For the Middle Class.

Seattle Seahawks at St. Louis Rams. Coincidentally Boston is also in St. Louis, game underway.

Sure, they're covered up. But you know they're in there.

The elbows I mean.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 04:52 PM | Comments (77)
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This is interesting.

Although the law claims that all policies in effect from March 23, 2010, will be grandfathered, the agency writing the regulations for this law wrote them as narrowly as possible -- any change in premium, copay, benefit package, or anything at all would be taken as a whole new policy, and thus be stripped of grandfather status and required, by law, to be terminated.

And the White House, of course, oversees the executive agencies writing regulations -- including the one that that almost completely took back the law's promise that you could keep your current policy.

And they've known they were doing this, and they knew they were taking back Obama's promise via bureaucratic regulation, for three years.

President Obama repeatedly assured Americans that after the Affordable Care Act became law, people who liked their health insurance would be able to keep it. But millions of Americans are getting or are about to get cancellation letters for their health insurance under Obamacare, say experts, and the Obama administration has known that for at least three years.

President Obama repeatedly assured Americans that after the Affordable Care Act became law, people who liked their health insurance would be able to keep it. But millions of Americans are getting or are about to get cancellation letters for their health insurance under Obamacare, say experts, and the Obama administration has known that for at least three years.

Four sources deeply involved in the Affordable Care Act tell NBC NEWS that 50 to 75 percent of the 14 million consumers who buy their insurance individually can expect to receive a “cancellation” letter or the equivalent over the next year because their existing policies don’t meet the standards mandated by the new health care law. One expert predicts that number could reach as high as 80 percent. And all say that many of those forced to buy pricier new policies will experience “sticker shock.”

None of this should come as a shock to the Obama administration. The law states that policies in effect as of March 23, 2010 will be “grandfathered,” meaning consumers can keep those policies even though they don’t meet requirements of the new health care law. But the Department of Health and Human Services then wrote regulations that narrowed that provision, by saying that if any part of a policy was significantly changed since that date -- the deductible, co-pay, or benefits, for example -- the policy would not be grandfathered.

The Obama Administration knew this choice of regulation would wind up causing 40 to 67 percent of all health policies to be canceled.

Note premiums increase most years -- and the regulation did not even take into account some kind of minor escalation in premium (for example, if the premium changes but no other details do, it's the "same policy" and hence grandfathered).

And if I could speculate here: They did this because they wanted the maximum number of people forced to subsidize the uninsured via ObamaCare's not-so-hidden-now tax.

It would have been simple as hell to write the regulation as "substantially similar" and then offer some safe-harbors for minor changes which would keep the policy grandfathered.

But Obama didn't want that. He actively wanted to break his pledge. So he had his minions write the regulations in such a way that very few existing policies would be grandfathered.

I note as forcefully as I can: While laws are the creatures of Congress, regulations are entirely within the Executive's power. Obama's decision to break this promise is his own action. He could direct the regulation-writing agency to revise the regulations so that they honor the promise that Obama himself made; I do not believe he will.

He never intended to keep this promise. He intended to make the promise, get ObamaCare passed, and then violate the promise by having his executive-controlled rules-writers take the entirety of the promise back.

Posted by: Ace at 02:31 PM | Comments (373)
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If he's always been clear people would be getting different, supposedly better coverage (such as 59 year old women now required to pay for maternity care), then why did he keep insisting "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan"?

Why didn't he promise "You're getting a new, different, more expensive (but supposedly) better plan"?

Because he was either lying or, given that Obama seems to know practically nothing of what goes on in his White House -- he seems to be given a speech to read, and doesn't know whether the speech is true or not -- it's actually possible he doesn't know these things at all.

After all, per Kathleen Sebelius, Obama was never told that the website he had a month ago promised would be as easy to use as buying a TV off Amazon was not ready to work and in fact was in disastrous shape.

What other truths are Obama's Yes Men afraid that Obama is incapable of handling?

I'll direct you to Hot Air for the Comically Evasive Mouthpiece Jay Carney's attempt to square this unsquarable circle.

Below, Jim Acosta asks him why Obama is always in the dark about virtually everything important going on in the world and in his White House. Obama, the supposed genius wonk, is forever claiming to have no previous "awareness" of things like the IRS scandal or Benghazi or the world's first SCOAMF website, Healthcare.gov.

Why shucks, he found out about these things same time you did -- from the newspaper.

Is this a lie?

Or, even worse, is it the truth?
more...

Posted by: Ace at 04:20 PM | Comments (214)
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The Wall Street Journal just tweeted that with a link to their general site, not to a particular article.

What? If this is true, it's irresponsible; if it's a lie, why is the Lightbringer so ready to lie?

I think maybe this illustrates my complaint in the comments about arguing that we shouldn't tell the truth, if a lie is in our political interests. No one's smart enough to figure out all the pathways and variations of possible future reality to determine that.

Well, I told the truth: We always have spied on allies (and everyone else) and we should do so.

So, actually, by telling the truth, I'm now actually in a position to criticize Obama for renouncing a necessary function of intelligence (and a necessary function of government).

Those who wished to criticize Obama for spying on allies will now, I suppose, have to... praise him for this decision, I suppose?

Oh, I doubt that. But the inconsistency -- damning him when he spies on Germany, but also damning him when he renounces spying on Germany -- will be noted, obviously.

I told the truth, and I didn't modify my take due to the moment's very short-term political needs, and I said "We have to spy on Germany. Of course we do."

So here I am now in a position to criticize Obama, whereas those who faulted him for spying on Germany are reduced to either flip-flopping on a position so blatantly as to be obviously offering completely partisan, conclusions-driven "analyses," or, less likely, to now be in the odd position of be required to praise Obama for refraining from doing what they previously implied he should indeed refrain from doing.

Some people might have meant that honestly, on principle. If so, I guess they will indeed offer some (restrained) praise for Obama for ending this odious practice.

But one commenter pushed the line that we shouldn't help Obama by speaking the truth about this -- that is, our short-term political needs should trump the truth. Well, I guess this new plan of Obama's sort of scotches that old plan of claiming it's a Bad Thing to spy on allies.

Now I guess it's safe to speak the truth of it...?

I really don't mind when people disagree. I'm just tired of being instructed of what we should or should not say based upon someone's often extremely superficial grasp of current political needs and corporate advertising account messaging techniques.

You really can't figure these things out 95% of the time. Unless the future is very obvious (as it was obviously in liberals' best political interests to claim, falsely, that Clinton hadn't lied under oath), the truth is just the best general policy, not just for political outcomes but as far as fostering a political discourse that consists of actual belief and information and not just of partisan positioning.

Partisan positioning is also boring as hell, which is lethal to discussion. Let's keep that sort of thing where it should be kept, on bumper stickers and in political ads and tv jingles, and permit ourselves to talk here like actual people, not self-appointed Marketing Majors.

Let's just saying what we actually think, not what we think we've Calculated to be our Best Political Positioning Message of the Day.

Spirit Squads are annoying.

Posted by: Ace at 01:45 PM | Comments (224)
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A question I actually do not know the answer to. (I don't know the answer to many questions, this is just one of a long list.)

But it does seem to me that Something Bad is going to happen, because Obama called upon his Bottomless Well of Executive Power to delay the Employer Mandate unilaterally, fearing political fall-out for the 2014 elections should millions upon millions of previously-covered workers be dumped into the exchanges.

Will this happen? I don't know. But here's what I do know: Obama sufficiently feared this possibility to violate the Constitution and delay his own beloved pet boondoggle to avoid the possibility of it.

Right now we are talking about the millions and millions of people in the individual insurance market. They are getting screwed. But as a percentage of the country, this is a small number of people -- I think the fraction is something like 8% or so.

Caveat: I just made that up. But it's low.

We should be talking about What Happens Next. And critics of ObamaCare have some good authority to speak about What Happens Next, given that they already predicted What Already Happened.

The individual-market Losers are the canaries in the coalmine for tens of millions more likely losers.

I would like Obama and his Minions to be questioned closely about what they predict will happen next. I want them on the record as to their new promises about "if you like your plan, you can keep your plan" as regards employer-paid coverage.

Let's face it: If 90% of the country thinks, probably wrongly, that only 10% of the country is getting screwed, they will probably just shrug it off and say "Sucks to be them." All of these anecdotes about people getting screwed will not move the general public.

Only worries about What Comes Next, regarding themselves, will agitate them for the 2014 elections.

Honestly I don't know if the disruption in the employer markets will be as bad. I think it will be bad, but not as bad -- for one thing, I think employer-provided insurance already includes a bit of subsidization for sick workers-- in as much as the employer buys coverage for an undefined group, which might include very sick people -- the risks then are already pooled, at least to some extent. But only to some extent, because the sickest of all people probably do not work, and thus do not ever enter the employer coverage pools.

Employer coverage is also generally decent, and thus won't be much affected by increased demands for coverage. But it will be affected somewhat, and when ObamaCare demands that a business give its employees, effectively, a $1,000 or $3,000 annual raise in the form of a health care policy that covers previously uncovered things (and also steals money to subsidize the uninsurable), many companies may balk and simply stop providing insurance altogether.

Maybe this is the secret evil genius of Obama's plan -- he will get all those healthy people subsidizing the sick on the individual markets, because when his employer mandates start kicking in, many companies will dump their huge numbers of relatively low-risk people (remember, the most sick people can't actually work for a living) into the high-risk individual market pools.

Do I know these things? No, I don't. But after having not looked into these matters for five years straight, perhaps our media could trouble itself to rise from its lazy slumbers for a few minutes to begin asking some questions about ObamaCare.

Until now they've gotten everything about ObamaCare wrong. Can they attempt to get some of it right, before the employer mandate kicks in?

Or do they agree with Nancy Pelosi that we'll all have to collectively suffer under ObamaCare in order to learn what's actually in it?

People insuring themselves and making the Rich Man's Wage of $50,000 or more per year (wow!!! That's like Sinatra-money!!!) are the first victims of ObamaCare.

Will there be more? Does anyone in the media have any interest in discovering the answer to these questions before people begin self-reporting their own victimization?

more...

Posted by: Ace at 12:54 PM | Comments (217)
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Via Dave at Garfield Ridge, yes, with one big proviso, which I'll mention later.

We now know that millions of people will lose their existing health-insurance policies thanks to Obamacare. Already hundreds of thousands of people have gotten letters from their insurance companies letting them know they’ll lose their coverage. Millions more are bound to get similar letters, particularly when the small-business mandate kicks in. They should also get another letter, however. And that letter should come from the GOP, either from Reince Priebus or, better, from their local GOP representative, senator, governor or whichever local politician makes the most sense. And that letter should, without stridency, hyperbole or annoying appeals for money, explain to them that this is exactly what Obamacare was designed to do and precisely what Republicans predicted would happen. If I was writing it, I would say something like, “The president vowed to you on numerous occasions (see attached document) that you could keep your insurance and that you would save money under the Affordable Care Act. This was untrue. Whether it was a well-intentioned mistake or a more deliberate deception, what the president and his party told you was flatly untrue, and we said so at the time.”

Of course.

My one caveat is that getting this kind of a letter on the heels of having your insurance cancelled would be creepy and alarming.

The letters would have to be transparent upfront about how the GOP came to learn they were likely individual policy-holders. Perhaps it's just as simple as sending out letters to all of Kaiser Permanente's customers (if that information is public).

If ObamaCare itself makes this public, so much the better: then introduce the letter by saying ObamaCare makes your personal health insurance information public, and we think that's a bad thing, but that said, here's our pitch as to the rest of it.

Government is an organized system for shifting the wealth of tribes not in the majority coalition to tribes in the majority coalition. The only thing I can say in defense of this aspect of government is that it is slightly better than outright brigandry and tribal warfare.

Obama is shifting a lot of wealth from less-favored tribes to more-favored tribes. If he is permitted to only gain the benefit of this exchange (that is, the gratitude of the tribes getting someone else's loot) he wins completely.

This sort of thing can only be checked (as a political matter) by enlisting those who are being looted from into a political opposition.

I can only say this so many times: The conservative party must find a way to better discuss these things, a more appealing way. They cannot just talk about taxes, abstractly; they have to talk about what taxes actually are.

They have to talk about what money really is: Money is a barter-chit of convenience which represents a certain number of minutes or hours of your labor. Every unit of money actually represents the duration of time -- time you could have spent lying around an doing nothing -- that you used in order to earn that money.

Saying "It's just money" is the practical equivalent of saying "it's just time, time I might spend with my family, or pursuing a hobby, or relaxing." Each dollar represents a quantum of such time.

And each exertion of government to tax a citizen for the benefit of another steals a quantum of time from one citizen to deliver it to another.

Money is not "just money." Money is your daughter's braces. Or it's the difference between metal braces that your daughter will hate and invisible-line ones she won't mind quite so much.

Money is that personal workshop you've wanted to build your whole life but never could.

Money is two weeks on vacation with your family, not just at home -- not just a staycation -- but a genuine real vacation.

Money is also charity -- charity that you decide to bequeath to.

The GOP needs to find a way to discuss "money" and "taxes" in more concrete ways, in ways which are more tangible and vital, and not let the progressive party keep on saying "it's only money" as they take more and more of one man's labor -- more and more years of one man's life -- to aid another.

BTW: I keep discussing this in the podcast. I think twice in the last three weeks I've said this sort of thing. I discussed it longer in the last one, with Ben Domenech.

I don't want to endorse Rand's idea that selfishness is virtue so much as I want to push back against this childish idea that forcibly extracting money from one man to give to another is virtuous.

There are costs involved here. Politics used to be all about costs -- real world adult stuff like "Who's paying?" and "Who Loses?"

We are now living in a Sesame Street world in which it has been decided that it is too ugly, uncomfortable, and uncouth to even discuss such things. All we talk about about now the Cash and Prizes being won by some government clients in the Great Government Game Show.

But we, as a culture, do not seriously discuss the things that serious adults have talked about for the previous 200 years of this countries' existence -- that there are costs to all of these things.

People like to conceive of themselves as generous to a fault, practically heroic in their desire to sacrifice for others. In fact they are not, and only wish to gesture towards sacrifice. They want the actual sacrifice borne by others. They just want the moral credit of having spoken up in favor of the proposition that somebody somewhere should sacrifice.

We have a very infantilized, retarded political discourse at the moment. We discuss serious matters of math -- boring, sterile, unforgiving math -- as children might, where all that matters is intention and good feeling.

How we go about changing society to the point where it once again begins discussing adult matters as adults, I don't know. But we must think about this, and attempt to re-educate an increasingly uneducated (or deliberately mis-educated) population about Simple Matters, like the basic idea that Stuff Costs Money and Money Isn't Free.

Posted by: Ace at 11:47 AM | Comments (313)
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Some people don't realize this, I guess, because they've never read an espionage book or a factual book about espionage: Every embassy in every country is a central hub for espionage.

The spies are mixed in with the diplomats. This is the way it's always been.

I realize the Germans maybe feel required to react with Outrage. But there are CIA assets posing as diplomats at the Berlin embassy, just as there are German intelligence agents posing as diplomats in the DC embassy.

This is what is meant by "diplomatic cover." It's cover... as a diplomat.

Perhaps Germans don't understand simple word combinations. You'd think they'd be outstanding at two-word combinations, as that's half of their language.

"Official cover" also means "diplomatic cover." "Non-Official Cover" -- NOC -- is especially dangerous precisely because you don't have diplomatic immunity if you're not a diplomat.

This is why spies are usually asked to leave the country -- declared persona non grata, person no longer welcomed -- rather than arrested: Because they have diplomatic immunity. (NOCs are arrested, held for a while, then usually ransomed back to their country in exchange for something, usually the release of any spies that country is holding.)

The Soviet Embassy in DC, IIRC, was built on a hill between two important cellular traffic antennae. (This was in the days before cell phones, but I think long-distance connections were still handled by relay antennae.) The site was chosen precisely so the Soviets could tap every single signal passing right through their damned building.

And that was actually our bad for permitting them to build on that site. It was a colossal oversight that no one noticed the hill they wanted to build on just so happened to be right between two telephone relay antennae. They couldn't believe their good luck -- or their opponents' incompetence ---when we gave them the okay.

Maybe some people believe that only "Bad" countries would dare lie about their spies and implant them in foreign countries as "diplomats." Maybe that's where this silly outrage comes from -- that there is a belief that only Bad Actors engage in such Dirty Pool.

Nope. Every single embassy since diplomacy existed has had the secondary (and in fact usually primary) function of serving as a hiding place for spies.

But Der Spiegel is very incensed that the CIA bugged Angela Merkel's phone right from the American Embassy.

Imagine that! The CIA acting right out of CIA Central. Why, the next thing you know and they'll be claiming the CIA Station Chief for Germany is actually posing as the Senior Vice Diplomat for German-American Economic Unity and chairs the Bilateral Salmon Fishing Promotion committee.

According to SPIEGEL research, United States intelligence agencies have not only targeted Chancellor Angela Merkel's cellphone, but they have also used the American Embassy in Berlin as a listening station. The revelations now pose a serious threat to German-American relations....

[The embassy is] an ideal location for diplomats -- and for spies.

Really? A property that is technically United States sovereign land but located right in a city's economic and political capital is ideally suited to host an espionage operation targeting that country?

Who knew?

Research by SPIEGEL reporters in Berlin and Washington, talks with intelligence officials and the evaluation of internal documents of the US' National Security Agency and other information, most of which comes from the archive of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, lead to the conclusion that the US diplomatic mission in the German capital has not merely been promoting German-American friendship.

What?!

What about the Bilateral Salmon Fishing Promotion Committee? Are you saying that was all just one big lie too?

On the contrary, it is a nest of espionage.

I shan't believe it. The deuce you say.

From the roof of the embassy, a special unit of the CIA and NSA can apparently monitor a large part of cellphone communication in the government quarter. And there is evidence that agents based at Pariser Platz recently targeted the cellphone that Merkel uses the most.

The NSA spying scandal has thus reached a new level, becoming a serious threat to the trans-Atlantic partnership. The mere suspicion that one of Merkel's cellphones was being monitored by the NSA has led in the past week to serious tensions between Berlin and Washington.

Now, this is a diplomatic discomfort, and I can't blame the Germans for being annoyed. They have to be annoyed -- after all, this revelation means that for years and years, the CIA was eating their lunch in the espionage-counterespionage game.

And I can't blame them for kicking up a fuss, because that's what you do when you've been owned.

Still, this whole thing is kind of silly. So many people are acting outraged to learn that spies spy.

On Capital Cities: Most countries' political capital is also their economic capital. That means spying is especially easy -- one stop shopping, if you will.

The US always had a minor advantage here, because DC was our political capital, but economically, it was a backwater. (Until government became our main economic product, that is.)

Then after WWII the rest of the world decided it didn't just want spies in DC, but wanted them in our financial capital (New York City) as well, and so proposed "Hey let's put up new embassies in New York City and put up a... let's call it a United Nations of Espionage center, I mean a United Nations building, there, to justify all those new spies posing as diplomats."

And for some reason we said "Yes."

We really should put the UN (if we keep it at all) someplace like Detroit. Throw Detroit some foreign dollars, and keep the spies away from the unofficial US second capital.

Posted by: Ace at 10:28 AM | Comments (406)
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Actually, Politifact said it was half-true -- but it was only partly false due to the insurance companies' ability to terminate you at will, not due to anything in ObamaCare requiring them to terminate your policies.

In other words, PolitiFact claimed the only people who'd terminate your insurance policy were the insurers themselves, acting for their own ends. ObamaCare itself, however, would not require the termination of your policy.

You can read "PolitiFact's" ruling here, and then ponder at what point they will rate the truthfulness of their own partisan political claims.

Via @AG_Conservative:

He compares PolitiFact's determination to rescue false Obama statements to their opposite determination to find Republican statements false, no matter how true they are.

Posted by: Ace at 09:37 AM | Comments (292)
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Via Hot Air, Ron Fournier discloses an email from a consultant.

"Dem Party is F****d." That was the subject line of an email sent to me Sunday by a senior Democratic consultant with strong ties to the White House and Capitol Hill. The body of the email contained a link to this Los Angeles Times story about Obamacare "sticker shock:"

"These middle-class consumers are staring at hefty increases on their insurance bills as the overhaul remakes the healthcare market. Their rates are rising in large part to help offset the higher costs of covering sicker, poorer people who have been shut out of the system for years."

"Although recent criticism of the healthcare law has focused on website glitches and early enrollment snags, experts say sharp price increases for individual policies have the greatest potential to erode public support for President Obama's signature legislation."

In his story, reporter Chad Terhune also quoted a letter sent to a California insurance company executive. "I was all for Obamacare," wrote a young woman complaining about a 50 percent rate hike related to the health care law, "until I found out I was paying for it."

Three points:

First, Democrats own Republicans (at least until lately) on the idea of voting for virtue. Republicans used to be in a better position on this (moral issues, war on terror), but lately it's the Democrats who are convincing people that voting for their party makes them more virtuous.

Republicans haven't shown any ability recently to make their own policy preferences -- such as self-reliance and liberty -- seem like the virtuous choice. Instead, they are forever playing on Democrats' preferred field, on which "virtue" equals "spending other people's money."

Which leads to the second point: Having completely failed to rhetorically challenge this premise, it's possible (but not guaranteed) that the facts -- the middle class being socked with a huge hidden tax they were promised would not happen -- will make it for them.

And yet even with this huge factual predicate, Republicans have to figure out a way to start talking about simple self-interest. At the present moment they seem embarrassed to do so, and so wind up changing the subject or demurring when Democrats start talking about spending other people's money as a way to show one's virtue.

The last point is simple, and I've made it before, but this is my first post back from vacation, so what the heck: Virtue consists of taking an action which costs one time or money for the benefit of another. The Democrats keep selling "virtue" as undertaking the cost-free action of voting for Democrats, who will then force other people to sacrifice for what is supposedly the Common Good.

What virtue is there in that? One thing I can say positively about ObamaCare is that it forces millions of middle-class Obama voters to actually own their supposed virtue, and actually pay for their gestures.

But will they accept this? I don't know. They may realize in time that if they aren't willing to pay for the program they have so enthusiastically supported (and peacocked about, showing off their Morality and Compassion Feathers), they will be exposed as the rankest hypocrites, and that may end up pushing them to accept that virtue should indeed cost something.

On the other hand, they may decide to avoid thinking about it too hard, and just blame Obama for lying to them (which he did, but come on, it was a lie so obvious the blame should fall equally on any who accepted it as true).

Posted by: Ace at 08:30 AM | Comments (402)
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This kinda dovetails with one of Ace's posts.

the real news was Fund's report of a conversation he had with a Democratic consultant, whose name, he said, we'd all know. He didn't say the guy's name, but he said he had spoken to him in the green room during the taping of a recent show.

Fund asked what he thought of the election, and this man said, "Off the record, I think Kerry just might lose." But he then continued (paraphrased): "That doesn't mean it's over, though. Democrats will protest and fight so strongly that Bush won't have a win even if he wins. We will obstruct so much that this country will be ungovernable by Christmas."

People talk of a (passive) Let It Burn strategy, but it looks like the Democrats were prepared to, and based on the trajectory of the past 9+ years, actually did execute the (active) Burn It Down strategy of their own that consultant referred to...

...problem is, now that things are getting kinda toasty, they find its their guy in the Whitehouse taking the heat.

[BUMPED]

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 06:48 AM | Comments (307)
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