American voters oppose the Affordable Care Act 55 – 41 percent and 40 percent are less likely to vote for a candidate who supports Obamacare, while 27 percent are more likely and 31 percent say this will not affect their vote.
#7MillionAndCounting #tcot #teaparty pic.twitter.com/oCl3EEchCC
— The People's Cube (@ThePeoplesCube) April 1, 2014
Suddenly ObamaCare is a roaring success, happy days are here again and liberals are euphoric, or claim to be. There are more than a few reasons to doubt this new fairy tale, not least the behavior of Senate Democrats running for re-election this year.More via Memeorandum.
In the Rose Garden Tuesday, President Obama reported that 7.1 million people had signed up so far, confirming a Monday night White House news leak. "That doesn't mean all our health-care problems have been solved forever," he conceded with customary modesty. The government appears to have tapped heretofore-unknown reserves of bureaucratic efficiency by releasing numbers timed to this campaign-style pep rally.
Yet for months the Health and Human Services Department has refused to disclose crucial contextual data, such as how many insurance contracts are in force, the market-by-market totals and how many beneficiaries were previously covered. Regardless of your partisan sympathies, the White House's selective disclosure is a crime against transparency and accountable government.
Then there are the 12 Democratic Senators up for re-election who each cast the decisive 60th vote for ObamaCare. They're acting as if the law is still a political threat, and presumably their polls say as much. The ObamaCare Dozen have tried to create an alibi by saying the plan isn't perfect but mend it don't end it. They've now proposed some concrete fixes, and they must think their constituents aren't paying attention.
Courtesy of Democrats like Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Mark Begich of Alaska and Mark Warner of Virginia, the big idea is to create a cheaper, worse type of coverage on the ObamaCare exchanges. All current plans are more or less interchangeable because of the law's benefit and wealth redistribution mandates. They differ based mainly on how much of the upfront cost is built into the premium, with tiers known as platinum, gold, silver and bronze.
The Senators want to create a new "copper" policy that would cover 50% of average medical expenses with the rest out of pocket. Are people really clamoring for even higher ObamaCare deductibles? A true fix would deregulate the exchanges and trust American consumers to choose the benefits they want or need, rather than forcing them to pay slightly less for one uniform standard. These mandates were determined via HHS administrative discretion, not by the statute or written by a finger of light.
The Democratic fixers also want to ask state insurance commissioners "to develop models for states to sell heath insurance across state lines" and "discern the benefits and challenges of selling health insurance in this manner." In other words, ask local regulators how much of their vast new ObamaCare powers they want to give up in the name of national competition. Predetermined answer: None...
Tempe police consider the death of an 18-year-old Arizona State University student a classic example of the dangers posed by under-aged drinking and are investigating who furnished her with alcohol at a party.
Sgt. Mike Pooley, a police spokesman, confirmed the investigation into furnishing alcohol for minors but said he cannot discuss further details. Pooley said that surveillance video shows that victim Naomi McClendon was clearly intoxicated after she left the party and entered 922 Place, a high rise off-campus apartment complex near Rural Road and Apache Boulevard where she was visiting a friend.
The surveillance video shows McClendon was unsteady on her feet early Sunday morning as she entered the lobby, rode in an elevator and walked in a hallway to her friend's apartment, Pooley said.
While McClendon's friends left the 10th floor apartment briefly, the victim walked onto the balcony, where she straddled the railing, lost her balance and plunged to her death at 2:45 a.m., Pooley said.
It was the sort of tragedy Tempe police were hoping to prevent earlier this year through their Safe and Sober Campaign, which cracked down on under-aged drinking, loud parties and driving under the influence of alcohol in the "loud party corridor" near ASU, where a study found a high incidence of major crimes. The corridor is bounded by University Drive, Broadway Road, Price Road and Rural Road.
"We know as a police department that minor, youth consumption can be a dangerous and sometimes deadly activity," Pooley said, especially when it involves binge drinking...
The Obama administration's campaign to forge a Middle East peace agreement appeared near collapse Tuesday, despite a U.S. move to negotiate the release of a convicted American spy in a last-gasp effort to win more concessions from Israel.Also at the Times of Israel, "Despite Palestinian unilateralism, talks will likely limp on," and "Pollard-for-prisoners deal said to be near completion."
Secretary of State John Kerry, who was set to visit Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah on Wednesday, canceled his trip, the State Department said.
A formal breakdown in negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, which the White House stressed hasn't occurred, would throw into turmoil President Barack Obama's second-term foreign-policy agenda, already reeling from rising tensions with Russia and an inability to stop the civil war in Syria.
Mr. Obama has said solving the Mideast conflict is one of three main international objectives of his second term. Republicans and Democrats on Tuesday criticized his administration's last-minute discussions with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to offer up the spy, Jonathan Pollard, to persuade the Israelis to make good on previous promises to release prisoners. They called it a sign of a White House desperate for a major foreign-policy success.
"Releasing Pollard, in the context of the current peace-process travails, is bad policy," said Aaron David Miller, who served for some two decades as an adviser to Republican and Democratic secretaries of state. "It reflects the weakness and desperation of the administration that is presiding over a peace process not yet ready for prime time."
Mr. Obama's allies on Capitol Hill questioned the move.
"I've followed this issue closely over the years. It's hard for me to see how releasing Jonathan Pollard would help jump-start Middle East peace talks," Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) said. "It's one thing to consider releasing him after an agreement has been reached, but it's another to discuss setting him free before that has happened."
White House officials refused to declare the peace effort a failure on Tuesday. One senior administration official said the situation is "still fluid," and it is unclear how it will conclude.
White House press secretary Jay Carney said Mr. Obama hasn't made a decision on whether to release Mr. Pollard.
Mr. Kerry has made a peace agreement the barometer through which to gauge his tenure by making dozens of trip to the Mideast over the past year and often holding meetings with Israeli and Arab officials by himself. Mr. Kerry has argued that ending the conflict would bring broader stability to the region and rob extremist groups like al Qaeda of an important recruiting tool.
Despite eight months of negotiations spearheaded by Mr. Kerry, diplomacy appeared to be unraveling late Tuesday after Mr. Abbas said he had signed papers formally applying to join 15 international organizations affiliated with the United Nations.
The U.S. had pressed Mr. Abbas during the negotiations not to move forward with such actions, which would have given the Palestinians more authority to press grievances. Washington hoped to forestall such a move through Israel's agreement to release political prisoners and to take other confidence-building steps as part of a larger process with a goal a formal peace agreement by April 29.
Mr. Netanyahu, though, had balked at following through with the prisoner release, infuriating the Palestinian side, and precipitating the U.S. offer of Mr. Pollard in a bid to get more Israeli cooperation.
All three sides have remained tight-lipped about how far the negotiations had progressed since their start in July, including the issue of the prisoner release...
Muriel E. Bowser, a low-key but politically canny District lawmaker, won the Democratic mayoral nomination Tuesday, emerging from a pack of challengers in a low-turnout primary to deny scandal-tarnished incumbent Vincent C. Gray a second term.More.
The 41-year-old D.C. Council member triumphed in the latest in a string of District elections to reveal a city unsettled over the shape of its future. Bowser’s win heralds many more months of uncertainty as she faces a substantial general-election challenger while a lame-duck Gray is left to steer the city amid the threat of federal indictment.
Bowser (D-Ward 4) moved deftly to capitalize on public doubts about Gray’s trustworthiness fueled by the still-unresolved federal corruption investigation into his 2010 campaign. Alone among seven Democratic challengers, she amassed a coalition that crossed demographic and geographic lines allowing her to outpoll Gray’s shrunken but steady base of African American voters.
The outcome of the race remained in doubt for four hours after the 8 p.m. closing of polling places as elections officials struggled with an unusually late and messy tabulation process.
For much of the evening, the campaigns and the public watched results trickle in and wondered what was going wrong at city elections headquarters downtown. Officials blamed the slow pace on poor training of election workers in the use of electronic voting machines. And the campaigns waited impatiently to know who had won.
Tamara Robinson, a spokeswoman for the city Board of Elections, said vote counters noticed inconsistent numbers reported in several precincts, so they stopped releasing tallies until they could examine them more closely. They found that five or six machines had not been shut down correctly by poll workers, who may have been overwhelmed by the larger number of electronic machines at precincts this year.
With 89 percent of precincts reporting shortly before midnight, Bowser led Gray 44 percent to 33 percent — prompting a concession speech from the incumbent.
Gray said he intended to keep working, and “by the way, we have nine more months.”
In her subsequent victory remarks, Bowser struck a conciliatory note, reaching out to her rivals’ supporters in an appeal for party unity during a seven-month general-election campaign to come.
“It’s our job to let them know that I’ll be their mayor, too,” she said. “We’re going to earn their support. We’re going to hear their vision, and we’re going to work with them.”
DAKAR, Senegal — An outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus in the West African nation of Guinea has reached the crowded capital, Conakry, prompting new fears about its spread, health officials said Tuesday.More.
Over the past month, the disease has traveled from Guinea’s remote forest regions near the Liberia and Sierra Leone borders and has already killed 83 people, including four in Conakry.
Now, with 13 cases in a densely populated capital of two million people, health officials say the challenge of containing the outbreak has become more acute. Ebola has killed hundreds in rural Central Africa over the past four decades, but it is unusual for it to reach urban centers.
Residents of Conakry said Tuesday that disquiet had set in, though markets were crowded and the capital’s monstrous traffic jams continued unabated. Some were carrying around small bottles of bleach, people were avoiding shaking hands, and pharmacies were selling out of hand sanitizer.
“In Conakry everybody is worried,” said Fodé Abass Bangoura, a lawyer with an office downtown. “People are really preoccupied about this. There is a sort of psychosis about this now. I’m avoiding physical contact with people, and I’m eating at home.”...
The Ebola virus is rare but deadly. Its point of origin is often the consumption of bush meat, including meat from apes or possibly bats, and it has a fatality rate of up to 90 percent. Human transmission occurs through contact with bodily fluids. Already, the Guinea outbreak is more serious than the most recent previous one, in Uganda in 2012, when fewer than 50 died. In that outbreak, cases were also recorded in the capital, Kampala. But in some previous outbreaks in Central and Eastern Africa, as many as 400 cases were recorded, health officials said.
The Ebola hemorrhagic disease is terrifying, as the virus punches microscopic holes in the endothelial lining of blood veins, vessels, and capillaries, causing blood to leak from its normal pipelines coursing through the body. Within hours, the punctures enlarge, the leaking turns into a flood, and blood pours into the intestines, bowels, and respiratory channels. As the victims become feverish -- raging in pain and hallucinations -- their tears drip red with blood. The crimson liquid flows from their noses, ears, bowels, bladders, mouths, while old wounds reopen all over their bodies. The deterioration is swift, transpiring from infection to death typically within five days. And Ebola is spread, via the infected body fluids, to attendant family members, health-care workers, and funeral preparers.It's like a freakin' Biblical plague. Damn.
Unlike Medicare and Social Security, Obamacare creates clear winners and clear losers. Of course, people end up losing in the deals in Medicare and Social Security (e.g. a person who has worked his whole life but dies at the age of 59 and thus never collects), but such people are never actually aware of the loss. Obamacare losers know that they have been made worse off, just as its winners know that they have been made better off.Oh, that oughta be a cakewalk!
Losers in the schema include people whose new insurance is more expensive or otherwise less satisfactory because of the new regulations, seniors whose Medicare Advantage program will be peeled back (or whose local hospital stops taking them because of cuts to Part A), businesses who cannot afford the mandates, people who lose their employer insurance as a consequence of the new business mandates, young and health people who, and others. Importantly, the administration's delays speak to the potential coalition of the losers, as almost all of them have been designed to keep these groups from realizing the harm they are due to suffer before the 2014 midterm election.
Two inferences to be drawn from this, one moral and one political.
The moral inference: Shame on the Democrats and the left for setting up Obamacare this way. The people who are losers in this schema have long been protected by both sides in an unwritten political agreement, which vouches that the only people the government "takes" from are those with plenty to spare. The rule was: you do not redistribute money and security away from the middle class to accomplish some policy objective. The Democrats broke this rule, largely out of cowardice. They wanted to hide the trust costs of the legislation. Rather than put together a straightforward tax that hit everybody equally (like the Social Security tax), they created a convoluted system to fund the program, such that people whose premiums have gone up are paying an implicit tax, one that happens not to be collected by the government.
The president deserves particular criticism. The president is the one elected official who can claim to represent all the people and thus has long been the agent to vouchsafe this political bargain. Barack Obama broke the deal, and he lied about it, to boot, with, "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan."
Next time you hear a liberal talking about radical conservatives breaking generations of tradition, remember that Obamacare is actually the break with the past. And a perverse one at that.
The political inference: The politics of this moving forward is a lot more complicated than people on both sides seem to think. This law cannot be repealed in a straightforward manner, nor is it securely in place. That is because there are winners and losers to be mobilized on both sides. The final fate of Obamacare depends upon (a) the relative size and strengths of both groups; (b) how well the two parties bid for their support.
This, then, is the goal for conservatives moving forward. The next week the Democrats and their water carriers in the media will cheer about how Obamacare is vindicated because of 6-7 million "enrollments." Nonsense. The real battle is going to be fought over the next few election cycles, as both sides mobilize their coalitions. Republicans must mobilize the losers and also present an appealing counter-offer to the winners. In any new program put forward by the GOP, people who are made better off under Obamacare must be left at least as well off. Not only that, but the program must be straightforward enough that Obamacare's winners will be able to understand clearly that in the GOP proposal their benefits will not disappear; after all, the Democrats and their friends in the media will do anything and everything to convince these people that they will be made worse off.
Importantly, this was the political landscape of Obamacare six days ago, six weeks ago, six months ago. The bill was bound to create winners and losers by its very design; indeed, a careful read of reports from CBO and CMS at the time of passage indicated that very clearly. The goal for the GOP is to build a coalition that combines the losers, and a critical mass of winners, to replace it with something that is better.
WASHINGTON — If it were only President Obama’s flagging poll numbers, the problem for Democrats of how to mobilize core supporters to vote this fall would be bad enough. Midterm elections for an unpopular president’s party are almost always bleak.Heh. Celinda Lake? She was in the news recently, at Scared Monkeys, "Leading Democratic Pollster Celinda Lake Says to Democrats, “Don’t Defend” Obamacare … Also Predicts “Huge Turnout Disadvantage” in 2014 for Dems."
But it is not only that. The very structure of the 21st-century national Democratic coalition makes its November turnout predicament bad, perhaps historically so.
“There’s never been a worse coalition for the purpose of a midterm election,” said David Wasserman of The Cook Political Report. The ability of Democrats to counter the problem will help determine how politically difficult Mr. Obama’s last two years in the White House could become.
Turnout for American presidential elections (roughly six in 10 eligible voters in recent contests) is always higher than for midterm congressional elections (fewer than half). But the rate of falloff from one to the next varies for different groups of voters.
In 2012, exit polls showed, Mr. Obama won a second term by rolling up margins of 11 percentage points among women, 24 percentage points among voters ages 18 to 24, and 87 percentage points among blacks. Over the last four midterm elections, turnout by all three groups fell more from the previous presidential race than turnout by Republican-leaning men, whites and those over 65.
Young voters have abandoned the midterm electorate at more than twice the rate of seniors. Hispanics, who favored Mr. Obama by a margin of 44 percentage points, have voted at just two-thirds the rate of whites. Unmarried women, the source of the Democratic advantage with women, vote less often than their married counterparts.
“I’m worried this could be a disaster,” said Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster...
On Baylor's injury: "Most femoral shaft fractures take 4 to 6 months to completely heal," per American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons.
— Bill Shaikin (@BillShaikin) April 1, 2014Don Baylor has fractured right femur, surgery tomorrow. #Angels
— Bill Shaikin (@BillShaikin) April 1, 2014It usually takes a car crash or something similar to break a femur, the strongest bone in body, per AAOS. Get well soon, Don Baylor.
— Bill Shaikin (@BillShaikin) April 1, 2014
Don Baylor breaks leg while catching 1st pitch (The Associated Press) http://t.co/cagavE9Xay #MLB #Angels
— L.A. Angels Baseball (@LAAngelsBB) April 1, 2014
When your hitting coach breaks his leg catching the 1st pitch, your season could be doomed. SorryAngels and Don Baylor
— mahoneybill (@mahoneybill) April 1, 2014
Baylor was diagnosed in '03 with Multiple Myeloma, a cancer that weakens the bones. Also afflicted Mel Stottlemyre, among many others.
— Tim Brown (@TBrownYahoo) April 1, 2014WASHINGTON — A frenzied last-minute scramble to sign up for health insurance overloaded phone lines and temporarily overwhelmed the website of the federal marketplace on Monday, as hundreds of thousands of people around the country raced to beat the deadline to obtain coverage under the Affordable Care Act.ClusterCare, from the day it opened for enrollment to the day of the so-called "final" deadline.
Administration officials, stepping up the push for enrollment in the final hours, said they were confident that they would reach their original goal of having seven million people sign up for private health plans through federal and state exchanges. But the end of the open enrollment period, which began six months ago with the disastrous debut of the federal website, starts a new phase likely to be defined by the economics of health insurance as well as by politics.
Though HealthCare.gov, the federal website, performed markedly better on Monday than on the day it opened, many consumers still struggled to enroll. The site unexpectedly stopped taking applications for several hours early Monday because of a software problem discovered during scheduled maintenance overnight, said Aaron Albright, a spokesman at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the agency running the site. For at least an hour at midday, the site again thwarted people trying to create accounts so they could buy insurance online...
Lance Corporal in the Coldstream Guards hit trigger switch of suicide bomber whose device then exploded, Telegraph learns.Continue reading.
A British sniper in Afghanistan killed six insurgents with a single bullet after hitting the trigger switch of a suicide bomber whose device then exploded, The Telegraph has learnt.
The 20-year-old marksman, a Lance Corporal in the Coldstream Guards, hit his target from 930 yards (850 metres) away, killing the suicide bomber and five others around him caught in the blast.
The incident in Kakaran in southern Afghanistan happened in December but has only now been disclosed as Britain moves towards the withdrawal of all combat soldiers by the end of the year.
Lt Col Richard Slack, commanding officer of 9/12 Royal Lancers, said the unnamed sharpshooter prevented a major attack by the Taliban, as a second suicide vest packed with 20kg (44lbs) of explosives was found nearby.
The same sniper, with his first shot on the tour of duty, killed a Taliban machine-gunner from 1,465 yards (1,340m)...
The latest attack on academic freedom comes not from government authorities or corporate pressure but from students. At UC Santa Barbara, the student Senate recently passed a resolution that calls for mandatory "trigger warnings" — cautions from professors, to be added to their course syllabi, specifying which days' lectures will include readings or films or discussions that might trigger feelings of emotional or physical distress.More.
The resolution calls for warnings if course materials will involve depictions and discussions of rape, sexual assault, suicide, pornography or graphic violence, among other things. The professors would excuse students from those classes, with no points deducted, if the students felt the material would distress them; it is left unclear how students would complete assignments or answer test questions based on the work covered in those classes.
The student resolution is only advisory, a recommendation that campus authorities can turn into policy or reject. They should not only choose the latter course but should explain firmly to students why such a policy would be antithetical to all that college is supposed to provide: a rich and diverse body of study that often requires students to confront difficult or uncomfortable material, and encourages them to discuss such topics openly. Trigger warnings are part of a campus culture that is increasingly overprotective and hypersensitive in its efforts to ensure that no student is ever offended or made to feel uncomfortable...
FLASHBACK: "Roses are red, Violets are blue. The heteronormative patriarchy Is raping you." http://t.co/RkOvnaagRj #tcot
— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) March 26, 2014One long period of Obamacare hand-wringing in Los Angeles County will end Monday, as the window for residents to enroll in mandatory healthcare coverage comes to a close.So, the kind of outreach that will be undertaken over the next months and years is the kind of outreach to the disadvantaged that idiot Democrats have should have undertaken from day one. Instead, the damned ghouls had to reorganize one sixth of the U.S. economy, throw healthcare markets into utter disarray, and basically destroy their own electoral coalition in the process. Shoot, perhaps Obama's The One after all. It'd normally take some act of divine intervention to bring about that much pain and political destruction. But hey, from where I'm standing it's all good, lol.
But less than 24 hours later, county elected officials will be confronted with another politically sensitive facet of the nation's healthcare overhaul: how to manage roughly a million people, many of them poor or undocumented, who will remain uninsured either because they aren't eligible or failed to enroll.
Unlike some other counties in California, which are sidestepping the issue and leaving the problem largely to nonprofit free clinics, Los Angeles has committed to providing residents without coverage some system of government-supported medical care.
But the debate over what that care will look like — and how it will be funded — is only now getting started.
The county plans to set up a managed-care-like system for some uninsured residents, but advocates question whether the effort to get patients assigned to community clinics — and out of emergency rooms — will be enough. They plan to gather Tuesday before the county Board of Supervisors' weekly meeting and push for additional funding to expand the program.
"People want to sign up," said Tom Holler, co-executive director of One LA, a coalition of churches, synagogues and nonprofits that has been working to increase access to healthcare. "That's why we have to ask the county for more money."
Researchers at UCLA and UC Berkeley have estimated that 3 million to 4 million Californians will remain uninsured five years after the Affordable Care Act is implemented.
Anthony Wright, executive director of the advocacy group Health Access California, said that a third to one-half of L.A.'s million uninsured won't have documentation of legal residency. That means they won't be eligible for federally subsidized healthcare programs such as Medi-Cal and Covered California...
#Selfie of an air force pilot flying high over Tel Aviv, #Israel pic.twitter.com/NvQPKhDfIX
— IDF (@IDFSpokesperson) March 31, 2014
