Mark Hemingway, senior writer at The Weekly Standard, and his better half Mollie, senior editor at The Federalist, join Ace, Gabe, Drew and John to discuss Obamacare developments, the New York Times' cheerleading for the president and his signature disast ... errr, program, and the latest polling results on the same.

Referenced in this episode:

• Charles C. W. Cooke - Failure of Failures: Could Obamacare end up as AmericaÂ’s worst domestic-policy disaster ever?


• New York Times - Obama in Bind Trying to Keep Health Law Vow


• Washington Post- Barack Obama for President

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Open thread in the comments.

Posted by: andy at 12:43 PM | Comments (7)
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Why not? Make Red State Democrats vote against the proposition that their own citizens should have the right to exit themselves from this disastrous law.

A bill along these lines could be made harder to vote against, by specifying that only some of Obamacare can be opted out of, the most unpopular parts of it. Thus, Democrats would be on record as voting against a state opt-out, for example, of the forced cancellations, and the taxes on large plans, the conscience-violating birth control/abortion mandate, etc.

Don't include the insured-up-to-26 stuff. Get rid of the bulk of it, and the rest will sink on its own.

I had this idea on a compromise between Upton and Landrieu, as regards the provision that new customers may buy in.

How about that each insurer has a cap of how many new customers they can enroll under the old plans, limited to (let's say) the number of previous policy holders. Thus, an insurer would have to offer the plans to its old customers, and an equal number of new customers seeking the same plan.

Thus, a lottery is basically created. More people will want to sign up for the old plans than the companies will be willing to offer.

You might say, "A lottery? That's terrible. People hate lotteries. People hate having it left up to random chance whether they'll be permitted to buy a better policy, or forced by Obamacare to buy a worse one."

That's the point. I want the spectacle of people trying to buy a better policy, but being told by their government they can't, because they didn't win the lucky lottery number permitting them to. (Or, of course: because they didn't have the connections to get a rigged lottery number.)

There's a tactic in communist agitation, and Alinksyite agitation: Put pressure on their internal contradictions until they break apart. Pressure them on their lie -- their original lie, that people with insurance would not be harmed in order to provide insurance to others -- until they are forced to confess it and affirmatively embrace it.

Make them admit: "You're goddamned right we ordered the Code Red on current policyholders."

We have to get into that mindset of political guerrilla warfare. Many people favor the straight-up massed-forces frontal assault. I understand that preference. I suppose it seems more manly and heroic.

And honest.

But I don't understand the dismissal of sneakier Alinskyite commando strikes. If the main battle cannot be won, why not begin fighting smaller battles?

And even if the main battle cannot be won, there is still no reason not to start smaller fights, both at the main battle line and deep behind it.

Don't let the vote against something on the pretext that they're doing so just to help the sick and poor. Make them specifically vote to tax the middle class.

The left is very good at designing these trap-votes, where they claim to just be proposing something common-sensical but have broader implications than they'd ever confess. The GOP has to start forcing the Democrats to vote themselves either into or out of these traps.

Posted by: Ace at 08:53 AM | Comments (203)
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The House is debating the Upton bill. It will pass; the only question is how much Democratic support it will have. Upton himself told Greta Van Sustern that he hasn't whipped this, so he doesn't know how many votes they'll have. But he guessed that even after Obama's fake administrative fix, the bill might get 50 Democratic votes.

I previously predicted that Democrats would resort to arguing against changes to Obamacare by claiming the changes constituted "socialism," whereas the Democratic mandates represented "free markets.' The idiot of Northern Virginia, Jim Moran, Washington, Jim McDermott, just made that exact case, misrepresenting the Upton bill as mandating that insurance companies sell policies.

He got confused. That's the Landrieu bill. Or, more likely, he was simply, get this, lying as usual.

These seem to be the differences between Upton and Landrieu:

Upton provides only for a year-long ability to buy your old policy. Landrieu's bill says the policy must be offered until there are no longer any subscribers to the policy. Advantage: Landrieu

Landrieu's bill applies only to people who actually had the policy before October 1st. Upton is much more expansive: Upton says that if the policy is being offered to anyone, then new customers may buy into that policy as well. Landrieu thus seeks to limit the pool of people who can self-exempt from Obamacare, whereas Upton seeks to expand it. Advantage: Upton

Upton's bill says that insurance companies may offer the old plans. Landrieu says they must.

Many conservatives don't like that last part, because it's a "new mandate." Fine, but insurance companies have been mandated to do things for 50 years, and Obamacare imposes a slew of new mandates. One more mandate won't hurt -- and further, this mandate is necessary to undo the harm that Obama is imposed.

Let's face it, insurance companies are in bed with Obama (but getting uncomfortable with being used by him). They have no more interest in exempting people from Obamacare than Obama himself does. To get them to actually offer these policies will in fact take a mandate -- otherwise, they'll be content to dump everyone in the exchanges.

The insurance companies went along with every other mandate. I will not cry if they get hit with a new one. They were fine with mandates so long as citizens were being mandated themselves, to buy their product; they have, as a group, announced their openness to mandates.

So, impose the mandate on them. They surrendered their right to complain on this point. They're not victims, they're volunteers.

Advantage: Landrieu

My call: Go with Landrieu... but, if possible, add in Upton's provision that any other similar customer who qualifies for a plan that's being offered can also buy it.

The "drawback" of this is that it destroys Obamacare. It undermines the system. Yes, fine: This is what is needed. A decision must be made, and that decision must be forced.

Even if we have to make things so bad that insurance companies bring suit against the government, or begin dropping out of the individual market entirely.

The insurance companies are currently afraid of Obama, and are still playing footsie with him. The only way to overcome the Chicago Mob's coercion of insurance companies is, frankly, to coerce them from the other direction.

We may not be able to repeal Obamacare in one swoop, but we can repeal it piece-by-piece, exempting this class of the population, then this one, then the next one, until no one at all is in Obamacare except the uninsurable.

At that point, the American people can decide whether or not it wants to accept huge new spending levels to insure the uninsurable, or not. But at least the public will have an honest accounting of the actual costs, as opposed to Obamacare's current scheme, in which Obama imposes hidden taxes on specific citizens to pay for his boondoggle.

Obama, as you probably know, has threatened to veto any bill that forces him to keep his promise:

We must make him do that.

And we must make Democrats vote to override his veto.

Corrected: It was Jim McDermott who made the "Republicans love socialism, and Obamacare is 'free market' capitalism" argument, not Jim Moran. I have trouble telling these two crusty communists apart.

Posted by: Ace at 07:48 AM | Comments (328)
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Interesting post from Megan McArdle.

Early in the post, she discusses Obama's metric for counting "enrollees."

. There has been a sort of Talmudic debate over the meaning of the word “enroll” -- should we count folks who had chosen a plan and asked to be invoiced, or should we count only those who paid? Some of the people who enroll will not actually end up paying their premium. However, because premiums for January plans aren’t due until December, counting only those who have already mailed in their check or money order will substantially undercount those who will end up enrolling. Myself, I leaned toward counting those who have enrolled in a plan and requested an invoice for payment. But there were decent arguments on both sides.

The Barack Obama administration resolved this debate by choosing a third metric: They counted everyone who had put a policy in their online shopping cart, even if they hadnÂ’t actually gone ahead and signed up. By this logic, I am the proud owner of 28 items in my Amazon.com cart, including a hot pink laptop case and a fridge mount for an iPad model I donÂ’t even own.

But the most important part is this:

The administration is not changing the rules, just declining to enforce them against the insurers. This is becoming a pattern: ObamaÂ’s position on the law seems to be that itÂ’s his law, and therefore the law is whatever he and his appointees say it is. ThatÂ’s dangerous for all sorts of reasons, not least because it makes them vulnerable to court action.

Presumably they will also not enforce the mandate against people who have grandfathered plans. But that raises an interesting legal issue. Remember that in 2012, the Supreme Court ruled that the mandate was a tax. And as a lawyer of my acquaintance points out, taxes have to be enforced uniformly; the Internal Revenue Service can pick and choose who it audits, but it cannot pick and choose who has to obey the law. If it declines to enforce the mandate against grandfathered consumers, it's conceivably opening itself up to a bunch of legal challenges.

There is an old saying that Supreme Court justices are not in fact apolitical actors at all, but are, of course, intensely political people sensitive to the same sorts of things as any other politician, such as politicians: "The Supreme Court reads the election returns too."

It is well known that Chief Justice Roberts reversed his legal opinion on Obamacare, that it was unconstitutional, to offer a political opinion, that it was a tax and thus constitutional, in order to save the law. And he did this for political considerations, to preserve the public's good-will towards the Court and maintain its image of nonpartisanship.

Now, he did so even when Obamacare was already unpopular. But Historic President and all that.

But note, now, how much the political situation has changed. And consider how much he might like to have a second shot at this opinion.

And Obama has given him a pretext to write a new opinion. The Court would never simply reverse itself in a year.

But if the facts have sufficiently changed, and if Obama is interpreting his "tax" in a lawless way, claiming it only applies to groups which aren't becoming a political headache.... That gives Roberts the cover to say not "I was wrong" (which he won't say) but "I was right, and as I said previously this is a tax, and taxes must be levied even-handedly, and therefore this law must be struck for failure of the executive to apply it equally to all citizens."

It's no slam-dunk, I know. And the usual judicial response to a failure to enforce a law even-handedly is to demand the executive enforce it even-handedly, not to strike down the law altogether.

But might as well take the shot and see what happens.

Posted by: Ace at 07:03 AM | Comments (249)
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• Obama Vows To Veto A "Keep Your Plan" Bill
  
• Quanitative Easing Enriched Banks At The Expense Of Households
  
• Why Liberals Are Panicked About Obamacare
  
• The Obamacare Administrative Fix Is A Scam
  
• If You Like Your Death Spiral, You Can Keep Your Death Spiral
  
• It Appears Everyone But Obama Knew The Website Would Fail
  
• We Should Tuck This Video Away For The 2016 Campaign
  
• These People Are Insane, Absolutely Insane
  
• Lockheed Martin Cuts 4,000 Jobs
  
• The Long War In Africa
  
• Obama Vs. The Generals
  
• A Plasma TV In Every Pot
  
• Americans Trimming Their Holiday Budget
  
• Feel Good Story Of The Day
  
• Don't Open A Plane Door While It's Flying
  
• How Evolution Determines The Flavor Of Beer And Whisky
  
• Al-Qaeda Sorry For Beheading The Wrong Person
  
• Leno Pokes Fun At Obamacare Presser
  
• If Federalism Can't Keep Us Safe, What Can?
  
• Great News! Sherlock Season 3 Premieres January 19th
  

Follow me on twitter.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:30 AM | Comments (308)
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Happy Friday.

So far, state insurance commissioners in Washington state, D.C., Arkansas, and Vermont -- all of them Democrats -- have rejected Obama's "fix" to Obamacare that guts the exchanges.

Obama has summoned the CEOs of several insurance companies to the White House for a meeting today, presumably on the Obamacare "fix." Apparently, checking with the insurance companies before enlisting them in a scheme with major practical and legal consequences didn't occur to the White House.

"'I don’t know how he f—-ed this up so badly,' said one House Democrat who has been very supportive of Obama in the past."

Last night Obama threatened to veto the "Keep Your Health Plan Act" a/k/a the Upton bill that the House is going to vote on today. The bill guts the Obamacare exchanges by allowing people whose policies would be cancelled because of Obamacare and people who never even had insurance to buy insurance on the individual market that doesn't meet Obamacare's expensive minimum requirements. What a trap.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:48 AM | Comments (431)
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These "isolated incidents" are getting to be like cockroaches.

...“Critics said the first video was an isolated incident so we decided to visit with even more navigators funded by American tax dollars,” said James O’Keefe, President of Project Veritas. “What we found was disturbing and showed a clear pattern of fraud inside the Obamacare navigator program.”

“But then the investigation took a turn we couldn’t foresee. Not only were our investigators encouraged to defraud the health care system of earned income, we learned that many additional agencies will have access to private health care records after submitting application...

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 10:26 PM | Comments (57)
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Hey I could get used to this new lifestyle. Sucks for the non-Platinum readers though.

Oh Noes: KRUGTRON, the Invincible Discovers Suburban Sprawl

Krugman comes close to suggesting that if suburban sprawl around Detroit had been prevented, Detroit would be fine today.  He deplores Atlanta, precisely because it has allowed suburban growth.  He endorses "smart growth" policies, "which try to promote compact centers with access to public transit."  In other words, Krugman joins other liberals in wanting to use the force of the law to compel people to live in modes contrary to their revealed preferences (as most other economists would say).  The irony is lost on Krugman that in order to promote social mobility, he wishes to use the power of government to prevent physical mobility-the right and ability of people to exit predatory, dysfunctional urban governments like Detroit.

It's a mystery to me why people like Krugman can still claim to be called "liberal."  There is nothing liberal at all about them.

Meanwhile Obama and HUD Have Vays of Making You Live Correctly

And getting you out of your reactionary suburbs.

The new HUD rule is really about changing the way Americans live. It is part of a broader suite of initiatives designed to block suburban development, press Americans into hyper-dense cities, and force us out of our cars. Government-mandated ethnic and racial diversification plays a role in this scheme, yet the broader goal is forced "economic integration." The ultimate vision is to make all neighborhoods more or less alike, turning traditional cities into ultra-dense Manhattans, while making suburbs look more like cities do now. In this centrally-planned utopia, steadily increasing numbers will live cheek-by-jowl in "stack and pack" high-rises close to public transportation, while automobiles fall into relative disuse.

...Recalcitrant suburbs can also be brought to heel by lawsuits claiming violations of federal fair housing law. California's SB375 facilitates such suits by placing the burden of proof on local jurisdictions accused of housing discrimination. Such legal claims are often brought by leftist community organizations of the type currently funded through the Obama administration's grant.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:48 PM | Comments (582)
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Over the last 24 hours, Comet ISON experienced an "outburst" event that places it well within range of the naked eye for rural observers and within binocular range for residents of even the brightest cities. We've been waiting all year, and it seems it has finally decided to "wake up". From NASA's Comet ISON Observing Campaign:

It could be that the comet is now simply finally “turning on”. After all, it is now only 0.66AU (61,000,000mi, 99,000,000km) from the sun, and if it is to reach the [brightness] at perihelion we’ve always thought it would, then it needs to start brightening by an order or two magnitudes within the next week. So this could be really great news, and indicate that we are indeed going to have a nice bright comet in our solar spacecraft images in a couple of weeks time!

Posted by: CAC at 04:29 PM | Comments (86)
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Good read over at Politico Magazine, which just launched, in a peel back the curtain sort of way about how Obama has handled his cabinet. It's not pretty. They're calling it the worst job in Obama's Washington.

I got a kick out of this story:

In April 2009, Chu joined Obama’s entourage for one of the administration’s first overseas trips, to Trinidad and Tobago for a Summit of the Americas focused on economic development. Chu was not scheduled to address the media, but reporters kept bugging Josh Earnest, a young staffer, who sheepishly approached his boss, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, with the ask. “No way,” Gibbs told him.

“Come on,” Earnest said. “The guy came all the way down here. Why don’t we just have him talk about all the stuff he’s doing?”

Gibbs reluctantly assented. Then Chu took the podium to tell the tiny island nation that it might soon, sorry to say, be underwater—which not only insulted the good people of Trinidad and Tobago but also raised the climate issue at a time when the White House wanted the economy, and the economy only, on the front burner. “I think the Caribbean countries face rising oceans, and they face increase in the severity of hurricanes,” Chu said. “This is something that is very, very scary to all of us. … The island states … some of them will disappear.”

Another interesting thing I've noticed in recent days, is just how freely much of the press is calling Obama on his bullshit right in the headlines. They're not burying it in paragraph 15 anymore.

The Hill: Obama's fix: Canceled plans may be offered until after midterms

HuffPo: Obama's Health Care Press Conference Gets Trashed In The Media

USA Today: For Obama, his presidency is at stake

WaPo: For Obama, loss of trust over health-care law poses major problems for his agenda, legacy

Meanwhile, much has been made of the Democrat defection from the White House regarding Obamacare "fixes". But it's not just Obamacare, the president is starting to see his party split with him on Iran too.

A bipartisan group of 63 House lawmakers are calling on the Senate to “act swiftly” in the passage of a new round of Iran sanctions that have been heavily opposed by the White House.

The letter, addressed to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.), maintains that despite ongoing negotiations with the West, “the objective of the Iranian regime remains the same: the pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability,” according to a copy of the letter and list of co-signers obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

...

“As this letter proves, even House Democrats are fed up with the administration’s weak approach on Iran,” the aide said.

Revealed: Obamacare plans will cost MORE 'in many cases' even with government subsidies, officials admit for the first time

The Obama administration has directly conceded for the first time that 'in many cases,' health insurance plans offered through government exchanges are more expensive than plans consumers bought before the Affordable Care Act became law – even when government subsidies are figured in.

In a letter to state insurance commissioners, Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight director Gary Cohen wrote on Thursday that one reason for the new Obamacare measures the president announced Thursday is that millions of consumers receiving cancellation letters from their insurers are learning the Affordable Care Act options are in fact less affordable.

Posted by: JohnE. at 03:25 PM | Comments (315)
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