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Every day in the New Normal, it is either a mass shooting or an explosion in some pipeline or crude-carrying train. Moments ago, a pipeline in Texas exploded in a massive fireball and has prompted the evacuation of the nearby town of Milford.

Over the weekend, in "Venezuela Government "Occupies" Electronics Retail Chain, Enforces "Fair" Prices", we reported that unpopular president Nicolas Maduro ordered the "occupation" of a chain of electronic goods stores in a crackdown on what the socialist government views as price-gouging hobbling the country's economy. Various managers of the five-store, 500-employee Daka chain - the local equivalent of Best Buy - have been arrested, and the company would be forced to sell products at "fair prices." Since then things have escalated rapidly. Because as we queried, and many wondered, the first question that arose is how would Maduro i) assure that prices were indeed kept at their "fair values" and ii) how would the cool, calm and orderly social order be preserved when suddenly everyone scrambles to buy all those flatscreens (which may have certain operational problems once the socialist paradise is hit with daily electric brown and blackouts very soon) they have been dreaming of for years. Now we know: with the help of the army.

Remember all those YouTube clips (the same medium used to nearly justify World War III) that caught the president lying again and again with promises and assurances everyone would be able to keep their existing insurance plan under Obamacare even though he knew full they wouldn't, until a week ago, thanks to what is left of the non-brownnosing media, as much was revealed to the general public? Well, it's time to come clean, and once again via clip. Moments ago, in an interview with NBC, the charming and very photogenic president said he was "sorry."

Bit by bit, we’re learning more about President Obama’s broken promise that you can keep your health insurance if you like it, which was repeated at least two dozen times in recent years... Obama’s pledge was no different to, say, JPMorgan’s misrepresentations about the toxic mortgages it sold to unwitting investors. Fraudulent mortgage claims were surely discussed within JPM, just as Obama’s team debated the health insurance promise. Moreover, any internal concerns about the mortgage fraud were certainly squashed, just like the reservations expressed by Obama’s more truthful advisers. Simply put: Obama told a blatant lie, which he then continued to repeat.  It’s not the first time he’s lied, but this was an absolute whopper.

UPDATE: First images from inside the mall...

Shots were fired Monday night at the 2.1 million square feet Garden State Plaza mall in Paramus, New Jersey. Local TV network PIX11 reports, "according to a police source: the shooting began near the Nordstrom’s department store on the second level of the mall; At least eight shots have been fired;  The gunman is believed to be wearing body armor; Stores are on lockdown;

CNN reports from mall insider:"There was just people running like crazy so I quickly just closed my doors, ran to the back, turned off all the lights, music and everything, just to stay hidden,"

Finally, several hours after it started, the situation ends with the suspected gunman allegedly shooting himself.

Tsunami Wouldn’t Have Taken Out the Reactors If Tepco Had Left the Natural Seawall In Place

“If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.”

These words, spoken by U.S. President Barack Obama in various forms and iterations, have become a running joke amidst the rollout of the Affordable Care Act. All across the country, hundreds of thousands of citizens are receiving cancellation notices in the mail. The stringent requirements for insurance plans under the new edict are curtailing many individual policies. A simpleton can grasp the economics: you prohibit something, it goes away. And yet, for years prior, the White House ignored the oncoming train and is now slowly inching away from the wreckage.

This was not the unforeseen consequence of good-intentioned legislation.

Contrary to initial reports that the shooter was an off-duty NSA agent, subsequent updates have revealed that the LAX shooter, who reportedly is still dead, although unclear if he was killed before or after he was in police custody, as Paul Anthony Ciancia, a 23-year-old who was either a Los Angeles native, or from Pennsville, N.J. Additionally, we have learned that according to a law enforcement official, who was briefed at LAX on the investigation but not authorized to speak publicly, said the gunman was wearing fatigues and carrying a bag containing a hand-written note that said he "wanted to kill TSA and pigs." The official requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly. Considering the accuracy with which this news event has been broken, most of it relying on unsubstantiated and often times fake Twitter sources (some had reported earlier, falsely, that the former NSA chief had been shot as well), we won't be surprised if this story were to change a few more times.

NBC has just released the following pictures from the scene of the schooting, and it appears that the weapon used is, once again, an AR-15.

JUST IN: LAX gunman killed by law enforcement

— NBC News (@NBCNews) November 1, 2013

UPDATE: One TSA employee killed, one wounded in LAX shooting

— NBC News (@NBCNews) November 1, 2013

It seems like it was an eternity ago that Obama was doing his post-government shutdown gloating media tour, when day after day the world was bombarded with news of the GOP's record low popularity rating, paradoxically following their attempt to do what even the president is now desperate to achieve: delay Obamacare. Well, the tables have turned and now that the government shutdown is history, at least until January, and the public focus has shifted to where it should have been in the first place - namely the embarrassing ponzi scheme experiment that is Obamacare, and the epic failure surrounding its rushed rollout - it is Obama's turn to suffer a record low rating, which is precisely what happened according to a just concluded WSJ/NBC News poll.

The debut of Healthcare.gov has been probably the worst launch of a major website in history, millions of Americans are having their current health insurance policies canceled, millions of others are seeing the size of their health insurance premiums absolutely explode, and this new law is going to result in massive numbers of jobs being lost.  It is almost as if Obamacare was specifically designed to wreck the U.S. economy. Americans are going to pay far more for health care, the quality of that care is going to go down, they are going to have to deal with far more medical red tape, and thousands upon thousands of U.S. employers are considering getting rid of the health plans that they offer to employees altogether due to Obamacare.  If the U.S. health care system was a separate nation, it would be the 6th largest economy on the entire planet, and now Obamacare is going to absolutely cripple it.  To say that Obamacare is an "economic catastrophe" would be a massive understatement. Of course we were assured that it wouldn't turn out this way.

The news keeps going from worse to worse-er for the administration and Obamacare. The latest hit, however, does not revolve around the dysfunctional healthcare.gov website, whose hundreds of millions of lines of faulty code will take a very long time to fix, but relates to Obama's promises that individuals would be able to keep their existing healthcare plans following the rollout of the Affordable Care Act. The truth, as NBC reports, is they can't but what's worse is that Obama knew as early as July 2010 that 40 to 67 percent of customers will not be able to keep their policy. And that's not all: since the 14 millions consumers who buy their insurance individually will be forced into comparable plans, they are all set to experience a "sticker shock" when "opting" for the mandatory alternatives.

There are reports of at least two people who have been shot in Millington. Emergency crews are responding to 5650 Attu which is listed as the Army National Guard recruiting center. We are told the shooter is in custody. A shelter in place order has been given on the base. Multiple ambulances are on the scene.