If you saw the President's speech yesterday you know that he spent 5-10 minutes sugar coating Obamacare before a brief admission that the website isn't working as hoped. He then gave out an 800 number as an alternative. Philip Klein called the number and was, after navigating the phone tree, directed to healthcare.gov. So that's helpful.

The situation is so bad that even Ezra Klein is admitting the administration is spinning just how serious this is:

The president emphasized that the Affordable Care Act "is not just a Web site." It's a Medicaid expansion, and it's got consumer protections, and delivery-system reforms, and all of those are ongoing.

The problem is that much of the law is a Web site. When the White House defined what it would mean for the Affordable Care Act to be a success, that definition ran right through the Web site.

Klein's take is that the spin no longer means anything. Either the site will be fixed or it won't.

Of course that's always true. In some ultimate sense, spin never matters. Things either happen or do not happen. And yet, someone at the White House thinks this more-than-a-website meme is helping. So maybe it's worth pointing out equally loudly that even Obamacare supporters like Ezra Klein think this is naked political lie.

The more important question is this: How long does the administration have for the new "tech surge" to fix the problem? Klein's fellow blogger Sarah Kliff wrote about that:

There's a point where not having a functional Web portal actually does interfere with consumers' ability to gain coverage through the marketplace.

I've spent most of Monday talking to experts about when, exactly, that happens and, perhaps more importantly, why it matters. Most of them point to sometime around mid-November, or even Thanksgiving, as the crucial moment where the health insurance marketplace needs to be working.

So the bottom line on Obama's speech from the sympathetic ears at Wonkblog is that Obama is not being truthful about the seriousness of the problem. Also, he has, at best, about four weeks in which to fix it.

You don't have to be a right-wing extremist to look at the basic facts and conclude the administration is in serious trouble. If the New York Times is correct about a real fix requiring a rewrite of 5 million lines of code, then a Thanksgiving fix sounds pretty optimistic.

Posted by: Guest Blogger at 06:28 AM | Comments (336)
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@rexharrisonshat has created a remarkable simulation of the ObamaCare sign-up experience.

Do hit "Apply."

Thanks to @slublog.

Posted by: Ace at 12:55 PM | Comments (212)
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I ask this of both Guest Bloggers and commenters.

I didn't stress this enough to Guest Bloggers: My main goal this week is to have time off, not necessarily to have an interesting, provocative blog that gets high traffic.

These two things will frequently be in conflict, because the edgier and more provocative a post is, the edgier and more provocative comments will be, and that means the cobloggers (who all have day jobs and are just stealing time here and there, fifteen minutes a break) have to get more involved with Guest Blog posts, and that means, ultimately, I have to get more involved myself, because it's not fair to ask them to do so much more work just so that I can have a day off.

But this means that I wind up not having time off, as I'm making judgment calls in the coblogger coordination thread, and writing to guest bloggers, and so on.

The rule against provocative and edgy stuff will result in a vanilla week of blogging. But that's exactly what I want. If it's not vanilla, then I actually don't have time off, and I might as well just be writing the posts myself. Editing is rewriting, after all.

If you have a post you're not sure about, please pitch it to a coblogger before you do any work on it. This will save you from wasting your time if they say "Nah."

And they will probably say "Nah." The cobs this week have similar incentives to a business' lawyers. Ever ask a lawyer if you can do something? He almost always says "No." Because "No" is the easiest possible answer. "Yes, but..." requires him to do a lot of work digging up the exact limits of what's legally permissible. He'd rather just say "No."

And so that's why lawyers just say "No you can't do that." They're trying to make their lives as easy as possible.

Which is the right way for the cobloggers to play it.

With me off (in theory), the cobs are already doing a lot more work than usual with regard to posting content and monitoring threads and trollbusting and so forth. Please don't make additional work for them -- that defeats the whole point of the Open Blogger thing. The whole point of asking guest bloggers to post is to lighten the cobloggers' workload, not add to it.

Edgier type stuff can be pitched to me when I'm back from vacation. Then I won't mind so much thinking about a topic or suggesting edits to a writer.

And I do understand that provocative writing is often interesting writing. But interesting writing requires me to do what I do not wish to do this week, which is work, write, edit, make judgment calls, troubleshoot questions, and patrol threads.

I really only get to be off when things are pretty vanilla, uncontroversial, and drama-free. Please help me out with this. I'm not shooting for the Most Exciting Week of blogging ever. I'm really shooting for the Least Exciting Week of blogging ever, because the Least Exciting Week of blogging ever means I get to spend the most amount of time napping.

I'm shooting for a genuine week off, more or less. That's my ideal. I'd love to just check in with the coblogger coordination thread and see "No issues" every day. If there are several issues each day, that means I'm not really taking a day off; it just means I'm working half-days, behind the scenes.

Another way to put it: When the Boss is off, it's not the time for Exciting New Product Rollouts or Aggressive Entries Into New Markets. It's time for caretaking.

Remember, we do post guest blog posts all the time, when I'm not on vacation. So anything provocative can be pitched as a post... next week. This week, I want a week of not working.

I want an Obama Week. I guess that's my real goal: I want a week of watching TV and doing practically nothing, just like our President has 40 weeks a year. Maybe even some golf.

Posted by: Ace at 12:43 PM | Comments (283)
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This is like when Colorado banned so many guns and magazines, a gun manufacturer decided to leave the state, except pre-emptive. These cities want to prevent jobs from even starting.

Four cities are going to hold votes on whether to ban fracking -- you know that enormously lucrative and productive new-fangled (it's not really that new, I use "new-fangled" in the "scary" sense) natural gas drilling technique.

“[W]e’re endorsing Question 300 on principle, the principle that a community should have the right to exert local control when it comes to keeping corporations and misguided governors from compromising public health and safety,” said a Thursday editorial in the liberal Boulder Weekly.

Meanwhile, industry officials took a more visible stance against the measures last week at the Natural Gas Symposium, sponsored by Colorado State University. The suggestion that voters must choose between jobs and health is a “false choice,” said Noble Energy CEO Chuck Davidson.

“There’s a lot of facts there that show we can have both,” said Mr. Davidson. “This is not a choice between clean water, clean air, and having energy and jobs, this is truly both. Just shutting something down is not the answer to how America works.”

This is one of those no-brainers that's almost too sad to watch, except not so sad I'm not going to laugh at these people if they actually do it.

I don't even know what I just wrote there, but it's like this: Fracking brings prosperity with it. Full stop. Wealth and fracking go hand in hand these days. They're K-I-S-S-I-N-G up in a tree. And while it is definitely good for the communities that get to partake in this big energy industry revolution, it's also good for the rest of us too. Cheap energy, happy little economies, etc.

These four localities, on the other hand, are saying they don't want to participate. They'd rather not have the jobs and prosperity that their neighbors will enjoy because, well, dubious science says that fracking is scary.

They haven't voted yet. And maybe good sense could spontaneously break out in liberal bastion Boulder, CO. Or, y'know, maybe we should respect their decision to be stupid. If they want to shoot themselves in the foot so publicly, it'll provide a nice lesson for future generations.

Think about that for a minute. Liberals are usually quite good at obscuring the effect their policies have on economies. For liberals, it's never their fault that their policies always seem to turn out bad; it's greedy companies, or greedy people, or darn regulations, or the passive-voiced "mistakes were made by somebody who shall remain nameless." But this is a straight-up vote, the long-term outcome of which cannot possibly be blamed on the companies that they choose to ban from town.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 11:41 AM | Comments (303)
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There's been a bit of conspiracy theorizing -- fueled by a letter from Iowa Sen. Grassley to the FBI last week -- that the FBI was surveilling the Tsarnaev brothers before the shootout that resulted in the death of MIT police officer Sean Collier. The FBI is emphatically denying it:

“To be absolutely clear: No one was surveilling the Tsarnaevs and they were not identified until after the shootout,” the FBI, Boston police and Massachusetts State Police said in a joint statement this afternoon, in reference to the wild April 19 gunfight that left Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, dead. “Any claims to the contrary are false.”

Sen. Grassley had also asked whether the Tsarnaevs had been approached to be FBI informants prior to the bombing, something else police authorities are denying.

The case against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is lumbering forward. Prosecutors are expected to make a recommendation to AG Holder by October 31 on whether to seek the death penalty. The final decision will be Holder's.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 10:58 AM | Comments (166)
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The Washington Examiner's Phillip Klein called (800) F1UCKYO (no, seriously) and it went about like you'd expect.

As the programÂ’s central website was under repair, Obama encouraged Americans seeking insurance to sign up the old-fashioned way by calling 1-800-318-2596.

But when I tried calling the number and followed the prompts in what I deemed the most logical manner, I got referred back to the website Healthcare.gov and its live web chat feature.

It gets worse. If the person on the other end of the live web chat tries to assist in filling out a live application, they have to use the same broken Healthcare.gov site that sent you to the phone in the first place.

I read somewhere that there's also an option for them to take your information and mail you a paper form, but that it takes several weeks to arrive and obviously the comparison shopping part of the Internet-based system isn't going to work too well.

What strikes me about this, having worked in a healthcare business with significant online and call center operations in the past, is that you don't just take an action that dials up the call center volumes on a whim. There's no possible way they were staffed for this alternative, given the rose-colored glasses they've been looking at the whole project through to date, and there's sure to be a lot more of this:

Buh, bye.

And as far as the "tech surge" idea of bringing tech experts in to fix this disaster, Geraghty had this blurb in the Morning Jolt, and it's absolutely true:

NR cruiser Bruce Webster, professional analyst of big organizations and how they tackle complicated projects, writes in again:

When I saw thisÂ…

The Obama administration Sunday said it’s called on “the best and brightest” tech experts from both government and the private sector to help fix the troubled website at the root of the Obamacare enrollment problems.

Â…I immediately thought of this:

“Adding manpower to a late project makes it later.” — Brooks’s Law (first coined in The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., back in 1975…

The two basic ideas behind Brooks’s Law are (1) the new people have to come up to speed on the project, and (2) you’ve just added an exponential number of new possible communication channels — from (N^(2)-N)/2 to ((N+M)^(2)-(N+M)/2, where ‘M’ is the number of new people added.

Translation: the problems are about to get worse, not better.

Link Added [ace]: I added the link to the Morning Jolt subscription page, which many of you already subscribe to, but if you don't, here's your chance.

One catch: It costs zero dollars.

Posted by: Guest Blogger at 10:00 AM | Comments (285)
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I think she just saw her new premium. more...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:46 AM | Comments (376)
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Obama has a White House event scheduled for 11:35 eastern (so figure sometime around noon) to introduce the world to one of the hardest to find types of people...those who have signed up for ObamaCare.

He's going to make it sound like everything is just fine aside from a few minor glitches but the reality is much different. From The Morning Jolt by Jim Geraghty (sign up here for this free weekday newsletter).

19 million hits turned into nearly 500,000 applications. So about 2.6 percent of all hits turn into an application?

Note that over at EnrollMaven.com, they keep their eye on the prize, actual plan enrollment (which usually begins after the purchaser has sent the first check to pay for it). It doesn't measure "web hits, user registrations, applications started, applications completed or any other pre-enrollment parameter, does not include enrollments in jurisdictions which have not yet reported enrollment statistics (except confirmed registrations in states on the federal exchange) and does not count new Medicaid enrollees."

This morning they put the number of confirmed enrollees at . . . 19,790. Something in the neighborhood of the attendance of the average NBA or NHL game.

The other story will likely be "the state run exchanges are doing better". Yeah, not so much.

In New York, one of only 16 states that has its own exchange, not one person had succeeded in using the site to enroll in a plan as of Friday.

Donna Frescatore, director of the New York State of Health marketplace, said Friday that 134,000 people had registered and shopped on the stateÂ’s online health care site since its Oct. 1 launch, and thousands signed up to enroll in a plan.

But the state has repeatedly delayed electronically transmitting those usersÂ’ data to insurers offering health plans.

Of course the real number that counts isn't website hits, registrations, or even people who have enrolled in plans. No, the important number is how many young, healthy and stupid people have gotten a policy. No one seems to have heard of any of them actually existing. Without lots and lots of those types of customers, this whole thing comes crashing down.

But Obama will trot out 3 or 4 people who are getting coverage while ignoring the millions who will be losing their policies because of ObamaCare, even if they liked their plan.

more...

Posted by: DrewM at 07:25 AM | Comments (462)
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When MSM and GOP talking points collide.

The oddest thing about this version of the so-called GOP "civil war" is the fact that the divide is over tactics, less about policy

— Chuck Todd (@chucktodd) October 20, 2013

We talked a little about this on the podcast but I think itÂ’s worth discussing further.

One of the supposed criticisms of the Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, and House conservative wing of the GOP, is they aren't all that interested in deal making or governing (as the term is understood in DC...increase government). I think itÂ’s a fair point and one that speaks well of them.

The Republican wing of the GOP (Speaker John Boehner, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Senator Susan Collins, and Senator Bob Corker, etc) is interested not in “small government” but “smaller government”. “Smaller” than what? The answer to that is the key. Most often it’s not “smaller than we have now” it’s “smaller than the Democrats want it to be in the future but bigger than now”.

Look at Cantor’s “Making Life Work” initiative.

First, does an actual conservative think itÂ’s the governmentÂ’s job to help people to make their life work? Or that the government is equipped to do that even if it should? IÂ’d argue no on both counts.

It’s all big government “compassionate conservatism” stuff.

more...

Posted by: DrewM at 06:26 AM | Comments (249)
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Follow me on twitter.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:30 AM | Comments (211)
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