Okay.

And now that the government has reopened and this threat to our economy is removed, all of us need to stop focusing on the lobbyists, and the bloggers, and the talking heads on radio and the professional activists who profit from conflict, and focus on what the majority of Americans sent us here to do.

Whenever Barack Obama is in trouble, which is about every month, he summons Leftist Bloggers Ezra Klein, Josh Marshall, and Matt Yglesias to the White House to put out his latest talking points and coordinated messaging.

I imagine he doesn't think we should ignore the people he's inviting to the White House to fill with poll-tested messaging.

What Was Obama's Former Career? real joe is taken by Obama The Community Organizer's warning against heeding "professional activists who profit from conflict."

Posted by: Ace at 09:05 AM | Comments (446)
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Joe Biden welcomed EPA workers back from their paid vacation with muffins.

Go!

Related: Obama thanked federal workers for, wait for it, their service.

I remain unthankful.

I hate to break it to people but just because you have an office job in the federal government doesn't mean you are "serving" your country.

— DrewMTips (@DrewMTips) October 17, 2013

In the world of government loving Democrats, DC bureaucrats and a soldier in Afghanistan are both "serving" their county.

— DrewMTips (@DrewMTips) October 17, 2013

Posted by: DrewM at 08:25 AM | Comments (289)
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Part of the on-going GOP vs. "Tea Party" civil war is an insistence by the GOP that the tea party needs to focus more on Democrats than conservative "purity tests" (one example).

This illustrates one of the big problems in the current battle, Republicans still don't get the nature of the insurgency movement. The "tea party" isn't about going after Democrats, that's the job of the GOP, conservatives are increasingly focused on policing the GOP.

For too long the GOP has wooed conservatives by talking tough but acting very moderate when elected. I think you can trace it back to George H.W. Bush breaking his "no new taxes" pledge. Conservatives rallied around the elder Bush and put aside their distrust and dislike of him mostly out of respect for Ronald Reagan only to find out Bush the Elder was exactly who conservatives thought he was all along...an old school country club Republican.

Last night on the podcast we talked about how a lot of these differences were papered over during George W. Bush's tenure. I argued to a large extent that was a result of 9/11 and the subsequent War on Terror. I said during the 2004 elections that had it not been for national security I would have wanted W. to face a primary challenge from the right and I think he might have been.

Conservative voters are feeling neglected betrayed and unappreciated by the GOP (and I think for good reason). Instead of telling conservatives to suck it up and fight Democrats, Republicans are going to have to treat conservatives as voters they have to woo. Maybe instead of telling conservatives to shut up and fight Democrats they should spend sometime telling conservatives what the GOP has done for them (and, "but the Democrats really suck" isn't good enough). If the GOP has been so good for conservatives (and I mean small government conservatives here), it shouldn't be hard to come up with a long list of positive achievements. Of course, there will be an alternative and likely longer list of GOP actions against small government conservative interests.

Increasingly the GOP is going to have convince wayward conservatives the GOP is good for them like they try and win over any other voting bloc. You don't see the GOP berating moderates, women, minorities or other blocs that aren't assumed to be part of the base the way they do "tea party" conservatives.

And like any group of transactional voters, the GOP is going to have to deliver if they want to keep conservatives on board. What we are seeing is the days of assuming quiet conservative compliance unrelated to what's being delivered by the GOP are coming to an end.

I understand that the GOP "establishment" feels under siege from the right and wants to see that heat turned on the Democrats but they should understand that discomfort they are feeling is a feature, not a bug of the "tea party" movement. It's in the GOP's interest to act accordingly.

No one likes the Internal Affairs types and honest efforts to uncover wrong doing can lead to witch hunts but the GOP has shown itself unworthy of the trust conservatives have placed in it and this is the new reality. The sooner the mainline GOP accepts the new reality, the sooner things can begin to settle down.

Of course, the GOP may decide that they can simply live without the right wing and file for divorce. As Reagan famously said, it's a time for choosing.

Posted by: DrewM at 06:35 AM | Comments (863)
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Happy Thursday.

Some shutdown post-mortems:

Jonah Goldberg (NR): "No fair minded person can really argue that this predicament is where the Republican leadership wants to be."

Rick Klein (ABC News): "The lights are coming back on. But thereÂ’s little worth gazing on in Washington."

Nicholas Johnston (Bloomberg): "The @robertcostaNRO rally..."

Brett Norman (Politico): "With the shutdown over and a default averted, Washington has another train wreck to sift through: the Obamacare rollout."

Speaking of Obamacare:

NY Times has the story on page A18 of a guy who managed to log in to a state Obamacare exchange, but then discovered that there was no way to tell whether the listed healthcare plans would cover his medication or let him keep his doctor. "Exasperated, he put off completing his application." Also note this bit:

Problems finding providers or drug coverage are occurring mainly on state exchanges paradoxically because those Web sites are working better than the federal insurance exchange used by 36 states. The federal exchange has been so crippled by technical problems that most consumers have been unable to advance far enough to compare plans, search for providers or review drug coverage.

Visits to Healthcare.gov dropped 88% from its first week. "Obama administration officials challenged the independent assessment but did not release any specific enrollment figures."

[ RSS]

[iTunes]

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:43 AM | Comments (381)
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• Only 185,000 People Have Applied* For Obamacare
  
• House Stenographer Goes Crazy During Last Night's House Vote
  
• The Battle Of Nations
  
• Europe Is Burning, Slowly
  
• Costas On The Word Warpath
  
• Cory Booker Spent 11 Million To Vanquish A Tea Party Candidate
  
• Tea Party Negatives Are High, But Obama's Are Higher
  
• The Senators Who Voted Against Re-Opening Government
  
• Obama To Pivot To Immigration
  
• Obamacare Might Well Be Imploding
  
• Civil Disobedience: Citizens Pushing Back
  
• Obamacare Parody Video (auto-play video)
  
• Firm Behind Disastrous O-Care Website Had Early White House Access
  
• Monks Slay Regulatory Monopoly In Louisiana Casket Case
  
• Are Democrats More Extreme Than The GOP
  
• Rise Of Libertarians On Campus
  
• EBT Cards And Free Stuff
  
• Five DailyKos Commenters Who Know Your Insurance Needs Better Than You Do
  
• Weird 1930s Health Posters
  
• The Honest Trailer For The Walking Dead (video)
  

*Applied, not enrolled. So 185,000 people have Chad Henderson'ed Obamacare.

Follow me on twitter.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:30 AM | Comments (287)
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Smoking Now Worse Than Cheating, Sodomy: The Decline of Misbehavior

Will The Supreme Court Find Racial Equality Unconstitutional?

Democrat Mayor Calls For Anti-Government Americans to be Exiled to Alaska

Plus c'est la même chose.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:55 PM | Comments (957)
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Sexton highlights CBSNews, mentioning a Miami Herald article calling ObamaCare's enrollees "urban legends."

Last night MKH noted that even Obama's hometown newspaper Party Organ, the Chicago Tribune, had to confess part of the truth.

Allah, quoting Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker:

“The ACA is the most important liberal project in decades. If it fails, it is a complete disaster for liberalism.”

This is another reason I'm not so against ending the shutdown. We actually have a better pathway to seeing ObamaCare ended: Letting it explode in its makers' faces.

This could spark a generational deligitimization and repudiation of American Socialism. No one can know the future -- who knows, perhaps people will meekly accept their brand-new North Korean pediatrician and doubled or trebled premium costs -- but it seems our best option is to get the hell out of the way and let the burning progressives defenestrate themselves from their high office windows.

Allah, the Eeyore Eternal, now speculates that Obama will voluntarily delay ObamaCare for a year. Without us demanding he do so, he will pretend to be the tough but fair-minded hero and do so himself. And pretend it has nothing to do with the law's disastrous implementation and its unavoidable structural flaws.

Exit Question:

Should we let him?!

Picture credit: The Slublog Gazette & Informant.

Posted by: Ace at 04:47 PM | Comments (365)
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"It's my nature," said the scorpion.

Apparently the debt ceiling hike can have extraneous matters attached to it, so long as they involve spending, rather than cutting.

The language was inserted by Senators Lamar Alexander (R., Tenn.) and Dianne Fienstein (D., Calif.)...

And requested by Barack Obama, Mr. Give Me a Clean CR.

More: Not McConnell, some sources claim.

Who then? Well, the article says it was requested by Obama, but then suggests it might have been requested by someone else.

Go read the name. It will be very familiar to you. Very familiar.

Appropriators appropriate even with it's completely inappropriate, don't they?

Update: The Post has now rewritten its article to delete the tweet noting that Hal Rogers is the head of the Appropriations Committee.

Now, are they retracting that story? Is it false? Or are they merely unsure?

You can't tell because, as usual, the media refuses to confess its errors. I made an error; I relied on the Post. Will the Washington Post tell me whether or not their original suggestion was in error?

Of course not; they'll just stealth-edit and pretend they never said it.

More: This is sort of the whole reason I quit the Republican Party.

What do they actually offer me? I cannot support them and feel idealistic about it; they are either corrupt, compromised, or opposed to my ideals.

During the Bush years I could at least enjoy winning elections, even if the party wasn't quite what I hoped it would be.

Now we just lose elections, and then Hal F'n' Rogers or whoever attaches some rancid pork that we've been told is a bill that the Fate of the Republic hangs upon the clean passage thereof.

What's the point?

We are too corrupt to lose with heroic dignity and too implacably idealistic to win with compromise.

It's a sucker's game. I choose to no longer play. True, I will no longer have any chance of my political aspirations prevailing in the public square.

But that was going to happen anyway. Now at least I am disburdened of the painful weight of futile hope.

I'm out.

I honestly don't understand this party.

I can only explain it this way: When the Washington Post called its base "poor, uneducated, and easily led," the party believed it.

Personally I'm only one of those things.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 03:48 PM | Comments (399)
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From "GWB:"

Ace, I disagree in one aspect - it wasn't mere apathy that helped to reduce political participation. It was primarily the elevation of so much to the national level, and the moving of so much power to the bureaucracy.

If your city council wants to tear down a beloved building and put up a carpark, you can mobilize and get a few hundred people to stop it - at least get it on a ballot. If the folks in DC want to close a national monument in a fit of pique, you have to mobilize thousands or tens of thousands and get them all to go to DC and make their message visible and dramatic. That takes a LOT more effort and money. So, if you want to take over the society and the nation, you nationalize everything, and run a crisis-centered, vastly populist campaign based on feelings and "doing something!"

You also hand over as much rulemaking to the mandarin class as possible, so you can shrug your shoulders and say "nothing I can do." You absolve yourself of responsibility, while still maximizing your power, and reducing responsiveness to the hoi polloi.

It was not an accidental thing that the populace began to feel apathetic about just how much it could change in politics and governance. It was the design all along - and globalization is the next step. The higher the level of government, the more technocratic and authoritarian it can become. Then your life can be ruled from conception to decomposition - all for your good!

I can't express how much I believe in this. I believe the Socialist Party has a strong interest in infantilizing the public -- and when you take responsibility away from the public, you make them irresponsible.

150 years ago fifteen year old boys got married to 14 year old girls and they ran farms together, in between raising children. Why did they grow up so fast? Because they had to, or they'd die. Responsibility for one's decisions makes one responsible in one's decision, and vice versa.

I became sold on this point of view considering the problematic politics in the Muslim world. Where the people actually aren't responsible for anything -- and are not forced to be accountable for their decisions -- it breeds the circumstances for a Comic Book Fantasy Politics centered on the Cult of the Warrior Hero, and all the Jewish and American Villains who must be vanquished.

And that goes double for a population in which many males are simply not working at all. Idle hands are the Devil's playthings; idle minds -- those minds which are not preoccupied by typical human responsibilities like rent, work performance, household chores, and so on -- are the breeding ground for conspiracy, paranoia, terrorism and evil.

And I see Americans' minds becoming more idle by the day.

I do not think that 200 years ago the public's reaction to the fact we were in $17 trillion in debt and rising faster would be "Bored now! Let's talk about something easy like Being Nice to Each Other!"

I think they would have been a bit more serious about it, and willing to work with some numbers on paper.

And speaking of this tendency: I really hate this kind of comment, and I do think it illustrates my belief that freedom from responsibility creates an irresponsible sort of thinking. I won't quote the comment, but I'll note the general gist of it:

We were totally right about Christine O'Donnell and Todd Akin and we could have won these elections if we had not been stabbed-in-the-back by The Establishment that engineered their failure.

The Establishment did not engineer their failures. The Establishment predicted their failures, which is not the same thing as causing them.

This sort of thing strikes me as sort of thing the Establishment types talk about when they suggest some in the Tea Party have a "reality problem." It's this relentless doubling-down and never admitting an obvious mistake, always looking for a scapegoat to justify one's own errors.

This is related to, I suppose, the incorrect idea that staking out the Hardest-Core Most Maximalist position in political campaigns shifts the Overton Window in your direction. Oh, it shifts the window a little if you win.

If you lose, it shifts it the other way. It shifts it away from you. It demonstrates, with rock-solid evidence, that you have reached the farthest perimeter of politically-viable thought, and thus sets an absolute boundary on such thought.

Prior to the experiment, one could claim there was no outer boundary on how Conservative one could run, and yet still win; after the experiment, that boundary is located.

One cannot win statewide in Missouri while advocating that abortion should be outlawed (even in terms of the 36-hour-post-sex Morning After pill) in cases of rape. One can also not win statewide in Indiana while advocating the same position, albeit without as much Biology Means What I Want It To Mean absurdity such as bodies "shutting that down" when they detect they've been raped.

Some people want to stick to this claim that there is absolutely no outer boundary of how far you can go to the no-exceptions right and still win, so rather than admitting the plainly obvious that such boundaries do exist, they simply claim the only reason for Murdoch's, Akin's, and O'Donnell's losses was the very convenient Stabbed In The Back theory.

This sort of reality-denying -- for purposes of Never Having To Admit, Not Even Once, You Got A Minor Political Calculation Wrong -- suggests to people that the speaker is simply not to be taken seriously, which is quite the opposite of what the speaker intends.

And quite opposite of what I think would be useful for this country, for I do think the Tea Party would do the country a service by dragging it, kicking and screaming, towards a more representative and smaller-government politics.

But this kind of thing? People shrug and just decide "Write those people off; they're crazy in the first place."

Well I don't think they're crazy. But I do think they're defensive and have a bit too much Ego riding on this proposition that they're Always right.

No one's always right. Einstein wasn't always right. He was famously wrong (we think...) to deny the implications of Quantum Electrodynamics.

Isaac Asimov wasn't always right. Asimov quipped that he could explain all principles of airplane technology to you, but still he disbelieved that something heavier than air could fly.

I think different cultures celebrate different aspects of character. I think people in the Tea Party celebrate a certain Get Your Back Up/Never Back Down spirit a lot.

In a lot of ways, this is very useful and praiseworthy. I'm sick to death of the dreary gray fearful ghostly presence of most Americans, a soft wet phantasm that jumps at the drop of a pin and is always ready to prostate itself before the Herd in order to swear its fidelity to the principles of Conformity and Social Invisibility.

But this can be taken too far too.

Todd Aiken didn't just lose; he was creamed. He was destroyed. He was destroyed, moreover, in a Red State. Not the Reddest of Red States, but a Red one, one that casts its ballots for the GOP presidential candidate every four years.

He lost against a horrible opponent, widely despised in the state, even by her constituents.

This was not "engineered" by the Establishment. He lost for the exact reasons they said he'd lose. His position, and his bumbling stupidity, was indeed too extreme even for Red, Republican-tilting Missouri, and even up against a horrible, unpopular ObamaCare-fan by the name of Claire McCaskill.

If people want to continue indulging in Fantasy Politics to spare their egos of having to admit just once "I might have calculated Missouri's statewide political make-up a little wrong," and instead cling to the I Was Right But The Conspiracy To Make Me Wrong won out, that's fine, but don't expect people to take you very seriously.

You're self-marginalizing as a True Believer who is impervious to all fact and who therefore should be ignored.

Posted by: Ace at 02:02 PM | Comments (568)
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An often-expressed idea -- a fear on the right, a hope on the left -- is that the failure of ObamaCare will drive people towards the full leftist position, that of a Single Payer system, in which government completely, rather than 80%, takes over all health care.

Charles C. W. Cooke examines this idea and finds it unlikely. For obvious reasons.

[I]f Obamacare fails structurally, we will start to hear a drumbeat from the Left — and one based upon the argument that Americans can’t have workable universal healthcare while maintaining a diffuse system of private health insurance. Advocates will contend, I suspect, that the for-profit model simply cannot be reconciled with “fairness” and “social justice” and whatever other silly and vague words they choose, and that the government must take over the payment system in consequence. How much success this approach will have is anybody’s guess.

But if Obamacare fails technically, too, and the memories of trying for weeks just to create a government account linger in the minds of the public — perhaps even leading to an embarrassing delay – opponents will have been presented with a strong hammer with which to whack the single-payer mole for years to come. “The government couldn’t even run a website without it turning into the DMV,” they will be able to say. “Do you want them in charge of the whole damn thing?”

Just trying to pump out the Optimism on a day of defeat. Not to say this stuff isn't true, but I'm trying to accentuate the positive.

Posted by: Ace at 01:13 PM | Comments (260)
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