Let's start at the bottom.

Tommy Christopher:

Shock and Awful: Conservatives Already Lying About Obamacare Enrollee Chad Henderson

Chad Henderson, the 21 year-old Flintstonian who has become the media’s go-to early example of an Obamacare exchange enrollee, has already become a talking point for conservatives, and the subject of conservative lies. Most glaringly, The Cato Institute‘s director of health policy studies Michael Cannon introduces Henderson with the lie that “Obamacare Increases Man’s Premiums 300%,” then backs it up with another lie that actually turns out to reveal that Republicans screwed poor Chad.

That headline is a self-evident lie, revealed in the Washington Post article that Cannon artfully cherry-picks. WaPoÂ’s Sarah Kliff reveals that Chad Henderson hasnÂ’t had health insurance for over 14 years, which means he had no health insurance premium to quadruple. That makes CannonÂ’s headline a complete and total lie, and Cannon never gets around to revealing ChadÂ’s pre-Obamacare status one way or the other.

Ah, yeah whatever. The Cato Institute did not say Chad had coverage -- it used the (this is a big word, Tommy, but write it down in your notebook) subjunctive mood or conditional mood to discuss what Chad would have paid pre-Obamacare.

Kliff reports that after a three-hour ordeal, Chad bought an Obamacare plan that cost him $175 per month – pretty steep, considering he makes less than $11,500 per year. His Obamacare premium comes to least 18 percent of his income. And no, Chad is not eligible for subsidies.

Compare that to what Chad could have paid if he bought one of the pre-Obamacare plans still available on eHealthInsurance.com until December 31. The cheapest such plan for someone meeting Chad’s profile is just $44.72 – as little as 5 percent of his annual income and about one-quarter of his Obamacare premium.

Yeah, lies Tommy. Tommy Christopher has declared the counterfactual conditional mood, basic to every language, a "lie."

Now I'm not done with this gigantic lying turd just yet. Don't click on the "Cf" link below just yet; you'll spoil my big reveal. Just enjoy Tommy Christopher, MSNBC Fanboi and hack, shitting all over himself.

Depending me? That seems to be a typo that reveals a deeper truth.

He then suggested that Peter Suderman's scoop at Reason, that Chad hadn't purchased health insurance at all, was itself a lie:

For his part, Chad appreciated Tommy's heroic efforts to rehabilitate the witness:

Noah Rothman continues documenting the media's unusual level of interest in Rudy-Like ObamaCare hero Chad Henderson.

“Reporters are clogging Henderson’s voicemail, pro-Obamacare forces are holding him up as a poster child of the health law and administration officials are giving him shout-outs on Twitter,” reported POLITICO’s Kyle Cheney. “He has been uninsured since he was around 6 years old when his father, a single parent, could no longer afford coverage.”

“It is such a huge honor,” Henderson, a student with a part-time job at a day care center, said of the flood of attention. “The fact that the White House shared my story and Enroll America asked me for some help is a major blessing to me.”

“Enrollment took three hours, mostly because the system crashed every time he tried to create an account,” Cheney continued. “Once he got through that step, he said the process was simple.”

“It’s like looking at a Verizon Wireless phone comparison,” Henderson told POLITICO.

The father and son signed up for a bronze plan in GeorgiaÂ’s federal exchange, the lowest cost, least generous level of coverage available, Henderson said. Anything more comprehensive wouldÂ’ve been too costly.

Well, then Peter Suderman did what the media should have done in the first place: He actually checked out the story. It was a false story.

Well now that it's been revealed as false, Sarah "Local Crime Story" Kliff, the WaPo's health issues blogger, must cover it, because she previously made Chad her own poster boy for the awesomeness of ObamaCare.

Now Chad says he didn't actually buy any health care, but says he wasn't lying when he says he "enrolled" in ObamaCare.

Sarah Kliff: So let me make sure I understand things right here. You went through the part of the website where you entered in your information and found out what you qualified for, and that's done. And you got to the part where you can compare plans, but you have not purchased a plan?

Chad Henderson: We have not purchased a specific.The application has information and once you submit it, it reviews eligibility. Obviously I'm not eligible for Medicaid because our governor isn't expanding it. And thatÂ’s what I meant by enrollment. I had assumed that I never said I purchased a plan or enrolled in marketplace. IÂ’m not backing down on my comments. I have not misled anyone.

Kliff, by the way, seems sympathetic to this claim that Chad did not "mislead" anyone at all. Just some poorly-chosen language, and a misunderstanding by a media primed to misunderstand to Obama's credit, I guess.

For those claiming no one ever said Chad "enrolled" in ObamaCare, well, at least one person did:

Ah. He said "looking forward" to having health care. So there you go.

Gee, it's so funny, in his dozens of media interviews I guess he just sort of forgot to say "I actually don't have any health insurance yet."

And I guess the media just forgot to ask him.

Or ask anything at all, really.

By the way: I wonder why Chad Henderson thought that Sarah "Local Crime Story" Kliff might be a friendly blogger to whom to make this disclosure.

Thanks to @charlescwcooke for that last tweet.
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Posted by: Ace at 11:19 AM | Comments (371)
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This week Gabe, Drew, John E., Rick Tempest and I are joined by John McCormack of The Weekly Standard to discuss the government shutdown, the death of author Tom Clancy and the laughably bad rollout of the Obamacare enrollment system, or, as it's called on the blog, 404care.

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Related reading:

- Shutdown
The shutdown is the ConstitutionÂ’s fault
Is It Time To Abolish Congress?

- 404care
Healthcare.gov: Code Developed by the People and for the People, Released Back to the People
Reddit: i guess a couple of are trying to sign up for healthcare...(a minor bug on the new healthcare website)
How AP altered its headline to protect Obamacare
ObamaCare's Technology Mess
Obamacare Increases ManÂ’s Premiums 300%, Supporters Call It a Success Story

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 12:08 PM | Comments (199)
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Shutdown Theater is a nasty little production, aimed at angering and upsetting the audience.

The scoop is at the Washington Times.

The Park Service appears to be closing streets on mere whim and caprice. The rangers even closed the parking lot at Mount Vernon, where the plantation home of George Washington is a favorite tourist destination. That was after they barred the new World War II Memorial on the Mall to veterans of World War II. But the government does not own Mount Vernon; it is privately owned by the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association. The ladies bought it years ago to preserve it as a national memorial. The feds closed access to the parking lots this week, even though the lots are jointly owned with the Mount Vernon ladies. The rangers are from the government, and theyÂ’re only here to help.

“It’s a cheap way to deal with the situation,” an angry Park Service ranger in Washington says of the harassment. “We’ve been told to make life as difficult for people as we can. It’s disgusting.”

I have spent the last hour attacking the media for allowing little Reason to scoop them on Chad Henderson. It's not that they couldn't have gotten this story; it's that they didn't want to.

Here again, People with knowledge of the situation are willing to talk to the media. They are in fact willing to dish dirt on what's really going on.

But the media does not pursue such obvious leads because they're afraid they'll wind up with a Story they'll have to report.

Think about that: They won't ask questions, because they fear it will result in a scoop and a big story.

And then, if they have the scoop and the story, they'll then have to Spike it, and that's dangerous, because people sometimes talk.

So the cleanest way around the problem is to simply not pursue any leads at all which may result in a storyline disfavorable to Obama.

And then of course they'll claim "you can't trust Reason" and "you can't trust the Washington Times."

Oh really? We can't trust them?

We should trust the Bennington College Media, though, huh?

The people who are deliberately avoiding any difficult questions for the federal government they're allegedly the Watchdogs of?

Posted by: Ace at 10:34 AM | Comments (415)
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Not my dad. His dad.

[I]n an exclusive phone interview this morning with Reason, Chad father's Bill contradicted virtually every major detail of the story the media can't get enough of. What's more, some of the details that Chad has released are also at odds with published rate schedules and how Obamacare officials say the enrollment system works.

The coverage of Chad Henderson has been massive. He was featured in The Washington Post Thursday as “the Obamacare enrollee that tons of reporters are calling.” He was also profiled in The Huffington Post as someone who “beat the glitches to sign up for Obamacare.” He was interviewed by Politico, multiple local news organizations, and, according to his Facebook feed, was asked to be part of a conference call hosted by the Department of Health and Human Services.

Chad's story was tweeted out by the official Obamacare Twitter feed. It was promoted to the media by Enroll America, a health-care activist group headed by a former White House communications staffer, as a sign of ObamacareÂ’s success. Henderson told reporters at multiple news outlets that after a three-hour wait to sign up online, he enrolled around 3 a.m. Tuesday morning in an unsubsidized private insurance plan that would cost him about $175 a month. He also said that his father enrolled in separate coverage plan that would cost about $250 a month after factoring in the subsidies for which his father qualified on his approximately $24,000 annual income.

Hit the link to read more. His dad says that he definitely didn't enroll, or wasn't enrolled by Chad, and that he doesn't think Chad enrolled himself, either.

John Sexton reports that the media is very much downplaying how intensely partisan Chad Henderson is (and therefore, how unrepresentative he is of young people generally), which is part and parcel of their determination to portray every leftist activist as jus' an ordinary American citizen.

Ordinary?

I realize everyone in the media just nodded vigorously and ejaculated at that Tweet, but that is not representative of American youth.

This is more representative of American youth.

Indeed. Welcome to the World of Actual Knowledge, dear children.

Posted by: Ace at 09:30 AM | Comments (430)
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Ross Ulbricht == Dread Pirate Roberts

The Silk Road underground/black market trading site lived in what's been termed the "deep web" or DarkNet, vast area where normal search engines don't usually yield usable results. Most is completely legit mundane stuff, some not so legit. Apparently drugs, weapons, etc were offered for sale on Silk Road. If it could be bought/sold for a price, it was traded there with no restriction.

The seizure order.

BitCoin takes hit on arrest news, but seems to have bounced back some.

Apparently Silk Road used TOR for security. Back in Sept I posted this about how the FBI has compromised the TOR servers to distribute some malware to unmask user anonymity. At the time, the nominal excuse being given for compromising TOR was a child porn sting, which seemed kinda thin. Casting such a wide net and compromising thousands of user's machines to locate one dude, who they pretty much had ID'd and located already smelled a bit funny.

Now with the Silk Road/Dread Pirate bust and seizure of millions in Bitcoin maybe we know the real reason the FBI compromised the TOR servers. They were hunting much bigger game than some child porn dude. They had their sights set on the hundreds of thousands of sketchy dark web users of Silk Road going through TOR. I imagine the freeways are clogged with people suddenly blowing town who left no forwarding address.

More on this bust HERE, HERE, and HERE.

fficial&client=firefox-a">It looks like the US media isn't ignoring this story even though it doesn't look good at all for San Francisco where Silk Road and Dread Pirate Roberts seem to have been based.

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Posted by: Purple Avenger at 09:00 AM | Comments (165)
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And bear in mind the Democrats' public position is that they just hate that politics has been brought into this by The Damned Tea Party, and all they want is for the government to open so that it can work its governmental magic.

But here's what they say when they've got a drink in them.

Said a senior administration official: "We are winning...It doesn't really matter to us" how long the shutdown lasts "because what matters is the end result."

The Washington Post asks if this is a potential "game-changer."

They don't think the "We're winning" part is important, because obviously someone is going to win and lose, and Rand Paul just also said that he thought the GOP could win this. But they do think the part about not caring how long the government remains shut down is a problem for the White House.

The first part -- "We're winning" -- is indeed important because the Democrats position, endlessly trumpeted by the media, is that they're sickened by the politics of this. Well that was always, obviously, bunk, and a six year old could see that.

But the media pushed that line anyway, uncritically. "We're winning" complicates their jobs on that front. (Their jobs being to carry water for Democrats, of course.)

Comically Evasive Obama Mouthpiece Jay Carney says the White House "utterly disavows" that thing that a "senior White House official" said, that thing that clearly represents the actual feeling in the White House.

So if someone confesses the truth which undermines your dishonest public relations strategy, all you have to do is "disavow" the truth and then you can go back to lying about everything.

Posted by: Ace at 08:09 AM | Comments (342)
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• Woman Killed Yesterday Thought Obama Was Stalking Her
  
• Most Interesting Man In The World Who Signed Up For O-care Turns Out To Be A OFA Worker
  
• $175 Premium For A Young Healthy Student
  
• Woman Who Continually Had Sexual Relations With An Underage Girl Sentenced To Prison
  
• Pelosi: Obamacare Is A Dream Come True
  
• Buzz Aldrin Reviews The New Movie Gravity
  
• Taranto: Could The Republicans Be Winning?
  
• Kenyan Soldiers Looted The Mall After A Terrorist Attack
  
• Unsealed Documents Shed Light On Lavabit Case
  
• This Cop Is Going To Get An Earful About His Driving
  
• In The Last Shutdown, The GOP Blinked Just As Clinton Was About To Fold
  
• Obamacare Has Time To Fix Exchanges, But Not Forever
  
• Sean Duffy Assaulted
  
• The Budget Fight And Obama's Vindictive Streak
  
• At Least He'll Be Able To Park His Next Motorcycle In A Handicapped Spot Closed To The Store
  
• Blame The Shutdown On James Madison
  
• New York Times Does Single Payer Pivot
  
• Sowell: Democrats Chose The Shutdown
  
• Park Police Now Using Wire To Keep WW 2 Barricades In Place
  
• Baby Lion Club Learning To Roar (video)
  

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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:36 AM | Comments (605)
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FRIDAY!

That movie 'Gravity' seems to have been well-received. Anybody seen it yet?

The dental hygienist shot dead by Capitol police might have been suffering from post-partum depression.

NRO editorial on the shutdown: "A modest bargain makes more sense than a grand one."

This week's podcast will be up later today, so get the last one with Iowahawk while it's still shiny and new.

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Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:45 AM | Comments (389)
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Day 3 of the Government Slowdown: Things Begin to Escalate A Bit

Posted by: Maetenloch at 04:37 PM | Comments (1049)
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The DC driver has been identified.

L to R: Possible Tea Partier, Possible Tea Partier,
Actual Perpetrator of DC Road Rage Incident

She was a 34 year old dental hygienist. She had a history of mental issues.

The one-year-old child in her backseat was unharmed.

We don't know what caused this, but the left was pretty sure.

They were also hoping Boehner and Cruz would be shot.

Another day in the Former States of America.

Posted by: Ace at 04:03 PM | Comments (237)
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