I'm confused.

I suppose the reason Obama doesn't want a repeal is... momentum, maybe? Maybe if some parts of ObamaCare are repealed, he worries that will make future steps that much easier?

But the confusing part is that the Administration is saying it will work hard to implement the program it has decided not to implement.

President Obama is against repealing the health law's long-term care CLASS Act and might veto Republican efforts to do so, an administration official tells The Hill, despite the government's announcement Friday that the program was dead in the water.

"We do not support repeal," the official said Monday. "Repealing the CLASS Act isn't necessary or productive. What we should be doing is working together to address the long-term care challenges we face in this country."

Over the weekend, The Hill has learned, an administration official called CLASS Act advocates to reassure them that Obama is still committed to making the program work. That official also told advocates that widespread media reports on the program's demise were wrong, leaving advocates scratching their heads.

Now CLASS was going to be taking in billions of dollars before it was actually implemented -- voluntary enrollment fees, I guess. Some $30 billion or so of these hypothetical fees was used to claim that ObamaCare reduced the budget (because the program, like other elements of ObamaCare, was scored in a ten year window in which ten years of taxes & income were reduced by only five years' worth of outflow).

But... the CBO now says that suspending or repealing CLASS is "revenue neutral"? No, it's not, not according to the analysis they presented that permitted ObamaCare to be passed. (Remember, without reconciliation -- which can only be used for initiatives that reduce the deficit -- ObamaCare could not have passed).

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, meanwhile, said Monday that repealing the program would not add to the deficit, making Republican repeal efforts that much easier.

The Obama administration sold the healthcare law with the argument that it would lower the nation's long-term health costs, and the CLASS Act was an important reason why.

CBO had scored the long-term care program for people with disabilities as saving the nation $86 billion in spending over 10 years. That's about 40 percent of the health law's $210 billion in total estimated deficit reduction over the next decade.

Although this seems to make no sense, and further reveals that earlier "projection" as a political fraud, it does help, given that Republicans won't have to deal with the fiction "But multibillion dollar programs reduce the deficit!" when they seek a repeal.

Oh, And Harry Reid Lied: Shock, I know. Reid claimed CLASS was funded for decades and decades into the future... citing the CBO.

Posted by: Ace at 10:53 AM | Comments (136)
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Victor Davis Hanson does a victory lap (for all of us) on the 2008 case against Obama, proven disastrously true.

The skeptics of 2008 proved prescient; those who demonized them should be embarrassed. And we should remember that candidates, of both parties, will govern mostly as they campaign. Slips are not indiscretions, but often will prove in hindsight windows of the soul.

A reader also sends in this op-ed, from April 2009:

First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based on pop culture, rather then the classics. Americans know more about their favorite TV dramas then the drama in DC that directly affects their lives. They care more for their "right" to choke down a McDonalds burger or a BurgerKing burger than for their constitutional rights. Then they turn around and lecture us about our rights and about our "democracy". Pride blind the foolish.

Then their faith in God was destroyed, until their churches, all tens of thousands of different "branches and denominations" were for the most part little more then Sunday circuses and their televangelists and top protestant mega preachers were more then happy to sell out their souls and flocks to be on the "winning" side of one pseudo Marxist politician or another. Their flocks may complain, but when explained that they would be on the "winning" side, their flocks were ever so quick to reject Christ in hopes for earthly power....

The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama. His speed in the past three months has been truly impressive. His spending and money printing has been a record setting, not just in America's short history but in the world. If this keeps up for more then another year, and there is no sign that it will not, America at best will resemble the Wiemar Republic and at worst Zimbabwe.

These past two weeks have been the most breath taking of all. First came the announcement of a planned redesign of the American Byzantine tax system, by the very thieves who used it to bankroll their thefts, loses and swindles of hundreds of billions of dollars.

This op-ed was published in... Pravda.

Posted by: Ace at 09:57 AM | Comments (122)
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Rasmussen's polls have been consistently on the low side for Republican candidates, with Romney only occasionally managing slight leads (and Perry managing that when he first entered the race).

Now Cain has a slight lead.

This could just be candidates briefly getting the "Generic Republican Advantage" when they first become prominent, and yet not well known as far as their particulars.

But still, a good poll for Cain, certainly.

Posted by: Ace at 08:58 AM | Comments (177)
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You might have guessed this. The outrage here is that the media refuses to report the facts accurately.

Given that the media is advising them in crafting a message that can (in theory) appeal to a broader segment of the population, that's no surprise.

The standard portrayal of the Wall Street protesters goes something like this: Ragtag group of unemployed young adults, venting often incoherent but overall legitimate populist outrage about economic inequality. But go down to the movementÂ’s headquarters, as I did this past weekend, and you see something far different.

It’s not just that knowledge of their “oppressors” -- the evil bankers -- is pretty thin, or that many of them are clearly college kids with nothing better to do than embrace the radical chic of “a cause.” I found a unifying and increasingly coherent ideology emerging among the protesters, which at its core has less to do with the evils of the banking business and more about the evils of capitalism -- and the need for a socialist revolution.

It’s not an overstatement to describe Zuccotti Park as New York’s Marxist epicenter. Flags with the iconic face of the Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara are everywhere; the only American flag I saw was hanging upside down. The “occupiers” openly refer to each other as “comrade,” and just about every piece of literature on offer (free or for sale) advocated socialism in the Marxist tradition as a cure-all for the inequalities of the American economic system.

Kevin D. Williamson finds the same:

IÂ’ve been spending as much time as I can down at Occupy Wall Street, listening to the speeches, reading the literature, talking to the organizers. HereÂ’s something to keep in mind: YouÂ’ll hear in a lot of the conservative media that this is some kind of socialist/communist enterprise piggybacking on a populist protest. In reality, it is much worse than even most of the conservative media is reporting.

Almost every organization present at OWS is explicitly communist or socialist. Almost every piece of literature being handed out is explicitly communist or socialist. I don’t mean half, and I don’t mean the overwhelming majority — I mean almost all of it. Yes, there are the usual union goons trying to figure out how to get OWS to do the bidding of the AFL-CIO and the Democratic party, and the usual smattering of New Age goo (the “Free Empathy” table) and po-mo Left wackiness (animal-rights nuts), the inevitable Let’s-Eradicate-Israel crowd (“Free Palestine, from the river to the sea!”). But, that being said, almost every organized enterprise and piece of printed material I have encountered has been socialist or communist. It’s been a long time since I saw anybody peddling books by Lenin. It’s been a long time since anybody told me the Ukrainians had it coming.

The media found the one or two racists in the Tea Party and made them the face of the movement; meanwhile, it finds the one or two people who are not avowedly Marxist and makes them the standard-bearer.

This is why lefties say the media is biased, by the way: Because the media refuses to report on "People's Movements" accurately.

They're correct in that. But the media is not airbrushing them out of the picture do to a rightwing bias, but due to a practical bias and a liberal one: The media wants liberalism to succeed, and may or may not be actually socialist but does not consider socialism viable as a political matter. So leftwing movements become "center-liberal" ones in the media's telling.

That is a kind of bias, but it's not a different bias or a new bias. It's the same liberal bias conservatives complain of all the time.

But I agree with the lefties: The media should report on such leftwing movements accurately. Not made all soft and cute (and standard liberal) for public consumption.

Posted by: Ace at 08:04 AM | Comments (241)
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"Journalism."

But they're not leftists or anything.

Thanks to JohnE., stolen from the sidebar. (I have been reading news for two hours trying to find something interesting. I figured I had to get something up now, even if I had no comment on it.)

Posted by: Ace at 07:26 AM | Comments (164)
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The bad news? DOOM. The really bad news? Even more DOOM. The sovereign debt crisis has made bonds a lousy investment choice now and perhaps for many years to come. But equities will be under pressure as well as the Boomers continue their retirement and begin to sell the assets in their 401(k) and IRAs -- they will be selling their stocks into a buyerÂ’s market, driving prices for equities down. And if national growth slows in the way I think it will over the next decade or two, businesses will not be able to make up for weak stock performance with higher earnings or corporate growth. But wait, thereÂ’s more! While all this is going on, the healthcare and Social Security bombs will be in the process of going off. But wait, there's more! If Americans become savers again, that puts a huge hurt on our consumption-based economy, with no offsetting export business to make up the loss.

If America has one trait that has stayed with us through good times and bad, it is our habit of thinking that prosperity is our birthright. Almost from the very start, America has been a cornucopia to most of her citizens, and a beacon to the rest of the world. But nothing is forever, and many Americans have forgotten that it is the effort of America’s citizens -- our industry, our creativity, our willingness to work and build -- that has made America what it is. The work-ethic used to be a signature trait of Americans, but that trait has bled away over the decades as the all-smothering State engulfs us. The State murmurs soothingly that it will not allow us to fail; we do not understand that this also means that many of us cannot succeed. (For striving brings with it the possibility of failure, does it not? Better not to strive at all, the State seems to say.) Freedom means choices and alternatives and risk -- freedom, in a very fundamental way, brings the risk of failure along with it. Freedom without risk is not freedom at all; it is a sham, a carnival ride where the State makes sure you are belted and padded and protected...but also prevented from going and doing what you wish. Perfect safety means perfect tyranny, a slavery no less absolute for being of our own making. (I often wonder: if the choice came down to being freer but less prosperous, would Americans make that choice? Or would they continue the Statist march to disaster, all in the name of being “safe”?) Benjamin Franklin’s epigram “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety” has never been as trenchant as it is now.

Things are bad; can they get any worse? Of course things can get worse. The fact that we think things are about as bad as they can get only serves to prove that our generation has never lived through really tough times. Ask a dustbowl Okie who lived through the depths of the Depression, or a Jew or Soviet conscript who lived through the worst of World War II, if things can get worse.

The worm at the heart of the Keynesian apple.

But theyÂ’re not anti-American! ThatÂ’s just crazy talk. This is just good honest dissent, right here, and we all know that dissent is the highest form of patriotism. Or something.

The army of the unemployed. It took us a long time to create this problem: weÂ’ve spent decades running up unsustainable debt, training young people with the wrong skills, drowning our productive population in an ocean of regulatory red tape, and transforming colleges from institutions of higher learning into leftist propaganda factories. ItÂ’s going to take an equally long time to fix this mess. But the rest of the world isnÂ’t going to stand around idle while we try and get our s**t together.

Jesse Jackson, Jr.: threat or menace? HeÂ’s a dullard and as innocent of basic economics as a stone, but thatÂ’s par for the course among the American left these days.

G20 to Eurozone: YouÂ’ve got six days to do the impossible. Eurozone to G20: IÂ’m sorry, I canÂ’t hear you over the strikes and riots. Can you repeat that?

Good news, everyone! The Federal government spends $7 for every $4 that it takes in! Hey, wait a minute...thatÂ’s not good news at all!

CaliforniaÂ’s ridiculous revenue projections proven to be ridiculous. California taxpayers and politicians will express gobsmacked amazement and then continue to do the same stupid s**t that got them into this mess in the first place.

"IÂ’d like to answer that question without actually, you know, answering the question. Or without even actually addressing the issue you were interrogating me about. Instead, I will pretend that you asked a question you didnÂ’t actually ask and answer that question instead." [Paraphrase]

The question is not “if” Greece is going to default; the questions are “when” and “how”.

Electric cars have been “the future” for about as long as I’ve been alive, but I’ve never understood either the economics or the ergonomics of them. They make no sense except in a very few specialized areas, and their high costs more than offset whatever marginal savings in energy-costs an owner might realize. They also fail the most basic requirement of an automobile: reliable transport.

A pretty interesting discussion of Boomer demographics and how their retirement will affect the welfare state, particularly Social Security and Medicare.

More mass layoffs in the pipeline? But hey, OWS dumbasses: it's a bunch of Wall Street types, so that ought to make you happy, right?

Apparently, amongst my many other outrages to Democrat dignity, now I want women to die on the floor. I think Dame Pelosi misunderstood me: I said I want women to lie on the floor, because my sciatica is acting up and I find it difficult to climb into my monstrous King-sized bed to ravish them.

Old and busted: “Saved or created.” New hotness: “Supported”. Kind of like a jockstrap -- if you can’t be an athlete, be an athletic supporter!

The GOP offers their own jobs plan. It wonÂ’t go anywhere, but...at least theyÂ’re showing up at work, right?

ItÂ’s true that housing prices are going to have to come to some kind of market equilibrium before we can start clearing the backlog. But it does not follow that government-mandated cramdowns are the way to do it -- in fact, event apart from the dubious legality of such a move, it would be too prone to graft and corruption (as all such government programs are: see Cash for Clunkers, TARP, and the sweetheart loan to now-bankrupt Solyndra). If this story seems like a re-run from 2010, by the way, it is (remember HAMP?). Obama was never one to let utter failure deter him from his ideological goals. Also: imagine my shock that the author Feldstein is another tenured Haaaavahd economist. The Administration must buy these guys in giant economy-packs at Academics-R-Us.

Silicon Valley will not save us.

Hey, IÂ’m not gloating at the EurozoneÂ’s impending collapse. But I did correctly anticipate this unfolding disaster more than a decade ago. Well...okay. Maybe IÂ’m gloating. A little. IÂ’m not proud of it.

High debt and low growth is deadly. Nations have been spending with profligate abandon on the assumption that the highly-atypical growth rates of the postwar era were going to continue indefinitely. Well, growth has slowed all across the developed world and all that debt is coming due at the worst possible time.

Oh, Nouriel, you wound me. You strike at my heart, you Socialist-spouting lout.

Karl Marx oversold socialism, but he was right in claiming that globalization, unfettered financial capitalism, and redistribution of income and wealth from labor to capital could lead capitalism to self-destruct. As he argued, unregulated capitalism can lead to regular bouts of over-capacity, under-consumption, and the recurrence of destructive financial crises, fueled by credit bubbles and asset-price booms and busts.

Seriously, though -- this obsession about “equality” in an economic sense is wasted mental effort. Equality of opportunity is all around us; equality of outcome is impossible, given the vagaries of fate and the innate differences between human beings of different skills and abilities. If everyone had equal skills and equal opportunity, then no economy would be necessary because we could all just make our own stuff. Bubbles, booms, busts, crises, panics, and downturns are a fact of life on this planet; no economic system will ever get rid of them. The “anglo-saxon” model of market capitalism has proven to be the most successful economic system ever invented. That doesn’t mean it’s without fault -- it just means it’s better than anything else we know of.

Gibson Guitars: We may have to move some of our production overseas. Obama is creating jobs, as it turns out...overseas.

While our youngsters embarass themselves by “occupying” various locales for reasons not even they can clearly explain, young people in China are doing important and cutting-edge stuff. Like creating a ping-pong playing robot. Gentlemen, I will not tolerate a ping-pong playing robot gap!

In China, the loan-sharks are circling.

CaliforniaÂ’s public employee unions still not quite understanding that the world has changed.

You know your city has become a hellhole when....

Speaking of hellholes.... Camden, NJ: Where even hookers and drug-dealers have trouble turning a profit.

Some chart-fu about our health-care productivity problem.

Four reasons the mortgage mess wonÂ’t get fixed. And since a sustained recovery depends on recovery of the housing sector..... DOOM.

Daryl Jones at Fortune advises Europe to embrace the suck.

California may have the distinction of finally killing off Medicaid -- or at least exposing its rotten underpinnings.

ItÂ’s almost as if ObamaCare was thrown together by a bunch of people who really didnÂ’t give much of a s**t as to whether the whole thing was actually affordable. ItÂ’s almost as if they were ramrodding a ruinous program down AmericaÂ’s throat for crass political gain.

GOP to Democrats: “You are going to eat the CLASS Act s**t-sandwich. In public. With no ketchup.”
more...

Posted by: Monty at 04:41 AM | Comments (177)
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After waiting three weeks for glowing MBM reports and biased polls to give the Occupy movement some heft, the White House is ready affiliate itself with the raging hipsters.

In a call previewing Obama's upcoming bus tour through North Carolina and Virginia, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Obama "will continue to acknowledge the frustration that he himself shares," about Washington's laggard response to the financial crisis.

Earnest added that while on the trip, Obama will make it clear that he is fighting to make certain that the "interests of 99 percent of Americans are well represented" — the first time the White House has used the term to differentiate the vast majority of Americans from the wealthy.

The media worked night and day to make the Tea Party out to be a racist, violent group of astroturfed malcontents without any legitimate goal, an impression the Democrats were happy to abet. This time around, the make-believe media is delighted to look the other way while the Occupiers demonstrate casual anti-Semitism.

Meet “occupier” Patricia McAllister. Patricia works for the Los Angeles Unified School District. She also hates Jews. She told Reason.tv, “I think that the Zionist Jews who are running these big banks and our Federal Reserve, which is not run by the federal government, they need to be run out of this country.”

Even more disturbing than what Patricia said was the calm demeanor in which she said it. Anti-Semitic hatred flows casually, openly and freely at these events. She seemed somewhat concerned she might be overheard by someone who would take offense, that the person interviewing her might have a problem with it. But she had no worry whatsoever what she was saying might be anything other than fact. This woman is involved in some way with educating children.

Has there been anything about the "Hitlers Bankers" signs, the yells to "Go home, Jews" in the New York Times? The Washington Post? The NBC, ABC, CBS nightly newscasts? Of course not.

Contrast:

In just the first eleven days of October, ABC, CBS and NBC flooded their morning and evening newscasts with a whopping 33 full stories or interview segments on the protesters. This was a far cry from the greeting the Tea Party received from the Big Three as that conservative protest movement was initially ignored (only 13 total stories in all of 2009) and then reviled.

It was radio silence on the Occupiers' anti-semitism for the past three weeks and now that President Lightbringer is on board the obfuscation will only get worse.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 03:23 AM | Comments (125)
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Historically, the new has often vanquished the old. Ask reptiles.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:44 AM | Comments (56)
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Just stepped off a very delayed plane so tonight you just get pictures...

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:42 PM | Comments (741)
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Season two of the best zombie series on TV "The Walking Dead" premiers tonight at 9pm EST 8 Central on AMC. The first season featured people acting stupid when faced with a ravenous zombie threat: "Hey let's set up an undefended camp next to this big bonfire that can be seen for miles." and "Don't use your guns because it attracts the zombies, no not the zombies attacking us right now but other zombies". In any event it should be an entertaining bloodfest.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 03:29 PM | Comments (512)
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