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Big treat today with Dave Barry’s End of the Year Review.  Our Summary, is a sampling.

January

… which begins with a crisis in Washington, a city that — despite having no industries and a workforce consisting almost entirely of former student council presidents — manages to produce 93 percent of the nation’s crises.

 

February

 

If the sequester goes into effect, federal spending will continue to rise, but not quite as fast as it would have risen without the sequester. To a normal human, this means government spending is still increasing, but to Washington, the sequester means “draconian cuts” and is a looming disaster of epic proportions.

 

The beleaguered cruise-ship industry suffers another blow when the Carnival Triumph loses power in a fire and drifts helplessly for days in the Gulf of Mexico. Fortunately, the passengers are able to survive the ordeal by eating each other.

 

 

March

… as the federal budget deadline passes without Congress reaching agreement, the devastating, draconian, historically catastrophic sequester goes into effect, causing a mild reduction in the rate of increase in government spending that for some inexplicable reason goes unnoticed by pretty much everybody outside the federal government.

 

April

In other alarming foreign developments, Iran announces that it is constructing a new uranium enrichment plant, which according to a government spokesman will be used for “youth sports.”

Weather scientists at both the Weather Channel and ColoradoStateUniversity, using sophisticated computer models, predict that the 2013 hurricane season will be unusually active. These scientists are immediately recruited to work on the much-anticipated rollout of Obamacare.

 

 

May

In New York City, Anthony Weiner announces his intention to enter … No, let’s rephrase that. Weiner announces his intention to plunge into … No, wait, sorry. He announces that he plans to run for mayor, using the campaign slogan “Weiner: You Know Where He Stands.” His announcement sets off a joyous celebration among headline writers for the New York Post.

In technology news, Microsoft, acknowledging widespread consumer dissatisfaction with Windows 8, announces that it has been chosen as the operating system for the much-anticipated Obamacare Web site.

 

June

The California legislature, as always staying ahead of the curve, passes a law making it mandatory for state residents to possess marijuana.

In an annual rite of passage, millions of young people graduate from college, and, following in the footsteps of the millions who have gone before them, move back in with their parents.

In sports, organizers of the Tour de France announce that this year they’re going to skip the bicycle-riding part and instead just gather all the competitors into a room and see who can do the most drugs.

 

July

In Obamacare action, the White House announces a one-year delay on the mandate requiring businesses to provide health insurance but insists that “we are right on schedule for rolling out the Web thing on the Intertubes.” With that concern out of the way, the Obama administration decides to once again pivot back to the economy, which continues to falter because — economists agree unanimously on this — not enough presidential speeches have been given about it.

 

August

In sports, New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez is indicted for murder; if convicted, under the strict new NFL rules aimed at reducing violence, he will have to sit out at least two games.

 

September

… when Kerry, continuing to stress the dire urgency of the situation, compares Assad to Hitler, only to declare a few days later — moments before his aides are able to fell him with a tranquilizer dart — that any strike against Assad will be an “unbelievably small, limited kind of effort.” President Obama clarifies this by stating that “the United States military doesn’t do pinpricks.”

Just when it seems as if there is no good way out of the Syria mess, help miraculously arrives in the form of our generous old friends the Russians, who, despite being longtime allies of Syria, are willing to lend us a helping hand without any thought of benefiting themselves. Under their plan, Assad gets to remain in power but must give up his chemical weapons and go back to killing people in a more humane, less Hitlerish way. With the crisis averted, everybody in Washington heaves a sigh of relief, and that is the last we hear about the crisis in Syria.

 

October

Things do not go nearly as smoothly with the rollout of Obamacare , which turns out to have a lot of problems despite being conceived of by super-smart people with extensive experience in the field of being former student council presidents. The federal Web site, Healthcare.gov, is riddled with glitches, resulting in people being unable to log in, people getting cut off, people being electrocuted by their keyboards, people having their sensitive financial information suddenly appear on millions of TV screens during episodes of “Duck Dynasty,” etc.

Fortunately, as the initial rush of applicants tapers off, the system starts to work a little better, and by the end of the second week U.S. Secretary of Blame Kathleen Sebelius is able to announce that the program has amassed a total enrollment, nationwide, of nearly two people, one of whom later turns out to be imaginary. But this is not good enough for a visibly angry and frustrated and, of course, surprised President Obama, who promises to get the Web site fixed just as soon as somebody answers the Technical Support hotline, which has had the White House on hold for 73 hours.

 

November

… public dissatisfaction with Obamacare continues to grow as many Americans discover that their current insurance plans are being canceled. A frustrated and — it goes without saying — surprised President Obama reveals to the nation that “insurance is complicated to buy” and clarifies that when he said “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan,” he was using “you” in the sense of “not necessarily you personally.” Observers note that the White House has stopped referring to the program as “Obamacare” and is now calling it by the more formal legal name “George W. Bush.”

 

 

December

Detroit is kicked out of Canada for shoplifting.

On the Obamacare front, the administration declares that the federal Web site has been significantly improved, although there are still occasional glitches, such as one that enables a Milwaukee woman seeking to compare dental plans to accidentally launch a tactical nuclear strike against Guatemala. But as Secretary of Blame Sebelius notes, “This kind of thing happens all the time with Orbitz.”

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Ron Christie has ideas of how, after a lousy year, the president can turn his record around. It is good Ron highlighted Susan Rice’s comments about Benghazi being a “false controversy.” It was a disaster for the country and the administration has never stopped lying about it.

… Valerie Jarrett is the president’s closest political adviser as well as a close friend of first lady Michelle Obama. Reports persist that White House staff are afraid of presenting information to the president that might upset Jarrett—information that might enable Obama to receive a more accurate picture of a dilemma before making a decision.

The president needs to send a message to his inner circle as well as the American people that he is singularly focused on bringing in the best and the brightest—those with Chicago political connections should be on notice. The White House is insular to begin with; surrounding yourself with people seeking to curry favor are doing the country a disservice. Incompetence has been tolerated by this president for far too long. Better to bring out the broom and start sweeping some folks out.

When I was sworn in as special assistant to President Bush, White House Chief of Staff Andy Card reminded me that I served at the pleasure of the president for the time being—both the pleasure and the time being could end before I wanted them to. Service in the White House is meant to be temporary and focused on the business of the American people. I found knowing that you could be fired at any moment for any reason keeps one’s mind strongly on the task at hand. Dear White House Staff: You serve the American people first. You should know when it is time for you to go and allow someone with a fresh perspective to take your place.

A brief aside: National Security Adviser Susan Rice telling CBS News’s Lesley Stahl on 60 Minutes this week that the death of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, was a “false controversy” is revealing. Does this reflect the president’s view or does he have an atmosphere in the White House where this line of thinking is encouraged? Whatever one’s thoughts on Benghazi, the death of innocent Americans murdered while serving their country is hardly a false controversy, Mr. President….

Paul Mirengoff of Power Line posts on how new federal regs designed to right the mortgage market will only make it worse. Of course! The government always screws it up!

The almost non-stop stream of Obamacare twists and turns should not divert our attention from radical new regulation of mortgage financing that will take effect, pursuant to Dodd-Frank, on January 10, 2014. Diane Katz of the Heritage Foundation has the details.

As Katz points out, Washington’s response to the financial crisis of 2008 rests on the premise that the housing bubble and subsequent crash were the fault of unscrupulous mortgage lenders who took advantage of naive, uninformed consumers. In reality, she says, “lenders and borrowers were responding rationally to incentives created by an array of deeply flawed government policies.”

What were these policies? Primarily, (1) artificially low interest rates set by the Federal Reserve, (2) the massive subsidy of risky loans by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, (3) and the low-income lending quotas set by the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

In the all-too-familiar pattern, Washington now seizes on the problems caused by its own poor policies as the basis for grabbing more power with which it can craft new bad policies that will lead to more problems. Indeed, as noted below, the new mortgage financing rules actually double-down on “diversity” policies similar to those that helped produce the financial crisis. …

Mirengoff also provides diversion as Mark Steyn and his editor at National Review have a kerfuffle.

John has mentioned the controversy between Mark Steyn and his National Review editor, Jason Lee Steorts. The matter centered around Steyn’s column of last Friday called “The Age of Intolerance.” Citing the experience of Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson, who came under attack from gay rights activists for expressing his view of homosexuality, Steyn argued that the forces of “tolerance” are so intolerant that they threaten to make ours a decidedly illiberal society.

Steyn led off his column with two old jokes about gays. The first, from Bob Hope, was, as Steyn said, “oddly profound” because it somehow foresaw the intolerance that Steyn attacks.

The second joke, from Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, was stupid and unfunny. Steyn, though, wasn’t holding it out as an example of clever humor, but rather as an example of something one can no longer say on television. And, as usual, Steyn put the gag to clever use in his piece.

Steorts found Steyn’s piece “less than illuminating” and characterized it as “200 percent felt and half thought.” Steyn fired off a pointed response to which Steorts replied. …

Here’s Jason the Editor.

… On the other hand, I can’t agree with Mark that anything of value is lost when derogatory epithets go out of bounds in polite society. They tend to be bad even for humor, substituting stereotype and cliché for originality. People who used them in different times need not be regarded as monstrous, nor must the canon be censored; we could instead feel good about having awoken to a greater civility and make generous allowances for human fallibility.

By way of criticizing speech, I’ll say that I found the derogatory language in this column, and especially the slur in its borrowed concluding joke, both puerile in its own right and disappointing coming from a writer of such talent.

And Mark’s retort to Steorts.

Having leaned on A&E to suspend their biggest star, GLAAD has now moved on to Stage Two:

‘ “We believe the next step is to use this as an opportunity for Phil to sit down with gay families in Louisiana and learn about their lives and the values they share,” the spokesman said. ‘

Actually, “the next step” is for you thugs to push off and stop targeting, threatening and making demands of those who happen to disagree with you. Personally, I think this would be a wonderful opportunity for the GLAAD executive board to sit down with half-a-dozen firebreathing imams and learn about their values, but, unlike the Commissars of the Bureau of Conformity Enforcement, I accord even condescending little ticks like the one above the freedom to arrange his own social calendar. Unfortunately, GLAAD has had some success with this strategy, prevailing upon, for example, the Hollywood director Brett Ratner to submit to GLAAD re-education camp until he had eaten sufficient gay crow to be formally rehabilitated with a GLAAD “Ally” award. 

It is a matter of some regret to me that my own editor at this publication does not regard this sort of thing as creepy and repellent rather than part of the vibrant tapestry of what he calls an “awakening to a greater civility”. I’m not inclined to euphemize intimidation and bullying as a lively exchange of ideas – “the use of speech to criticize other speech”, as Mr Steorts absurdly dignifies it. …

Charles Krauthammer says the government is “treating insurance companies like errand boys.”

This is at least the 15th unilateral change in Obamacare that the administration has made without changing the actual law. That’s unconstitutional; that’s lawless. That’s banana republic stuff. As George indicated, the last change was made by a letter from the HHS secretary. That is the what you do it in a banana republic. If you want to know what the law is on a Wednesday, you check the correspondence of El Presidente instead of looking at law. There is no law.

It’s as if the whole 2,000 pages of Obamacare — which nobody has read anyway — are completely irrelevant. it’s simply an authorization for the president and the HHS secretary to do anything required. And today, it wasn’t even announced. It wasn’t even — it was leaked. And the people in the administration who leaked it refused to give a name. It was anonymous. It was like Watergate; it was like Woodward and Bernstein.

And the insurers, the people who have to sign up the people who sign up tomorrow, were not even informed, it was a simple change in the software. The insurers are upset because they only have eight days to register anybody who signed up today, and now it is seven days. They have no time. But again, this is the administration’s running the insurance companies like errand boys. They are extensions, they are instruments, they are essentially an arm of the government and we’re seeing it every day.

In the end, if this fails, this arm of the government, the insurers, are going to have only one recourse and that is going to be a bailout. Ahuge government bailout with your tax money and with mine.

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We started this week with kudos for the president for his refusal to take part in the Olympics. Today we have more compliments. This time for his recent pardons. Debra Saunders has the story.

President Obama commuted the sentences of eight crack-cocaine offenders Thursday, including that of Clarence Aaron, who was serving a sentence of life without parole for a first-time nonviolent drug conviction when he was 23.

Aaron’s story represents the worst excesses of the federal criminal justice system. Aaron, of Mobile, Ala., had no criminal record. He had held jobs. In 1992, he was a college student who decided to address his money problems by acting as an intermediary between two career drug dealers. The dealers paid him $1,500 to set up two large cocaine deals. They got caught. The ringleaders knew how to game the system. They pleaded guilty and testified against Aaron.

Aaron wasn’t as savvy. He pleaded not guilty and lied on the stand — which enhanced his sentence. The buyer planned on converting powder cocaine to crack — that, too, enhanced Aaron’s sentence. One deal didn’t happen, but federal prosecutors charged Aaron for it anyway. Voila, he won the same sentence that was imposed on FBI agent-turned-Russian spy Robert Hanssen and now-deceased serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer.

Aaron knows he broke the law. He had earned prison time. But what does it say when federal prosecutors seek and win life without parole for a first-time offender while letting the big fish finagle lesser sentences? All but one of Aaron’s cohorts have been out of prison since 2000.

Aaron’s cousin, Aaron Martin, said the commutation made this season “the best Christmas ever.” Attorney Margaret C. Love said, “We are grateful to President Obama.” …

More on the pardons from Jacob Sullum in Forbes.

President Obama issued eight commutations today, which is eight times the number he issued in the first 58 months of his administration. The best-known prisoner who will be freed as a result of today’s clemency actions is Clarence Aaron, who was sentenced to three consecutive life sentences in 1993 for his role in arranging a cocaine deal. Aaron’s case received a lot of publicity recently thanks to reporting by ProPublica’s Dafna Linzer, who revealed that his clemency petition probably would have been granted by George W. Bush if the Office of the Pardon Attorney had not omitted important information from its evaluation.

Another commutation beneficiary, Stephanie George, received a life sentence in 1997 for letting her boyfriend stash his crack at her house. New York Times reporter John Tierney highlighted her case in a front-page story last December. Thanks to Obama’s commutations, Aaron and George will both be released next April instead of spending the rest of their lives behind bars. …

John Podhoretz reviews the president’s terrible year.

When Barack Obama sings “Auld Lang Syne” on New Year’s Eve, he will have reason to think back, with a deep sense of nostalgia and not a small amount of regret, on the last time he sang the song.

If he gets a lump in his throat as he recollects that glorious night one year ago, who would blame him? After all, he was riding about as high as a man can ride on New Year’s Eve 2012.

There he was, almost literally the master of the universe — the canny victor of the 2012 election, having run what was instantly regarded as the most brilliant technical campaign in American history. He used that victory to prevail in a “fiscal cliff” showdown with Republicans the last week of December that led to the significant tax increases on the well-to-do he had sought since the beginning of his first term. He had a 53% approval rating; only 40% disapproved.

In a few weeks, he would be inaugurated for a second term and, liberated from the demands of running again and emboldened by his win, he would that day offer the country an unabashedly and unapologetically left-wing vision of the American future toward which he was guiding it.

“Preserving our individual freedoms,” he said in a startling turn of phrase, “ultimately requires collective action.” …

Glenn Reynolds thinks 2014 will be even worse. Condign punishment is what we say.

A lot of people are saying that 2013 was President Obama’s worst year. Roll Call headlined, “Subdued Obama Hopes For Better 2014.” The Hill reported, “Obama names health care rollout his biggest mistake of dismal year.” Most people seem to think it was. But I think it was average, in the manner of the old Soviet joke:

Ivan: So how was your day?

Boris: Average.

Ivan: What do you mean, average?

Boris: Worse than yesterday, better than tomorrow. So, average.

Unless something turns around, Obama’s 2013 is likely to be similarly “average”: Worse than 2012, but better than 2014.

It’s true that Obamacare has been a debacle, wrapped in a catastrophe, shrouded in a disaster. But it’s also become clear that it was founded upon a lie: …

We were going to ignore the Duck Dynasty flap, but Mark Steyn wrote his weekly column on it. So, here we go.

Last week, following the public apology of an English comedian and the arrest of a fellow British subject both for making somewhat feeble Mandela gags, I noted that supposedly free societies were increasingly perilous places for those who make an infelicitous remark. So let’s pick up where we left off:

Here are two jokes one can no longer tell on American television. But you can still find them in the archives, out on the edge of town, in Sub-Basement Level 12 of the ever-expanding Smithsonian Mausoleum of the Unsayable. First, Bob Hope, touring the world in the year or so after the passage of the 1975 Consenting Adult Sex Bill:

“I’ve just flown in from California, where they’ve made homosexuality legal. I thought I’d get out before they make it compulsory.”

For Hope, this was an oddly profound gag, discerning even at the dawn of the Age of Tolerance that there was something inherently coercive about the enterprise. Soon it would be insufficient merely to be “tolerant” — warily accepting, blithely indifferent, mildly amused, tepidly supportive, according to taste. The forces of “tolerance” would become intolerant of anything less than full-blown celebratory approval.

Second joke from the archives: Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra kept this one in the act for a quarter-century. On stage, Dino used to have a bit of business where he’d refill his tumbler and ask Frank, “How do you make a fruit cordial?” And Sinatra would respond, “I dunno. How do you make a fruit cordial?” And Dean would say, “Be nice to him.”

But no matter how nice you are, it’s never enough. …

Now, for the important stuff. According to Nautilus, it was beer that civilized the world.

The domestication of wild grains has played a major role in human evolution, facilitating the transition from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to one based on agriculture. You might think that the grains were used for bread, which today represents a basic staple. But some scientists argue that it wasn’t bread that motivated our ancestors to start grain farming. It was beer. Man, they say, chose pints over pastry.

Beer has plenty to recommend it over bread. First, and most obviously, it is pleasant to drink. “Beer had all the same nutrients as bread, and it had one additional advantage,” argues Solomon H. Katz, an anthropology professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Namely, it gave early humans the same pleasant buzz it gives us. Patrick E. McGovern, the director of the Biomolecular Archaeology Project for Cuisine, Fermented Beverages, and Health at the University of Pennsylvania, goes even further. Beer, he says, was more nutritious than bread. It contains “more B vitamins and [more of the] essential amino acid lysine,” McGovern writes in his book, Uncorking the Past: the Quest for Wine, Beer, and Other Alcoholic Beverages. It was also safer to drink than water, because the fermentation process killed pathogenic microorganisms. “With a four to five percent alcohol content, beer is a potent mind-altering and medicinal substance,” McGovern says, adding that ancient brewers acted as medicine men.

In fact, McGovern has found that the ancients used beer as medicine.

John Hinderaker points out 2013 was one of the ten coldest years on record in the U. S.

2013 will go down in the record books as one of the 10 coldest years in the U.S. since 1895. This chart, from Real Science, shows the average temperatures recorded at all NOAA USHCN stations from 1895 to the present: …

This is our last post for a few days. As a parting gift, here is the story of Twas The Night Before Christmas by Sal Monella.

     Click here for Sal’s Christmas message.

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Charles Krauthammer says we know what ”the lie of the year” is, but what is the story of the year?

The lie of the year, according to Politifact, is “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.” But the story of the year is a nation waking up to just how radical Obamacare is — which is why it required such outright deception to get it passed in the first place.

Obamacare was sold as simply a refinement of the current system, retaining competition among independent insurers but making things more efficient, fair and generous. Free contraceptives for Sandra Fluke. Free mammograms and checkups for you and me. Free (or subsidized) insurance for some 30 million uninsured. And, mirabile dictu, not costing the government a dime.

In fact, Obamacare is a full-scale federal takeover. The keep-your-plan-if-you-like-your-plan ruse was a way of saying to the millions of Americans who had insurance and liked what they had: Don’t worry. You’ll be left unmolested. For you, everything goes on as before.

That was a fraud from the very beginning. The law was designed to throw people off their private plans and into government-run exchanges where they would be made to overpay — forced to purchase government-mandated services they don’t need — as a way to subsidize others. (That’s how you get to the ostensible free lunch.)

It wasn’t until the first cancellation notices went out in late 2013 that the deception began to be understood. …

Jonathan Tobin thinks the latest healthcare exemption shows the law is unraveling. 

Only a few months ago, the White House and Democrats scoffed when Republicans suggested that the implementation of ObamaCare be postponed in order for the government to understand exactly what it was foisting upon the country. Nothing could stop the administration’s determination to roll out the president’s signature health-care legislation on time. All liberals and some conservatives as well were convinced that once it began, the debate about its wisdom would cease as the extension of benefits would make it as universally popular as Social Security and Medicare. But though the White House is still insisting that all will come right in the end, they may be wishing they had taken the GOP’s offer. In the latest example of the problems the administration has encountered in trying to make ObamaCare work, it announced late yesterday that yet another aspect of the law will be delayed. As the New York Times reports:

Millions of people facing the cancellation of health insurance policies will be allowed to buy catastrophic coverage and will be exempt from penalties if they go without insurance next year, the White House said Thursday night.

Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, disclosed the sudden policy shift in a letter to Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, and five other senators. It was another effort by President Obama to cushion the impact of the health care law and minimize political damage to himself and Democrats in Congress who adopted the law in 2010 over solid Republican opposition.

The decision is an attempt to shield Democrats from voter outrage about the impact of the law until after the 2014 midterm elections. But while beleaguered Democrats are happy of any reprieve, however belated, the decision comes too late to avoid adding to the general public impression of the rollout as a disaster that doesn’t seem to get better despite repeated White House promises that the worst is behind them. Taken as a whole, the list of exemptions and delays in the implementation of the misnamed Affordable Care Act is leaving the country asking what exactly were all the geniuses in the West Wing and the Department of Health and Human Services doing during the two years between the bill’s passage and the start of this fiasco?

Megan McArdle agrees.

… The White House is focused on winning the news cycle, day by day, not the kind of detached technocratic policymaking that they, and the law’s other supporters, hoped this law would embody. Does your fix create problems later, cause costs to spiral or people to drop out of the insurance market, or lead to political pressure to expand the fixes in ways that critically undermine the law? Well, that’s preferable to sudden death right now.

However incoherent these fixes may seem, they send two messages, loud and clear. The first is that although liberal pundits may think that the law is a done deal, impossible to repeal, the administration does not believe that. The willingness to take large risks with the program’s stability indicates that the administration thinks it has a huge amount to lose — that the White House is in a battle for the program’s very existence, not a few marginal House and Senate seats.

And the second is that enrollment probably isn’t what the administration was hoping. I don’t know that we’ll start Jan. 1 with fewer people insured than we had a year ago, but this certainly shouldn’t make us optimistic. It’s not like people who lost their insurance due to Obamacare, and now can’t afford to replace their policy, are going to be happy that they’re exempted from the mandate; they’re still going to be pretty mad. This is at best, damage control. Which suggests that the administration is expecting a fair amount of damage.

Turning to the fortunes of Scott Brown, late of Massachusetts, Jennifer Rubin thinks he can go to New Hampshire and win a senate seat there courtesy of the affordable care act.

Scott Brown is relocating to New Hampshire, which we take as a near-certain sign he will run for Senate from that state. His potential opponent, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), should be very nervous. Like many Senate Democrats up for reelection in 2014, she will have a mammoth Obamacare problem. In fiscally tight New Hampshire, Shaheen’s refusal to attack entitlements and address our long-term debt will not sit well. She ran as an independent voice and is now stuck to President Obama and his failing presidency like Velcro.

Moreover, Brown would be a candidate — albeit one who will have to beat back the carpetbagger attack — well suited for New Hampshire, experienced in running a Senate campaign, well-versed on the issues and fully vetted as a senatorial candidate. In a speech recently at the Ronald Reagan dinner in Iowa, Brown showed how effective he is in connecting with ordinary voters:

“I became a Republican when I was poor.  … Before I was a year old, my Dad went his own way … and, unfortunately, he never really came back.  My Mom raised my sister and me alone, working as a waitress, sometimes depending on welfare, and generally doing her best.  We moved 17 times in 18 years.  If it wasn’t to another cheap apartment or second-floor walk-up, then we were the needy visitors in other people’s homes.

I had a series of stepdads.  Two out of 3 of them had a mean streak, and a few drinks made it a violent streak.

Both those guys brought a lot of fear into our lives and with no father to protect me, there were times in my boyhood when it felt like I couldn’t trust anyone.”

No, his biography is not the stereotypical Republican one. And as a result, he can convey with sincerity a theme now heard increasingly from conservatives, namely that liberalism has failed the poor and conservatives have something better to offer:

John Fund says the ad that all Dems should fear has been rolled out for the Scott Brown campaign in New Hampshire. 

The conservative group Ending Spending may have premiered the ad that nationalizes the 2014 midterm elections around Obamacare.

The 30-second killer ad was produced by Republican media consultant Larry McCarthy and goes after Jeanne Shaheen, the first-term Democratic Senator from New Hampshire who is likely to face former GOP Senator Scott Brown next year.

The ad begins with footage of Shaheen on the Senate floor echoing President Obama by saying, “if you like your insurance you can keep it.” An overlay graphic points out that Obama was given the “Lie of the Year” award from a fact-checking group for that whopper. …

Click here for the ad.

Now for the fun – it’s time for pajama boy!. We’ll let John Hinderaker from Power Line do the intro.

One of the central imperatives of Obamacare is to persuade healthy young people to pay way too much for health insurance in order to subsidize the older and sicker. So far, this doesn’t seem to be happening. So the administration has embarked on a PR campaign that conveys a whiff of desperation. In part, the campaign has been geared to the holiday season, and the administration was justly ridiculed for a series of tweets urging the party’s faithful to bring up health insurance at their families’ Thanksgiving dinners, aided by a typically misleading Obamacare “fact sheet.”

Yesterday, the administration’s pro-Obamacare campaign jumped the–no, wait, you can’t say that anymore. It went around the bend. Over the top. With this ad, tweeted by OFA, President Obama’s permanent campaign organization:

 

Pajama Boy was born, and the hilarity ensued immediately. A doofus in a plaid onesie drinking hot chocolate–is this really how the Obama administration pictures its supporters? Pajama Boy takes the absurdity of the “talk about health insurance” campaign to new depths. Merciless ridicule has been heaped on the administration; see, for example, the reaction at Twitchy. (“Obama appeals to the core ‘grown man in a onesie’ demographic.”)

Jim Geraghty has more.

Where to begin? That appears to be a plaid adult onesie, and this is really testing my libertarian live-and-let-live limits. I suspect there’s a reason grown men don’t usually wear onesies. Probably something to do with zippers and midnight trips to the bathroom, and how you really don’t want anything down there getting caught when you’re half asleep and zipping up.

By the way, if you’re in the market for a plaid adult onesie, apparently they cost $69.95. What you wear to bed is your business, but that seems like a lot of money for something you sleep in.

Of course, he’s not sleeping in that; he’s having hot chocolate and discussing health insurance.

Naturally, the Photoshop folks went crazy with the pajama boy picture and we have many of those for you. However prolonged viewing of the image of a twenty-something guy in a onesie pajama needs an antidote. For that we have a series of pics of girls with guns. You don’t want to miss those. Mrs. Pickerhead might not be amused, so this might happen just once.

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Jennifer Rubin approves of the administration’s snub of the Sochi Olympics.

The Post reports: “The White House announced Tuesday that President Obama, Vice President Biden and the first lady will not attend the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, in February, a pointed snub by an administration that is feuding with Russian leaders on a range of foreign policy and human rights issues. The U.S. delegation will be led by a former Cabinet secretary and a deputy secretary of state, and will include two openly gay athletes — tennis legend Billie Jean King and ice hockey player Caitlin Cahow — in an apparent bid to highlight opposition to Russia’s anti-gay laws.” Well — and you don’t read this often around here — bravo, Mr. President.

I’ve argued for just such a snub for some time, so it pleases me no end that Obama has finally stepped up to the plate on even a small, symbolic issue of human rights. Did we wait too long, letting Europeans take the lead? Sure, but this is Obama we’re talking about, not Ronald Reagan. Did he only see the light when the human rights cause became a favorite cause of the left (gay rights)? You bet. He praised Putin’s stolen election, has been silent about kangaroo court trials and has nary a word to say about the female punk rock band thrown in jail. But you have to start somewhere. …

Jonathan Tobin posts on the president’s affinity for House of Cards. 

Nobody should blame President Obama for enjoying the Netflix political thriller House of Cards. Indeed, the show’s millions of fans (including me) probably sympathized with the commander in chief when he pleaded for access to advance copies of the series’ second season that is due out next year when high-tech execs (including the head of Netflix) came to the White House to discuss important issues, like how to build a functional website. But I wasn’t quite so amused by the president’s much-quoted remarks in which he purported to envy the ability of the show’s villain Frank Underwood to do what he likes.

 “I wish things were that ruthlessly efficient,” Obama joked at a meeting with tech CEOs on Tuesday, according to a White House pool report.

We’re supposed to chuckle at this comment and regard it as an understandable expression of frustration by the president at the inability of Congress to do its job. But I’m afraid this crack tells us more about Obama’s way of governing that it does about the fact that neither House Speaker John Boehner nor Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid can teach Frank Underwood much about passing legislation. The fact is, for five years Obama has sat in the White House and acted as if he had as little interest in accommodating the positions of his political foes as Underwood does. The problem isn’t that the West Wing and its congressional allies aren’t as “ruthlessly efficient” as the wicked Underwood, it’s that he has as negative an attitude toward the normal business of democracy as the character played by actor Kevin Spacey. …

Peter Wehner thinks 2014 will be worse than 2013 for the administration. 

President Obama is ending a miserable year on a down note.

Public opinion polls show Mr. Obama’s approval ratings at their low and disapproval ratings at their high. He’s being tagged by the elite media as a liar and as having had the Worst Year in Washington. His signature achievement, the Affordable Care Act, is a rolling disaster. And the rest of his agenda–on gun control, climate change, immigration, and much else–is dead in the water. As CNN’s John King put it, Obama was “0 for 13” on the policy proposals he advocated at the beginning of the year.

One question, I suppose, is whether 2013 can be written off as simply one bad year–or whether, in fact, the Obama White House will look back to this year as the good old days of the second term.

It’s impossible to know for sure, of course, since politics is rarely linear and events we can’t anticipate are sure to intervene. But all we can do is to assess how things look at any given moment in time–and based on where things now stand, my guess is that 2014 will be even worse for the Obama presidency than has been 2013. …

Marc Thiessen says there’s a new poll with even worse news for the administration.

… But as bad as that news is, it pales in comparison to the new AP-GfK poll on Obamacare that came out earlier this week – because this poll suggests that Obama’s numbers will continue their downward spiral in 2014 as more Americans feel the negative impact of Obamacare.

The administration has taken comfort in the fact that while about six million Americans have seen their health plans cancelled, the “vast majority” of insured Americans have been largely unaffected. But this poll shows that “vast majority” is increasingly unhappy with Obamacare.

The AP reports:

The poll found a striking level of unease about [Obamacare] among people who have health insurance and aren’t looking for any more government help. Those are the 85 percent of Americans who the White House says don’t have to be worried about the president’s historic push to expand coverage for the uninsured.

In the survey, nearly half of those with job-based or other private coverage say their policies will be changing next year — mostly for the worse. Nearly 4 in 5 (77 percent) blame the changes on the Affordable Care Act… Sixty-nine percent say their premiums will be going up, while 59 percent say annual deductibles or copayments are increasing.

Only 21 percent of those with private coverage said their plan is expanding to cover more types of medical care, though coverage of preventive care at no charge to the patient has been required by the law for the past couple of years.

In other words, most of those with employer-based coverage are expecting to see their plans get worse and more expensive next year thanks to Obamacare – and they are not happy. …

John Fund says the staff shake up will only move the white house to the left.

… From this staff shake-up it’s clear there won’t be even a feint to the center. Last week’s budget deal in Congress bypassed Obama. The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward candidly told Fox News on Sunday that the budget deal came together only because “Obama was not part of the negotiations — he is not a good negotiator.” While Republican Paul Ryan and Democrat Patty Murray were hammering out a compromise budget, the Obama White House was desperately issuing retroactive “suggestions” to insurance companies to provide free health care to people who have lost their insurance thanks to Obamacare. You can bet that most insurers will follow the “suggestions,” given the White House’s veiled threats that it will view any non-compliance unfavorably when it comes to taking regulatory actions in the future.

Welcome to Obama’s New Power Grab, where the administrative state takes on a quasi-lawless form as the White House tries every scheme in the book (and some that aren’t in any book) to save Obamacare without having to negotiate changes with Congress — the old-fashioned American way of altering laws.

Certainly, John Podesta, the most well known of Obama’s new aides, will be helpful in this anything-goes strategy. Podesta is ostensibly on board merely for a one-year assignment focusing on climate and energy issues, but few believe he will stick to that knitting.

Podesta was chief of staff to President Clinton when, shortly before leaving office, he issued outrageous pardons to fugitive financier Marc Rich and other criminals. …

Seth Mandel posts on why Podesta was chosen. 

The potential impact of President Obama’s decision to bring veteran Democratic figure John Podesta on board to save his floundering presidency continues to be debated, and is the subject of a Glenn Thrush analysis today. But Thrush’s article seems to have fallen victim to the reportorial success of its author, with Thrush having been able to get such a juicy quote out of Podesta that the quote itself has overshadowed the rest of the story.

That’s too bad, because the more important element of the story is not Podesta’s quote, though that’s worth mentioning as well: “[Obama and his team] need to focus on executive action given that they are facing a second term against a cult worthy of Jonestown in charge of one of the houses of Congress,” Podesta told Thrush, comparing the GOP and the large segment of the American public that elected them to the cult movement that ended in infamous mass suicide.

There’s not much surprising about the quote. Now that the moderate wing of the Democratic Party has all but disappeared, unhinged rhetoric and uncontrolled temper tantrums characterize much of the left’s discourse. And the modern Democratic Party has an unhealthy fascination with murder fantasy, from their political ads depicting legislators throwing people off a cliff to their columnists’ attachment to effigy executions. What’s important about the quote is not its morbid conclusion but the first half of it, which is the subject of Thrush’s article:

“This is not just about providing added muscle to a beleaguered and undermanned West Wing staff. According to interviews in recent weeks with an array of Obama insiders and a dozen current and former senior aides, Podesta’s hire is explicitly meant to shake things up inside the White House. In effect, I was told, it represents the clearest sign to date of the administration’s interest in shifting the paradigm of Obama’s presidency through the forceful, unapologetic and occasionally provocative application of White House power. Podesta, whose official mandate includes enforcement of numerous executive orders on emissions and the environment, suggested as much when he spoke with me earlier this fall about Obama’s team. “They need to focus on executive action given that they are facing a second term against a cult worthy of Jonestown in charge of one of the houses of Congress,” he told me. …”

Paul Mirengoff pointed out Jim Jones was a Dem operative.

John Podesta, who is about to join the Obama administration as a top adviser, should fit right in. In an interview with Politico, Podesta stated that the White House “need[s] to focus on executive action given that they are facing a second term against a cult worthy of Jonestown in charge of one of the houses of Congress.”

Jonestown — an avowedly leftist enterprise — was where followers of James Jones committed mass suicide. It is also where a former member of Congress (Leo Ryan) was killed and a current member (Ryan’s aide Jackie Speier) was shot when they tried to find out what the cult was up to. …

 

Jim Geraghty spotted a Salon article on Jim Jones outlining his attachment to the Democrat party. Salon even has a nice picture of Jones with Jerry Brown.

During the 1976 presidential campaign, Jones wangled a private meeting with Jimmy Carter’s wife, Rosalynn, at the elegant StanfordCourtHotel on Nob Hill, arriving with a security contingent that was larger than her Secret Service squad. Later Jones accompanied Moscone and a group of Democratic dignitaries who climbed aboard vice presidential candidate Walter Mondale’s private jet when it touched down at San Francisco International Airport.

Governor Jerry Brown sang the preacher’s praises. Congressman John Burton, Phil’s brother, lobbied the governor to appoint Jones to the high-profile board of regents, which oversaw California’s sprawling public university system. San Francisco Supervisor – now U.S. Senator — Dianne Feinstein accepted an invitation to lunch with Jones and to tour Peoples Temple.

But no political figures were more gushing in their praise of Jones than Willie Brown and Harvey Milk, San Francisco’s rising tribune of gay freedom.

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Arthur Brooks on happiness.

… Along the way, I learned that rewarding work is unbelievably important, and this is emphatically not about money. That’s what research suggests as well. Economists find that money makes truly poor people happier insofar as it relieves pressure from everyday life — getting enough to eat, having a place to live, taking your kid to the doctor. But scholars like the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman have found that once people reach a little beyond the average middle-class income level, even big financial gains don’t yield much, if any, increases in happiness.

So relieving poverty brings big happiness, but income, per se, does not. Even after accounting for government transfers that support personal finances, unemployment proves catastrophic for happiness. Abstracted from money, joblessness seems to increase the rates of divorce and suicide, and the severity of disease.

And according to the General Social Survey, nearly three-quarters of Americans wouldn’t quit their jobs even if a financial windfall enabled them to live in luxury for the rest of their lives. Those with the least education, the lowest incomes and the least prestigious jobs were actually most likely to say they would keep working, while elites were more likely to say they would take the money and run. We would do well to remember this before scoffing at “dead-end jobs.”

Assemble these clues and your brain will conclude what your heart already knew: Work can bring happiness by marrying our passions to our skills, empowering us to create value in our lives and in the lives of others. Franklin D. Roosevelt had it right: “Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.”

In other words, the secret to happiness through work is earned success. …

The best fish story in years from More Intelligent Life.

AS THE SUN was setting on August 18th 2003, the night fishermen of Hahaya village eased their wooden pirogues off the jagged lava rocks and slid into the water. The ocean off the western coast of Grande Comore was calm and as the half-moon rose, they could see the volcano of Karthala silhouetted against the darkening sky. A few hundred metres offshore, one of the fisherman, a veteran of decades of nights on the dark water, laid his paddles across the boat and prepared a line. He tied two flat black stones above a baited hook, then let the fine filament slip through his fingers until it touched the seabed, deep below.

He was waiting for the nibble and tug of a fish—a snapper or a grouper, perhaps, or if he was lucky, a marlin, which he would take the next morning to sell at the market in Moroni. But this time the tug was unfamiliar, and the old fisherman fought with the line before he managed to pull the fish to the surface.

Deep water at night is ink-black and the first thing he saw was a pair of eyes, glowing pink in the pale moonlight. As they surfaced, he could make out a large fish. He recognised it instantly as a gombessa, or coelacanth (pronounced see-la-kanth). Although rarely caught, it was known to all in the Comoros as their most precious asset, a fish that some said was the ancestor of man.

Only six coelacanths had been caught in the waters off Hahaya since 1966, and none in the previous five years, but the old fisherman knew what to do. He tethered it to the back of the boat and paddled back to the village. He knew there was little time to lose as gombessa live in the ocean depths and had never survived for more than a few hours at the surface. Determined to try, he made a safe water pool, and waited for the sun to rise.

The next morning, his nephew took the first bus into Moroni and went straight to the Centre National de Documentation et de Recherche Scientifique (CNDRS)—a handsome white building off the central roundabout in Moroni, which houses the national museum and archives. He told them about the catch. It was what they had been waiting for since the previous year, when Professor Rosemary Dorrington of RhodesUniversity in the Eastern Cape had visited the island to talk about a new project—the African Coelacanth Ecosystem Programme (ACEP)—that had been set up in South Africa. She had left behind some equipment and instructions on what to do if a coelacanth was caught. Her point man in Moroni was Said Ahamada, a young environmentalist.

Ahamada was at home when the phone rang. He rushed to the CNDRS, grabbed the collecting kit and then caught a bush taxi to Hahaya. “It was very emotional,” he remembers. “I was very impatient to see the fish. And when I got there it was still moving a little. It was a very big female, close to two metres, and had already turned brown. But its eyes were still shining; it was amazing to see lights coming from its eyes.” …

Wesley Pruden writes on the scam that will not die – globalony.

We were all supposed to be dead by now, fried to a toasty potatolike chip. Or doomed to die with the polar bears. It was to be a soggy end for the most beautiful planet in the cosmos and for all the passengers riding on it. The global alarmists never quite got their story of fright and fear straight, whether by now we would be fried or frozen.

First they warned of global warming, and when they needed a new narrative “global warming” became “climate change.” They finally settled on something they could prove because the climate does, in fact, change. First it rains, and then the sun comes out. Then it rains again. Rain, sun, rain, sun, drip, drip and dry. The narrative is ever new.

There was always a scarcity of evidence that the globe was on a wild tear, but there was never a scarcity of alarm. We got bedtime stories of ghosts and goblins from the graveyard, wild monsters from Boggy Creek, even a creature from a black lagoon and all kinds of other things that make the night a time of fearsome fun and games. Al Gore, who had a lot of time on his hands after his White House gig was aborted, even made a movie about it. It’s still popular in certain circles on Halloween night. …

And, as John Hinderaker points out, a cooling climate might be the big worry.

As Steve noted a little while ago, the Northern states have been in a deep freeze for a while now. The Minneapolis Star Tribune reports that northern Minnesota hasn’t had a six-day stretch colder than the one the state has just suffered through since the Nixon administration, 1972. From December 6 through 11, the temperature in Duluth averaged 6 degrees. The Brainerd Dispatch went farther back in history to find the record coldest six-day stretch in December. If you’re curious, it was 1927, when for six days in Brainerd, the average temperature was 7.5 degrees below zero.

Of course, that’s just weather. But many scientists are growing increasingly concerned about the prospect of a long-term chill. The Earth has barely emerged from the Little Ice Age, and already solar activity is diminishing to an alarmingly low level. At Watts Up With That, Dr. Leif Svalgaard says, “None of us alive have ever seen such a weak cycle.” Here is the graph: …

And in the feel good story of the week, we learn from Technology Review that this cold weather is making things difficult for electric cars.

EVs could cut gasoline consumption, but their appeal is limited by practical issues like their variable range on a charge.

As winter weather arrives, electric car owners are worrying about what the cold will do to the range of their vehicles. Message threads with titles like “Winter driving warning” and “Another way to stay toasty on long trips without running heat” are showing up on online customer forums run by Tesla Motors, which sells many of its cars in particularly cold places such as Norway.

Cold weather presents two main challenges for electric vehicles: cold air limits battery performance, and running the heater drains the battery. As temperatures go below freezing, some drivers accustomed to traveling 250 miles on a single charge have seen their car’s range drop to 180 miles. Drivers in extreme climates might see the range decrease even more. That might force drivers to choose cars with bigger batteries than they would need in the summer, adding $10,000 or more to the cost of the cars. …

Walt Mossberg has been writing tech reviews for WSJ for 22 years. He writes about the most significant 12 advances he has covered in that time. 

This is my last column for The Wall Street Journal, after 22 years of reviewing consumer technology products here.

So I thought I’d talk about the dozen personal-technology products I reviewed that were most influential over the past two decades. Obviously, narrowing so many products in the most dynamic of modern industries down to 12 is a subjective exercise and others will disagree.

Though most were hits, a couple weren’t blockbusters, financially, and one was an outright flop. Instead, I used as my criteria two main things.

First, the products had to improve ease of use and add value for average consumers. That was the guiding principle I laid down in the first sentence of my first column, in 1991: “Personal computers are just too hard to use, and it’s not your fault.”

Second, I chose these 12 because each changed the course of digital history by influencing the products and services that followed, or by changing the way people lived and worked. In some cases, the impact of these mass-market products is still unfolding. All of these products had predecessors, but they managed to take their categories to a new level. …

We top off the week with Late Night Humor from Andrew Malcolm.

Leno: George Zimmerman’s girlfriend is dropping assault charges against him and wants to get back together. Apparently, she heard Charlie Manson is no longer available.

Leno: The Washington Redskins have benched quarterback Robert Griffin III. He showed great promise at first but now his play has fallen apart. President Obama said, “Tell me about it.”

Leno: Kanye West says he wants to be the Obama of clothing. He’s designing fashions no one wants and selling them on a website that doesn’t work.

Leno: Only one government health program is having a worse roll-out than ObamaCare: Rwanda is trying to hand out 700,000 kits for self-circumcision. Low demand so far.

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Jonah Goldberg says the affordable healthcare act was erected on a foundation of lies.

“Obamacare was sold on a trinity of lies.”

That ornate phrase, more suitable for the Book of Revelations or perhaps the next installment of Game of Thrones, comes from my National Review colleague Rich Lowry. But I like it. Most people know the first deception in the triumvirate of deceit: “If you like your health insurance you can keep it, period.” The second leg in the tripod of deception was “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.”

But the third plank in the triad of disinformation hasn’t gotten much attention: Obamacare will save you, me, and the country a lot of money. This lie took several forms.

First, Obama promised on numerous occasions that the average family of four will save $2,500 a year in premiums. Where did that number come from? Three Harvard economists wrote a memo in 2007 in which they claimed that then-Senator Obama’s health-care plan would reduce national health-care spending by $200 billion. Then, according to the New York Times, the authors “divided [$200 billion] by the country’s population, multiplied for a family of four, and rounded down slightly to a number that was easy to grasp: $2,500.”

In September, the Obama administration’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services used far more rigorous methods to predict that Obamacare would increase national health-care spending by $621 billion. Using Obama’s own math, that would mean — according to Chris Conover, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute and DukeUniversity — each family of four in America will spend an additional $7,450 thanks to Obamacare.

Of course, that methodology is still bogus. But it’s probably closer to the truth. …

WaPo’s Fact Checker awards the biggest Pinocchio of the Year to the affordable care act lie by the president.

“If you like your health-care plan, you can keep it.”

This memorable promise by President Obama backfired on him when the Affordable Care Act went into effect and millions of Americans started receiving cancellation notices. As we explained, part of the reason for so many cancellations is because of an unusually early (March 23, 2o10) cut-off date for grandfathering plans — and because of tight regulations written by the administration.

And PolitiFact calls it the “Lie of the Year.” 

It was a catchy political pitch and a chance to calm nerves about his dramatic and complicated plan to bring historic change to America’s health insurance system.

“If you like your health care plan, you can keep it,” President Barack Obama said — many times — of his landmark new law.

But the promise was impossible to keep. …

… The debate about the health care law rages on, but friends and foes of Obamacare have found one slice of common ground: The president’s “you can keep it” claim has been a real hit to his credibility.

A WaPo news item is a perfect illustration of how the administration hides the truth.

The White House systematically delayed enacting a series of rules on the environment, worker safety and health care to prevent them from becoming points of contention before the 2012 election, according to documents and interviews with current and former administration officials.

Some agency officials were instructed to hold off submitting proposals to the White House for up to a year to ensure that they would not be issued before voters went to the polls, the current and former officials said.

The delays meant that rules were postponed or never issued. The stalled regulations included crucial elements of the Affordable Care Act, what bodies of water deserved federal protection, pollution controls for industrial boilers and limits on dangerous silica exposure in the workplace.

The Obama administration has repeatedly said that any delays until after the election were coincidental and that such decisions were made without regard to politics. But seven current and former administration officials told The Washington Post that the motives behind many of the delays were clearly political, as Obama’s top aides focused on avoiding controversy before his reelection.

The number and scope of delays under Obama went well beyond those of his predecessors, who helped shape rules but did not have the same formalized controls, said current and former officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic. …

All of that resulted in Chris Cillizza deciding the president had the worst year in Washington. Well deserved, we might add.

When historians write the story of Barack Obama’s presidency, 2013 will be his lost year. It opened with great promise and closed with equally great disappointment. In a year that could have been about building his legacy, the president was instead reduced to salvaging the signature accomplishment of his first term.

The chasm between what was expected and what was delivered was evident in the precipitous drop in Obama’s approval ratings throughout 2013, all the way down to George-W.-Bush-second-term territory. Dashed expectations sent Democrats up for reelection in 2014 fleeing for cover and comforted Republicans still smarting from their party’s 2012 defeat.

Second-term presidencies are tricky. The pace of modern politics and the desire of journalists (scourges!) to always look ahead to the next campaign put a reelected incumbent in a race against irrelevancy from the second he is sworn in again. Scandals tend to creep in or escalate — Watergate, Iran-Contra, Monica Lewinsky — and investigations follow, often drifting far afield. Momentum toward any meaningful achievement fades.

Usually, a president has until the midterm elections of his second term to get big things done; after that, attention moves on to deciding who will next occupy 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. But Obama may not have the luxury of even that truncated timeline. The split control in Congress — Democrats in charge in the Senate, a Republican majority in the House — combined with the tea party’s continued demand for conservative purity from its elected officials and the politicization of just about everything makes it hard to imagine that 2014 will afford Obama any chance to move his agenda through Congress. And his addition of John Podesta, a vocal advocate of taking executive action to end-run lawmakers, to the White House staff suggests that the president has effectively given up trying to work with the Hill.

All of which makes what happened — or more accurately, what didn’t happen — in 2013 that much more dire for Obama’s chances of leaving a lasting legacy on his party, Washington and politics more broadly. …

And Michael Boskin doesn’t think 2014 will be any better. Should be fun to watch. 

The White House is claiming that the Healthcare.gov website is mostly fixed, that the millions of Americans whose health plans were canceled thanks to government rules may be able to keep them for another year, and that in any event these people will get better plans through ObamaCare exchanges. Whatever the truth of these assertions, those who expect better days ahead for the Affordable Care Act are in for a rude awakening. The shocks—economic and political—will get much worse next year and beyond. Here’s why:

The “sticker shock” that many buyers of new, ACA-compliant health plans have experienced—with premiums 30% higher, or more, than their previous coverage—has only begun. The costs borne by individuals will be even more obvious next year as more people start having to pay higher deductibles and copays.

If, as many predict, too few healthy young people sign up for insurance that is overpriced in order to subsidize older, sicker people, the insurance market will unravel in a “death spiral” of ever-higher premiums and fewer signups. The government, through taxpayer-funded “risk corridors,” is on the hook for billions of dollars of potential insurance-company losses. This will be about as politically popular as bank bailouts.

The “I can’t keep my doctor” shock will also hit more and more people in coming months. To keep prices to consumers as low as possible—given cost pressures generated by the government’s rules, controls and coverage mandates—insurance companies in many cases are offering plans that have very restrictive networks, with lower-cost providers that exclude some of the best physicians and hospitals.

Next year, millions must choose among unfamiliar physicians and hospitals, or paying more for preferred providers who are not part of their insurance network. Some health outcomes will deteriorate from a less familiar doctor-patient relationship.

More IT failures are likely. …

A very good collection of cartoons today.

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Telegraph, UK column on the bad luck of U. S. friends when the 2008 election heralded changes in our foreign policy.

In his oration at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service on Tuesday, Barack Obama asked himself “how well have I applied his lessons in my own life?”, and invited all of us to ask the same question of ourselves.

In his own case, President Obama offered no answer. But it was the fairly clear implication of his words that he didn’t think he was shaping up too badly. Madiba, he said, had been “the last great liberator of the 20th century”. Guess who looks like being the first great liberator of the 21st.

Today’s leaders needed to be filled, he went on, with the spirit of Ubuntu – a Nguni Bantu word meaning “the oneness of humanity” (Cameroon translation: “We’re all in this together”). They needed to stand up for justice and peace. His performance reminded me slightly of Tom Lehrer’s Folk Song Army: “We all hate poverty, war and injustice – unlike the rest of you squares.”

Such rhetoric is consistent with the tone that Mr Obama has used from the beginning of his presidency, notably when he reached out to Islam in his speech in Cairo in June 2009. It is by now not too early – in some respects, it may even be too late – to ask whether Mr Obama’s foreign policy has yet produced any great outbreak of global Ubuntu.

There is no doubt that billions of people – including your hard-bitten columnist – wanted to hear some such hopeful message when Mr Obama first came to global prominence in 2008. Even today, it is not only Left-wing Danish prime ministers and Mr Cameron who want to share a selfie with him: a large portion of humanity feels the same. The BBC News website still leads off each day with an elderly picture of Obama and Bill Clinton arm in arm. But what, in five years or so, has actually happened?

Broadly speaking, the governments and people which most closely identified with the United States have lost out. …

 

… We in the non-American West are still a bit dazed by what is happening. We liked President Obama so much that we wanted to agree with whatever he wanted to do. But such agreement was based, of course, on the premise that he wielded power. Today, with Obamacare turning into his poll tax at home, and Russia, China and Iran all pushing forward into the spaces he has vacated, this has become harder to believe. Which leaves Barack Obama as little more than an eloquent, narcissistic global preacher, expounding Ubuntu to gradually dwindling congregations.

On the Great Seal of the United States is – to use the correct heraldic term – “A Bald Eagle proper displayed”. It symbolises its country’s soaring power. Time to modernise it, I fear, and replace it with a selfie.

Michael Barone has similar thoughts while reading the history of how the Western world stumbled into the first World War. 

Watching the twists and turns of American foreign policy while reading Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 is an unnerving experience.

Clark’s history, unlike many on the outbreak of World War I, starts not with the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June 1914, but a dozen or so years earlier. He examines the muddled internal politics behind the foreign policies of major and minor powers — and how often they were incomprehensible to each other.

He also shows how different powers formed shifting and sometimes unlikely alliances, with fateful consequences. Britain ended her longtime enmity with France in the 1904 entente cordiale and broke with the Ottoman Empire to join her “Great Game” rival Russia.

Have we been watching something similar in our own time? Barack Obama brought to the presidency a different approach than the post-Cold War stances of his two predecessors. …

… Sudden reversals of policy, shifting alliances, secret negotiations—these are reminiscent of Christopher Clark’s statesmen who sleepwalked into World War I. Let’s hope that clashes over Asian islets or Iranian centrifuges don’t have the kind of consequences as that terrorist murder in Sarajevo did 99 years ago.

Michael Goodwin has more. 

My bookshelves sag with encyclopedic volumes arguing that America and the West are in decline. But proving that a picture is worth a thousand books, the “selfie” seen ’round the world ends the argument.

It’s official — the government of the United States of Obama consists of boobs and bores and is led by a narcissist. It is no consolation that Great Britain joins us in racing to the bottom.

President Obama’s flirting with Denmark’s prime minister would be shameful on any occasion. That it happened at the memorial for Nelson Mandela only adds to the embarrassment.

But the “selfie” episode also symbolizes the greater global calamity of Western decline. With British prime minister David Cameron playing the role of Obama’s giggling wingman, the “look at me” moment confirms we have unserious leaders in a dangerously serious time. …

Closing this section is a NY Times news report on a Saudi Prince trashing the president.

An influential Saudi prince blasted the Obama administration on Sunday for what he called indecision and a loss of credibility with allies in the Middle East, saying that American efforts to secure a peace deal between Israelis and Palestinians would founder without a clear commitment from President Obama.

“We’ve seen several red lines put forward by the president, which went along and became pinkish as time grew, and eventually ended up completely white,” said Prince Turki al-Faisal, the former intelligence chief of Saudi Arabia. “When that kind of assurance comes from a leader of a country like the United States, we expect him to stand by it.” He added, “There is an issue of confidence.”

Mr. Obama has his problems, the prince said, but when a country has strong allies, “you should be able to give them the assurance that what you say is going to be what you do.” The prince no longer has any official position but has lately been providing the public expression of internal Saudi views with clear approval from the Saudi government.

The Saudis have been particularly shaken by Mr. Obama’s refusal to intervene forcefully in the Syrian civil war, especially his recent decision not to punish President Bashar al-Assad of Syria with military strikes even after evidence emerged that Mr. Assad’s government used chemical weapons on its own citizens. …

Turning to another subject, the Daily Caller notes a Swedish study that determined the world was much warmer during the height of Roman power and during the Medieval era. Pickerhead wants to know why that happened without his SUV and his boat that gets 1 mile to a gallon? All this effort to increase his carbon footprint, and for what?

… The study, by scientist Leif Kullman, analyzed 455 “radiocarbon-dated mega-fossils” in the Scandes mountains and found that tree lines for different species of trees were higher during the Roman and Medieval times than they are today. Not only that, but the temperatures were higher as well.

“Historical tree line positions are viewed in relation to early 21st century equivalents, and indicate that tree line elevations attained during the past century and in association with modern climate warming are highly unusual, but not unique, phenomena from the perspective of the past 4,800 years,” Kullman found. “Prior to that, the pine tree line (and summer temperatures) was consistently higher than present, as it was also during the Roman and Medieval periods.”

Kullman also wrote that “summer temperatures during the early Holocene thermal optimum may have been 2.3°C higher than present.” The “Holocene thermal optimum was a warm period that occurred between 9,000 and 5,000 years ago. This warm period was followed by a gradual cooling period.”

According to Kullman, the temperature spikes were during the Roman and Medieval warming periods “were succeeded by a distinct tree line/temperature dip, broadly corresponding to the Little Ice Age.”

For many years now, there was an alleged scientific consensus that the Earth was warming due to humans releasing greenhouse gases into the air — primarily through burning fossil fuels. However, temperatures stopped rising after 1998, leaving scientists scrambling to find an explanation to the hiatus in warming.

Increasingly, scientists are looking away from human causes and looking at solar activity and natural climate variability for explanations of why the planet warms and cools.

“All other things being equal, adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere will have a warming effect on the planet,” Judith Curry, a climatologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, told the Los Angeles Times. “However, all things are never equal, and what we are seeing is natural climate variability dominating over human impact.” …

And snow in Cairo Egypt according to the LA Times. How stupid is Algore?

CAIRO — Snow coated domes and minarets Friday as a record Middle East storm compounded the suffering of Syrian refugees, sent the Israeli army scrambling to dig out stranded motorists and gave Egyptians a rare glimpse of snow in their capital.

Nearly three feet of snow closed roads in and out of Jerusalem, which is set in high hills, and thousands in and around the city were left without power. Israeli soldiers and police rescued  hundreds trapped in their cars by snow and ice. In the West Bank, the branches of olive trees groaned under the weight of snow.

In Cairo, where local news reports said the last recorded snowfall was more than 100 years ago, children in outlying districts capered in white-covered streets, and adults marveled at the sight, tweeting pictures of snow-dusted parks and squares. In other parts of the city, rain and hail rocketed down. …

Closing this section, we have a post from John Hinderaker on the corruption of the green movement.

We have written many times about the corruption of the global warming movement. Billions and billions of dollars are being poured into the pockets of global warming alarmists, because they perform such a valuable service: they help to persuade voters that governments should be given greater control over the world’s economies. What’s a few billion dollars when trillions are at stake?

We have written mostly about the corruption of Greens in America, where Al Gore has become a standing joke. But the Daily Mail has performed the valuable service of exposing the corruption that is rampant among British environmentalists; specifically, global warming alarmists:

“The Mail on Sunday today reveals the extraordinary web of political and financial interests creating dozens of eco-millionaires from green levies on household energy bills.

A three-month investigation shows that some of the most outspoken campaigners who demand that consumers pay the colossal price of shifting to renewable energy are also getting rich from their efforts.”

 

One is tempted to ask why anyone should be surprised by this, but of course, many people had no idea that the environmental movement is a cesspool of corruption. …

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Jennifer Rubin, who has become a bete noire for some on the far right, celebrates the budget deal.

The margin was simply stunning — 332 to 94 — for House passage of a two-year budget that restores some monies for defense, includes minor pension reform, eschews tax increases and maintains the basic structure of the sequester. The far-right groups  (Heritage Action, Club for Growth) and their minions squawked, but they were ignored and even insulted by the speaker, who questioned how the folks that brought us the shutdown could question a bipartisan budget deal that takes away the threat of tax hikes and a shutdown for the remainder of the Obama presidency. The era of bullying by the hardliners — if not over — is at least waning.

The victory is a substantial one for the House leadership, for mainstream Republican groups like the Chamber of Commerce (which has roused itself to take on the far right) and most especially House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who struck the deal and persuaded the 168 other Republicans to join him in passing the bill (Dems provided nearly as many votes).

In essence, Ryan saved the GOP from itself, allowing it to forgo endless squabbles and shutdown threats in order to concentrate on the best issues for them, primarily Obamacare. In staring down the far-right groups, the speaker and others in House leadership gain some running room to use on immigration and other issues. With a win this big — one that the country desperately wanted to end the budget histrionics — why quiver at the prospect of Heritage Action e-mails or threats by Club for Growth to primary incumbents? (Let them try to primary 169 Republicans.) …

Roger Simon has the same take. 

Excuse me, but I’m a little confused. Just why are “movement” conservatives and libertarians so angry with Paul Ryan about the budget deal he made with Patty Murray?

Now, of course, I understand why some politicians are angry, or pretending to be. They’re Ryan’s competition for POTUS in 2016, assuming the Wisconsin congressman wants to run. They’re positioning themselves for a campaign. But the rest of us?

Let’s stipulate this: No conservative or libertarian is going to get what he or she wants on government spending — or even anything remotely close to it — without winning the Senate in 2014 and the presidency two years later. Barring mass lobotomies, it ain’t gonna happen — not with Barack Obama and Harry Reid standing in the way. You have to get rid of these people first.

The good news is, as of this moment — thanks to the Obamacare fiasco that will likely continue for some time, even get worse, and, to a lesser extent, the Iran deal that, in all probability, is headed for disaster — things are running in the right’s direction. What Ryan quite obviously was trying to do is keep it that way — tread some water until we have at least the first of those elections (2014). He was following Hippocrates’ prescription to do no harm. …

Turns out the same blasé attitudes that gave us the healthcare.gov disaster were in charge of security at Mandela’s memorial. Byron York has the story. This is an administration filled with mediocrities like Ben Rhodes, who must be well liked by Valerie Jarrett, because there cannot be anything else to recommend him.   (“Bete noire”, “blasé”; Pickerhead has become continental.)

It’s becoming increasingly clear that when President Obama arrived at the Nelson Mandela memorial service in Johannesburg, South Africa Tuesday, he stepped into an atmosphere so chaotic, disorganized, and unsafe that under any other circumstances the White House and Secret Service might well have insisted the president not appear.

FNB Stadium, where the memorial was held, seats 95,000 people. Even with a steady rain and thousands of empty seats in uncovered areas, there were tens of thousands of people in the area with the president. It appears most of them got in without going through any security.

“There were no security checks upon entry to the stadium,” a local South African activist wrote Friday in a letter to the Johannesburg Star newspaper. “I walked freely to my seat without passing through metal detectors, being searched or any other check.”

The stadium’s main entrance was “completely unattended,” a reporter for a Washington, D.C., television station told Politico. “There were no workers performing bag checks or pat-downs — there were no magnetometers to walk through, no metal detector wands being used — anywhere.” …

… Even as Obama flew to South Africa, White House officials confidently told reporters that the South African government could take care of things. “The sheer number of leaders appearing in the same place at one time raises numerous logistical and security challenges, but the White House expressed confidence in the South African government’s ability to handle the event,” CNN reported. “‘We have not heard any concerns,’ Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes told reporters aboard Air Force One. ‘The South Africans hosted the World Cup, so they have experience hosting significant crowds and managing events like this.’”

Now it is clear that American confidence was misplaced. And the United States is lucky the president emerged safely from the confusion and disorder of FNB Stadium.

Ed Carson at IBD drills into the unemployment numbers.

The official unemployment rate has fallen to a five-year low of 7%. But put away the champagne.

That gradual decline reflects a historic drop in labor force participation. Without that drop, joblessness would be 11.3%, holding at 11% or higher in every month but one in the last 50 months.

To be considered unemployed, a person has to be out of work but actively looking. So when people give up the job hunt, they reduce unemployment — even if the number of people working hasn’t risen.

At the start of the recession in December 2007, the labor force participation rate was 66%. It fell sharply, tumbling to 62.8% in October, a 35-year low. It rose slightly to 63% last month.

The actual labor force has declined by 217,000 so far this year, even with nonfarm payrolls up by 2.1 million.

During recessions and the early stages of a recovery, discouraged people leave the workforce. So the unemployment rate at these times typically masks how bad the job market really is.

But the size and scope of the distortion is far higher now than in past economic recoveries. The gap between the official and “true” unemployment rate is 4.3 percentage points — more than four years after the recession ended.

After the brief 1990-1991 slump, the unemployment gap never was wider than 2 percentage points. …

Nolan Finley says Robin Hood policies hurt the poor. If you understand that the government always screws up, you then expect that policies to help the poor will make them poorer.

President Barack Obama has some bad news for poor and working class Americans: He’s going to spend the final three years of his presidency attacking the income gap.

“The combined trends of increased inequality and decreasing mobility pose a fundamental threat to the American dream, our way of life, and what we stand for around the globe,” the president said in a recent speech.

No coincidence the pledge to stamp out inequality comes at the same time Obama’s popularity and performance ratings are plunging due to the Obamacare fiasco. He always pivots to populism when he gets in trouble.

But this is no grand shift. Obama has been playing Robin Hood since Day One. All his major initiatives have been built on soaking the rich.

And what’s happened? Those on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder have less disposable income than they did when he took office, and the fat cats are fatter than ever. …

Megan McArdle says the pill was important, but there would be no sexual revolution with antibiotics.

Last night, I had a drink with Peter Huber, who has a terrific new book out on how the legal system is holding back medical innovation. We chatted about a lot of things, but one thing we discussed was how antibiotics have been the unseen driver of so many developments in the modern world.

Most of them are medical, like transplant surgery, and I’ve written about those before. But here’s one you might not have thought of: the sexual revolution. Most of us, if we think about it at all, probably attribute the rise in premarital sex to The Pill, among other factors. But before the birth control pill, there was another invention that was just as necessary: antibiotics. …

Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink? Turns out there’s gobs of fresh water in aquifers under the world’s oceans. Walter Russell Mead with the story.

We may soon be looking to our oceans for our freshwater—or more accurately, we’ll be looking underneath our oceans. A new study, the first to comprehensively survey the world’s known reserves of undersea freshwater, estimates that there are roughly 120,000 cubic miles—more than 100 times the amount of freshwater we’ve drilled from the ground since 1900—of fresh and nearly-fresh water trapped underneath seabeds. The upshot: we could be seeing more offshore drilling for water as well as oil in the future. ScienceDaily reports:

“… The water, which could perhaps be used to eke out supplies to the world’s burgeoning coastal cities, has been located off Australia, China, North America and South Africa. [...]

These reserves were formed over the past hundreds of thousands of years when on average the sea level was much lower than it is today, and when the coastline was further out, [lead author Dr Vincent Post] explains…”So when it rained, the water would infiltrate into the ground and fill up the water table in areas that are nowadays under the sea.  ‘ …

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We enter the week with a downbeat. Norman Podhoretz calls for a strike on Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Since president ostrich will do nothing, it falls on Israel to defend civilization.

Not too many years ago, hardly anyone disagreed with John McCain when he first said that “the only thing worse than bombing Iran is letting Iran get the bomb.” Today hardly anyone disagrees with those who say that the only thing worse than letting Iran get the bomb is bombing Iran. And in this reversal hangs a tale.

The old consensus was shaped by three considerations, all of which seemed indisputable at the time.

The first was that Iran was lying when it denied that its nuclear facilities were working to build a bomb. After all, with its vast reserves of oil and gas, the country had no need for nuclear energy. Even according to the liberal Federation of American Scientists a decade ago, the work being done at the Iranian nuclear facilities was easily “applicable to a nuclear weapons development program.” Surprisingly, a similar judgment was made by Mohamed ElBaradei, the very dovish director of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The second consideration was that the prospect of being annihilated in a retaliatory nuclear strike, which had successfully deterred the Soviets and the Chinese from unleashing their own nuclear weapons during the Cold War, would be ineffective against an Iran ruled by fanatical Shiite mullahs. As Bernard Lewis, the leading contemporary authority on Islam, put it in 2007, to these fanatics “mutual assured destruction is not a deterrent, it is an inducement. …

… Given how very unlikely it is that President Obama, despite his all-options-on-the-table protestations to the contrary, would ever take military action, the only hope rests with Israel. If, then, Israel fails to strike now, Iran will get the bomb. And when it does, the Israelis will be forced to decide whether to wait for a nuclear attack and then to retaliate out of the rubble, or to pre-empt with a nuclear strike of their own. But the Iranians will be faced with the same dilemma. Under these unprecedentedly hair-trigger circumstances, it will take no time before one of them tries to beat the other to the punch.

And so my counsel to proponents of the new consensus is to consider the unspeakable horrors that would then be visited not just on Israel and Iran but on the entire region and beyond. The destruction would be far worse than any imaginable consequences of an Israeli conventional strike today when there is still a chance to put at least a temporary halt, and conceivably even a permanent one, to the relentless Iranian quest for the bomb.

Speaking of the slow learner, Charles Krauthammer says president bystander was really president oblivious.

In explaining the disastrous rollout of Obamacare, President Obama told Chris Matthews he had discovered that “we have these big agencies, some of which are outdated, some of which are not designed properly.”

An interesting discovery to make after having consigned the vast universe of American medicine, one-sixth of the U.S. economy, to the tender mercies of the agency bureaucrats at the Department of Health and Human Services and the Internal Revenue Service.

Most people become aware of the hopeless inefficiency of sclerotic government by, oh, age 17 at the department of motor vehicles. Obama’s late discovery is especially remarkable considering that he built his entire political philosophy on the rock of Big Government, on the fervent belief in the state as the very engine of collective action and the ultimate source of national greatness. (Indeed, of individual success as well, as in “If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”)

This blinding revelation of the ponderous incompetence of bureaucratic government came just a few weeks after Obama confessed that “what we’re also discovering is that insurance is complicated to buy.” Another light bulb goes off, this one three years after passing a law designed to force millions of Americans to shop for new health plans via the maze of untried, untested, insecure, unreliable online “exchanges.”

This discovery joins a long list that includes Obama’s rueful admission that there really are no shovel-ready jobs. That one came after having passed his monstrous $830 billion stimulus on the argument that the weakened economy would be “jump-started” by a massive infusion of shovel-ready jobs. Now known to be fictional. …

Similar thoughts from George Will.

The education of Barack Obama is a protracted process as he repeatedly alights upon the obvious with a sense of original discovery. In a recent MSNBC interview, he restocked his pantry of excuses for his disappointing results, announcing that “we have these big agencies, some of which are outdated, some of which are not designed properly”:

“We’ve got, for example, 16 different agencies that have some responsibility to help businesses, large and small, in all kinds of ways, whether it’s helping to finance them, helping them to export. .So, we’ve proposed, let’s consolidate a bunch of that stuff. The challenge we’ve got is that that requires a law to pass. And, frankly, there are a lot of members of Congress who are chairmen of a particular committee. And they don’t want necessarily consolidations where they would lose jurisdiction over certain aspects of certain policies.”

The dawn is coming up like thunder as Obama notices the sociology of government. He shows no sign, however, of drawing appropriate lessons from it. …

Streetwise Professor noticed a White House tweet suggesting getting covered by the healthcare act will give your mother piece of mind.

The Fascism With A Smile campaign to fool suckers into signing up for Obamacare is in full swing.  The White House is engaged in a flood-the-zone campaign to get people to Get Covered.

What a concept! Imagine if they had, I dunno, a website where people could sign up, send their information to an insurance company, pay their premium.  That would be amazing!

But today this campaign surpassed the ability of even a Swift to satirize.   The White House posted this on Twitter.

Peace. Piece. I know.  I always have such a hard time knowing when to use which.

Perhaps this is a Freudian slip.  The administration knows that the success of Obamacare depends on a lobotomized population.  People who have lost a piece of their minds, if they had any to begin with. Or maybe it’s just that the creator of this propaganda has issues with Mom.  S/he wants to give her a piece of her/his mind.  But what about the “quality control”? The “editing” process?  Does everyone at the WH have Mom issues?

Isn’t it grand? Turning over control of 1/6th of the US economy to people who don’t know the difference between “piece” and “peace”, or who don’t care enough to make the distinction when producing propaganda intended to gull the great unwashed.

The next challenge for the administration: to grasp the subtle differences between “there”, “their”, and “they’re”.

We are so screwed.

And Power Line is taking to calling her Queen Seeb since she appears to be writing laws on the fly. Can’t write code, but an edict without bothering with that congress thingy is no problem.

Bloomberg View columnist Megan McArdle summarizes the conference call for journalists yesterday afternoon with Kathleen Sebelius and other members of the Obamacare team in which the powers-that-be announced further decrees and encouragements to smooth the pending implementation of Obamacare on January 1:

· Insurers will be required to accept payment for policies beginning Jan. 1 as late as Dec. 31, and they will be “encouraged” to accept payment after that. In response to a question, HHS says that at least one insurer, Aetna Inc., has agreed to take payments as late as Jan. 8.

· The high-risk pools that were established to cover people with pre-existing conditions in the transition will be extended through the end of January for people who haven’t already selected a plan.

· Insurers are being “strongly encouraged” to treat out-of-network doctors as in-network doctors for acute-care episodes, or if the provider was listed in the plan’s provider directory when the patient enrolled.

· Insurers are also being “strongly encouraged” to refill prescriptions in the month of January, even if they aren’t covered under the new plan, if they were covered under the patient’s old plan.

The Hill’s Jonathan Easley also reports on the call here. HHS has posted an update here on what it modestly describes as its “steps to ensure Americans signing up through the Marketplace have coverage and access to the care they need on January 1.”

The times seem to call for resumption of my “Adventures in administrative law” series of posts, but I think I would be over my head. To borrow a phrase, this is banana republic stuff.

A Pickings reader wrote last week complaining about the lack of sick Mandela jokes. Mark Steyn found a good one by Neil Phillips from the English town of Rugeley. Ignoring, of course, that whole joke in South Africa.

Alas, far from the face-pulling selfies, Mandela jokes are no laughing matter. Simon Amstell (who appears to be a comedian in the same sense that Thamsanqa Jantjie is a sign-language interpreter) visited BBC Radio and quipped that “it’s so white in here Mandela would not approve.” Shortly thereafter, the host apologized on air lest anyone was offended. Which they were, because Mr. Amstell himself subsequently apologized on Twitter. Neil Phillips did not get off so lightly. During the final stages of the African leader’s slowly deteriorating health, Mr. Phillips, who runs the Crumbs sandwich shop in the English town of Rugeley, had gone online and complained: “My PC takes so long to shut down I’ve decided to call it Nelson Mandela.” The Staffordshire Constabulary arrested him, seized his computers, and, in the course of an eight-hour detention, fingerprinted and DNA-swabbed him.

“There are no jokes in Islam,” Ayatollah Khomeini sternly warned, and that’s true even for its “moderate” redoubts, where Shez Cassim, a U.S. citizen from Minnesota, has languished in a Dubai jail cell since April for making a video mildly parodic of United Arab Emirates youth. But, as Mr. Phillips discovered, there are fewer jokes outside Islam, too. Once upon a time, it was the communist Eastern Europe that policed gags, as captured in Milan Kundera’s first great novel. Now even in free societies an infelicitous jest can lead to a rap sheet. In such a world, we should treasure the hilarity of the Mandela service. “Nelson Mandela stood for freedom,” his successor Jacob Zuma said. “He wanted everyone to be free.” Unfortunately, some of the crowd booed Zuma, so he’s now having them investigated for embarrassing him.

Still, let’s take Zuma at his word: Mandela wanted everyone to be free. Free to sign-translate the U.N. secretary-general’s speech into total codswallop. Free to cop a feel from the Danish prime minister. And free, for all the loftiness of the forgettable rhetoric, to relish the low comedy all around it.

Power Line posts on the famous selfie.

There is a reason why the infamous selfie photo is the only significant news story to emerge from Nelson Mandela’s funeral. The shot, and the story, resonate with people because they express what we already knew about Barack Obama: he is a narcissist. Michael Ramirez puts the selfie into historical context:

How a man as temperamentally unsuited to any leadership position as Barack Obama managed to become President of the United States is a question that historians will debate for many years to come.