Internet Scofflaw

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!

(Previous post.)

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.

(Previous post.)

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.)

The hypocrisy of the Democrats invoking the “nuclear option” to abolish the filibuster for presidential appointments is palpable. I’m not going to bother to cite the myriad statements by Democrats decrying it (here’s one collection). I will cite the New York Times, after the break, because it expresses the hypocrisy so perfectly.

What I want to comment here is on the notion that hypocrisy over the nuclear option is somehow being practiced by both sides. (As a concrete example, there’s NBC’s account.) It’s natural for them to try to tell that story; the hypocrisy of their own side is so inarguable, all they can do is try to attribute some to the other side as well.

It’s utter nonsense. Yes, in 2005 there were a lot of Republicans arguing in favor of using the nuclear option to abolish the filibuster. And yes, some of those same Republicans are inveighing against it now. Does that make them hypocrites?

It would, if they had gone through with it in 2005. They did not. That’s the key historical fact that all the efforts to bipartisanize the hypocrisy somehow, bizarrely, seem to be forgetting.

If the Republicans had abolished the filibuster and now wanted it back, they would be complete hypocrites. They would be just as bad as the real-world Democrats, who demanded the filibuster be retained, got their way, and the abolished it once they were on the other side.

But Republicans didn’t do it. They stepped back from the nuclear option while they were still in the majority. That’s the opposite of hypocrisy. That’s principle.

So let’s not have any more nonsense about how both sides are being hypocritical about the filibuster. It’s not just wrong, it’s historically ignorant.

Read the rest of this entry »

The federal government is shutting Intrade down.

Terry McAuliffe, the ethically-challenged but never-yet-indicted Democrat just elected governor of Virginia, has named a criminal to his cabinet:

The name Levar Stoney may not ring a bell to many in Wisconsin, but the new Secretary of the Commonwealth of Virginia and former Deputy Campaign Manager for Governor-elect Terry McAuliffe has some scandalous history in Wisconsin.

In 2004, Levar Stoney was involved in covering up and lying for five Democratic campaign operatives who slashed the tires of 25 vans rented by the Republican Party for get out the vote efforts.

It’s interesting that, despite all the Democratic bleating about voter suppression (in particular, how any measure whatsoever to inhibit election fraud constitutes voter suppression), it’s the Democrats who actually practice it.

So we’ve got President Obama using the phrase “tea-bagger” — a grotesque sexual slur aimed at Tea Party members — on White House letterhead now. Ironically, it’s in a letter explaining that he’s always been civil to them:

I do have to challenge you, though, on the notion that any citizen that disagrees with me has been “targeted and ridiculed” or that I have “made fun” of tea-baggers.

Obama was responding to a letter complaining about references to “tea baggers”. In his short, 1-page letter he used scare quotes four times — twice in that very sentence — but did not use them for the phrase in question.

Does Obama understand that the term is offensive? If so, then he’s just being a jerk; delivering an in-your-face insult while pretending to tout his civility. It’s possible, but it seems unlikely that the president would bother to pen an ironic insult to a private citizen of no particular importance.

The other possibility is that Obama forgot that the term is offensive. How can one forget that a term, invented for the purpose of giving offense, is offensive? I can’t think of a better theory than Mary Katharine Ham’s, that he hears the term so often in the White House that he’s forgotten its vulgarity.

One element of Healthcare.gov actually was working in time, so of course the administration scrapped it:

When the troubled federal health care website came online, the key “Anonymous Shopper” function was nowhere to be found — even though it passed a key test almost two weeks before HealthCare.gov launched.

That successful test, noted in documents obtained by CNN and confirmed by a source close to the project, contradicts testimony from an Obama administration official overseeing HealthCare.gov, who told lawmakers earlier this month the function was scrapped because it “failed miserably” before the October 1 launch.

The “anonymous shopper” feature would have allowed people to look at health insurance rates without signing up for account and giving personal information. Had it been available, it would have lessened the load on Healthcare.gov, not enough to make the system work (the system folds under a few hundred users), but maybe enough to make it easier to fix.

According to CNN, the feature actually did work, but the administration struck it from the system, and lied about the reason why:

Chao said he made the decision in conjunction with colleagues and testified before Congress last week that it was because the feature “failed so miserably that we could not conscionably let people use it.”

Yet a CMS document made public by the same committee last week tells a different story. The agency and one of its subsidiaries, the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight, was working with government contractors on the website. It determined the Anonymous Shopper feature “tested successfully,” revealed “no high severity defects open” and that “remaining lower severity defects will not degrade consumer experience.”

CMS raised questions about the “tested successfully” denotation for the feature in a statement. . . ‪The source close to the project, however, said the anonymous shopper function did pass testing conducted in the weeks ahead of the HealthCare.gov launch.

CNN doesn’t seem to know why the feature was scrapped, but we do. The Obama administration doesn’t want people to know the real price of their insurance; they only want people to see price with subsidies, and they can’t do that anonymously:

An HHS spokeswoman said the agency wanted to ensure that users were aware of their eligibility for subsidies that could help pay for coverage, before they started seeing the prices of policies.

So here we have yet another Obama administration official committing perjury. Chao knew perfectly well that the feature wasn’t scrapped for failure; his own words show that plainly:

The successful test occurred on September 17, according to a source familiar with the project. The next day, in an internal e-mail obtained by CNN, Chao wrote the shopper function “isn’t needed and thus should be removed.”

Fortunately for Chao, no Obama administration will ever be prosecuted for perjury while Obama is in office.

POSTSCRIPT: We should note, by the way, that Obama promised the system would have this feature:

“Just visit HealthCare.gov, and there you can compare insurance plans, side by side, the same way you’d shop for a plane ticket on Kayak or a TV on Amazon,” Obama said on October 1, the day the website went live. “You enter some basic information, you’ll be presented with a list of quality, affordable plans that are available in your area, with clear descriptions of what each plan covers, and what it will cost.”

Sure, it’s small potatoes next to his broken promises to let you keep your health insurance, and cut your premiums by $2500, but it’s still worth noting.

POST-POSTSCRIPT: The system does have a related feature now, but it’s crippleware. It takes too little information to give a good estimate and consequently underestimates premiums by as much as a factor of two. That’s presumably deliberate. CNN again:

The “Plan Preview” tool was added to the site October 10, amid criticism there was no window shopping feature. But it only includes two age categories for estimates — “49 or under” and “50 or older” — and has been criticized for providing wildly varied cost estimates.

“It’s not as good as Anonymous Shopper,” Karp told CNN. “It doesn’t provide the full experience of anonymous shopping that was recommended” in the prototype CMS encouraged state exchanges. . .

As far as the real thing, they have no plans to release it at all:

At the federal government’s order, the contractor responsible for it, CGI, is not even working to ready it, a source close to the project tells CNN. HHS would not provide an estimate of when the window shopping feature will be available.

(Previous post.) (Via Hot Air.)

The Healthcare.gov fiasco is getting so bad, it’s not even good comedy:

Between 30 and 40 percent of the IT system for the federal health insurance marketplace must still be built, a top official at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) said Tuesday.

Henry Chao, the agency’s deputy chief information officer, said that a large portion of the behind-the-scenes work has yet to be finished.

 “I think it’s just an approximation, we’re probably sitting somewhere between 60 or 70 percent [completed],” he told the House Energy and Commerce Oversight subcommittee. . .

Instead, he said, the major projects under construction involve back-end work, like setting up the procedure to pay health insurance companies once plans begin in January.

 “There is the back office system, the accounting systems, the payment systems, they still need to be [built],” he added.

The whole back end isn’t even built. Wow.

(Previous post.)

Millions of people in the health care individual market are seeing their plans cancelled, and millions more who get health insurance from their employer will see it soon. But there is one group to whom Obama is keeping his promise to let them keep their plans: unions.

Yes, it turns out that those who get their health insurance from a union have a real grandfather clause. While everyone else will eventually lose their insurance, unions will keep theirs.

I guess this is how American government works now: screw everyone but exempt your friends.

(Previous post.)

Barack Obama and the Democrats have probably killed this woman:

My grievance is not political; all my energies are directed to enjoying life and staying alive, and I have no time for politics. For almost seven years I have fought and survived stage-4 gallbladder cancer, with a five-year survival rate of less than 2% after diagnosis. I am a determined fighter and extremely lucky. But this luck may have just run out: My affordable, lifesaving medical insurance policy has been canceled effective Dec. 31.

My choice is to get coverage through the government health exchange and lose access to my cancer doctors, or pay much more for insurance outside the exchange (the quotes average 40% to 50% more) for the privilege of starting over with an unfamiliar insurance company and impaired benefits.

Am I being overly harsh? Possibly. But it seems fair to put a human face on the consequences of the Democrats decision to up-end the entire health care system.

POSTSCRIPT: Besides, those same people accused Mitt Romney of murder in a tragic death to which Romney had only the flimsiest connection, and no culpability whatsoever.

(Previous post.)

President Obama’s “tech surge” to fix Healthcare.gov is a slogan with nothing behind it:

President Obama promised elite Silicon Valley talent to fix Healthcare.gov, but so far his “tech surge” appears to consist of a handful of White House fellows assigned to the main contractor that designed the troubled website.

“If there were tech experts that were flown in from Silicon Valley, they did not land at our facility,” said a knowledgeable official who spoke on condition of anonymity. . .

Federal officials plucked participants in the Presidential Innovation Fellows program and assigned them to CGI Federal, the U.S. subsidiary of CGI Group, the Canadian firm that was awarded the $94 million main design contract for Healthcare.gov. Fellows typically spend six to 13 months working in a federal department or agency as “change agents” and to promote government-wide innovation, according to whitehouse.gov.

Why not use real experts? Well, none of the considerations that led to them to use amateurs in the first place have really changed. They still see this is a political problem, not a technical problem.

(Previous post.)

The Washington Post has a heavily reported article on how Obamacare is failing as a direct result of the White House prioritizing political considerations over technical ones. It dovetails well with earlier reporting on the matter but brings much more detail. It ought to be read in its entirety, when you can find the time.

My favorite example is this one:

According to two former officials, CMS staff members struggled at “multiple meetings” during the spring of 2011 to persuade White House officials for permission to publish diagrams known as “concepts of operation,” which they believed were necessary to show states what a federal exchange would look like. The two officials said the White House was reluctant because the diagrams were complex, and they feared that the Republicans might reprise a tactic from the 1990s of then-Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.), who mockingly brandished intricate charts created by a task force led by first lady Hillary Clinton.

In the end, one of the former officials said, the White House quashed the diagrams, telling CMS, instead, to praise early work on those state exchanges that matched the hidden federal thinking.

They refused to release vital information on how the system was supposed to work, because they were afraid Republicans might inform the public how the system was supposed to work. And yes, I think their fear was justified.

(Previous post.)

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) explains that Obama didn’t break his promise about letting people keep their health insurance. What he meant was (you might want to be sitting down for this): you can keep your plan until we pass our bill!

I swear I am not making this up:

Well, as I understand it, you can keep it up to the time — and I hope this is correct, but this is what I’ve been told — up to the time the bill was enacted. Then, after that, it’s a different story.

Really, she actually did say that. Video here.

(Previous post.)

I’ve been harping for years about how Obama’s central health-care promise was a lie:

If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what.

Now, with millions of cancellation notices going out, people are finally noticing, and the Obama administration is in a tough spot. People don’t like being lied to, particularly over matters consequence. The best that Obama’s defenders at the New York Times can manage is he “misspoke”. The Washington Post does better, practically tying itself in knots with this circumlocution:

the seeming contradiction shows the difference between political talking points intended to sell a controversial law and the intricacies of the health policies that underlie it.

Ah yes, the “seeming contradiction” between the talking points and the actual policies.

He did not misspeak. He lied. He told the same lie, over and over again, for years. In fact, the White House web site still has the lie, even today (weeks after Fox News pointed it out):

For Americans with insurance coverage who like what they have, they can keep it. Nothing in this act or anywhere in the bill forces anyone to change the insurance they have, period.

The lie was essential to getting his plan enacted, and it was essential for getting him re-elected. (If the election were held today, Romney would win.) They set out deliberately to break a system that most people are satisfied with, and to do it, they needed the people to think it wouldn’t affect them until it was too late to stop it.

With the law they passed, the promise was ultimately unkeepable, but they didn’t even try. Get this:

If you dig into the regulations (go to page 34560) [Scofflaw: OMG, page 34560!], you will see that HHS wrote them extremely tight. One provision says that if co-payment increases by more than $5, plus medical cost of inflation, then the plan can no longer be grandfathered. . . Another provision says the co-insurance rate could not be increased at all above the level it was on March 23, 2010. . . [T]he net effect is that over time, the plans would no longer meet the many tests for staying grandfathered.

And of course Democrats voted unanimously to defeat a Republican bill that would have altered the regulations to allow more people to keep their plans longer.

Were they perhaps unaware of the consequences of their policy? This bunch is so unfamiliar with the law of unintended consequences that you can almost imagine it. But no: the federal government does employ civil servants capable of working through the direct consequences of policy, and they did inform the White House:

Buried in Obamacare regulations from July 2010 is an estimate that because of normal turnover in the individual insurance market, “40 to 67 percent” of customers will not be able to keep their policy. And because many policies will have been changed since the key date, “the percentage of individual market policies losing grandfather status in a given year exceeds the 40 to 67 percent range.”

That means the administration knew that more than 40 to 67 percent of those in the individual market would not be able to keep their plans, even if they liked them.

With a decay rate of 40-67%, you’re down to virtually zero within a very short time. And it’s not just the individual market. The same is true for the employer market, where the government projects that 39-69% of plans will lose their grandfather status.

And it wasn’t just the White House that knew, Congressional Democrats knew as well. House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer (MD): “We knew that there would be some policies that would not qualify and therefore people would be required to get more extensive coverage.” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY): “No, we all knew.”

(Previous post.)

Don’t take it personally, America, this White House lies to everyone, including their own people:

White House Bungles Leak About GOP Leader Trashing Obama

The White House today was forced to backtrack on a rumor Obama administration officials started about a Republican House leader who purportedly insulted President Obama to his face, telling the president, “I cannot even stand to look at you.”

Turns out, it never happened. How do we know? The same White House that was responsible for starting the buzz now says there was a “miscommunication” and a “misunderstanding.”

It was a strange story, because while it’s certainly common for that bunch to lie, it’s not at all common for them to retract their lies. As it turns out, this particular lie was told just to Senate Democrats, apparently in an effort to charge them up during the budget fight, much like a coach who motivates his team using the opposing team’s insults. And he’s certainly not the first just to make up the insults when none were at hand.

I shouldn’t be taking pleasure in the misfortunes of others, but Obamacare has taught me to hate the Democrats to a degree I never did before. They did this to us on purpose, exploiting their momentary ascendancy, and ignoring — nay, mocking — our protests. Reading this sort of story makes me really happy:

Veteran House Democratic aides are sick over the insurance prices they’ll pay under Obamacare, and they’re scrambling to find a cure.

“In a shock to the system, the older staff in my office (folks over 59) have now found out their personal health insurance costs (even with the government contribution) have gone up 3-4 times what they were paying before,” Minh Ta, chief of staff to Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.), wrote to fellow Democratic chiefs of staff in an email message obtained by POLITICO. “Simply unacceptable.”

In the email, Ta noted that older congressional staffs may leave their jobs because of the change to their health insurance.

Enjoy your handiwork, jerks.

(Previous post.)

The premise of Obamacare was to make health care affordable for the less fortunate. It doesn’t. That’s the conclusion of the notably right-wing, anti-Obama, Republican-mouthpiece newspaper The New York Times:

As technical failures bedevil the rollout of President Obama’s health care law, evidence is emerging that one of the program’s loftiest goals — to encourage competition among insurers in an effort to keep costs low — is falling short for many rural Americans.

While competition is intense in many populous regions, rural areas and small towns have far fewer carriers offering plans in the law’s online exchanges. Those places, many of them poor, are being asked to choose from some of the highest-priced plans in the 34 states where the federal government is running the health insurance marketplaces, a review by The New York Times has found.

(Via the PJ Tatler.) It’s not true that competition is intense in populous regions either, so it’s particularly damning if competition is even less intense in poor regions.

So if Obamacare isn’t about helping the poor afford health care, what is it about? One thing, the same thing they’ve always wanted: government control of your health.

(Previous post.)

The left likes to style itself the “reality-based community,” or to claim that “reality has a liberal bias.” They seem to think that this is desperately clever. I’ve never really understood why. It’s just a more arrogant way to say I’m right about everything. Very often leftists mistake arrogance for cleverness (see also: Barack Obama), so that’s probably what’s going on.

But anyway, the reality-based community. Yes, let’s see how the reality-based community saw the oncoming train wreck of the Obamacare rollout:

Just days before HealthCare.gov went live with disastrous results, top White House officials were excitedly briefing lawmakers, reporters, Capitol Hill staff members and Washington pundits on their expectations for the government’s new health care Web site.

(Via Hot Air.) They really thought it would work! Which seems astonishing, since everyone knew it wouldn’t:

CBS News is learning the Obama administration knew of the risks associated with the Obamacare rollout well before last month.

Three years ago, a trusted Obama health care adviser warned the White House it was losing control of Obamacare. A memo obtained by CBS News said strong leadership was missing and the law’s successful implementation was in jeopardy. The warnings were specific and dire — and ignored.

David Cutler, who worked on the Obama 2008 campaign and was a valued outside health care consultant wrote this blunt memo to top White House economic adviser Larry Summers in May 2010: “I do not believe the relevant members of the administration understand the president’s vision or have the capability to carry it out.” Cutler wrote no one was in charge who had any experience in complex business start-ups. He also worried basic regulations, technology and policy coordination would fail.

(Via Hot Air.) How could they fail to be aware of what everyone knew? Time’s Gloria Borger (an Obama apologist!) has a simple explanation:

This much is clear, after speaking with both past and present senior administration officials: no one was really in charge, so no one knew for sure how bad the overall picture was. What’s more, and—perhaps most telling—no one wanted to even hint to the president that this techno-savvy administration possibly had a website stuck in, say, 1995. “People don’t like to tell him bad news,” says an ex-White House staffer.

(Via Ace.) Enjoy that “reality-based” bubble, Mr. President.

POSTSCRIPT: But wait, there’s more “reality” to be mocked. Kathleen Sebelius claims that Healthcare.gov has never crashed. And here’s the key mouthpiece of the far-left, Media Matters:

Right-wing media have used temporary technical glitches exacerbated by a flood of interest to demagogue against the Affordable Care Act (ACA) exchanges. In reality, the technological issues are caused in part by high levels of traffic, which demonstrate that millions of Americans are signing up for the health care program.

“In reality”! That piece was posted on October 1, the day Healthcare.gov launched. How many people signed up that day? Not millions, as Media Matters claims. Not even hundreds. Heck, not even tens. Just six.

Ah, the reality-based community.

(Previous post.)

I’ve been too busy to blog the last few weeks, so I’ve missed the opportunity to note the vindication of every criticism we leveled at Obamacare (save only those that can’t come to pass until Obamacare has had a few years to wreck the health care system), and the exposure to everyone of the Obamacare administration’s lies and incompetence. I’ve got some catching up to do.

Obamacare is costing more Americans their health insurance than have gained it. Many more:

More Americans In 3 States Have Had Their Insurance Canceled Under ObamaCare Than Have Filed An Exchange Account In All 50

This week the reality of the ObamaCare roll-out appeared in a set of news stories that serve as an ironic juxtaposition. Over 500,000 individuals have seen their insurance policies cancelled in just 3 states.  In all 50 states, only 476,000 applications have been “filed” in an exchange. (Even though we are still learning the true definition of “filed.”)

This parenthetical remark refers to the fact that the federal government (as well as some states including California and New York) are reporting applications as filed when in fact the application has merely been started (i.e., the applicant has logged in and begun shopping).

This is an unmitigated disaster.

(Previous post.)

This was President Obama, way-back-when (two-and-a-half weeks ago), categorically refusing to delay Obamacare’s individual mandate:

“Steve, let’s be clear, we’re not going to delay the Affordable Care Act,” Obama said. “There are millions of Americans, right now, who don’t have health insurance and they are, finally, after decades going to be in a position where they can get get affordable health care just like everybody else and that means that their families, their kids, themselves, they’ve got the basic security that you and I enjoy. And the notion that we would even delay them getting that kind of peace of mind, potentially going to a doctor to get treated for illnesses that they currently have simply because the Republicans have decided, ideologically, that they’re opposed to the Affordable Care Act is not something that we’re going to be discussing.”

And he meant it. He was willing to shut down (sorta) the government to prevent any delay to his signature achievement. Republicans wanted a full year’s delay, but Obama would not even negotiate something shorter.

But now the White House is announcing a six-week delay. And the Democrats’ efforts to spin a delay as not really a delay are simply hilarious.

Of course, there is a big difference between what the Republicans offered and what the White House is announcing, much bigger than length of the delay. The law imposes the individual mandate on February 15, no ifs, ands, or buts. Republicans offered the president a legal delay, through properly-enacted legislation. He refused it, and is now unilaterally imposing an illegal delay. He didn’t have to flout the rule of law; he prefers to flout it.

POSTSCRIPT: Meanwhile, we should remember that delaying the individual mandate is not actually good policy, unless community rating (i.e., price controls) and guaranteed issue are also delayed. The individual mandate is what makes community rating and guaranteed issue possible without skyrocketing premiums. (Yes, premiums are as much as tripling, but without the mandate it would be even worse.) The administration has no good solution to this mess they’ve made.

POST-POSTSCRIPT: By the way, when you read Obama’s prattle above, keep in mind that what he was refusing to delay was the individual mandate, the part of Obamacare that forces people to buy “peace of mind” whether they want to or not.

(Previous post.)

At President Obama’s everything-is-fine-with-Healthcare.gov-really-I-mean-it Rose Garden speech, he brought a dozen supposed success stories, but when you actually look at them, hardly any of them actually are:

For example, a Pennsylvania man named Malik Hassan was in the group, and this is the White House description of his situation, in full: “Malik Hassan works at a restaurant in Philadelphia. Hassan, who does not receive coverage through his employer, is looking forward to enrolling for health coverage this fall. He recently used Healthcare.gov. to process his application and is waiting for the options for potential plans in Philadelphia.” . . .

Then there is Nathaniel Hojnacki, who recently finished his schooling. Here is the White House description of his situation, again in full: “Nathaniel Hojnacki recently received his Master’s degree at Johns Hopkins University SAIS and is in an employment situation without benefits. Hojnacki recognizes the importance of coverage and is planning to enroll after he explores his coverage options on the DC exchange.”

These are what pass for success stories: people who are planning to use the system eventually. In fact, not one of Obama’s “success stories” had actually managed to use the federal exchange. Two of them (reportedly) used state exchanges, and a few others exploited other provisions of the law; the rest are pretty much of the same character as the examples above.

UPDATE: I found the video for Obama’s speech:

(Previous post.)

Remember when President Obama promised you could keep your health insurance?

If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what.

He was lying, and not just a little bit:

Insurance companies are also already sending out notices to millions of consumers cancelling individual policies because they are non-compliant with ObamaCare’s new mandates. Kaiser Health News, usually a cheerleader for the law, reports that “Florida Blue, for example, is terminating about 300,000 policies, about 80 percent of its individual policies in the state.” Kaiser Permanente in California has sent notices to 160,000 people, Highmark in Pittsburgh is dropping about 20% of its individual market customers, and Independence Blue Cross of Philadelphia is dropping about 45%.

UPDATE: More people losing their health insurance:

The Affordable Care Act was signed by President Obama in 2010 and since then he has repeated one reassuring phrase: “If you like your insurance plan you will keep it. No one will be able to take that away from you. It hasn’t happened yet. It won’t happen in the future.”

But it is happening. The president’s health care law raises the standards for insurance policies, which many consider to be a good thing. But hundreds of thousands of Americans whose policies don’t meet the new standards are being told that their health plans are being cancelled. . .

[Natalie Willes’s] insurer, Kaiser Permanente, is terminating policies for 160,000 people in California and presenting them with new plans that comply with the healthcare law.

“Before I had a plan that I had a $1,500 deductible,” she said. “I paid $199 dollars a month. The most similar plan that I would have available to me would be $278 a month. My deductible would be $6,500 dollars, and all of my care after that point would only be covered 70 percent.”

Wiles may be paying more to get a worse deductible and coinsurance, but now she’ll get to say that her plan is Obamacare compliant. Priorities.

More People Have Signed Up To Go To Mars And Die Than For Obamacare.

(Previous post.)

The 17% federal government shutdown is over now, so the Park Service — now shown to be as partisan and corrupt as any other part of the federal government — is now back at work. Or what passes for work as a federal employee. But there’s still one instance of the Obama Park Service’s screw-you-all policy that is worth noting:

When a man took it upon himself to mow the lawn at the Lincoln Memorial, the Park Service shut him down. Once again, the Obama shutdown does not mean that the government stops doing things; it means the government makes affirmative efforts to ensure things are worse.

Anyway, now that the shutdown is over, the furloughed workers get back pay. Thus, the shutdown was actually a paid vacation, which is pretty sweet. (ASIDE: Which is one reason why the unions had to hire fake government workers to protest the shutdown.) In fact, those workers who were willing to engage in a little public larceny get paid double:

Some federal workers who were furloughed in Oregon could be getting paid twice, with a state official confirming to Fox News that those workers who received state unemployment benefits during the partial government shutdown will not have to re-pay the money.

Other states haven’t yet determined if claimants will have to repay the money. Of particular importance, of course, is DC and Maryland:

Washington D.C. and Maryland also both paid millions in unemployment benefits to about 24,000 furloughed workers during the budget crisis.

(Previous post.)

We’ve covered this in the past, but it’s useful to find the case gathered in one place:

• Deception #1: universal coverage
• Deception #2: no new taxes on the middle class
• Deception #3: annual premium savings of $2,500
• Deception #4: no increase in the deficit
• Deception #5: you can keep your plan if you like it

I’ve focused particularly on #5 here.

(Via Power Line.)

Ilya Somin has a very interesting article “voting with your feet”, arguing that foot-voting behavior is much more rational than ballot-voting behavior, and that foot voting strengthens the case for limited and decentralized government.

The Obama administration would like to claim that its unprecedented, spiteful, “shutdown” activities — spending money they don’t have in order to make sure the shutdown hurts — are somehow legally required. But they have never released any legal opinions to explain why a lack of spending authority even permits — much less requires — them to pay people to “make life as difficult as possible”, particularly when such has never been done before.

Moreover, by ending some of their most egregious shutdown theater, the Obama administration is conceding that those activities are not in fact required.

For example, one of the first instances of shutdown spite to come to light was the Claude Moore Colonial Farm, which has been operated by volunteers at no cost to the government since 1980. Since it costs the government nothing, the Farm was never affected by government shutdowns before. But in the Obama shutdown, the federal government rented barricades to close the Farm. After public outcry, the Obama administration is allowing the Farm to re-open, proving that the administration never needed to close the Farm in the first place.

Also, the Obama administration will now allow states to pay to keep National Parks open, something they rejected as impossible just a week ago.

(Previous post.)

More Obama administration shutdown theater:

• Barricading wheelchair ramps in Washington DC.
• Removing handles from water fountains on trails.
• Illegally closing Alaskan lands.

The pictures of barricaded wheelchair ramps are really quite astonishing. We used to think that “shutting down the government” meant that the government would not have the money to deliver public services. But now that the Obama administration is spending money they don’t have in order to hurt people, the government is revealed as just an extortion racket: if you don’t keep the protection money flowing, they will screw you up. “Nice wheelchair ramp. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.”

(Previous post.)

The Telegraph reports:

EU plans to fit all cars with speed limiters

All cars could be fitted with devices that stop them going over 70mph, under new EU road safety measures which aim to cut deaths from road accidents by a third. Under the proposals new cars would be fitted with cameras that could read road speed limit signs and automatically apply the brakes when this is exceeded.

In Daniel Keys Moran’s Continuing Time science-fiction series, an oppressive world government bans manual control of vehicles. Computers drive all the cars, coordinated by a central system, ostensibly for safety, but really so the government can control everyone’s movements. We’re behind schedule on the telepaths and cyborgs, but that prediction seems to be moving along nicely.

Ah, the beauty of socialized medicine. When the government runs health care, health care failures become political problems to be covered up:

Internal emails from the Care Quality Commission show that Labour tried to stop the watchdog from informing the public about failings at Basildon University Hospital, where patients were dying needlessly on filthy wards.

The dossier of emails, released under Freedom of Information, state that Andy Burnham, the then Health Secretary, was “furious” when “graphic details” of the care failings became public. Separate emails suggest that Mike O’Brien, the former Labour minister of state for health, told the NHS watchdog that “anything you do is political” in the run up to the General Election.

Executives at the watchdog decided that “given the political environment” a report into standards of care across the country should be “largely positive”.

So the purpose of the healthcare “watchdog” is to protect the government by hiding its failures. Good to know.

The lion’s share of the blame here belongs to the old Labor government, which actually committed this atrocity, of course. But we should also recognize that the structure of the system makes this malfeasance likely. Government-run health care inevitably is politicized health care.

That’s our future, now. And it won’t take as long here.

(Via Power Line.)

More from President Obama’s “make life as difficult as possible” strategy:

The National Park Service also closed the Foothills Parkway, a major thoroughfare in the county. The closure came without warning and left the local school district scrambling to get children back to their homes.

The children live in the eastern Tennessee community of Top of the World – serviced by School Bus 49. Normally, the bus travels along the Foothills Parkway. Other roads leading to the isolated mountain community are impassible by bus.

“It’s dangerous,” said Nancy Kemp, the spokesperson for Blount County Schools.”It’s very curvy and straight up the mountain. It’s just not a safe route.” . . .

Until the partial government shutdown ends, school buses will not run. That means parents will have to transport their children to and from school using treacherous “white knuckle routes.”

This has gone beyond a fight over spending and a quixotic effort to defund Obamacare. This is much bigger now. The president has maliciously decided to shut down things that don’t need to be shut down, purely to hurt people. He must not get away with it.

(Previous post.) (Via Instapundit.)

The Obama administration shuts down the AMBER Alert website as part of its petty, malicious shutdown theater, but don’t you worry, union representatives will stay on the payroll, thanks to a timely new ruling by the administration:

The Obama administration quietly changed its furlough guidance Friday to allow government employees who are also union representatives to return to work and receive a regular paycheck during the government shutdown.

And while people are being physically ejected from the National Mall, the Park Service is allowing an immigration pressure group to rally on the National Mall:

A planned immigration reform rally will take place on the National Mall on Tuesday even though the site is closed due to the government shutdown. . . The event is hosted by several immigration activist groups, together with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the AFL-CIO.

In short, if you’re inconvenienced by the shutdown, it’s because the Obama administration doesn’t care about you. They’re happy to carve out exceptions for the people they care about.

(Previous post.)

As part of its malicious shutdown theater, the Obama administration has decided to shutter the AMBER alert website:

The Amber alert website, the national missing-child warning program, has been shut off due to the government shutdown, according to the Department of Justice.

“Due to the lapse in federal funding, this Office of Justice Programs website is unavailable,” it says on amberalert.gov.

The administration claimed that it had no choice but to shut down the AMBER site, but this was clearly a lie because (1) it makes no sense at all:

The Justice Department official explained the website’s page appearing as if Amber Alert is down by saying, “The Office of Justice Programs (OJP) ran out of funds on Friday so all of the sites they maintain about the work they do went offline.”

It was not clear as to why it would cost less to change the website’s appearance than to just keep it the way it was.

and (2) they subsequently decided to bring the site back up again, proving they can keep it up it they want to.

They later argued that it was somehow a security risk to have content on a page that wasn’t being supervised. Aside from making no sense, this fails to explain why the AMBER Alert site was singled out. Nearly every other page on the DOJ’s Juvenile Justice page is still in operation.

POSTSCRIPT: Just to be clear, the AMBER Alert system itself was unaffected. This is the page that gives information about the AMBER Alert system.

UPDATE: Ace has been finding countless .gov sites left up all day.

(Previous post.)

Hah. Ha hah. Hah ha ha ha:

“Of course, I want people to have health care,” Vinson said. “I just didn’t realize I would be the one who was going to pay for it personally.”

Maybe next time you won’t be so quick to put your hand in your neighbor’s pocket.

(Via Instapundit.)

As part of its vindictive shutdown theater, the Park Service is evicting people from their own homes:

National Park Service officials cited the government shutdown as the reason for ordering an elderly Nevada couple out of their home, which sits on federal land.

“Unfortunately overnight stays are not permitted until a budget is passed and the park can reopen,” an NPS spokesman explained to KTNV.

Ralph and Joyce Spencer, aged 80 and 77, respectively, own their home, but the government owns the land on which it sits.

Just to be clear, they own the home and pay rent on the land. The federal government has no right to evict them, and doing so actually costs the government money. Is it really possible that Obama and the Democrats can get away with this?

(Previous post.) (Via Instapundit.)

If you calculate what percentage of federal spending is actually halted by the federal government “shutdown”, it’s just 17%. The vast majority is exempted from the shutdown for one reason or another.

Yet another example of the Obama administration shutting down something the federal government doesn’t even control:

The rangers even closed the parking lot at Mount Vernon, where the plantation home of George Washington is a favorite tourist destination. . . But the government does not own Mount Vernon; it is privately owned by the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association.

But the real scoop is this one:

The Park Service appears to be closing streets on mere whim and caprice. . .

“It’s a cheap way to deal with the situation,” an angry Park Service ranger in Washington says of the harassment. “We’ve been told to make life as difficult for people as we can. It’s disgusting.”

The Obama administration clearly is supremely confident that they won’t be blamed for anything that happens, but should they be? Their behavior is so inexcusable, the story is bound to get out, even with the media’s wall of silence.

(Previous post.) (Via Ace.)

The awesome pettiness of the Obama administration is truly a sight to behold. Alas, that’s the only sight they’ll let you behold:

Blocking access to trails and programs at South Dakota’s most popular attraction was one thing, but state officials didn’t expect Congress’ budget stalemate to shut down a view of Mount Rushmore.

The National Park Service placed cones along highway viewing areas outside Mount Rushmore this week, barring visitors from pulling over and taking pictures of the famed monument.

They actually closed the places where you could pull off the highway. This isn’t the government shutting down; this is the government going into full screw-the-people mode. Amazing. And horrifying.

(Previous post.)

Today is the centennial of America’s second-worst mistake: the federal income tax. It wasn’t always as onerous as it is today; take a look at the original 1040 form from 1913. Keep it in mind whenever the government imposes a new program that seems not so bad at first.

Democrats like to say stuff like this:

If even one child’s life can be saved, then we need to act. Now is the time to do the right thing for our children, our communities, and the country we love.

But that argument only applies when they’re talking about banning guns, which they want to do anyway. It certainly doesn’t apply when their own sacred cows are at stake. Propose exempting the NIH from the government shutdown, and you get this:

CNN: “If you can help one child who has cancer, why wouldn’t you do it?”

Sen. Reid: “Why would we want to do that?”

Democrats like to cry “think of the children!”, but it’s all crocodile tears. They don’t mean a word of it.

(Previous post.) (Via Instapundit.)

Because of the federal government “shutdown”, the federal government is spending extra money to close facilities that cost the government nothing to operate. The instance that is getting a lot of attention is the World War 2 memorial, an unstaffed, open-air monument that is open 24/7, except when the Obama administration barricades it to make a point.

An even better example is the Claude Moore Colonial Farm, in McLean, Virginia. The Farm has been operated by entirely by volunteers for 30 years since its budget was zeroed in 1980:

Visitors unaware of how the farm is run are apt to conclude that the government shutdown, now two days old, is directly responsible for the farm’s closing. But Eberly sent a note Wednesday morning to the park’s email list. In the email, Eberly says, “For the first time in 40 years, the National Park Service (NPS) has finally succeeded in closing the Farm down to the public. In previous budget dramas, the Farm has always been exempted since the NPS provides no staff or resources to operate the Farm.”

The Claude Moore Colonial Farm, Eberly says, has thrived even as the federal government has treated it with “benign neglect” for decades. That benign neglect would serve it better than the barricades now surrounding it. . .

[Eberly adds:] “You do have to wonder about the wisdom of an organization that would use staff they don’t have the money to pay to evict visitors from a park site that operates without costing them any money.”

In fact, the Park Service is actually renting the barricades it is using to close the Farm. A strange “shutdown” indeed.

UPDATE: More of this crap:

It is obvious that the Park Service intends to block access to these trailheads, even though it literally costs them nothing to leave them open and by closing them they actually increase the possibility of serious problems for drivers on the road and hikers still in the park. In fact, it is costing them money they don’t have trying to block access.

To block access is thus a deliberate, senseless, and mean-spirited act that demonstrates quite clearly the political goals of the Obama administration during this shutdown.

Indeed. Glenn Reynolds adds, “I’m surprised they didn’t put a bag over the Washington Monument.”

Clearly the Obama administration is supremely confident that the public will hold Republicans responsible for everything, no matter what. If they had any worry about blowback at all, they wouldn’t dare indulge in such mean-spirited behavior.

UPDATE: Still more:

The campgrounds are self-sufficient and receive no federal funding. No government employees staff or manage the parks. The management companies pay the National Park Service out of the funds they generate from operating the thousands of campgrounds. . .

Notice that last part. The parks not only do not cost the taxpayers any money, they pay funds into the Treasury out of the fees park users pay. Shutting them down will cost the taxpayers money.

Will Baude has some interesting thoughts on presidential fidelity to the law that relate to my Scofflaw Principle. I think I come down with theory #3:

Government officials are special. Civilians may have no moral obligation to obey the law (see #1), but government officials are empowered by the law, so they are specially obligated to take the bitter with the sweet. The oath of office operates to convert law into a personal promise.

By government officials, I mean specifically executive-branch officials, in regard to the law they are tasked with administering. For the president that’s everything (or, more precisely, all Constitutional federal law). For other executive-branch officials it depends on their portfolio: if you work at the IRS, you might not be morally obliged to obey speed limits, but you had better obey every jot and tittle of tax law.

Barack Obama, June 2009:

If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what.

Now:

Last week, our family received notice from Anthem BlueCross BlueShield of Colorado that we can no longer keep the plan we like because of “changes from health care reform (also called the Affordable Care Act or ACA).” The letter informed us that “(t)o meet the requirements of the new laws, your current plan can no longer be continued beyond your 2014 renewal date.”

Yes, we knew this was going to happen, but this is worth quoting for its bluntness.

Megan McArdle looks at how states that trying to limit health insurance premiums are resulting in insurers dramatically cutting pack their provider networks.