Lara Logan Hammered on Botched Benghazi Report

Her "60 Minutes" Benghazi segment ran during the World Series and I never did get a chance to blog it.

Turns out that's probably for the better.

At the Washington Post, "CBS News and reporter Lara Logan face brutal criticism on flawed Benghazi report":

Lara Logan, CBS News’ hard-charging chief foreign correspondent, has repeatedly risked her life in pursuit of the story. She’s been shot at, arrested, blindfolded by militiamen, and physically assaulted by a mob while reporting from some of the most troubled places on earth.

But her mistaken “60 Minutes” report about a supposed eyewitness to the Benghazi consulate attacks has put Logan under a different kind of pressure. Despite two on-air apologies, including one Sunday night on “60 Minutes,” Logan, 42, has come in for widespread criticism and demands for a more complete explanation of how her Oct. 27 report went so wrong.

Until last week’s unpleasantness, the Washington-based journalist has lived an almost made-for-TV idea of a foreign correspondent. Glamorous and intense, she has reported — and reported well — from combat zones in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and across the Middle East for years. Among other reporting triumphs, she was the only journalist from an American TV network to broadcast live from Firdos Square in Baghdad in 2003 when American soldiers pulled down the statue of Saddam Hussein.

She has been amply recognized for her work, having won an Emmy Award, an Overseas Press Club Award and the duPont Award, among others.

At the same time, Logan’s globetrotting lifestyle and striking looks have occasionally made her tabloid fodder. Her relationship with a security contractor in Iraq, Joseph Burkett, became the subject of gossip columns in 2008; Logan and Burkett were married to others at the time, although both were separated from their spouses when their relationship began. They married in 2008 and live in Cleveland Park.

Logan’s feminity often attracts as much attention as her reporting; virtually every profile of her mentions that she was once a swimsuit model. On Halloween, people who live in Logan’s neighborhood were startled to see the famous TV correspondent trick-or-treating with her children while dressed in a hot-pink bodysuit costume, set off with high heels.

Logan has also been outspoken about some of the stories she has covered. After Rolling Stone published a story by Michael Hastings in 2010, in which aides to Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal criticized Washington’s civilian leadership of the war in Afghanistan, Logan rushed to defend McChrystal. “Michael Hastings has never served his country the way McChrystal has,” she told CNN.

Last year, she offered some unusually blunt public comments about the American response to the Benghazi attack. Speaking to a civic group in Chicago a month after the compound was assaulted on Sept. 11, 2012, Logan scoffed at the Obama administration’s initial statements about the incident as a spontaneous protest that spun into violence.

“When I look at what’s happening in Libya, there’s a big song and dance about whether this was a terrorist attack or a protest,” she said. “And you just want to scream, ‘For God’s sake, are you kidding me?’ The last time we were attacked like this was the USS Cole, which was a prelude to the 1998 embassy bombings, which was a prelude to 9/11. And you’re sending in the FBI to investigate? I hope to God that you are sending in your best clandestine warriors who are going to exact revenge and let the world know that the United States will not be attacked on its own soil, its ambassadors will not be murdered and the United States will not stand by and do nothing about it.”

Continue reading.

And at CBS News, "60 Minutes apologizes for Benghazi report."

'Palestinian' Teenager Kills Israeli Soldier on Bus in Afula, Northern Israel

He was stabbed to death.

At the Times of Israel, "Palestinian youth stabs sleeping soldier to death on Afula bus":

An Israeli soldier died after he was stabbed multiple times in the neck Wednesday morning by a Palestinian youth on a bus at the central bus station in Afula.

The soldier, 18-year-old Eden Atias of Nazareth Illit, was evacuated to the city’s Haemek Hospital. Doctors operated on him in an attempt to stabilize his condition but he succumbed to his injuries a few hours later.

His funeral was due to be held Wednesday evening at 23:00pm at the Nazareth Illit military cemetery.

Eyewitnesses said Atias was sleeping in his seat on the bus when he was attacked.

Also at the New York Times, "Attack on Israeli Worsens Tensions With Palestinians":

JERUSALEM — A Palestinian teenager fatally stabbed a 19-year-old Israeli soldier on a bus in northern Israel on Wednesday, according to the police, shocking Israelis who have grown unused to such killings in their cities and further clouding a peace process that was already severely strained by Israeli settlement plans in the West Bank.

Infuriated by news of long-term planning for more settlement housing, the Palestinian leadership is expected to meet on Thursday to discuss the future of the American-backed negotiations, which began this summer and were supposed to continue for nine months.

The latest crisis was set off by reports on Tuesday that Israel’s housing minister, Uri Ariel, had started planning for about 20,000 new settlement homes. But some officials suggested that talk of a possible collapse of the negotiations amounted to posturing, especially after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered Mr. Ariel to “reconsider” his new settlement plans, essentially putting them in suspension.

“If the Palestinians want to create an artificial crisis, that’s unfortunate,” a senior Israeli official said on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the peace talks in public. Dismissing Mr. Ariel’s plans as having no legal standing or practical significance, the Israeli official said the Palestinians were “going through the motions.”

Arik Ben-Shimon, an aide to Mr. Ariel, said on Wednesday that the new settlement planning was “frozen” but not canceled. Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, who offered his resignation two weeks ago, along with his fellow negotiator Muhammad Shtayyeh, in frustration over a lack of progress in the talks and the continuing settlement activity, said Mr. Ariel “needs to revoke the orders,” indicating that the issue was far from resolved.

The president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, confirmed in an interview with Egyptian CBC television this week that the Palestinian negotiating team had resigned, though it was never clear if the resignations had been accepted. Mr. Abbas said he was trying to persuade the negotiators to continue, adding, “If they don’t accept, I will form another team.”

The interview was recorded two days before the Palestinians learned of the latest settlement plans, according to Mr. Erekat.

The stabbing of the soldier on Wednesday also prompted calls for a rethinking on the Israeli side. Right-wing Israeli politicians have demanded a re-examination of Israel’s agreement to release 104 long-serving Palestinian prisoners from Israeli prisons in four batches as part of a deal to resume peace talks. Two of the four groups have already been released.

In a post on her Facebook page, Tzipi Livni, the minister leading the negotiations for the Israeli government, wrote: “I wrote here earlier and harshly criticized the damage in announcing settlement construction, but I took the post off because the profound political debate about the future of our life here will certainly continue, but not now. Now I would like to pay my respects to the memory of the soldier and express sorrow to the family and to clarify one more thing: violence will not bring political achievements. And we will fight terrorism and extremists decisively and without compromise.”

The stabbing took place when the bus, traveling from Upper Nazareth to Tel Aviv, pulled into a station in the northern town of Afula.

The elusive peace. Sigh.

Seriously, the murder is so shocking because they're so infrequent since Israel put up the wall. And this 19-year-old terrorist didn't even have a legal visa to be in the country. The so-called Palestinians just want the Israelis dead and buried so they can take over all of historic Palestine. Screw 'em.

Alternative to #ObamaCare

From Ramesh Ponnuru and Yuval Levin, at the Wall Street Journal, "A Conservative Alternative to ObamaCare":

As ObamaCare's failures and victims mount by the day, Republicans have so far mostly been watching in amazement. They expected the law to fail, but even among its most ardent opponents few imagined the scale and speed of the fiasco.

Seeing the pileup, Republicans might be tempted to step aside and let ObamaCare continue to disappoint and infuriate Americans. After all, the GOP doesn't have the power to repeal the law, or even to make meaningful changes to undo its worst effects. So why not just watch the Democrats pay the price for their folly?

But such passivity would actually protect the Democrats from paying that price. What Republicans can and should do is offer the public something better. Now is the time to advance a conservative reform that can solve the serious, discrete problems of the health-care system in place before ObamaCare, but without needlessly upending people's arrangements or threatening what works in American medicine. That the Democrats are now making things worse doesn't mean the public wants to keep that prior system, or that Republicans should.

The biggest Republican misconception about health care is that the system before ObamaCare was a free-market paradise. On the contrary: It has consisted chiefly of massive and inefficient entitlements that threaten to bankrupt the nation; the lopsided tax treatment of employer-provided coverage that creates incentives for waste and overspending; and an underdeveloped individual market struggling to fill the gaps.

Exploding health-care costs and millions left needlessly uninsured are a result of misguided federal policies. Solutions require targeted reforms to those policies.

The outlines of such reforms have been apparent for years. The key is to enable all Americans to purchase coverage and to approach health care as consumers: with an interest in quality and an eye on cost.

The first step of a plan to replace ObamaCare should be a flat and universal tax benefit for coverage. Today's tax exclusion for employer-provided health coverage should be capped so that people would not get a bigger tax break by buying more extensive and expensive insurance. The result would be to make employees more cost-conscious; and competition for their favor would make insurance cheaper.

That tax break would also be available—ideally as a refundable credit sufficient at least for the purchase of catastrophic coverage—to people who do not have access to employer coverage. This would enable people who now choose not to buy insurance to get catastrophic coverage with no premium costs. It also would give those who want more-comprehensive coverage in the individual market the same advantage that people with employer plans get.

Medicaid could be converted into a means-based addition to that credit, allowing the poor to buy into the same insurance market as more affluent people—and so give them access to better health care than they can get now.

All those with continuous coverage, which everyone could afford thanks to the new tax treatment, would be protected from price spikes or plan cancellations if they got sick. This guarantee would provide a strong incentive to buy coverage, without the coercion of the individual mandate. People who have pre-existing conditions when the new rules take effect would be able to buy coverage through subsidized, high-risk pools.

By making at least catastrophic coverage available to all, and by giving people such incentives to obtain it, this approach could cover more people than ObamaCare was ever projected to reach, and at a significantly lower cost.

The new alternative would not require the mandates, taxes and heavy-handed regulations of ObamaCare. It would turn more people into shoppers for health care instead of passive recipients of it—and encourage the kind of insurance design, consumer behavior and intense competition that could help keep health costs down. Redesigned and directed this way, the flow of federal dollars and tax subsidies would do much less to distort health markets than it has for the last several decades, while getting far more people insured...

Click through at Google to read the whole thing.

The Left's Skeezy 'Hosurance' #ObamaCare Distraction

At Michelle Malkin's, "Bros and hos: Obamacare’s bread and circuses."

Liberal marketing gurus here in Colorado are masters of Obamacare distraction. While customers struggle to apply through the still-broken health insurance exchange and consumers grapple with cancellation notices, these hipster ad designers are partying it up. Who cares about the insurance market meltdown? They’ve got keg stands and one-night stands!

The “Got Insurance?” campaign is the lame brainchild of two “progressive” outfits with dubious nonprofit status: ProgressNow and the Colorado Consumer Health Initiative. Their previous claim to fame: a “Thanks, Obamacare” social media movement to propagandize praise and gratitude for the federal mandate.

Modeled after the “Got Milk?” ads, the latest print and web promos pander to young people with pop-culture memes and entitlement-friendly appeals. The dumbed-down website address: doyougotinsurance.com. Last month, while federal and state Obamacare exchange sites 404′ed, the Colorado marketing buffoons LOL’ed. Their “Brosurance” ads featured frat boys with red solo cups guzzling beer, playing golf and celebrating government with a “Thanks, Obamacare!” smile.

ProgressNow’s Alan Franklin boasted about his coverage. Media coverage, that is: “Within the first few weeks, ‘Brosurance’ has been featured by The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, CNN, MSNBC, Conan O’Brien, Bill Maher and Roll Call, as well as the front page of Buzzfeed and Jezebel, just to name a few. Just in the first 24 hours of the campaign’s launch alone, #Brosurance was mentioned more than six million times on Twitter, and #GotInsurance more than 1.7 million times. Yes. The ads went viral.” Priorities.

On Tuesday, the groups launched phase two of their Obamacare bread and circuses. Aimed at young women, the ads show party gals with shot glasses lined up on a ski; “Hey, Girl” gags involving a cutout of actor Ryan Gosling; and the Sandra Fluke-inspired promo featuring birth control-wielding “Susie” and her “hot to trot” date, Nate. The caption reads:

“Let’s Get Physical. OMG, he’s hot! Let’s hope he’s as easy to get as this birth control. My health insurance covers the pill, which means all I have to worry about is getting him between the covers. I got insurance. Now you can, too.”

It’s bad enough that these idiocracy-targeted ads reduce young people to perpetually partying boozers and traffic-bait boobs. But what’s truly toxic is the ad campaign’s cynical feint to draw attention away from Obamacare’s undeniable harm to responsible young people.

More at the link.

And at AoSHQ, "Progressives' "Brosurance" Ads Are An Embarrassment." And Daniel J. Mitchell, "The Oleaginous Interaction of Sex and Obamacare."

#ObamaCare Girl Comes Out!

At Instapundit, "WELL NOW, DOESN’T THIS JUST SAY IT ALL: Obamacare girl not a citizen, hasn’t signed up and….wasn’t paid."

Boom! Panicked White House Now Welcomes #ObamaCare Fix!

Hell freezes over.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Obama Open to Health Law Fix: Shift Comes as Figures Show Far Lower Insurance Enrollment Than Expected":

WASHINGTON—The government released numbers Wednesday showing that far fewer Americans had enrolled in private insurance plans under the new health law than expected and, in a marked shift, the Obama administration signaled it was open to legislation to fix the troubled rollout.

The move came as the administration faced mounting dissatisfaction from Democrats over the law's implementation.

New administration figures showed that only 26,794 people nationwide had enrolled in a private health plan through the balky online federal marketplace in its first month—far short of projections. Meantime, some 79,391 people had bought private plans on state-run exchanges.

In the past, White House officials had said they strongly preferred an administrative remedy to the law's shortcomings. But on Wednesday, officials suggested that President Barack Obama was open to a bill by Sen. Mary Landrieu (D., La.), that would require insurers to continue offering plans that were in existence this year, even if that meant reinstating ones that had been canceled because they didn't meet the health law's standards.

The magnitude of Democratic support for a legislative solution will become clearer on Friday, when the House is set to vote on a separate Republican plan to let insurance companies continue to offer policies that were canceled recently. That vote may push Mr. Obama to move before Friday to offer his own administrative remedy or more fully embrace Ms. Landrieu's bill.

The White House shift came as more Democrats in Congress, fearful of a voter backlash due to the law, have lost confidence in administration assurances that the problems could be solved without changing the legislation.

"Sen. Landrieu's proposal shares a similar goal to what the president has asked his team to explore," White House spokesman Jay Carney said. "There may be ways to help some people with cancellation notices without legislation, but we are happy to work with her and any member of Congress who has ideas on how to make the Affordable Care Act better."

At least five Democratic senators have backed Ms. Landrieu's bill, with the latest, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D., Ore.), joining on Wednesday. Support from Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.), which came on Tuesday, was considered significant because she is an influential senior lawmaker.

In the House, where every member is up for election in 2014, Democrats on Wednesday confronted two White House aides who were dispatched to Capitol Hill to explain that the administration was working to address flaws in the online marketplace and warn representatives that it would be a mistake to reinstate insurance policies that don't meet minimum standards set by the 2010 law.

While some Democrats emerged from the meeting circling the wagons around the White House, others said they would vote anyway on Friday for the Republican plan—or at least consider doing so

"The frustration level is growing," said Rep. Jose Serrano (D., N.Y.) after leaving the closed-door Democratic strategy session. "The main message is there were three years to make this good, and it's not good. It's a mess right now."

The House bill is expected to come to an up-or-down vote Friday without any opportunity for lawmakers to offer amendments.

PREVIOUSLY: "Democrats Threaten to Abandon Obama on Health Law Provision."

The Numbers Behind Victoria's Secret and Its Iconic Fashion Show

At BuzzFeed:

The annual show tapes tonight and airs Dec. 10.

Democrats Threaten to Abandon Obama on Health Law Provision

At the New York Times:

WASHINGTON — Anxious congressional Democrats are threatening to abandon President Obama on a central element of his signature health care law, voicing increasing support for proposals that would allow Americans to retain the health insurance coverage they are losing because of the Affordable Care Act.

The dissent comes as the Obama administration released enrollment figures Wednesday that fell far short of expectations, and as House Republicans continued their sharp criticism of administration officials at congressional hearings examining the performance of the health care website and possible security risks of the online insurance exchanges.

In addition, a vote is scheduled Friday in the Republican-controlled House on a bill that would allow Americans to keep their existing health coverage through 2014 without penalties. The measure, drafted by Representative Fred Upton, the Michigan Republican who is the chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, is opposed by the White House, which argues that it would severely undermine the Affordable Care Act by allowing insurance companies to continue to sell health coverage that does not meet the higher standard of Mr. Obama’s health care law.

But a growing number of House Democrats, reflecting a strong political backlash to the rollout of the health care law, are warning the White House that they might support the measure if the administration does not provide a strong alternative argument. The approaching House vote is shaping up as an important test for both the health measure and the unity that Democratic leaders have so far been able to maintain around the health law despite a fierce Republican attack against it.

In a closed-door meeting Wednesday of House Democrats and White House officials, tensions flared as several lawmakers upbraided the administration, saying that the president had put Democrats in a tough political position by wrongly promising consumers that they could keep their existing health care plans. In fact, hundreds of thousands of Americans have received cancellation notices from their insurers because their health care coverage does not meet the minimum standards dictated by the new law.

“I’m frustrated in how it rolled out, and I let them know in no uncertain terms,” said Representative Mike Doyle, Democrat of Pennsylvania. “The point I was making in caucus to the administration is don’t give us this techno-babble that you’re going to do some administrative fix down the road. There’s a bill being put on the floor on Friday.”

Continue reading.

That's the House Republicans' press conference today at the clip.

And actually, it's not clear to me why Republicans are bailing out the Democrats on this. Erick Erickson has that, "It's a Trap!" (At Memeorandum.)

#ObamaCare Enrollment Deals Blow to White House

At the Wall Street Journal, "Obama Administration Gives First Month Health-Site Tallies":

The Obama administration said Wednesday that 26,794 Americans selected a private insurance plan sold through the troubled federally run health exchange in its first month, falling far short of initial expectations.

The administration, releasing the first nationwide figures on enrollment under the Affordable Care Act, said that through Nov. 2, an additional 79,391 people were able to choose a private plan in states running their own exchanges.

The news that only 106,185 people nationwide were able to get through the sites in a month comes as a significant blow to the administration. In one memo, it had projected some 500,000 people would obtain private-insurance coverage through the federal exchange in October. The Congressional Budget Office projected in May 2013 that seven million people nationwide would sign up for private plans by the end of March 2014.

Top officials had been bracing for a low number and had sought to play down expectations for it. The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that as of last week, fewer than 50,000 people had been able to enroll through the federal exchange. The Journal's figure included some enrollees past the Nov. 2 cutoff date.

The federal exchange serves consumers in 36 states. The remaining 14 states plus the District of Columbia are running their own health-insurance exchanges, and several posted better numbers.

California alone had more people picking private health plans—35,364—than the 36 states using the federal site combined. Still, California's enrollees represent less than 1% of the state's 6.6 million people who lack health insurance. Vermont was among the best performers, with 1,325 people picking a health plan, or 3.26% of the state's uninsured residents.

"There is no doubt the level of interest is strong. We expect enrollment will grow substantially throughout the next five months," said Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in a statement on the release. "They're also numbers that will grow as the website, HealthCare.gov, continues to make steady improvements."

Still, the formal release of numbers showing that enrollees so far are just a tiny percentage of the goal is likely to fuel further attacks by Republican critics who have sought to repeal the 2010 health law.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) said Wednesday that the administration should have delayed the rollout rather than introduce a problem-plagued website that few have been able to navigate. "This was a monumental mistake to go live and effectively explode on the launch pad," Mr. Issa said.

The 106,185 figure doesn't include new enrollment in Medicaid, the federal-state health program for the poor that is being expanded in roughly half of the 50 states. The administration said that some 396,261 Americans have signed up for the newly expanded Medicaid programs.

The House is set to vote Friday on legislation that would allow insurers to continue selling current insurance policies that don't meet the standards of the new law. Some 5% of Americans buy health coverage on the individual market, rather than getting it through an employer or government program. Many of those people have received cancellation.

Also at NBC News, "GOP pounces on Obamacare enrollment figure."

New Guidelines: Heart-Risk Strategy Gets Major Shake-Up

At WSJ, "Panel Unveils Shake-up in Strategy to Cut Heart Risk: Long-standing Strategy Jettisoned Under New Guidelines":

The current strategy of reducing a person's heart-attack risk by lowering cholesterol to specific targets is being jettisoned under new clinical guidelines unveiled Tuesday that mark the biggest shift in cardiovascular-disease prevention in nearly three decades.

The change could more than double the number of Americans who qualify for treatment with the cholesterol-cutting drugs known as statins.

The guidelines recommend abandoning the familiar and easy-to-understand guidance to keep LDL, or bad cholesterol, below 100 or below 70 for people at high risk—a mainstay of current prevention policy. Instead, doctors are being urged to assess a patient's risk more broadly and prescribe statins to those falling into one of four risk categories.

The aim is to more effectively direct statin treatment to patients with the most to gain, and move away from relatively arbitrary treatment targets that are less reliable in predicting risk of attack than is widely believed.

"We're trying to focus the most appropriate therapy to prevent heart attack and stroke...in a wide range of patients," said Neil J. Stone, professor of medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and head of the panel that wrote the guidelines.


Cardiovascular disease is the Western world's leading killer. In the U.S., it accounts for about 600,000 deaths each year, or about one in four. About 130,000 Americans die annually of stroke.

Numerous studies show that statins reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke. But solid data demonstrating the benefit of reaching specific targets are lacking, said Dr. Stone.

While lowering the LDL number remains a critical goal, the focus is on the risk reduction achieved with statins rather than the effect on LDL, said Donald Lloyd-Jones, chief of preventive medicine at Northwestern and a member of the guidelines panel.

Cardiologists expect the recommendations, jointly developed by the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association, to substantially change the conversation between doctors and millions of patients over the best way to lower their risk of heart attack or stroke.

The risk groups identified in the guidelines include patients who have already had a heart attack, stroke or major symptoms of cardiovascular disease; those with an LDL of 190 or higher, which typically has a genetic cause; people with diabetes; and anyone ages 40 to 79 who faces a 7.5% risk of having a heart attack over the next 10 years, according to a new risk score. That score—with a lower threshold than under current guidelines—takes into account cholesterol level, smoking status, blood pressure and other factors.

All are recommended to take high or moderate statin doses that would result in LDL reductions of about 30% to more than 50%. If fully implemented, the guidelines could more than double the number of people who qualify for statins, to more than 30 million, the authors said.

The new approach is likely to have a modest immediate effect on the pharmaceutical industry. All but one of the statins available, including Lipitor, have lost patent protection and are available as inexpensive generics.

I'm not in any of those risk categories, although pharmacological treatment is the wave of medicine these days. If these medications are that effective, and less expensive generics are available, it makes sense to adjust treatment regimes to help the largest number of individuals.

Interesting, in any case.

More at the link.

Jonathan Cohn: We Had to Destroy the American Healthcare System in Order to Save It

Really, I'm freakin' astounded by the left's callousness. Deaf ears and hard hearts.

I thought these people were supposed to be about compassion, diversity, and tolerance!

This is literally painful, from Jonathan Cohn, at the New Republic, "Bill Clinton Is Wrong. This Is How Obamacare Works" (via Memeorandum):

The Affordable Care Act includes a so-called grandfather clause. That allows insurers to keep renewing plans, without changes or benefits and prices, as long as they were available before March 2010, when the Affordable Care Act became law. But the non-group market is volatile: Very few people stay on plans for more than two years anyway. And the grandfather clause is narrow, by design: If insurers made even modest changes, the protection goes away. Those plans are subject to the new regulations that take effect in January. As a result, the majority of people who buy insurance on their own are learning they can’t have what they had before, even though Obama promised everybody they could. Either their premiums are going up, as insurers accommodate the new regulations, or the plans are disappearing altogether. In those cases, people have to find new plans. And the sticker price of what they’ll find is higher than what they pay now.

This is not a glitch or an accident. This is the way health care reform is supposed to work. And it’s important to put these changes into context. For one thing, it’s a small number of people relative to the population as a whole. The vast majority of Americans get coverage through employers or a large government program like Medicare. These changes don’t really affect them. The law also anticipates these changes by, among other things, offering tax credits that discount the premiums—in many cases, by thousands of dollars. (Other provisions of the law, like a limit on insurance company profits and overhead, should restrain prices more.) As a result, many people buying coverage on their own will be paying less money for benefits that are as good, if not better, than what they have now.

But there are real people who must pay more and, in some cases, put up with less. Some of them are people walking around with junk insurance, the kind are practically worthless because they pay out so little. Some of them are young people, particularly young men, whom insurers have coveted and wooed with absurdly low premiums—and make too much money to qualify for substantial subsidies. And some of them are reasonably affluent, healthy people with generous, open-ended policies that are hard to find even through employers. Insurers kept selling them because they could restrict enrollment to healthy people. Absent that ability, insurers are canceling them or raising premiums so high only the truly rich can pay for them.

Those people are the ones everybody is hearing about now, partly because they are a compelling, sometimes well-connected group—and partly because, absent a well-functioning website, stories of people benefitting from the law’s changes aren’t competing for attention. It’s impossible to know how big this group is. The data on existing coverage just isn’t that good. The anecdotes are frequently, although not always, more complicated than they seem at first blush. It’s probably one to two percent of the population, which doesn’t sound like much—except that, in a country of 300 million, that’s 3 to 6 million people. Most experts I trust think they represent a minority of people buying coverage on their own, but nobody can say with certainty.

Is that a worthwhile tradeoff for reform? Obviously that’s a matter of opinion. The fact that some people—even a small, relatively affluent group—are giving up something they had makes their plight (genuinely) more sympathetic. They are right to feel burned, since Obama did not make clear his promise might not apply to them. And there’s a principled argument about whether people should be responsible for services they’re unlikely to use presently, whether it’s fifty-something year olds paying for maternity care or twenty-something year olds paying for cardiac stress tests.

Read the whole thing. Utterly astounding.

Where to begin?

Well, for one thing, Obama lied to get this law passed, without a singe Republican vote in Congress. It's a wholly partisan bill that's now generating majority disapproval in national surveys. And right, it's not a glitch. Democrats literally had to destroy the private insurance market before they could ram down the ObamaCare monstrosity on the people.

How's the working out for you, Dems? Oh, not so great, eh? Well, people liked their healthcare plans. They shopped for what best fit their needs. That's the American way: individualism and diversity all in one. And all of a sudden statists like this idiot Jonathan Cohn are saying, "Hey, this is how it's supposed to work. Suck it up you privileged fat slobs." Well, f-k you buddy. The "real people" now forced to "pay more" are telling you to shove it. Just anecdotes, eh? Right. You tell "3 to 6 million people" they're just anecdotes, alright. You will be buried alive. Damned straight they "are right to feel burned," you smug a-hole. You burned them. You and your statist Democrat clusterf-k party that rejected all expert warnings because you didn't want to give the Republicans ammunition against the law. That is, you knew it wouldn't work, and you planned all along to stiff "3 to 6 million" people" for the absurd theory about how insurance markets are "supposed to work." Hey num-nuts, it's not working! Get that? It's a bleedin' disaster unfolding right before our eyes. Democrat defections are piling up faster the corpses in Stalin's Ukrainian famine. Because anecdotes! Those 60-year old couples needed that maternity coverage anyway! It's all for the common good. Sacrifice people!

Seriously, I'd like to pound this dolt Jonathan Cohn into the ground. In theory, of course. All in theory.

IMAGE CREDIT: Diogenes' Middle Finger, "ObamaCare or (SPMD) - Sick Pig of Mass Deception."

Hope is All #ObamaCare Has Left

From Megan McArdle, at Bloomberg.

Like I said a few days ago, I never realized how good she is.

Congressional Democrats Give Obama 72-Hours to Fix #ObamaCare!

I watched hot Megyn Kelly earlier tonight and it was blockbuster. Man, she was fired up!

I tweeted:

.@MegynKelly is on fire!
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) November 13, 2013

So now here's the opening blockbuster segment, via Gateway Pundit, "BREAKING: Congressional Democrats Give WH 72 Hours to Fix Obamacare Disaster (Video)."



Like I said earlier. Today was a very bad day for the White House.

See also Freedom's Lighthouse for the full opening segment at the Kelly File, "Panicked Congressional Democrats Give Obama a “72-Hour Ultimatum” to “Fix” ObamaCare – Video 11/12/13."

The Making of an #ObamaCare Management Failure

Man, the hits keep coming, and how.

From Carrie Budoff Brown, at Politico:

In the days after HealthCare.gov went live, White House chief of staff Denis McDonough quietly dispatched Jeff Zients, a favorite West Wing fixer, to assess the operation and report back.

When Zients did, President Barack Obama learned the project was in worse shape than suspected — riddled with coding problems, management issues and communication gaps, according to a senior administration official.

It was only then that Obama and his top aides realized the extent of what they didn’t know.

The story of how a technology-obsessed White House failed to head off a technological disaster may be as simple as it is mind-boggling to the law’s supporters. Senior White House officials claim they just never anticipated the magnitude of the problems that would unfold — there was concern, yes, but not an impending sense of doom.

The notion that Obama wasn’t clued in seems to defy logic, given the warning signs from both within the administration and outside of it, the importance of the law’s success to his presidency and his own understanding of the power of technology. But ever since the troubled launch, administration officials have tried to keep Obama as far as possible from the debacle, describing him as engaged in the implementation but unaware of the depth of the website issues.

The question of how much the White House knew will get a fuller, public airing Wednesday when technology officials in charge of the website testify before House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

Sheesh. That's clinical, almost like an autopsy.

Continue reading.

Bill Clinton Sticks a Knife in #ObamaCare

From Jonathan Tobin, at Commentary:

The five-year-long dance between the Clintons and President Obama has always been an interesting show, but never more so than now as the runner-up in the 2008 Democratic presidential contest starts to maneuver in preparation for 2016. Hillary Clinton spent her four years as secretary of state playing the good soldier for the president, doing little of value but also (and unlike her spectacularly inept successor John Kerry) causing him little trouble. She exited the cabinet with a presidential love fest that had to annoy Vice President Joe Biden, her only likely rival for 2016. But now that she is safely out of the Washington maelstrom and embarked on a path that she hopes will see her return to the White House as president rather than first lady, her relationship with Obama has undergone a not-so-subtle change. That has allowed some of the old antagonism between her and, in particular, her husband and the man who beat her in 2008 to resurface.

That antagonism was on display today as Bill Clinton joined the growing chorus of critics of the ObamaCare rollout in an interview published in a web magazine. Speaking much as if he was one of the angry red-state Democrats who think the president’s lies about ObamaCare can sink their hopes of reelection next year, the 42nd president stuck a knife into the 44thpresident by saying the law should be changed to accommodate the demands of those who are losing their coverage despite the president’s promises to the contrary:

“I personally believe even if it takes a change in the law, the president should honor the commitment the federal government made to those people and let them keep what they got.”

In doing so, the former unofficial “explainer in chief” for Obama has helped undermine the notion that the president’s signature health-care legislation can be kept intact. But he has also begun the process by which Hillary will begin to disassociate herself from an administration that is beginning to take on the odor of lame-duck failure.

Continue reading.

This has been a very bad day for the White House.

There's so much disastrous news I'm simply gonna have to do a couple of roundups. In addition to Clinton, today saw further Democrat defections on Capitol Hill, particularly Senator Dianne Feinstein, who's apparently ready to join Senator Mary Landrieu for a legislative fix for the millions health plan cancellations nationwide. Also in the news in the new James O'Keefe undercover video that exposes ObamaCare navigators encouraging enrollees to lie on applications. And in a twist that's real-life imitating frat-house parody, progressives out of Colorado are pitching hookup sex and alcohol to promote ObamaCare --- a turn that is nothing less than Democrats embracing rape culture to get "young invincibles" to sign up for the world-class clusterf-k.

See Twitchy, "Sens. Feinstein, Landrieu co-sponsor bill to let people keep their health plans."

More, "‘There’s a new sheriff in town’: James O’Keefe exposes Obamacare navigator fraud [video]," and "Obamacare navigator caught on tape fired; Three others suspended."

And, "Do you got ‘Ho-surance’? ‘Brosurance’ creators branch out, set their sights on lady parts [pics]."

Plus, I sure hope Twitchy does a curation, but Dana Loesch is just destroying idiot leftist Alan Franklin, who I guess is the dolt who created these Colorado ObamaCare ads. Just scroll Dana's timeline to witness a thing of beauty.

Germany Debates Edward Snowden Asylum

At Der Spiegel, "Germany's Quandary: The Debate over Asylum for Snowden":

There are growing calls in Germany not only to question Edward Snowden in connection with the ongoing NSA scandal, but also to offer him safe passage and asylum. Yet the heads of the two major political camps fear the wrath of the United States.

Hans-Christian Ströbele, a lawyer and parliamentarian for Germany's Green Party, turned 74 this year. He has devoted more than 50 of those years to the political struggle for justice and for what is good in the world - or at least that's how he sees it. "Have you ever been on the wrong side of things?" Ströbele was asked in a recent television interview.

"Politically speaking?" he asked the interviewer, glancing at the ceiling. For two seconds, it seemed as if he had to consider the question, but he quickly regained his composure and emphatically replied: "No."
Now Ströbele is waging another political battle, probably the most noteworthy one of his life. Last Thursday, he went to Moscow and spent three hours speaking with Edward Snowden, the man whose revelations about the spying activities of the United States have both captivated the world for months and deeply changed its perceptions.

Ströbele, a lawmaker from the Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg election district in Berlin, was the first politician in the world to meet with Snowden in his Moscow exile. Snowden's mission is now Ströbele's mission. He wants to bring the American whistleblower to Germany to testify before an investigative committee of the German parliament, the Bundestag, and in doing so provide him with a secured right of residence in Germany.

Ströbele knows that granting Snowden the right to stay in Germany would create problems for German-American relations. The Americans have already submitted an extradition request, just in case Snowden ever sets foot on German soil. But Ströbele doesn't care. He sets his own priorities and, once again, he believes himself to be on the right side of history, notwithstanding Germany's trans-Atlantic partnership with the United States. "If the political will exists, as well as the courage, including the courage to stand up to presidents, then it's possible," Ströbele said after returning from Moscow.

More here.

Plus, "Asylum Debate: Germany Wants to Question Snowden":

Since revelations emerged two weeks ago that America's National Security Agency had long spied on Chancellor Angela Merkel's mobile phone communications, calls have been growing for whistleblower Edward Snowden to be offered political asylum in Germany.

Well, he can't stay in Russia forever. He's still a man without a country. Interesting though is how much  the German left digs the guy. Anything to stick it to Obama right in the eye.

#ObamaCare Enrollment Numbers Coming In on the Short Side. Just a Little...

At The Last Refuge, "Report: October Obamacare Enrollment Fewer Than 50,000."

And you know, if the numbers aren't coming in the way you want them (the way you need them!), no problem. Just tweak the numbers until they're just right!

At WonkBlog, "Who counts as an Obamacare enrollee? The Obama administration settles on a definition":

When the Obama administration releases health law enrollment figures later this week, though, it will use a more expansive definition. It will count people who have purchased a plan as well as those who have a plan sitting in their online shopping cart but have not yet paid.

WTF?

If Amazon counted all the items sitting in my shopping cart as "paid" I'd be broke a long time ago.

— Amanda Carpenter (@amandacarpenter) November 12, 2013

Word.

Mystery of the Gurlitt Family and the Munich Nazi Art Find

At Der Spiegel, "Phantom Collector: The Mystery of the Munich Nazi Art Trove":

The world has been captivated by the discovery of more than 1,400 works of art in a Munich apartment, among them many lost masterpieces stolen by the Nazis. The mystery surrounding the paintings reveals much about the great tragedies of the 20th century -- and Germany's attempt to grapple with its past.

Two men are on horseback, it's summer, the colors are radiant, the riders are deep in conversation, and one of the horses prances in the surf. It's a brief moment on a beach in Holland - but it is also a moment for eternity.

Max Liebermann's painting, "Two Riders on the Beach," is an Impressionist masterpiece. He painted it in 1901, and a Jewish sugar refiner from Breslau in Lower Silesia, now the Polish city of Wroclaw, owned it for more than 30 years -- until the Nazis confiscated the work. After that, it disappeared.

Two attorneys in Berlin have been searching for the Liebermann for the last five years. Lothar Fremy and Jörg Rosbach specialize in restitution cases. In the postwar period, they helped clients assert claims for expropriated property in eastern Germany. The lawful heirs of the Liebermann paintings are brothers, 88 and 92, who live in London and New York, respectively. The sugar refiner from Breslau was their great uncle. The painting is probably worth about €1 million ($1.34 million) today.

When Fremy and Rosbach switched on the television last Tuesday, they weren't expecting much. The public prosecutor's office in the Bavarian city of Augsburg was giving a press conference on a mysterious Munich art find, and it was being broadcast live. Yet what they saw on TV was the announcement of the largest discovery of lost art from the Nazi period since World War II. Eleven of the 1,406 art works that had been seized in Munich a year and a half ago were presented in the press conference. The Liebermann was one of the paintings.

Talk about international intrigue.

Continue reading.

PREVIOUSLY: "Nazi Art Cache."

PTSD Veterans Fight Addiction to Prescription Painkillers

At WSJ, "For Veterans With PTSD, A New Demon: Their Meds: Threat of Addiction to Prescription Painkillers Heightened With Mental Illness":

NEWPORT, N.H.—Desperation drove Timothy Fazio, a former Marine, to turn up around midnight at a veterans' hospital near Boston. His post-traumatic stress disorder was causing flashbacks and blackouts. He had leapt from a balcony.

And he had overdosed, twice, on painkillers originally prescribed for a hand injury suffered in Iraq.

"I want detox," Mr. Fazio told doctors that night in 2008, his medical files say.

After a week of withdrawal, Mr. Fazio checked himself out of the Veterans Health Administration hospital—and was given 168 pills of the same opiumlike drug he was already addicted to, according to his files, which The Wall Street Journal has reviewed. The next day, the hospital gave him another 168 pills.

PTSD and painkillers are the twin pillars of a new mental-health crisis in America. Many of the more than two million Americans who served in Iraq or Afghanistan suffer, as Mr. Fazio does, from a mixture of pain and PTSD. The VA treats many of them with powerful opioid painkillers for their pain. But opioids can be a combustible mix with mental illness because of a heightened addiction risk.

Effectively, some critics say, it amounts to treating mental illness with addictive narcotics.

A study by a VA researcher found that veterans with PTSD were nearly twice as likely to be prescribed opioids as those without mental-health problems. They were more likely to get multiple opioid painkillers and to get the highest doses. Veterans with PTSD were more than twice as likely to suffer bad outcomes like injuries and overdoses if they were prescribed opioid painkillers, the study found.

In Mr. Fazio's case, between 2008 and 2011 the VA prescribed him more than 3,600 pills containing oxycodone, a narcotic painkiller from the same family as heroin and morphine, his records show. He overdosed a total of six times.

"I was always a tough kid, but I feel like this has been the toughest fight of my life," Mr. Fazio said in March, after a spell of homelessness that saw him sleeping in an ATM lobby. "I don't know if I'm going to win it."

The VA declined to comment on Mr. Fazio's treatment and said it would review his records. It said it follows uniform guidelines and procedures for veterans' pain care, adding that those are being reinforced with further training of doctors and patients in safe opioid use. "The Veterans Health Administration has worked aggressively to promote the safe and effective use of opioid therapy for veterans," it said.

The number of vets with both PTSD and pain isn't known. But some 30% of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans under VA care have PTSD, VA figures show, and more than half suffer chronic pain.

Continue reading.

'The White House is Desperate to End #ObamaCare Blues...'

Major Garrett reports, for CBS News:



I know the press is still soft for the Chicago Jesus, but all this critical reporting on the mofo's utter incompetence and moral bankruptcy is quite stunning. It's almost as if George W. Bush was back in the White House.

More here, "Obama's Second Term FUBAR as Approval, Personal Favorability Hit the Crapper."

Obama Tech Support Arrives to 'Fix' the Website and #ObamaCare

Tweeted this out after cracking up on Facebook yesterday.

.@RSMcCain Via @PRHouseworth, the tech surge is coming to fix #ObamaCare! pic.twitter.com/8GTRlKHgaG

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) November 12, 2013

Supreme Court to Hear Challenge to Union 'Card-Check Neutrality Agreements'

It's supposed to be one of the most important labor cases before the Supreme Court in decades, at the New York Times, "Supreme Court to Take Up Challenges to Union Practices":

Labor leaders and businesses are closely watching a Supreme Court case to be argued this Wednesday that involves a popular strategy used by unions to successfully organize hundreds of thousands of workers.

That strategy — widely deployed by the Service Employees International Union and the Unite Here hotel workers union — involves pressuring an employer into signing a so-called neutrality agreement in which the employer promises not to oppose a unionization drive. By some estimates, more than half of the recent successful unionization campaigns involve such agreements, which sometimes allow union organizers onto company property to talk with workers.

Benjamin Sachs, a professor of labor law at Harvard Law School, said the case before the Supreme Court was potentially “the most significant labor case in a generation.”

Professor Sachs said that if the court ruled against labor, it could significantly hobble efforts by private sector unions to organize workers. He added that the other big labor case the Supreme Court has agreed to hear this session could have a significant impact on public sector unions. In that case, a home-care worker has asked the court to rule that the state of Illinois violated her First Amendment rights by requiring her to pay “fair share” fees, much like dues, to a union she did not support.

In the case being argued on Wednesday, Unite Here Local 355 vs. Mulhall, an employee of Mardi Gras Gaming in Florida sued Unite Here, asserting that its neutrality agreement with the company was illegal. The United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit ruled in his favor, finding that the agreement was a “thing of value” that federal labor law bars employers from giving to any union or union official.

More at that top link.

And at Labor Pains, "SCOTUS to Ask, “What about the Employees?”":

Mardi Gras Gaming agreed to recognize a card-check procedure, not to speak out on the issue of unionization, and to hand over a list of unionizable employees to the union. In return, the union agreed not to strike and to help pass a ballot measure allowing slot machine gambling. Employees who oppose unionization like Martin Mulhall, who filed suit to block the agreement, had no seat at the table.

The Cato Institute legal team argues that these perks absolutely are “things of value,” noting:

We argue that, not only are Mardi Gras’s concessions clearly “things of value,” they are the types of exchanges that the Taft-Hartley Act was specifically passed to prohibit. The union exchanged a promise of “peace” from strikes and boycotts for concessions from the casino that compromised Mr. Mulhall’s right to dissent from unionization. The “exchange” was little better than extortion.

It's extortion alright. The union goons are breathing down their necks.

Infighting Can Be Fun – Meanwhile We're Losing the #War

Via Becca Lower:

Yes, we need to have the conversation about where the Republican party is going. People like Mike Lee and Ted Cruz (and others) are making compelling arguments. But should that mean losing the path we’re all on, the one that leads to beating back the forces of the Left who despise us and everything we have built together as Americans? Should that fall victim to our squabbles? Not on Veterans Day, not any day. While we’re infighting about whether someone’s speaking the conservative message exactly the way we’d like them to, we’re losing the #War.

RTWT.

President Moron

From William Gensert, at American Thinker, "Obama: The Most Dangerous of Morons":

There have been bad presidents -- see Jimmy Carter.  Yet has there ever been a president as staggeringly incompetent as Barack Obama?  Really, can there be any other explanation for his performance as president than the man is, well...a moron?

Let's face it, we all know them.  They are the people who either started out with money, or have spent a lifetime failing up.  Despite a distinct lack of accomplishment, personal or professionally, they believe they are the smartest person in every room.  They cannot utter a sentence that does not include "I," "me," and "my," and they never stop speaking.  To quote Alice Roosevelt, they are "the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding and the baby at every christening."

They seem to Forrest Gump their way through life, with one undeserved success after another.

Does this remind you of anyone?

Have you ever noticed how many of these "really smart" people there are in government?  It's a magnet for morons, and it seems every damn one of them is portrayed by the media as a genius in his own right.  Yet, they never seem to be able to do anything but make things worse, and usually much worse.

These are America's morons and Barry is their leader.

Obama has strange tastes.  His favorite show is Homeland.  He's proud to tell people this, and don't get me wrong, I like the show myself -- as a work of fiction.  Then again, I'm not the President of the United States of America.  In that case, the bar should be set higher.

A president who brags about liking a show where one of the lead characters assassinated the Vice President of the United States is not one to be taken seriously as president, or as anything.

One more time for emphasis, the President of the United States willingly tells people his favorite show is one in which the Vice President was assassinated.

What is this guy, a moron?

The answer is yes, he is a moron, and worse, he is the most dangerous of morons, one who doesn't think he is a moron.

Don't get me wrong, this is not an anti-moron screed.  In my life, I have had more than 2,000 people work for me.  Morons have their place.  A good manager reads an employee and his skill set and uses that person to the maximum of his abilities.  A moron can contribute.  A moron can be an effective employee -- I've had many of them.

Yet when he is delusional and lacks self-awareness, he often has the 'I can do anything' syndrome and ends up thinking he can be President of the United States, while believing he's got game like Lebron and is smarter than all his advisors.

A dangerous moron, at times, can self-limit the damage done, by lightening the workload.  Having surprisingly risen past his level of competence, he naturally thinks he is actually so great, he doesn't have to work hard.  So...he doesn't.  Instead he plays golf, and throws parties, and gives speeches, and looks longingly at his reflection in the mirror.

Narcissus was convinced no one was prettier than Narcissus.  And Barry is convinced no one smarter than Barry.

A moron can be productive -- providing he knows his limitations and can use what God has given him within those limitations.  A dangerous moron, however, is all arrogance and bluster, always convinced that every one of his incompetent actions and the inevitable results, are actually brilliant successes and if not, somebody else's fault.  Dangerous morons hate to admit they were wrong.  They are also incapable of feeling shame or guilt.

Dirty Harry Callahan said: "A man's got to know his limitations."  And Clint Eastwood talked to an empty chair.  Well...Barack Obama is the iconic "empty suit," which, by definition is the most dangerous of morons...

Continue reading.

Grim Toll Rises in Philippines

At WSJ, "Grim Toll Rises Amid Ruin and Chaos: Death Toll Above 1,700 Is Likely Much Higher":

People covered their faces with towels and scarves against the stench of death Monday, clogging the typhoon-ravaged roads of the hardest hit part of the Philippines in a traffic jam of desperation.

Headed into one center of devastation were Filipinos frantic to find loved ones, or help, or both; fleeing in the other direction were battered and fearful survivors of the howling winds and raging waves of supertyphoon Haiyan.

As the death toll surged and food and water became scarce three days after the storm, tens of thousands of refugees struggled to find their way to aid. With the return of cellphone signals and as rescuers cut their way toward isolated communities on Monday, the depth of the loss of lives became clearer. The government put the death count at 1,744—and it was expected to rise much further. Thousands remained missing.

On the streets of Tacloban, capital of the shattered province of Leyte, stiffened animal carcasses and human bodies were a common sight, some out in the open, others partly covered by tarps or sheet metal.

The road to Tacloban's airport was jammed with people trying to get out as limited commercial service restarted. At the same time, the road into town was also snarled by motorbikes and cars—even as humanitarian workers warned that both food and water were rapidly running out.

Continue reading.

Oops! #ObamaCare TV Ads Kinda Forget to Mention Individual Mandate Penalty

Yeah, the California advertisement below is all about the utopian healthcare heavens parting, or something. It's pretty disgusting.

At the New York Times, amazingly, "Talk of Penalty Is Missing in Ads for Health Care":

New York’s health exchange slogan is “Today’s the Day.” Minnesota has enlisted Paul Bunyan. Oregon held a music contest, and California stresses the “peace of mind” that will come with insurance.

The state and federal health insurance exchanges are using all manner of humor and happy talk to sell the Affordable Care Act’s products. But the one part of the new system that they are not quick to trumpet is the financial penalty that Americans will face if they fail to buy insurance.

On state exchange websites, mention of the penalty is typically tucked away under “frequently asked questions,” if it appears at all. Television and print ads usually skip the issue, and operators of exchange telephone banks are instructed to discuss it only if asked. The federal website, now infamous for its glitches, mentions the penalty but also calls it a fee, or an Individual Shared Responsibility Payment.

The euphemisms and avoidance of any discussion of the penalty are no accident, both supporters and critics of the law say. While the mandate for all Americans to buy health insurance — with a penalty if they do not — was the linchpin of the Supreme Court decision upholding the law, and is considered the key to its success, poll after poll has found that it is also the least popular part of the program.

State exchange operators say that they are not trying to hide the penalty, but that their market research has taught them that, at least in the initial phase, consumers will be more receptive to soothing messages and appeals to their sense of collective responsibility than to threats of punishment.

“We feel that the carrot is better than the stick,” said Larry Hicks, a spokesman for Covered California. “This is a new endeavor. We want people to come in and test our wares.”

But there is also the dirty little secret of the penalty: It is a bit of a chimera, because the federal government cannot use its usual tools like fines, liens or criminal prosecutions to punish people who do not pay it. The penalty is supposed to be reported and paid with the income tax returns of those who do not buy insurance, but the government has not said how it will collect from those who owe it but do not pay it, though the law allows it to deduct from any income tax refunds.

“It might be that they want to be positive,” said Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies at the conservative Cato Institute. “But it’s also the case that an informed customer is not their best customer.”

And for many healthy middle-class people, a side-by-side comparison might suggest that it would be more cost-effective to pay the penalty than to buy insurance.

Cost effectiveness? Heaven forfend we can't have that!

Continue reading.

If Only We'd Have Gotten the Public Option...

The left's response to the catastrophic ObamaCare rollout has been to (1) deny there's a problem, because once the website's working everything will be rosy, or something, or (2) to demonize those criticizing the president as greedy, racist capitalist scumbags raping the disadvantaged out of healthcare, or thereabouts.

There might be a couple other versions I'm leaving out, but so far that's about it. Folks on the left just aren't getting it. And they're not taking it too well. ObamaCare's not working and is not likely to ever work, because just wanting to provide universal health coverage doesn't necessarily translate into the political and technological competence to make it happen.

So here's one of today's example, at NewsBusters, "NYT Prints Op-Ed 'Daring to Complain About Obamacare'; Leftist Wrath Ensues." Following the links takes us to Lori Gottlieb's op-ed at the New York Times, "Daring to Complain About Obamacare." By now Ms. Gottlieb's story is all too familiar. Millions of people have been losing their insurance, and it's become an enormous political problem for the Democrats. At this point it's almost a certainty that a major policy change will be adopted, perhaps delaying full implementation of the law until 2015. Actually, at this point I say let it go into effect, so Democrats can eat that f-ker at the polls next November.

Either way, it's going to be ugly. But the Newsbusters piece trolled the comments at NYT, and doing likewise I noticed this comment below from an anti-captialist Obama supported who was down for a "robust" public option in 2009. (The public option was the socialist left's preferred socialist option, pushed, during the congressional debate in 2009, by people like Jane Hamsher at Firedoglake.)

You gotta love the attacks on "private insurance companies":

Do not blame President Obama for the fact private insurance companies are using the ACA as an excuse to change your policies and increase your premiums.

Blame 3 Senators (Nelson, D-NE; Lieberman, I-CT; and Landrieu, D-LA). President Obama wanted a public option in the bill, but those 3 Senators announced they would not vote for cloture if the bill contained public option. Without a vote for cloture, Harry Reid had to bring a bill to the floor without a public option. They sided with big insurance (who were afraid of government competition) and against the people.

If there were a public option, people could choose it instead of paying what private insurance companies charge. Consider education, people can send their children to free public schools or pay tuition to send their children to private schools. In the case of the ACA, there is no choice. Everybody must purchase private insurance. This is great for the bottom line of private insurance companies; but not so great for the people.

Ironically, my former Senator, Cornhusker Kickback Ben Nelson, lives in a state that requires that all power generation be public (there are no private electric companies in Nebraska). We have some of the lowest electric rates in the country because power is socialized in Nebraska (the people own the means of electricity generation).

Give me public insurance (e.g., Medicaid and Medicare) any day. The ACA doesn't even give the public the option of buying public insurance.

And no surprise, but Martin Longman jumped on the socialist bandwagon, attacking Ms. Gottlieb as a liar, "Another ObamaCare Liar."

She's not lying. Nor are the millions of others who've been kicked to the curb by this law. But leftists are not dealing with reality here. They're operating through the utopian socialist healthcare ideology that got us to this spot in the first place. It's time to unravel it. And that will come after the Republicans win back control in Washington and repeal the left's ObamaCare monstrosity.

More from JustOneMinute, "We'll Score This as 'Not A Like'," and Legal Insurrection, "Tax The American Prospect to pay this lady’s increased health care bill."

U.S. Marines Arrive in the Philippines to Help Disaster Relief

At the Marine Corps Times, "More Marines, aircraft head to devastated Philippines."

And the Washington Post, "Typhoon survivors in Philippines plead for food, medicine as US Marines fly in help."



Also at USA Today, "Relief effort intensifies after Philippines tragedy."

'If you like your teeth you can keep them. Period...'

Seen on Twitter.



More, at Twitchy, "Brit Hume retweets promise made in new ‘Obamacare dental plan’ [pic]."

France Saves the West From Very Bad Nuclear Deal with Iran

At the Wall Street Journal, "Vive La France on Iran":

We never thought we'd say this, but thank heaven for French foreign-policy exceptionalism. At least for the time being, François Hollande's Socialist government has saved the West from a deal that would all but guarantee that Iran becomes a nuclear power.

While the negotiating details still aren't fully known, the French made clear Saturday that they objected to a nuclear agreement that British Prime Minister David Cameron and President Barack Obama were all too eager to sign. These two leaders remind no one, least of all the Iranians, of Tony Blair, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush. That left the French to protect against a historic security blunder, with Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius declaring in an interview with French radio that while France still hopes for an agreement with Tehran, it won't accept a "sucker's deal."

And that's exactly what seems to have been on the table as part of a "first-step agreement" good for six months as the parties negotiated a final deal. Tehran would be allowed to continue enriching uranium, continue manufacturing centrifuges, and continue building a plutonium reactor near the city of Arak. Iran would also get immediate sanctions relief and the unfreezing of as much as $50 billion in oil revenues—no small deliverance for a regime whose annual oil revenues barely topped $95 billion in 2011.

In return the West would get Iranian promises.

RTWT.

PREVIOUSLY: "Critics Ask Why France Scuttled Iran Nuclear Deal."

George W. Bush Veterans Day Message

Just awesome, "A Veterans Day Message From President George W. Bush."



Via Twitchy, of which the hatred highlighted there is just too much for the day, "Pathetic: Veterans Day brings out the Bush Derangement Syndrome."

Oh My! Sarah Palin Stuffs Matt Lauer's #ObamaCare 'Apology' Meme

This is too good!

Matt Lauer doubles-back with the "Obama apologized" line, but Palin's having none of it. She rightly debunks the story that everything will be fine once the healthcare.gov website is fixed. The problems go way beyond the website. And the look on Lauer's mug is gold.

Via Doug Powers, at Michelle's blog, "Matt Lauer pushes Dem O-care talking points; Sarah Palin doesn’t take the bait."

What Palin does is bring the grassroots message of decency and values right into America's living rooms. I'm sure it's a shock to the system for the left's regressive ghouls. They'll dash for their channel-changers faster than a cockroach scurries for the baseboards at the flip of the light-switch.



She also plugs her new book, Good Tidings and Great Joy: Protecting the Heart of Christmas.

What a great American.

Added: Also at the Other McCain, "Go, @SarahPalinUSA, Go! Whacks Lauer, ObamaCare on ‘Today’ Show (VIDEO)."

#ObamaCare Marriage Penalty Pushes Brooklyn Couple to Consider Divorce

At Breitbart, "Married Couple Considers Divorce to Save Money on Obamacare."

And at the Atlantic, of all places, "The Hidden Marriage Penalty in Obamacare":

The first time I heard Nona Willis Aronowitz talk about getting divorced to save money on health insurance I thought she couldn't really be serious. We were at Monte's, an old Italian place in South Brooklyn, having dinner with a group of New York women writers in late July.

"Don't do it!" I urged her, certain, having watched my friends over the years, that no matter how casually she or her husband might treat the piece of paper that says they are married, getting unhitched would inevitably change their relationship as profoundly as getting hitched in the first place.

But with the arrival of the Affordable Care Act's insurance exchanges, the question for Nona and her husband Aaron Cassara moved from the realm of casual conversation to a real financial conundrum. Aged 29 and 32, respectively, they were facing tough times for their professions, a wildly expensive city, and the scary prospect that both of them could shortly be uninsured. Right now Nona only has a COBRA plan—"which I can barely afford"—that ends January 1, she tells me. Her last staff job ended when the media outlet she was working for laid off its whole editorial team; she's been a full-time freelancer since. Aaron, a filmmaker who works part-time and also freelances, has been uninsured since her layoff, because it would be too expensive to have him on COBRA too.

Any married couple that earns more than 400 percent of the federal poverty level—that is $62,040—for a family of two earns too much for subsidies under Obamacare. "If you're over 400 percent of poverty, you're never eligible for premium" support, explains Gary Claxton, director of the Health Care Marketplace Project at the Kaiser Family Foundation.

But if that same couple lived together unmarried, they could earn up to $45,960 each—$91,920 total—and still be eligible for subsidies through the exchanges in New York state, where insurance is comparatively expensive and the state exchange was set up in such a way as to not provide lower rates for younger people. (Subsidy eligibility is calculated using a complicated formula involving income in relation to the poverty line, family size, and the price of plans offered through a state's marketplace.)

Nona and Aaron's 2012 income was higher than the 400 percent mark, but not by much. In New York City, that still doesn't take you very far for two people. If their most recent months of income are in the same range, they will get no help at all with buying insurance through the exchanges if and when they apply, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation and eHealth subsidy calculators. Premiums for the two for silver-level plans came in at $9,248 for the year.

But if they applied as unmarried individuals with something like their 2012 income, one of them would get at least $3,964 in subsidies toward the purchase of a plan, or possibly even be eligible for Medicaid, thanks to their uneven individual earnings that year. And if they fall below the 400 percent threshold, which Nona says they might this year, they could get substantial subsidies as a couple that are still worth less than what they'd be eligible for as individuals. These gaps are the marriage penalty.

Continue reading.

Look, progressives are doing all they can to destroy the institution of marriage. The ObamaCare marriage penalty is just one more weapon in the left's arsenal against moral decency, tradition, and basic self-sufficiency.

Obama's Second Term FUBAR as Approval, Personal Favorability Hit the Crapper

At the Wall Street Journal, "Health-Law Rollout Weighs on Obama's Ratings, Agenda: Approval, Personal Favorability Polling Sags, Creating New Complications for Second Term" (via Cracker Squire):

President Barack Obama, bogged down by problems with his signature health-care program, is seeing both his approval and personal-favorability ratings with Americans sag, creating new complications for his second-term agenda.

During past turbulence in Washington, Americans' approval of the job Mr. Obama is doing dipped. But in those stretches, Mr. Obama was buoyed by voters' general admiration for him as a person and by their trust in his credibility.

That has changed recently, particularly as thousands of Americans lose their insurance coverage under the health law's rollout, despite the president's pledge that anyone who liked their current plan could keep it.

The president has apologized to Americans about the insurance-cancellation notices, and he is taking other steps to shore up his political standing. But if his reservoir of personal goodwill continues to diminish, it could hamper him at a time when his administration is trying to repair the insurance website on which much of the Affordable Care Act rests.

An Obama administration official said the recent standoff over the government shutdown and raising the nation's borrowing limit was bound to take a toll on the president's popularity. "I think the president took on the least amount of water after that fight than any of the other actors involved," the official said.

Going forward, Mr. Obama wants to enlist the public as allies in the push to pass an immigration overhaul, expand access to early-childhood education and raise the minimum wage. All these goals already are drawing resistance from congressional Republicans, and if the public sours on him, the job is that much more difficult.

"His credibility is hurt, because he said things that aren't quite true," said Lou D'Allesandro, deputy Democratic leader in the New Hampshire Senate, referring to the vow that Americans could keep their health plans. "Unless a couple of dramatic things happen, he could be a lame duck by January."

A survey released last week by the Pew Research Center found the president's approval rating at 41%, down 10 points since May. Pew's pollsters compared Mr. Obama's fortunes to the slide that former President George W. Bush saw. At a comparable point in Mr. Bush's second term—after Hurricane Katrina had hit—Mr. Bush's job approval stood at 36%.

By contrast, second-term support for Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan held steady in Pew polling, with 58% and 62% of the public, respectively, approving of their job performance at a similar point in their presidencies.

Chris Lehane, a former Clinton White House official, said that Mr. Obama's "political success depends on maintaining trust" and that the White House must work to keep intact this "most precious leadership asset."

"Second-term presidents have hit those moments when they lost the trust of a critical mass of the public…which effectively made them lame ducks," Mr. Lehane said. He said he doesn't believe Mr. Obama has reached that point.

Mr. Obama also is facing an increasingly uneasy Democratic contingent in Congress, with some lawmakers worried the rollout of the health law might damage their election prospects. Last week, Mr. Obama met with Democratic senators facing re-election in 2014, some of whom aired their complaints about the implementation of the health law. Later, Mr. Obama flew to Louisiana on Air Force One with one such senator, Louisiana's Mary Landrieu. After the plane landed, the president and Ms. Landrieu went separate ways: Mr. Obama to a port in New Orleans, Ms. Landrieu to an event in the western part of the state. Her office said she had a previous commitment.

Mr. Obama has little influence with the Republicans he needs to make policy gains, and his sliding poll numbers figure to only weaken his hold.

But it is difficult for Mr. Obama to work in bipartisan fashion because of GOP animosity toward him, some policy activists said.

Critics Ask Why France Scuttled Iran Nuclear Deal

Maybe Hollande's just not quite ready to throw Israel under the bus?

At LAT, "France's role in scuttling Iran nuclear deal prompts speculation":

WASHINGTON — France's role in the unraveling of an international deal to curb Iran's nuclear program brought angry reactions Sunday from Tehran, glowing praise from Iran's detractors and a whirl of speculation about what the French motive might be.

A marathon round of international talks in Geneva fell short of a widely anticipated deal early Sunday after French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius objected, saying the terms of a preliminary accord were too easy on Tehran. Many nations fear Iran has been secretly seeking a nuclear weapons capability, despite its claims to want nuclear power only for energy and medical purposes.

Fabius broke an informal rule of the six-nation diplomatic group that has been negotiating with the Iranians by going public with his criticism of the preliminary deal, which was aimed at opening the way for comprehensive negotiations over the nuclear program.

"One wants a deal … but not a sucker's deal," Fabius said.

When the negotiations ground to a temporary halt, Iran was quick to point a finger.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani told the National Assembly that Tehran would not be intimidated by any country's "sanctions, threats, contempt and discrimination," according to Iran's student news service. "For us there are red lines that cannot be crossed."

The semiofficial Fars news agency criticized the "destructive roles of France and Israel" for the failure of negotiators to reach an interim deal and ran a caricature of France as a frog firing a gun. "By shooting he feels he is important," the commentary said.

In contrast, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) tweeted that France "had the courage to prevent a bad nuclear agreement with Iran. Vive la France!"

The halt in talks set off a debate on whether France's intervention was motivated by commercial or geopolitical interests in the Middle East.

Good for France. Sheesh, doesn't anyone understand that Iran's up to no good?

More at that top link.

Radical Left Rejects Rational Ideas That Make the World Go 'Round

From the letters to the editor, at the New York Times, "Role of Humanities, in School and Life":

The humanities professors who spoke out on the causes of declined student enrollment did not mention a major factor that’s reshaped humanities education since 1970, when the decline began: postmodernism.

In the 1990s, when I was an English major at the University of Michigan, postmodernists dominated humanities study, and in their zeal to critique “Western culture,” they pointedly spurned old Enlightenment notions of “the classics,” “science,” “reason” and even “knowledge” itself — categories that they quarantined in dubious scare quotes as if they were hazardous materials. I fled my passion, literature, for a practical and rational-minded career in medicine.

While the professors justifiably cite inadequate funding and marketplace demand for scientists and engineers as causes of the marginalization of the humanities, they also ought to look inward at their profession’s rejection of the rational ideals that make the educated world go round.

AUSTIN RATNER
Brooklyn, Oct. 31, 2013

The writer is the author of two novels and a physiology textbook.

Yes. Indeed. That might be worth pointing out, that the radical left has destroyed decency and rationalism in American life. It can't be said enough, so don't stop saying it. Shout it from the rooftops: THE RADICAL LEFT IS DESTROYING ALL THAT'S GOOD IN THE UNITED STATES!!

PREVIOUSLY: "Ethnic Studies Programs Crash and Burn at Cal State University."

Obama 'Deeply Saddened' by Typhoon Haiyan Devastation

At London's Daily Mail, "Obama 'deeply saddened' by Typhoon Haiyan devastation as US marines go to Philippines to assist in relief efforts after thousands killed."



IMAGE CREDIT: iOWNTHEWORLD.

Robbie Williams: 'Mack the Knife'

Via Ghost of a Flea.

Oh the shark babe has such teeth, dear
And he shows them pearly white
Just a jack knife has ol’ MacHeath, babe
And he keeps it out of sight

You know when that shark bites with his teeth, dear
Scarlet billows start to spread
Fancy gloves though wears ol’ MacHeath, babe
So there's never, never a trace of red

On the sidewalk, Oh Sunday morning don’t you know
Lies a body just oozing life
And Someone's sneaking around the corner
Could that be our boy Mack the knife?

From a tug boat down by the river don’t you know
Lays a cement bag just dropping on down
That’s cement's there, it’s there for the weight, dear
I’ll get you ten ol’ Macky is back in town

Did you hear bout Louie Miller? He disappeared, babe
After drawing out all his hard earned cash
And know MacHeath spends, he spends just like a, like a sailor
Could it be, could it be, could it be, our boy did something rash?

[2x]
Jenny Diver Oh Sukey Tawdry
Look out Miss Polly Peachum and Oh Lucy Brown
Yeah the line forms on the right, babe
Now that Macky is back in town