December 03, 2013
— Maetenloch

In which Michael Totten journeys to Cuba to see first-hand what it's like. Read the whole thing.
What struck me most while walking around Havana for the first time is how dead and quiet it is. This was unexpected, though in hindsight I should have known. Where has communism ever been lively?
...But Havana's establishments are not closed. There just aren't very many of them. You cannot go shopping. There's nothing to buy. If you had millions of dollars, you would not be able to spend it. The city would be horrifying if were in a cold climate with dismal architecture like much of the former Soviet Union, but it didn't strike me as horrifying. It's just static. And vaguely post-apocalyptic.
Next to the front door of one CDR office I saw the image of a faceless man wielding a sword above the words "Always in combat."Always in combat against whom, you might ask?
The neighbors.
"The surveillance and denunciation system is so rigorous," Fontaine writes, "that family intimacy is almost nonexistent."
Family intimacy is almost nonexistent.
Aside from the slave labor camps and the staggering body counts, I can think of no more devastating an indictment of totalitarian government than that sentence. Something broke inside me when I read it.
I certainly wasn't intimate with anybody in Cuba-and I don't mean physically any more than Fontaine did. I had to lie by omission every minute of every hour of every day just like the Cubans. A person could get used to this sort of thing, I suppose, but that does not make it less alienating. That's the counterintuitive thing about totalitarian systems. They herd people into Borg-like collectives, yet every individual is savagely atomized.
I never felt so alone in my life.
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— Ace Obama vows that no matter how badly Obamacare fails, and no matter how many people it harms, he's not repealing it. Ever.
Meanwhile, for the first time ever, Obama's RCP job approval has fallen below 40%.
A Megan McArdle column argues that Obama has given up on trying to make Obamacare work, per se; he's only attempting to keep it alive through the 2015 midterms.
The administration has given up on success, as it might once have defined it. The object is no longer 7 million people signed up through the exchanges, with 2.7 million of them young and healthy, and the health-care cost curve bending back toward the earth. It is to keep the program alive until 2015. The administration's priorities are, first, to keep Democrats from undoing the individual mandate or otherwise crippling the law; second, to keep insurers from raising premiums or exiting the marketplace; third, to tamp down loose talk about the failures on the exchanges; and, only fourth, to get to the place where it used to think it would be this year, with lots of people signed up for affordable insurance. It is now measuring the program’s success not by whether it meets its goals, but by whether it survives at all. And all of its choices are oriented toward this new priority.You can see this in the decisions the administration made about fixing HealthCare.gov: It focused on the part that voters can see, even though the part that accurately transmits data to insurers is arguably more important -- is it better, or actually worse, to “sign up” a bunch of people when you can’t get that information to the insurers who need to write the actual policies? You can see it in the strategic delays, particularly the delay of the open enrollment deadline until after the 2014 elections....
From the administration's perspective, this makes a lot of sense. A program that survives until 2015 can hopefully be fixed. A program that is fatally damaged by Democratic or insurer defections definitely canÂ’t. The question is whether the public will embrace this new way of measuring the programÂ’s success Â… and what happens if it doesn't.
A frequent guest on Megyn Kelly's show, Chris Stirewalt (I believe), has explained all of Obama's moves: Buy time. It's that simple. Everything he does (and, in fact, virtually everything he's ever done as President) is about buying time. Putting off hard decisions. Telling the public lies which will hold for a news cycle and hope that the ultimate price to be paid for determined serial deception will be minimal.
All of these dilatory tactics are common among failures, criminals, and liars. They don't want to pay the price for their actions; and, rationally speaking, who could blame them?
People who put off difficult decisions are hoping, in the end, that some Miracle intervenes between the present moment and the Day of Accounting to spare them that accounting entirely.
I'm not certain what miracle Obama thinks is on the way. I don't think people will grow to like the fact that they are spending an extra $300 on insurance every single month, forever. Progressives like to euphemize this as a "disruption;" it's not a disruption, as a disruption implies a limited-duration event which will soon pass. The ObamaTax will be levied on every single taxpayer from now until the bill is repealed.
But he seems to be counting on people doing just that, deciding they don't mind they were lied to constantly and are now being swindled out of $1000-$10,000 per year, every single year, until they day they die.
So like a chronic gambler, or a downgoing drunk, he just keeps putting off the day of reckoning, doubling down on bad bets and unsustainable lies, hoping someone, somewhere bails him out of a jam.
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— Ace Worth reading in full, I'm limited as to what I can excerpt.
I think part of the reason he wasn’t careful is because he sort of lives in words. That’s been his whole professional life—books, speeches. Say something and it magically exists as something said, and if it’s been said and publicized it must be real. He never had to push a lever, see the machine not respond, puzzle it out and fix it. It’s all been pretty abstract for him, not concrete....Here I will say something harsh, and it’s connected to the thing about words but also images.
From what I have seen the administration is full of young people whoÂ’ve seen the movie but not read the book. They act bright, they know the reference, theyÂ’re credentialed. But theyÂ’ve only seen the movie about, say, the Cuban missile crisis, and then they get into a foreign-policy question and theyÂ’re seeing movies in their heads.... Grrr, grrr, good guys beat bad guys.
It’s as if history isn’t real to them. They run around tweeting, all of them, even those in substantial positions. “Darfur government inadequate. Genocide unacceptable.” They share their feelings – that happens to be one of the things they seem to think is real, what they feel. “Unjust treatment of women—scourge that hurts my heart.” This is the dialogue to the movies in their heads.
ThereÂ’s a sense that theyÂ’re all freelancing, not really part of anything coherent.
For four years I have been told, by those whoÂ’ve worked in the administration and those whoÂ’ve visited it as volunteers or contractors, that the Obama White House isnÂ’t organized. ItÂ’s just full of chatter. Meetings donÂ’t begin on time, thereÂ’s no agenda, the list of those invited seems to expand and contract at somebodyÂ’s whim. There is a tendency to speak of how a problem will look and how its appearance should be handled, as opposed to what the problem is and should be done about it. People speak airily, without point. They scroll down, see a call that has to be returned, pop out and then in again.
It does not sound like a professional operation....
And when you apply this to the ObamaCare debacle, suddenly it seems to make sense. The White House is so unformed and chaotic that they probably didn’t ignore the problem, they probably held a million meetings on it. People probably said things like, “We’re experiencing some technological challenges but we’re sure we’ll be up by October,” and other people said, “Yes, it’s important we launch strong,” and others said, “The Republicans will have a field day if we’re not.” And then everyone went to their next meeting. And no one did anything. And the president went off and made speeches.
Because the doing isnÂ’t that important, the talking is.
At the end of the piece, she suggests Obama's -- and his fellow Wordplay Acolytes' -- belief in the power of soothing words is essentially the primitives' belief in magic.
And on that, I'd recommend this old post I did about a military psychiatrists' diagnosis of members of his own class, the "wordsmith" class, as he termed them.
As a psychoanalyst I belong to a wordsmith profession, of course, and I have a close-up view of its practitioners. They are overwhelmingly left in their politics and tend to think words are the answer to all serious problems. Their faith in the power of words to resolve conflict is almost absolute.
Oh, Goody:
Pres. Obama vows to spend the remainder of his presidency making his health care reform plan work. @ChuckTodd reports now #NBCNightlyNews
— NBC Nightly News (@nbcnightlynews) December 3, 2013
The Wordsmiths and Myth: This post got posted late-ish on a Friday, so people didn't see it, maybe. But it's pretty insightful. At least I think it is.
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— Ace The press is occasionally willing to cop to some flaws, at least when they fail spectacularly.
But one flaw they are determined to never confess: a strong rooting interest in favor of the Democratic Party and progressive politics in general, and palpable distaste for Republicans and conservatives.
Thus Politico's attempt to discover why the press failed so badly in informing the public about Obamacare deliberately misses the obvious.
Let's sum up the claimed reasons for their failure:
1. The Press Neutrally Repeated Competing Claims Between Republicans and Democrats In Favor of Scrutinizing Those Claims.
What the press delivered instead was mostly a conversation among policy wonks and Beltway political elites without letting in the people who would be most affected by the nostrums they were prescribing. The public was the victim of a messaging war, with much of the conversation shaped by spin and talking points. And as in all wars, truth is the first casualty. Americans needed clear, direct explanations, honesty, dot connection and a probe of the carefully crafted words that came to define the debate. Yes, there were plenty of fact-checkers keeping watch, but as press critic and political scientist Brendan Nyhan has pointed out, these services can fall short. Their one-the-one hand, on-the-other hand format often confuses more than illuminates. Against this backdrop, the backlash of the last few weeks was probably inevitable.
Ah yes, the fact checkers -- such as Politifact, who claimed it was "True" that "if you like your plan, you can keep your plan." To be precise, they claimed this was "Half True," but it was only not fully true because Obama couldn't force insurance companies to continue offering you the same plan.
As far as Obamacare itself, they claimed it was "True" that the law did nothing to cancel your insurance, and exempted current policy-holders from having to go to the marketplace.
They have still not retracted this claim, instead preferring to imply it's still too complicated to offer a ready assessment about (both Republicans and Democrats are spinning this!), thus sparing them the pain of confessing error.
The media did a little more than neutrally report the back-and-forth between Republicans and Democrats on this issue: They actively claimed that Obama's narrative was true and that Republicans' criticisms were false. If you have any doubt about this-- about PolitiFact's tendency to cast Democratic lies as too complicated to evaluate, while claiming tendentious (but arguably true) Republican criticisms are flat-out lies, remember their Lie of the Year from 2010.
Politico is spinning. The media did not merely fail to scrutinize the parties' competing claims, and leave it all up to the readers to figure out the truth. They affirmatively reported that Obama's false claims were true and that conservatives' true claims were false.
And they're still doing it, even now. Even in this very piece, the author claims that the characterization of IPAB as denying procedures to certain patients is a flat-out false claim:
Suddenly, many journalists were realizing that the real story was not the stuff of far-right paranoia—like the false “death panels” claims or the canards about “socialized medicine” that dominated the early coverage; it was the law’s messy tradeoffs, its power to create new classes of winners and losers as it tried to bring insurance to more Americans.
Pro-tip: The whole point of IPAB is to restrict certain expensive procedures' availability, to bring costs under control, if the rate of growth of medical spending exceeds a certain amount. That's not false-- that's the explicit point of the law.
And as for "socialized medicine," well, the author gives the game away when she writes blithely of "tradeoffs" and "winners and losers" in the system. The system takes from some to give to others.
That is socialism, or, at the very least, it is a response informed by the values of socialism.
And that is the point of the thing.
2. It's All Just Too Complicated To Explain to the American Public.
American health care is what Yale professor emeritus Theodore Marmor calls a “patchwork system.” Because of the many “patches,” the best Obama could do without scrapping it entirely—a politically unviable option—was “weave them into a quilt.” As the president said on Nov. 14, in order to make things less disruptive “we tried to choose a way that built off the existing system.” And so the ACA was not wholesale reform or even a “sweeping” health care plan, as the New York Times misleadingly called the bill when it passed the House in November 2009. It was a modest, albeit complicated step to give insurance to as many as 30 million more people and reduce the number of uninsured Americans without resorting to a national health insurance system. As such, it is a crazy quilt indeed.
This was a "modest" step?
In any event, she claims here that the story was just too complicated to explain to the American public, suggesting that the fault lies with Americans' ability to comprehend the complicated system, and not so much with reporters.
But I'm pretty sure that 95% of reporters didn't understand Obamacare either. The problem wasn't just with the public, and their lack of expertise and inability to grasp difficult, complex systems. Reporters are, frankly, just as dumb, if not more dumb, than the average American citizen. (It's the stupid people who believe they're clever who do all the damage, after all.)
In any event, it wasn't all that complicated. Senator Mike Enzi explained, presciently, that most of the people in the individual market would be losing their coverage and forced into the exchanges. He explained this in 2010, in arguing in favor of his law to actually guarantee that people could keep their coverage.
There was actually a non-complicated answer here: Mike Enzi was right.
But the press didn't like that narrative, and so they didn't bother to check to see if he was right. They assumed he was lying, because, of course, that's what Republicans do.
3. The Same Thing I Said In Point One, Pretty Much. Except the Problem Is Mostly With the Political Reporters, Not the Subject Matter Expert Reporters, Like Me, Who Got It Pretty Much All Right.
I don't remember the media's health care reporters advertising the fact that most people in the individual market would lose their insurance and be forced into the exchanges. Do you?
This woman does. And she's found three or four reporters who suggested that a few people might lose their insurance, so apparently the media's "experts" all got it right.
One reason is that while many health-care wonks and policy reporters may have understood that insurers would have to cancel some plans to comply with the new law (see, for instance, this June 2010 story in the New York Times), most political reporters did not, and paid little attention until the failed Obamacare rollout became a political story....
Nor did the media probe deeply into what affordability really meant for all people, including those who would not get subsidies and saw insurance becoming increasingly unaffordable. That failure now haunts the Affordable Care Act, even though a few thoughtful journalists presented warning signals....
“It doesn’t fit their idea of news,” [Senator Ron] Wyden observed. “Their idea is liberals for and conservatives against.” In other words, the horse race dominated, with each horse getting equal coverage until the votes were counted.
Again, these arguments were all resolvable by simply reading the law and regulations -- something the media refused to do. And if the "experts" in the media did so themselves, they sure didn't make much noise about it.
Also note who she suggests that the media should have spent more time talking to: Not Senator Mike Enzi, of course, who warned the country about Obamacare's deliberate cancellation of policies (though no one in the media reported on it).
No, she thinks we could all do with a strong dose of Ron Wyden, whose criticism of Obamacare -- back when it contained a Trojan horse to destroy private insurance, aka the Public Option -- was that the Trojan Horse didn't go far enough.
She allows the media could have been more critical of Obamacare, then: so long as those criticism emanated from the left, and so long as the law were being criticized as not socialist-leaning enough.
But maybe this sentence explains, more than any of the prior silliness, the media's failure to adequately cover Obamacare:
Now that the website seems to be more or less working, will the media move on to the next political food fight, or will journalists do a better job explaining to consumers how they can actually use it?
Note the two absurd assumptions in that sentence:
1. that Healthcare.gov is now "more or less working," and
Incidentally, when she says the media should help the public "use it," I assume she means "offer advice for working around the glitches and bugs." Because usually, with a functioning website, you don't need media articles explaining how to "use it."
Even in an article desperately attempting to pin the blame for the media's failure to properly on Obamacare on anything besides a kneejerk embrace of progressive politics and an uncritical credulousness about claims by progressive politicians, she just can't help but agitate for Team Progressive some more.
The Only Permissible Criticism Is Criticism From the Left. Politico's reporter/Cheerleader for Single Payer writes this:
News outlets werenÂ’t seeking sources like Wyden. Their go-to guys were Ron Pollack, the head of the advocacy group Families USA and a cheerleader for Obamacare, when they wanted a quote representing the consumer view, and MIT economist Jonathan Gruber when they wanted the opinion of an academic. But Gruber was no ordinary academic. He was a paid consultant to the Department of Health and Human Services that was helping to design Obamacare and a staunch advocate for the law. In December 2009, with Congress on the verge of passing legislation, Families USA collected 58 mentions in the media, ranging from elite outlets like the New York Times to local dailies like the Contra Costa Times. From Jan. 1, 2009, through the end of January 2010, Gruber got 386 media mentions, compared with Jonathan Oberlander, a political scientist from the University of North Carolina who, like Gruber, was a health reform expert. Oberlander, though, was skeptical of the billÂ’s cost-containment measures and favored different solutions.
Different solutions? Why, that's rather vague. Did he propose permitting insurance companies to sell across state lines? Malpractice reform? Health Savings Accounts?
No. The "different solutions" she alludes to, so very vaguely, was... ta da! Canadian-style Single Payer.
In an article presuming to diagnose why the press got Obamacare wrong, the author continues to deliberately mislead her audience (not admitting her proposed solution is a single payer plan, choosing instead to replace two clear words ("Single Payer") with two vague words ("different solutions")) and misrepresenting the range of options America might have chosen.
She pretends the only voices worth hearing in this debate are on the left: Obama vs. Wyden, and Hacker vs. Oberlander. Health care policy is to be determined, she suggests, by an open debate between the political left and the academic left. Conservative plans are not even mentioned as possibilities, and conservatives apparently have no business in the debate at all.
And that is why the press dropped the ball so badly on Obamacare.
Perhaps if she read her own article, she'd understand this a little better.
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— Ace Good God. Video at the link, and it's worth watching.
"We're talking multiple months to over a year to at least address some of the critical-to-high exposures on the website itself."
And that's just to fix the big holes in security, nevermind closing the smaller exploits.
This expert's advice? If you like your identity, you should keep your identity off Healthcare.gov. Period.
“They said they implemented over 400 bug fixes,” he said. “When you recode the application to fix these 400 bugs—they were rushing this out of the door to get the site at least so it can work a little bit—you’re introducing more security flaws as you go along with it because you don’t even check that code.”“I’m a little bit more skeptical now, and I would still definitely advise individuals to not use the website because it’s definitely something that I don’t believe is secure and neither did the four individuals that testified in front of Congress,” Kennedy said. “I think there’s some major security concerns there around privacy and information, and they haven’t even come close to being addressed, and won’t be in the short term.”
It gets worse, actually. The expert (a white-hat hacker) notes that the federal government is not required to inform users when their security has been compromised.
“States are required to notify in the event of a breach, the federal government is not,” he added. “So in the event that Healthcare.gov gets compromised and all their information gets taken out of it they don’t have to notify anybody.”
I think we can safely predict that Obama will hide this information from the victims of his site, as he's hidden all information from "Obamacare's losers" already.
Legislation Required: The bills floating around Congress should remedy this defect and include a command that victims of security breaches be alerted, and the public generally apprised of how many breaches occur.
And throw in a criminal penalty for responsible officials should they choose to conceal such breaches.
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— Ace Oh I was just kidding with the "sharp" thing. I imagine Obama will hit the podium around three-ish.
FoxNews' live feed is here.
I don't know if he'll be taking questions. FoxNews has the video captioned as Obama "delivering remarks" about Obamacare, which implies to me he's going to read a prepared statement and then leave. Maybe he'll answer one or two questions. Maybe.
But more likely he'll just deliver an agitprop message about how awesome Obamacare is. He'll be going "on offense" on Obamacare.
And that means only one thing: Speeches, and "better messaging."
It is somehow appropriate that the administration’s health-care plan, which was sold on the basis of multiple untruths (keep your health-care plan, keep your doctor, bend the cost curve) is now itself a grand deception. The Web site provides the illusion of a working health-care exchange, but while it takes your information, there’s no telling what it will do with it (e.g. lose it, send duplicates, garble it). It’s the embodiment of the administration’s fixation on treating every substantive issue and real screw-up as a ”message” problem. Now White House spokesman Jay Carney can “message” (when a noun is made into a new verb you know something phony is going on) that the Web site is “working.”
The only problem is that it isnÂ’t. Ironically, the president was the one to point it out: Obamacare is more than a Web site. The Web site is a portal. Now that you can enter it, you expect to get the insurance you paid for? Silly you.
One third of all "selections" of health care plans via Healthcare.gov are actually lost or destroyed or incorrectly formatted. So one third of folks who think they'll have insurance on January 1st... actually won't.
Obama, of course, will not address this. Facts cannot be allowed to get in the way of "messaging."
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— Ace Fake.
Reports of bias incidents at Vassar College that involved hateful messages left on students’ doors were actually elaborate hoaxes — and the perpetrator is none other than the student member of the Bias Incident Response Team, The Daily Caller has learned.This fall semester at the liberal arts college in New York saw a curiously high number of bias incident reports. On Nov. 14, the college sent a mass email to students advising them that Bias Incident Response Team (BIRT) had received at least six reports in the last few months of hateful and insensitive messages being scrawled and spray painted on student residences. Messages included “Avoid Being Bitches,” “Fuck Niggers,” and most prominently, “Hey Tranny. Know Your Place.”
...The task force had one student member: Genesis Hernandez, who is transgendered and was also a vice president of the Vassar Student Association (VSA), the student government.
Five days after the email was sent, Vassar President Catharine Hill sent a follow-up email announcing that the bias incidents were hoaxes perpetrated by two students. The students wrote the vile messages and then filed the reports themselves, claiming to be the victims of unknown haters.
“It is our unfortunate duty to report that two Vassar students have admitted responsibility for creating a number of recent bias and hate-speech messages in public spaces on campus,” wrote Hill in an email. “They also falsely reported these as anonymous messages. Sadly, our community has been deeply hurt by these actions.”
The email noted that the two students had admitted responsibility and withdrawn from the college voluntarily. Their names were not reported.
...However, The DC has learned that one of the perpetrators was none other than Genesis Hernandez.
Damn Dirty Rino notes something that just occurred to me this weekend: These Hate Crime Hoaxes are a form of Munchausen Syndrome.
Münchausen syndrome is a psychiatric factitious disorder wherein those affected feign disease, illness, or psychological trauma to draw attention, sympathy, or reassurance to themselves. It is also sometimes known as hospital addiction syndrome, thick chart syndrome, or hospital hopper syndrome. True Münchausen syndrome fits within the subclass of factitious disorder with predominantly physical signs and symptoms, but in addition they also have a history of recurrent hospitalization, travelling, and dramatic, untrue, and extremely improbable tales of their past experiences. There is discussion to reclassify them as somatoform disorder in the DSM-5 as it is unclear whether or not people are conscious of drawing attention to themselves.
Rather than faking illness, some have discovered it's far easier (and requires less self-induced vomiting) to write a couple of bad words on a piece of paper and then claim to be a "hate victim."
Despite the left's refusal to acknowledge the obvious, the Hate Crime Hoax variation of Munchausen Syndrome is a real phenomenon, and a growing one, especially due to the velocity with which the machinery of the left acts in order to supply the attention-and-sympathy seeker with precisely what she seeks.
It's time to officially add this to the DSM. It's a real psychological disorder, and it's time to acknowledge it as such.
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— DrewM Little bit of content for you...Chris Christie wants you to know he didn't flip on giving in-state tuition to illegals (He calls it "tuition equality". Seriously, that's what he said.). He supports it, just not the version the NJ legislature passed.
So to sum up...don't think Christie is flipping on an immigration issue to win over GOP primary voters. No, he's proudly to the left of Mitt Romney on in-state tuition for illegals.
Glad I could help clear that up.
Related: The Stupid Party(tm) is stupid.
McCain's ex-immig person MT @elisefoley: Rebecca Tallent from Bipartisan Policy Ctr joining Boehner's office to work on immigration reform.
— Mark Krikorian (@MarkSKrikorian) December 3, 2013
Personnel is policy. Boehner hiring McCain's staffer? They are going to do this thing no matter what you say. They got donors to please and a base to replace.
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— DrewM And we have a new city atop the list of Largest US Municipal Bankruptcies. Congratulations Detroit!
BREAKING: Judge Steven Rhodes rules #Detroit is eligible for bankruptcy and the Chapter 9 case can proceed toward debt-cutting phase.
— Chad Livengood (@ChadLivengood) December 3, 2013$18 BILLION in debt. One city.
U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes determined the city meets the criteria for bankruptcy, ruling the city is financially insolvent and that the filing was properly authorized. He dismissed challenges to Michigan’s emergency manager law and ruled that pensions are not protected by the state Constitution.“The case was filed in good faith and should not be dismissed,” Rhodes said.
Rhodes also ruled the city negotiated in good faith with its creditors, a key point of contention in the eligibility fight. The judge was sympathetic to creditors’ complaints that they did not get a reasonable chance to respond to the city’s proposals, but he noted that the sheer number of creditors — more than 100,000 — made it “impracticable” for Detroit to negotiate with them all.
Earlier the judge ruled that municipal worker pensions were not immune from the bankruptcy process. So it looks like the people who helped bleed the city dry with get to live with the results of their greed.
It takes awhile but eventually this is where Democratic rule leads.
Of course it's not just Detroit. No this is going to be the first in some mega-municipal bankruptcies across the country.
Illinois is starting to try and deal with their out of control pension plan.
[Update - Andy] The left is reacting about as calmly and rationally as you'd expect to a judge's mainstream interpretation of Chapter 9 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code.
Judge Rhodes, if you ever show your face in #Detroit, please expect to either be beaten or run over. You have betrayed this city. #uniteblue
— Dominic Nanni (dpn) (@dominicnanni) December 3, 2013Honestly, the bankruptcy process provides Detroit its only (slim) chance for survival as a major city. Without it, the years and years of decline will just continue as it withers away.
The whole idea of the bankruptcy process is to provide an opportunity for a fresh start, and I find it highly instructive that the left would rather see the city's last dollar used to pay a union pension benefit than for it to have a chance at rebirth.
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— Purple Avenger
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