November 25, 2013
— Ace It would just be "Aw that's funny" if he just did it accidentally.
But he doesn't seem to do it accidentally. Because he keeps doing it. He seems to be playing -- engaging in sport.
From @laurww, via The Hostages (the Andy/Dave/Laura Satellite of Love.)
more...
Posted by: Ace at
04:31 PM
| Comments (121)
Post contains 61 words, total size 1 kb.
— Ace Bonus points for an unexpected use of, "Let me finish."
Twitchy notes that what he now says he cannot do -- order the non-enforcement of immigration laws with respect to deportation -- he just did, last year, with regard to a subset of illegal aliens (younger ones).
Hey I just got an email from OFA on how to talk to your family about Obamacare this Thanksgiving: "Pivot to Immigration"
— SquatchPride69 (@AceofSpadesHQ) November 25, 2013more...
Posted by: Ace at
01:41 PM
| Comments (159)
Post contains 192 words, total size 2 kb.
— JohnE. Pure Coincidence.
From Obama's own website which shockingly, actually works:
This holiday season, millions of Americans have a chance to get quality, affordable health insurance—many for the first time. If you have family members who are uninsured, you can play a big part in helping them find coverage that works for them. It might not always seem like it, but your family listens to you. So have the talk.He's actually encouraging people to print up these lying points and to, I don't know, recite them at Thanksgiving dinner? This sort of flies in the face of his reassuring back-patting and confidence in you being your family's healthcare policy expert if you have to rely on pathetic propaganda you printed up. It's got pretty colors and paint-by-number instructions, so maybe this shit will fly over at the kids' table, but I wouldn't be so quick to try this in front of adults. Hungry and varying degrees of intoxicated adults who just want to watch football and be left alone.
If you can't catch the Chris Hayes "how to talk to conservatives about Obamacare at Thanksgiving dinner" special, don't worry, the same thing has already been printed in a number of newspapers and magazines across the country. From WaPo: A guide to surviving Obamacare debates at Thanksgiving
That's the part of the health-care law that isn't working. But in some states that built their own insurance marketplaces, Obamacare is working--and the health law is meeting enrollment projections. California, for example, has signed up 80,000 people for coverage and Washington has enrolled nearly 12,000. These examples are limited, but the suggest that the problem isn't with demand but a technical one. We won't know whether this is true everywhere, though, until HealthCare.gov is fixed.Yeah, go with that.
Next up, Huffington Post, who is not even trying to hide what side of this debate they're on: Here's Every Argument You'll Need To Win Your Obamacare Debate This Thanksgiving
We've all got a crazy uncle we love. He might not even technically be an uncle -- it's not something the family likes to get into -- but he's there at Thanksgiving every year just the same, getting heavy handed with the 1.5-liter wine bottle, insisting on calling the dog "bitch," starting with off-color jokes that made people uncomfortable even before the country "evolved" and finishing with a tea party-inspired screed about the Kenyan in the White House. We'll call him Uncle Hank.Your plan sucks Uncle Hank, you dumb slack-jawed hick. Get over it.
...
Those plans were terrible anyway -- high deductibles, no hospital coverage, dropped you if you got sick, etc. It wasn't insurance if you actually needed it. Cite an example from a family member here who's gotten screwed by an insurer. Shouldn't be hard to find.
Slate jumps in as well. They're not content with just bringing up Obamacare, they actually want you to fight about it: How To Pick a Fight With Your Relatives This Thanksgiving
2) Getting Started. First off, you should wait until everyone's seated at the table before you try to get things started. That way you have a captive audience that has to watch the fireworks, and everyone is settled in for a nice long time. Getting the topic of conversation to politics shouldn't be too hard. Stick to short, sarcastic, tendentious remarks to get things going. "I'm thankful for all that free stuff Obama gave me." Once you've engaged the enemy, it won't take much effort to pivot to whatever particular subject you feel most comfortable with. A good Thanksgiving skirmish will scamper from topic to topic wildly and without warning, but it's best to begin by digging into one particularly contentious subject to get tempers flared."Get in their faces". I remember someone saying that once.
There are others out there, even in local papers like the Denver Post and the Pittsburgh Courier. I'm sure there will be more before Thursday. But what if you don't feel like talking about Obamacare, what with the steady, embarrassing and collapsing failure and all? Well don't you worry one bit, because there are other liberal causes you can awkwardly bring up as well! Michael Bloomberg wants you to start talking about gun control, for instance.
Lovely people, aren't they? And of course, all coincidental.
Posted by: JohnE. at
12:36 PM
| Comments (368)
Post contains 758 words, total size 5 kb.
— Ace 1. Hey remember when you said that Obamacare was going to work great, and then, when people asked you how it actually worked, you sort of implied they were stupid for not knowing, and yet you never provided any evidence that you had any idea of how it was supposed to work yourself? Yeah, you were wrong to do that.
2. Remember when you called me crazy for saying Obama wanted to "spread the wealth around," based on not a scrap of evidence except for Obama himself saying he wanted to spread the wealth around? Yeah, there's a NYT article that says that Obamacare is fundamentally a redistributive program -- which means it "spreads the wealth around." Yeah you were wrong on that, too.
3. Remember when you said that it was only "REPUBLICAN LIES!!111!!" that Obama's "if you like your plan, you can keep your plan" promise was itself a lie? I hate to keep coming back to this point, but you were way wrong on that one too.
4. Remember the "if you like your doctor" pledge? Yeah I feel like a broken record here, but you were wrong.
5. Remember when you gleefully, giddily declared the end of the Republican Party and a new era of Proud Progressive dominance? Yeah, the current political Big Story is whether or not Obamacare will wind up discrediting progressivism for just an election cycle or two, or as much as a generation. It looks like you were wrong about that.
6. Remember when you were so confident, arrogant, snotty, sneering, and dismissive about legitimate and informed concerns about Obamacare? You were wrong. And you weren't just wrong on the facts, but you were wrong on a human level. You very nearly screamed your ignorant opinions and shouted down dissent. You sneered at people as ignorant who actually knew more than you did, and you indulged in entirely-unwarranted moral preening about your alleged concern for the poor. Despite the fact that you never do anything to actually aid the poor. Apparently shouting at relatives is your idea of "charity."
Yeah you were wrong. You are wrong.
I know you won't apologize, but at least keep your stupid mouth shut this year and let us all digest in peace.
Posted by: Ace at
11:48 AM
| Comments (265)
Post contains 407 words, total size 2 kb.
— Ace It truly is insidious, I think, this devotion to cause such that one would seriously -- earnestly! -- urge others to fight with family in order to advance a political goal.
It's not just about the casual denigration of the family in favor of the Real Family, which is of course like-minded socialists in the Progressive Cult. It is that, but it's not just that.
Devoting our whole show on Wednesday to how to talk about politics, news with conservative family members. Should be fun!
— Christopher Hayes (@chrislhayes) November 25, 2013It's also this idea that a person's highest aspiration is to be... A telemarketer. Or, as there's nothing "tele-" about picking fights with your family in face-to-face meetings, an epimarketer, then.
There is a terribly strange notion affecting the country, chiefly on the left but sometimes on the right, that man's highest calling is to be a Public Relations Account Manager.
But I'll put that aside to get to the funny stuff. Via @johnekdahl, enjoy this email from Organizing for America.
Do not read it hastily; the most magical sentence in the email is the second sentence.
Posted by: Ace at
10:55 AM
| Comments (373)
Post contains 312 words, total size 2 kb.
— Ace And just too concerned about #AndTheMiddleClass, I'm sure.
President Barack Obama, on a fundraising swing in Seattle on Sunday, described himself as "not a particularly ideological person" despite ongoing political clashes with Republicans over healthcare, the economy, and immigration reform....
The president called that chamber a barrier to progress in his remarks and said there would be broad consensus on issues such as immigration reform if politics were stripped away."I'm not a particularly ideological person," he said, saying pragmatism was necessary to advance the values that were important to him.
Note how Reuters sets up the President's claim with a stealth rebuttal, suggesting only the highly-ideological Republicans would call Obama ideological:
Republicans view the president as very ideological. They view his healthcare reform as a government overreach and are hoping to capitalize on its shaky rollout to keep control of the House and wrest control of the Senate away from Democrats in next year's midterm elections.
And yet nowhere in the article does Reuters acknowledge that many of Obama's and the Democrats' maneuvers -- delaying this, not enforcing that -- are, to put it into Reuters' language, designed to keep control of the Senate and wrest control of the House away from the Republicans in next year's midterm elections.
Nope! Only one political party engages in politics. And that's you-know-who. The Democrats are all about pragmatism and helpin' folks, and aren't ideological or political at all.
By the way, apparently Reuters didn't notice this, but in the same ridiculous speech in which he claimed to be non-ideological and non-political, he demanded that Nancy Pelosi be put back in charge of the House of Representatives.
“The biggest barrier and impediment we have right now is the Congress, and in particular the House of Representatives, that is not focused on getting the job done for the American people and is a lot more focused on trying to position themselves for the next election,” Obama told about 60 wealthy supporters at a fundraising dinner outside of Seattle.
That other party cares about winning elections, Obama said to group of wealthy supporters forking over $16,200 to $32,500 a plate in order to defeat the Republican Party.
Obama described himself “not a particularly ideological person,” saying he is passionate about his values but is practical about how to achieve them. He attacked House Republicans for being what he considered overly partisan.“More than anything, what we’re looking for is not the defeat of another party,” Obama said, in a non-partisan fashion.
I added that last clause. It was implied; I thought it ought to be explicity.
“What we’re looking for is the advancement of ideas. But to do that, we’re going to need Nancy Pelosi as speaker, because there’s a lot of work to be done right now.”
When I think of "fresh ideas," I think of Nancy Pelosi, and when I think of Nancy Pelosi, I think of mothballs and pee pee.
Obama hailed Pelosi, who was in attendance at Sunday night’s fundraising dinner, as “our once-speaker and soon-to-be-speaker-again.”
Yes and I'm sure she'll put politics aside as she campaigns to win a political election.
You will not be surprised to learn that the Washington Post has rushed out an article arguing that Obama is really not all that liberal at all.
Posted by: Ace at
10:05 AM
| Comments (276)
Post contains 566 words, total size 4 kb.
— Ace Via Hot Air, the press continues discovering how informative reading the law and consulting with impartial experts can be.
Don’t Dare Call the Health Law ‘Redistribution'...
“Redistribution is a loaded word that conjures up all sorts of unfairness in people’s minds,” said William M. Daley, who was Mr. Obama’s chief of staff at the time. Republicans wield it “as a hammer” against Democrats, he said, adding, “It’s a word that, in the political world, you just don’t use.”
These days the word is particularly toxic at the White House, where it has been hidden away to make the Affordable Care Act more palatable to the public and less a target for Republicans, who have long accused Democrats of seeking “socialized medicine.” But the redistribution of wealth has always been a central feature of the law and lies at the heart of the insurance market disruptions driving political attacks this fall.
“Americans want a fair and fixed insurance market,” said Jonathan Gruber, a health economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who advised Mr. Obama’s team as it designed the law. “You cannot have that without some redistribution away from a small number of people.”
A small number of kulaks, he means.
Don't worry about them. They're Unpeople.
The Times turns to the process of passing Obamacare.
...But throughout the process, they knew that some level of redistributing wealth — creating losers as well as winners — was inescapable.
They were nonetheless acutely aware of how explosive the word could be. When Mr. Obama ran for president in 2008, Republicans tried to wound him by accusing him of waging “class warfare” to achieve wealth redistribution. That fall, the Republican presidential nominee, Senator John McCain, derided Mr. Obama as the “redistributor in chief” as he seized on Mr. Obama’s comments to an Ohio man later known as “Joe the Plumber” that he wanted to “spread the wealth around.”
Who they "vetted" and awful lot. And then spent a lot of energy claiming that Obama didn't mean what he said when he said what he meant.
And now the press says, "Sorry, brah. M' bad."
Mr. Obama survived that episode and other instances when Republicans deployed old recordings of him using the word “redistribution” as evidence that he was a closet socialist. But Mr. Obama had learned a lesson.
The Times does not say this, but that lesson was "lie about everything."
The article discusses the acknowledged redistribution in Obamacare, such as targeting high income earners for additional taxes to finance the scheme. And then:
...And yet for those nervous about potential changes, the president promised stability. “If you like your current insurance, you will keep your current insurance,” Mr. Obama said the day he signed the legislation in March 2010, a promise he made repeatedly as the Oct. 1 opening day of the online health insurance marketplaces approached.
Hiding in plain sight behind that pledge — visible to health policy experts but not the general public — was the redistribution required to extend health coverage to those who had been either locked out or priced out of the market.
Now some of that redistribution has come clearly into view.
The press, again, is attempting to conjure a Narrative in which they are not to be deemed either ignorant and incompetent, or else dishonest and complicit in foisting an enormously consequential lie upon the public.
They acknowledge that this was all known by "health policy experts," and yet nowhere here is a satisfactory answer to why the New York Times' own health policy experts did not disclose the redistribution at the heart of Obamacare. Their only quote from a media writer warning the public of this is from a National Review writer, writing back in May 2013.
Did they have no citations to the alleged "Paper of Record" explaining this? Apparently not.
Why not?
As with Obama himself, there are only two possible explanations:
1, the press is ignorant and incompetent and simply not up to the job of doing anything more difficult than straight stenography. And what does this say about their alleged status as the cognitive elite?
or,
2, the press is institutionally, conspiratorially dishonest, and chose not only to not report this for four long years, but even more, chose to actively join in a lie. Because they are fundamentally political actors, and they behave as if they are an extension of Obama's communications shop, pushing false Narratives and pushing back against honest, accurate criticism.
And what does that say about their status as the nation's fact-finders?
At some point, we will get them to confront this, and give us a straight answer as to why they lied to the country, more frequently than Obama himself , about Obama and his pet redistributive Trojan Horse.
Posted by: Ace at
09:08 AM
| Comments (286)
Post contains 836 words, total size 6 kb.
— Gabriel Malor Oh, now you tell us. Oversold, underdelivered:
Back in April, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told a congressional subcommittee that any individual making under that $45,960 threshold -- or four times the poverty level of $11,490 for an individual -- would qualify for "an upfront tax subsidy."more...
"Somebody who's making $25,500 would definitely qualify for a subsidy if he or she is purchasing coverage in the individual market," Sebelius added.Despite the secretary's assurance, a 25-year-old living in Nashville, Tennessee, making $25,500 will not qualify for a subsidy, for example.
Posted by: Gabriel Malor at
08:16 AM
| Comments (217)
Post contains 131 words, total size 1 kb.
— Gabriel Malor Baby steps. Now that Obama's popularity, credibility, and, er, usefulness is at an all-time low, the papers can pretend to have some journalistic ethics again.
From now on, we won’t publish White House handout photos of events that should have been open to news photographers, even if that means going without a photo. As the protest letter said, closing the door to the press gets in the way of “the public’s ability to independently monitor and see what its government is doing.
It was the case last year and the year before that the Obama White House ran a tightfisted propaganda machine. The papers are only squealing now because it's easy to.
*Headline corrected. Bah. Seattle, Tacoma. All ya'll look alike.
Update: A bigger deal: USA Today is also declining to run White House propaganda photos.
Posted by: Gabriel Malor at
07:42 AM
| Comments (121)
Post contains 155 words, total size 1 kb.
— andy Welcome to the short workweek, or, as the Campaigner-in-Chief calls it, a week.
President Barack Obama sounded a nostalgic personal note Sunday night and offered a rare self-assessment while criticizing congressional Republicans as an "impediment" to governing during the start of a West Coast fundraising tour for the Democratic Party.Obama told donors the sight of Mt. Rainier illuminated by a setting sun was particularly special because it reminded him of his mother, who attended high school in the Seattle area. "I feel the spirit of my mom," he said.
He also attempted to contrast himself with Republicans who control the House of Representatives, saying they are "more focused on positioning themselves for the next election."
"I'm not a particularly ideological person," he said, adding he still is passionate about giving people a fair shake, about the environment, and working for peace and national security. "But I'm pretty pragmatic about how we get there."
Hahahahaha. Whatever, dude.
And ICYMI, Team Juicebox provided some hilarious entertainment over the weekend. Part 1. Part 2.
*Programming Note* We want your comments, questions, advice, jokes, japes, and jackfoolery for this weeks' podcast. This is a holiday-week opportunity only, so if you're really dying to get something out of the cobs, this is your moment. Send your question/comment/request for advice/whatever to andy+asktheblog AT aoshq DOT com, and, provided it's not utter lunacy, there's a good chance we'll read it and either answer it or (more likely) mock it on the podcast. You know you want to.
AoSHQ Weekly Podcast: [
RSS] [
iTunes] [Download Latest Episode]
Posted by: andy at
02:47 AM
| Comments (459)
Post contains 262 words, total size 3 kb.
44 queries taking 0.3783 seconds, 151 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.
