Heritage is not to blame

In the course of a Facebook snit with a bunch of Freedom-Haters, I came across this Stuart Butler column in USA  Today:

The confusion arises from the fact that 20 years ago, I held the view that as a technical matter, some form of requirement to purchase insurance was needed in a near-universal insurance market to avoid massive instability through "adverse selection" (insurers avoiding bad risks and healthy people declining coverage). At that time, President Clinton was proposing a universal health care plan, and Heritage and I devised a viable alternative.

My view was shared at the time by many conservative experts, including American Enterprise Institute (AEI) scholars, as well as most non-conservative analysts. Even libertarian-conservative icon Milton Friedman, in a 1991 Wall Street Journal article, advocated replacing Medicare and Medicaid "with a requirement that everyU.S. family unit have a major medical insurance policy."

My idea was hardly new. Heritage did not invent the individual mandate.

But the version of the health insurance mandate Heritage and I supported in the 1990s had three critical features. First, it was not primarily intended to push people to obtain protection for their own good, but to protect others. Like auto damage liability insurance required in most states, our requirement focused on "catastrophic" costs — so hospitals and taxpayers would not have to foot the bill for the expensive illness or accident of someone who did not buy insurance.

Second, we sought to induce people to buy coverage primarily through the carrot of a generous health credit or voucher, financed in part by a fundamental reform of the tax treatment of health coverage, rather than by a stick.

And third, in the legislation we helped craft that ultimately became a preferred alternative to ClintonCare, the "mandate" was actually the loss of certain tax breaks for those not choosing to buy coverage, not a legal requirement.

So why the change in this position in the past 20 years?

First, health research and advances in economic analysis have convinced people like me that an insurance mandate isn't needed to achieve stable, near-universal coverage. For example, the new field of behavioral economics taught me that default auto-enrollment in employer or nonemployer insurance plans can lead many people to buy coverage without a requirement.

Also, advances in "risk adjustment" tools are improving the stability of voluntary insurance. And Heritage-funded research on federal employees' coverage — which has no mandate — caused me to conclude we had made a mistake in the 1990s. That's why we believe that President Obama and others are dead wrong about the need for a mandate.

Additionally, the meaning of the individual mandate we are said to have "invented" has changed over time. Today it means the government makes people buy comprehensive benefits for their own good  rather than our original emphasis on protecting society from the heavy medical costs of free riders.

 

 

Pretty much everybody except the Kook-Aid guzzlers gets it now

Politco, nobody's idea of a rightie outlet, has a those-who-warned-that-the-MEC-was-blowing-smoke-from-the-get-go-are-proving-prescient story today.

On Monday, NBC News reported that at least half of the approximately 14 million Americans with individual insurance are set to have their health plans shut down by insurers under Obamacare. On Wednesday, the story was featured on the front page of some of the nation’s leading newspapers and was the main talking point for Republican lawmakers during the congressional hearing with Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

For Republicans, it’s been a long time coming.

“We’ve been warning that these things were going to happen since 2009,” said Kirsten Kukowski, the press secretary for the Republican National Committee.
“There were stories all across the country,” said Brendan Buck, the press secretary for House Speaker John Boehner. “We see stories like that get dismissed — but this was going to happen at some point, it was inevitable.”
For the past few years, the RNC, top conservative think tanks and several influential right-leaning bloggers have been trying to convince Americans that Obama’s claim about being able to keep your plan was wrong. A few news outlets also cautioned against the president’s promise. As early as June 2009, The Associated Press wrote that “no president could guarantee such a pledge.”

But for the most part, the mainstream media failed to aggressively pursue the story, taking Obama’s claim at face value without testing it against the facts. Meanwhile, congressional Republicans, who had given a burst of attention several years ago to the issue that people may lose their plans, moved on to critiquing other aspects of the legislation and the press coverage followed. 

“For the mainstream media, this matters to them now because they feel like they were lied to — that’s why it’s caught on,” Kukowski said. “The White House made it out like we were the ones crying wolf, now it turns out they’re the ones who were wrong.”

Nobody who's not hopelessly brainwashed like being handed a bunch of jive.

 

Sink, Comrade sink!

Beautiful and glorious!  Unprecedented low approval numbers for the Lightworker in Chief!

Tell it, Sister Suze!

WSJ column by actress and health advocate Suzanne Somers on FHer-care.

I’ve had an opportunity to watch the Canadian version of affordable health care in action with all its limitations with my Canadian husband’s family. A few years ago, I was startled to see the cover of Maclean’s, a national Canadian magazine, showing a picture of a dog on an examining table with the headline, “Your Dog Can Get Better Health Care Than You.” It went on to say that young Canadian medical students have no incentive to become doctors to humans because they can’t make any money. Instead, there is a great surge of Canadian students becoming veterinarians. That’s where the money is. A Canadian animal can have timely MRIs, surgeries and any number of tests it needs to receive quality health care.

My sister-in-law had to wait two months to get a General Practitioner. During this period she spent her days in bed vomiting continuously, unable to get any food or drink down because she couldn’t get an appointment with the doctor. When she finally did, the doctor said, “Oh you don’t need me, you need a specialist.” That took another two weeks until she got a pill that corrected the problem.

Really, is this what we want?

All of my husband’s cousins are doctors. Several have moved to the U.S. because after their years of intensive schooling, they want to reap financial rewards. My 75-year-old Canadian girlfriend was denied treatment because she was too old. She died recently, having been given palliative care. That’s all the system would allow.

Evil

I know it looks like I've ratcheted up the hyperbole level as the day has progressed, but there's no other word for this.  Representative Steny Hoyer confesses forthrightly that Freedom-Haters knew all along that some people would not be able to keep insurance policies they were perfectly satisfied with and that the Most Equal Comrade's lies were intended to placate those who, hopefully, wouldn't be too badly surprised by the truth.

Need further substantiation that evil is not an inappropriate term to use in this context?  Here it is.

So far, LITD still has it available for you

I've been hearing all day about NBC making Lisa Myers's report on how the MEC lied about FHer-care disappear into thin air.  But I just checked my link in the post below, and voila, there's the story.

Maybe the network put it back once word got out?

The early symptoms of Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome

I basically like Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin.  I saw him live at the Americans for Prosperity Defending the American Dream summit in August and was impressed with his story of how he decided to make the leap from business into politics.

I'm not at all happy with the bill he's authored that grandfathers existing plans into FHer-care, though.  It's predicated on the most dangerous notion of all:  That FHer-care is here to say.  Pubs must not lift that poisoned chalice to their lips.

Two big-picture looks at the emerging historical take on the MEC

Victor Davis Hanson at NRO and Dennis Prager at Townhall.

Hanson:

The world’s leaders do not any longer seem much impressed by the president’s cat-like walk down the steps of Air Force One, or the soaring cadences that rechannel hope-and=change themes onto the world scene. They acknowledge that their own publics may like the American president, and especially his equivocation about the traditional role of American power in the world. But otherwise, for the next three years, the world is in a holding pattern, wondering whether there is a president of the United States to reckon with or a mere teleprompted functionary. Certainly, the Obama Nobel Peace Prize is now the stuff of comedy.

At home, the signature Affordable Care Act is proving its sternest critics prescient. The mess can best be summed up by Republicans’ being demonized for trying to delay or defund Obamacare — after the president himself chose not to implement elements of his own law — followed immediately by congressional Democrats’ seeking to parrot the Republicans. So are the Democrats followers of Ted Cruz or Barack Obama? Is Obama himself following Ted Cruz?

Prager:

I have never written or broadcast that our country was being seriously damaged by a president. So it is with great sadness that I write that President Barack Obama has done and continues to do major damage to America. The only question is whether this can ever be undone.
This is equally true domestically and internationally.
Domestically, his policies have gravely impacted the American economy.
He has overseen the weakest recovery from a recession in modern American history.
He has mired the country in unprecedented levels of debt: about $6.5 trillion dollars in five years (this after calling his predecessor "unpatriotic" for adding nearly $5 trillion in eight years).
He has fashioned a country in which more Americans now receive government aid -- means-tested, let alone non-means tested -- than work full-time.
He has no method of paying for this debt other than printing more money -- thereby surreptitiously taxing everyone through inflation, including the poor he claims to be helping, and cheapening the dollar to the point that some countries are talking another reserve currency -- and saddling the next generations with enormous debts.

With his 2,500-page Affordable Care Act, he has made it impossible for hundreds of thousands, soon millions, of Americans to keep their individual or employee-sponsored group health insurance; he has stymied American medical innovation with an utterly destructive tax on medical devices; and he has caused hundreds of thousands of workers to lose full-time jobs because of the health care costs imposed by Obamacare on employers. 

His Internal Revenue Service used its unparalleled power to stymie political dissent. No one has been held accountable.

His ambassador to Libya and three other Americans were murdered by terrorists in Benghazi, Libya. No one has been blamed. The only blame the Obama administration has leveled was on a video maker in California who had nothing to do with the assault.

In this president's White House, the buck stops nowhere.

The magnitude of the ruin and chaos he is generating is unprecedented.

 

It's on purpose - today's edition

Retail sales are headed south big-time.

Can you find worse?  Sure can -- look at 2001 (-11.14%) or 2002 (-11.09%) -- both during the Tech Wreck.
The bottom line is that this number is very soft -- indeed, right on the edge of recession territory.

And homes sales have collapsed at the fastest rate in 40 months.

Can you say Cloward - Piven?

Real-life stories from post-America

There's now a website sharing the stories of those who have lost their insurance under FHer-care.

"Lie" is the only accurate word for it

To call a public figure a liar is the cheapest of cheap shots, cheaper even than a charge of bigotry.

But the Most Equal Comrade has been caught red-handed in an intentional falsehood he uttered repeatedly.

He knew that million of Americans would not get to keep health plans they were perfectly satisfied with under FHer-care.

The MEC's new partner in patty-cake - today's edition

Our State Department wants so much to hang hopes of comity, rainbows and unicorns on Rouhani, the new Iranian president.  But since he's assumed office, the stonings, hangings, and harrassment have continued apace.  (And let us not forget the 80 lashes each for four Christians for drinking communion wine I posted about the other day.)

You probably missed the news that four women were recently stoned to death in the country President Obama loves to flatter by calling it the Islamic Republic of Iran.  Their bodies showed up in the Tehran morgue mid-month.  So far as I have read, no one has claimed the cadavers.

You may also have missed the big roundup of homosexuals and devil-worshippers in Kermanshah Province.  Regime media reported with horror that eight of the gays were married.

And then there was the mass arrests of a hundred Kurds in Tehran.  Why Kurds?  The answer:  there’s a real war on in the region, and the Kurds are in the middle.  Kurds in Turkey are fighting for autonomy against the Erdogan crowd.  Kurds in Iraq have carved out a great degree of independence from Baghdad, and are profitably engaged in cross-border commerce with the Iranian Kurds, who are helping the Turkish Kurds…who are helping the Syrian Kurds, who have established control over significant areas of the north, and who justgrabbed one of the two principal border crossings into Iraq.  The Tehran regime is fighting Kurds in the area near Turkey, and the arrests are probably part of that campaign. 

[snip]

 Indeed, repression is worse all over the country;  150 have been (officially) executed since the Great Moderate won office.

And while State wants Congress to hold off on a new round of sanctions in order to see what fruit patty-cake can bear, Iran continues 20 percent uranium enrichment.

 

Just plain wacky

The MEC regime is going to start letting Libyans come to post-America to train in aviation maintenance and nuclear science - at a time when the Benghazi 9/11/12 situation is still unresolved and when Libya is in a state of total chaos and overrun with militias.

It depends on whether you're using normal-people criteria or FHer criteria on the question of whether the MEC's foreign policy is a success or an abject failure

The facts are clear:  The world in general wants to know what the hell is up with the post-American regime.

Again, I point out that, yes, by conventional standards, the guy and his regime are an utter failure.  The unquestioned role of US world leadership is now openly and frequently questioned.  But, when you consider that that is the essence of the declinist enterprise, you have to give the guy the preponderance of the numbers on the scoreboard.

So, Most Equal Comrade, does there ever come a point at which you are responsible?

Daisy of Chicks on the Right looks squarely at the broader implications of Kathleen Sibelius's remark about not working for those who have a problem with the failure of the FHer-care launch.

The thunderous truth

49 years ago today.  On any list of the ten most important speeches of the twentieth century.

Powerful, from the heart, and spot-on

Breitbart.com felt that a piece Erick Erickson wrote for Red State called "What I Fear" was important enough to reprint it.

It is about how the level of vitriol and spiritual poison on the Left in this country has reached a point at which some conservatives - particularly young ones - may decide to adopt Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome out of abject fear.

He begins is piece listing a few examples of the harrassment and threats of torture and murder of his family he has endured in recent years, and says that this really isn't what he fears.  Then he gets to the gist of his point:

Let me tell you what I do fear.

I fear that because of these people, their hatred for me, and the world’s hatred for God Almighty, that my children might decide it is a far better path through life to find an accommodation with the world than have the world hate them because of either of their Fathers — the one here or the one in Heaven.

I fear my kids might decide to go along to get along. The Bible says, and history bears it out, that the world hates those of God because the world hates God. I fear my children, though, may decide they love the world more than God because it is easier to get through this world doing that.

It is not easy for my family. My wife sometimes gets asked questions or mouthed off to by people who would not do that to me. The kids pick up on more than we realize. We are occasionally stopped in public by people who recognize me.

This is my fear. This is why I write checks to my church. Yes, God says tithe, but I write the check as much because our church is a safe haven from the world — a place where my kids can go and worship and learn to love God apart from the world — to love him as he is meant to be loved and to be surrounded by others willing to love God.

The other day, I was in the midst of one of my periodic Facebook tangles with a leftist of my acquaintance, and somehow Sarah Palin got inserted into the proceedings.  This person said, "If there's ever a public guillotining of that bitch, I want a front row seat."

This is the difference between the sides in the war for America's soul.  The Left conflates hatred of our ideas and principles with hatred of us as persons.  We characteristically don't do that, and must guard our thoughts and emotions against it.  In fact, Erickson alludes to the way out of such a position by basing his position on the centrality of God.  We must pray, and pray fervently - that we can find the effective way to change the minds and hearts of our enemies, and, in any event, pray that we can stay above a desire to wish them personal ill.

This tenet has been at conservatism's core since Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France.  Burke foresaw the profound difference in the way that revolution was shaping up, and the recently concluded revolution in America.  Chivalry, charity, a desire for good to prevail, the exaltation of dignity, were essential to the American revolution (recall Jefferson's discussion of how the colonists had tried, in the Declaration of Independence, to appeal to the common bonds held with their British brethren), and lacking in the unrest brewing in France, which would shortly lead to Robespierre's reign of terror (speaking of guillotines) and the outsized imperial ambitions of Napoleon.

The reason conservatism is so preoccupied with the individual vis a vis the collective society is that individual virtues that equip us for dealing with a fallen universe are at the core of what we seek to foster.

Pub machinations are not the reason we don't have single-payer health care

Great Debra Saunders column on the ruse that FHers are putting forth: that there was some kind of action on the part of Pubs that prevented FHers from crafting a full-tilt pure-socialism health care law.

Just ain't so.

The latest iteration of Democrats-on-the-cross works like this: Obamacare hasn't delivered the big savings promised by the president -- $2,500 annually for the average family -- because Democrats ditched the single-payer model to mollify Republicans. In the Los Angeles Times, Harvard professor Jane Mansbridge writes,

"The Democratic Party reluctantly adopted RomneyCare, a.k.a. Obamacare, to get Republican approval." What's more, House Republicans "coerced the Democrats into adopting a Republican health insurance reform plan."

A reader emails me, "The Republicans who hate Obama would not permit the creation of a decent single payer plan which would allow private insurance carriers to participate on a competitive uniform benefit program." Another insists, "We wanted single payer! The GOP did not -- that was the compromise, and it was one of many from this president."

Really? The Affordable Care Act did not win a single Republican vote on the House or Senate floor. If Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi abandoned single-payer to win GOP votes, they are the most incompetent negotiators in history.

And this:

Now, I won't deny that two decades ago, some conservative think tank swell came up with the term "individual mandate" -- which allowed other wonks to try to pin the tail on the elephant. But if liberals have to fish for a 1989 Heritage Foundation policy paper that had no Republican support in 2008, 2009 or 2012 to establish Republican paternity for the Affordable Care Act, that tells you one thing: They think Obamacare won't work. 

Can you say "tipping point?"

Here's what country you live in: recipients of gummint benefits outnumber year-round full-time workers.

We all know that FHer-care is not getting many takers so far, but among that meager few, what group is the most represented?

Those signing up for Medicaid.  They're outnumbering healthy folks getting private plans big-time, which spells collapse for FHer-care if it's not reversed.

This is encouraging

It looks like House Pubs won't take the bait on amnesty for illegal aliens.  There's no interest in passing the Senate bill or even dealing with immigration for the rest of the year.

Looking for the exits

Two pieces I've run across this morning on the beginning of a significant phenomenon:  Freedom-Haters in Congress bailing on FHer-care:  Jonah Goldberg at NRO and Kimberly Strassel at the WSJ.

This is the Most Equal Comrade's new patty-cake partner

Iran sentences four Christians to 80 lashes each for drinking wine during communion.

Secretary Global Test no doubt wants to have a substantive Syria pow-wow, but he's not likely to get much support from his boss, who is bored by foreign policy

Due to the bolstered position of Assad and the splintered condition of the resistance in Syria, Global Test's big conference looks to be a bust.  I would imagine he's more than a little frustrated by the indifference to it all shown by the Most Equal Comrade.

A close examination of how the Obama administration finds itself at this point — based on interviews with dozens of current and former members of the administration, foreign diplomats and Congressional officials — starts with a deeply ambivalent president who has presided over a far more contentious debate among his advisers than previously known. Those advisers reflected Mr. Obama’s own conflicting impulses on how to respond to the forces unleashed by the Arab Spring: whether to side with those battling authoritarian governments or to avoid the risk of becoming enmeshed in another messy war in the Middle East.

[snip]

Even as the debate about arming the rebels took on a new urgency, Mr. Obama rarely voiced strong opinions during senior staff meetings. But current and former officials said his body language was telling: he often appeared impatient or disengaged while listening to the debate, sometimes scrolling through messages on his BlackBerry or slouching and chewing gum.

In private conversations with aides, Mr. Obama described Syria as one of those hellish problems every president faces, where the risks are endless and all the options are bad. Those views would then be reflected in larger groups by Tom Donilon, the national security adviser, and Mr. McDonough. 

And this guy still has devotees who swoon at his every word.

I knew that all countries gathered intelligence on other countries, but wowee zowee!

Can anyone tell us if there is a precedent for this?  The NSA monitored the phone activity of 35 world leaders.

Can you say "orchestrated decline?"

CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield says 76,000 policy holders in Virginia, Maryland and DC will lose those policies due to FHer-care.

When one considers that corralling the masses into the pen of socialist health care is the real aim of its architects, this thing is a stellar success.

There has been no sabotage; just plain failure

Charles C.W. Cooke at NRO makes an important point about the argument one is starting to hear that states which declined to set up their own exchanges are somehow responsible for FHer-care's horrible rollout:

To believe that the states have in some way “nullified” or “sabotaged” the law by choosing not to do the lifting themselves is to believe that the states are merely regional departments of the federal government and that their electing whether or not to expand Medicaid or set up health-care exchanges is illegitimate. In this case, “political reasons” means doing what the people in their states wanted them to do. What next? That “if Americans had just chosen to sign up, then the system would have worked”?

I guess I can see the FHers' motivation for such desperate whining.  It would be hard, if you were an FHer, to admit that this BFD, in Joe Biden's immortal characterization, was inherently fatally flawed.

Losing influence in a region where we can hardly afford to do so

The Most Equal Comrade's moves in the middle east over the last couple of years have cost us much respect and trust:

What should worry the Obama administration is that Saudi concern about U.S. policy in the Middle East is shared by the four other traditional U.S. allies in the region: Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Israel. They argue (mostly privately) that Obama has shredded U.S. influence by dumping President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, backing the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi, opposing the coup that toppled Morsi, vacillating in its Syria policy, and now embarking on negotiations with Iran — all without consulting close Arab allies.

Once again, I say, the one thing you can't fault the MEC for is hiding his aims.  He's let it be known from the outset of his career as a socialist that he desired to the America taken down a peg.  So it's inaccurate to call him a failure.  Unfortunately, on hos own terms, he's quite a success.

Another "glitch" in FHer-care

The estimates for the costs of plans it's giving people who get far enough into the website to do some shopping are often utterly meaningless.

Now, this really is a BFD

U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman is refusing to dismiss a case brought by attorney Sam Kazman alleging that the regime is treating all states the same regarding FHer-care, granting subsidies even in states that took a pass on creating their own exchanges.

Could be the move that pulls the plug on socialist health care once and for all.

And we were excoriated for our attempt to defund it

NBC News reports that hundreds of thousands of folks who bought their own health insurance are now getting cancellation notices.

The Most Equal Comrade just plain lied to us.

Meanwhile, on post-America's foreign-policy front . . .

Saudi Arabia is nobody's idea of a wonderful country.  However, it has been a staunch ally of the United States, and that has had important ramifications in our overall dealings with the middle east.  Now, it seems that the oil-rich kingdom is reconsidering the relationship on the most basic level, mainly because of the MEC's overtures to Iran and its fumbling of the Syrian matter.

And how is the Syrian civil war going?  It seems the momentum is presently with a not-too-worried Bashar Assad.

Even Darden Restaurants' part-timers . . .

. . . are getting their health insurance 86ed due to FHer-care.

She's not going to let that one go unremarked upon

Remember my three-takes-on-the-meaning-of-the-shutdown post from yesterday, and how George Will had penned one of the takes?

Well, Sally Zelikovsky at The American Thinker doesn't think much of his construct:

To suggest that the Tea Party has common ground with the one person and administration that stands diametrically opposed to everything they hold dear -- limited government, fiscal responsibility, lower taxes, individual liberty, and free markets -- is a reductio ad absurdum. One wonders if the author is completely out of touch with the people who make up the Tea Party or is just filled with his own disdain for it? I hope the former.

Then, to describe this supposedly shared disdain with the qualification "within the Framer's institutional architecture" makes me further wonder where George Will has been for the last five years? The Tea Party reveres the Constitution, the Framers, and their infrastructure for constitutional governance. The Tea Party actually promotes the "practice of politics" as long as it takes place "within the Framer's institutional architecture." It's... what we live for! And, it's what we've been ridiculed for as well.

We've endured five years of left-wing mockery and scathing condescension characterizing the Tea Party as patriotic throwbacks to an outdated constitution. The fact that random tea partiers can quote directly from the Federalist Papers -- and understand what they are saying -- is a testament to their reverence. Moreover, many tea partiers want to repeal the 17th Amendment so the Senate would go back to being chosen by the states -- not the popular vote -- so that this process is brought back into alignment with the original "institutional architecture" set forth by the Framers!

I had that problem with it, too.

Truth is on your side

Obviously, it's not fun to see Facebook posts or comment threads under political articles that paint Tea Party types as knuckle draggers and bigots.  Your solace can be the fact that it's a false portrayal.

Digging a deeper hole

There's a certain type of speech that the MEC gives in which he tries to reassure the post-American public that he is resolute and on top of the problematic situation at hand, and is woefully inadequate at achieving that aim.

Such was the case today when he spoke about the abysmal launch of the exchange website.  Jake Tapper and Wolf Blitzer at CNN were both underwhelmed.  Tapper made the key point about it:  Citizens are under the threat of getting dinged for not signing up for something that's impossible to sign up for.

It sure doesn't help that only 3 of the 13 people standing behind the MEC at his Rose Garden speech have successfully signed up for FHer-care on the exchange.

Parsing the meaning of last week - a few different takes

There's Andrew McCarthy at NRO.  He represents the "a-Hail-Mary-pass-was-the-best-option-given-the-circumstances" school:

It is repeatedly said that the crusade to defund Obamacare was delusional, that it never had a chance. That is an overstatement. Hail Mary passes are tried because they occasionally work. A lot of things have to go right, and the success rate is low. But a Hail Mary is a ray of hope when the clock nears zero, when something has to be done, and when you are out of better options.

So, were we out of better options? I think so. To my mind, if the defund plan was delusional, the GOP establishment’s “repeal Obamacare by winning elections” alternative is delusional squared.

[snip]

To repeal Obamacare on the establishment plan, the GOP needs sudden and sustained electoral success — despite the high hurdle of media bias. At least two federal election cycles, and more likely three or more (i.e., at least four years, and probably six or more), will be necessary. Obama, after all, will still be president for three more years and will never sign a repeal bill. Even if a Republican wins the White House in 2016, and even if Republicans by then have held the House and won the Senate, the GOP will not have overwhelming congressional majorities.

Then there's George Will in the WaPo putting forth the "the-rightie-base-was-hobbled-because-James-Madison-designed-the-relationship-between-government's-branches- that-way" view:

Obama wanted something simple rather than a product of Madisonian complexity. He wanted something elegantly unblemished by “any” messy legislative involvement, other than Congress’s tug of the forelock at final approval. It is, Obama thinks, unfortunate that he had to talk to many people.

He and some of his tea party adversaries share an impatience with Madisonian politics, which requires patience. The tea party’s reaffirmation of Madison’s limited-government project is valuable. Now, it must decide if it wants to practice politics.

Rauch hopes there will be “an intellectual effort to advance a principled, positive, patriotic case for compromise, especially on the right.” He warns that Republicans, by their obsessions with ideological purity and fiscal policy, “have veered in the direction of becoming a conservative interest group, when what the country needs is a conservativeparty .”

A party is concerned with power , understood as the ability to achieve intended effects. A bull in a china shop has consequences, but not power, because the bull cannot translate intelligent intentions into achievements. The tea party has a choice to make. It can patiently try to become the beating heart of a durable party, which understands this: In Madisonian politics, all progress is incremental. Or it can be a raging bull, and soon a mere memory, remembered only for having broken a lot of china. Conservatives who prefer politics over the futility of intransigence gestures in Madison’s compromise-forcing system will regret the promise the tea party forfeited, but will not regret that, after the forfeiture, it faded away.

Then there's Kimberly Strassel at the WSJ, who adheres to the "the-lack-of-clarity-about-strategy-and-results-did-in-the-defund-it-now-crusaders" view:

The Americans who supported the defund mission did so for the right reasons. They are correct that the law is a disaster, and that GOP leadership lacked a coherent plan to counter it this summer. They are correct that the House has every "right" to control the purse. They are correct that the party is too often rudderless, that it has lacked a vision, that it needs some bold figures willing to define a modern (which doesn't mean populist) conservatism.
But none of that changes the fact that Defund ObamaCare was the wrong fight, at the wrong time, facing impossible odds, and conducted by generals who lacked an endgame. Being right isn't always enough.

History is full of brave men who are famous mostly for losing. Republicans will have more shots to cut down ObamaCare, and pry out budget concessions. But to win those fights, they'll have to learn from this one. Brave charges mean little if they aren't followed by victory. 

What say you?  Are these mutually exclusive postmortems, or are there elements of each in an accurate assessment of what went down?

I know that nothing makes my teeth grind like some elected official who is universally regarded as having his or her conservative creds in impeccable order responding to questions on a talk show with boilerplate, talking points and platitudes.  I expect that out of those afflicted with Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome, and certainly out of FHers, who, after all, have much to hide regarding where they're really coming from.  So, I find myself inclined toward disillusionment way too often.

But then I run across a real-deal principled rightie such as Ted Cruz, or Sarah Palin, and I watch them proceed with happy-warrior certainty in the face of vitriol that includes death threats, and I begin to harbor a bit of hope for Western civilization.

 

This is not about mere "software glitches"; this is about whether the architects have the chops to plan, strategize and manage

Why the hell would you trust them?  They have no competition.  They're the only game in town.  So it matters not that they didn't test the technology until a week before rollout.   You, dear comrade with the blank cattle stare, will just stand there in the corral until we tell you what to do next.

Let's check in with FHer-care implementation; how are things going today?

Oops. Not so great.  More website hose-ups and more cancellation letters.

And the Kaiser Family Foundation is advising people to earn less money so as to qualify for subsidies.

The overlords' plan to bring America to its knees is right on target.

What was that again about a debt-ceiling increase not adding to the debt?

The federal government's debt surpasses $17 trillion for the first time ever.

The jackbooted henchmen carrying out the overlord's grand design

Are you cool with someone like this being a FHer-care "navigator"?

Dismal failure - this hour's edition

Maryland, which had set such great store by its self-identification as an example of smooth FHer-care rollout, is turning out to be anything but.

Horror stories from actual households - and lots of 'em

Heritage is posting tweets, anecdotes and photos of premium-hike-notification letters from Americans whose situations are definitely not improving as Freedom-Hater-care begins to grip our society by the throat.

Maybe we've already found a more effective way to kneecap FHer-care

Conservatism is based on keeping things as local as possible, and using the states as policy laboratories to see what works and what doesn't.  It seems that some pretty nice damage to FHer-care is being done by that method:

Let's start with the disastrous launch of the behemoth federal insurance exchange run by the Health and Human Services Department. Yes, Republicans managed to divert attention from that to their own comedy of errors on Capitol Hill. But don't forget why the federal exchange,healthcare.gov, is so gigantic. It's because just 16 states and the District of Columbia created or plan to create their own marketplaces. By contrast,almost all of the nation's 30 Republican governors took a pass on setting up exchanges for their own states, punting that task to the feds. That along with other tactics and decisions amounts to what you might call the GOP Effect—damage that's indirect, often uncoordinated, and possibly at times unintentional, but potent all the same.

For instance, some of the initial problems on the federal exchange were due to heavy traffic. It would not have been as much of a bottleneck had more governors created individual state exchanges. More serious and continuing problems are due to misjudgments and shortcomings embedded in the federal website itself, and the worst may be yet to come.

Using our own model for getting things done.  What a concept!

They'll have to get their ice cream from somewhere else

Bonnie Doon, an ice-cream maker that has been a South Bend - Mishawaka institution for generations, is closing its production plant, specifically citing FHer-care as the reason why.

It is a great question

An Investors Business Daily editorial points out that FHer-care has been coming in for a lot of derision and pronouncements of failure and disaster - from prominent FHers (Ezra Klein, Robert Gibbs, Jon Stewart), while Pub response to the rollout has been tepid.  Why is this so?

Well, not all Pubs have been tepid, of course.  There's our bunch (Cruz, Lee, et al). I guess the Reasonable Gentleman-afflicted look at the abuse heaped on those willing to really fight to kill FHer-care and conclude, "Not for me, thank you."  Not an honorable course, but understandable, given human nature.

Enough with this preoccupation over shiny objects, already

Last week, it was the fascination with 86ing the medical-device tax (and, to reiterate, the LITD position is that that would be an essential part of any overall final solution).  Now, it's with FHer-care subsidy applicants having to verify their incomes - and, again, this is important and must be part of any satisfactory ultimate deal.

But any agreement with the Freedom-Haters on a way to skate past Thursday's debt-ceiling max-out must not hinge on one, or even two, isolated aspects of FHer-care.

So I am encouraged by the rumblings leaking to the public ahead of the meeting of House Pubs going on even as I write.

Would love to know the name of the Representative who called the latest Senate proposal "a mushy piece of s---."  I sure agree with him.

Any acceptable final deal must come as close as humanly possible to killing FHer-care outright.  Nothing less.

Get familiar with this name; she's one of the more sinister of our overlords

Jeanne Lambrew.  She's ideologically fired up and she has no use for citizen privacy:

“[Lambrew] is also unabashedly liberal – often serving as the architect of her party’s most progressive ideas on healthcare reform,” wrote American Enterprise Institute resident fellow Scott Gottlieb in a March op-ed.

“The few remaining centrists thinkers inside the White House, mostly scattered across the National Economic Council and Treasury, are gone – or largely marginalized when it comes to issues around implementation. The people drafting and reviewing the regulations are mostly centered in the White House and its Domestic Policy Council — and they mostly work for Jeanne Lambrew,” Gottlieb wrote.

“Normally, the Office of Management and Budget and the National Economic Council would be heavily engaged on the issuance of regulations tied to a major law like Obamacare. Not the Obama White House. The economists still play on the fiscal issues related to Medicare and Medicaid. But when it comes to Obamacare implementation, they are not calling the shots. The power is centered on Lambrew,” Gottlieb wrote.

Lambrew exchanged confidential taxpayer information on organizations with IRS official Sarah Hall Ingram and White House health policy advisor Ellen Montz, according to 2012 emails obtained by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and provided to The Daily Caller last week. Ingram attempted to counsel Lambrew and the White House on a lawsuit from religious organizations opposing Obamacare’s contraception mandate.

Lambrew also hosted 155 of Ingram’s 165 White House visits, according to White House visitor logs that were recently taken offline during the government shutdown. The IRS improperly targeted conservative groups for harassment of their tax-exempt applications and abusive audits between 2010 and 2012.

Creepier by the minute.

It would be nice if we really did want those things, but . . .

. . . I suspect America doesn't cherish freedom and national greatness that much anymore.

David Harsanyi looks at a new Rasmussen poll and has doubts that respondents offered these viewpoints truthfully:

1.) "We hate Congress"

2.) "We want a third party."

3.) "We're super-worried about debt."

4.) Government is too big."

It's interesting that people want to believe they hold these views, and want others to believe they hold them.  But election results of the past couple of decades do not point to a conclusion that we are still a center-right country.

Which is not to say, of course, that those of us who actually are center-right should stop fighting.

A nation of cattle

Planned decline and dependency on the state: the endgame of leftism.

The San Francisco Chronicle tells people wanting to get subsidized FHer-care coverage to "consider reducing your income in 2014 by working just a little bit less."

The end product of political correctness

Daniel Greenfield has an attention-worthy post at Sultan Knish today on just what those denigrating the Italian cartographer and sailor Christopher Columbus have as their ultimate aim.
Among other things, he points out the irony of La Raza being mostly comprised of the descendants of Spaniards who colonized Mexico and Central America.
The main point of his essay, though, is that the push to attach shame to Columbus Day is to destroy America's legitimacy:

 But this is about more than one single 15th century Genoan with a complicated life who was neither a monster nor a saint. It is about whether America really has any right to exist at all. Is there any argument against celebrating Columbus Day, that cannot similarly be applied to the Fourth of July?

If Columbus is to be stricken from the history books in favor of ideological thugs like Malcolm X or Caesar Chavez, then America must soon follow. Columbus' crime is that he enabled European settlement of the continent.

If the settlement of non-Indians in North America is illegitimate, then any national state they created is also illegitimate.

It is easier to hack away at a nation's history by beginning with the lower branches.

And he points out another irony that ought to sadden anyone who respects scholarly standards of historical inquiry:

The final note of politically correct lunacy comes from a headline in the Columbus Dispatch about the Columbus Day festival in the city of Columbus, Ohio. "Italian Festival honors controversial explorer with its own Columbus Day parade".

Once the great discover of America, Columbus is now dubbed "controversial" by a newspaper named after him, in a city named after him .And if he is controversial, how can naming a city after him and a newspaper after the city not be equally controversial? 

Citizens of the most righteous nation in human history are, bit by bit, accepting the invitation to hate their own heritage.

Even the Grey Lady can't fail to take notice

 . . . of the fact that the FHer-care rollout goes beyond glitches and a few underestimated target dates.

For the past 12 days, a system costing more than $400 million and billed as a one-stop click-and-go hub for citizens seeking health insurance has thwarted the efforts of millions to simply log in. The growing national outcry has deeply embarrassed the White House, which has refused to say how many people have enrolled through the federal exchange.

Even some supporters of the Affordable Care Act worry that the flaws in the system, if not quickly fixed, could threaten the fiscal health of the insurance initiative, which depends on throngs of customers to spread the risk and keep prices low.

“These are not glitches,” said an insurance executive who has participated in many conference calls on the federal exchange. Like many people interviewed for this article, the executive spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying he did not wish to alienate the federal officials with whom he works. “The extent of the problems is pretty enormous. At the end of our calls, people say, ‘It’s awful, just awful.' ”

Interviews with two dozen contractors, current and former government officials, insurance executives and consumer advocates, as well as an examination of confidential administration documents, point to a series of missteps — financial, technical and managerial — that led to the troubles.

So, even if the technical hose-ups were to get pretty well straightened out - a mighty big if - we would be asked to put our faith that such abysmal planning would not characterize the "customer service" aspect of this monstrosity?  Timothy S. Jost, consumer representative to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, is inclined to think that's a bad bet:

“Even if a fix happens quickly, I remain very disappointed that the Department of Health and Human Services was not better prepared for the rollout,” he said. 

What a love of freedom looks like

This.

Today's Million Vet March rally in D.C. was typical of the grass-roots efforts of patriots and freedom-lovers in recent years, and even the high-profile figures who showed up pretty much blended with the groundswell communicating with the police who tried to barricade the crowd alongside everyone else.  That's what makes leaders of our movement such as Sarah Palin, Ted Cruz and Mike Lee so great.

Have you noticed that our spokespeople tend to convey their points - even if they're shouting - while wearing smiles?

The fruits of orchestrated decline

Xinhua, China's official news agency, calls for a "de-Americanized world."  Says the US government is so mired in disfunction that it cannot lead on the world stage anymore.  Calls for emerging nations to step up and fill the void.

The Most Equal Comrade's life mission has been to take America down a peg.  That's why "failure" is not the correct word to apply to what he's done as overlord.

I tend to agree . . .

. . . with this depiction of the school of thought on Capitol Hill that wants to make repeal of the medical device tax, which would be a great and good thing, but the tax is by far not the only aspect of FHer-care that needs immediate dismantling:

Many House GOP conservatives see ending the device tax as going after a “shiny object” instead of focusing on truly altering the law, one conservative Republican told POLITICO. Appropriators are angry that the government would be funded until March — they would prefer a shorter-term measure, to allow lawmakers to cobble together a full 2014 spending package.

Defund would have been best, delay of it all and repeal of the medical-device tax would be second best, delay of the individual mandate and repeal of the tax, next best, and  . . . well, I can't think of any other options I'd find remotely acceptable.

Not this again

North Korea is threatening "all-out war" on the United States.

The Kim regime was having none of Secretary Global Test's latest gesture of patty-cake:

The country also refused to sign a non-aggression pact that John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, offered last week on condition of denuclearisation.

In a thinly veiled threat to strike the United States, the North's National Defence Commission (NDC), chaired by leader Kim Jong-Un, said the US government must withdraw its policy of hostility against the North if it wants peace on both the Korean peninsula and the "US mainland".

Keep an eye on this one

Should another SCOTUS vacancy come up during the remainder of the Most Equal Comrade's rule, look for Freedom-Haters to float the name of Stanford Law School professor Pam Karlan.

IF we live in a world where there's a shred of sanity left, her track record will surely shoot her down.

I so wanted to believe that this guy wasn't susceptible to Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome - today's edition

But it looks like Paul Ryan believes there's a possibility for "bipartisan agreement" and a willingness on the part of The Most Equal Comrade to discuss "areas of cooperation" if we shift the focus from FHer-care to more general entitlement and tax reform.

His wonkery has been valuable, but it seems to have clouded his understanding of what our enemy is all about.

Not getting more favorable

Reviews for the rollout of Freedom-Hater-care, that is, according to a new AP-Gfk poll.

Ever fewer remaining microseconds

The basic purpose of this blog since its inception has been, per its name, to point out how far Western civilization has strayed from its foundations and how close to a state of irretrievability we have inched.

Because whatever is happening to America and the West generally is happening to all of us, whether we fear it or, in the case of mad minority, embrace it, I've seen little point in taking an alarmist tone except for the most egregious cases.  In fact, I think I have made this site a voice for where we should be going as much as a rail against the damage.

In the last few days, however, the full horror of the western Left's agenda has been bearing down on our civilization, and I'm not sure any depiction of it could be construed as unwarranted hyperbole.

From a roundup of developments, a picture emerges:

 - Everyone is aware that the FHer position is to increase the debt limit.  Harry Reid has put a number on it: $1.1 trillion.  And mind you, America's $17 trillion debt is only a fraction of what we really owe when you consider the unfunded liabilities of our transfer-payment programs.

- Using the excuse of the shutdown, the regime is turning World War II vets away from their open-air memorial, while mere yards away, a rally for illegal aliens hosted by the AFL-CIO and SEIU is allowed to take place without harassment.

- The rollout of the FHer-care exchanges is generally agreed to be a disaster, but the Most Equal Comrade got not one question about it at his presser yesterday.

- Miley Cyrus's exercise in self-embarrassment at the MTV music awards show not only did not harm her career, it emboldened her to keep pushing the envelope, as she did last week when, as host of Saturday Night Live, she played Michelle Bachmann in a soft-porn skit that also involved a John Boehner character.

- The UN has appointed Iran to its disarmament committee.  Israel is protesting strongly.  A US reaction has yet to be reported.

- China warns the US - Japan - Australia alliance to stay out of Pacific territorial disputes.


These are just five very recent developments, mind you.  They follow a steady flow covered by this blog and elsewhere: Putin's NYT column, anti-Christian bias in the US military, the murder of the US coal industry, the bankruptcy of Detroit, the Marxist-supporting past of New York mayoral candidate Bill DeBlasio . . .

Scroll though your Facebook news feed.  If there is any diversity at all to your array of "friends," you'll see how dug in the two sides warring for America's soul are.  And you'll see how afraid of basic facts the pro-tyranny side is.

There are just days when how very, very late it is is especially impressed upon one.

I'd so wanted to believe that Mitch McConnell didn't have Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome . . .

. . . but consider his recent exchange with Reince Preibus:

When Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell bumped into Republican Party Chairman Reince Priebus near Capitol Hill recently, the discussion turned to the man who has become the undisputed public face of the government shutdown: Republican Ted Cruz.

The Republican National Committee staff was about to send an email blast urging the party faithful, and their wallets, to stand behind Mr. Cruz in his battle against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat. No one inside the RNC expected a backlash. After all, Mr. Cruz had become a hot commodity since his all-night filibuster on the Senate floor, and Mr. Reid has long been a favorite inspiration for Republican donors.

But Mr. McConnell politely cautioned Mr. Priebus at their chance encounter, suggesting that the party chief should not look like he was taking sides in the tactical dispute between Mr. Cruz or other members of the GOP’s raucous tea party faction and the party’s congressional leaders. Mr. Priebus countered that he saw himself as chairman of the entire party and would support any Republican, including Mr. Cruz, in battling Democrats.

The RNC sent an unequivocal email soon afterward, under Mr. Priebus‘ name: “In a fight between Harry Reid and Ted Cruz, I will stand with Ted Cruz any day,” he said in the message, extolling Mr. Cruz’s anti-Obamacare efforts. “As Republicans, we must remain true to our principles and fight to protect the American people from this reckless law.”

Soon, establishment Republicans who had chafed for months about the ego, tactics and strident focus of the junior senator from Texas were on the phone to staff. They complained that the RNC was picking sides in an intraparty struggle between establishment leaders and a new generation of headstrong conservatives epitomized by Mr. Cruz.

Do these establishment "old bulls" have any inkling how ineffective their modus operandi for the last several decades?

Thomas Sowell does .

We are in the midst of a national crisis, immediately affecting millions of Americans and potentially affecting the kind of country this will become if ObamaCare goes into effect -- and yet, with multiple television network cameras focused on Speaker Boehner as he emerged from the White House, he couldn't be bothered to prepare a statement that would help clarify a confused situation, full of fallacies and lies.

Boehner was not unique in having a blind spot when it comes to recognizing the importance of articulation and the need to put some serious time and effort into presenting your case in a way that people outside the Beltway would understand. On the contrary, he has been all too typical of Republican leaders in recent decades.

When the government was shut down during the Clinton administration, Republican leaders who went on television to tell their side of the story talked about "OMB numbers" versus "CBO numbers" -- as if most people beyond the Beltway knew what these abbreviations meant or why the statistics in question were relevant to the shutdown. Why talk to them in Beltway-speak?

When Speaker Boehner today goes around talking about the "CR," that is just more of the same thinking -- or lack of thinking. Policy wonks inside the Beltway know that he is talking about the "continuing resolution" that authorizes the existing level of government spending to continue, pending a new budget agreement.

But, believe it or not, there are lots of citizens and voters outside the Beltway. And what is believed by those people whom too many Republicans are talking past can decide not only the outcome of this crisis but the fate of the nation for generations to come.

You might think that the stakes are high enough for Republicans to put in some serious time trying to clarify their message. 

It's worse than being merely articluate.  When you speak the plain truth, a la Ted Cruz, they attempt to muzzle and marginalize you.

It's come to this

In post America, everyone has to be afraid - of getting smacked with a ball in an athletic game, of losing such a game, of lawsuits, of the God-imbued resilience and exuberance of the individual human being:

As CBS 2’s Jennifer McLogan reported Monday, officials at Weber Middle School in Port Washington are worried that students are getting hurt during recess. Thus, they have instituted a ban on footballs, baseballs, lacrosse balls, or anything that might hurt someone on school grounds.

Tossing a football during recess has long seemed to be a rite of passage for kids in the school community.

“I think we need the soccer balls, the footballs and everything, so we can have some fun,” one student said.

But the students will have no such option anymore. They were just informed that during recess, football is out and Nerf ball is in. Hard soccer balls have been banned, along with baseballs and lacrosse balls, rough games of tag, or cartwheels unless supervised by a coach.

Students were not thrilled about the news.

“Cartwheels and tag — I think it’s ridiculous they are banning that,” one said. 

“You go for recess — that’s your free time to go let loose and recharge,” another said.

But Port Washington schools Supt. Kathleen Maloney said the change in policy is warranted due to a rash of playground injuries.

“Some of these injuries can unintentionally become very serious, so we want to make sure ourchildren have fun, but are also protected,” Maloney said.

It is so very late in the day.