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Rescue crews searched into the night for survivors from a massive mudslide in Washington state that killed at least three people, after hearing voices from the debris field pleading for help. The slide of mud, trees and rocks happened about 11 a.m. Saturday morning. Several people - including an infant - were critically injured and at least six houses were destroyed. Snohomish County Fire District 21 Chief Travis Hots said at a news briefing late Saturday that searchers weren't giving up on finding more people. "We have people who are yelling for our help, and we are going to take...

A few days ago, America experienced the 72nd anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. At the end of September, the world observed the 75th anniversary of the Munich Agreement, whereby Britain and France surrendered Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland to Hitler's Germany. Nazi Germany annexed most of the rest of Czechoslovakia within months, and invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, thus beginning the Second World War. What do Pearl Harbor, the Munich Pact, and Germany's invasion of Poland have in common? The common thread running through these events is that western democracies' military weakness tempted aggressors to strike. Add to this...

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Republicans are launching investigations into three state-run ObamaCare exchanges that are failing disastrously. Lawmakers are setting their sites on exchanges in Oregon, Maryland and Massachusetts where Democratic governors embraced the healthcare law, and are demanding to know why their expensive online portals remain useless more than four months after launch. On Wednesday, four Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee sent a letter to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) requesting a review of the $304 million in federal grants that Oregon received to build its broken website. “The catastrophic breakdown of Cover Oregon is unacceptable, and taxpayers deserve accountability,”...

President Obama is scrambling to put Band-Aids on the health care law instead of admitting that it is DOA. He pushed Obamacare through Congress with the promise that it would help the 30 million uninsured Americans and not hurt the rest of us. Five years later, the government intrusion has disrupted the coverage of the more than 300 million Americans who were content with their insurance, and it is already dragging down the economy. Mr. Obama is trying to hide the problems. That’s why the White House announced Monday it would again push back the deadline for the mandate to...

One of Microsoft's strongest supporters took a good, hard look at the soon-to-be released next version of Windows 8, which could arrive in April, and threw his hands up in frustration. The new version is called Windows 8 Update 1, and it includes a number of small changes, mostly minor tweaks. These tweaks try to fix some of the complaints people still had about Windows 8. But blogger Paul Thurrott of the influential Windows blog “Supersite for Windows” says they really just make Windows 8 more difficult to use, especially on a tablet. He took Microsoft to task, writing: Windows...

BIRMINGHAM, Ala.—Ernest Maiden was dumbfounded to learn that he falls through the cracks of the health-care law because in a typical week he earns about $200 from the Happiness and Hair Beauty and Barber Salon. Like millions of other Americans caught in a mismatch of state and federal rules, the 57-year-old hair stylist doesn't make enough money to qualify for federal subsidies to buy health insurance. If he earned another $1,300 a year, the government would pay the full cost. Instead, coverage would cost about what he earns. "It's a Catch-22," said Mr. Maiden, an uninsured diabetic. Without help, he...

A record-number of people lost their power across the region thanks to a significant ice storm and power officials warn it could be days before everyone has their electricity back. "Based on the current conditions and the damage across the entire region, we believe service for the majority of customers will be restored by Friday night," said PECO spokesman Ben Armstrong. "However customers in more heavily-damaged areas will be without power through Sunday." PECO Energy, the largest power provider in the Philadelphia region, told NBC10.com the storm was the second worst in their history and worst winter storm outage ever with more...

THIS VIDEO WAS A GOOD MORNING LAUGH

Charles Krauthammer predicted Wednesday on "Special Report with Bret Baier" that "all hell's going to break loose" if the administration can't fix the problems with the Healthcare.gov website by mid-March. "Right now the insurers are guessing at the subsidy, so all of this is on the honor system and it can be wildly off," Krauthammer, a syndicated columnist and Fox News contributor said. "If they undershoot, the insurers are going to go bust. If they overshoot, the government is going to be stuck with a huge bill."

When toxic chemicals spilled into the Elk River in Charleston, West Virginia a couple of weeks ago we got another glimpse into what the world might look like in the aftermath of a major, widespread disaster.

Democratic senator Kay Hagan refused to appear with President Obama during his trip today to her home state of North Carolina. But Obama went out of his way to "publicly" thank Hagan anyway: "Your senator, Kay Hagan, couldn't be here. But I wanted to thank her publicly for the great work she's doing," said Obama. Hagan's up for reelection this year.

What do times of disaster teach us about ourselves and society? Is our moral center what it ought to be? In 2005 I worked as a volunteer at a shelter for people displaced by Hurricane Katrina. We tried to console confused, hungry, frightened people who had been picked off the roofs of their houses in New Orleans and transported to San Antonio, Texas. One young woman sat on a cot staring aimlessly. In obvious shock, she ignored the activity swirling around her. I stopped, leaned down and asked her if I could help. She looked up with eyes filled with...

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They continue to insist that they’re on track for “major improvement” or whatever to the website by November 30th, but if it was as major as they’d hoped, they never would have resorted to this. A little heads up for our twentysomething readers: In case you haven’t decided yet what you’ll be buying with the cash you get for Christmas, good news — Obama and the insurance industry have decided for you. Wait a sec. I thought the reason they set December 15th as the deadline for enrolling if you want your new coverage to start on New Year’s Day...

... The cleanup from Sunday's outbreak of tornadoes had scarcely begun, but people in storm-ravaged towns like Washington, 140 miles southwest of Chicago, had to keep moving.....

“Even if it takes a change to the law, the president should honor the commitment the federal government made to those people and let them keep what they got.— Bill Clinton, Nov. 12 So the former president asserts that the current president continues to dishonor his “you like your plan, you can keep your plan” pledge. And calls for the Affordable Care Act to be changed, despite furious White House resistance to the very idea. Coming from the dean of the Democratic Party, this one line marked the breaching of the dam. It legitimized the brewing rebellion of panicked Democrats...

Before Healthcare.gov’s troubled launch on Oct. 1, the White House estimated nearly 500,000 people would enroll in the Obamacare health exchanges within the first month and an estimated 7 million were expected to gain private coverage by the end of March, when the open-enrollment period is scheduled to end. Now – even before the administration can deliver on its promise to release an official head count of how many people have enrolled for insurance coverage in the first full month of operations – insurance industry analysts on Monday released figures showing the government has signed up a mere fraction of...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)TACLOBAN, Philippines (AP) - Typhoon-ravaged Philippine islands faced a daunting relief effort that had barely begun Monday, as bloated bodies lay uncollected and uncounted in the streets and survivors pleaded for food, water and medicine. Police guarded stores to prevent people from hauling off food, water and such non-essentials as TVs and treadmills, but there was often no one to carry away the dead - not even those seen along the main road from the airport to Tacloban, the worst-hit city along the country's remote eastern seaboard.....