I've argued before in various places that conservatives need candidates who are better liars. Democrats run candidates in red/purple states that talk a reasonable game back home but when they get to DC, they vote the Reid/Pelosi/Obama line without fail. The GOP on the other hand has a nasty habit of running candidates that talk a very conservative game and then vote like moderates when it counts. Conservatives need to find a way to flip that calculus within the GOP if the marriage is to survive.

One reason I think conservative voters want their candidates to stake out the most rightward position possible and try and hold them to it is they often distrust a candidate who sounds moderate to actually be conservative when push comes to shove.

Yesterday Senator Mike Lee gave a speech at Heritage which set a lot of conservative hearts aflutter. Personally I have decidedly mixed feelings about it and I think it has to do with the sound moderate/be conservative challenge for Republicans.

And let me say this as clearly as possible...I know Mike Lee is a conservative. I'm not accusing him of being an establishment squish.

After reading the speech, which if you haven't you should, I wanted to like it but I don't. That's not to say I dislike it. It just feels...off to me. I'm deeply, deeply ambivalent about it.

My biggest problem with it is Lee isn't arguing that government can not and should not try to solve all of the problems he identifies or that the country faces. At least that's not the overriding theme of the speech. He offers policy ideas where I'd personally prefer a candidate to say, "Government can NOT do anything about this! Stop believing people who say it can".

An example from Lee's speech...

The federal government also needs to open up AmericaÂ’s transportation system to diversity and experimentation, so that Americans can spend more time with their families in more affordable homes, and less time stuck in maddening traffic.

What? Are you nuts? The federal government is going to make your commute easier and quicker? Who is giving this speech, a leading conservative or Dennis Kucinich?

But then you look at his policy suggestion.

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Posted by: DrewM at 05:37 AM | Comments (181)
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I hope none of you were affected.

OAB: feeling safe
TNH: 7x24x365 perma-paranoia

And it looks like Krispy Kreme is gonna be a walkover in NJ. 60/70-something'ish. The Dem is getting blown out. more...

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 04:29 AM | Comments (295)
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Happy Wednesday.

Sen. Lee gave a heckuva speech yesterday at Heritage, which sounds an awful lot like that Ponnuru and Lowry piece from NR I linked yesterday.

If our generation of conservatives wants to enjoy our own defining triumph, our own 1980 – we are going to have to deserve it. That means sharpening more pencils than knives. The kind of work it will require is neither glamorous nor fun – and sometimes it isn’t even noticed. But it is necessary.

To deserve victory, conservatives have to do more than pick a fight. We have to win a debate. And to do that, we need more than just guts. We need an agenda.

The transcript is here, or you can watch the video here. It's well worth your time.

Also, Ponnuru put up a response to Erickson's criticism.

ICYMI, Ace put up an open thread last night that's full of Obamacare news and links that really should be clicked. Some crazy stuff in there.

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Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:52 AM | Comments (230)
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Because sometimes delays happen at Heathrow...

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:44 PM | Comments (728)
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Leftism is not a politics; it is a psychology. A psychology of resentment, which is then transitioned (like your insurance plan) into a vague politics of opposition against society, which, being sufficiently large, powerful, and vague, can stand in for one's personal anger against God.

So here they're pretty much admitting that they are driven by feelings of inadequacy and anger about their inadequacies.

Yes, Success is the Evil that must be be overcome, for the Success of one man makes another man feel poorer about himself.

It seems like whenever a minority identifying individual “succeeds”, he or she is identified as a “success story.” We will be featuring successful members of different minorities speaking of their own story and success, with a focus on how this idea of “success story” shouldn’t exist. The idea that minority success is “outstanding” means it’s not the norm–we don’t want “success stories.” We just want stories.

Now that we're talking about what the problem really is and always has been, now maybe we can actually discuss it fruitfully.

Thanks to @benk84.

Posted by: Ace at 03:31 PM | Comments (229)
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Sebelius telegraphed her plan to blame the private contractors for her and her boss' SCOAMF website.

And then comes a memo, likely leaked by CGI, noting that they warned Sebelius that the site wasn't ready but she proceeded to launch anyway, apparently thinking Coding Elves would come in overnight and fix it.

Tomorrow should be fun then.

Niedermeyer's Dead Horse tried to sign up for Obamacare -- and ran into a bureaucratic nightmare. Her tweets on her experience were Storified (put into readable order) by @tsrblke.

Worth reading.

It's very short. Click on it, you gooniebirds. I can't excerpt something so brief and to the point.

Also reporting an Obamacare nightmare... David Frum?!?!

And also David Fredoso, who shares his own experiences with the system. His choices: He can either get the same plan he had but pay 3.5 times as much for it, or pay a mere 2.5 times as much for a plan with a deductible twice as high.

Thirteen Democrats who echoed Obama's Big Lie.

Finally, some people who aren't incompetent, for a change. A guy and gal dress up in the best Halloween costumes ever-- as Plastic Army Men.

And man, are they realistic.

Posted by: Ace at 04:15 PM | Comments (501)
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Important article: How the Obama Administration Made Sure People CouldnÂ’t Keep Their Plans. Worth a read in full, but let me excerpt the bullet point conclusions.

First of all, even the "grandfathered" policies required that they be offered at equal prices to those with pre-existing conditions -- thus jacking up premiums immediately, by law.

How, exactly, were health insurers supposed to comply with these new mandates (and other ways the ACA is raising costs) without raising customersÂ’ contributions in the way the law says means losing grandfathered status?

...

In other words, the ACA did make it incredibly hard for insurers to continue plans for the millions of Americans who don’t want comprehensive insurance — financially, insurers almost certainly had to adjust them in such a way that they would lose grandfathered status. This isn’t “normal turnover in the insurance market” (though there is plenty of that in the individual market); there’s a reason why an exceptionally large number of Americans are getting cancellation notices this fall.

One error I made earlier (repeating Lisa Meyers' error): A change in premium alone doesn't un-grandfather a policy. However, the point this article is making is that very often insurance companies will keep premiums down, despite rising costs, by raising deductibles or copayments-- and that's precisely what Obama's regulations say makes a policy automatically un-grandfathered.

The article then notes that while the law did in fact say, essentially, if you like your plan, you can keep your plan, the HHS wrote its regulations in contradiction to the law of the United States and not only "interpreted the provision narrowly," as Lisa Meyer said, but actually changed its meaning to take back the protection the law afforded.

The conclusion:

The Affordable Care Act as written and passed would have protected the grandfathered plans for a longer period of time and with more freedom for adjustment, but the Obama administration filled out the Secretary Shalls in such a way as to make that much harder, if not basically impossible, to do. The Obama administrationÂ’s original, June 2010 rules were actually even stricter, and would have, for example, made it impossible for an insurer or company to change the firms it uses to manage and administer the plan (which neednÂ’t affect coverage and is a simple way to lower costs); those ludicrous restrictions were eliminated, but enough rules remain that itÂ’s, again, near impossible to maintain a grandfathered health-care plan.

And thus, Obama didn't just "know" he wouldn't be able to keep his promise; he actively worked, through his inferior officers, to break that promise himself.

Via @gpollowitz. P-shop via @rdbrewer4.

Posted by: Ace at 02:17 PM | Comments (268)
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Some really thick pro-ObamaCare spin in the preamble -- Serious You Guys, the insurance you had was bad! You need to pay double or triple rates for "Good Insurance" with high deductibles -- but the video is outstanding.

Remember, Obama vowed that you would have your own choice as to keeping your old, supposedly "bad," insurance, or converting to the new, supposedly "good" insurance.

If the new insurance is so good, why does he draft regulations to force people into buying it? Wouldn't "better" insurance entice people to subscribe to it out of their own volition?

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Posted by: Ace at 12:26 PM | Comments (474)
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I do appreciate that Jon Stewart notes the obvious -- the large number of things Obama is supposedly "not in the loop" on is alarming. Either he is lying, or he is a Chauncey Gardiner-like figurehead, who gives speeches and plays golf while the real president(s), unelected and unaccountable, do the actual governing.

But his bit is just not funny. The skit that follows is just Pure Silly, and hence not damaging to Obama at all. It's also not funny, partly because it's so intentionally non-damaging.

And here's this past weekend's SNL cold open about ObamaCare. All I can say is that the show is awful. Even when they have a rich target like this, their jokes border on the amateur, and also echo a lot of previous (better) jokes that have been done on the show.

In both cases I think it's pretty clear the comedians' hearts are not in it -- they still think there's nothing at all funny about Obama, but feel compelled to acknowledge some obvious truths.

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Posted by: Ace at 01:50 PM | Comments (156)
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First up, Hot Air has Charles Krauthammer attacking Comically Evasive Mouthpiece Jay Carney for imposing a raft of new mandated coverages on people, arguing, essentially, they're too stupid to know what's good for them, so Daddy Government is going to step in and choose policies for them.

Noah Rothman notes that Obama's minions -- here, one of Obama's claimed "favorite writers," a minor liberal hack at Business Insider -- are getting themselves right on Obama's Page as far as claiming People Don't Know No Better.

The technocratic conceit has always been that their judgment should supplant the will of the public. Their methods, they assure themselves, are always justified because the end is noble and the opposition is never arguing in good faith. If they were, the technocrat insists, there would be no opposition in the first place.

It is in this hubristic thinking that provides those seeking them with excuses that they believe vindicate so many otherwise indefensible ends – this includes subterfuge, and so much worse. The technocrats among us today justify the president’s lie because they believe the end is virtuous. And perhaps it is. But what they do not understand, just as [arrogant, bulldoze-happy city planner Robert] Moses never understood, is that no end is justified by any and every means. In fact, a virtuous project can be made forever toxic if its proponents adopt dishonest tactics in order to achieve it.

True. But we will have to discuss this word choice, "technocrat." I reject it. It implies skill -- tech is skill, after all -- that the putative technocrats do not actually evince.

We need a word for these people, but the flattering term technocrat is their preferred word choice, and it's not neutral. It's positive where it ought not to be.

Now, the story being missed here is this: How much, exactly, does adding a substance abuse treatment rider or maternal care rider to a policy actually increase a policy's premium?

Consider all the very expensive things a policy covers -- cancer, traumatic injuries from car accidents, back surgeries, strokes, heart attacks and related heart operations, diabetes, and on and on.

That's a lot of expensive treatments that hit with alarming regularity.

So how much will a substance abuse rider or mental health rider actually add to the premium to insure against these huge risks?

I don't know myself. But here is what I suspect: Such new coverage does in fact make ObamaCare insurance more expensive, but only by a little (say, 10-15%); the bulk of the increased premium costs, 85-90%, is due to forced, semi-hidden subsidization for other people.

What I'd like to see is a health policy expert put this theory to the test, assembling a policy per ObamaCare's rules, using 2011 costs for these additional coverages, and see how that Virtual ObamaCare policy stacks up to the actual ObamaCare policies in terms of premium.

If my hunch is correct, we'll find that the costs of the supposedly "better" coverage are quite minor, and that most of the new costs are simply imposed by distribution-of-wealth fiat.

And I'd suspect something else, too. Suppose I am a Tablet company executive. Suppose I sell tablets for $400. Suppose I intend, next year, to jack my prices up to near Apple's.

Well, if I were doing that, I couldn't just jack my prices up to $550. People would wonder, "Why am I paying Apple-level prices for a product I used to pay Amazon-level prices for?"

So how would I sell my new high prices to my client base? Why, I'd add features, and suggest that it is the cost of these new features which justifies the new, much-higher price.

Even if the cost of the features to me, and the fair price to customers, is only about 10% of the new price increase.

I'd need a pretext for jacking up prices, and I'd claim that "New Features!" was a good justification for doing so. I might not fool everyone, but hopefully, in my scheme, I'd fool some.

I think all this talk of the "new coverage" in ObamaCare is largely a smokescreen to hide the fact that people's premiums would be skyrocketing whether there were new features or not, because people are being charged a hidden tax to subsidize the uninsurable. It's the "New Features" claim that lets them claim that having your premiums jacked up double or triple is still, somehow, a really good deal.

Now, I don't know this: This is why I'd like to see Avik Roy or someone like this bust out his calculator, and tell me if I'm on the right track or off of it.

Until I see Avik Roy or someone with policy chops analyze these prices rigidly, I reject Krauthammer's casual acceptance of the spin that the increased prices are attributable to being forced into "better coverage."

Posted by: Ace at 11:28 AM | Comments (312)
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