Nothing great has ever been achieved except by
those who dared believe something inside them was
superior to circumstances.
Bruce Barton
ObamaCare Roundup
From CNBC;
As few as 1 in 100 applications on the federal exchange contains enough information to enroll the applicant in a plan, several insurance industry sources told CNBC on Friday. Some of the problems involve how the exchange's software collects and verifies an applicant's data.
"It is extraordinary that these systems weren't ready," said Sumit Nijhawan, CEO of Infogix, which handles data integrity issues for major insurers including WellPoint and Cigna, as well as multiple Blue Cross Blue Shield affiliates.
Experts said that if Healthcare.gov's success rate doesn't improve within the next month or so, federal officials could face a situation in January in which relatively large numbers of people believe they have coverage starting that month, but whose enrollment applications are have not been processedHeck of a job, Barry!
As a former MIS professor and current IT consultant, I cannot adequately explain my utter disgust at this clip of incompetent government IT management from USA Today. I'll send in a substitute pitcher, the Donald:
The government website launched this week to sell health insurance was overwhelmed by up to five times as many users as it was designed to handle, President Obama's top technology adviser said Saturday in an exclusive interview with USA TODAY.
U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park said the government expected HealthCare.gov to draw 50,000 to 60,000 simultaneous users, but instead it has drawn as many as 250,000 at a time since it launched Oct. 1.
"These bugs were functions of volume,'' Park said. "Take away the volume and it works.''
Former JOTY Winner Alan Grayson Merits Another Nomination
A "freedom fiend" calls you out, you "progressive" parasite:
Images of the Day
I have sometimes referred to the first paraphrased quote as a natural extension to the Golden Rule or the second Greatest Commandment: You can't really love and accept other people until you love and accept yourself. Here is a post excerpt which excellently addresses my point:
How many of us were given the message that it is selfish to give to ourselves? That it is more blessed to give than to receive. There is often a deeper message here: we don’t deserve to receive. My favorite Native American saying: “Humble yourself to receive, before you can truly give.” In fact, there can be no real giving unless you are willing to receive.
Flight attendants instruct passengers, in the event of loss of cabin pressure, to put an oxygen mask on yourself before you try to help your children or other passengers. A mother sitting next to me on one flight defiantly blurted out, “They can’t tell me what to do. I’d put the masks on my children first.” But how much help could this mother offer her children if she passes out while trying to put their masks on?Analogously, how can you argue for world peace when you haven't even reconciled with your own family. At UWM, I had an ideological feminist tenured professor as an office neighbor; she had an attraction to me which wasn't mutual. (I was a young professor, and she called me a "pup"; she once "forgot" something in her office which she needed me to bring to her home.) At one point, she almost proudly confessed (I don't recall how the conversation led to the point) that she hadn't spoken to her own sister for several (like 8-10) years; she didn't explain the dispute, but I actually felt a little sorry for her.
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| Via myfavequotes.com NOTE: I believe this is a paraphrase from a 1979 Nobel Peace Prize Q&A |
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| Courtesy of QuickMeme |
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| We need the White House in there, too! Via Lew Rockwell on FB |
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| Via LFC on FB |
Laissez-Faire Capitalism: Let's examine social justice and how it relates to the gov't shutdown. In a free society, individuals are punished for the crimes they've committed. In a collectivist society, groups are punished for crimes that individuals have committed. An example of social justice: The British put sanctions on Boston for the acts of a few individuals in the Tea Party. Another example: Feds punishing Americans during this shut down. (Teal)
Well, I think it has more to do with the Dems trying to abuse their authority to manipulate public opinion against the House. It was entirely predictable from the "progressive" playbook. Why shut down the monuments, parks, etc.? Because it gets a lot of sympathetic mainstream media coverage. Your point is to punish the tiny Tea Party caucus in Congress? Me, I think the solution to this madness is to privatize operations and make them self-funding. We can spend over $100 for a family to go to a major league baseball game but we expect taxpayers, but not users, to pay for overhead of parks, monuments, etc.?
Libertarian Republic: In 2010 the Tea Partiers and libertarians sparked a movement that swept our legislators in power and sent the establishment on the defensive.
Some of us have fallen by the wayside as others have risen in power and prominence. The key to our future success will be a test of pure willpower and endurance.
The goal of liberty is a lifelong project and if some fall, we must be ready to pass the torch. But if our children are one day more free, it will be worth the struggle.
I'm worried that it will take a day of reckoning before people will be broken from the bribery and spells of the "progressive" Ponzi-scheme free lunch delusion.
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| Via LFC on FB |
Caption this via LFC:
Will politic for food and other government freebies
(I earlier ad-libbed: Damn public schools! She misspelled 'expendable'.)
They whacked Glass Stegal back in 2000. The rest will follow suit soon enough.
Glass Steagall is a red herring that left-wing propagandists put out there... What we need is for government to repeal/reform morally hazardous policies, including guarantees of deposits, legislating "too-big-to-fail" and assorted policy madness...
(To LFC moderator) You've been cheering the shutdown all along. Now it's punishing Americans? Cake and eat it too much?
The tacit assumption is that the shutdown is punishing Americans. A fact of life adult Americans have to live with is living within their means; we expect government to do the same. What we have is a spendthrift Senate and President trying to stonewall long-overdue fiscal and regulatory reform. They want to overspend as a matter of Keynesian ideology. I don't regard predictable symbolic abuse of power like shutting down facilities, including some not even funded by the government, and laying off non-essential personnel as "punishing the people"; I believe that stealth Statist empire building is slowly but surely undermining our economy and true prosperity. The Democrats refuse to negotiate; hence, they own the shutdown, because they are trying to extort the people's House, like a drug addict manipulating other people to fund his habit.
(Sarcastic response to LFC tongue-in-cheek comment: "I hate roads")
I hate clean air. And the elderly.
Yeah, with government, roads are poorly designed and lack maintenance, we have moral hazard in grossly unfunded senior entitlements, and excess environmental regulation has a self-defeating crippling effect on the economy. How I hate economically-illiterate progressive trolls!
[I just want to comment here: the topic of roads is rather like an inside joke in the libertarian community. We are basically mocking a knee-jerk defense by Statists to justify their gullible faith in government. If you look at comments on free market groups, you'll often see comments like "But the rrroooaaaddds!" So the LFC moderator just put the mockery out there; nobody really hates roads--he's simply mocking Statists.]
The clueless author decided to attack me:
The ACA has been projected to decrease the deficit more than repealing. That's form the cbo, a non partisan organization. The deficit has been cut in half and is currently running at 3-4% of GDP. That percentage has historically been favorable to economic growth.
Let's try and stick to facts, Ronald.
The ObamaCare kaleidoscope accounting is all based on disingenuous and misleading modeling. Look at any federal health entitlement--e.g., Medicare/Medicaid. They have always blown up beyond "nonpartisan" cost projections. I guarantee that subsidies are underestimated; part of the problem is that you have gold-plated, expensive benefits, and it'll be easier and cheaper for organizations to dump workers on the exchanges. As to the deficit projections: first, SSA is already running at an operational deficit--they are dipping into interest payments to the reserve, and the deficit is projected to start widening again; we also have over $80T in unfunded entitlement liabilities and less than $3T in revenues annually. Also some research shows national debts at or over the size of GDP impair future GDP growth making deficits and debt harder to fund. Not to mention that the federal government is paying an artificially low interest rate on new debt. If we go to historic norms, interest expense could go to a trillion or so a year--nearly half of receipts. Stop reading progressive propaganda and get educated on economics.
[This is in response to a college student asking LPC why Austrian School economists take a dim view of intellectual property claims.]
Ir's a different type of property and often is a creative twist on cumulative knowledge from the public domain, others. Other people can independently achieve the same result. Government, in which we have limited confidences, establishes winners and losers and established monopolies. Among other things, patent trolls are rent-seekers whom serve to impair, not promote creative endeavors.
Obama Owns the Shutdown, Not the GOP
I'm in the process of writing a one-off commentary on disingenuous "progressive" talking points. As I have repeated in this blog over the past year, I'm not a GOP shill; I've never contributed to or volunteered/worked for the GOP or any candidate. I've criticized a number of GOP politicians and used to be an active Democrat during my salad years. In a recent FB thread, I noted that it's difficult to run against Santa Claus, but I wish that the GOP had more balls.
The current budgetary process is not specified in the Constitution but has essentially emerged over the past century; it has become a de facto standard. Still, in the context of this tradition, the Democratic-controlled Senate only recently passed its first budget in years. Obama, by law, is supposed to submit a budget annually but his recent higher-spending budgets have been non-starters not only with the GOP, but his own caucus. When a President can't even win the support of fellow Democrats, it's an unambiguous failure of leadership. The reason the shutdown occurred was due to the failure of Congress to pass a budget through reconciliation; the alternative is a series of continuing resolutions, the current one at a stand-off because the Democrats are refusing to negotiate and have rejected multiple House passed CR's, without offering a single constructive concession.
Whereas Dems will knee-jerk compare Obama's popularity to Congress, let's point out that Obama, not even a full year into his new term, is down to 41% in two national polls--and the bulk of his support is with Democrats, not increasingly alienated independents and moderates. Whereas a lot of pundits like to point to polls showing the GOP taking more of the reputed blame for the showdown, what the viewers see is a President whom categorically says he will not negotiate or give in an inch on spending, whom implies or says that a shutdown would damage the economy, but gosh darn, it's far more important to not negotiate with "hostage takers". I don't see Obama coming out of this well. Let's put in this way; I think if Obama is anywhere near 40 approaching the mid-term, it's going to be ugly, maybe the flip side of the 2006 elections.
Thw GOP offered Obama a softball pitch--defer the individual mandate over the coming year; let's point out (1) Obama opened the door by offering businesses a deferral--something he is not empowered to do under his own law,(2) Obama ran in 2008 against an individual mandate and (3) the individual mandate primarily hits the middle class. I guarantee it'll be an issue next fall. Why would he look a gift horse in the mouth? It can only be that he believes that he benefits more from a shutdown. This reminds me of Obama's hubris back in 2010 when Dem Congressmen warned him of Clinton's first mid-term, Obama implied that he was a better politician than Clinton. We know how that turned out.
I personally think that Obama has made a tactical, if not strategic error. I think that the GOP is giving him all the rope he needs to hang himself. Whenever he engages in sniping of the political opposition, he is basically tarnishing the only thing really going for him--he comes across as a nice, reasonable, unflappable guy. If he loses his likability persona, he's political roadkill.
Nick Gillespie of Reason, who goes out of his way to point out he was also a Bush critic, has an alternative critique insisting as President, Obama owns the shutdown:
But Barack Obama...he's a different beast, isn't he? He's fond of insisting that because Obamacare passed along strict party lines back in 2010, when the Democrats had majorities in the House and the Senate, that it's a done deal. Will of the people, that sort of thing. Even the Supreme Court upheld it. Suck it, Republicans. I won - get over it. His pique is understandable, even as I wish Obamacare had never been passed, much less upheld.
But Obamacare also helped spark a Republican resurgence in the 2010 midterms and the Democrats lost the House. They didn't lose in spite of your programs, Mr. President. They lost because of your first two years in office, when you signed on to Bush's TARP plan, expanded unpopular military actions, pushed a stimulus that failed by your own predicted measures of success, and forced through a health-care plan that people still don't like.
Then you compounded legislative issues by failing to kick the asses of sorry little functionaries like John Boehner and Harry Reid to pass budgets on a regular basis. At this point, you're one for five, batting .200 on budgets.Political Humor
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| Courtesy of Jordan Sunderland on LFC photo on FB |
Political Cartoon
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| Via the Bastiat Institute on FB |
Smokey Robinson & the Miracles, "The Tracks of My Tears"
Obama's Golf Course Isn't Shut Down, but the Homes of the Elderly....
