The Commissar for Healthcare Enforcement will soon begin compulsory collectivization of those citizens who refuse to pay their fair share of the healthcare program. Kulaks will be paying penalties for their excessive hoarding through their refusals to pay into the State-mandated insurance collectives. Please assist the Commissar by denouncing uninsured citizens.And for all your information needs on the jackboots of ClusterCare, check the link.
The end of the filibuster entails a serious diminution of the Senate's power vis-à-vis the president and the House. As we observed this July, the Senate's power consists largely in its ability to withhold consent from both House-passed legislation and presidential actions (nominations and treaties). Thus majority rule enhances the power of the majority party at the expense of every individual senator, regardless of party.Well, Democrats are desperate.
As the Senate has become more partisan, and members elected during an earlier age have retired or died, concern for the Senate's institutional power has diminished. Yesterday's third Democratic dissenter, Carl Levin of Michigan, is one of only three remaining Democratic senators first elected before 1984.
But there's also a partisan incentive for restraint: A change in rules to benefit today's majority party will also benefit the other party the next time it is in the majority. It's called the "nuclear option" because it entails mutually assured destruction of the rules that benefit the minority. If the Republicans had gone nuclear in 2005, the Democrats would have reaped the benefit in 2009.
Once the filibuster is gone, it's as good as forever gone. There is no incentive for any majority party to reinstate it. Nor is there any reason to expect that future majorities will respect what's left of it. If a Democratic minority in 2017 tries to filibuster a Republican Supreme Court nominee, the Republicans will surely follow yesterday's precedent. The legislative filibuster may prove more robust, but one suspects our hypothetical Republican majority would abolish it if that's what it takes to repeal ObamaCare.
What's peculiar about the timing of the Democrats' decision is that it comes just when the partisan risk of abolishing the filibuster has been heightened. As the Washington Post's Ezra Klein acknowledges:
There's a lot of upside for Republicans in how this went down. It came at a time when Republicans control the House and are likely to do so for the duration of President Obama's second term, so the weakening of the filibuster will have no effect on the legislation Democrats can pass. The electoral map, the demographics of midterm elections, and the political problems bedeviling Democrats make it very likely that Mitch McConnell will be majority leader come 2015 and then he will be able to take advantage of a weakened filibuster. And, finally, if and when Republicans recapture the White House and decide to do away with the filibuster altogether, Democrats won't have much of an argument when they try to stop them."The political problems bedeviling Democrats" is a marvelous bit of understatement. The abject failure of ObamaCare has made the prospect of a Republican Senate in 2015 and a Republican president in 2017 much likelier. Thus even from a purely partisan standpoint, rational Democrats would have been more cautious about invoking the nuclear option when they did than at just about any other time in the past five years.
@gretawire You're doing a great job!
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) November 21, 2013@AmPowerBlog it is growing...we need to do what we can to stop it now?
— Greta Van Susteren (@gretawire) November 21, 2013@gretawire Well, I posted it on my blog too. Helping as much as I can: http://t.co/lu8JWumIum Thanks!
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) November 21, 2013Obamacare privileges the poor over the rich, the middle aged over the young, women over men, and everyone else over the elderly on Medicare. In order to extend more government control over private insurers, doctors and hospitals, Democrats have chosen to sacrifice the financial well- being and even the lives of other Americans. They justify it because they want to offer government subsidized insurance to those they deem needier.A great piece.
People who watch Fox News or read the Wall St. Journal have seen the faces and heard the voices of cancer patients who have lost the doctors and hospitals who are keeping them alive. Families working as hard as they can to maintain themselves find their insurance bills jumping to calamitous rates. We have heard from quietly desperate mothers saying their family cannot afford these rate hikes and that they don't know what they are going to do.
The government has taken the power to divert the train. It is morally wrong.
The Obama administration is planning to push back the period during which Americans sign up for coverage under the new health law in its second year of operation, a change that could reassure insurers while also avoiding the 2014 midterm elections.
The Department of Health and Human Services will allow Americans to start signing up for coverage starting Nov. 15, 2014, rather than Oct. 15, 2014, a department official said early Friday. People will have until Jan. 15, 2015, rather than Dec. 7, 2014, to complete the process, the official said.
The move is intended to give insurance issuers "the benefit of more time to evaluate their experiences during the 2014 plan year and allow them to take into account those who may enroll late, including young adults, before setting 2015 rates," the department said. The change also would give states and the federally run marketplace currently serving 36 states more time to get their systems ready for the next open enrollment period, it said.
The change applies to the new health-insurance exchanges created by the 2010 Affordable Care Act. They offer coverage to those who can't obtain it from an employer or government program.
The decision was earlier reported by Bloomberg News. It doesn't affect the open enrollment period for this year, which began Oct. 1 with a rough start. Open enrollment this season continues through March 31, and some supporters have delayed plans for promotions until January.
Insurers typically prepare rates in the spring for plans that will take effect the following year. Dismal early enrollment numbers and other developments in the market have made insurers nervous about the kind of risk they will bear after the first enrollment period under the law is over. That could prompt them to err on the side of caution and propose higher premiums for 2015.
The delayed 2015 enrollment calendar now being proposed by the Obama administration would give the insurers more time before they had to pull the trigger on rate decisions.
Such a shift also would ensure that Democrats facing tough re-election races next fall don't have to campaign at the same time as open enrollment is taking place, although some premium information would be already available during the campaign.
DALLAS—Under leaden skies, thousands of people here paid solemn respect to President John F. Kennedy on Friday at the small greensward that his motorcade was passing when he was slain by gunfire exactly 50 years ago.
Roughly 5,000 people, who were awarded tickets through a lottery, braved freezing temperatures and steady rain for the hourlong commemoration at Dealey Plaza, which included songs by the U.S. Naval Academy Men's Glee Club, a nod to Kennedy's service as a naval officer during World War II, as well as a recitation of some of the president's speeches by historian David McCullough.
Among those attending was Jill Michaels, who drove an hour and a half from her home in Waco, Texas, to commemorate the fallen president, arriving several hours before the ceremony began at noon. "Kennedy's assassination was our generation's 9/11 moment," said Dr. Michaels, a 59-year-old dentist. "I came to remember it and maybe to experience a healing moment."
Dallas's event was as much a tribute to the president's life and vision as it was an attempt at closure for the city, which had been scarred by the events a half-century ago on Nov. 22, 1963, after which people blamed a climate of intolerance here for the shooting.
Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings, 59, assured citizens that the city "was not guilty of the crime," but acknowledged that it had used the event as a catalyst to change for the better.
"It seems like we all grew up that day," said Mr. Rawlings, who recalled being ushered into the school gymnasium that Friday in 1963 and told his school day was over.
The commemoration drew visitors from around the world, many of whom were drawn by both Kennedy's legacy and the persisting mystery surrounding his death. Many people to this day continue to believe there must have been a wider plot to assassinate Kennedy, with some questioning the Warren Commission conclusion that accused gunman Lee Harvey Oswald, a worker at the Texas School Book Depository, was the sole gunman.
WASHINGTON — Officials at the National Security Agency, intent on maintaining its dominance in intelligence collection, pledged last year to push to expand its surveillance powers, according to a top-secret strategy document.There's more at that top link.
In a February 2012 paper laying out the four-year strategy for the N.S.A.’s signals intelligence operations, which include the agency’s eavesdropping and communications data collection around the world, agency officials set an objective to “aggressively pursue legal authorities and a policy framework mapped more fully to the information age.”
Written as an agency mission statement with broad goals, the five-page document said that existing American laws were not adequate to meet the needs of the N.S.A. to conduct broad surveillance in what it cited as “the golden age of Sigint,” or signals intelligence. “The interpretation and guidelines for applying our authorities, and in some cases the authorities themselves, have not kept pace with the complexity of the technology and target environments, or the operational expectations levied on N.S.A.’s mission,” the document concluded.
Using sweeping language, the paper also outlined some of the agency’s other ambitions. They included defeating the cybersecurity practices of adversaries in order to acquire the data the agency needs from “anyone, anytime, anywhere.” The agency also said it would try to decrypt or bypass codes that keep communications secret by influencing “the global commercial encryption market through commercial relationships,” human spies and intelligence partners in other countries. It also talked of the need to “revolutionize” analysis of its vast collections of data to “radically increase operational impact.”
The strategy document, provided by the former N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden, was written at a time when the agency was at the peak of its powers and the scope of its surveillance operations was still secret. Since then, Mr. Snowden’s revelations have changed the political landscape.
Prompted by a public outcry over the N.S.A.’s domestic operations, the agency’s critics in Congress have been pushing to limit, rather than expand, its ability to routinely collect the phone and email records of millions of Americans, while foreign leaders have protested reports of virtually unlimited N.S.A. surveillance overseas, even in allied nations. Several inquiries are underway in Washington; Gen. Keith B. Alexander, the N.S.A.’s longest-serving director, has announced plans to retire; and the White House has offered proposals to disclose more information about the agency’s domestic surveillance activities.
The N.S.A. document, titled “Sigint Strategy 2012-2016,” does not make clear what legal or policy changes the agency might seek. The N.S.A.’s powers are determined variously by Congress, executive orders and the nation’s secret intelligence court, and its operations are governed by layers of regulations. While asserting that the agency’s “culture of compliance” would not be compromised, N.S.A. officials argued that they needed more flexibility, according to the paper.
Senior intelligence officials, responding to questions about the document, said that the N.S.A. believed that legal impediments limited its ability to conduct surveillance of terrorism suspects inside the United States. Despite an overhaul of national security law in 2008, the officials said, if a terrorism suspect who is under surveillance overseas enters the United States, the agency has to stop monitoring him until it obtains a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
“N.S.A.’s Sigint strategy is designed to guide investments in future capabilities and close gaps in current capabilities,” the agency said in a statement. “In an ever-changing technology and telecommunications environment, N.S.A. tries to get in front of issues to better fulfill the foreign-intelligence requirements of the U.S. government.”
Spurning President Obama's call to let insurers extend canceled health policies, California won't allow 1 million policyholders to keep their health plan for another year.Yeah, that'll help.
The board of the Covered California health exchange voted unanimously to break with the president and keep its requirement that insurers terminate most individual policies Dec. 31 because the policies don't meet all the requirements of the Affordable Care Act.
Officials acknowledged that their decision won't satisfy angry consumers and will mean many of them will pay significantly more for new coverage come January. But they worried that allowing widespread renewals could cripple the rollout of the healthcare law in California just as enrollment is picking up steam.
"We know this transition is difficult and some people will be hurt," Covered California board member Susan Kennedy said. "But delaying the transition won't solve a single problem. I think it will make a bad situation worse if we complicate it further."
The state did offer some modest relief for consumers. The exchange will open a special hotline Monday to address policyholders' questions about cancellations and pushed back the deadline to sign up for January coverage to Dec. 23, about a week later.
We learn more about the vagaries of Obamacare every day. People who thought they were somehow okay are discovering that they are getting it in the neck and wondering how this could be. One tends to feel sympathy. But in some cases, not so much. As for instance, the situation described by Jonathan Allen & Jennifer Haberkorn of Politico:More at the link.
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 …
Today's Democrats have grown up in the Saul Alinsky tradition, and on Thursday they proved it with a partisan vote to break the Senate filibuster rule for confirming judges and executive-branch nominees. The new rules will empower the party's liberals for as long as they control the White House and Senate, but they will also set a precedent for conservatives to exploit in the future.RTWT.
Majority Leader Harry Reid broke a GOP filibuster of a judicial nominee on a 52-48 vote. He was prodded by the Democratic Senate classes of 2006-2012, younger liberals in a hurry like Al Franken (Minnesota), Jeff Merkley (Oregon) and Jeanne Shaheen (New Hampshire). These are the same liberals who enjoyed a rare 60-vote supermajority in 2009-2010 when they rammed through ObamaCare without a single Republican vote. They view the minority as an inconvenience to be rolled.
It's true that Senators of both parties have misused the advice and consent power to make it harder for the executive branch to govern. But the great irony is that Democrats voted to end the practice of judicial filibusters that they pioneered when George W. Bush was President. As the minority from 2003-2005, Democrats demanded 60 votes to confirm executive-branch nominees like John Bolton for U.N. Ambassador.
The campaign manager for Rep. Bill Cassidy's (R-LA) Senate campaign tweeted out a link to a photo of Sen. Mary Landrieu's (D-LA) face superimposed on the body of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini an hour after a conservative Louisiana blog posted the image.Screw 'em. As if I'm supposed to be upset by a Photoshop.
