Internet Scofflaw

Answer: because of liberalism. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Item #1: The blogosphere is abuzz over this ad from Barack Obama’s twitter account:

As many have pointed out, this tells you a lot about this how they see their own followers. I think it’s even more insulting to Obama’s non-followers: the very idea that grown men and women with jobs and families are going to change their opinion of the government taking over health care, just because a spoiled man-child came home from college for the holidays carrying marching orders from the president to harangue his parents with hope, change, and ironic eyebrows.

More on this in a moment, but first, item #2: Americans are sorting themselves into red and blue communities:

Democrats and Republicans are much less likely to live among each other than they were a generation ago.

Back in 1976 — the year of a close presidential election — just over a quarter of the population lived in “landslide counties,” where the winning margin was greater than 20 percentage points. . . Last year, more than half the country lived in landslide counties. . .

States themselves have become more polarized, with most legislatures and governorships controlled entirely by one party. As a result, not only are blue and red states tracking different courses on just about every issue, but some people are seeking to escape their states.

But if Americans are sorting themselves into like-minded communities, are they doing so on purpose? In other words, are people voting with their feet by consciously moving to states or counties that reflect their own partisan preferences?

Researchers at the University of Virginia and the University of Southern California suggest that, yes, they may be.

This comes as no surprise to me. The fact is, blue-state liberals are very frequently a pain in the neck to work with. (Or to live with, I would guess, but fortunately I don’t have pajama boy in my family.) Why? Because of the constant political harangues in what ought to be non-political contexts. Exactly the kind of harangues that President Obama is asking ironic pajama-clad children to inflict on their parents this Christmas.

Case in point: Years ago I related the story of how a discussion of candidates for an important position in my department was turned to a nonsensical slam on Sarah Palin, apropos of nothing at all.

Case in point: More recently, at a retirement party for a valued member of our faculty (who happened to be female), another faculty member launched into a speech about how the departing faculty member reminded him of Hillary Clinton who was then leaving her job as Secretary of State. This was intended as a high compliment. In fact, the comparison was absurd and insulting; the two women have nothing at all in common other than their gender, and the departing woman was quite accomplished, in contrast to Clinton’s complete lack of any accomplishments at the State Department (unless you count her courageous stand against security at overseas consulates).

Case in point: More recently still, a colleague sent me an essay he wrote on the government shutdown. It rambled a bit, but I can summarize its key points: (1) Republicans claim to oppose Obamacare. (2) Obamacare is obviously great; no one could honestly oppose it. (3) So why are Republicans really shutting down the government? (4) It must be because they’re racist. He asked me for my comments, which I duly provided him.

I could go on, but I won’t. (Indeed, I’m leaving out the more painful harangues I’ve received.) In short, if blue-state liberals in general are anything like the liberals I know in ultra-blue academia, it’s no wonder conservatives and libertarians prefer nothing to do with them.

For all I know, red-state conservatives are just as insufferable. To some extent, I’d be surprised if they weren’t. Nevertheless, it’s still the fault of liberalism. The phenomenon at work is the intrusion of politics into all aspects of life. To some extent that’s because of the liberal media and the president’s pajama-clad minions, but fundamentally it’s because of the intrusion of government into all aspects of life.

Liberalism is at war with civil society. Civil society is the collection of disparate institutions, independent of the government, that make society work. The problem with civil society, to liberals, is that independence. Liberals can’t control it, so sometimes it does things of which liberals don’t approve. In fact, it often does such unacceptable things, since civil society, being made up of churches, other civic organizations, and individuals, has a strongly conservative character.

As a result, liberals have been very deliberately trying to crowd out civil society with government, by replacing activities that people just did on their own — but sometimes in a fashion that didn’t comport with liberal preferences — with government programs that liberals can control.

For instance, in the Obamacare HHS mandate you see a very deliberate effort to get religious organizations out of the business of charity. For years, Democrats have been trying to raise taxes on charitable donations, since any monies spent by private charities would be better spent by the government.

As the government supplants more and more of civil society, and as it simultaneously takes increasing control of our individual lives, politics — which ought to be a sideshow — is becoming dreadfully relevant. We have to fight over it, because it affects us so much.

And that’s why politics sucks. In part it’s because of liberal jerks like Barack Obama’s pajama-clad harangue brigade, but in greater part it’s because of liberalism itself.

Ohio Democrats recently introduced a bill to make it very difficult for parents to homeschool their children — after all, outside the public school who knows what those kids will be learning! (The bill was quickly withdrawn in the face of public outrage.)

In the public schools, we can be sure that the kids are learning the right things, thanks to the new federal “Common Core” that teaches important truths like “government officials’ commands must be obeyed by all” and “an individual’s wants are less important than the nation’s well-being.”

POSTSCRIPT: We can be sure that Common Core isn’t offered in good faith. If it were, the Obama administration wouldn’t be making clumsy efforts to turn it into a racial wedge issue.

You can close the books on the GM bailout. All it took to rescue GM and give it to the unions, other than screwing all GM’s creditors, was $10.5 billion in taxpayer money.

UPDATE: The Washington Post has its own version of this.

(Via Ed Driscoll.)

Could an embattled spy agency possibly be more tone deaf than this?

This is the real mission patch for a NRO mission, tweeted out proudly by the Office of Director of National Intelligence.

(Via Instapundit.)

I’m sure the reason the Obama administration refuses to release any meaningful statistics on Obamacare enrollment is the numbers are really, really good.

(Previous post.)

After the Newtown massacre, the NRA was widely mocked (for example) for their response. Their “crackpot” idea: schools should have armed security. The anti-gun media has become so dedicated to the nonsensical proposition that the best defense is no defense at all, they actually seem to have come to believe it.

Nevertheless, reality prevails outside journalists’ heads:

As they investigate the latest school shooting in the United States – Friday at Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colo. – one thing is clear to law enforcement officials there: The presence of an armed deputy sheriff on regular duty at the school was the key factor in preventing more deaths and injuries.

As soon as he heard the first of five gunshots, that officer and the two school administrators he was talking to raced toward the commotion shouting their presence and ordering students and staff to follow the school’s lock-down protocol.

As a result, Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson said at a briefing Saturday afternoon, the heavily-armed shooter realized he was about to be confronted by an armed officer, and he took his own life.

(Via Power Line.)

One consequence of the Democrats ending the filibuster is the era of presidential nominees answering questions from the opposing party is now over:

Johnson could go into the process knowing he didn’t need a single Republican vote to be confirmed. If Johnson could be confident that he had at least 51 of the Senate’s 55 Democratic votes — he actually had all of them — he didn’t need to pay attention to Republicans at all.

And so he didn’t. . .

On Nov. 15, several Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee . . . sent Johnson a list of more than 50 questions, most of them about immigration, that had not been answered during Johnson’s confirmation hearing. . .

In a Dec. 12 letter, Johnson essentially blew them off.

Johnson was the first post-nuclear nominee, and I think we’ll soon find his scorn for the opposing party’s questions has set a precedent.

POSTSCRIPT: Johnson, by the way, wasn’t nominated to run a highly political department like HHS, Justice, or the IRS. He was nominated to run homeland security!

John Podesta — a senior Democratic party functionary who ran the Clinton administration and the Obama transition and was re-hired this month by the Obama White House — says that the Republican party is “a cult worthy of Jonestown” (and that’s why Obama should rule by executive fiat).

The unmitigated gall of this guy to liken the Republicans to Jim Jones’s death cult. Jim Jones was a Democratic party power broker.

He had close ties to the Democratic Party in San Francisco, committing voter fraud to help get George Moscone elected mayor and Harvey Milk elected supervisor. (Whether Jones’s fraud was decisive can’t be known, since the Democratic district attorney terminated the investigation without any charges against Jones’s people and destroyed the election records.) Moscone rewarded Jones by appointing him the chairman of the San Francisco housing convention. Jones did not give up the position until after moving to Guyana. (He resigned by shortwave radio.)

During the 1976 presidential campaign, Jones met personally with VP candidate Walter Mondale and First-lady-to-be Rosalynn Carter. Mondale later wrote, as Jones moved his movement to Guyana, that “Knowing of your congregation’s deep involvement in the major social and constitutional issues of our country is a great inspiration to me.”

At a dinner honoring Jones at his “People’s Temple”, Willie Brown — long-time Democratic speaker of the California Assembly — likened Jones to a combination of Martin Luther King, Angela Davis, Albert Einstein, and Mao Tse-Tung (two out of four ain’t bad!). Also in attendance at the dinner was California governor (then and again today) Jerry Brown, and lieutenant governor Mervyn Dymally. Dianne Feinstein (current Senator from California) also accepted Jones’s hospitality.

Jones’s cult was a peculiar one, as it had nothing to do with religion. He preached that “those who remained drugged with the opiate of religion had to be brought to enlightenment — socialism”. When he slaughtered his cult, he directed that all his assets (millions of dollars), be given to the Soviet Union:

Dear Comrade Timofeyev,
The following is a letter of instructions regarding all of our assets that we want to leave to the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Enclosed in this letter are letters which instruct the banks to send the cashiers checks to you. I am doing this on behalf of Peoples Temple because we, as communists, want our money to be of benefit for help to oppressed peoples all over the world, or in any way that your decision-making body sees fit.

Jones was a Democratic communist, and his work for the Democratic party still reverberates in California politics today. He was, in short, the exact opposite of a Republican. Podesta has apologized for the comparison, as he should. But the rest of us should take the opportunity to remember how the Democratic party embraced the monster.

This is a man who really loves himself.

This isn’t too surprising (given how hard we already know the White House worked to hide the ball):

The White House systematically delayed enacting a series of rules on the environment, worker safety and health care to prevent them from becoming points of contention before the 2012 election, according to documents and interviews with current and former administration officials.

Some agency officials were instructed to hold off submitting proposals to the White House for up to a year to ensure that they would not be issued before voters went to the polls, the current and former officials said.

The delays meant that rules were postponed or never issued. The stalled regulations included crucial elements of the Affordable Care Act, what bodies of water deserved federal protection, pollution controls for industrial boilers and limits on dangerous silica exposure in the workplace.

But it’s still notable because, yes, the White House lied about it:

The Obama administration has repeatedly said that any delays until after the election were coincidental and that such decisions were made without regard to politics. But seven current and former administration officials told The Washington Post that the motives behind many of the delays were clearly political, as Obama’s top aides focused on avoiding controversy before his reelection.

Really, there’s no excuse for ever believing any Obama administration denial of anything. This bunch lies about everything.

The Obama administration wants health insurers to cover people who sign up but don’t pay:

Another Obamacare deadline was pushed back on Thursday and now the White House is asking insurers to accept late payments and still give individuals coverage in the interim. . .

HHS is asking insurers to accept payments through this extended date and give consumers additional time to pay their first month’s premium while still offering coverage starting on Jan. 1

Somehow I think giving people free health care will be a non-starter for most health insurers.

Why? I think the answer to that is actually the bigger news:

The latest pushback also comes after a glitch that was confirmed last week by CMS, that the back-end mechanism that allows the government to pay insurers for subsidized and cost-sharing plans had not yet been built. Insurance companies will have to bill the government for these premium tax credits, and the government has announced it will act in a timely manner.

OMG! They haven’t even implemented the part of the system that pays the government subsidies! Moreover, I can’t imagine why anyone would trust them to to “act in a timely manner” when they are proving, again and again, that they can’t.

UPDATE: More on this.

(Previous post.)

The Washington Examiner reports:

After refusing for weeks to detail the extent of back-end problems with healthcare.gov, the Obama administration on Friday said a technical bug affected approximately 25 percent of enrollments on the federal exchanges in October and November.

Those technical bugs, separate from the troubles consumers had experienced accessing information on the website during the first two months, are posing a significant new problem for those who signed up and are expecting insurance coverage come Jan. 1. . .

A spokesman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services on Friday suggested that the only way those who enrolled in October and November can be sure they will be covered in January is by paying their insurance bill and contacting their insurer to confirm their standing.

(Emphasis mine.)

In order to verify your enrollment, you need to contact your insurer directly. In other words, to make sure Healthcare.gov worked, use something other than Healthcare.gov. Awesome!

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The New York Post is making a blockbuster allegation:

In the home stretch of the 2012 presidential campaign, from August to September, the unemployment rate fell sharply — raising eyebrows from Wall Street to Washington. The decline — from 8.1 percent in August to 7.8 percent in September — might not have been all it seemed. The numbers, according to a reliable source, were manipulated.

And the Census Bureau, which does the unemployment survey, knew it.

There was a time, not so long ago, that allegations such as this would have sounded outlandish. But now that we know that the IRS abused its power to harass conservative groups, did so with the full knowledge of top administration officials, and no one was ever disciplined for it, the allegation hardly seems outlandish at all.

The Post also identifies other instances of falsification that were covered up by the Census Bureau.

POSTSCRIPT: As Glenn Reynolds is good enough to remind us, the White House took over control of the Census early in the Obama administration.

Remember when Obama promised that if you like your doctor your can keep your doctor? (Indeed, they still have it up on Whitehouse.gov.) Just like keeping your health care plan, that was a lie.

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After a month of hastily implemented patches, Healthcare.gov is now even more insecure:

The Obamacare insurance marketplace is even more vulnerable to security breaches since the administration “fixed” Healthcare.gov, according to a cyber security expert.

Health and Human Services (HHS) released a progress report on Sunday following its self-imposed Nov. 30 deadline to repair the website. . . The eight-page report made no mention of the website’s numerous security flaws, which experts say put Americans’ personal information at risk.

“It doesn’t appear that any security fixes were done at all,” David Kennedy, CEO of the online security firm TrustedSec, told the Washington Free Beacon.

POSTSCRIPT: If you think that its security failings are merely theoretical; they’re not.

(Previous post.)

Just don’t believe anything these people say about anything:

President Obama acknowledged on Thursday that he lived with his Kenyan uncle for a brief period in the 1980s while preparing to attend Harvard Law School, contradicting a statement more than a year ago that the White House had no record of the two ever meeting.

Their relationship came into question on Tuesday at the deportation hearing of his uncle, Onyango Obama, in Boston immigration court. His uncle had lived in the United States illegally since the 1970s and revealed in testimony for the first time that his famous nephew had stayed at his Cambridge apartment for about three weeks. At the time, Onyango Obama was here illegally and fighting deportation.

This is weak beer compared to his lies about substantial issues (if you like your plan you can keep it), but it underscores that this bunch will lie about anything at all.

(Via Hot Air.)

I knew that Healthcare.gov was sending a lot of bad data to insurers, but I didn’t know it was this bad:

The enrollment records for a significant portion of the Americans who have chosen health plans through the online federal insurance marketplace contain errors — generated by the computer system — that mean they might not get the coverage they’re expecting next month.

The errors cumulatively have affected roughly one-third of the people who have signed up for health plans since Oct. 1, according to two government and health-care industry officials. The White House disputed the figure but declined to provide its own.

(Via Moe Lane.) An error rate of one-third!  Wow.

ASIDE: Remember when the White House disputed the allegation that virtually no one was successfully using Healthcare.gov, and the real number of successful users turned out to be six? Good times.

Also, I knew that a lot of the people signing up for plans weren’t actually paying, but I didn’t know it was this bad:

One insurer, Physicians Health Plan of Northern Indiana, has received payments from only about 20% of applicants, nearly all using the firm’s online portal. . . If payment isn’t made by New Year’s Eve, PHP has been told by federal officials that it must void the application.

(Previous post.) (Via Hot Air.)