Sorry 'rons and 'ettes. Crazy, busy week and long day for me so this will be a light ONT. Like that will stop y'all from doing what 'cha do.

If Obama really wanted to do something about the failure of his signature legislation, he'd fire these people at a minimum. Then repeal it.

Image h/t more...

Posted by: CDR M at 06:15 PM | Comments (784)
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At Twitchy. Some really tremendous work here.

So, you know how Obama "honors" every president, right? By inserting himself into their story. He thinks he elevates others (including presidents) by validating them with a connection to himself.

So this is what the White House's photo-propaganda operation tweets out on the day of JFK's assassination:

He likes himself a whole heck of a lot, huh?

@johnekdahl has a suggestion:

So then this happened:

And then this:

There's one more at the end, but I can't steal that. You have to go to Twitchy for the last one.

And, Open Thread. Until CDR M's open thread.

Posted by: Ace at 04:13 PM | Comments (446)
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Launch? Well, detonation on the launching pad, anyway.

Compare to the last post: Chao testified he removed the Anonymous Shopper feature because to have foisted such a flawed bit of software on an unsuspecting public would have been "unconscionable."

Yet the bulk of Healthcare.gov was... to call it flawed would be like saying Obama is slightly fond of golf, television, and himself.

You guys remember the rumors that CBSNews was thinking about firing Attkisson for bringing too much of a partisan edge to her reportage?

Yeah. She's the one who lives in a partisan fantasyland, huh?

Posted by: Ace at 01:18 PM | Comments (189)
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The "Anonymous Shopper" tool didn't require anyone to enter in all their personal information before checking out insurance plans.

Amazing idea, huh? Shopping for your plan before you enter all of your personal and financial data. Bear in mind, they're not even just asking for your name, billing address, and credit card number; they want All The Things.

Now, why wasn't this part of Healthcare.gov included with Healthcare.gov?

Well, you have two choices. You choose the version you find more plausible.

1) The Anonymous Shopper option wasn't included because Obama knew the public would recoil from the sticker shock of seeing the real prices for insurance he was offering, unmitigated by the cushion of a subsidy. Sure, a lot of people aren't getting subsidies, and so a lot of people will see the huge new costs of insurance under the president's Save Your Family $2500 Per Year law, but he wanted to keep the number of people seeing these huge new premiums to a minimum.

So, he told his people to take this option out. This then required people to enter all their most personal financial data before even seeing what the hell they'd be buying, so that the system could, in theory, calculate a subsidy and deduct it from the premium.

Note that this causes a great deal of problems for the system, as all the tough stuff must be done first.

And he did all this jackass shit, sabotaging his own website, in order to, get this, further deceive the public about the Exciting New Super-High Premiums people would pay under Obamacare.

Or:

2) The Anonymous Shopper feature, the most dead-simple sort of thing you can do on the web (it shows products and prices; some innovation, huh?) just didn't work, so they scrapped it.

Unlike the rest of Healthcare.gov, which they apparently thought was workin' fine.

Now, you-all are a suspicious lot, so I can guess many of you are leaning towards Option 2.

But you're wrong: Documents released by the Administration prove that the Anonymous Shopper function really wasn't working, and that's the only reason they disabled it.

Ah, I'm just fuckin' with you. Of course they lied. And they didn't just, get this, lie to the public about it.

They, get this, lied to Congress about it, which is a little more problematic than lying to the doormat American Public.

Now remember: The Administration's claim is that this feature was taken out due to technical snags. They're specifically denying they chose to disable the feature, because that would imply they did so for reasons of political dishonesty.

Via CNN:

Chao said he made the decision in conjunction with colleagues and testified before Congress last week that it was because the feature “failed so miserably that we could not conscionably let people use it.”

...

The source close to the project, however, said the anonymous shopper function did pass testing conducted in the weeks ahead of the HealthCare.gov launch.

...

The successful test occurred on September 17, according to a source familiar with the project. The next day, in an internal e-mail obtained by CNN, Chao wrote the shopper function “isn’t needed and thus should be removed.”

By "isn't needed" you are free to read "is politically unhelpful."

Every single of them is just lying now. Every single thing they say is a lie.

Posted by: Ace at 12:34 PM | Comments (281)
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Really?

I brought this up in the podcast-- I think Eekdahl agreed with me. The media is attempting to claim they were snookered by Obamacare, same as us.

Well, not us. We got it. But the media is now claiming that they were snookered along with the rest of the Low Information Voters.

Sort of like they're turning to us now, after having echoed Obama's lies about Obamacare for five years, and saying, "Can you believe the bullshit this guy is tellin' us...?"

Um, guys? You told us the same bullshit.

You know how Obama poses as a spectator to his own Administration? As someone who has no responsibility to actually do a good job, but only to criticize the government when it fails to do a good job?

Watch Politico attempt the same maneuver here-- apparently forgetting that as a news operation focused only on DC and the laws promulgated there, they had a responsibility to report the actual facts about Obamacare:

[Headline:] Obamacare tradeoffs: Now they tell us Â…

They're telling you this now? Were you incapable of reading the law or the Federal Register? Did you feel no obligation to check the veracity of Obama's claims? Did you feel that Senator Enzi's detailed chapter-and-verse explanation of how Obamacare would boot off millions from their insurance companies was Obviously A Lie, just because he's a conservative?

Did you have any responsibility to look into this a little bit more thoroughly than not at all?

But the problem with Obamacare’s stumbling start is that it shined a harsh light on intended consequences — more costs and more government regulation — that were always embedded in the ACA but were deliberately downplayed by Obama and Democrats on the way to passage.

If these things were always embedded (which they were), why did no news organizations report them?

...

It is, in many respects, a classic social welfare program. Like other social programs, it involves transferring from haves to have-nots. Healthy people are going to have to pay to help sick people get coverage. People who had skimpy coverage before — and in some cases, not-so-skimpy coverage — will have to upgrade to insurance that covers more things, but costs more. And young people will have to pay so older people don’t face sky-high premiums.

...

It is not as if these trade-offs — the kind required by any big social program — were not understood by experts at the time Obamacare was being debated in 2009 and 2010. But they certainly weren’t part of the pitch Obama and the Democrats made to the rest of America — the people who shouldn’t have had to read between the lines to know what was going to happen.

I agree. If only we had some kind of institution whose primary mission it was to scrutinize the claims of politicians, contact experts, and report the major facts about major new legislation to the public.

But alas, it seems we don't.

Politico does get around, obliquely, to defending themselves and the rest of the media on this.

Any guesses?

Go ahead, guess.

If you said "By blaming Republicans," you're smarter than you look.

Republicans in Congress have been quick to say that they warned of the dangers of the law. But the truth is that they sounded the alarms about so many threats, including dubious assertions about death panels and the slippery slope to a Canadian-style single-payer health care system, that they never put any sustained focus on the very specific tradeoffs people are seeing now.

Politico, the "experts" on public policy, continues showing off its colossal ignorance. In fact, the original proposal was a slippery slope to single payer health care; the architect of it admitted that, saying that it couldn't be called a "Trojan Horse for single payer," because it's "right there."

In other words, it can't be a Trojan Horse if it is so obviously smuggling in Single Payer. If you're so overt about your intention, people can't accuse you of dishonesty.

Furthermore, even high-ranking Democrats, like Harry Reid, publicly confessed the public option was a way to move towards single payer. When asked if the public option was a means towards displacing the private insurance market and moving us towards single payer, he responded: "Absolutely yes."

Once Joe Lieberman got wind of this -- when Richmond's and Sexton's scoop got into the pages of the Wall Street Journal -- he insisted the public option be removed, or else the Democrats would not have his vote. So the Democrats went to this ungainly monster we now call "Obamacare," something Max Baucus sharted out after a long night of tequila, burritos, and incompetence.

So no, Politico, Republicans weren't making "dubious" claims about Obamacare; they were making accurate ones. Something, by the way, that the media totally got scooped on; it was the bloggers Verum Serum (John Sexton) and Morgan Richmon who found, reported, and brought to Joe Lieberman's attention Hacker's "Trojan Horse" confession. The media reported it later... slightly.

Most deliberately did not report on the fact that the architect of the original plan was caught on tape bragging that Obamacare 1.0 was designed to wipe out private insurance.

At any rate, that's Politico's excuse: You guys made so many "dubious" (actually accurate) charges against Obamacare, we just couldn't ferret out the accurate ones from the false ones.

I say again: This wasn't a fast-moving story about a sudden natural disaster, in which information is scattered and comes in panicked burst. Nor was it a story about national secrets -- CIA stuff -- where the story couldn't come out until the Right Source delivered the Right Leak.

It was all written out, right there in the law, right there in the Federal Register. All a reporter had to do was read it -- and if it was too complicated or too arcane for a reporter, all he had to do was contact an expert.

Did the experts themselves know? Yes, says Megan McArdle -- including the left-wing ones.

[T]he most interesting line of defense is, essentially, that “we always knew this was coming.” The Official Blog Spouse chronicled the emergence of this meme last summer, and it hasn’t changed much since. It’s interesting because it’s both completely true and completely false -- depending on who you think “we” is.

ItÂ’s absolutely true that every policy wonk who was writing or speaking about the law in 2009 and 2010 understood that it would mean premiums going up for at least some people, many of whom would lose insurance that they would have preferred to keep. Who it would be depended a bit on how the law unfolded, of course, but at a minimum, young, healthy people who made more than $46,000 a year could expect to pay higher premiums for the same level of coverage. They had to; mathematically, it was not possible for coverage to expand and everyoneÂ’s premiums to go down -- not unless you spent more in premium subsidies than the government could afford.

But I think itÂ’s also clearly true that the majority of the public did not understand this. In 2008, the Barack Obama campaign told them that their premiums would go down under the new health-care law. And the lawÂ’s supporters believed it.

...

[Most of Obama's arguments about how it could possibly be that premiums would go down] all sounded entirely plausible; I heard many smart wonks make most of these arguments in 2008 and 2009. However, itÂ’s fair to say that by the time the law passed, the debate had pretty well established that few to none of them were true.

“We all knew” that preventive care doesn’t save money, electronic medical records don’t save money, reducing uncompensated care saves very little money, and “reining in the abusive practices” of insurance companies was likely to raise premiums, not lower them, because those “abuses” mostly consist of refusing to cover very sick people.

But that information did not get communicated very well to the public. The administration reiterated that, in Obama’s words, “We will keep this promise to the American people. If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period. If you like your health-care plan, you will be able to keep your health-care plan. Period.” They also promised that the average family would save $2,500 a year on premiums. There was no fine print about how some folks would lose their insurance, be forced into narrower doctor networks, and see premiums rise, even though they seem to have known what was going to happen.

And the wonk community did not exactly hasten to disabuse them.

So it seems to me there are several possibilities in play, none of them good for the media, nor the left-leaning "experts" that are on the media's speed-dials.

Either the wonks told the media, in all candor, that most of this was bullshit, and that people would indeed be suffering under Obama's plan, his promises to the contrary, and yet the media chose to not report that;

or their own trusted experts lied to them about what all of this meant.

Now, if it's the former, they're in on the conspiracy themselves. And if it's the latter, those experts should never, ever be called or quoted again, having deliberately lied to the reporters asking about Obamacare.

But I don't hear any in the media calling out any of their experts.

Going back to Mary Katharine's post: Mark Halperin also attempts to blame the media's negligence or intentional lying on Republicans.

INGRAHAM: ThatÂ’s part of the issue, is it not? The President always seems to see things in terms of political solutions or political responses. So the response here is we have got to rebrand. We have got to sell it differently. We have to have a new ad, have to have the website have more colors, whatever it is. IsnÂ’t it more of a branding problem? This is a technical problem. ItÂ’s a policy problem. ItÂ’s a substantive problem. ItÂ’s not just about whether ObamaÂ’s big legacy is intact or progressive ideas in the future are doing well. These are real concerns that were expressed frankly back in 2008, 2009, and into 2010. Forgive me, but I donÂ’t think Time Magazine was doing cover stories on a lot of concerns that were raised back then that were routinely dismissed by many in the media, ideological, as just mean-spirited, turns out most of the Republican concerns about Obamacare were right.

HALPERIN: Laura, there is no doubt that the press failed to scrutinize this program at the time of passage and during the context of the president’s re-election. Any reporter who would argue otherwise would be putting their head in the sand. As we write in “Double Down,” the problem for the Republicans in the re-election context was you nominated, Republicans nominated Mitt Romney, a guy who was not very well positioned, to say the least, to make the case against Obamacare because he passed the healthcare plan in Massachusetts.

MKH immediately points out the inconvenient fact that there was no presidential election in 2009 to early 2010, when Obamacare was rammed through the Congress, and Mitt Romney was not the nominee of anything yet, except as the first name in Jen Rubin's Crush Book.

Mark Halperin continues maintaining, in the article, that it was only Mitt Romney's job to patrol Obama's claims for their veracity, or the 2000+ pages Obamacare (plus thousands of regulations in the Federal Register) for their actual impact on the American public, and that the media only had a responsibility, at most, as a secondary actor.

To which Mary Katherine finally bursts out in exasperation:

WHAT IS THE POINT OF YOU, MARK HALPERIN?

Indeed. If the media is now claiming that their only job is to put pictures of Obama on TV, well, Obama does quite a job of that himself. And any YouTube channel could satisfy that portion of news coverage.

If the media is not there to look into matters and closely question politicians, and get to the actual truth, what is the point of it?

Note that the media smugly tells you that it's their job to Tell You What the Truth Is when they're questioned about bias. There is a bias, they say, towards the truth, and to report Democrat Truth and Republican Lie as if they're equivalent would be "false equivalency."

But when asked why they permitted Democrat Lies to be trumpeted as truth for so long, or why they ignored Republican Truths about the cancellation of policies, they now say:

That's not our job. That was up to Mitt Romney.

Back when he was still just a former governor of Massachusetts and former contender for the Republican nomination. Who lost.

Incredible. Incredible.

Corrected: I got my Obamacare shills mixed up and attributed the Trojan Horse line to Gruber. It was actually Hacker.

Also corrected: I blew the timeline on Romney's governorship.

Posted by: Ace at 10:53 AM | Comments (484)
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All pretty funny. First up, "Ylvis," the group that did that "The Fox" song which I don't get at all. I mean, it's meant to be bad and annoying. So how is it funny that it's bad and annoying?

But I like their song about Massachusetts. Stick with it; it gets more ridiculous as it goes. (Including some Light Content Warning stuff.) more...

Posted by: Ace at 09:41 AM | Comments (101)
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@maetenloch (I think) alerted me to this great George Will column on the Left's mythology of the Kennedy assassination. It was published, oddly, last month; but perhaps Will avoided publishing it to coincide with the anniversary of the assassination because the truth would be too painful for the Left -- and his left-leaning editors and syndicators.

“He didn’t even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights. It’s — it had to be some silly little Communist.”

— Jacqueline Kennedy, Nov. 22, 1963

She thought it robbed his death of any meaning. But a meaning would be quickly manufactured to serve a new politics. First, however, an inconvenient fact — Oswald — had to be expunged from the story. So, just 24 months after the assassination, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the Kennedys’ kept historian, published a 1,000-page history of the 1,000-day presidency without mentioning the assassin.

The transformation of a murder by a marginal man into a killing by a sick culture began instantly — before Kennedy was buried. The afternoon of the assassination, Chief Justice Earl Warren ascribed Kennedy’s “martyrdom” to “the hatred and bitterness that has been injected into the life of our nation by bigots.” The next day, James Reston, the New York Times luminary, wrote in a front-page story that JFK was a victim of a “streak of violence in the American character,” especially of “the violence of the extremists on the right.”

Never mind that adjacent to RestonÂ’s article was a Times report on OswaldÂ’s communist convictions and associations.

Three days after the assassination, a Times editorial, “Spiral of Hate,” identified JFK’s killer as a “spirit”: The Times deplored “the shame all America must bear for the spirit of madness and hate that struck down” Kennedy. The editorialists were, presumably, immune to this spirit. The new liberalism-as-paternalism would be about correcting other people’s defects.

...

The moral of liberalismÂ’s explanation of KennedyÂ’s murder is that there is a human instinct to reject the fact that large events can have small, squalid causes; there is an intellectual itch to discern large hidden meanings in events. And political opportunism is perennial.

Do read the whole thing. He writes of liberalism's descent into "punitive liberalism," which is not so much a politics as a religious mode of thought, in as much as modern progressivism is much-bothered by mankind's sins and the various offerings we can make to the Sky Gods to expiate them.

Rush Limbaugh talked about this article last month. The book which both Will and Limbaugh are discussing is 2007's Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism by James Piereson of the Manhattan Institute.

Now I'll talk about crocodiles and sorcerers. This will make sense, I promise.

I read a book a while ago by Carl Jung, called Modern Man In Search of a Soul. Jung had spent some time as an anthropologist in Africa. In the book, he attempted to explain the differences between the mental states of Modern Man and "Archaic Man," that is, Primitive Man. He noted that there was no real difference in actual intelligence. However, their thought processes were quite unalike.
more...

Posted by: Ace at 02:15 PM | Comments (348)
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California is often touted as an ObamaCare success. Nearly 1/3 of registrants/shoppers/people who Googled ObamaCare (or however they are measuring it) came from California about 80,000 in total. Of course this "success" is made up mostly of old and sick, so hop aboard the Death Spiral Express!

Now the state has rejected the illegal and unworkable plan to let 1 million plus Californians keep their policies.

Unlike in other states where the insurance commissioners are making the decisoin on Obama's newest scheme, it's the management of the exchange itself who made the call in California.

But in California, although the state's insurance commissioner, Dave Jones, strongly favored Obama's fix, he said he needed the state's new insurance exchange, Covered California, to release insurers from contractual obligations that they cancel policies that did not comply with the law by year end.

Covered California's board decided on Thursday not to allow people to stay in non-compliant plans beyond the end of the year.

"Covered California has spent a lot of time structuring a marketplace that's best for consumers," the exchange's executive director, Peter Lee, told the board before it voted on Thursday.

On Thursday, Jones called Covered California's decision a "disservice to California's consumers," but said there was nothing more he could do.

Huh, it's almost like they had a financial incentive to force people into their crappy programs to subsidize the old and sick who are signing up in their faux market place.

Oh and if you're keeping score...

Covered California has signed up 80,000 uninsured and forced 1.1 million out of their plans. That means there are 1,020,000 MORE uninsured people in California now than before this whole thing started.

Welcome to Liberal World!

Posted by: DrewM at 09:31 AM | Comments (381)
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Corrected: Thanks to commenters and Andy, I've been informed that I've misread this article badly.

I've been so strongly expecting him to delay the employer mandate (as I mention below) that when I saw an article with the words "mandate" and "delay," I just made up the rest of the sentence in my head.

But re-reading the article more carefully, I see that this move applies to enrollment in the Obamcare exchanges. So it applies to the individual market.

Now, this is still being done for political reasons. Remember, Obama seeks to keep the old policies in effect for one year, after which people will have to seek an Obamacare policy. They will of course start seeking these policies, then, on October 15th.

He's keeping them from seeing the Sticker Shock prices until after the election.

I'm sorry I blew the story so badly. I've anticipated the delay of the employer mandate so hard that I just completely misread this article as vindicating that prediction.

Below a rewrite of the post-- without the major error I made.

...

Democrats complained that enrollment for the employer mandate -- with the Sticker Shock that will accompany it -- was slated to start less than three weeks before the 2014 midterms, on October 15, 2014.

In addition, Obama's one-year grace period for old policies means that people will start seeking new policies October 15, 2014, as well.

Well, not any more.

King Obama is now trial-ballooning -- that he'll delay the enrollment period on the Obama exchanges by exactly one month, from October 15th (before the elections) to November 15th (after them).

On the podcast now posted below, and also in conversation, every time someone said "Well the Democrats are going to face the employer mandate before the election," I just laughed and scoffed. Sure they will.

Sure.

That will be the next shoe to fall, I still think. But for now, here's this dropping shoe-- the individual market enrollment will not start until after the elections. Conveniently enough.

John Eekdahl had a point in the podcast, though: How much does this actually help Obama and the Democrats? The public understands what Obamacare means-- it means skyrocketing prices for their healthcare. Does delaying this -- attempting to keep a secret that's already out -- actually help them?

Maybe it could hurt them-- perhaps the public will imagine the damage to themselves will be even greater than it actually will be.

I don't know.

I do know the media is up to its old Obama-protecting tricks. Watch how Bloomberg claims the move is for policy purposes, which may also have a political benefit:

The Obama administration plans to push back by a month the second-year start of enrollment in its health program to give insurers more time to adjust to growing pains in the U.S. law, a move that may stave off higher premiums before the 2014 congressional elections.

Before I read that, I had been thinking "The media can't possibly spin this as anything other than what it is, a stinking filthy attempt to delay the pain of Obamacare so that Democrats have a chance to cling to power."

But there you go. Bloomberg's opening sentence reports, as a factual matter (not "the Administration claims," but that this is factually so), that the move is made for prudential reasons to permit insurers to "adjust" to "growing pains."

And not for the transparently political and, get this, dishonest reason that obviously is motivating the New Unilateral Executive Law-Making.

A one month delay of a mandate he already delayed by one year. Thirteen months instead of twelve months.

I guess it's just a coincidence that this one-month adjustment moves the pain from before the elections to after them.

Posted by: Ace at 07:14 AM | Comments (418)
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Bumped! While we work on other posts.

Programming Note: Given the holiday next week, we thought we'd mix the podcast format up a bit and answer reader questions instead of booking a guest, talking about the latest Obamacare clusterf***, etc.

This is where you come in.

If you have any thoughts/questions/comments/advice/requests related to the blog, send them to me at andy+asktheblog AT aoshq DOT com.

Send all other comments, hate mail, etc. to Gabe and/or Drew who apparently came up with this cockamamie idea.

Scott Lincicome, attorney, writer at The Federalist, Cato Institute fellow, etc., etc., joins Ace, Gabe, Drew and John to discuss Obamacare and GOP alternatives and the Census Bureau's unemployment data SNAFU. They move on discuss free market-oriented tax reforms based on Scott's piece on the child tax credit that we covered at the HQ and finish up with some quick hits on a range of topics.

Referenced in this episode:

• Obamacare tradeoffs: Now they tell us Â…


• Sorry, Expanding the Child Tax Credit is Not the Perfect Conservative Tax Reform™


• Obamacare Shows How Americans Are Becoming Jerks

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

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

Open thread in the comments.

Posted by: andy at 08:30 AM | Comments (272)
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