Obama had a bright suggestion for his insurance companies (they do kind of belong to him, don’t they?):
The Obama administration said Thursday it would allow millions of Americans whose insurance policies had been canceled to purchase bare-bones plans next year, in another 11th-hour tweak to the law likely to cause consternation among health insurers.
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told a group of six senators in a letter that people whose policies had been canceled because of new requirements under the Affordable Care Act would be allowed to purchase “catastrophic” plans. Those plans previously had been restricted under the new law to people under the age of 30 or those who qualified for a set of specific hardship exemptions.
Basically, this means they’ve expanded the definition of “hardship” to include “screwed by the Obamacare regulations.” Come to think of it, that makes sense.
In fact, though, it’s even later than the eleventh hour. Many insurers are saying this move would amplify the chaos in an already chaotic situation.
I have a question for Obama, Sebelius, and the rest: if the individual policies cancelled were such terrible “junk,” why are you allowing those who originally had them to purchase one of the very types of policy you defined as “junk” in the first place? Might it be because catastrophic insurance can be a valid choice for some people depending on their circumstances, and not “junk” at all?
Another question for Obama and company: why not just let anyone purchase a catastrophic plan who wants to do so? Wouldn’t that be a novel idea?
Lately there’s been so much news that I don’t have the time to write in depth about all the things I’d like to. So I’m going to put on my “linker” hat and turn into Mini-Instapundit for the day:
Say what you will about Mitt Romney, he was one of the best men—on the personal level—ever to run for president in my lifetime. Maybe the best. And I believe he would have been a very good president, for all the reasons I’ve stated in the million or so (give or take a few) words I’ve written about him on this blog.
Looks interesting, but oh so painful (for me, anyway; perhaps not so much for you):
NOW they make it.
And here’s some snarky yet interesting commentary from the left:
…[I]n the end, Romney wasn’t as easy to hate as some other politicians might be.
So a year after he joined that small, melancholy club of presidential losers, it’s time that even those of us who thought it would be a terrible thing if he became president can see Romney as a human being. In January, Netflix will be releasing a behind-the-scenes documentary called “Mitt,” and the preview is surprisingly endearing…
Not so easy to hate? They certainly gave a good imitation of it, didn’t they?
NOW they can afford to admit that the man they slandered (and continue to slander*) was a good man, because it doesn’t cost them anything. They got their Obama second term, by hook or by crook. Hope it turns out to be a Pyrrhic victory.
[NOTE: *I’m using the word “slander” in its colloquial rather than legal sense. Legally, however, slander is spoken and libel is written, and the entire kit and caboodle is legally known as defamation.]
RUSH: Now, I got a post here at Legal Insurrection. And the poster, the writer is somebody that calls themselves Neocon, but it’s actually just a post pointing to something in the Washington Post, and they point to the headline, and they say, “Look what’s gonna happen here. They’re gonna make Obama a victim. That’s how they’re gonna explain this,” and the Washington Post headline: “Obama Suffers Most From Year of Turmoil, Poll Finds.”
It’s a Washington Post/ABC poll, and the article goes on to describe the precipitous decline in Obama’s standing in the approval numbers and how that is causing Obama to suffer. Not people who’ve lost their health insurance, no. Not people who are going to be. Not people who’ve lost their jobs. Not people who can’t pay off student loans. Not people who are trapped because of the Obama economy.
No, no, no! We’re not worried about them. “Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Obama! Oh, Obama is suffering more than anybody from this.” This is perverted, and it is sick, and it is their way of dealing with this. I went and researched my website, and it’s all the way back on October the 16th where I first made reference to this fact that the Democrats, the left, the media were going to start portraying Obama as a victim.
There’s quite a bit more at the Limbaugh link. I believe he regularly posts transcripts of his entire shows.
So to those of you who asked me about it: no, the Rush mention didn’t drive any traffic here that I could see. After all, the link was to Legal Insurrection, a site where the powers that be (Professor William A. Jacobson of Cornell) kindly allow me to cross-post.
It’s always extremely nice to get some recognition from the biggees—even if yesterday Rush did call me by the dread n-word: “Neocon.” And so: many thanks!
…that maybe this was what they were going for in the now-famous Obamacare ad with the nerdy guy in the onesie that was supposed to appeal to the sought-after millenials:
The first is Obamacare’s Pajama Boy. The second is Johnny Galecki of CBS’s “Big Bang Theory.”
Commenter “Paul in Boston” links to this piece by Kevin Drum claiming that there are many Obamacare success stories. “Paul in Boston” writes that:
After reading them they sound like the ads that appear in the comments section of lots of websites. “You can earn $8000 a month in your spare time at home”¦”.
My response is that I never had any doubt whatsoever that there will be many Obamacare success stories and relative success stories.
People who had trouble getting insurance before because of losing a job and having pre-existing conditions (especially if they waited too long to purchase new insurance).
People whose income was too high for Medicaid but who now qualify for it, especially if they were uninsured before.
People whose income was too high for Medicaid but who will now get hefty subsidies on the exchange.
That there will be some success stories is not the issue. The issue is how many will be hurt by Obamacare (“failure” stories), and how those pluses and minuses balance out, as well the feeling of betrayal engendered by the false pretenses under which the ACA was sold to the American people. Also, the fact that the American people never really “bought” Obamacare; the Democrats in Congress did.
But make no mistake about it, there will be success stories, and those stories will be touted to the skies. Another problem for Obama, though, is that he had hoped the success stories would come before the failure stories rather than after them.
Some research has been published indicating that the offspring of same-sex couples may not be doing quite as well as other kids, and it has met with a firestorm of politically-correct disapproval. This should come as no surprise; politics is rife in the social sciences.
Of course it affects the quality of the research done, as well as the hiring of faculty. If a person really cared about truth, truth would be followed wherever it led. But that is too dangerous; witness what happened to Larry Summers when he dared to mention the paucity of women at the very highest levels of science, and to suggest that this phenomenon should be studied.
This is what goes on today:
Such homogeneity of sociopolitical views among social scientists almost invariably leads to “groupthink,” a phenomenon that occurs when group members have relatively homogeneous backgrounds or ideological views. With this groupthink comes self-censorship and pressure on dissenters, the negative stereotyping and discounting of conservative perspectives, and a failure to consider conservative-friendly (as compared with liberal-friendly) question framing and data interpretation. A recent national survey of psychology professors found that one in four reported that they would be less likely to give a positive recommendation on a journal manuscript or grant application having a conservative perspective, and one in six would be less likely to invite conservative colleagues to participate in a symposium…
It is not surprising, nor is it indicative of nefarious scientific misconduct, that researchers of different ideological persuasions would produce findings consistent with their own ideology. It is human nature to frame research questions and interpret findings in ways that confirm one’s political beliefs. Such biases are the norm, even among scientists. This is particularly true when it comes to research on social issues because social scientists, many of whom were attracted to social science because of its progressive ideology, often have values invested in the issues they research. One can find such ideological tilt throughout social science research. For instance, how researchers interpret data on the relative contributions of hereditary factors versus environment to intelligence, or on biological factors in personality styles, seems to be partly a function of their political views.
One could argue that social science research—a field I know something about, having studied it and even worked briefly in it—is fatally flawed anyway as a scientific pursuit. It is certainly deeply flawed, but it is also used increasingly to justify the increasing number of government interventions that are all designed (supposedly, that is) to make us healthier and better people. As such, it’s doubly dangerous that PC thought dominates it so thoroughly.
[*NOTE: the title of this post is from the 2010 movie “The Kids Are All Right,” about a family parented by two women, with two children conceived through artificial insemination.]
So, Peggy Noonan just started to perceive this a few weeks ago?
I would add that in recent weeks I have begun to worry about the basic competency of the administration, its ability to perform the most fundamental duties of executive management.
Maybe Noonan’s time lag in noticing is because she’s a nice person. At least, I’ve always gotten the impression that she’s a nice person, and nice people often don’t like to think ill of others. Especially others they once thought highly of, and Peggy was an Obama fan once, not so very long ago.
But actually, the fact that Obama and company lack management skills has been obvious for a long, long time. And before you say “But neo, you’ve always said yourself that he was smart,” let me just point out that “smart” and “competent” are not the same things. Nor are management skills.
I’ve long said that Obama has basic intelligence of the sort that probably did allow him to get good grades when he finally decided to apply himself, which probably had happened by the time he was at Harvard Law School. He’s also very smart (and probably even a good manager) about politics and especially about campaigns, as are the advisors he chose for that purpose. How else could he have won the election of 2012 (and for those of you who think he cheated to win, that would come under the heading of “smart about politics” too)? But it was clear even in 2008 that he had virtually no executive experience except for running his campaigns, which meant that even things he wanted to get right as president—and I think we can safely assume that the Obamacare website was one of them—would be at risk for poor management.
As president Obama has hired a great many political operatives who are untried and untested in other arenas, which has meant that this tendency of his towards poor management has been greatly multiplied. Appointing people with more experience and wider knowledge of the world would have avoided the problem, but it would also have meant some of those people might have criticized Obama or crossed him or showed him up, and he couldn’t have that.
Along with Noonan, I have to say that no president in my lifetime has ever struck me as incompetent in this same sense. Some were more competent than others, of course. Some I liked and some I didn’t, some I agreed with and some I disagreed with, but I never questioned their basic competence to run things This time I do, and it’s not just Obama—it’s the whole lot of them. Of course, it doesn’t take much competence to muck things up royally.
“Obama Suffers Most From Year of Turmoil, Poll Finds.”
Accompanying it is this photo:
The article goes on to describe the precipitous decline in Obama’s standing in approval polls this year:
His position is all the more striking when compared with his standing a year ago, as he was preparing for his second inauguration after a solid reelection victory. That high note proved fleeting as the president faced a series of setbacks, culminating in the botched rollout of his Affordable Care Act two months ago.
I offer the above as another demonstration of the care with which these things are written. Some may think reporters and editors are simply clumsy or indifferent writers, and sometimes they are. But much of the time they choose their words (and photos) with exquisite and subtle care. They also realize that most people only look at the headlines and photos of most articles, and that those are therefore the most important, and that even people who do read the article often read only the first few paragraphs.
In this article, the headline and photo have been chosen to suggest that Obama is a suffering victim—in fact, the greatest victim—of a series of unfortunate circumstances that have befallen him. Nearly a martyr. And the copy (the paragraph I’ve quoted here is the second one in the piece) reinforces that idea by this phrase, “faced a series of setbacks.” Passive voice; no actor.
The only mention of culpability I could find occurred in the article’s third paragraph, and it’s a curious one:
…[I]t is the president who has suffered the most damage from his administration’s self-inflicted wounds and a year of partisan conflict that included a partial shutdown of the government.
Again, we have the president as sufferer, and even though here (finally!) the wounds are “self-inflicted.” But it is the administration rather than the president himself that is doing the damage. Note, also, that this observation is followed in the same sentence by a balancing reference to the government shutdown, which didn’t hurt Obama at all and was widely blamed on the Republicans.
All in all, a masterpiece of subtly crafted writing designed to effect a certain perception: that of a beleaguered president who is the suffering victim.
Now to the poll itself. In some ways encouraging—because it indicates, as do other polls, that people are not liking Obamacare and are not as positive about Obama or Democrats in general as they were just a short while ago—certain of the findings are mind-bogglingly discouraging. As an example of the latter, I give you the following:
The president is back in positive territory, however marginally, on two important attributes ”” whether he understands the problems of everyday Americans and whether he is honest and trustworthy. At the worst of the health-care mess, bare majorities said no to both questions. Today bare majorities say yes.
Obama has recovered some credibility? Why? There’s also this, “A 26-point Obama advantage a year ago on who would better protect the middle class has fallen to just six points in the latest survey.”
I’m glad it’s fallen. But why does he still have any advantage at all? I know the answer to that question, or at least I think I know: Republicans are strongly and widely perceived as only caring about the rich. It seems it would take a much more powerful demonstration of real-world negative consequences for the middle class unequivocally and unmistakably linked to Obama’s policies, and of real-world positive consequences for the middle class unequivocally and unmistakably linked to Republicans’ policies, to make a sizable dent in these perceptions.
You may be reluctant to place Joan Fontaine among the “greats.” You may even have trouble distinguishing her from her perhaps-more-well-known-actress sister—from whom she was estranged for most of her life—Olivia de Havilland, who is presently 97 and still alive.
But Fontaine was my favorite, for two early films of hers: “Rebecca” and “Jane Eyre.” The two roles are related. Rebecca was a Gothic novel about a shy young woman who marries an arrogant rich guy and goes off to live in a mansion with the shadow of his former wife (now deceased) hanging over her head. It was acknowledged to have been inspired in part by Jane Eyre, a novel about a shy young woman who goes off to live as governess in a mansion owned by an arrogant rich guy with the shadow of a madwomen (who turns out to be his wife) hanging over her head.
The roles of Jane and the nameless main character of “Rebecca” (Rebecca is the name of the dead former wife) are somewhat similar, and Fontaine could have chosen to play them almost exactly the same. But instead she instilled each with a different tone, and she did it mainly with her body language. The young woman she plays in “Rebecca” is shy and not especially brave, with the easily-seen-through courage of bravado, and her posture is a bit slumped and nervous. Her Jane is also shy but has an inner strength, a core of iron, despite the requirement to appear modest and sedate. Her posture in that film is quiet and self-contained, with a minimum of movement and fuss.
The love interest in “Rebecca” is the brusque, sometimes short-tempered, and somewhat mysterious Maxim de Winter, played by Laurence Olivier. Jane’s own true love Mr. Rochester is played by Orson Welles, who seems an odd choice until you see his hypnotic intensity in the role—to me, he is the best Rochester ever.
“Rebecca” was directed by the master Alfred Hitchcock. “Jane Eyre” boasted a script written by John Houseman and Aldous Huxley. Both movies are in black and white, and both dramatically emphasize the more gothic aspects of their respective stories.
YouTube has full-length videos of both movies, but not as many shorter excerpts as I’d like. Here’s a clip of the frightened Fontaine in “Rebecca,” in a scene in which she succumbs to curiosity and enters the bedroom of her predecessor Rebecca and is then interrupted by the stupendously creepy head housekeeper (and Rebecca’s former personal maid) Mrs. Danvers, played by the incomparable Judith Anderson, who seems to be reprising her turn as Lady Macbeth and/or presaging her performance as Medea.
Fontaine hardly speaks here. But watch the way she moves and the way she watches Anderson:
And here’s Fontaine as Jane Eyre. This scene is in an over-the-top staging that would be read as ludicrous today. What saves it from foolishness, even in this short clip, is the utter conviction both Fontaine and Welles bring to their lines. Here Mr. Rochester surprises Jane by proposing to her when she thinks he is going to marry someone else and send her away instead:
When I was doing the research for this film, I noticed that there are an enormous number of filmed versions of the story. They keep remaking it and trying to get it right, but getting it right would be impossible, so they just keep on trying. The book is too beloved, too literary, too plot-laden, with too much verbiage devoted to Jane’s internal thoughts, to be a completely satisfying film in comparison to what the reader can conjure up in the realm of imagination. But from my hour or two spent watching clips of the same proposal scene from almost all the different versions, I have to say that the 1944 version that starred Fontaine and Welles was by far the best and the only one for me.
Yes, the 1944 version took many liberties with the plot and the dialogue. Among other things, it’s a great deal shorter than most modern versions, many of which were first made as a TV series and could therefore take a more leisurely stroll through the plot. But Huxley and Houseman and director Robert Stevenson knew what they were doing, and the subsequent innumerable Janes and Rochesters never seem to inhabit their roles in the same way.
Here are a few clips to sample—all of them, for comparison sake, of that same proposal scene. In chronological order, first we have 1970’s George C. Scott and Susannah York (both of these great actors seem miscast to me here):
1973:
1983:
1996 (William Hurt miscast as Rochester):
2006:
2011 (with Mia Wasikowska, an actress I admire a great deal but whose body language and manner in this role completely misses the period effect; she might as well be wearing jeans and a T-shirt)
That may be way too many Janes and Rochesters for your taste.
