• The Exploited Laborers Of The Liberal Media
  
• Obama Poll Numbers Plummet In California
  
• Obamacare And The Totalitarian Mindset
  
• Demint Vs. McConnell
  
• No Security Built Into Healthcare.gov? (autoplay video)
  
• Taming The Fury Of Rage
  
• Cancer Patient Who Spoke Out Against Obamacare Says He's Being Audited
  
• No, America Doesn't Have Too Many Banks
  
• FBI Impeding Inquiry Into The IRS
  
• Socialism Can't Even Keep The Lights On
  
• Feds Offering Insurers Assistance For Loses
  
• Obamacare Customers Urged to Double Check Insurance Status
  
• Sowell: The Test Score Gap
  
• Big Changes Coming At CNN
  
• Video Of Man Who Survived Three Days Under Water In A Ship Wreck
  
• Obama Hasn't Yet Signed Up For Obamacare
  
• Phobias May Be Memories Passed Down In Genes From Ancestors
  
• Joe Biden, National Embarrassment
  
• Angry Alabama Fan Kills Someone After The Iron Bowl
  
• 80th Anniversary Of The Repeal Of Prohibition
  

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Posted by: Open Blogger at 05:33 AM | Comments (242)
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Happy Tuesday.

The world's most generous nation, according to a global index of giving, is the United States. "A higher proportion of Americans helped a stranger than any other country in the world."

WaPo front page, above the fold: "Health-care enrollment on Web plagued by bugs." "The errors cumulatively have affected roughly one-third of the people who have signed up for health plans since Oct. 1."

The NY commuter train that derailed Sunday, killing 4 and injuring dozens, was going 82 mph as it entered a 30 mph curve. "A freight train derailed in the same place in July."

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:50 AM | Comments (260)
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I'll Take Alternate Realities For $500 Alex

Krugtron the Invincible on Obamacare this Saturday:

'Health reform is starting to look like a bigger success than even its most ardent advocates expected'

This Is What Poverty Is Like...Or Not

So Linda Walther Tirado AKA KillerMartini wrote a piece on what it's like to be truly poor and how the limitations from poverty end up forcing her to make bad decisions and how she and her family have to live off of junk food in a hotel. It soon went viral on the internet.

Rest is a luxury for the rich. I get up at 6AM, go to school (I have a full courseload, but I only have to go to two in-person classes) then work, then I get the kids, then I pick up my husband, then I have half an hour to change and go to Job 2. I get home from that at around 1230AM, then I have the rest of my classes and work to tend to. I'm in bed by 3. This isn't every day, I have two days off a week from each of my obligations. I use that time to clean the house and soothe Mr. Martini and see the kids for longer than an hour and catch up on schoolwork. Those nights I'm in bed by midnight, but if I go to bed too early I won't be able to stay up the other nights because I'll fuck my pattern up, and I drive an hour home from Job 2 so I can't afford to be sleepy. I never get a day off from work unless I am fairly sick. It doesn't leave you much room to think about what you are doing, only to attend to the next thing and the next. Planning isn't in the mix.

...Convenience food is just that. And we are not allowed many conveniences. Especially since the Patriot Act passed, it's hard to get a bank account. But without one, you spend a lot of time figuring out where to cash a check and get money orders to pay bills. Most motels now have a no-credit-card-no-room policy. I wandered around SF for five hours in the rain once with nearly a thousand dollars on me and could not rent a room even if I gave them a $500 cash deposit and surrendered my cell phone to the desk to hold as surety.

Except that it appears to all be bullshit. She owns a house, is married to a Marine and has worked as a political campaign aide off and on since 2004, takes vacations to Vegas, and attended boarding schools in her youth and doesn't think much of your ilk.

So why is she still raising $100,000 to 'get out' of poverty?

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:05 PM | Comments (473)
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Saints and Seahawks. A couple of teams with actual good records. Could be something.

I meant to post an update on the College Football Pick thingy this weekend but I suck so here it is.

1 Knightbrigade - 139
2 Jay in Ames - 137
3 Murph - 129
4 BigBoy - 129
5 Gator Nation - 127
6 Boyz in da Hoodies - 127
7 WVhokie - 126
8 The Douchebag Collective - 123
9 Syrias You Guys - 122
10 MikeTalley73 - 121

I ("I" is @MikeTally73) have taken the liberty of setting up two Bowl Pickem groups:

Group ID#: 1176
Group ID#: 1181
Password for both is: scandi

Still laughing about that Auburn win over the Tide this weekend. FSU ain't gonna lose to Duke in the ACC Championship game. Ohio State has a much tougher opponent in (10) Michigan State, but unless one of these gets knocked off (and assuming Auburn beats Missouri), Auburn's chances for the title game don't look promising.

But enough of that. It's Monday.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 04:24 PM | Comments (175)
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People who help people are the luckiest people in the world.

Tim P. Carney writes:

he contraception mandate is nakedly a huge subsidy to the industry that most firmly supported Obamacare: the drugmakers.

The drug industry has spent more on lobbying under Obama than any other industry. Top lobbyists at the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) in 2009 met behind closed doors with the White House and Senate Democrats, promising political support for Democrats in exchange for friendly provisions in Obamacare.

Top Obama bundler Sally Susman oversees the lobbying shop at drug giant Pfizer, which sells $7.6 million a year in name-brand birth control pills, while also selling contraceptive injections and generic drugs. Pfizer's CEO during the Obamacare debate was Obama donor Jeffrey Kindler. In a corporate filing, the company justified his salary increase by pointing to his Obamacare lobbying.

Obama's contraception mandate requires all employer-sponsored health care plans to cover 100 percent of the cost of all FDA-approved contraception. That gives customers incentives to choose Pfizer's name-brand pills, because the entire cost is passed onto employers and thus onto customers and colleagues. And of course, this means more profit for Pfizer.

Merck, which also makes birth control pills, deployed top lobbyist, former Democratic congressional staffer and major Democratic donor Mark Raabe to Capitol Hill and the White House to lobby on “efforts to gain coverage of preventive services,” according to company lobbying filings. The administration uses the “preventive services” provision of Obamacare to justify the contraception mandate. Merck sells implants and other contraceptives -- if “sells” is the right word for products that many customers now get for “free,” sticking colleagues and taxpayers with the bill.

...

This is just a brief taste of the corporatism that went into creating the mandate. The corporatism underlying the law's defenses is more telling in some ways.

He contrasts the Left's eagerness to pay off corporations who are willing to play ball with their seething hostility towards the rights of the owners of Hobby Lobby -- owners consisting of a husband, wife, and three children.

Posted by: Ace at 03:21 PM | Comments (224)
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The reason? Obama is at 37%, and Al Franken has been a loyal Yes Man for Obama and Obamacare.

Franken's at 51% disapproval (people who rate his job performance as "fair" or poor).

Meanwhile, the GOP is taking the Federalist Meatball's advice and looking to expand the 2014 Senate contest into blue states.

In 2012, Democrats snagged Senate seats from Republicans in states where the GOP should have prevailed with relative ease.

In 2014, Republicans want to show they can play that game, too.

The GOP could conceivably capture the Senate by winning in seven states currently represented by Democrats but that Mitt Romney carried. But running the table in those states is a very tall task, party strategists freely acknowledge, so theyÂ’re working to expand the map of competitive races to states like Iowa, Michigan, Colorado and several others.

Franken only got 42% of the vote in a three-way split last time, and only won was credited as winning after a contested recount, barely beating being claimed to have beaten Norm Coleman.

Norm Coleman has taken a pass on running this year.

In case you didn't see this reported: Scott Brown seems to be considering running for Senate again... in neighboring state New Hampshire, rather than current home Massachusetts. He's sold his Massachusetts home and is spending time in the Granite State.

I don't know-- that seems to me to be No Big Deal, because, come on, the differences between two neighboring seem small enough that New Hampshirites* wouldn't think, "My God, we can't elect this man; he doesn't understand our culture."

But then, people are very state-proud, especially political people.

* This is probably wrong. But here's the thing: I don't care.

Posted by: Ace at 02:19 PM | Comments (211)
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This is just plain funny, but it's also a good news piece.

Hard Sell

Going door-to-door for Obamacare

by Matt Labash

Hollywood, Fla.

Standing here on the streets of Hollywood with two comely Obamacare cheerleaders by my side, I’m feeling fired up and ready to go. I’m feeling like the change I’ve been waiting for. I’m feeling like whatever Obama cliché you can think of. And all I want to say, like the late Todd Beamer before me, is, “Let’s roll.” Or more like, “Let’s enroll.” Because much as Beamer, God rest his soul, took on the terrorists who tried to take down America, we are now in a similar cataclysmic fight: the fight to guarantee that every American has the right to buy overpriced health insurance on a glitchy website, under threat of punitive tax penalties.

I’ve come to Florida to go door-to-door with the foot soldiers of Get Covered America, the boots-on-the-ground division of Enroll America, which bills itself as a “nonpartisan 501(c)(3) organization whose mission is to maximize the number of uninsured Americans who enroll in health coverage made available by the Affordable Care Act.” These Obamacare evangelists are very serious about the “nonpartisan” nature of their business. Nearly every Enroll America staffer I speak to emphasizes it, often repeatedly. And while it might strain credulity that an organization is nonpartisan which seeks to make sure people are Obamacared for by setting $100 million fundraising goals for itself, and conducting $5 million ad campaigns, and targeting 10 different states, 9 of which are coincidentally run by Republican governors, I choose to take them at their word.

After all, Enroll America boasts all manner of nonpartisan credentials. Most of its staffers seem to have worked in the nonpartisan Obama presidential campaigns of 2008 or 2012, often both. Its president, Anne Filipic, served as deputy executive director of the nonpartisan Democratic National Committee, and came here straight from the nonpartisan White House Office of Public Engagement. The nonpartisan Obamacare czar, Kathleen Sebelius (whom Filipic also worked for), has admitted putting the arm on companies to make donations to Enroll America, sparking several nonpartisan congressional investigations.

And after decidedly partisan conservative gadfly James O’Keefe and his undercover Project Veritas crew caught Texas Enroll America communications director Chris Tarango on tape conspiring to help obtain a private list of potential Obamacare enrollee data for political purposes, a national Enroll America spokesman told me again: “Enroll America is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization,” it doesn’t technically enroll people “so we don’t have any sensitive personal data,” and though the video “does not show any violation of our nonprofit status,” even the suggestion of any violation is “inappropriate” and the “employee seen in the video has resigned from his role with Enroll America.”

With my nonpartisan concerns allayed, weÂ’re ready to roll! At the Hollywood public library, I meet up with Get Covered AmericaÂ’s Katie Vicsik and Rhianna Hurt, 2 of 28 Florida staffers (they also have nearly 1,800 volunteers on the ground in the state). They are twentysomething, earnest, clipboard-carrying, and as adorable as speckled pups. TheyÂ’re the Platonic ideal of Obama campaign staffers (which they both were) from back in the salad days, when the winds of hopeÂ’nÂ’change blew across the prairie, and there was still dew on the world.

....

Katie and Rhianna are light touches. They don’t hard-sell. They don’t discuss premiums (Enroll America’s internal polling showed that discussing prices, even when emphasizing subsidies, was death to prospective enrollees). They don’t use flashpoint words like “Obamacare” if it can be helped—only “the Affordable Care Act.” All they want to do, Katie tells me, is to provide information, to apprise people of their options. They are not interested in political debates. “We always stress that we’re nonpartisan,” says Katie.

So IÂ’ve heard.

That's the funnier part, but the rest of it is important reporting: Even going door-to-door with microtargeted call sheets, armed with names of people Obama has decided are likely supporters of Obama, and/or need health insurance themselves, Katie and Rhianna encounter a lot of skepticism and outright anger about Obamacare.

And speaking of that, I have to link this great video I saw in Hot Air's Quotes of the Day last night. The person who posted the video explains:

I took this video because "I" knew what my liberal relative was going to try to do and I knew how my unsuspecting consevative family was going to react. I just had to capture the moment on video!

Update: Commenters point out that this video seems like a set-up by an Obamacare opponent, deliberately trying to elicit a laugh from the family. That's fair enough, and would still make the video a useful commentary about public perceptions about Obamacare, if not for the fact that the claim about how the video came to be -- quoted above -- is therefore false.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 12:07 PM | Comments (146)
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It's incredible that this even has to be argued, but that's where we are in "post-racial" America.

Ron Christie is a Republican-leaning strategist. He's also black, which must mean he's racist against himself.

The era of ‘hope and change’ was supposed to usher in a ‘post-racial’ era. Instead it’s now the appalling norm to blame any political opposition to the president on racism.

As Americans participate in the post-Thanksgiving rite of passage known as Black Friday, I canÂ’t help but reflect on a disturbing trend that increases with each passing day of the Obama presidency: If you disagree with the president, you must be racist.

Of course, criticism of black Republicans by liberals of all colors is nothing new. When I first started on Capitol Hill in 1991 as a young legislative aide, it didn’t take long for Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) to call me a “sellout to my race” and tell me to my face that black Republicans are nothing more than “Uncle Toms.” The phenomenon is all too familiar to black conservatives who dare to express views that are out of the liberal mainstream.

But the Obama administration was supposed to change all that. The promise of “hope and change” was to have ushered in a new color-blind society for America’s first “post-racial” president.

...

Today I am appalled that blaming genuine political opposition to Obama and his policies on racism has become the norm rather than the exception. It would be one thing if this sort of cheap political attack were limited to Chris Matthews and his colleagues at MSNBC, where charges of racism surface frequently. But in August, when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) accused his Republican colleagues of obstructing the presidentÂ’s agenda because of the color of ObamaÂ’s skin, the leader of the worldÂ’s greatest deliberative body revealed himself to be nothing more than a cheap racial huckster who will say or do anything to perpetuate a cynical untruth.

I notice an odd double-standard on the left. Suppose I were to champion giving little girls little-girl-type gifts -- dollies and the like. The left would attack me for attempting to foist upon little girls a narrow definition of what a girl (and later a woman) must be. I would be guilty, they would argue, of attempting to impose my stereotypical views of womanhood on women -- I would be denying women the full range of possibility in self-definition and basic human autonomy.

I suppose there's something to that, actually. (To the extent I actually do the things they would claim I was doing -- that is, deliberately attempting to impose a model of gender norms on a little girl, as opposed to, say, simply giving her a baby doll because she had it on her Christmas list.)

But note how quickly this notion -- of encouraging people to explore the maximum possibility-space of what they could decide they could be -- goes out the window when we speak about the possibility of a woman or minority deciding they they might be conservatively-oriented.

Note how quickly the left descends into attacking such people, claiming that conservative women aren't really women at all, that Republican-leaning blacks are "Oreos" and Uncle Toms.

And that conservative-leaning Latinos aren't really Latinos. An example of that is fresh news today, as the Mexican-American blogger SooperMexican is being accused by a Latino blog of not being Latino at all. See, because SooperMexican chooses to remain anonymous, and writes in favor of conservativism, that must mean he (or she) is actually a White Guy.

It's just impossible, you know, that someone of Mexican heritage could find value in the concept of liberty favored by the authors of the American Republic.

In all these cases, the Left is very determined to limit the amount of social freedom a woman or minority feels to discover her own true self. If that true self turns out to be traditionalist, capitalist, or skeptical about the power of Holy Government, the Left attempts to impose its own narrow definition of what a woman, black, or Mexican must be.

As to the ridiculous idea that conservatives only began opposing progressivism and socialism when it had a (half) black face, a commenter at the Daily Beast called "dadadav" sums it up well enough:

As a white latino who is conservative and make no fuss about it, I have simply taken the easier path to avoid more discussions on the issue and "please" the Liberal-left:

In 2000 I voted against Al Gore because he was the Democrat candidate, and I am not a Democrat.

In 2004 I voted against John Kerry because he was the Democrat candidate, and I am not a Democrat.

In 2008 and 2012 I voted against Barak Obama because...oh yeah, Im racist.

That's that. See? Easy.

Posted by: Ace at 12:44 PM | Comments (226)
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One of Healthcare.gov's "innovations" was telling people to get off the website and come back later.

You know, like all big websites do. Amazon famously tells you "come back later" all the time. Google notoriously says "we can't handle your search at this time, please wait in line to conduct your search."

By the way, before getting to the new news, let's examine this ridiculous claim made more and more frequently by Obamacare defenders -- that Healthcare.gov is having problems "just like any other website." See, for example, Rahm Emmanuel's brother, Dr. Ezekiel Emmanuel (second video at bottom of post):

"I think it's good enough progress. Clearly, just like Google and FaceBook and all the internet sites are constantly tweaking their sites, constantly improving them, this one still has a ways to go. But it is, certainly, working reasonably well."

Wait, what? Google and FaceBook and all the rest of the internet sites are routinely non-functional? The spin here is so obvious it's condescending to point it out, as I'm sure you caught it, but putting it on the record:

Rahm's Bro is attempting to liken Healthcare.gov's problems -- which is a complete botch, a non-working system, and a system which furthermore has been crippled by its designers for both political reasons (don't want public to have too much sticker shock) and, well, other political reasons (we said we'd have this ready to go, and it's not ready to go, so we'll just take all the difficult things out of the website, like the payment system) -- with Google's and FaceBook's tweaks and improvements to actually functioning websites.

He's actually claiming that FaceBook's occasional aesthetic changes and new features are just like Healthcare.gov's complete failure to work at all. That if FaceBook offers you a new version of the Poke Button, that's just like a complete and total failure of a website to do anything except generate error messages and identity theft.

So: "Just like FaceBook," I guess, when Healthcare.gov can't handle traffic, it asks you to come back later to update your profile. It puts you in a queue, so that you don't have to "wait in line" again.

You know, wait in line, just like FaceBook. I'm always waiting in line to post an update to FaceBook. Why, it took me eight hours of waiting and fighting with the FaceBook system to add "This sandwich is tasty" to my FaceBook Wall.

But, get this, the queuing system isn't working, says a Bloomberg health care writer:

Maybe the next "tweak" and "improvement" Healthcare.gov offers is a secondary queuing system so that you can wait in line in order to wait in another line.

You know, just like Google, FaceBook, Amazon. All those other sites that are always giving people error messages and completely failing to do the tasks they're supposed to do.

Posted by: Ace at 11:06 AM | Comments (341)
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All football watchers have seen this six thousand times by now, but maybe some non-football watchers haven't. And it's the kind of play where even non-football watchers will enjoy some football.

The game was tied at 28-28 with a single second on the clock. Alabama attempted a would-be game-winning field goal.

If you don't know the rules of football, it's important to know that a failed field goal kick which remains on the field of play is a live ball, and can be advanced like a fumble or interception.

[Update JohnE.] To add some context: It helps to understand that this game is also one of the biggest rivalry games in the country (if not #1) and Alabama was undefeated, was the #1 ranked team in the country and cruising towards yet another National Championship. The last 4 BCS Champions look like this:

2009: Alabama
2010: Auburn
2011: Alabama
2012: Alabama

So, y'know.... sort of a big game anyway. Auburn is now ranked #3 and has an outside shot at the National Championship Game.

[Update Andy] Even moar context:

First, Bama's starting placekicker had failed to connect on 3 FG attempts in the game, all from 40-some-odd yards (missed 2, had 1 blocked). This kicker was their second attempt at one ... a freshman backup with only two previous attempts all season.

Second, time had expired in this game and it was going to overtime, then a review ... after some urging by Bama ... put one second on the clock after replay showed that a runner got his foot down out of bounds with fractions of a second to spare.

Given the ineptness in the kicking game to this point and the fact that they didn't seem to really be pushing to hard to score at the end of regulation, I expected Bama to just heave it once for the end zone and then take it to overtime.

But they didn't. And the rest is history. more...

Posted by: Ace at 01:28 PM | Comments (169)
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