Democrats plan to discuss their legislative strategy for raising the minimum wage to more than $10 an hour at a lunch meeting Thursday.  —  Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee Chairman Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) …

Republican Senate Candidate Jokes About Obama Being From Kenya (AUDIO)  —  Colorado state Sen. Owen Hill considered telling a Kenyan kid “Well, you know what, we already have someone from Kenya as President of the United States.”  —  Source: OwenHillForSenate.com

F.D.A. Ruling Would All but Eliminate Trans Fats  —  The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday proposed measures that would all but eliminate artificial trans fats, the artery clogging substance that is a major contributor to heart disease in the United States, from the food supply.

Clunker progressivism  —  Barack Obama's presidency has become a feast of failures whose proliferation protects their author from close scrutiny of any one of them.  Now, however, we can revisit one of the first and see it as a harbinger of progressivism's downward stumble to HealthCare.gov.

EPA pushed to allow state carbon taxes  —  A prominent scholar says the Environmental Protection Agency should let states impose a carbon tax to meet new emissions guidelines for power plants.  —  Brookings Institution scholar Adele Morris plans to urge EPA to consider the idea …

Last spring, the remains of 10 missing Afghan villagers were dug up outside a U.S. Special Forces base - was it a war crime or just another episode in a very dirty war?  —  In the fall of 2012, a team of American Special Forces arrived in Nerkh, a district of Wardak province, Afghanistan …

Time to Stop the Senate Filibuster Madness  —  Blocking qualified D.C. Circuit Court nominees is all about denying a president the right to pick judges to fill vacancies.  —  Can anyone doubt that Mitch McConnell would blow up the filibuster rule in a nanosecond if he had the ability to fill all courts with radical conservatives?