The Associated Press finds that “some of President Barack Obama’s political appointees, including the Cabinet secretary for the Health and Human Services Department, are using secret government email accounts.”

The official explanation is that the cabinet members use the secret accounts to “prevent their inboxes from being overwhelmed with unwanted messages” . . . but the AP notes that using secret accounts has another benefit:

secret email accounts complicate an agency’s legal responsibilities to find and turn over emails in response to congressional or internal investigations, civil lawsuits or public records requests because employees assigned to compile such responses would necessarily need to know about the accounts to search them. Secret accounts also drive perceptions that government officials are trying to hide actions or decisions.

Maybe Sebelius was just afraid Eric Holder would try to read her e-mail.

There is also this bizarre detail: “The Labor Department initially asked the AP to pay more than $1 million for its email addresses.”

From the final Morning Jolt of the week:

Republican House Member Demonstrates Sebelius Doesn’t Know How IPAB Law Works

Rep. Andy Harris is a Republican from Maryland and a physician. He’s on the Appropriations Committee, and on Thursday he had the chance to ask some questions of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius about the Independent Payment Advisory Board, also known as IPAB, which hopeless demagogues like you and me call “the death panel,” because it will ultimately decide which medical treatments are insufficiently cost-effective to be covered by the government.

Harris asked Sebelius if she would have the authority of the IPAB board if its members don’t get appointed. Obama has yet to nominate anyone to serve on the IPAB board. (Earlier this month, the administration testified that the nominations are coming; the Senate would confirm the members, and yes, they could (and probably will) face a filibuster.) She said if the appointments aren’t made, it doesn’t go into effect.

You’re probably sighing a great sigh of relief, but you shouldn’t. The problem is that no, that’s not what the law says.

If appointments aren’t made to the board, then she would have the authority to find the savings, and determine which treatments are not cost-effective. Video of her testimony here.

Here’s the U.S. Code for IPAB:

(5) Contingent secretarial development of proposal

If, with respect to a proposal year, the Board is required, but fails, to submit a proposal to Congress and the President by the deadline applicable under paragraph (3)(A)(i), the Secretary shall develop a detailed and specific proposal that satisfies the requirements of subparagraphs (A) and (C) (and, to the extent feasible, subparagraph (B)) of paragraph (2) and contains the information required paragraph (3)(B)). By not later than January 25 of the year, the Secretary shall transmit—

(A) such proposal to the President; and

(B) a copy of such proposal to the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission for its review.

But hey, why should we expect Kathleen Sebelius to be familiar with the fine print of Obamacare?

Everybody’s mind is on the quickly-developing manhunt in Massachusetts, but the Morning Jolt will arrive today, keeping an eye on the much-less dramatic political stuff:

Max Baucus: I Can’t Wait to Find The Jerks Who Passed Obamacare and Punish Them!

So this is how Congressional Democrats plan to deal with the coming mess that the implementation of Obamacare will create: pretend they had nothing to do with it, and blame the administration.

Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., scolded Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on Wednesday over the implementation of President Obama’s health care law. Complaining about confused individuals and small businesses in his state and warning of a coming “train wreck,” at times Baucus sounded more like a Tea Partier than one of the key authors of the legislation that would become known as Obamacare. But his posture during the Finance Committee hearing is also a telling sign that Democrats up for reelection in 2014 are increasingly worried that mangled implementation could put their jobs in jeopardy.

In 2009, five different health care proposals made their way through the relevant committees in the House and Senate. The Finance Committee bill that Baucus authored was the closest to the finished product that Obama signed. Go back and look at Baucus’s bill, and you’ll see most of the law’s key components  there – taxes on insurers, drug companies, medical device manufacturers and high value health care plans; exchanges; the Medicaid expansion; IPAB. Also significant is what wasn’t in the Baucus bill – a public option, which had been a central component of the other proposals circulating through Congress, but was ultimately abandoned.

Rep. Mike Pompeo wrote, in member-to-member letter form, a pretty thorough smack-down of Baucus:

 I was stunned, and also saddened, to read of your complaint that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is doing an insufficient job informing the public about the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), otherwise known as Obamacare.  My shock wasn’t because I disagreed: You’re right to say this legislation has led to great uncertainty for hard-working Americans, small business owners, and families.  No, I was shocked because youwrote this bill.  I was saddened because your acknowledgement of the harm caused by PPACA has come so late.

     Unlike you, the American people have opposed this law from the moment it was first introduced in Congress.  How hard was it to see that even the smartest government bureaucrats can’t competently plan something as complicated as America’s health-care sector?

     President Obama’s proposal to rescind the Medicaid disproportionate share hospital payments for 2014 is an admission that this law will not work as written.  The IRS is violating the clear language of this law by planning to spend more than half a trillion dollars and tax millions of employers and individuals without congressional authorization.

     No one in the country bears more responsibility for the complexity of this law than you.  

The next explanation from Baucus will probably be, “It wasn’t me! It was the one-armed man!”

But this illustration from Lachlan Markay says it all:

Over in the Corner, Kathryn reminds me that whatever you think of the Romney campaign running an ad declaring, “President Obama has declared war on religion,” the war metaphor for this issue was first used by Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, telling a luncheon of pro-choice activists, “we are in a war” on that issue.

Once we recall that the Department of Defense under Obama “prefers to avoid using the term ‘Long War’ or ‘Global War on Terror’ and urges the “use ‘Overseas Contingency Operation’”… we find we have an administration where the Secretary of Health and Human Services believes she is fighting a war and the Secretary of Defense does not.

Dear liberal friends,

One of the two statements below is true.

1) Providing co-pay-free birth control to all citizens represents such a national priority that it is worth raising the premiums for everyone who has health insurance.

2) Providing co-pay-free birth control to all citizens is not enough of a national priority that it is worth raising the premiums for everyone who has health insurance.

There is no option three. There is no way to require insurers to cover a good or service without raising premiums for everyone. Throughout this debate, our friends on the left have argued that birth control is simultaneously so inexpensive that insurers and employers have no reason to complain about being forced to provide it without co-pays AND that it is too expensive for consumers to purchase for themselves separate from their insurers.

What is the cost of birth control? Planned Parenthood puts the cost at “$15–$50 a month.” ABC News recently reported, “Generics are available at Walmart pharmacies, for example, for around $9 a month.”

Obviously, some women pay more, or require more expensive versions of birth control because of their particular health needs. And if providing birth control to anyone who needs it is genuinely a national priority of the federal government, perhaps we could tailor policies to focus on ensuring its availability to those whose health requires more expensive versions. But even in those circumstances, it is unclear why the Reign of Kathleen Sebelius would require no co-pays.

If the federal government has deemed $9 per month too much for any citizen to bear, why would any co-pay for any other medical treatment or service be considered a reasonable cost to bear?

Jeff Dobbs notices that when Obama defended this proposal, he said women will “no longer have to pay hundreds of dollars a year that could go towards paying the rent or buying groceries.” ($9 x 12 months = $108.) He also recalls Michelle Obama scoffing at a $600-per-year tax cut enacted by the Bush administration.

So “a couple hundred dollars” ($108 in some cases) is a lot when the Obama administration needs it to be a lot, but $600 is minuscule when it needs it to be minuscule.

“‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

UPDATE: One of the liberal arguments is that the government forcing insurers to provide birth control, without co-pays, will somehow be a cost-saving measure for all:

The truth is that both insurers and employers who self-insure save money in the long run by covering contraception. So much money is saved that it makes financial sense to waive co-pays and deductibles. A 2000 study by the National Business Group on Health estimates that not providing contraceptive coverage in employee health plans winds up costing employers 15% to 17% more than providing such coverage.

Two thoughts: One, if covering co-pay-free birth control genuinely and consistently does cost the insurer and employer less, one wonders why any insurer would not offer it. To believe this article, one would have to believe that health insurers, so often demonized for their callous greed, are acting against their own financial interest.

Oh, by the way, take a look at the membership of the National Business Group of Health. It includes Pfizer, Bayer, Johnson & Johnson, and Merck, four of the country’s largest birth-control-pill manufacturers.

I suppose we should be glad that liberals no longer find large pharmaceutical companies to be the root of all evil. Still, it is rather fascinating that our friends on the left are gladly citing a study, funded in part by those oft-demonized pharmaceutical companies, as an objective assessment of the value of buying those pharmaceutical products for every woman of childbearing age in America.

Plenty of CPAC fun and a bit of talk about the media’s coverage of the 2012 GOP presidential primary, but also this thought in the final Morning Jolt of the week:

Panetta, Biden, Daley See the Folly That Obama Can’t

JakeTapper offers a fascinating portrait of the Obama administration’s internal debates on the contraception rule:

“What are we doing here?” asked Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, stepping outside his wheelhouse to ask about a rising storm involving the Obama administration and the Catholic Church. “What’s the point?”

It was the Fall of 2011 and Panetta had read about a proposed Obama administration rule that would require employers — excluding houses of worship but including religious organizations such as charities, hospitals, and schools — to offer health insurance that fully covered contraception.

Panetta — a Catholic, former U.S. Representative, and White House chief of staff — didn’t quite understand why the Obama administration would be stepping into this conflict.

The Obama administration did not accidentally stumble into this controversy. They’re in it because some members of the White House staff — and ultimately, President Obama himself — wanted this controversy. They wanted to find those who they disagree with and punish them, to force them to bend to their will. They’re absolutely certain that enough Americans feel so favorably about birth control that they will applaud the federal government forcing institutions to pay for it even if those institutions consider it a sin. In their minds, there is absolutely no reason significant enough for an employer to not pay for it, certainly nothing as obscure and intangible as a faith’s interpretation as the Will of the Almighty. It pales in comparison to the Will of the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

This controversy is another manifestation of the argument of the individual mandate. Life is full of good things, or popular things. The goodness or popularity of a particular good or service doesn’t mean Americans want their government telling them that they must purchase it.

Obama has heard the controversy, and is, so far, refusing to back down. His faith in his own infallibility is clear.

UPDATE: Backing down? Depends upon your perspective:

ABC News has learned that later today the White House — possibly President Obama himself — will likely announce an attempt to accommodate these religious groups.

On source described the attempted accommodation as “Hawaii Lite” — a reference to that state’s law which allows religious groups to opt out of coverage that includes birth control, as long as employees are given information whether such coverage can be obtained.

This announcement would not go that far. Sources say it will involve health insurance companies helping to provide the coverage, since it’s actually cheaper for these companies to offer the coverage than to not do so, because of unwanted pregnancies and resulting complications.

Great news, religious organizations. The government might not force you to pay for something you consider a sin; you simply have to help your employees obtain something you consider a sin!

From the RNC this morning:

 IT’S NOT JUST RANGEL

Senator John Kerry Is Avoiding Paying $500,000 In Taxes On His Yacht.

Obama’s First Nominee For HHS Secretary, Tom Daschle, Failed To Pay $128,000 In Taxes.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner Failed To Pay $34,000 In Taxes.

HHS Secretary Sebelius And Her Husband Had To Pay $7,000 In Back Taxes.

Labor Secretary Hilda Solis’ Husband Had A Tax Lien On His Business For 16 Years.

Nancy Killefer, Slated To Be The White House Chief Performance Officer, Had A $900 Lien On Her House For Failing To Pay Unemployment Taxes For Household Help.

Lael Brainard, Obama’s Nominee For Undersecretary Of The Treasury For International Affairs, Was Late In Paying Property Taxes.