Senate Intelligence Committee report on Benghazi released

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m not at all sure most people will care, because the left has succeeded in making just the word “Benghazi” a big yawn for way too many people. But for what it’s worth, the Senate Intelligence Committee has issued a fairly blistering report on the Benghazi debacle.

Aside from some all-important pre-2016 minimizing of Hillary Clinton’s role by the majority Democrats, who claim that the early “it was a video” emphasis was the result of poor communication by US intelligence rather than an administration coverup, here are the some of the highlights (or lowlights, depending how you look at it) of the report’s findings, as described by Ed Morrissey at The Fiscal times:

The committee found that a string of terrorist attacks in Benghazi against Western targets, especially one three months before the final attack on the US facility itself, should have alerted State to the danger it faced. Furthermore, the committee questioned how State could have ignored its own security standards to approve the use of the building, a decision reapplied in July when State renewed the lease ”“ just weeks after the previous attack.

These two issues ”“ of the terrorist activity and the inexplicable waivers for proper security ”“ drive most of the bipartisan condemnation of the report. The committee pointedly notes that the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) warned the Obama administration in June 2012 of the growing threat against Western interests in Benghazi in a report with a title that should have grabbed attention: “Libya: Terrorists Now Targeting U.S. and Western Interests.”…

The CIA did not formally share knowledge of the existence of their annex with the Department of Defense. The commander of US Africa Command, General Carter Ham, had no idea that there were more personnel to protect until the attack, leading the Republicans to muse: “We are puzzled as to how the military leadership expected to effectively respond and rescue Americans in the event of an emergency when it did not even know of the existence of one of the U.S. facilities.”…

It’s as if the Pentagon, CIA, and State Department set out to ignore the red flags they themselves had been raising all year long. No one was prepared on the anniversary of 9/11 for an attack in the region where everyone knew al Qaeda to be “establishing sanctuary,” openly operating, and where the US predicted attacks would escalate.

The State Department in particular didn’t take action to bring its facility into compliance with its own security requirements, purposefully waiving them, in a city where terrorist attacks had already begun to escalate ”“ including one on the facility itself ”“ nor took action to get Americans out of harm’s way, despite the departure of other Western nations from Benghazi earlier in the year.

One does not need a name at the top of this report to know where responsibility rests for this massive failure. Hillary Clinton ran State, Leon Panetta ran Defense, and David Petraeus ran the CIA. But the distributed nature of the failure indicts the Obama administration and Barack Obama himself, too. The White House is responsible for interagency coordination, for one thing, especially when it comes to national security and diplomatic enterprises.

However, Obama’s responsibility extends farther and more specifically, too. The reason that eastern Libya had transformed into a terrorist haven in the first place was because of the Obama-led NATO intervention that deposed Moammar Qaddafi without any effort to fill the security vacuum his abrupt departure created.

Americans, who should care, seem to be sleepwalking through all of this. The fact that the Democratic majority on the committee signed off on it is unusual enough to be worthy of note and should be significant. But unless both parties are prepared to make a big stink about it, I’m afraid that nothing will happen as a result.

The anti-Christie forces have settled on a meme…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and the meme is “bully.”

Which I think is an interesting word to use for a politician. “Bully” conjures up all the current anti-bullying campaigns that have to do with school and the playground, but politics is not the schoolyard nor are we children (we just act like them sometimes). “Bully” also plays on Christie’s bulk: the picture is of a big hulking nasty guy punching out the little kids.

But again, this is politics. Doesn’t the word also convey the idea that he’s not a wimp, that he’s a fighter? I’m talking about metaphors here, not reality; no one thinks Christie throws any literal punches. And of course, as a fat guy, Christie is actually the one who’s the more natural target of bullies—including his opponent in his first New Jersey governor’s race, Jon Corzine, whose bullying of Christie for being fat failed to win Corzine the election.

Daniel Henninger points out the contrast between the treatment of Christie for Bridegate and the winking at the far more serious bullying (although he doesn’t use that word) perpetrated by the Obama administration, Obama, and his underlings, as well as the left in general:

The Christie bonfire has burned for a week. In that same week, The Wall Street Journal reported that the FBI found nothing in the IRS’s targeting of conservative political groups that warrants criminal charges…

Thus, two of the most powerful public institutions in the U.S.””the FBI and the IRS””have concluded no harm, no foul, and the memory hole swallows the Obama administration’s successful kneecapping of the GOP’s most active members just as they prepared to participate in the 2012 presidential campaign. Many””ruined or terrified by the IRS probes””shut down. Mr. Obama won.

One may be thankful that corners of the U.S. judiciary remain intact and unintimidated. Late last week, a judge in Wisconsin slowed down what was essentially a Democratic prosecutor’s star-chamber investigation of conservative groups that supported Republican Gov. Scott Walker. A special prosecutor armed with subpoena power had been poring over the groups’ finances, while a gag order stopped the groups from saying they were his targets.

On Friday, a court quashed some of the subpoenas for lack of probable cause. That’s good, but don’t expect to see Friends of Scott Walker going on offense any time soon. Legal pistol-whippings by state prosecutors can have that effect, win or lose.

As Henninger writes earlier in the piece, this sort of thing makes Chris Christie (and/or his aides) look like Little Bo Beep.

Note also how important the legal system and the courts are to the other stories Henninger points out. People often ignore the vast effect that judicial appointments have on the way things go, but they are vital. The more the left takes over that system, the more deeply entrenched leftist thought becomes. That is one of the main reasons that the Senate recently established simple majority approval for presidential appointments; they know how overwhelmingly important this is for their agenda. The left wrote the book on “bullying”—only that’s way too mild a word for it.

Something people don’t seem to understand about Obamacare

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve noticed this before, and I noticed it again while reading this article in the Washington Examiner about Obamacare. Here’s the quote that caught my attention:

Former New York Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey, a Republican who is now a health care advocate, said Obamacare’s lack of first-class hospitals is a big problem.

“It’s not just the number, but who they are. You’ll find under the Obamacare exchanges that the academic hospitals have declined to participate, along with the specialists who practice at those hospitals. The same is true of cancer hospitals,” she said.

“People who are seriously ill need to stay away from these exchange plans,” McCaughey said.

But what McCaughey doesn’t appear to understand—and what my research so far has told me is true (although Obamacare is so Byzantine there’s always the possibility of error)—is that in the individual market there is almost no way for people, seriously ill or otherwise, to “stay away from these exchange plans.”

For those with employer-based insurance, they can stay away (for now—we’ll see how that changes next year). Employer-based plans still have good networks. But people without employer-based insurance who must seek individual policies don’t for the most part have access to those networks, they only have access to the more narrow Obamacare networks.

You might say, “But what of people who buy individual insurance off the exchanges? Can’t they circumvent the problem?” After doing a lot of research (including phoning insurance companies), everything I’ve read and heard points to the fact that the entire individual health insurance business has restructured itself to conform with Obamacare, and that individual policies off the exchanges are the exact same policies as those on the exchanges.

That includes the narrow networks. The only difference is that off the exchanges you can’t get a subsidy, although the plus side is that off the networks you don’t have to deal with the healthcare.gov website and its perils.

As an alternative, you can buy temporary catastrophic insurance that allows you to go to any doctor. But temporary insurance is just that: temporary. It is limited to one 6-month period or at the most two, depending on the state. Then you are not allowed to buy it anymore.

So the only way a person buying individual insurance could act according to McCaughey’s suggestion is to not buy insurance at all. If you’re paying out-of-pocket, then you can go anywhere you want. Most people can’t afford to do that, of course, especially the “seriously ill,” the ones McCaughey was addressing in her statement.

If anyone has done research that contradicts what I’m saying, please let me know. Obamacare is a maze of complications, arcane rules, and contradictions, and it’s much like an iceberg, the bulk of which is invisible.

The ladder of evil

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Ymarsakar” made an interesting observation two days ago. The subject:

When the world declares Jews, Republicans, and whites to be non humans that need to be exterminated to get rid of a threat to humanity, most people will Obey.

Most will. They have nothing in their spine that can resist the Power of the World and its numbers. Nothing.

I have a slightly different take on it. I’ve long conceptualized the whole thing as a hierarchy of evil and the resistance to it, a sort of ladder with many rungs. Here they are, in order from most evil to most dedicated to fighting evil:

Some people will conceptualize, plan, and implement it as leaders.

Some people will actively cooperate with vigor.

Some people will support it but not actively participate.

Some people will be indifferent unless it directly reaches them or their family.

Some people will be somewhat disturbed by it, but manage to put it out of their minds most of the time and go on with their lives.

Some people will be disturbed by it and contemplate various forms of resistance, but will be too frightened to act.

Some people will be disturbed by it and will decide to act in small ways to resist it, ways they consider lower risk.

Some people will be disturbed by it and will decide to take great risks in order to resist it, but could be stopped by threats (not necessarily threats to themselves, but threats to friends and family).

Some people will risk all to actively resist it in every way they can.

An example of the latter would be those Poles who continued their rescue efforts and resistance despite this type of retribution from the Nazis:

Poland was the only place where German law rendered any assistance to Jews punishable by death. That punishment was severe and collective: It was meted out not only to the rescuer but also to his entire family and to anyone else who knew about such activities and did not report them. Almost 1,000 Poles were killed this way, including entire families whose children were not spared.

When we talk about the prevalence of evil in humanity, and whether people are “good at heart,” this is what I think we’re actually discussing. What percentage of the population belongs to each group? I don’t know, but if I had to guess at the shape of a graph, it probably would be a normal distribution—that is, the biggest bump would be in the middle groups, with much smaller numbers for the beginning and ending rungs of the ladder of evil.

So what causes the difference among the groups? Why is a person in one rather than another? Darned if I know, but I have ideas. Some of it probably has to do with devotion to something beyond oneself, which could be religion (in certain circumstances it could even be Communism—in Poland, for example, many of the resisters to the Nazis were Communists). This can lead to good or to evil (such as the 9/11 terrorists). Many of the differences among groups almost certainly involve personal traits that are some combination of nature and nurture, such as the extent of the devotion to liberty. And although psychopaths/sociopaths (the ladder’s first couple of rungs) are often born, certain societies in certain times can be especially effective at fostering and encouraging and promoting them, and using them most fully to further goals of the group rather than just goals of the individual psychopath/sociopath.

In the end, though, there is something mysterious about it all: the problem of evil, with which humankind has been wrestling for aeons.

The FBI and the IRS: nothing much to see, move along now

The New Neo Posted on by

The FBI’s investigation into the IRS scandal has yielded no criminal charges. That’s not so surprising, considering that the bar for criminal behavior is set fairly high.

And that there really wasn’t all that much of an investigation:

Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who has represented about a dozen groups that faced such IRS questioning, said the FBI has yet to contact her clients over the issue. “As far as I can tell, nobody has actually done an investigation. This has been a big, bureaucratic, former-Soviet-Union-type investigation, which means that there was no investigation,” she said. “This is a deplorable abuse of the public trust, but I am not surprised.”

The WSJ has a similar opinion:

The story by Devlin Barrett says that investigators found no political bias but instead merely bureaucratic mismanagement. We’d be willing to credit that conclusion if there were more evidence that anyone did much of an investigation. Congressional probers say FBI director James Comey has refused to provide details about the resources it has devoted to the probe, though such basic information would not interfere with the investigation. Cleta Mitchell, a prominent lawyer who represents several conservative groups that applied for tax-exempt status, reports that the FBI hasn’t contacted any of her clients. That’s like investigating a burglary without interviewing the burgled.

Obamacare is working!

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s just that the plan may not have been what most people thought it was. And I’m not even talking about eventual single payer; I’m talking about Obamacare itself.

Jonathan Cohn analyzes the first set of data we’ve received on who has actually signed up for Obamacare on the exchanges. There are way fewer young people (only 24% are between the ages of 18 and 34) than the original stated goal. But, as Cohn correctly points out, it doesn’t matter for the first year or two because the government has guaranteed to insurance companies that they’ll be protected against loss.

So the fact that enrollees are older than expected—and therefore much more likely to make claims and reduce insurance companies’ profit margins—is okay because government will take up the slack. And by “government” we mean, of course, the taxpayer. And by “taxpayer” we mean, of course, predominantly the wealthy, although the middle class will pay as well in many circumstances.

Here’s a list of the taxes that are supposed to fund Obamacare. Will they be adequate to cover the fact that (as Cohn points out), nearly 80% of enrollees so far on the exchanges are getting subsidies? It depends on whether this was approximately the number anticipated, and also on whether the tax revenues actually collected will be as great as had been projected.

The Byzantine nature of Obamacare is reflected in the fact that one of the largest items in the list of Obamacare funding tax sources is the following:

$60.1 Billion [projected amount of revenue]: Tax on Health Insurers: Annual tax on the industry imposed relative to health insurance premiums collected that year. Phases in gradually until 2018. Fully-imposed on firms with $50 million in profits.

So Obamacare giveth to the insurance companies and then it taketh away. And then it giveth back again, in a sort of shell game. A significant amount of the revenue that insurance companies get from Obamacare is from the government subsidizing those who might not otherwise buy insurance, and a significant amount of the money the government gets in order to go about subsidizing those people is from taxes paid by insurance companies, which are then given back to the insurance companies in the form of customer subsidies for low-income policyholders, and then…well, you get the idea.

There are a number of ways that Obamacare could go under despite the government’s stalwart attempt to protect insurance companies from loss and therefore gain their cooperation/collaboration. One is if people decide not to comply with the individual mandate if they become aware that there is no real way to enforce it unless a person is eligible for a tax refund from which it can be deducted. That could change, of course, if the government sees that too many people are defying the mandate. But the legislature would have to pass a law to that effect, and to do that the legislature would have to turn more Democratic, which doesn’t seem likely in 2014. Of course, Obama can probably overcome this problem in his favorite way: by executive order or through government agency, bypassing the legislature altogether and putting more teeth into the collection process.

Another potential problem for Obamacare is the fact that the House is considering a bill to abolish the risk corridor and reinsurance protection for insurance companies: i.e. the bailout. Such a bill could pass in the House, but it’s hard to believe it would have a chance in the Senate, at least not this Senate. But in 2015 there’s a possibility, if things keep going the way they’ve been going. This could potentially destroy Obamacare if insurance companies suffer losses as a result; that’s why insurers are lobbying so mightily against such a bill.

In case you haven’t followed some of these more arcane aspects of Obamacare, here’s how the risk corridor and reinsurance programs are supposed to work:

The bailout provisions of Obamacare are found in Sections 1341 and 1342 of the Affordable Care Act…The first provision bails out insurance companies for costs associated with individual patients when they exceed $45,000. Under this so-called reinsurance program, insurers will be able to push off 80 percent of costs between $45,000 and $250,000 onto a fund financed by a fee of $63 per head on customers of insurance companies and workers covered by self-insuring companies. Given that most of the associated costs will almost certainly be passed on to consumers by insurers, that fee is in effect a tax. And in the event that the fund does not generate revenue sufficient to cover its costs ”” far from an unlikely scenario ”” then taxpayers will be explicitly on the hook. This preemptive bailout was included in the law as a deal-sweetener to induce more insurance companies to participate in the program. It is a good deal for insurers, for whom any opportunity to reassign risk to somebody else is a welcome profit opportunity, but it is a terrible deal for consumers and taxpayers.

The second and potentially even more troubling bailout provision is the one for so-called risk corridors, which asks the insurance company to project their total costs and then picks up most of the difference if losses should exceed those targets. The potential for gaming the system here is obvious and dire, and the potential costs are enormous. Senator Marco Rubio already has introduced a bill to repeal this provision, though it is unlikely to pass. At the very least, Republicans should ensure that the provision, scheduled for sunsetting in 2016, dies on schedule.

The potential costs and risks associated with these provisions are worrisome, and the fact that they are in effect hidden from the public is troubling in and of itself. The complexity of Obamacare is by design: By obscuring the realities of the program, Obamacare’s architects ensured that it would be easier to peddle such untruths as “If you like your insurance, you can keep it” and promises of substantially lower premiums. The reality of Obamacare has shocked Americans, but it has not shocked them enough: Even as the law sends many Americans’ insurance premiums skyrocketing, those higher premiums do not cover the costs associated with the program ”” Americans will be paying on the front end and on the back end as well, with premiums on one side of the equation and bailouts on the other.

If Congress had tried to pass a law simply transferring $1 trillion to insurance companies over the next decade, there would have been energetic resistance to its doing so. The Affordable Care Act amounts to the same transfer, even as it places insurers in the enviable position of having a federal law in place that gives Americans a choice between buying their products and being fined by the federal government.

Unlike the Wall Street bailouts, the insurance bailouts are not a one-time expedient instituted in the face of a crisis: They represent an open-ended claim on taxpayers’ resources and a transfer of risk from private, profit-seeking enterprises onto the government. Together, the provisions represent an important part of the Democrats’ agenda for transforming what we know as insurance companies into semi-public utilities managed by central planners in Washington.

Most Americans do not understand this, and it’s not necessarily because they’re stupid. It’s because the facts have been purposely suppressed. It’s also because the law is complex and requires study, and many people’s eyes glaze over when discussing the finer points of health insurance and funding. And then of course there are a number of people who couldn’t care less, as long as the subsidies go to them.

The public ignores Bridgegate—or does it?

The New Neo Posted on by

The headline of this article on a post-Bridgegate Pew public opinion poll is “Christie Story Attracts Little Public Interest.” That certainly appears to be true at first glance, when you read that only 18% followed his apology “closely.”

As for its impact:

There also has been little short-term change in opinions about Christie: 60% say their opinion of Christie has not changed in recent days, while 16% now view him less favorably and 6% more favorably.

Although that’s not a lot of swing, it’s still 10%, which in elections can be pretty huge. Read the details and you will learn that most of the negative change was among Democrats and Independents rather than Republicans:

Among Republicans, about as many say their opinion has become more favorable (9%) as less favorable (10%).

More Democrats say their opinion has become less favorable (25%) than more favorable (3%). Among independents, 14% say their opinion of Christie has become less favorable and 6% more favorable.

When the pollsters added those who followed the story somewhat, they got these results:

Republicans are about as likely as Democrats to have followed the Christie story at least fairly closely last week (43% vs. 46%). Like Republicans overall, those who followed the story at least fairly closely are closely divided between those who are more favorable to Christie (18%) and less favorable (17%), with 62% saying their opinion hasn’t changed.

Democrats who closely followed Christie’s apology have come to have sharply less favorable opinions of Christie: 43% say their opinion is now less favorable, 3% more favorable, and half (50%) say their opinion hasn’t changed.

That’s an even greater negative swing among Democrats than in those who paid close attention to his apology.

There’s little question in my mind that Bridgegate has therefore hit its target, although the press and Democratic leaders may have hoped for an even greater negative impact on Christie’s reputation. This story was never about the goal of souring Christie among Republicans, it was about muting his crossover appeal, which is (was?) his biggest strength. And in that sense, mission accomplished.

Rather, first mission accomplished, in terms of tarnishing Christie among Democrats and Independents. There will be a lot more effort where that came from because he’s seen as a dangerous frontrunner.

As for Republicans, they were already not so very keen on Christie, or at least conservatives weren’t. Simply put, many of them already detested and despised him, perhaps far more than most Democrats do. I’m not certain that the left understands the depth of the dislike of Christie among conservatives, but I’ve long thought that it would be a difficult slog for Christie to win the Republican nomination, and to do so the conservative vote against him would have to be split.

There’s another goal of the press’s focus on Bridgegate, and that is distraction. In that, also, the story may have done its job, at least a small amount:

The release of a book by former Defense Secretary Robert Gates that criticized the Obama administration drew even less interest than news about Christie. Just 11% followed news about Gates’ book very closely.

However, whether this has much to do with Bridgegate as a competing story or more to do with general public apathy about scandals is unclear, but I vote for the latter. In the years since Obama became president the public has gotten rather scandal-weary, and has become used to shrugging at some very shocking excesses and excusing them by saying they’re over-hyped and unimportant, or that every politician does the same thing. There may even be some spillover into increasing apathy about Republican scandals, too (real or hyped), although the press will probably never stop trying to accentuate Republican offenses and make light of Democratic ones.

Obamacare may be different because it’s up close and personal, and therefore may still be able to rouse the public out of its depressed and apathetic cynicism. I guess we’ll see in due time.

Le Chambon: the village of rescuers

The New Neo Posted on by

Last night by chance I came across the story of the French village of Le Chambon during WWII. I’d never heard it before, but it’s one of the most fascinating stories of rescuers during the Holocaust.

I’ve written about rescuers several times before, especially here. Different countries had different degrees of cooperation with the Nazi occupation in rounding up their Jews, and as a whole France’s role was a decidedly shameful one. There were individual acts of heroism, to be sure. But Le Chambon was very, very different because the village, as well as the surrounding area, was united in its courage:

From December 1940 to September 1944, the inhabitants of the French village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon (population 5,000) and the villages on the surrounding plateau (population 24,000) provided refuge for an estimated 5,000 people. This number included an estimated 3,000”“3,500 Jews who were fleeing from the Vichy authorities and the Germans.

Led by Pastor André Trocmé of the Reformed Church of France [French Huguenot], his wife Magda, and his assistant, Pastor Edouard Theis, the residents of these villages offered shelter in private homes, in hotels, on farms, and in schools. They forged identification and ration cards for the refugees, and in some cases guided them across the border to neutral Switzerland. These actions of rescue were unusual during the period of the Holocaust insofar as they involved the majority of the population of an entire region.

Pierre Sauvage, one of the saved children, grew up to become a documentary filmmaker. In the 1980s he made a film about Le Chambon entitled “Weapons of the Spirit.” Here’s a small clip:

The attitude of the couple is one that I’ve learned is not unusual among rescuers. They almost always deny heroism or any special sort of behavior at all, and act as though what they did was merely normal. The man in the clip says that at first it was not particularly dangerous to shelter the Jews, but then it became so. He’s referring to the fact that during the last year and a half of the German occupation, the Nazis began to crack down more on the people of Le Chambon, even murdering some of the leaders. But the village never cracked, and never betrayed the Jews whose rescue it had taken on.

It’s fairly clear what was going on with Le Chambon, and what was different about it. As Sauvage put it in an interview with Bill Moyers:

SAUVAGE: …[They were a] singular group of people with a singular history: this Huguenot stock, this memory of their persecution, not only the fact that they had a history of persecution but that they remembered it, that it mattered to them.

…I think on the one hand, there was that sense of identification with somebody else who was persecuted. On the other, there was their particular slant on their Christian faith which both mandated deeds””that was essential””but also involved a certain, special kinship with the Jews.

MOYERS: Through persecution, through…

SAUVAGE: Well, even broader than that. Simply because the Jews, for many of the Christians of the area, were the People of the Book. These were Christians whose sense of roots went that far back that they were comfortable with the Jewish roots of their faith.

Sauvage’s parents ended up emigrating to the US, where he was raised. But in a great irony, they (like a small number of other Holocaust survivors) abandoned their Jewish identity to the point of not even telling their son that they were Jewish. This is what happened, as Sauvage tells it:

MOYERS: You grew up in New York. Did you hear growing up about Le Chambon? Did your parents constantly refer to it, make you mindful of that part of your story?

SAUVAGE: Well, I guess the answer to that is perhaps a big paradox about the making of the film. The answer is no, my parents did not talk much about Le Chambon. Oh, I knew I was born there. But I didn’t know that Le Chambon had mattered in any particular way.

They basically were people who had put the past behind them to the extent of not even allowing me to know that they were Jewish and that I was Jewish.

MOYERS: They didn’t tell you?

SAUVAGE: They did not tell me. Till I was 18.

MOYERS: You were 18? Nothing in the home had indicated this, nothing in the conversation had indicated this, nothing in your own intuition had indicated this?

SAUVAGE: You know when you were raised under a taboo, the power of that taboo is extraordinary. People sometimes can’t believe that I could have not suspected or known. But the truth is I did not. I did not.

It may not be meaningless that the film was not the work of a dutiful child fulfilling his parents’ fondest wishes. It was the work of a rebellious child, laying a claim to a part of the past, indeed to a heritage, indeed to an identity that he had essentially been deprived of.

MOYERS: In what sense, rebellion?

SAUVAGE: Well, the mere fact of becoming Jewish was a rebellion. I was sort of sent forth into the world as a “nothing.” I wasn’t a Christian, I was simply a “nothing.”

That satisfied me for quite a while, by the way. I was a student in Paris and it never bothered me. It took a long time for me to start measuring that that was not a productive way to live your life. I think two major influences–one, my wife, who is Jewish, and who sort of was working on me””a lot.

And the other, actually, was Le Chambon. Because I realized that a lot of what they did came out of their strong sense of self, their intimate knowledge of who they were, of what their history was. And I realized that, well, if they were getting such strength from being who they are, then I had to aspire to be who I was.

So for Sauvage it came full circle—Le Chambon saved his life, and then Le Chambon helped to give him back his Jewish identity.

[NOTE: If you want to learn more about the persecution the Huguenots had historically faced, see this.]

And now for Obamacare and the small businesses

The New Neo Posted on by

This is news?

The only “news” is why the WaPo has decided to finally report it. I don’t know the answer. Perhaps they’re trying to slip it in and hope no one notices in all the Bridgegate hysteria.

Whatever people read in the paper or don’t read in the paper, though, they will be inclined to notice it if/when it finally starts happening to them, which ought to be before the 2014 election:

When millions of health-insurance plans were canceled last fall, the Obama administration tried to be reassuring, saying the terminations affected only the small minority of Americans who bought individual policies.

But according to industry analysts, insurers and state regulators, the disruption will be far greater, potentially affecting millions of people who receive insurance through small employers by the end of 2014.

While some cancellation notices already have gone out, insurers say the bulk of the letters will be sent in October, shortly before the next open-enrollment period begins. The timing ”” right before the midterm elections ”” could be difficult for Democrats who are already fending off Republican attacks about the Affordable Care Act and its troubled rollout.

Ben Sasse…

The New Neo Posted on by

…who’s running for the Senate from Nebraska, sounds like a good guy to me.

Nebraska born and bred. Harvard undergrad. Ph.D. in history from Yale, his prize-winning doctoral thesis was on populist conservatism from the 1950s to the 1970s. Lots of business background. Sense of humor. And last but far from least, a specialist in health care insurance.

Some good quotes from Sasse*:

“Most of us were taught that government exists to provide for the common defense ”” a military and a social-safety net ”” but the actual budgets show that our government has become a big insurance company that also runs a navy.”…

As a college president [his current job], Sasse likes to conduct informal surveys of students. “I ask them what the Republican party stands for,” he says. “Most don’t have a clue. They think Republicans are for rich people and big business. We’ve got to do a better job of conveying our ideas. We need to have an American constitutional, reformation, revival movement.”

Sasse is 41 years old, which seems very very young to me. But that “most of us were taught” quote marks him as a member of an older generation than one would think. I’m not so sure even most 41-year-old were taught such things; maybe in Nebraska they were, but in liberal enclaves they may already have been learning that government exists to do whatever we’d like it to do, if only we could pry the money out of the cold, live (and dead) hands of the rich.

[NOTE*: Pronounced “sass,” not “sassy.”]