Then read it again to help it sink in...
Can’t beat fundamentally sound logic like this.
Hat tip: BB.
Super storm Typhoon Haiyan today hit Philippines on Friday, forcing millions to flee to safer ground, cutting power lines and blowing away houses.
...The storm is being touted as the strongest this year and the most powerful ever during landfall.
...Haiyan is a category-5 super typhoon with 275 kph (170 mph) wind gusts and 5-6 metre (15-19 ft) waves.
QOTD: "Over the past 30 years, as society has moved away from centralization, the political class has resisted. Government has grown ever more centralized. In fact, the federal government today directly controls a far larger chunk of the nation’s economy than it did just a generation or two ago.
That disconnect exists partly because politics and government always lag behind. It’s also partly because politicians are not thrilled with riding the new wave that disperses power away from the political class.
The disconnect cannot continue. Sooner or later, the politicians will concede and the government will catch up.
Simply put, a one-size-fits-all central government cannot survive in the iPad era." --Scott Rasmussen
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — When you exit prison in Illinois you’ll get your street clothes, a notice of when to check-in with your parole officer and a pamphlet about Obamacare.
The state’s prisons and county jails are taking a proactive approach to enrolling people, mostly into Medicaid, through the Affordable Care Act. They’re starting the process while prisoners are locked up.“When the person is in custody, they’re not eligible for enrollment,” McLean County Sheriff Mike Emery told Illinois Watchdog. “The stance we’re taking here in McLean County…is that we’re starting the process with inmates to get them enrolled for health care.”
Emery said his staff will fill out almost all of the paperwork for Obamacare so that once someone is released they can sign a few pages and be enrolled in Medicaid, or apply for private insurance. Most will go into Medicaid.
In Illinois’ prisons, inmates who are set to be released are told they could be covered by Medicaid well before their last day.
Because I am a nice guy and don't want anyone to waste their time, here is a quick list of those who won't enjoy this post:
1) People working for Mitch McConnell's reelection.
2) People who come from families that internalize everything rather than fight it out and get it over with.
3) People who are Mitch McConnell.
The last several weeks have brought to the fore some ugly realities that the establishment GOP was hoping it could deal with using its go-to conflict resolution strategy: put it off, hope the problem goes away and then perhaps a nap.
Led by a host of Republican senators whose most notable achievement is getting elected a lot, the old guard has been busy publicly admonishing the more Tea Party-minded additions to the fold that they don't know anything.
Because they haven't been elected a lot.
Now, I will concede that, yes, the establishment dinosaurs do have a knack for winning elections. However, the gaps in between those victories tend not to be filled with much to crow about unless you're a fan of things like the Department of Homeland Security, Medicare expansion or being part of a team that's only won the popular vote in a presidential election once in twenty five years.
A school of thought is emerging amongst us extremists that it might be rather refreshing if they applied some of that ability to battle and prevail over Democrats in elections to the legislative process.
So a schism is erupting that sees one side yelling, "Hey, we win elections and stuff!" and the other side responding, "Yeah, but you're kind of hosing us once you do!"
The eruption, however, isn't from a new source of conflict. In fact, this is a decades-old ideological volcano in the GOP that has had spectacular consequences after blowing up in the past.
This New York Times article almost deserves a sentence by sentence examination but let's just grab a couple of chunks and look at them.
QOTD: "NAPOLITANO: So the ’47 percent,’ which impaled Romney will go over 50 percent if this legislation succeeds in moving people below the poverty level and making them dependent on the government. And they vote.
KRAUTHAMMER: Which is part of the plan. However, if you were wealthier and you lose it and you end up on Medicaid, I don’t think you’ll vote Democratic.
STODDARD: I really don’t think the White House had a fantasy of this kind of a disaster. I just can’t imagine —
(CROSSTALK)
KRAUTHAMMER: You misunder — it’s a political disaster. But the geniuses, the economists — if you hear Ezekiel Emanuel say on the “Fox News Sunday” this was designed — you had to get people out of the individual insurance market, generally people of some means, you put them in the exchanges, they overpay and you use the subsidy. This was not an accident. What they never understood is how disastrous it would be politically. But economically, that’s the way they make it work.
BAIER: It is pretty incredible to try to get 5-7 million on the upside by March — the amount of money to try to get 7 million people in these exchanges.
NAPOLITANO: It would be less expensive if they just paid the premiums for the 7 million out of the federal treasury." --Fox News Special Report
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...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”:
- 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...
...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:
...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.
- Many states not building their own exchanges, as permitted under the law.
- 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.
- Criticism.
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!
...over [my] 25 years, when anybody, any conservative, Ollie North, I don't care who it is, when they've come under assault, Clarence Thomas, I don't care, whether I knew 'em or not, I ran in there and I defended 'em to the hilt because of the cause, because I knew exactly why they were being targeted. Sarah Palin. I went in there and defended these people because I know that it's an effort to undermine everything I believe. They attacked Palin, they attacked Ollie, they attacked Clarence Thomas, they're attacking us, me.
Well, it's not enough just to come here and tell you, "Oh, look what they're saying about Palin. See ya, folks, have a great day." Then tomorrow, "Oh, look what they said about Newt. See ya, folks, have a great day." Why am I doing this? And the reason I wrote this [children's] book is to try to counter what's going on. Why would you write a book on how the left has corrupted education if you didn't have some desire to fight it? And this is what has frankly stunned me ever since Barack Obama's election. I understand there's a fear of the media, and I understand there's a fear of Obama's race, but it's time to get past that. The guy's president. He's destroying the foundations of this country, as founded. He's literally setting his sights on transforming this country into something it was never founded to be.
I don't think that should happen, and I've been under the impression that everybody else that's not part of the Democrat Party has been of the same mind-set, and that's where I've been wrong. So those of us who fight back upset the applecart, are those who just want to sit there and accept it and try to manage their lives and careers in the midst of this mess because we're upsetting the applecart. So we have to then be attacked as whatever.
That's why they're going after Cruz. What are they going after Ted Cruz for? What's he done to anybody? It's Obama they ought to be going after! Why are they going after Mike Lee? That's why we defend these guys. They're out there actually trying to beat this stuff back, and they're doing it because they love the country. They're doing it because they're shocked and saddened by what they're seeing happening here, and they don't think it's time to give up.
Look how rare that is! Sarah Palin, the same thing. Look at what happens to people that do that. I mean, even Republicans go after 'em. They went after Reagan, too. It's the same thing, but Reagan was able to overcome it. It's a sad thing that there's only been one of him, but that's because they've done everything they can to revise history from that era and make people think it was the exact opposite of what it was. But, folks, the whole point of this latest book has been to join people, 'cause I know there are a lot of you.
This is the thing I know. A lot of you are fighting back, the Tea Party is. A lot of you do want to arrest this stuff and stop it and reverse it. A lot of you do want get rid of the current liberal power structure that's destroying the fabric of the country, cultural, politically, societally, economically, you name it. It's a wrecking ball that's been unleashed each and every day, and I know all of you in the Tea Party and most of you in this audience are trying to stop it.
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.
- Obamacare provides millions of dollars to leftwing community organizers, including ACORN descendants. A radical illegal alien is running the NYC Obamacare “navigator” program.
- 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...
- Progressive activist Jeanne Lambrew, now in charge of Obamacare implementation, traded confidential taxpayer information with the IRS.
...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:As they say on the real blogs, read the whole thing.
- 49 percent of Americans receive some kind of public assistance.
- More people collect means-tested benefits today (108.6 million) than there are full-time workers (101.7 million)
- 1.2 million homeless children attend public school, up 72 percent since the recession began.
- 46.6 million people receive food stamps, the highest number in recorded history.
- 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.
- Median household income is 9% below what it was in 1999.
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.
QOTD: "...... It’s amazing how the media cooperates in these administration propaganda campaigns: “Senior aides” tell reporters what the White House message strategy is and the reporters then help push the White House message. Then the media report the story of how successful the White House message strategy was — as if they were covering something other than their own coverage. It’s a Mobius loop of bulls***." --Robert Stacy McCain
First Amendment: A federal court has ruled that the ObamaCare contraception mandate violates the guarantee of free exercise of religion and forces some to choose between their religious conscience and bankruptcy.
The Supreme Court's decision in June 2012 that ObamaCare was constitutional because its fines for not complying with its mandates made the law a tax within Congress' authority to impose did not end the constitutional or court challenges to this attempt at redistribution of health and wealth.
On Friday, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Gilardi v. HHS that ObamaCare's contraception mandate violates the constitutional rights of plaintiffs Francis and Philip Gilardi, two Catholic brothers who own Freshway Foods and Fresh Unlimited.
The two companies plus Freshway Logistics provide health insurance for their 400 employees through a third-party administrator. The court ruled that they face the choice of violating their religious beliefs in providing insurance to their employees or closing up shop.
I suppose we should be thankful they didn't copy the shoulder-launched Stinger Anti-Aircraft missile from Call of Duty.ABC’s Good Morning America took a great deal of liberty with reality this morning, creating a computer animation that equipped Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) shooting suspect Paul Ciancia not with the Smith & Wesson M&P15 modern sporting rifle that he actually used, but instead with a military M16 selective-fire assault rifle and m-203 40mm grenade laucher.
It’s nice to know that a major network still retains such great creative license as part of their news programming.
In 2011, the Department of Health and Human Services moved "the on-the-ground work of carrying out" from Secretary Kathleen Sebelius's office to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, known as CMS. "The move had a political rationale," Goldstein and Eilperin report. "Tucked within a large bureaucracy, some administration officials believed, the new Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight would be better insulated from the efforts of House Republicans, who were looking for ways to undermine the law..."
...As a result, "the work of designing the federal health exchange--and of helping states that wanted to build their own--became fragmented." Nobody was in charge of directing the program.
In the spring of 2011, CMS staffers "struggled . . . to persuade White House officials for permission to publish diagrams known as 'concepts of operation,' " which would have shown what a federal exchange would "look like." The White House balked for fear that "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." Instead, the White House ordered CMS "to praise early work on those state exchanges that matched the hidden federal thinking."
"Meanwhile, the White House also slowed down important regulations that had been drafted within CMS months earlier, appearing to wait until just after Obama's reelection," Goldstein and Eilperin report. Rules governing mandated benefits and calculations of premiums weren't proposed until Thanksgiving and didn't become final until February. A former Medicare chief actuary describes the delay as "a singularly bad decision" taken "for short-term political gain."
The story Goldstein and Eilperin tell is one not of GOP sabotage but of Obama administration self-sabotage. The geniuses who were sure they were capable of running the entire medical industry were so unnerved by the prospect of political opposition that at every stage of the way they undermined the president's own signature "achievement."
This is in part a story of political incompetence and hubris. Obama and his allies in Congress were unable to win a single Republican vote--and it doesn't seem to have occurred to them that a monstrously complicated law enacted by a slender partisan minority might prove especially difficult to implement. As Obama himself admitted yesterday in a rare truthful statement: "Now, let's face it, a lot of us didn't realize that passing the law was the easy part."
...We should note that this entire discussion has dealt only with the incompetent technical execution of ObamaCare, what we call Phase 1 of the disaster. Phases 2 and 3, respectively, are the exposure that ObamaCare is a massive consumer fraud and the economic inviability of the entire scheme.
The exposure of ObamaCare as a massive consumer fraud--and of Obama as the Bernie Madoff of politics--is well under way.
QOTD: "The White House has violated the old political adage, "If you're explaining why cancer patients should lose their health insurance, you're losing."" --Jon Gabriel