This week reminded of that awful movie Aliens VS Predators where the tagline for the movie was "no matter who wins, we lose". So you democrats enjoy your victory. If you want to call it that.

So what are we left with? A burgeoning debt, and no effort on the horizon to get it under control. Obama’s “victory” couldn’t be much more hollow, as his policies continue to drive us toward financial catastrophe.

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Posted by: CDR M at 06:00 PM | Comments (658)
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This is a post I had planned to write, including Matthews' calling the Tea Partiers racist yet again two days ago, but Allah did the whole thing already, as did Noah Rothman at Mediaite.

Rothman:

aybe 10%,” or ”maybe 20%, on a bad day,” Matthews said in May when asked by MSNBC host Al Sharpton how much conservative opposition to President Barack Obama is rooted in racism. “It’s the sense that the white race must rule, that’s what racism is, and they can’t stand the idea that a man who’s not white is president,” he clarified.

They’re “almost traitors,” Matthews said of conservatives who believe that the Internal Revenue Service, an agency created in 1913 and which recently admitted to targeting conservative groups in order to limit their political efficacy, should be abolished. “First of all, the right-wing are crazy,” he said in June. “What they’re saying about getting rid of the IRS is insane.”

“It seems there’s a very interesting compelling continuing effort to delegitimize this president,” the MSNBC host added in August. His evidence: conservatives who refer to Obama as “Obama.”

They refer to him as ‘Obama.’ They don’t say the ‘the president.’ They don’t say the ‘a law.’ They don’t even speak the language we normally speak in civilized political debate.”

“When are we going to have the book we’ve been waiting for, Killing O’Reilly?” Matthews said in October, jokingly envisioning the assassination of a rival cable news host with whom he disagrees. This moment was particularly satisfying. Matthews made this statement while appearing on HBO with Bill Maher to promote his book on civility.

“I think it’s hatred,” Matthews opined while summarizing the thinking that motivates conservatives in Congress this week. “I don’t think it’s politics.” Just yesterday, perturbed with conservatives who dare refer to themselves as “the American people” while justifying their opposition to the president’s programs, “Do they still count blacks as three-fifths?”

AllahPundit wishes they would choose one Mask, rather than toggling between them moment-by-moment:

Is it really too much to ask of America’s lefty talking heads that they either demagogue grassroots righties as racists and militiamen or lecture the public on the need for more comity and civility in politics? It doesn’t seem like much. The whole “civility” pageant is, after all, just a pose they’ve developed after the Tucson shooting to score political points when an opportunity presents itself, before getting back to calling conservatives terrorists. The GOP shut down the government so now it’s time for a new episode of Reasonableness Theater. Let’s drop it, at long last. Say it loud — I’m a cutthroat partisan and I’m proud.

Not just Grassroots Righties, of course, but moderate milquetoasts such as Mitt Romney.

Posted by: Ace at 12:45 PM | Comments (427)
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This really should have been my slumpbuster: Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to run for president, and he wants either an Amendment to the Constitution to permit this, or he wants to attempt a legal challenge to a clear and unchallengeable statement in the Constitution.

One source said: “Schwarzenegger has been talking openly about working on getting the constitutional rules changed so he can run for president in 2016. He is ready to file legal paperwork to challenge the rules.”

...

Columbia University Law School professor Michael Dorf, an expert in constitutional law, said about the Governator’s case in 2007, “The law is very clear, but it’s not 100 percent clear that the courts would enforce that law rather than leave it to the political process.”

There are a few problems with a Schwarzenegger run, apart from the fact that it's flat-out illegal.

There is the little matter of his love-child with his maid (?), for example. Scandals are no longer automatically disqualifying in candidates, but they don't help. There were already unsavory claims about Schwarzenegger's treatment of women before that, too, claims people will probably now be inclined to take more seriously.

Then there's this: His governorship of California is widely adjudged to be either a disappointment or a failure, and such assessments are bipartisan. Tripartisan, actually, when you consider that Libertarians (his natural constituency) also were disappointed in his work as governor.

This old Reason article by Tim Cavanaugh makes the best case possible for Schwarzenegger as a partial success as Governor, but the author is fairly unconvinced himself.

So is there a case for Gov. Schwarzenegger? HereÂ’s my best defense:

First, as Abraham Lincoln said of Ulysses Grant, “He fights.” Schwarzenegger’s time in office has been marked by almost constant public struggles with teachers, prison guards, nurses, and walk-on players like the preening Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg and the obstructionist Controller John Chiang. Schwarzenegger, a lifelong dealmaker, is nevertheless willing to fire heavy weapons at his opponents....

Schwarzenegger is also willing to say the holiest word in any politicianÂ’s vocabulary: no. He has set yearly state records for percentages of bills vetoed, memorably adding an acrostic F-bomb in the memo accompanying his rejection of a Port of San Francisco boondoggle....

“He’s helped us more than he’s harmed us, for sure,” says Marcia Fritz, president of the California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility.

...

Finally, while Schwarzenegger failed to shrink government, he did limit its growth.

These are indeed good things. So I'm personally inclined to put Schwarzenegger in the "disappointment" column, rather than the "failure" one.

But the only way the Constitution would be altered to permit a Schwarzenegger bid were if he were such a towering figure -- the Only Man Capable of Saving America -- that the public would demand it.

But he's not. He was, at best, a somewhat competent governor who picked some fights on spending and had partial success in those fights, and partial failures. He also has no substantial constituency at all, having thwarted the Blue State Government Goons on spending and raises for public employees, and having thwarted conservatives on high-profile lobbying for gay marriage and The Crucial Fight Against Global Warming.

So who, apart from Schwarzenegger, seriously entertains this idea, apart from Michael Bloomberg?

Update: Actually, here's where I am most disappointed:

The hope of Schwarzenegger was that he could leverage his star-power and charisma to become a Reagan-esque promoter of Milton Freeman style economics and general political liberty. That is, that he could mainstream an ideology of liberty which the reactionary leftist media, academic, and government classes are determined to delegitimize and Otherize.

I would give f***-all about his mixed record on specific spending items in California if he managed to do that.

The battle for people's minds is more important than any battle over any budget.

Not only did he definitely not manage to do that, I'm not even sure he tried particularly hard. The only thing I have any memory of him talking about is the Statist imperative to Fight Global Warming.

Posted by: Ace at 11:41 AM | Comments (387)
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Sarah Kliff trumpeted Oregon's "success" yesterday. The state had signed up 56,000 people for Medicaid, due to ObamaCare's Medicaid expansion.

Today, the actual Miss Local Crime Story reports on a number the Administration isn't as excited to trumpet: The number of people enrolled in private insurance, through the market place, is zero.

Wait, did you say zero?

I guess you did. Thank you, Dean Vernon Wormer.

Cover Oregon -- Oregon's version of the exchanges -- realized they had too many errors in their website to process applications that way, and so began manual processing.

Their spokeswoman, whose salary is paid for by Oregon taxpayers, refuses to divulge the number of people who have applied in this way. Just because, peasant.

However, Fauver said that no Oregon health plan has received an enrollment through the marketplace. She declined to comment on the number of applications submitted to the marketplace, saying her department is "still working through the data to to arrive at a number we can stand by." It's possible that some of the applications could be incomplete, or represent multiple people. Cover Oregon doesn't know because they're still pending manual processing.

Also via the Morning Jolt, Connecticut is similarly signing up a few people for Medicaid (through ObamaCare's expansion), giving a subsidy to a few people, and signing up fewer people who will receive no subsidy. So Those Who Subsidize are fewer in number than Those Who Will Be Subsidized.

Of the 3,847 individuals who signed up for coverage, 1,857 qualified for Medicaid, 1,897 signed up for plans with one of the three private insurance carriers, and 93 qualified for the ChildrenÂ’s Health Insurance Plan. Of the individuals who signed up with private carriers, 772 wonÂ’t receive a subsidy and 1,125 will receive a federal subsidy to lower their monthly premium.

To be honest with you, I cannot parse if these are "good numbers" as far as the death spiral or "bad numbers." But it does look like the people paying for other people is relatively low, so guess is that their premiums will be pretty high. And if the rate of purchase of insurance on the markets by those not getting a subsidy remains low, their rates will go higher, and then fewer will join, and the rates will go higher still, and so on.

But I don't know that. I'm just looking at the numbers and guessing at them.

Thanks to @benk84 and, again, the Morning Jolt.

Posted by: Ace at 10:56 AM | Comments (299)
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From Geraghty's Morning Jolt.

The background is that the few people who successfully created accounts (not the same as actually getting insurance) had their passwords reset and deleted. It was claimed that this was a deliberate action, required to fix the site (or something).

But that's not what help-line agents are telling the public.

The Obamacare website, which launched October 1, deleted some users' passwords, according to multiple call center representatives for the site.
Five call center agents told CNN on Wednesday that because of an upgrade to the beleaguered website, many passwords were deleted if they were created in the first week or so after the launch. More recently created user names and passwords don't seem to have the same problems.

If the representatives have it right, some users will continue having trouble logging in, no matter how many times they try.

"They did maintenance on the website recently and deleted all the passwords, so they needed resetting," one agent wrote in a live online chat with a CNN reporter who has been attempting to go through the process of using the site.

"They deleted passwords on accident," said another agent who answered the phone at the healthcare.gov call center. "They lost them."

A senior administration official said these call agents are wrong. She said no passwords have been deleted, and the call agents were reading from a script that was given to them by mistake.

She? I don't know many senior administration officials with direct oversight of ObamaCare who are also female.

Can I ask why Kathleen Sebelius insists on giving on-background answers to matters directly under her control for which she is answerable, by name, to the public?

Does she want plausible deniability? Why does she need that, if she's telling the truth?

They were given a false script to read, by mistake? How did this allegedly false script get written in the first place?

You can sign up to received the Morning Jolt, and other NRO newsletters, here.

Posted by: Ace at 10:14 AM | Comments (252)
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You're welcome.

Posted by: DrewM at 09:32 AM | Comments (253)
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On this week's episode, political consultant and former NRO news editor Dan Foster (a Dan Foster-type conservative) joins Gabe, Drew, John E. and Rick Tempest to discuss the shutdown deal, the state of the GOP post-deal, the ongoing Obamacare disaster, the GOP leadership, Bob Filner's plea deal and Slate's XX Factor blog.

[MP3 Download] | Subscribe: [RSS] | [iTunes]

Follow on Twitter:
AoSHQ Podcast (@AoSHQPodcast)
Rick Tempest (@RickTempest)
Drew M. (@DrewMTips)
Gabriel Malor (@GabrielMalor)
John E. (@JohnEkdahl)
Andy (@TheH2 and @AndyM1911)

Posted by: andy at 01:42 PM | Comments (99)
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I have neither the inclination nor desire to dig into all the various allegations regarding this WikiLeaks rant against the The Fifth Estate veracity, but there's one section tucked in there among all the rambling that rings true outside the ever swirling vortex of WikiWhatever™ theater and posturing by all involved:

Exposing wrongdoing is what journalists are supposed to do

• US government officials responded negatively to WikiLeaks because they were embarrassed.
• They should be embarrassed. WikiLeaks' publications showed that they were doing something wrong.
• It is not the job of journalists to rescue government officials from embarrassment.
• It is also not the job of journalists to protect governments from the diplomatic or political consequences of their own wrongdoing.
• When powerful wrongdoers fear being found out, they are forced to behave more acceptably. That is a good thing.

Those last three bullet points? Pretty hard to argue with those.

I'm looking forward to some WikiLeaking on internal Obamacare implementation documents. Its gonna happen, you know it is. The real internal story of this Obamacare fustercluck's implementation will read like a world class mystery novel...epic technical failures always do. Deceit, treachery, villains, heroes, greed, and lust, they'll all be there in ample supply...

...because 99% of technical failures are actually due to human mechanism failures. Rarely does one encounter a failed project that failed due to actual technical intractability (ex. requiring responses in linear time when scaling up, when calculations will actually take exponential time.)

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 07:19 AM | Comments (432)
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• New York Doctors Sick Over Obamacare
  
• Assessing The Exchanges
  
• Obamacare Woes Widen As Insurers Get Wrong Data
  
• The Abysmal, Pathetic Obamacare Rollout
  
• Taranto: In Defense Of Kathleen Sebelius
  
• Someone Told Hitler About The Obamacare Exchanges
  
• Trailer For Wes Anderon's New Movie (video)
  
• NSA Director To Step Down
  
• Cooke: The Case For Optimism
  
• Obamacare Won't Reach Its First Enrollment Goals
  
• Remembering America
  
• Goldberg: The Tea Party's Wasted Energy
  
• Nearly 30 Million People Living In Slavery Worldwide
  
• Did The ATF Give Grenades To Mexican Drug Cartels
  
• Teen Found With Fetus In A Bag At A NYC Store
  
• Pope Plans To Visit Israel
  
• Moveon.org Is Calling For The Arrest Of Republicans For Sedition
  
• Rare Interview With Bill Watterson
  
• Teacher Confesses To Heroin Use After Passing Out In Class
  

Follow me on twitter.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:30 AM | Comments (351)
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Happy Friday.

As a follow-up to our shutdown theater posts, I've heard both at the office and from folks online about the Claude Moore Colonial Farm's Market Fair this weekend. If you're in the D.C.-area, you might think about going. I'm sure they could use the revenue after being shut down for so long.

If you're still in the mood for shutdown fight post-mortems, here's two more from National Review guys Rich Lowry and Jonah Goldberg.

To be honest, I don't think either the GOP or conservatives are capable of learning from past mistakes. This played out so exactly as predicted, but there's no evidence that I can see that either group thinks it needs a change in tactics. Goldberg writes once again that this was about a fight over tactics, but conservatives simply don't believe that.

Lowry notes that after weeks of squirming, we ended up pretty much where we started, but I think it's worse than that. We started with GOP leadership and the Democrats all inclined toward a one-year clean CR that preserved the sequester cuts. What we got was a three-month CR. Why so short? It was so short because Democrats realized that they could get another shot at undoing the sequester. In light of the GOP's now-obvious shortcomings, Democrats are salivating at undoing the only substantive spending cuts the federal government has seen in over a decade.

I'm not going to get drawn into a fantasy about the budget commission working, but if you'd like to follow it's inevitable collapse, the NYTimes has a notable article on its shitty start, with no real entitlement reform on the table (entitlement reform was the GOP's claimed demand): "With the scope of the talks narrowed for now, on the table are ideas left over from past, failed bargaining: possible reductions in other programs — like farm subsidies, federal pensions, the Postal Service and unemployment insurance — and relatively minimal tax loophole closings, possibly as little as $55 billion."

Three legal groups are fighting to take the lead role in Virginia lawsuits that they think will lead to nation-wide lawful gay marriage. I flag it because you're probably going to be hearing about either the Bostic or the Harris cases next year.

The video this week comes from Citizens Against Government Waste. There's heavy breathing: more...

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:59 AM | Comments (370)
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