…from the Democrats’ point of view is not that it will keep people from enrolling for a while.
After all, there’s no enormous rush, although it would have been nice to have gotten the ball rolling faster.
It’s the undermining of whatever lingering trust anyone might have retained in the federal government’s ability to run such a thing. It’s on that trust that Obamacare depends.
Some of you might say, “What are you talking about; who trusted the government even before this?” I contend that there are many people who did—although most of them are not on the right—and this has to make those folks feel a lot shakier about that trust.
And I wonder whether anyone except the right remembers—ah, it was so long ago—that part of the original argument for Obamacare and how it would be funded was that waste would be trimmed from other programs. Yes, you may laugh, but that was the drill. Now that we know about the huge waste of money that was the rollout itself, I wonder whether many of those who believed such savings would happen have managed to hold on to those ideas? I’m not talking about the bureaucrats and officials and pundits who either believed their own projections or were lying to cynically exploit what used to be called The Masses, but those ordinary voters who accepted what they were saying and thought it plausible. Do most of those voters still believe?
Now, it’s possible that all this messiness is just a passing phase and that the Obamacare website will get its act together soon enough. But at that point a lot of people will be getting some very, very bad news about their premium rates, their deductibles, their co-pays, and/or which doctors and hospitals are now out of their networks.
Others, of course, will be getting some good news.
Which group will be larger? And how many of the people who get bad news will be Democrats who might then begin to wonder about giving their votes in the future to a party that has so grievously betrayed its promises to them?
I wonder if, given the opportunity, they also would do what I used to do when I was a little girl: break the Oreos into pieces and mix the pieces into Mott’s applesauce. The apples gave it a little kick, and the entire concoction had a nice crunch if you ate it before the cookies became soggy, a feat I always managed.
Alas, I no longer eat Oreos, because I now can’t eat chocolate since it gives me migraines. I suppose this inability to eat Oreos is a good thing, though, because that’s one less addictive fat-and-sugar-laden treat that can beckon to me. The news that they are addictive is no surprise, nor is it any surprise that in general foods loaded with fat and sugar are addictive.
And “addictive” isn’t just a figure of speech in this case:
New research suggests that sugary, fatty treats can elicit the same reaction and activate the brain in a similar manner as cocaine and morphine, at least in lab rats…
The experiment was…repeated with…rats being offered injections of cocaine or morphine in one room and saline in the other…[T]he researchers found that the rats had an “equivalent preference” for a room when it contained an Oreo as when they were given injections of morphine and cocaine.
Further examination of the rats’ brains found that they had higher cellular activity in the “pleasure center” of their brain after eating an Oreo versus being injected with one of the drugs.
But the rats didn’t “seem to get much pleasure” out of eating rice crackers. My guess is that they’re not partial to cardboard, either.
One New Jersey Republican source noted that, if anything, the dichotomy between the two outcomes will only further crystallize Christie as a “unique” player in an increasingly partisan national environment.
“I don’t think the Senate election outcome says much about Christie’s future, except that if Booker wins handily even after running a lackluster campaign, it will underscore just how blue New Jersey is, and how unique Christie is to be able to carry it,” the source said.
You may recall that Christie may have had the chance four months ago to appoint a Republican senator but did not, and chose to have this special election instead. Note I wrote “may have had,” because it wasn’t at all clear that Christie had the right to make such an appointment in the first place, and he would have faced legal challenges by Democrats had he tried.
Many conservatives were angry about it (a lot of them were already mad at Christie), but that single increased Republican presence would not have made a difference to anything in the current Senate, and whomever he’d appointed would have almost certainly lost election next year, because New Jersey hasn’t had a Republican senator in over forty years and shows no indications of wanting one.
But it looks like Christie will sail to re-election in a deep blue state:
A Monmouth University poll released Tuesday found Christie leading his Democratic challenger, Buono, 59 percent to 35 percent. That’s in a state President Barack Obama carried in 2012 by 17 points.
“We are looking at a potential 20-point margin in a blue state and an outright win among Hispanic voters,” Monmouth polling director Patrick Murray said in a statement. “What more could a 2016 GOP presidential contender ask for?”
Well, he/she could ask for being able to appeal to conservatives nationwide. My reading is that a great many of them strongly distrust him, in particular holding it against him that he acquiesced to a love-fest photo-op with Obama after hurricane Sandy and just prior to the 2012 election.
What do I think? I think it’s way premature to talk seriously about 2016. There may be some Republican candidates in the running that I’ll like better than Christie.
But I will say one thing (well, actually, more than one): if Christie is the Republican nominee, I will vote for him with something akin to enthusiasm. That’s because I think for the most part he does have conservative principles, and unlike so many, he is able to articulate them clearly, colorfully, and forcefully. He’s a politician all right (the plus side is that he’s not naive about politics and has good political instincts), but he talks like a straight shooter. He’s funny. He’s a fighter, and he has guts. He’s smart. He has a proven record of knowing how to appeal to Democrats and minorities (for example, he earns over 30% of the black vote in New Jersey, which is extraordinary for a Republican) without turning into a Democrat. Stylistically he is nothing like Mitt Romney, with none of his vulnerabilities in terms of appealing to the blue collar crowd, a very important demographic.
Christie is a potential winner, no doubt about it. Is he perfect? Far from it. But he is a fiscally conservative Republican, and one tough cookie. He can take the heat that will no doubt be thrown his way.
Of course. The Senate voted last night, the House will approve today.
Now it’s time to emphasize what a train wreck Obamacare is. However, that could end up leading to single payer if the Republicans don’t do well in the 2014 elections. That should be Republicans’ next focus: doing everything they can to keep the House and win back the Senate.
But I’m not knocking the effort that led to the shutdown and the debt-ceiling brinksmanship. I understand why they made it, although I thought it was poorly planned and would lead to this end almost inevitably. Unfortunately, even if Republicans get control of the legislature in 2014 (which could happen; I think the bad feeling engendered by the last few weeks will blow over), Obama will retain veto power and he will not be the least bit shy about using it. That is one of the many reasons why his re-election in 2012 was such a blow.
I know that many of you see all this as merely rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Maybe yes, maybe no. The actual implementation of Obamacare will be quite the wild card.
Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane famously said that if you can remember anything about the 60s you weren’t really there.
Cute, but not really true. I bet even Kantner remembers quite a bit (as you can see by this), and he was most definitely there.
As was I.
In my post earlier today about Cornell in the late 60s, commenter “mizpants” had the following to say:
How terrible the sixties seem in retrospect – more and more so, the older I get. It was truly the opening of a Pandora’s box. The anarchic glee looks diabolical from here. I used to nod vaguely when people waxed nostalgic about that time. Now I leave the room.
Well, I ain’t going to wax nostalgic; I didn’t much care for the 60s even at the time. Oh, it was nice to be young, and the music and the fashions were fun and fine, and there was a sense of something new beginning. But I was very uneasy about what that new thing actually would turn out to be.
People seemed silly, full of themselves and self-indulgent, histrionic, violent, and (this is rarely written about) misogynistic or even misanthropic as they mouthed platitudes about the rights of women and of mankind. Those things gave me an uncomfortable feeling that fools and reckless idiots, or people up to no good, were in the driver’s seat of the movement. They seemed pretty drunk on their own power, too, while simultaneously accusing others (the older folk, of course) of being power-mad.
Now that I’ve learned more about the repercussions over time, it seems even worse. But even some of that was hinted at then, as I learned in a course I took that was called “Russian Intellectual History”:
It was there I learned – without anyone ever telling me directly – that in the 60s we were reliving those long-past Russian years in a somewhat altered, Americanized form. No, my generation was not unique; that was clear. No, we were not inventing something that had never been tried, going down some wonderful path that had never been trod. We were going somewhere that in the past had led to nothing good.
I could see it for myself; all I had to do was read, and think. If we don’t learn history we are indeed condemned to repeat it. And even if we do learn it, we may be condemned to repeat it anyway.
It was not only reading about it in the abstract; I was experiencing it more up-close and personal:
I also remember attending an SDS meeting at that same university…I was flirting with Leftist thought at the time – trying it on for size, as it were. And what I saw there made it clear to me that it was not a good fit for me. The level of mindless rage was immediately apparent. The speeches seemed nothing but name-calling and obscenities, with a few prepositions and conjunctions and verbs thrown in to aid the flow. It was assumed that everyone was on the same page and no argument or reasoning was necessary. The type of language used reflected the jettisoning of the conventions of rational discourse on the part of speakers who fancied themselves revolutionaries.
It was all there, even then. And this is not 20/20 hindsight. I well remember my visceral feeling of slowly-dawning horror when attending that meeting. I didn’t totally understand it all at the time, but I sensed both on an intellectual and a gut level that what I was seeing was wrong, dangerous, and would lead to no good.
Nothing I’ve seen since has disabused me of that notion.
You might ask how I managed to remain a liberal Democrat for decades after that experience. I’d refer you to my change series for the answer, but I’ll add that I simply did not connect the radicals I saw at that meeting with most of the liberals in the Democratic Party. Also, I didn’t know much about conservatism and never thought to seek it out because what I read about it in my usual and trusted sources, the NY Times, the Boston Globe, and the New Yorker, made it seem not worth the trouble. It really took the advent of the internet to introduce me to it and get me to realize its value.
You’ve probably already heard about the EBT card breakdown during a power outage in which shoppers at a couple of Louisiana Walmarts purposely took advantage of the situation by “buying” a huge number of groceries for amounts that greatly exceeded their EBT limits in normal times.
You might say the Walmart managers were stupid not to ban the cards or limit the amount that could be charged on them for the duration of the problem, and perhaps you’d be right. But perhaps they thought that if they did that they would face a riot, or at least very bad PR, and so they decided to let people continue to use their cards freely (pun intended) and hope for the best.
As for the lawbreakers, we don’t know what percentage of the EBT-carrying population they represent. But it seems that quite a few cheaters happened to be in Walmart that day. They stole from Walmart (if Walmart is left holding the bag) or from the taxpayers, or perhaps from both. Why did they feel they could and should do it?
I don’t profess to know all the reasons. Some of it is mob mentality, some greed. But some of it is that the welfare system itself, and especially its more recent political manifestations (let’s soak the rich; they owe it to the rest of us to help us) engenders the idea that it’s your right to get free stuff if you’re poor or even just somewhat poor. So, why not get more free stuff when you can?
For some people, it’s a very slippery slope from one idea to the other. The payor is unseen and unknown in each case. The people who might be hurt by it are unseen and unknown as well. The mechanism is the same for each transaction: a card. And the venue is the same: Walmart.
I don’t live very close to one. But not too very far away, either. Perhaps just right (in the Goldilocks sense), because any closer and I’d be a lot poorer and a lot fatter, and any further away and I’d be sadder.
Yesterday I succumbed, as I sometimes do, to the seductive call of a piece of Whole Foods almond cream cake. After I’d partaken of its delicately perfumed, almond scented, moist and tender—well, you get the idea—it occurred to me that, unlike its policy with much of the rest of its food, Whole Foods is mum on the calorie content.
No accident, that. I thought perhaps I could find it online and write about it here. But when I Googled “whole foods” almond cream cake calories there was nothing among the first few except some recipes for supposed-but-bogus equivalents—and then, at number four on Google’s list, this previous post that I’d written only a year and a half ago on the very same subject, and which I’d already forgotten about.
I guess I could use the fact that I write approximately three posts a day as an excuse. But anyway, I really, really, really like that cream cake.
Question: If Ted Cruz and John Boehner were both on a sinking ship, who would be saved?
Answer: America.
Harsh? Look around you at what is happening to America and you will see harsh. I am not talking about closed parks and monuments. I am talking about the funds cut to nearly 9 million mothers and young children for food, breastfeeding support and infant formula.
That is harsh. Making a war against babies is harsh. And for what? Because Cruz, Republican senator from Texas, has grown so drunk on the sound of his own voice and so besotted with illusions of his own grandeur that he believes halting government today will propel him into the White House tomorrow?
You can read the whole thing if you wish, but that’s a sample of what passes for political discourse from a respected and middle-aged reporter-now-turned-opinion-writer. And from the comments section there (which you are welcome to peruse) the “Tea Party Racists” theme that Simon is flogging has become entrenched truth among Democrats (although if you want to see racism, just read some of the comments about Thomas Sowell in the comments section to Simon’s article).
It’s a feeding frenzy on the left because the sharks think they smell the blood of the dying GOP. It’s not the display of an isolated fringe, either, but a mainstream display by people who don’t think of themselves as polemicists.
Polemicists? Noted journalist Roger Simon neglects to convey a few itty bitty facts when he writes:
Remember Samuel Wurzelbacher? Known as “Joe the Plumber,” he was selected by John McCain as his presidential campaign mascot in 2008 with the same care McCain used to select Sarah Palin.
Over the weekend, Wurzelbacher posted an article on his blog titled: “America Needs a White Republican President.”
“Admit it,” the article said. “You want a white Republican president again. Wanting a white Republican president doesn’t make you racist, it just makes you American.”
America has come to a sorry pass. Not because there are still racists among us, but because the racists among us think they can tell us what makes an American.
Sounds pretty bad, doesn’t it? But here are the facts: (1) Joe the Plumber didn’t write the article, although he did put it on his site; (2) the article was written by a black man, Kevin Jackson, and is actually quite different than what one might think from reading the title (have a read). In it, Jackson is saying that if we had a white president people couldn’t argue that every criticism of him was due to racism.
Ironic, isn’t it, how Simon turns that around, and accuses Jackson (or whoever he thought wrote it) of racism? Either Simon didn’t even do his homework and failed to read the article and/or find out who wrote it, or he knows all of this and prefers to dissemble to his readers. I would bet on the latter.
[NOTE: Note, also, that Simon fails to link to the Jackson piece. Perhaps he doesn’t want his readers to actually read it and see what it really says.]
It has not escaped my notice that the Obamacare website is named “healthcare.gov.” That sounds innocuous enough, so why am I calling anyone’s attention to it?
It’s emblematic of the insidious nature of the language around the ACA that we hardly notice. But I very doubt doubt the site’s name was chosen casually. It is a very deliberate attempt (although almost beautiful in its subtlety) to make the populace think that what Obamacare—and government—dispenses is health care itself.
Government as healer, and as beneficent portal to doctors, nurses, hospitals, and medication; to treatment.
But what the government is actually offering here is health insurance. “Healthinsurance.gov” is not too unwieldy a phrase for a website URL. Of course, health insurance facilitates the procuring of health care for the majority of people (although the price of health care has risen so much partly as a result of widespread third-party coverage).
You won’t be seeing the website renamed “healthinsurance.gov” any time soon. Or any time at all. Even if we went to single payer—in which case it really would be healthinsurance.gov—the government would call it something else. In Britain, for example, they skip the “care” and just call it the National Health Service.
The Big Dig was the most expensive highway project in the U.S. and was plagued by escalating costs, scheduling overruns, leaks, design flaws, charges of poor execution and use of substandard materials, criminal arrests, and one death. The project was originally scheduled to be completed in 1998 at an estimated cost of $2.8 billion (in 1982 dollars, US$6.0 billion adjusted for inflation as of 2006). However, the project was completed only in December 2007, at a cost of over $14.6 billion ($8.08 billion in 1982 dollars, meaning a cost overrun of about 190%) as of 2006. The Boston Globe estimated that the project will ultimately cost $22 billion, including interest, and that it will not be paid off until 2038.
Get used to it, if you weren’t already. They don’t say “good enough for government work” for no reason:
The biggest problem with Healthcare.gov seems simple enough: It was built by people who are apparently far more familiar with government cronyism than they are with IT.
That’s one of the insights that can be gleaned from the work done by the Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that focuses on government transparency. In a report filed this past week, the group examined why the system broke as horribly as it did: The contracts awarded to those who built it were, by and large, existing government contractors with “deep political pockets.”..
Why did they get the work? The report hints at a likely reason: The companies were big lobbyists, with “some 17 contract winners reported spending more than $128 million on lobbying in 2011 and 2012.” Granted, some experience with government work is vital for any contractor, and the federal procurement system is geared to favor those already doing government work, but Sunlight pointed out that the list tips heavily toward those with both existing contracts and political leverage…
One…name in particular on the contractor list probably won’t be familiar to readers, but ought to be from now on: Science Applications International Corp., or SAIC. Nominally a defense contractor, SAIC has been involved with many government projects with ghastly end results, such as New York City’s fraud- and corruption-riddled $600 million CityTime payroll software boondoggle.
But many problems with the website were not the fault of incompetent contractors. One of the main difficulties, the sign-in process and the fact that an account must be created before a person can browse programs and prices, was intentional (although I doubt they meant it to be quite as awful as it has turned out). But there actually was a reason they made people sign in and be verified before they could get price quotes, and the reason was not a trivial one, although the whole thing underscores the problems with Obamacare and the federal government in general: they figured that if they allowed people to shop around and look at prices before their income level and eligibility for subsidies had been verified, too many viewers would see the real (that is, unsubsidized) prices and freak out at the cost. The government wanted lower-income people to only see the prices they’d actually be paying, with the government (in other words, the taxpayers and/or Obamacare subscribers with more money than they) footing the rest of the bill. So the real price of Obamacare would be hidden.
It’s exactly the opposite of discount stores where they proudly display the original price so you can see just how much it’s been marked down and feel that you’re getting a huge bargain. Of course, in that case, the consumer is free to accept or reject the product, taxpayers aren’t subsidizing the shopper, and the original price may even be inflated to make the buyer think the deal is even better.
But the point of the Obamacare site was to be, if not exactly duplicitous (after all, the subsidized price is in fact what a person getting a subsidy would actually pay), then certainly to be secretive about the bigger picture of cost. But one of the hallmarks of Obamacare has been this speed and secretiveness, so why would that change now?
Even Ezra Klein has interviewed a guy who noted it (Robert Laszewski, president of Health Policy and Strategy Associates):
One thing the Obama administration has been really paranoid about is rate shock. When someone like me says there’ll be rate shock they say you have to net out the subsidies. That is a fair point. But I think what happened was when they designed their system they were so paranoid about that that they wanted to make sure people browsing got the lowest price. That required signing in so you could see subsidies. And my theory is that’s why they went to the architecture they did even though the IT systems people wanted to go another way.
So not only are the problems no simple glitch, but they are only partly the fault of the IT people. Some of this is the fault of big government itself, and why so many people hate it. But in this case the Obama administration had political goals above all else, and they sacrificed efficiency and openness to them. This, of course, is not news.
[NOTE: Another bonus of the way the website was designed was to maximize the amount of information the government could glean about even casual browsers. The way the Obamacare website is set up, there are no casual browsers.
And to be fair, the government may also have feared that if people saw the unsubsidized prices first, they run screaming from the site and never return. This, of course, would spell doom for Obamacare, since it depends on a lot of young and healthy people enrolling.]
David Horowitz was a leader of the American left during the tumultuous 60s and 70s. Raised by Communist parents, he was a devoted mover and shaker in the cause, and an early editor of Ramparts magazine.
But Horowitz has been on the right for quite some time now; he chronicled his change experience in his book Radical Son, which I wrote about here and here and is recommended reading.
Having looked at activist political life from both sides now for quite a while, Horowitz is uniquely positioned to comment on left and right, old and new. Here is a small portion of what he said in a searing address he recently gave to the Kohler conference of the Bradley Foundation:
There is a marked difference between the radicals of the Sixties and the radical movement Obama is part of. In the Sixties, as radicals we said what we thought and blurted out what we wanted. We wanted a revolution, and we wanted it now. It was actually very decent of us to warn others as to what we intended. But because we blurted out our goal, we didn’t get very far. Americans were onto us. Those who remained on the left when the Sixties were over, learned from their experience. They learned to lie. The strategy of the lie is progressives’ new gospel. It is what the progressive bible ”” Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals ”” is all about. Alinsky is the acknowledged political mentor to Obama and Hillary, to the service and teacher unions, and to the progressive rank and file. Alinsky understood the mistake Sixties’ radicals had made. His message to this generation is easily summed up: Don’t telegraph your goals; infiltrate their institutions and subvert them; moral principles are disposable fictions; the end justifies the means; and never forget that your political goal is always power.
An SDS radical wrote in the Sixties: “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.” The Alinsky version is this: The issue is never the issue; the issue is always power: How to wring power out of the democratic process, how turn the process into an instrument of progressive control. How to use it to fundamentally transform the United States of America ”” which is exactly what Barack Obama warned he would do on the eve of his election.
The chosen legislative instrument to begin this transformation was Obamacare. It was presented as an act of charity, a plan to cover the uninsured. That was the “issue” as they presented it. But the actual goal of Obamacare’s socialist sponsors was a “single payer system” ”“ government healthcare ”” which would put the state in control of the lives of every American, man, woman and child. That is the reason that none of the promises made about Obamacare was true, beginning with his campaign lie that Obamacare government health care was not a program he would support. Obamacare will not cover 30 million uninsured Americans, as Obama and the Democrats said it would; Obamacare will not lower costs, as they promised it would; Obamacare will deprive many Americans of their doctors and healthcare plans, as they assured everyone it would not; Obamacare is a new tax, as they swore it wouldn’t be. All these promises Obama and the Democrats made were false because they were only a camouflage for their real goal actual goal, which was universal control.
This false face of the left was not actually new. Horowitz says that in his parents’ generation, Communists were for the most part working underground and secretly, calling themselves “progressives” and “Jeffersonian democrats” instead of disclosing their true affiliation. But in the 60s, his generation of leftists came in from the cold of being undercover and declared themselves proudly for what they actually were, thinking the time was right for their brand of politics.
It wasn’t.
And it probably wasn’t in 2008, either, despite the fact that in the interim the educational system and the MSM had both come more and more under leftist control and had prepared the way, at least in part (and, by the way, many of those early 60s and 70s leftists have been instrumental in that endeavor). But if Obama had openly declared his leftism during the election of 2008 or even that of 2012 (when it could have been inferred even more easily than in 2008, although it could have and should have been figured out in both years), he most likely would have lost. The left still has to remain somewhat stealthy—although less stealthy than before—until it achieves its over-arching goal of indefinite one party rule.
[NOTE: If you followed the Ramparts link to its Wiki entry, you’d have seen see the following list of writers who contributed articles there: Robert Scheer, Murray Rothbard, Noam Chomsky, Cesar Chavez, Seymour Hersh, Tom Hayden, Angela Davis, Jonathan Kozol, Todd Gitlin, Sol Stern, Tariq Ali, Alexander Cockburn, Christopher Hitchens, Saul Landau, David Welsh, and John Beecher. A sort of who’s who of the radical left at the time. Besides Horowitz and Peter Collier, both editors of the magazine who underwent a left-to-right conversion, Christopher Hitchens had a sort of half-conversion that was equally dramatic. The Wiki entry also mentions that Brit Hume was the Washington correspondent for the magazine for a short time.
Why would they want to live in an oppressed nation. Is it because they think they will be the oppressors and they get sadistic joy from that? Do they think they will redistribute the wealth of a nation’s people and take it for themselves. Do they think they will all be the leaders living in luxury?
I dont understand. I see it happening but I cannot understand why any human born free would want to change a free land into something so abominable.
My answer:
Some are in it for the power.
Some really think that they are the ones who can figure out a way to bring justice, peace, and joy to man/womankind, and save the planet as well (see this book by Thomas Sowell). “We are the ones we have been waiting for.”
Tyranny rides in on the back of a union of the amoral/immoral power-hungry and the idealistic dreamers. The second are the tools of the first.
And what makes it easier to happen is when we get lazy and abdicate teaching our young people how to avoid it. Watch:
You know, listening to that again (and I’ve heard it several times in the last few years, and linked to it before) brings tears to my eyes. A brilliant, brilliant expression of a truth we’ve come to know very well in the years since he said it. Let’s hope we never ever have to tell our children what Reagan says at the end there.]
