If you like it, you can keep it.

Posted by: andy at 03:34 AM | Comments (219)
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Kathleen Sebelius hosted a healthcare event in Tennessee. A helpful Republican state senator was there to offer some tech support advice. more...

Posted by: Slublog at 04:45 PM | Comments (291)
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CENTCOM is saying the material removal process is well underway and is on track for year end 2014 completion.

About 40,000 containers and 30,000 vehicles have been shipped back from Afghanistan over the past year, but a strategic transportation planner said the system "has not yet been taxed" to its fullest potential...

...It's feasible to bring back the 80,000 containers and 20,000 vehicles still in Afghanistan by December 2014, said Clifton, who is chief of the Joint Operational Planning and Execution System branch at ARCENT.

...As recently as this spring, there were thousands of containers waiting to be processed at the sort yards in Kandahar and Bagram, Gamble said, but the advent of the joint sorting teams helped eliminate that backlog.

“We hit a tilting point in about July where we were retro sorting and demilitarizing and shipping back to the United States more from our forward locations than we were from [Bagram] and [Kandahar],” he said.

Altogether, the CMRE and joint sorting teams are recovering about 91 percent of the value of the retrograde equipment, the general said.

“So, the high-dollar value items are being retained and shipped back to [the U.S.], where the high-volume, low-dollar items that don't make sense to retain or are just plain excess to requirements are either being redistributed forward or being disposed of forward,” Gamble said...

When people were seriously discussing this material extraction process before it began, it was clear there'd be three ways out. By land through Pakistan to Pakistan ports, to the north overland via the so called "Northern Distribution Network", and by air. All three possible routes are apparently being used.

Air is nominally "expensive", but that nominal cost can be mitigated by not dead heading planes out that were bringing in force protection resupply and such in. Don't forget, even as we pull out and extract material, other material is inbound in support of ongoing operations. So, the cost to extract by air is really only incremental fuel usage if a plane would otherwise be leaving with empty space.

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 02:38 PM | Comments (156)
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Come morons, share with me the cries of despair from an Obama voter. Another satisfied member of the Obama youth. He still gives Obama waaaayyyy too much credit for things that largely happened without much effort from Obama. I'm surprised this dude didn't mention Obama's peace prize as an accomplishment. Still, it is encouraging to see someone actually say that many of the problems occurring now cannot be blamed on the republicans. Baby steps I guess.

As for the recent media scrutiny on 404Care failures, I can only wonder what the MSMs angle is. They never attack democrats unless they have a plan. I doubt they finally realized they are journalists and have a job to do besides hang out on a journolist somewhere and regurgitate democrat talking points. So what is the long con they're trying to pull off? Is this battlespace preparation for something or someone? more...

Posted by: CDR M at 06:06 PM | Comments (782)
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I really don't see this going anywhere -- it never does. It'll be something like he hates the government for firing his ass or something.

But the right is collectively holding its breath anyway, because they know the media has blamed the last 15 shootings, erroneously, on crazed right wingers, so Lord only knows what they'll do when they find a real one.

Posted by: Ace at 12:54 PM | Comments (432)
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While the Republican Party has suffered more in polls than the Democratic Party since the shutdown, the parties aren't up for elections-- specific candidates are.

And the Carville-Greenberg poll finds that while support for all incumbents has declined, it has declined a great deal more for Democratic incumbents. They've lost 11 points of support, moving from +8 to -3 (underwater), while Republicans have declined from +10 to +6, a four point loss.

Mother Jones pointed this out. With the headline, ""New Poll Shows Democratic Incumbents in Big Trouble."

Posted by: Ace at 11:20 AM | Comments (287)
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If you've listened to this week's soon-to-be-award-winning podcast, you heard Ace and the crew rate Mary Katherine Ham's list of euphemisms using, appropriately, gymnastics-style scoring.

Well here's a late entrant ...

I'll take that as a 9.94 from the tough but fair judge MKH. What, you ask, could be at the link in that tweet that Brings It! enough to elicit this near-perfect score? more...

Posted by: andy at 12:06 PM | Comments (257)
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Jonah Goldberg has a column up today about Obama being, well, basically, either dumb or full of overweening hubris or both, because if he were smart, he would have gladly accepted the GOP demand to delay Obamacare, to give him time to sort his Hot Health Care Mess out.

Drew actually began to suspect that Obama would do that, back on September 17:

A couple of things occurred to me after writing this post this morning.

...

My concern has always been that Obama will yield on a one-year delay in order to try and ensure that the roll out isnÂ’t the disaster itÂ’s shaping up to be. HeÂ’ll then spend the next year insisting that Republicans help him fix it, while blaming them for keeping millions of people from getting coverage (or for not having any since so many people are about to be dumped by their employers into exchanges that will be delayed).

Well, that prediction wasn't perfect, because Obama didn't yield. But not even a psychic can foresee that level of arrogance and stupidity.

@johnekdahl also seems to have predicted something like this.

Posted by: Ace at 10:00 AM | Comments (256)
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I want to thank the permanent staff of the site, first of all, for being here year round, and covering for me during odd hours, such as 8am to 1pm in the afternoon. You know, the Witching Hour. Every day, @benk84, @gabrielmalor, @theh2, @drewmtips, @daveintexas, Purple Avenger, @rdbrewer4, and @comradearthur bring it. And every night, @maetenloch and his great overnight team of CDRM, TMI3rd, Krakatoa, and Damn Dirty Rino (who together are essentially running a second blog on the blog) put in a top-notch post.

Oh and @johnekdahl. How did I forget him? He says his name every five minutes on the podcast. And of course the lovely but strange @laurww.

I also want to thank the weekend and specialty team -- OregonMuse with books and The Gang of Gaming Morons (@zakn, @thedude) with games, and @conartcritc for astronomy (and, during elections, really great "Decision Desk" style coverage).

And thanks to the guest bloggers who lightened the load for me and provided some great posts: Errol F, @mflynny (Niedermeyer's Dead Horse), @moxiemom (Y-Not), CharlieBrownsDildo, The Warden and @tsrblike.

I should also thank the Trollbusters, who continue to guard the site, anonymously, like Batman, except with Bannings.

And thanks to all the readers who've stayed with this idiotic moron-site for so long, especially the ones who kept saying "Go on vacation already." Obviously, this would be no fun at all-- and pretty pointless -- without readers, commenters, and commenters posting under fake names. I mean other fake names.

If I've left anyone out, I do apologize.

Posted by: Ace at 10:45 AM | Comments (312)
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Unamimously.

Senate Democrats voted unanimously three years ago to support the Obamacare rule that is largely responsible for some of the health insurance cancellation letters that are going out.

In September 2010, Senate Republicans brought a resolution to the floor to block implementation of the grandfather rule, warning that it would result in canceled policies and violate President Barack ObamaÂ’s promise that people could keep their insurance if they liked it. . . . On a party line vote, Democrats killed the resolution, which could come back to haunt vulnerable Democrats up for re-election this year.

Senate Democrats like Mary Landrieu, Jeanne Shaheen, Mark Pryor, Kay Hagan and Mark Begich – all of whom voted against stopping the rule from going into effect and have since supported delaying parts of Obamacare.

The link is to Instapundit, but this is actually CNN's story.

Posted by: Ace at 09:05 AM | Comments (304)
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