Showing posts with label Economy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Economy. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 06, 2013

BOOM: "Obamacare Shouldn't Have Been Managed Like a Campaign"

Great analysis by Megan McArdle of Bloomberg (the news service, not the idiot mayor) regarding the complete, Chernobyl-like meltdown of Obamacare.  The highlights are mine.
Another Sunday, another amazing reported piece on the rather amazing history of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act's health insurance exchanges. You’ll have to read the whole thing, because summary won’t do it justice. But here are a few highlights:
  • David Cutler, one of the top health-care economists in the U.S., wrote a memo to Larry Summers in 2010 warning him that the team in charge of implementing Obamacare was not up to the job. The memo makes it clear, though not quite explicit, that Cutler was writing to Summers, rather than someone on the health-care policy team, because the team had ignored his concerns. The memo is eerily prophetic: The key people were analysts with no experience in project management, technology, startups or the insurance business; responsibility was too diffused; the staff didn’t understand either the magnitude or the urgency of what they had taken on; and neither the Department of Health and Human Services nor the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, to which most of the job had been delegated, had the personnel or technical experience to manage it well...
  • Parts of the implementation were hamstrung by the assumption that all the states would build their own exchanges, and because it was a draft bill that no one had expected to pass, it didn’t contain funding for federal exchanges or, apparently, for the policy wonks needed to put the law together. The Republicans, who continued to oppose the law to the apparent surprise of its architects and supporters, declined to provide funds on top of the nearly $1 trillion that had already been allocated...

  • But many of the bad decisions were designed to avoid Republican criticism. There was another reason that the exchanges' architects were tucked away inside CMS: to try to stay out of the public eye. Other such decisions followed. CMS carefully obscured the unwillingness of a large number of states to build exchanges -- despite the fact that this would greatly increase the complexity of the job -- lest Republicans seize on that fact. Then CMS kept extending the deadline to declare, in the hopes that some states would decide to build exchanges after the 2012 elections. The agency also refused to issue a bunch of regulations until after the election. But this is by far the most incredible:
According to two former officials, CMS staff members struggled at “multiple meetings” during the spring of 2011 to persuade White House officials for permission to publish diagrams known as “concepts of operation,” which they believed were necessary to show states what a federal exchange would look like. The two officials said the White House was reluctant because the diagrams were complex, and they feared that the Republicans might reprise a tactic from the 1990s of then-Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.), who mockingly brandished intricate charts created by a task force led by first lady Hillary Clinton.

In the end, one of the former officials said, the White House quashed the diagrams, telling CMS, instead, to praise early work on those state exchanges that matched the hidden federal thinking...
  • The White House was heavily focused on regulations, rather than exchange design, for the first two years... They didn’t even begin writing the specifications for the contracts until spring of 2011. Then they kept changing deadlines and requirements, seemingly oblivious of the havoc they were wreaking on an already impossibly late system...

  • Congressional Democrats were not given as much information as you’d expect, which is one reason that Max Baucus started worrying about a “train wreck”; apparently, they found out that the employer mandate was being delayed just a half-hour before the rest of us...
This has, rather predictably, triggered opposite reactions from left and right. The response from the right is somewhere between schadenfreude and slack-jawed amazement. The response from the left is, I think, summed up by Kevin Drum in “The Lesson of Obamacare: Sabotage Works”:
...No federal program that I can remember faced quite the implacable hostility during its implementation that Obamacare has faced. This excuses neither the Obama administration's poor decisions nor its timidity in the face of Republican attacks, but it certainly puts them in the proper perspective.
Andrew Sullivan echoes this interpretation. 
You will perhaps be unsurprised to hear me say that this response is overblown. Let’s remember what this “sabotage” consists of:
  1. Many states not building their own exchanges, as permitted under the law.
  2. Republicans did not join together with Democrats to pass extra funding for a law that was already spending nearly a trillion dollars over 10 years.
  3. Criticism.
...But Obamacare’s biggest problem, as I have written, was that the architects of the law demanded an enormously ambitious software project on an impossibly hubristic deadline. Whatever slim chance this had of working was ultimately doomed -- not by Republicans, but by the administration’s own paranoid and self-destructive decisions to manage a software project as if it were a top-secret campaign strategy rather than a mission-critical component of the most ambitious federal entitlement expansion in almost 50 years.
Remember that when Cutler wrote that devastating memo, Democrats still had control of both houses of Congress. The administration failed to rectify the shortcomings he identified because it did not understand that making a program happen is very different from writing out a description of it.
The administration did not refuse to issue key regulations and guidelines, or to announce the final number of states that would be building their own exchanges, because Republicans used secret mind-control rays or stole the notebooks they had used to write the draft memo. They delayed because they did not want Republicans to be able to tell the public about them before Barack Obama was safely re-elected to a second term.
In other words, most of the damage was done not by lack of funding, but because the administration was either incompetent or trying to insulate itself from the perfectly ordinary, natural, legitimate and, dare I say, patriotic function of an opposition party, which is to point out to the public when the party in charge is doing something that the public wouldn’t like. Reframing “criticism of the administration” as “sabotage” deserves an Oscar for outstanding lifetime achievement in the field of political spin.
...Unsurprisingly, the massive and unpopular transformation failed to attract any Republican votes. When Republicans had faced similar electoral math on Social Security reform -- an opposition party implacably opposed, and the electorate clearly against it -- they’d abandoned their efforts. That is what parties do when they reach such an impasse; it’s what Democrats did on Clintoncare. No program this large had ever passed on a party-line vote, because this was correctly viewed as political suicide. Nancy Pelosi managed to get it through the House anyway, which should go down as one of the most impressive political achievements in history, and Harry Reid shepherded another version through the Senate. When Republicans protested, they were rather smugly told that “elections have consequences.”
Then Ted Kennedy died. Massachusetts -- Massachusetts! -- elected Republican Scott Brown in an election that often seemed to revolve around the health-care bill. Democrats still pressed forward. Without the votes to overcome a Republican filibuster, they had the House pass a draft Senate bill that had never been meant to become law and used some procedural tap-dancing to push some fixes through the Senate. Such maneuvering wasn’t unprecedented, but it wasn’t popular, either. And the limitations of the method they used left the bill with all sorts of problems, many of which we are dealing with now...
Fukushima!


Hat tip: Mtntoppatriot

Fundamental Transformation or... a Coup d'état?

Writing at Accuracy In Media, historian James Simpson describes what could well be the precursors for the obliteration of the American economic system.

America is being fundamentally transformed, as Obama promised. This is one promise that he clearly intends to keep, no matter how many people lose their health insurance policies, their jobs, or their productive futures.

Even the liberal media have been forced to acknowledge President Obama’s lies regarding the Affordable Care Act, especially the whopper about being able to keep your own health insurance policy. 
Consider what we have learned so far as the lies are being exposed:
  • Despite repeatedly being told we could keep our healthcare plans and doctors, the White House estimated three years ago that 93 million people would lose their plans. Obama knew this and has been lying about it all along.
  • Rather than provide healthcare, the Obamacare website is being used to boost low-income Democrat voter registration. Election integrity activists have called it “The biggest voter registration fraud scheme in history.” The Soros-funded Demos has bragged that Obamacare exchanges will register “68 million people to vote.”
...For modern-day progressives, lying is not merely something one does to avoid getting caught, lying is tradecraft. Thus our President lies. But these are no ordinary lies; they are grand, sweeping, all-encompassing lies. He says exactly the opposite of truth, consistently, to confuse people, and tops it off by accusing his opponents of doing what he does...

...Prior to the latest debt limit agreement, Obama threatened to default on the federal debt—sending jitters through financial markets. It would have been the first default in history. Obama’s Treasury Department also issued a report titled, The Potential Macroeconomic Effect of Debt Ceiling Brinkmanship. But President Obama was the one engaged in “brinkmanship,” even while accusing Republicans of doing so.


To avoid default, the government needs only to pay interest, about $35 billion per month. The Treasury collects about $250 billion per month, more than enough. But Obama claimed he didn’t have the authority. 
To call him on it, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 807, the Full Faith and Credit Act, making the authority explicit, but Obama promised to veto it—implicitly admitting he could avoid default if he wanted. But Obama was willing to threaten a major financial collapse to achieve short-term political objectives. 
However, all we heard from the media was a non-stop barrage of angry “news” reports accusing Republicans of trying to destroy the economy...

[...Likewise, b]efore the Obamacare website rollout, the media mindlessly fawned over it. CNN’s new Crossfire co-host, former “Green Jobs Czar” Van Jones, heralded it “a huge breakthrough” for the uninsured. MSNBC’s Ed Schultz enthused that it was easy to navigate. Bloomberg’s Peter Gosselin equated it to shopping on Amazon. CBS’s Jill Schlesinger thought it was like Travelocity. ABC’s Rebecca Jarvis compared it to mall shopping.

...Considering the debacle it has become, the media should not only expose the glaring problems that continue to unfold, but also examine whether this is the result of incompetence or design. 
Following the shutdown/showdown debacle, Obama gratuitously accused Republicans of a “manufactured crisis.” It is interesting that Obama accused Republicans of such a plan, given the title of a viral 2008 article, “Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis.” There is such a strategy; Obama has known about it for decades and is using it now.

It was developed in the 1960s by Columbia University professors Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, who published an article in Nation magazine titled “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty.” By packing welfare rolls with new beneficiaries, they hoped to bankrupt local governments and foment a blazing revolution when benefits dried up. It came to be known as the “Cloward Piven Strategy,” or simply “Crisis Strategy.”

The strategy helped explode welfare rolls in the 1960s and 1970s, and precipitated New York City’s near bankruptcy in 1975. Speaking of that crisis, New York Mayor Rudolf Giuliani accused the pair of economic sabotage.

Cloward and Piven created the organizations tasked with executing this strategy, most notably ACORN. Subsequently, the strategy was applied to: 1) Housing, where the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and similar groups colluded with the Clinton White House to foment the subprime mortgage crisis that led to the 2008 crash; 2) Voting, through enactment of the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, (aka Motor Voter), again with Clinton complicity; and 3) Illegal immigration.
Cloward and Piven were the authors of Motor Voter, which turns motor vehicle and other state offices into defacto low income voter registration drives. This law allowed the nationwide explosion of voter registration fraud conducted by ACORN, and is largely responsible for today’s 24 million bad registrations nationwide. Motor Voter also made Obamacare’s online voter registration possible.

Obama has connections to Cloward and Piven, ACORN and its voter registration arm, Project Vote, going back to the early 1990s. The Holder Justice Department has been caught colluding with Project Vote in Motor Voter lawsuits. Matthew Vadum, author of the ACORN exposé, Subversion Inc, reports that former ACORN leaders are still working with Obama.

One has to consider the distinct possibility that Obamacare is part of a deliberate strategy to overwhelm the American people with crisis upon crisis until they throw up their arms in despair and give up.

...In 1932, FDR used this same kind of strategy to deliver Democrat majorities in Congress for the next 60 years. Cloward and Piven explained
Although these [New Deal] measures were a response to the imperative of economic crisis, the types of measures enacted were designed to secure [a] new Democratic coalition. 
Today, close to 50 percent of Americans pay no taxes, and lower income groups can obtain government benefits that provide the equivalent of up to $50,000 per year, strongly encouraging welfare dependency. 
Democrats don’t care. It was Cloward and Piven’s explicit goal to create misery and strife sufficient to trigger a blazing revolution. As they reported in their “Weight of the Poor” article:
“Moreover, this kind of mass influence is cumulative because benefits are continuous. Once eligibility for basic food and rent grants is established, the drain on local resources persists indefinitely…”
The consequences of welfare state policies are evident everywhere. Consider the following statistics:
  • More people collect means-tested benefits today (108.6 million) than there are full-time workers (101.7 million)
  • 46.5 million Americans live in poverty. This is the first time the poverty rate has remained at or above 15% three years running since 1965.
Witness the burned out, abandoned buildings staining our cities, especially Detroit. Think of the entrenched crime, drugs, prostitution, and abandoned children that are the face of inner city ghettos, and reflect on Cloward and Piven’s enthusiasm that “the drain on local resources persists indefinitely…” In Detroit, the response of the Obama administration has been to pour more federal money, an estimated $300 million, into the city, in part to demolish public housing originally constructed with federal funds, and then to construct more.


Incredibly, Bill de Blasio, poised to become New York City’s new Democratic mayor on November 5, says, “The federal government must get back in the affordable housing business, and the federal government must get back in the mass transit business and infrastructure business.”

...On top of failure after failure, this Obama-backed Democrat wants more of the same. He might as well be a spokesman for the Democratic Party as a whole. Perhaps that will be his role in the years ahead. 

Obama and the Democrats are now feverishly working to inflate this roster of the needy by pushing through amnesty for illegal aliens, officially numbering 11 million, but probably more like 30 million people. Congress is currently debating this plan, with some Republicans, such as John McCain, willing to accommodate Obama’s scheme, in the name of “comprehensive immigration reform.”

...Government spending will continue to increase substantially in the coming years. This is a deliberate effort by Obama, who learned from Cloward and Piven how to collapse an economy. The strategy has moved from the local to the national. It will have global repercussions.
As they say on the real blogs, read the whole thing.

Monday, November 04, 2013

Federal investigations cast huge shadow over Terry McAuliffe on Election Day

Guest post by Kenric Ward

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — As Virginians head to the polls Tuesday, a darkening cloud of federal investigations hangs over Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe.

The inspector general at the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission are conducting separate inquiries into actions involving McAuliffe’s GreenTech Automotive company and its use of a federal investor-visa program.

The investigations, which began last spring after Watchdog.org started digging into McAuliffe’s activities, target U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Alejandro Mayorkas and Gulf Coast Funds Management, GreenTech’s fundraising arm.

“Voters should be aware that the two investigations around GreenTech and Gulf Coast may well cripple a McAuliffe administration, as well as the commonwealth’s credibility and ability to move forward,” Virginia state Sen. Tom Garrett told Watchdog last week.

“Literally, from day one, a pall would hang over a McAuliffe administration and over Virginia’s executive branch. Simply put, it would be bad for business,” said Garrett, a Republican and former Louisa County prosecutor.

Sunday, November 03, 2013

Naturally: Virginia Democrat Wants to Force Doctors to Accept Medicare and Medicaid Patients

After, all health care is a "right", don't ya know?

Of course, when the government grants "rights", it must steal the labor of one individual to give to another. And, to do so, it must use compulsion and force.

In Virginia, the Democrat Party has moved from plain old socialized medicine to the next step on the path to tyranny: forcing doctors to see patients.

FYI last night at the Great Falls Grange debate, Democrat delegate candidate Kathleen Murphy said that since many doctors are not accepting medicaid and medicare patients, she advocates making it a legal requirement for those people to be accepted.

She did not recognize that the payments are inadequate to cover the doctors' costs. She also did not recognize there is a shortage of over 45,000 physicians now and that it is forecast to be 90,000 in a few years.

Democrats appear to want to make physicians slaves of the state, but Democrats don't admit they would just drive more doctors out of practice into retirement and other occupations. The Obamacare law and regulations are causing millions of people to lose their health insurance, drop many doctors and hospitals. The HHS internal forecast is 93 million Americans would lose their health insurance due to the Obamacare law and rules about adequacy of insurance.

...I hope physicians rise up and speak out for common sense, protecting quality medical care in the US and giving patients freedom to choose...

Next on the agenda: government will tell doctors where they can live and practice.

Guaranteed.

If you live in Virginia or know folks who do, make sure to support Ken Cuccinelli for Governor.

That is, if you believe in liberty.


Hat tip: Drudge Report.

The 9 Faces of Obamacare Architect Ezekiel Emanuel: Private Companies and Health Insurers Are to Blame for Failures

I'll save you from having to watch the profoundly disturbing Fox News Sunday panel discussion with Ezekiel "Dr. Death" Emanuel, one of the key architects of Obamacare.

In trying to defend his stillborn brainchild, Emanuel constantly interrupts the other panelist and host Chris Wallace, haranguing them for misunderstanding his genius.

Hell, instead of having to listen to him, just take a look at his facial expressions.


If you interpret these looks as condescension, haughtiness and delusions of grandeur, well, that was the interview.

That said, there were some interesting nuggets uncovered.

First, Emanuel admits that Obamacare will destroy the individual insurance market.

CAPRETTA: People who knew the law as it was being written knew the president wasn't telling the truth. The grandfather provision written in the law itself was too narrow and frankly they wrote a regulation intentionally trying to get people out of the individual market.

EMANUEL: Look --

CAPRETTA: They want the people to go into the exchanges because there's a lot of people in the individual market. The whole point of the exchanges is to close down the individual insurance market overtime.

EMANUEL: The insurance company, wait a second --

CAPRETTA: They wanted to move millions of people into the exchanges --

EMANUEL: The insurance companies don't like -- the insurance companies don't like the individual market as it's constructed. They see the future. That individual market is going away. They don't want to invest in it.

Second, Emanuel blames insurance companies for Obamacare's failures.

WALLACE: I have to ask you, does ObamaCare mandate that insurance companies change their plans to meet certain standards?

EMANUEL: Yes, it brings it up. But those -- look, we grandfathered in all of the pre-existing plans. If you want to change plans or you want to buy a new car, you have to meet safety standards. That was the rule and --

WALLACE: But wait, wait. Wait a minute. Your grandfathering is so narrow. For instance --

EMANUEL: It's not so narrow.

WALLACE: Let me give you an example. For instance, if an insurance company changes the co-pay by more than $5, over the course of three years since 2010, it's no longer grandfathered in.

EMANUEL: That's a 25 -- usually, a 25 percent change. That's a big change. You have to --

WALLACE: A $5 change in the co-pay, now, it's not grandfathered.

Third, Emanuel also blames private companies for the failures of his grand designs, the genius of which is simply misunderstood by we simple mortals.

WALLACE: Dr. Emanuel, it isn't just small business or the individuals -- forgive me, sir -- there are big companies, Time Warner, IBM, Sears, Wal-Mart -- or K-Mart, Walgreens, they're all saying they're going to take people off their coverage and put them into exchanges. None of them are going to be able -- of those people are going to be able to keep their current policies.

EMANUEL: Those are companies making decisions of how they want to insure people. Remember --

WALLACE: Because of the way ObamaCare works.

EMANUEL: Before ObamaCare, those companies could drop coverage at any time. Before ObamaCare, companies didn't have to offer insurance to their people and many didn't. As we know, we have 50 million uninsured people -- so, plenty of people -- and most of those are workers who didn't have coverage. Before Obama --

WALLACE: Simple question --

EMANUEL: Wait a second. Before ObamaCare, we were having lots of those people --

WALLACE: Simple question, are those going to be able to keep their coverage as the president?

EMANUEL: The president -- look, the law does not say Sears dropped coverage. Sears decides what's good for Sears. The law doesn't say to the insurance industry, you drop coverage. The insurance industry decides how it's going to make money.

When the private companies decide that they're going to drop people or put them in the exchange, you blame President Obama. He is not responsible for that.

In short, everyone else is to blame for the failures of Obamacare. The insurance companies aren't cooperating, the private sector is too greedy, the customers don't know what's best for them.

But it's not the mastermind's fault.

It never is.

The delusions of Emanuel are pretty much described in The 10 Commandments of Government as well as by every rational thinker since The Enlightenment.


Hat tip: BadBlue News.

Tribune Expose: 12 Horrifying Secrets of Chicago's Imminent Fiscal Collapse
 

The Chicago Tribune has published a special report (subscription required) that offers a stunning glimpse into the Second City's true financial situation -- peeling back the obfuscation and misdirection offered by the corrupt Democrat hacks who have run the city for the last century.

Its report is worth reading in its entirety, but 12 salient details summarize the imminent collapse of Chicago's finances:

• Chicago has more general obligation debt per capita than any of the 10 largest U.S. cities except New York

• Chicago even has more general obligation debt per capita than Detroit

• When the city does reveal its spending plans to the public, the information often turns out to be inaccurate or misleading


• 63 percent of all property taxes went to debt payments last year

• The dependence on bond money has created a massive debt burden even as the city wrestles with chronic deficits and a pension crisis. Chicago's outstanding debt on general obligation bonds has quadrupled during the past 18 years, reaching $7.2 billion last year. With interest, that amount nearly doubles.

• Most of Chicago's debt woes can be traced to the long reign of former Mayor Richard M. Daley, but the borrowing he relied on so heavily has continued under Rahm Emanuel.

• The billions in bonds issued under Daley allowed him to cut ribbons, plant trees and hand out large contracts — helping him become the longest-serving mayor in Chicago history.

• The Tribune provided former mayor Daley details on its analysis, but he declined repeated requests for interviews.

• Rahm Emanuel has done virtually nothing to address the situation since taking over as Mayor. Just like Daley, Emanuel has used bond money for short-term budget relief.

• Chicago leaders routinely use bond proceeds to make interest payments on the bonds themselves, borrowing more than $450 million since 2000 just to pay interest.

• Daley and Emanuel have used $1 billion in bond money to pay for legal judgments and settlements. The practice not only forces future generations to pay a huge price for the city's misdeeds but also is likely illegal under the tax code.

• For a series of bond issues, Rahm Emanuel's team had to pay higher interest rates than most of the bonds they replaced; they did so to push payments out to the year 2039 (an expert says "this suggests the noose is tightening"). It also means taxpayers in 2039 will be paying off bonds from 1993. Some of that original money went into public housing that was torn down more than a decade ago.

Ain't the infernal alliance of public sector unions and Democrat hack politicians great?

In the ongoing battle between mathematics and Democrats, math has extended its perfect record to about 75 bazillion to zero. But, hey, ain't you Chicagoans happy you voted to keep Sandra Fluke flush with contraceptives?


Hat tip: BadBlue 24x7 News Service.

Saturday, November 02, 2013

Lies, Damn Lies, and Obamacare

Guest post by Sean Hannity

It's one thing for Obamacare to fail, as many conservatives expect and we are currently witnessing. It's another to be lied to by Barack Obama, his administration and Democrats in Washington. This gap between what we were promised and reality will haunt Democrats in the 2014 election because the American people no longer feel the Democrats can be trusted.

Let's go through some of the lies we've been fed throughout the years related to healthcare.

“If you like your plan, you can keep it.”

This lie has been perpetrated for years and continues to be said by Obama and his administration to this day. They knew Americans would lose their current coverage, affecting millions of people, and yet they went forward nonetheless. This shows that they are not really serious about the effects on the American people but are driven by an ideological pursuit of big-government, socialized medicine.

Amazingly, the administration seems to have been caught flat-footed by deluge of stories showing how millions of people are losing coverage. It's as if they didn't believe it would actually happen or they believed the American people would just roll over and accept it, assuming the Obama-mania media would be reluctant to report on it. Well they assumed incorrectly. So now the administration has taken a two-prong approach: Use the bully pulpit to strong-arm insurance companies into hushing up and then blaming the insurance companies themselves.

Obama and Sebelius in recent days have made “substandard” insurance plans the boogie man, rather than the law that decides what coverage people need. Can't the American people decide for themselves what kind of coverage they need and what is “substandard” for their own family? As Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn said yesterday, some people drink out of red solo cups and some out of crystal stemware. Either way you are achieving the same result but how you do it is up to the individual and not the government.

“Obamacare will cut the cost of a typical family's premium by up to $2,500 a year."

The actual name of the law – the Affordable Care Act – is a joke.

At last, an Obamacare website that works: MyCancellation.com lets users post health care cancellation notices

Someone handed Kathleen Sebelius a copy of "Websites for Dummies" yesterday.


It turns out that someone has created a real Obamamcare website that functions properly.

That site is, of course, called "MyCancellation.com". It allows users to upload photos of health care cancellation notices and it's taken off like a rocket.


I hope the server running the site has a lot of storage capacity.

After all, the Obama administration predicted in 2010 that around 100 million Americans would have their insurance plans cancelled.


p.s., I wonder if any of the folks posting photos match up with the "We're Sorry" crew?

A Culture of Ignorance, Part One

Guest post by Jim Quinn

“Five percent of the people think;
ten percent of the people think they think;
and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think.”

- Thomas Edison

The kabuki theater that passes for governance in Washington D.C. reveals the profound level of ignorance shrouding this Empire of Debt in its prolonged death throes. Ignorance of facts; ignorance of math; ignorance of history; ignorance of reality; and ignorance of how ignorant we’ve become as a nation, have set us up for an epic fall. It’s almost as if we relish wallowing in our ignorance like a fat lazy sow in a mud hole. The lords of the manor are able to retain their power, control and huge ill-gotten riches because the government educated serfs are too ignorant to recognize the self-evident contradictions in the propaganda they are inundated with by state controlled media on a daily basis.

“Any formal attack on ignorance is bound to fail because the masses are always ready to defend their most precious possession – their ignorance.” - Hendrik Willem van Loon

The levels of ignorance are multi-dimensional and diverse, crossing all educational, income, and professional ranks. The stench of ignorance has settled like Chinese toxic smog over our country, as various constituents have chosen comforting ignorance over disconcerting knowledge. The highly educated members, who constitute the ruling class in this country, purposefully ignore facts and truth because the retention and enhancement of their wealth and power are dependent upon them not understanding what they clearly have the knowledge to understand. The underclass wallow in their ignorance as their life choices, absence of concern for marriage or parenting, lack of interest in educating themselves, and hiding behind the cross of victimhood and blaming others for their own failings. Everyone is born ignorant and the path to awareness and knowledge is found in reading books. Rich and poor alike are free to read and educate themselves. The government, union teachers, and a village are not necessary to attain knowledge. It requires hard work and clinging to your willful ignorance to remain stupid.

The youth of the country consume themselves in techno-narcissistic triviality, barely looking up from their iGadgets long enough to make eye contact with other human beings. The toxic combination of government delivered public education, dumbed down socially engineered curriculum, taught by uninspired intellectually average union controlled teachers, to distracted, unmotivated, latchkey kids, has produced a generation of young people ignorant about history, basic mathematical concepts, and the ability or interest to read and write. They have been taught to feel rather than think critically. They have been programmed to believe rather than question and explore. Slogans and memes have replaced knowledge and understanding. They have been lured into inescapable student loan debt serfdom by the very same government that is handing them a $200 trillion entitlement bill and an economy built upon low paying service jobs that don’t require a college education, because the most highly educated members of society realized that outsourcing the higher paying production jobs to slave labor factories in Asia was great for the bottom line, their stock options and bonus pools.

Instead of being outraged and lashing out against this injustice, the medicated, daycare reared youth passively lose themselves in the inconsequentiality and shallowness of social media, reality TV, and the internet, while living in their parents’ basement. They have chosen the ignorance inflicted upon their brains by thousands of hours spent twittering, texting, facebooking, seeking out adorable cat videos on the internet, viewing racist rap singer imbeciles rent out sports stadiums to propose to vacuous big breasted sluts on reality cable TV shows, and sitting zombie-like for days with a controller in hand blowing up cities, killing whores, and murdering policemen using their new PS4 on their 65 inch HDTV, rather than gaining a true understanding of the world by reading Steinbeck, Huxley, and Orwell. Technology has reduced our ability to think and increased our ignorance.

“During my eighty-seven years, I have witnessed a whole succession of technological revolutions. But none of them has done away with the need for character in the individual or the ability to think.” - Bernard M. Baruch

The youth have one thing going for them. They are still young and can awaken from their self-imposed stupor of ignorance. There are over 80 million millenials between the ages of 8 and 30 years old who need to start questioning the paradigm they are inheriting and critically examining the mendacious actions of their elders. The future of the country is in their hands, so I hope they put down those iGadgets and open their eyes before it is too late. We need many more patriots like Edward Snowden and far fewer twerking sluts like Miley Cyrus if we are to overcome the smog of apathy and ignorance blanketing our once sentient nation.

CARTMAN HARDEST HIT: South Park Eviscerates Obamacare and Secretary of Fail Kathleen Sebelius

Guest post by Adam Tobias

“South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone have made a living being equal opportunity offenders since their brazen and outspoken animated series premiered more than 16 years ago.

Their latest target?

The Obama administration and its botched rollout of Obamacare.

In Wednesday night’s episode, South Park Elementary School counselor Mr. Mackey has installed in the school a new “simple, integrated portal” known as Intellilink, which is supposed to streamline communications.

But every time Mackey or a student uses the program, various problems occur, such as window shades falling down, fire suppression sprinklers accidentally going off or songs like Lionel Richie’s “All Night Long” suddenly blaring in the background.

When forced to speak in front of his colleagues, Mackey is told by Principal Victoria the Intellilink system has cost the school $22,000, and so far it’s been “an unmitigated disaster.”

The problem is not everybody has signed onto it yet, Mackey claims.

The reason they haven’t signed onto it is because every time they try, they make the sprinklers go off, shop class teacher Richard Adler responds.

Friday, November 01, 2013

DEMOCRATS LOSE TO MATH, CHAPTER 6,039: Illinois Pensions Ratchet Up to Crazy-town Level

Guest post by Ted Dabrowski


Members of Illinois’ state-run pension systems claim they’ve paid their fair share into the pension funds.
 
To be sure, these workers have paid in what’s been required legally under mutually agreed upon contracts.
 
But the benefits politicians and union bosses have negotiated for retirees are pushing the state's pension systems to the brink of insolvency.
 
A look at the pension of Henry Bangser, the ex-superintendent of New Trier High School and the Teachers’ Retirement System’s highest pensioner, reveals just how out of sync worker contributions are with the benefits they receive.
 
Bangser will receive nearly $8 million in pension benefits during his retirement, which began at the age of 57.
 
Yet he contributed just $336,000 to the pension system over his 30-plus year career, an amount less than his final salary of $364,500 in 2007 and just 4.2% of his expected lifetime benefits.
That’s the problem with the current system: worker contributions are far too small relative to the pension benefits they’ll receive during their lifetimes. Not only that, but the state’s defined benefit pension plan forces young workers to contribute to a system that may collapse by the time they are ready to retire. Illinois’ pension systems are nearing insolvency and only have $0.40 of every dollar needed to make future payments.
 

When Memes Collide

Actual quotes:


BUT


The President was so perturbed about getting to the bottom of the Obamacare debacle, and the slaughter of his diplomats in Benghazi, and his IRS targeting conservative, evangelical, and pro-Israel groups that he went golfing for the 148th time this week.


Hat tip: BadBlue News


Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Awesome News: North Carolina Public School Teachers Sending Pro-Union Propaganda Home With Kids

As Scott Walker's experience in Wisconsin taught us, public sector union bosses are the lowest of the low.

In North Carolina, the radical Marxist agitators have stooped to using schoolchildren to disseminate pro-union propaganda.

A line was crossed tonight in Holly Springs, NC by the North Carolina Association of Educators (NCAE). A flyer for a planned Teacher “Walk In” was distributed to kids at Holly Ridge Elementary school in their ‘take-home folders’ today. This “Walk In” has been talked about in the media a bit but nothing hit as close to home as this did. This flyer had no business being ferried home by our children...


...The flyer has a website on it: www.Organize2020.com... This is a site affiliated with the NCAE. It is almost purely politics, shows shots of teachers protesting at Moral Monday...

Now go read the mission statement, which ends with this paragraph detailing the point of Organize 2020 — to bring unions into our schools...

The mission statement page concludes with the following timeless plea for more taxpayer cash:

We need hope. We need a union.

Never mind that public sector unions have effectively bankrupted the teachers' retirement systems in Illinois and California.

Never mind that Detroit more resembles Mogadishu than an American city, thanks in large part to forced unionization.

Never mind all that.

North Carolina's teachers want a union and if the taxpayers don't like it, well, **** you.

If you don't like your kids being used as pawns to promote more failing public schools, well, **** you.

In short: just when you think the Left has hit rock bottom, they break out a jackhammer and start digging a new septic tank.


Hat tip: BadBlue News Service.

Obamacare in Three, Eh, Make That FOUR Pictures

During today's testimony regarding her botched Obamacare rollout, CNN did itself proper with coverage of HHS Chief Kathleen Sebelius's outrageous lies. You might call this "real-time repudiation." Or "split-screen smackdown":

Secretary Sebelius: Yes, sir, because we were anxious to get the website up and running and functional, which we clearly have failed to do to date, although I would suggest the website has never crashed. It is functional, but at a very slow speed and very low reliability and has continued to function. Having said that, they pared down some of the features, feeling that it would be better to load them in later. One was the shop and browse feature. Another was the Spanish version of the website and the Medicaid transfers. All three of those issues were pared down in September to not load the system.

While Sebelius was insisting -- under oath, mind you -- that the website had "never crashed", CNN used a split-screen to show the Healthcare.gov website in real-time.

And... surprise! It had just crashed again, for the umpteenth time, displaying an error message "The System Is Down At the Moment ... Please try again later."

Which prompted Twitchy commenter Red Pill to post the following trifecta explaining the true impact of Obamacare.


The true destructive impact of Obamacare -- even though 80 percent of Americans are covered by their employers and are not yet subject to the individual mandate (won't that be fun next year?) -- has become apparent to most Americans.

That's not me saying it. That's NBC saying it.


Hat tip: BadBlue News.

Tuesday, October 29, 2013

OUCH: NBC Buries Own Reporter To Hide Obamacare Lies

Guest post by Media Research Center


RESTON, VA – In a bombshell report for NBC News.com, NBC News senior investigative correspondent Lisa Myers found buried in the 2010 Obamacare regulations language predicting, “A reasonable range for the percentage of individual policies that would terminate is forty percent to sixty-seven percent.” Myers’ reporting shows that Barack Obama knowingly lied to the American people for more than three years when he regularly insisted that those who like their current health insurance would be able to keep it under Obamacare.

Yet, according to an analysis from the Media Research Center, this massive, deliberate breach of trust was worthy of only 21 seconds of coverage on NBC Nightly News, buried at the end of the show’s fourth story, with no follow up on Today. ABC and CBS completely censored Lisa Myers’ discovery with not one single second of coverage on either their morning or evening programs.

Media Research Center President Brent Bozell reacts:

“Barack Obama lied to the American people – repeatedly and with a straight face – every time he insisted that those who like their current healthcare could keep it under Obamacare. And he’ll keep lying to the American people because the liberal media refuse to hold him accountable.

“NBC News, whose own reporter found the language in Obamacare proving Obama knowingly lied to the people for over three years, gave this bombshell revelation a pathetic 21 seconds of coverage on Nightly News. There was no follow-up on Today. In other words, NBC News buried their own reporter to protect Obama.

 “This sends a clear message to the American people. As far as the liberal broadcast networks are concerned, when Barack Obama lies, it’s not news. What would Richard Nixon have given for a press corps this corrupt?”


Read more at the Media Research Center.

CONGRATULATIONS, DEMOCRATS! Nearly Half of New York Doctors Bailing on Obamacare

Ain't central planning awesome?

New York doctors are treating ObamaCare like the plague, a new survey reveals.

A poll conducted by the New York State Medical Society finds that 44 percent of MDs said they are not participating in the nation’s new health-care plan.

...Only 23 percent of the 409 physicians queried said they’re taking patients who signed up through health exchanges.

“This is so poorly designed that a lot of doctors are afraid to participate,” said Dr. Sam Unterricht, president of the 29,000-member organization. “There’s a lot of resistance. Doctors don’t know what they’re going to get paid.”

...“Obama Care wants to start right away, but who see all these new patients???? Not me,” e-mailed one doc.

Another said, “I plan to retire if this disaster is implemented. This is a train wreck.”

“I refuse to participate in the exchange plans! I am completely opposed to this new law,” said a third respondent.

One doctor recycled the mantra used to attack addictions: “The solution is simple: Just say no.”

Oh, and all you residents of New York City?

Congratulations. You appear poised to elect the radical Communist Bill de Blasio as mayor.

What could possibly go wrong?


Hat tip: BadBlue News.

REVEALED: President Obama intentionally, wantonly and systematically destroyed millions of health care plans.

Ace dissects yesterday's NBC News' Investigative Report that confirmed what every regular American already knew. That is, the Obama administration knew from the outset that millions of Americans would lose their health care plans while they were publicly telling them the exact opposite.

The more interesting part of the analysis relates to the regulations that actually triggered the catastrophic destruction of 10 to 12 million individual health policies. As NBC reported (emphasis added):

The law states that policies in effect as of March 23, 2010 will be “grandfathered,” meaning consumers can keep those policies even though they don’t meet requirements of the new health care law. But the Department of Health and Human Services then wrote regulations that narrowed that provision, by saying that if any part of a policy was significantly changed since that date -- the deductible, co-pay, or benefits, for example -- the policy would not be grandfathered.

As Ace notes, HHS operates at the behest of Obama.

They didn't have to tighten the regulations to make it impossible for Americans to keep their health care plans.

They, in fact, could have loosened the guidelines to ensure that the president's oft-repeated mantra ("If you like your health care plan you can keep your plan... period!") remained true.

The President refused to do so.

Why?

Because f*** you.

The real scandal isn't just that the president lied repeatedly to the American people. The real scandal is that the President, in fact, gave direct orders to HHS to destroy the health care policies of millions of Americans.

These regulations, being a creature of the Executive branch, can be rewritten by the executive branch at any time. We don't need a law for this (though one would be useful, to force Obama to do the right thing).

Obama has it within his power to call up the HHS reg-writers and instruct them to honor the promise he made time and again for two years. And he doesn't want people to know this, because he is determined to break that promise.

That promise was always a lie, and not a meaningless lie at the periphery, but a central lie propping up the political campaign for ObamaCare...

Had he told Americans that they would be losing their current health care in order to be dumped into what is effectively a high-risk pool, so that they could subsidize high-risk clients, the public would have rejected the law even more strongly than he did.

So he lied. And lied. And lied. And lied some more.

And even at this late date, he could still choose to honor his promise.

But he won't, because he can't -- he always intended to take people's insurance away from them. Always.

Ace concludes with the notion that the president "should be forced to explain why" he intentionally sabotaged millions of health care policies.

Hell, we can't even find out what President Obama did for eight hours as American diplomats were fighting for their lives in Benghazi.

Yeah, I know, he went to sleep after refusing to authorize a rescue.

But the odds that a reporter will ask him about this? Just a skosh less than Vern Troyer winning the Heisman.


Hat tip: BadBlue News.

Monday, October 28, 2013

California Democrat Cheers for One-Party Rule (Because Hitler Made the Trains Run on Time, Right @FromaHarrop?)

Some crackpot named "Froma Harrop" claims one-party rule is good for California, even as the state collapses into bankruptcy. Ralph sends along a link to Creators featuring someone with that name -- which, memory serves, is Latin for a certain highly contagious STD. And she simply adores one-party rule.

California has found a formula for ending the partisan warfare that once paralyzed its government: Get rid of one of the parties, in this case, the Republican. The state's famously dysfunctional government now hums with calm efficiency.

Yes, "calm efficiency". The trains run on time, one would assume. Oh, and Pol Pot had one-party rule, too. That didn't work out too well for, oh, a couple million of his subjects. Who we won't be interviewing for... the rest of their lives.

Democrats there hold a supermajority in the state Legislature, making it well-nigh impossible for Republicans to gum up their plans. The governor, Jerry Brown, is a Democrat, as well.

Plans like massive deficit spending, rampant illegal immigration, a collapsing welfare state, and a looming pension disaster? Congratulations! Let freedom ring!

...As districts become more politically diverse, Republican right-wingers — with their inflamed imaginings and inexplicable amount of free time — see their power to produce sure losers curbed...

Yes, those damnable Republicans with their inflamed imaginings. Like the Constitution matters. Like individual liberties matter. Like trying to control an IRS, an NSA, a DOJ, and a Beltway Elite who are completely out of control. Imagine the nerve!

...Sacramento is now a model of quiet efficiency. The state's new health insurance exchange is off and running with minimal drama. And there's even a move to ease some environmental regulations at the behest of business.

"The new California health insurance exchange is running with minimal drama"? Perhaps Froma (Gesundheit!) should ask those affected by Blue Cross canceling roughly 60 percent of its individual insurance policies. Or the thousands of other horror stories so egregious even the Los Angeles Times has been forced to take note. Or the more than 10 million people nationwide who have thus far lost their policies.

Now if we didn't have Detroit, and Chicago, and Sacramento, and dozens of other bankrupt, one-party, Democrat-run cities collapsing into miserable microcosms of third-world cesspools, she might have a point to consider.

Yo Froma, if that is your real name, I have two suggestions: first, lay off the acid; and second, head over to PensionTsunami, where the true economic toll of the Detroitocrat Party is laid bare. Don't worry, they use words at the sixth-grade reading level, so you should be okay.

In short, the infernal alliance of public sector unions and their Democrat toadies have set California on a course of fiscal destruction. Businesses and taxpayers are fleeing, illegal immigrants who suckle on the public teat are welcomed, and Shmenga Hadoop thinks that model's sustainable.

So I'll take a flyer and trust Milton Friedman over Yenta Maloop: he said that combining open borders and a massive welfare state would bankrupt a country. And that is where California is headed as surely as as Freda Maloof is destined to be a footnote to a footnote to a footnote when the history of America's great op-ed writers is written.

Yo, Maroof: stop destroying my country!


SWEET FANCY MOSES: NBC (!1!11!) annihilates administration's Obamacare lies; Obama knew 10 million would lose coverage

If NBC News is revealing this much, the true tale must be far, far worse. NBC Investigations reports that the Obama administration knew in advance that their catastrophic takeover of the health care industry would throw millions off their plans.

President Obama knowingly lied to the American people over and over and over again. And -- I repeat -- this is NBC News reporting on the scandal.

President Obama repeatedly assured Americans that after the Affordable Care Act became law, people who liked their health insurance would be able to keep it. But millions of Americans are getting or are about to get cancellation letters for their health insurance under Obamacare, say experts, and the Obama administration has known that for at least three years.

Four sources deeply involved in the Affordable Care Act tell NBC NEWS that 50 to 75 percent of the 14 million consumers who buy their insurance individually can expect to receive a “cancellation” letter or the equivalent over the next year because their existing policies don’t meet the standards mandated by the new health care law. One expert predicts that number could reach as high as 80 percent. And all say that many of those forced to buy pricier new policies will experience “sticker shock.”

...the administration knew that more than 40 to 67 percent of those in the individual market would not be able to keep their plans, even if they liked them.

Yet President Obama, who had promised in 2009, “if you like your health plan, you will be able to keep your health plan,” was still saying in 2012, “If [you] already have health insurance, you will keep your health insurance.”

...Those getting the cancellation letters are often shocked and unhappy.

George Schwab, 62, of North Carolina, said he was "perfectly happy" with his plan from Blue Cross Blue Shield, which also insured his wife for a $228 monthly premium. But this past September, he was surprised to receive a letter saying his policy was no longer available. The "comparable" plan the insurance company offered him carried a $1,208 monthly premium and a $5,500 deductible... And the best option he’s found on the exchange so far offered a 415 percent jump in premium, to $948 a month...

...Richard Helgren, a Lansing, Mich., retiree, said he was “irate” when he received a letter informing him that his wife Amy's $559 a month health plan was being changed because of the law. The plan the insurer offered raised his deductible from $0 to $2,500, and the company gave him 17 days to decide...

..."I heard him only about a thousand times," he said. "I didn't believe him when he said it though because there was just no way that was going to happen. They wrote the regulations so strictly that none of the old polices can grandfather."

Kudos to NBC's Lisa Myers and Hannah Rappleye for publicizing what most of us already knew.

Obamacare isn't about health care. It's about control. It's about changing the relationship between the government and the individual. It is designed explicitly to give the government control over every American family's mental and physical well-being, which it can use to reward its political allies and punish its enemies.

Anyone with an ounce of intellectual honesty would admit as much, which excludes Juan Williams and the rest of the drones who relentlessly cheerlead for their own destruction.


Hat tip: BadBlue 24x7 News

Sunday, October 27, 2013

ONCE AGAIN, DEMOCRATS LOSE TO MATH: Detroit pensioners to receive only 16 percent of their promised retirements

Hundreds of cities have underfunded pension plans, but Detroit really takes the cake. Its pensioners will take haircuts of 84 cents of every dollar they're owed.

That's a stiff price to pay for electing Democrats.

On Friday, city financial consultant Kenneth Buckfire said he did not have to recommend to Orr that pensions for the city's retirees be cut as a way to help Detroit navigate through debts and liabilities that total $18.5 billion.

Buckfire said it was clear that the city did not have the funds to pay the unsecured pension payouts without cutting them.

"It was a function of the mathematics," said Buckfire, who said he did not think it was necessary for him or anyone else to recommend pension cuts to Orr.

"Are you saying it was so self-evident that no one had to say it?" asked Claude Montgomery, attorney for a committee of retirees that was created by Rhodes.

"Yes," Buckfire answered.

Buckfire, a Detroit native and investment banker with restructuring experience, later told the court the city plans to pay unsecured creditors, including the city's pensioners, 16 cents on the dollar. There are about 23,500 city retirees.

And this, my friends, is why I call them Detroitocrats. Everything they touch will turn into Detroit, and that includes America itself.


Hat tip: Zero Hedge.