Oh, yes.

Worse and worse and worse.

Thomas Dougall has a warning for Obamacare website users: Your "information may not be secure."

Dougall, a South Carolina attorney whose personal information was misdirected by the Obamacare website to a stranger in another state, says "I just want my personal information removed from what is an unsecured system." His adult daughter also wants her information removed from the Obamacare site but, so far, no one from HHS has answered their requests for help.

The entire saga began over the weekend when the Heritage Foundation reported that Justin Hadley, a North Carolina man, had logged in to his Healthcare.gov account and discovered personal information for two other people, one of them was named Thomas Dougall. Local news station News 48 interviewed Dougall Saturday.

"We're told constantly that it's a secure system and it's not, obviously," Dougall told 48 News. He added, "they have no procedure whatsoever to handle security breaches." News 48 contacted HHS for comment but only got an email asking for further information.

Sexton interviewed the man, but I'll direct you to the post to read his update as to whether or not Team Obama has reacted with vigor and seriousness to this serious violation of this man's privacy. (Spoiler alert: It's not good.)

The glitches just keep on comin'.

See John's Post Below. We had a miscommunication and I wound up stomping him.

Posted by: Ace at 10:07 AM | Comments (296)
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Do watch the report from Jonathan Karl below. Or click GretaWire for an excerpt from the print article.

Calling up 1-800-FUCKYO does not help the person seeking insurance -- those on the other end of the phone line still have to complete the application via the website, which doesn't work. All that calling people does, according to memos written by people inside the Administration, is "buy time" by giving people the sense -- the false sense -- that things are moving forward.

So Obama's claim that this was an easy-peasy way around Heathcare.gov was, get this, a gigantic lie. Hm, there seems to be a pattern.

Also make sure you watch the end of this report: When Jonathan Karl asked White House officials about this, they began spinning him that Obama didn't say people could enroll via the phone, only that they could submit applications via the phone.

Another case of Obama "misspeaking," or, perhaps, making broad statements that may be contradicted by individual experience.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 09:02 AM | Comments (282)
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David Gregory grills Mitt Romney over Obamacare's failures, suggesting he's the real author of all the problems.

Unbelievable.

And it's not just super-prog David Gregory. It's also super-proggy Candy Crowely, who asks Kelly Ayotte, unbelievably, this howler:

CROWLEY: I want to play for you something the president said Wednesday in Boston about the opposition to his Affordable Care Act.

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Unfortunately, there are others that are so locked into the politics of this thing that they wonÂ’t lift a finger to help their own people because if they put as much energy into making this law work as they do in attacking the law, Americans would be better off.

CROWLEY: Now, he is saying in a sort of nuance way what other Democrats are saying right out there which is that you- all would rather defeat the president and Obamacare than help your constituents. Have you helped your constituents who called to your office looking for help? And do you think republicans are vulnerable on this that they have tried so hard and so many times to derail it, but now the criticism looks like nothing but politics?

Are they vulnerable for having told the truth about Obamacare and having been proven right in all their predictions? Because they didn't try hard enough to "help make work" what they estimated to be a disaster, which in fact turned out to be the biggest political disaster that veteran newsmen and politicos have ever seen?

When you pass something on a party line vote, you own it. That's why, historically, major pieces of legislation have been done on a bipartisan basis. Both parties want cover -- the moving party wants cover should the endeavor fail, the responding party wants a piece of it in case it proves to be popular.

But not so with Obamacare. Republicans objected, and Democrats employed every bit of chicanery in the book to pass Obamacare by the slenderest of possible margins. In the House, if you remember, at-risk Democrats begged Pelosi for the right to vote against it -- and Pelosi chose her favorites, those Democrats she'd permit to vote against it, and thus hold their seats, and those who would be required to vote for it, and thus likely lose their seats. They arranged the vote so that the fewest number of Democrats necessary would wind up voting for it.

So now the Democrats own this massive catastrophe, outright. There is no cover. There are no Republican votes with them, not even the Maine Twins. Not even John McCain and Lindsay Graham.

And the media would have loved to have granted the Democrats all the credit if it had proved popular.

But it's not turning out that way. Not at all.

So the media, and the Democratic Party itself (but, as always, I repeat myself), are now determined to make the Republican own a piece of a massive failure of a law they all voted against, and have vigorously warned the public against.

Republicans are now forewarned: It will be common media SOP to suggest that somehow, by some weird misuse of faulty logic, the GOP is actually on the hook for the very policy they've warned people about for four years.

They should all prepare snarky, aggressive answers for these inevitable questions. Maybe something like, "No, Candy. You see, unlike you, I actually bothered to read Obamacare and understood that it contained little but pain for America's struggling middle class. That's why I voted against it, and have tried to repeal it for four years, over your strenuous, ignorant objections."

Well, okay, that last part is too edgy.

But everyone really needs to go Loaded for F***in' Bear for this question. Embarrass them for their ignorant cheerleading. Punish them for lying to the American public. Expose them as ignorant, lazy gabbers who have a lot of opinion and almost no information or expertise to back it up.

Posted by: Ace at 12:14 PM | Comments (331)
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Before or after reading this, you might want to review Niall Fergusson's three-part take-down on Paul Krugman -- or, as he calls himself, "Krugtron the Invincible," the latter styling he gave to himself to honor his self-claimed track record of having been wrong only twice in his entire career.

Krugman reserves a special contempt for people who, in his words, "take a position and refuse to alter that position no matter how strongly the evidence refutes it, who continue to insist that they have The Truth despite being wrong again and again." He calls this "derping." The awkward thing for Krugman is that "being wrong again and again" perfectly characterizes his own commentary...

Yes, well. There's a reason for that: He's a narcissistic idiot.

So now let's look back at Krugman talking up "The Wonk Gap," the imagined gulf between progressive and conservative levels of competence.

Erm, he meant that progressives were much more competent and expert at policy matters and predictions about their likely impact.

The Wonk Gap

By PAUL KRUGMAN

On Saturday, Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming delivered the weekly Republican address. He ignored Syria, presumably because his party is deeply conflicted on the issue. (For the record, so am I.) Instead, he demanded repeal of the Affordable Care Act. “The health care law,” he declared, “has proven to be unpopular, unworkable and unaffordable,” and he predicted “sticker shock” in the months ahead.

What an idiot, huh?

So, another week, another denunciation of Obamacare. Who cares? But Mr. BarrassoÂ’s remarks were actually interesting, although not in the way he intended. You see, all the recent news on health costs has been good. So Mr. Barrasso is predicting sticker shock precisely when serious fears of such a shock are fading fast. Why would he do that?

Well, one likely answer is that he hasnÂ’t heard any of the good news. Think about it: Who would tell him?

My guess, in other words, was that Mr. Barrasso was inadvertently illustrating the widening “wonk gap” — the G.O.P.’s near-complete lack of expertise on anything substantive. Health care is the most prominent example, but the dumbing down extends across the spectrum, from budget issues to national security to poll analysis. Remember, Mitt Romney and much of his party went into Election Day expecting victory.

About health reform: Mr. Barrasso was wrong about everything, even the “unpopular” bit, as I’ll explain in a minute. Mainly, however, he was completely missing the story on affordability.

For the truth is that the good news on costs just keeps coming in. There has been a striking slowdown in overall health costs since the Affordable Care Act was enacted, with many experts giving the law at least partial credit. And we now have a good idea what insurance premiums will be once the law goes fully into effect; a comprehensive survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation finds that on average premiums will be significantly lower than those predicted by the Congressional Budget Office when the law was passed.

Um, it was like 16% lower, and that was a reduction from the previously predicted very big premium increases. That is, they lowered their prediction as to how much higher premiums would climb under Obamacare. They were not, as Krugman dishonestly (or perhaps incompetently) implies, predicting a lowering from their pre-Obamacare levels. They changed their prediction as to how much of a sticker shock the public would experience, not that there would be no sticker shock at all.

But do Republican politicians know any of this? Not if they’re listening to conservative “experts,” who have been offering a steady stream of misinformation. All those claims about sticker shock, for example, come from obviously misleading comparisons.

...

Modern conservatism has become a sort of cult, very much given to conspiracy theorizing when confronted with inconvenient facts.

Really? That's odd, because I was just told by a progressive writer named Todd S. Purdum that all of Obamacare's woes were due to a conspiracy of conservative saboteurs.

But I'm sure Krugtron the Invicible will be telling us shortly that that conspiracy-theory-created-to-dismiss-inconvenient-facts is actually a real conspiracy.

It’s all kind of funny, in a way. Unfortunately, however, this runaway cult controls the House, which gives it immense destructive power — the power, for example, to wreak havoc on the economy by refusing to raise the debt ceiling. And it’s disturbing to realize that this power rests in the hands of men who, thanks to the wonk gap, quite literally have no idea what they’re doing.

Yes. And speaking of arrogant juvenile ego-monsters who have no idea what they're doing, 33 days post-launch, Healthcare.gov still doesn't work, and neither do most of the state exchanges.

Let me introduce my own conspiracy theory-- I think that on a day when, as Gabe reports, virtually all outlets are reporting on Sticker Shock, the New York Times instead chooses to "go a different way"...

...it could just be that the New York Times is seeking to spare its alleged "Economics Star Columnist" further humiliation over another huge error.

Furthermore, let me suggest that what Krugtron the Invincible claims the GOP is doing -- cocooning itself so that it doesn't have to confront inconvenient facts -- is the New York Times' key mission today.

In fact, it's the NYT's key mission every day. But check out that huge above-the-fold "Good News About Obamacare, Yay!" headline, and we can at the very least say the NYT is insulating its readers from discomfiting facts at least for today.

Via JammieWF.

Posted by: Ace at 07:21 AM | Comments (230)
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Also from this upcoming book called Double Down.

Before getting to the key quote, let me once again quote Valerie Jarret in 2010, talking about the Extraordinary Intellect of Barack Obama. This will tie in in a minute, swearsies. From John Fund's piece on the high court flatterer of Obama's Camelot.

“I think Barack knew that he had God-given talents that were extraordinary. He knows exactly how smart he is. . . . He knows how perceptive he is. He knows what a good reader of people he is. And he knows that he has the ability — the extraordinary, uncanny ability — to take a thousand different perspectives, digest them and make sense out of them, and I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually. . . . So what I sensed in him was not just a restless spirit but somebody with such extraordinary talents that had to be really taxed in order for him to be happy. . . . He’s been bored to death his whole life. He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do.”

Did Jarrett get that last idea -- that when Obama fails, it's just because he's too talented to do what other people do -- from Barack Obama himself, or did Barack Obama get that defense from Valerie Jarrett?

I don't know. But reading Obama's assessment of his talents with regard to his poor debate performances, it does seem as if he is using that ego-protecting excuse: I'm too smart to do this.

After President Barack Obama’s mediocre first debate performance against Mitt Romney in 2012, he reportedly told advisors, “I just don’t know if I can do this,” when they urged him to turn around his re-election campaign.

In “Double Down,” journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann say that Obama followed up his presidential debate by conducting a “dismal” mock debate with then-Sen. John Kerry.

“If we don’t fix this, we could lose the whole f---ing election,” Obama advisor David Plouffe reportedly said following the mock debate.

Obama’s advisors attempted to shift his tone and approach in advance of the second presidential debate, leading Obama to respond, “I can’t tell you that ‘Okay, I woke up today, I knew I needed to do better, and I’ll do better.’ I am wired in a different way than this event requires. … I just don’t know if I can do this.”

He's too talented to do what ordinary people do, you know.

But I hear he's really good at killing people. He told me so himself.

Incidentally, "too smart for the job" is precisely the explanation that Morning Joe's Chirpy Parrot Mika suggested as the explanation.

The author of Double Down suggested that this was likely Obama's preferred explanation.

Posted by: Ace at 11:16 AM | Comments (366)
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At Twitchy, via Business Insider, the upcoming book Double Down (from the writers of Game Change) reveal that Obama bragged about his drone strike Kill Lists, saying he was "really good at killing people."

This reveals a lot about Barack Obama.

First of all, it reveals his fundamental moral unseriousness. I don't remember George W. Bush bragging about how many people he'd killed. He treated matters of life and death with the level of emotional maturity of which they are deserving, not as a baskets made in a game of Horse.

Second of all, it reveals his toxic level of narcissism. Obama is hardly the one doing these things. A lot of men and women are putting together intelligence and designing attack strategies and presenting them to Obama for him to check a box "yes" or check a box "no." And that's the extent of his engagement.

For this he smothers himself in self-flattery?

Let's recount this preference of Obama's for superficial, box-checking "leadership."

Contrarian liberal blogger Mickey Kaus sums it up: "The president's decision-making method -- at least as described in this piece -- seems to consist of mainly checking boxes on memos his aides have written for him."

A $60 billion cut in the stimulus package? "OK." Use the reconciliation process to pass the health care bill? A checkmark in the box labeled "yes."

Include medical malpractice reform in the health care bill? The man who as an Illinois legislator often voted "present" writes, "We should explore it."

Obama's narcissism spares him from self-criticism. And self-criticism is critical to achievement. Perhaps if Obama were more self-critical about his alleged awesomeness at killing people, he wouldn't be signing on to dubious tactics like these:

Under Obama U.S. drone operators began practicing “signature strikes,” a tactic in which targets are chosen based on patterns of suspicious behavior and the identities of those to be killed aren't necessarily known. (The administration counts all “military-age males” in a strike zone as combatants.)

Furthermore, the disturbing trend of the “double tap” — bombing the same place in quick succession and often hitting first responders — has become common practice.

Obama may be good at killing people, but it's unclear to me how good he is at killing terrorists, which is, I should hope, the actual goal here.*

* Business Insider is a lefty webzine. Honestly, I have never heard of the "double tap" technique before, and I should have been cautious about echoing Business Insider in claiming the veracity of the claims made here.

The part about not knowing precisely whom they were bombing is, I think, more or less accepted as true, and has been reported by others. As is the part about calling all military-aged males in the bomb radius terrorists.

Posted by: Ace at 08:15 AM | Comments (314)
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The other half haven't provided data yet.

Democratic Representative Steve Cohen tells everyone who's been lied to to "Get over it." He also adds that Heathcare.gov isn't like ordering a "Tickle Me Elmo" doll from Amazon.com -- which is strange, because President Obama promised the website would be just like ordering a TV off Amazon.com.

Of course everyone getting his insurance cancelled is now facing much higher rates.

The Griffins are among millions of people nationwide who buy individual insurance policies and are receiving notices that those policies are being discontinued because they don't meet the higher benefit requirements of the new law.

They can buy different policies directly from insurers for 2014 or sign up for plans on state insurance exchanges. While lower-income people could see lower costs because of government subsidies, many in the middle class may get rude awakenings when they access the websites and realize they'll have to pay significantly more.

Yeah, this part about "because the new policies don't meet the higher benefit requirements" is flat-out untrue, and the media keeps repeating Obama's spin. In most cases, people are being offered less generous insurance at higher rates -- because the main increase in cost (and raising of deductibles) comes from a forced subsidy to the uninsurable, not from an increase in benefits.

It's scandalous that the AP and other outlets can keep claiming this even as their own reportage in the same article contradicts it. For example, just before claiming this guy was getting his policy cancelled because it wasn't good enough, AP actually revealed his old policy was strictly better:

The Griffins, who live near Philadelphia on the Delaware border, pay $770 monthly for their soon-to-be-terminated health care plan with a $2,500 deductible. The cheapest plan they found on their state insurance exchange was a so-called bronze plan charging a $1,275 monthly premium with deductibles totaling $12,700. It covers only providers in Pennsylvania, so the couple wouldn't be able to see the doctors in Delaware whom they've used for more than a decade.

So let's check:

Old premium: $770/month. New premium: $1,275/month. Old is better.

Old deductible: $2500 -- a pretty darned low deductible. Ne deductible: $12,700 -- a pretty high deductible. This is basically catastrophic coverage at very high comprehensive coverage rates.

Old network of doctors: The client had his pick of all the doctors he wanted. New network of doctors: He doesn't have his pick of the doctors he wants.

How can the media continue claiming, again and again, that the new insurance is "better," just because it offers maternity care and substance abuse counseling to 65 year olds?

When are we going to see some pushback against this ludicrous water-carrying by the media on Obama's behalf? I want to see advertisements all over the airwaves directly contradicting this risible claim, comparing Old vs. New, just as I did above.

It's not just that "If you like your policy, you can keep your policy" that was a complete lie. Also a gigantic lie: "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor."

You Also Can't Keep Your Doctor

I had great cancer doctors and health insurance. My plan was cancelled. Now I worry how long I'll live.

By EDIE LITTLEFIELD SUNDBY

Everyone now is clamoring about Affordable Care Act winners and losers. I am one of the losers.

My grievance is not political; all my energies are directed to enjoying life and staying alive, and I have no time for politics. For almost seven years I have fought and survived stage-4 gallbladder cancer, with a five-year survival rate of less than 2% after diagnosis. I am a determined fighter and extremely lucky. But this luck may have just run out: My affordable, lifesaving medical insurance policy has been canceled effective Dec. 31.

My choice is to get coverage through the government health exchange and lose access to my cancer doctors, or pay much more for insurance outside the exchange (the quotes average 40% to 50% more) for the privilege of starting over with an unfamiliar insurance company and impaired benefits.

A patient whose doctors helped her to beat the odds and survive a cancer that is 98% fatal is a patient who'd really like to keep her doctors.

But she can't. As Obama might say: "It's. The. Law."

It's the law that she will be forced to find inferior doctors who might wind up killing her. It's all for the good, you know. Omelet, eggs.

I know that it makes little sense for the RNC and conservative outlets to run a major advertising campaign so far out from the 2014 elections, however: The media is lying right now. They cannot be permitted to set this narrative that people are paying more "but for better insurance." If we do not push back vigorously, the great majority of those who are not directly affected (and those who do not know better by their own personal experience) will believe this lie.

We have to push back on this, with commercials featuring Edie Littlefield Sundby and other victims of Obmacare. If the media is not forced to confess its new Obama-protecting lies, it will of course choose not to.

Money spent now will bear fruit down the road.

While the media continues to lie about the reasons for the skyrocketing premiums and reduced benefits, they are at least doing stories about it. Except for one "news" outlet. Gabriel Malor writes in an email:

Unreal. The Obamacare story of the day, carried on the WaPo front page and with variations in USAToday, WSJ, LATimes, Bloomberg, and also covered by Reuters and AP (which means a lot of local papers), is Obamacare sticker shock.

The only paper to buck this trend is the NYTimes, which ran a front-page above-the-fold article on "free policies" in the ACA.

"Free policies." As they kept saying: If you think it's expensive now, wait until it's free.

Of course, the New York Times embarrassed itself again by opining thus on Obama's gigantic, cynical campaign of serial falsehoods: "He misspoke."

And what's coming next? Every socialist initiative requires even more socialism to "make it work." That's the iron rule of socialism -- every theft of liberty requires even more theft of liberty to make the corrupt system work.

So a state Virginia Democrat is now floating the next logical step -- if Woebamacare isn't working, perhaps those greedy tonsil-stealing doctors are just charging too damn much money.

So let's force them all to work for the low compensation afforded by Medicare and Medicaid.

Baseball Crank Dan Loughlin looks at the Vermont exchanges "success" story, and finds that it cost $272 for each and every person in the state-- all for a $170 million website that "inevitably" offers an error message when people attempt to access it.

Meanwhile, David Fredoso crunches some numbers and finds that you could have just taken the $1 billion that it cost to set up the 15 semi-working state exchanges and used that money to insure all the people who they've managed to enroll, at least for a couple of years.

Finally, and possibly the most scandalously, Dianne Feinstein offers some egregiously awful apologism for Obama's Big Lie. She now adds this gloss to the "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan, period," promise:

ROTHFLMAO! Democrat Senator Diane Feinstein on Face The Nation: "You could have kept your health plan up until Obamacare was passed." Wow!

Wow, indeed. She says this after a question which begins at 1:20. This answer makes no sense -- she's saying Obama only promised not to retroactively cancel insurance policies before Obamacare passed?

It's pretty plain she does not in fact understand how the law works. Yet another member of the "Elite" who needed to pass (and then implement) the plan in order to find out what's in it.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 06:04 AM | Comments (337)
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• Obama Lied And It Will Cost Some People Their Lives
  
• Don't Worry About The Death Spiral, We'll Simply Bail Out Insurance Companies
  
• Memories Of Futures Past
  
• Texans Coach Gary Kubiak Collapsed On Field At Halftime Last Night
  
• Obamacare Paper Applicants Stuck In Limbo
  
• Axelrod: Only A Small Group Of Americans Losing Their Plans
  
• Puppcide: A Surprising Number Of Dogs Are Shot By Cops
  
• Well, We're All Good At Something I Guess
  
• The Humanitarian Shortcomings Of The ACA
  
• Senate Dems Supported Obamacare Rule Leading To Cancelled Insurance
  
• News Coverage Montage Of Reactions To Obama's Big Lie
  
• Healthcare.gov User Presented With Stragner's Eligibility Letter
  
• Two Of Our Biggest Asian Allies Hate Each Other
  
• VA Dem Calls For Forcing Doctors To Accept Medicare And Medicaid Patients
  
• Toronto's Alleged Crack Smoking Mayor Won't Resign
  
• The Dutch Rethink The Welfare States
  
• Can The GOP Capitalize On This And Win New Voters?
  
• Germany Finds 1,500 Masterpieces Looted By The NAZIs
  
• VDH: Obamacare And Human Nature
  
• Obamacare Sticker Shock Sets In
  
• Sweet Video Of An Electric Fireball
  
• Expidited Bidding Led To Website That Was Doomed From The Start
  

Follow me on twitter.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:00 AM | Comments (234)
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Happy Monday.

ICYMI, WaPo had a piece on how the White House let politics destroy its Obamacare rollout.

The President will be spending some time this week campaigning for Obamacare. No, the website's not fixed yet. He's got one answer for everything -- a speech -- and, by Golly, if that's all he can do then that's all he'll do.

National Journal's Ron Founier doesn't think Obama has learned anything from the failed Obamacare rollout and expects more "insularity, incompetence, and deception" as things get worse.

Megan McArdle picks apart the latest Democratic lie that people who get their insurance through their employers are unaffected by the Obamacare disaster.

[ RSS]

[iTunes]

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:46 AM | Comments (284)
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Take The Geek Test

I could recognize 12 of the 16 symbols which I guess puts me in the geeky but not shamefully geeky category.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:32 PM | Comments (361)
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