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Andrew Malcolm opens up our day on healthcare with a post about how the young are abandoning the president just when they’re needed to save the healthcare plan.

You may have noticed over these past 2,501 days that Barack Obama likes to give speeches, sometimes two or more a day. It’s better than Oval Office work. And on Wednesday the poor guy gave a particularly revealing one.

He’s increasingly desperate now, the president is. So desperate that he modestly likened ObamaCare to the suffrage struggle and to the civil rights movement, when he was growing up in Indonesia.

The litany of Obama gaffes, scandals, under-achievements and downright deceits is long and messy. And topped by this ongoing ObamaCare train wreck that worsens by the day.

The website was hilariously inept, except it cost way north of $600 million of our dollars. The president’s now proclaimed it fixed for the majority of attempted users. But that’s just the front door.

Once you’re in and perhaps enter your data, it’s not only not secure. It likely won’t reach the insurers because the site’s innards are not yet built.

There are many more problems to come. Premium shock; double the price for many. Deductible shock; most must soon pay the price of a used car before the policy kicks in. Next year thousands of employers will shorten shifts to get under the 30-hour threshold for health coverage and abandon company plans, whether employees like them or not.

On the other hand, everyone — gals, guys, seniors — gets free birth control coverage.

But here’s the largest challenge for Obama’s ObamaCare: He needs to ensure that 40% of all new enrollees are under 35 and willing to pay huge premiums for coverage they really don’t need. …

American.com blog post says regardless of the PR effort, the healthcare site is not close to being fixed.

Despite optimistic sound bites from the White House about improvements to HealthCare.gov, the President’s health reform remains dysfunctional. The website now boasts that it can handle 50,000 users at a time. But HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius warns that there will still be delays and urges people to try in off-peak hours. That is an improvement over the complete failure of  HealthCare.gov in October—but if amazon.com had that level of performance, it would not stay in business for long.

Even with a better-functioning website, the government is having trouble enrolling people in health plans. An anonymous source claims that 29,000 people selected a plan through the website on December 1 and 2. That does not mean they actually completed their application or paid their first month’s premium. HHS still cannot accurately transmit applicant information to insurers, including state Medicaid programs.

This is a far more serious problem than it may seem. Five million people have had their current coverage cancelled because it did not satisfy ACA requirements. They are facing higher premiums and tighter provider networks, and they want to know what the government is offering just as much as the uninsured. During the week before Christmas, millions of people will try to purchase coverage through a web site that falls far short of private sector standards.

The result will be human and political calamity. Parents bringing their sick children into the doctor in January are liable to find that there is no record that they are covered by the insurance they think they have. People with chronic conditions going in for a long-delayed checkup may be handed a bill that was supposed to be covered by insurance. These stories will play out in every community across the country, permanently undermining public belief in big government solutions.

Noemie Emery writes on why she thinks repair is impossible.

… Most social policy involves the redistribution of money, and none of the plans mentioned above were immune from that. But the costs of these plans were funded by taxes, spread out over all of the country and, due to progressive taxation, fell hardest on those who could pay. Dispersed and proportional, the cost was accepted as moral and justified.

But the costs of Obamacare fall like a hammer on discrete groups of people who face hikes of hundreds of dollars in premiums in being forced — by the collapse of their plans — to go on exchanges. And most of these people are not rich. The pain was direct, and the pain was immediate, and the pain was communicated in the press and to Congress, where it was enough to force Obama into an improvised (and unworkable) program “fix” to keep 100 House Democrats from stampeding to the Republicans’ side. And at the same time, the program costs more and causes people problems they never expected (and were promised they never would face).

The second big difference is that Medicare, et al, raised taxes on people, but otherwise left them alone. Obamacare isn’t just costing people more money, it’s vastly curtailing their medical choices in ways they perceive as a threat. They can’t keep their doctors. They can’t keep their hospitals. And some state exchanges produce “narrow networks” that put good doctors and hospitals out of their reach.

By threatening their lives as well as their budgets, Obama has created a huge class of losers, who statistically overrun the small class of winners and outweigh them in savvy, no doubt. “A significant minority of losers or self-perceived losers and a few high profile bad outcomes are more than enough to cause real political problems,” as Kaiser Foundation head honcho Drew Altman informs us. They’re not a minority, and they have, and they will. …

Debra Saunders says the next disaster will be “doc shock.”

“The bottom line is this law is working and will work into the future,” President Barack Obama said of his signature Affordable Care Act on Tuesday. It would be easier to believe the president if he hadn’t said in 2009, “If you like the plan you have, you can keep it. If you like the doctor you have, you can keep your doctor, too.”

One million Californians who lose their individual plans in 2014 know that’s not true; when many saw their new premiums, they experienced “sticker shock.” Next comes “doc shock” — the revelation that many folks also won’t be able to keep their doctors.

Meet Chico, Calif., attorney Kenneth Turner. His wife found out that she has breast cancer two days before they received their cancellation notice. She’s scheduled for surgery Dec. 20 and will hear the prognosis Dec. 30. Two days later, she loses the doctor who will have operated on her, as well as other doctors she has seen for decades. …

The Hill has more on the youth deficit.

Mounting opposition to ObamaCare among young adults is creating a new crisis for the White House.

While the federal enrollment website HealthCare.gov appears to be improving by the day, polls show the “young invincibles” key to making the law work are becoming less likely to enroll.

Younger people were skeptical of the healthcare reform law even before its troubled rollout, despite their support for President Obama. 

But polling indicates the problems facing HealthCare.gov — a site the administration initially touted as a hip, tech-friendly experience — have reinforced their doubts about the need to have health insurance at all.

“The trend is daunting for the White House but not necessarily surprising,” said Pew Research Center Director Michael Dimock. 

“Younger folks are part of Obama’s base … but the rollout confirmed concerns that were already in their minds.” 

A poll released Wednesday by HarvardUniversity’s Institute of Politics found that more than half of 18- to 29-year-olds disapprove of ObamaCare and believe it will raise their healthcare costs. 

Even more troubling for the administration is that less than one-third of uninsured young people said they plan to enroll in coverage. 

Without a large number of young, healthy people in the insurance exchanges, it could create a “death spiral” of high premiums that could threaten the long-term viability of the marketplaces. …

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Hillary Clinton’s lack of a position on the Iran deal is proof of her courage deficit according to Jennifer Rubin.

… This is the calculated careerism for which she is famous. Timid when the stakes are high (e.g., she was mum on gay marriage until even Ohio Republican Sen. Rob Portman made known his support), she has never been one to carve her own intellectual or political space. She was a dutiful senator with no particular achievement. She was a secretary of state with oodles of frequent flyer miles but no doctrine or accomplishment. Like so many celebrities famous for being famous, she is presidential only by virtue of racking up items to put on her resume and  coveting the presidency. Perhaps it is time she earned the presidency through political courage or imaginative policy.

In refusing to make known her views on this, as on the Syria debacle, she is trying to deprive critics of later criticizing a misstep. But in fact the misstep is having uppermost in her mind only the zeal for public office. She has her own foreign debacles to deal with (e.g, Benghazi, siding with Hugo Chavez’s stooge in Honduras and the Russian reset). Add to those her reticence on the most important national security issue in decades and you have a 2016 contender who, like the 2008 Hillary, is more a gender symbol than a leader. Perhaps that is why she is beatable by a charismatic and/or truly accomplished competitor.

Seth Mandel posts on the faint praise that the Dems damn Hillary with.

Though it’s probably not intended this way, Politico Magazine editor Susan Glasser’s verdict on Hillary Clinton’s legacy as secretary of state is revealed before readers get to the first sentence. The headline of the piece is, naturally: “Was Hillary Clinton a Good Secretary of State?” But the subheadline gives it away: “And does it matter?” Thus, the article seems to be making excuses for Clinton before even revealing what must be excused.

The problem for Clinton is that she has a sympathetic judge in Glasser, who penned a Foreign Policy cover profile of Clinton last year that was celebratory despite not having much to celebrate. Yet when Glasser asks around the foreign-policy community about Clinton’s accomplishments at State, those on the left side of the political isle seem to all bypass the question itself and move right onto why she had no accomplishments. You have to wonder what the answers would be if Clinton weren’t presumed to be the next Democratic nominee for president. …

Daniel Greenfield posts on all the awards given to H. Clinton. Greenfield goes on a liitle too long, but it’s still fun.

Hardly a week goes by without Hillary Clinton receiving another award.

Last month she was named a “Global Champion” by the International Medical Corps at a gala Beverly Hills event crowded with celebrities, received the American Patriot Award at the National Defense University Foundation in the Ronald Reagan Building and the Hermandad Award from the Mexican American Leadership Initiative.

Considering that Hillary Clinton is as much of an American patriot as is she is a Mexican-American leader… both awards seem equally deserved.

Hillary was honored by Malaria No More for taking the controversial position of being against malaria and by the Lantos Foundation for Human Rights and Justice for supporting internet freedom. Because nothing says a deep commitment to internet freedom like sending a man to jail for a year over a YouTube video that offended Muslims.

The President of Georgia (the one in the Caucasus) honored her with the Order of the Golden Fleece. That’s considered a high honor in Georgia, but back in the United States it just reminds everyone of Whitewater and the Rose Law Firm.

The Queen of Spain gave Hillary Clinton and Antonio Banderas gold medals and Oceana honored her for saving the oceans. And that was a slow month after Yale Law School gave her its Award of Merit, Chatham House gave her a prize and Citizens for Research in Epilepsy honored her for taking a courageous stand by opposing epilepsy.

The American Bar Association had already given Hillary its highest honor for “her immense accomplishments as a lawyer”. The National Constitution Center awarded her the Liberty Medal (an honor she shares with such Constitutional scholars as Bono, Hamid Karzai and her husband) and Elton John gave her an award for fighting AIDS declaring himself “honoured to honour her”.

(If you’re keeping track, Hillary has come out against malaria, epilepsy and AIDS. No word on her position on shingles—but reportedly she’s against it.)  …

 

… The more you listen to Hillary, the more you realize that she doesn’t have ideas, she has cliches. String together a bunch of cliches and you have a Hillary speech. String together a bunch of Hillary speeches and you have a candidacy that is as empty as it is inevitable. Hillary isn’t even Chauncey Gardiner. Her cliches lack even accidental poetry. Instead they’re as empty as she is.

 

What does Hillary stand for? A casual observer would be forgiven for assuming that she stands for nothing. After eight years in the senate, the only thing about her time there that anyone bothers to mention is her vote on the Iraq War. That’s because there isn’t anything to mention.

If Hillary had not accidentally taken what would become a controversial position, while trying to cast a safe vote, all that anyone would remember about her time in the Senate is that she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame for “opening new pathways for women in leadership”.

That was quite an accomplishment considering that she was the 32nd female senator. …

 

…  Hillary is obsessed with winning and certain that she will lose. Everything she has done throughout the years was calculated to make defeat as unlikely as possible… including taking the position of Secretary of State while doing as little as possible in that role. Instead of inspiring people, she has built up a bulletproof resume while taking as few risks as possible. And that insecurity may be her undoing.

 For 13 years, Hillary has done little except abuse public office to map out her future presidential run. By the time the election actually takes place, she will have spent nearly two decades or a third of her adult life focused on running for president.

At the Benghazi hearings, Hillary famously demanded to know what difference it made. The same can be said of her life.

Jennifer Rubin also posts on Hillary’s baggage.

Hillary Clinton may be the overwhelming front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016,  but she’s going to have to deal with some knotty problems sooner or later. She can’t ignore forever either her party or the media’s entreaties to talk on important subjects.

The first problem surely is health care. President Obama won’t allow it to be repealed, so the Affordable Care Act will be hanging there, damaged and disliked for Clinton to address. Will she throw it and her former boss overboard, call for a single-payer plan as a sop to the left and risk scaring off the electorate in Nov. 2016?

It’s not like the problem is going to go away.  According to one poll, a majority of young people think the law will be repealed — next year. You can bet these people won’t bother to sign up for a program they consider a goner. Couple that with news reports of scamming and a 10 percent error rate and the incentive for the millions who must sign up to make the scheme work pretty much vanishes. Obamacare threatens to hang over Clinton’s campaign like low-hanging fog. Frankly, before long she may be begging Obama to get rid of it so she doesn’t have to deal with it. (It won’t help that Obamacare closely resembled the health-care plan she ran on in 2008.)

The other problem is her record at the State Department. It is supposed to qualify her for the presidency. Instead it’s becoming a burden. …

The Atlantic has a look at higher education done right.

LaGuardia Community College is a GED machine. At this urban school, near the Long Island Expressway in the New York City borough of Queens, the prep courses for the state’s high school equivalency exam aren’t just textbook reviews—they are professional-development classes. There is a course for would-be health workers, another for business students, and yet another for anyone interested in technology and engineering.

LaGuardia’s free classes, funded by state, city, and foundation grants, have a months-long waiting list. Students willing to pay for courses (at about $3.50 per hour of instruction) can usually get a spot in the next scheduled class, although those fill up, too. Most students are black or Latino.

Gail Mellow, LaGuardia’s president, says postsecondary educators who don’t reach out to high school dropouts are ignoring many of the young people who most need their help. In big cities such as New York, almost 40 percent of students who enter high school don’t finish. “To really educate the American populace,” she says, “we cannot forget people who did not graduate from high school.” …

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Jeff Jacoby writes on majority rule in science. 

Back in 2006, around the time Al Gore’s global-warming documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” was released, I started a file labeled “What Climate Consensus?” Gore was insisting that “the debate among the scientists is over,” and only an ignoramus or a lackey for the fossil-fuel industry could doubt that human beings were headed for a climate catastrophe of their own making. But it didn’t take much sleuthing to discover that there was plenty of debate among scientists about the causes and consequences of global warming. Many experts were skeptical about the hyperbole of alarmists like Gore, and as I came across examples, I added them to my file.

The thicker that file grew, the more shrilly intolerant the alarmists became.

Over and over the True Believers insist that their view is not just widely accepted in the scientific community, but virtually unanimous apart from some crackpots. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has likened doubters to members of a Flat Earth Society. CBS news reporter Scott Pelley, asked why his “60 Minutes” broadcasts on global warming didn’t acknowledge the views of skeptics, reached for an even more wounding comparison: “If I do an interview with Elie Wiesel, am I required as a journalist to find a Holocaust denier?”  …

Paul Mirengoff asks, “Where’s Chucko?” As in Hagel the SecDef.

Earlier this year, John Kerry and Chuck Hagel took over the top jobs at the Department of State and the Department of Defense, respectively. Since then, Kerry has been hyper-active. But whatever happened to Hagel?

He has impinged on our consciousness only once, as Kerry’s sidekick during congressional hearings on authorizing an attack on Syria. The impingement was slight. Kerry and Gen. Dempsey did almost all of the talking. Hagel was content with silence except for an occasional misstatement of fact (the Pentagon had to walk back his claim that Russia supplies Syria with chemical weapons).

Presumably, Hagel was under orders to remain mute during the Syria hearings. The White House could ill afford a repeat of his epically awful performance during his confirmation hearing. …

More on the Dud at DOD from Jonathan Tobin.

The biggest fight of the first two months of Barack Obama’s second term was his determination to get his man at Defense. Former Senator Chuck Hagel had few credentials for the job other than being a Vietnam War hero and a defender of the rights of veterans. He made unforced errors such as saying he believed in tolerating a nuclear Iran and backtracked unconvincingly from past statements in which he asserted that a “Jewish lobby” was manipulating U.S. foreign policy. These were bad enough, but even Democrats who felt obligated to give the president his choice for a key Cabinet post were dismayed at the clueless manner with which the Nebraska Republican who had endorsed Obama in 2008 and 2012 approached his confirmation hearings. He looked lost in the glare of public scrutiny and his performance when faced with tough questions did not inspire much confidence in his ability to lead America’s military or deal with the political labyrinth that anyone heading up the mammoth Department of Defense must navigate. But Obama stuck with his man and with enough Republicans refusing to filibuster the nomination, Hagel was confirmed. But fast forward a little more than nine months later and the scuttlebutt emanating from the White House appears to confirm just about everything the secretary’s critics had been saying all along.

This barely suppressed buyer’s remorse about Hagel is the conceit of a new Politico Magazine story about the DOD head. The piece aptly refers to him as the secretary who’s been on defense virtually his entire tenure as the same deer-in-the-headlights looks that astounded senators during the confirmation process are now causing concern in the West Wing. The “low energy” secretary has underwhelmed Washington, prompted criticism from both sides of the aisle and is widely seen as a political cipher who is unable to stand up to the generals inside the Pentagon or for the defense establishment in the political infighting that is part of any administration. While he has shown some signs of trying to break out of that uninspired mold recently, the enduring image of him sitting mutely next to Secretary of State John Kerry during the Syria hearings in August tells you all you need to know about what a dud he has been. Virtually every disparaging remark voiced by anonymous administration staffers echoes the points made by those who argued last winter that he had no business in the Cabinet. …

… In one sense, Hagel is a classic example of the way second-term presidents wind up with untalented also-rans after their initial appointees either leave or burn out. Though he has largely flown under the radar since his confirmation, he is the perfect symbol for Obama’s fifth year in office during which he has lost the confidence of the public and demonstrated his inability to govern effectively on a host of issues. But he is more than a symbol. What the president needed was more than a steadier hand and tougher presence at Defense than Hagel. He needed someone of the stature of former secretary Robert Gates who, whatever his mistakes and failings, gave both Presidents Bush and Obama an alternative view to what many top advisers were whispering in their ears. Such a figure would have been invaluable this fall as Obama and Kerry rushed headlong into the arms of the Iranians in pursuit of their effort to create a new détente with the Islamist regime and to throw Israel under the bus. If Obama’s staffers now realize that Hagel is an empty suit that can’t advance their political agenda, it is the country that has lost even more by having an Obama yes-man at the Pentagon.

Meanwhile, something very interesting is showing up in our human genetic make-up. NY Times reports on the DNA extracted from 400,000 year old bones of our ancestors.  

In a paper in the journal Nature, scientists reported Wednesday that they had retrieved ancient human DNA from a fossil dating back about 400,000 years, shattering the previous record of 100,000 years.

The fossil, a thigh bone found in Spain, had previously seemed to many experts to belong to a forerunner of Neanderthals. But its DNA tells a very different story. It most closely resembles DNA from an enigmatic lineage of humans known as Denisovans. Until now, Denisovans were known only from DNA retrieved from 80,000-year-old remains in Siberia, 4,000 miles east of where the new DNA was found.

The mismatch between the anatomical and genetic evidence surprised the scientists, who are now rethinking human evolution over the past few hundred thousand years. It is possible, for example, that there are many extinct human populations that scientists have yet to discover. They might have interbred, swapping DNA. Scientists hope that further studies of extremely ancient human DNA will clarify the mystery.

“Right now, we’ve basically generated a big question mark,” said Matthias Meyer, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and a co-author of the new study.

Hints at new hidden complexities in the human story came from a 400,000-year-old femur found in a cave in Spain called Sima de los Huesos (“the pit of bones” in Spanish). The scientific team used new methods to extract the ancient DNA from the fossil.

“This would not have been possible even a year ago,” said Juan Luis Arsuaga, a paleoanthropologist at Universidad Complutense de Madrid and a co-author of the paper.

Finding such ancient human DNA was a major advance, said David Reich, a geneticist at HarvardMedicalSchool who was not involved in the research. “That’s an amazing, game-changing thing,” he said. …

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Max Boot with a look at Nelson Mandela and how he kept South Africa from becoming Zimbabwe.

While traveling around the country promoting my last book, Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present, I was often asked which insurgents I admired the most. The answer is those insurgents who have fought relatively humanely and, most important of all, once they have seized power have governed wisely and democratically and shown a willingness to give up power when the time came to do so.

This is not, needless to say, the norm. Much more common are insurgents like Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Mugabe, Kim Il Sung, and (fill in the blank) who, while posturing as freedom fighters battling an evil dictatorship, swiftly become dictators in turn as soon as they seize power. The exceptions to that rule are some of the greatest figures of modern history–the likes of George Washington, Michael Collins, David Ben-Gurion, and, most recently, Nelson Mandela. …

… Mandela knew that South Africa could not afford to nationalize the economy or to chase out the white and mixed-raced middle class. He knew that the price of revenge for the undoubted evils that apartheid had inflicted upon the majority of South Africans would be too high to pay–that the ultimate cost would be borne by ordinary black Africans. Therefore he governed inclusively and, most important of all, he voluntarily gave up power after one term when he could easily have proclaimed himself president for life. …

… Mandela’s example is a ringing endorsement of what is derisively known as the “great man school of history”–the notion that influential individuals make a huge difference in how events turn out. He certainly made a difference, and for the better. He will go down as one of the giants of the second half of the twentieth century along with Reagan, Thatcher, Deng Xiaoping, Lech Walesa, and Pope John Paul II.

Charles Krauthammer on the thanklessness of being allied with the U. S.

Three crises, one president, many bewildered friends.

The first crisis, barely noticed here, is Ukraine’s sudden turn away from Europe and back to the Russian embrace.

After years of negotiations for a major trading agreement with the European Union, Ukraine succumbed to characteristically blunt and brutal economic threats from Russia and abruptly walked away. Ukraine is instead considering joining the Moscow-centered Customs Union with Russia’s fellow dictatorships Belarus and Kazakhstan.

This is no trivial matter. Ukraine is not just the largest European country, it’s the linchpin for Vladimir Putin’s dream of a renewed imperial Russia, hegemonic in its neighborhood and rolling back the quarter-century advancement of the “Europe whole and free” bequeathed by America’s victory in the Cold War.

The U.S. response? Almost imperceptible. As with Iran’s ruthlessly crushed Green Revolution of 2009, the hundreds of thousands of protesters who’ve turned out to reverse this betrayal of Ukrainian independence have found no voice in Washington. Can’t this administration even rhetorically support those seeking a democratic future, as we did during Ukraine’s Orange Revolution of 2004? …

Telegraph, UK with another foreign disaster. This time Venezuela.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has insisted that a massive electricity blackout which plunged much of the country into darkness on Monday was the work of Right wing saboteurs hoping to influence the outcome of key municipal elections this weekend.

The leftist leader claimed to have proof that a deliberately severed cable was the cause of the power outage which hit 10 states and brought chaos to Caracas, drawing accusations of government incompetence from the opposition. …

Power Line says another demagogue is complaining about wreckers. 

There is a disturbing undercurrent in Obama’s campaign-style speech on behalf of Obamacare at the EisenhowerExecutiveOfficeBuilding today. Obama never credits opponents of the law with the substance of their criticism. He does not attribute decent motives or good faith opposition to them. Rather, he treats them as “wreckers” (as they were deemed in the Soviet Union) guilty of destructive thought crime:

“Now, we may never satisfy the law’s opponents. I think that’s fair to say. Some of them are rooting for this law to fail — that’s not my opinion, by the way, they say it pretty explicitly. (Laughter.) Some have already convinced themselves that the law has failed, regardless of the evidence. But I would advise them to check with the people who are here today and the people that they represent all across the country whose lives have been changed for the better by the Affordable Care Act.”

Mr. President, We trump your beneficiaries with the millions of citizens whose lives have already been blighted by Obamacare!

And Power Line says the young are getting restless.

Just about the only good I could ever see in the election of Barack Obama was the near inevitability that the young voters who helped elect him would become disillusioned. These voters had been trending leftward so vigorously that more than just the slow aging process seemed necessary to reverse the movement. An Obama presidency always seemed likely to supply the “more.”

And so, finally, it has. From Ron Fournier of the National Journal:

Young Americans are turning against Barack Obama and Obamacare, according to a new survey of millennials, people between the ages of 18 and 29 who are vital to the fortunes of the president and his signature health care law.

The most startling finding of HarvardUniversity’s Institute of Politics: A majority of Americans under age 25–the youngest millennials–would favor throwing Obama out of office.

It looks like the young and the restless take their buyer’s remorse seriously.

But this is not the only striking finding of the Harvard survey: …

Peter Wehner says obama’s nothing but a community organizer after all.

… the president is betting that three weeks of his speeches, spin, and PR events will undo the damage; that his reassuring words and assault on the GOP will make up for his epic governing incompetence.

This is a delusional hope.

The problem Mr. Obama faces isn’t a communications failure; it’s a facts-on-the-ground failure. He is the author and architect of a perfectly awful law. A few clever lines delivered from an increasingly unpopular and discredited president won’t make any difference. The public is both turning on the president and tuning him out.

Americans are tired of Mr. Obama; and they are tired of the pain and trauma, the ineptness and dishonesty, of his presidency.

Maybe he was just a Chicago community organizer after all.

Jonathan Tobin doesn’t think a PR offensive will cure the healthcare bill.

Today the White House returns to what it does best. Unfortunately, that isn’t governing; it’s campaigning. So after two months of a disastrous ObamaCare rollout, instead of sitting down and figuring out the implications of a bill that still aren’t fully understood and why the healthcare.gov website is still not fully functional, the president is about to hit the road in full campaign mode to sell the country on the bill’s benefits and blaming all of its problems on Republicans. The point of this new push is public relations, not policy. The administration has been flummoxed by its inability to control the ObamaCare narrative after the website didn’t work and the nation discovered that the president’s promises about people keeping their insurance and doctors if they liked them proved to be a lie. So their answer is to go back to their strengths that won the 2012 election: captivating the nation with the magic of Obama’s personality and scapegoating the GOP.

Will it work? Anyone who underestimates the president’s still potent powers of persuasion is making a mistake. It’s also probably foolish to think that the mainstream media that has gone off the reservation in recent months won’t respond to Obama’s planned three-week-long dog-and-pony show as they always did before he was mired in a spate of second-term scandals and disasters. But the problem with the administration’s strategy is that recasting the ObamaCare narrative will require more than a good public-relations strategy. So long as the website doesn’t work, millions are losing their coverage and being faced with higher costs and with the implications of the new insurance landscape still a question for the majority of Americans who are covered by their employers, a few presidential speeches and events highlighting the minority that will undoubtedly benefit from the bill won’t change the narrative. …

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The Pope has criticized “unrestrained capitalism.”  As if a system like that exits anywhere in the world today.  What we need is real unrestrained capitalism. The Pope’s enmity towards free markets gets a few rebukes. David Harsanyi is first.

… For starters, it’s troubling that the Pope fails to make any genuine distinction between Western poverty (terrible) and the poverty of the Third World (unimaginably terrible). But is it really true that “absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation” are the driving reasons for poverty and inequality? People in places like Congo, Burundi, Eritrea, Malawi, or Mozambique live under corrupt authoritarian regimes where crippling poverty has a thousand fathers — none of them named capitalism. The people of Togo do not suffer in destitution because of some derivative scheme on Wall Street or the fallout from a tech IPO.

“While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially,” the Pope goes on to say, “so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few.”

In truth, global inequality has been dropping for years. The World Bank estimates global poverty was halved from 1990 to 2010. In fact, according to the World Bank, the United Nations’ “millennium development goal” of cutting world poverty in half by 2015 came in five years ahead of schedule despite a major global recession. The decline in poverty coincides, not coincidentally, with developing nations embracing more market-based systems.

Moreover, the Pope falls into the trap of conflating inequality and poverty. …

… Rather than credit those who do their best to balance this imperfect system that lifts millions out of impoverishment, the Pope attacks them for the prevalence of imaginary economic Darwinists who callously keep equality from blooming. “Consequently,” these people “reject the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of control,” Pope Francis contends.

Any form of control? Really? The Federal Registry of the United States regularly comes in over 60,000 pages. Or, to put it another way, it’s longer than all 46 books of the Old Testament, the 27 books of the New Testament and every gospel the Council of Nicaea decided to toss, combined. And the United States, a place teeming with these economic Darwinists, also happens to be one of the most charitable places on the planet — even before we begin counting per capita spending on safety nets. …

… Finally, the Pope claims there is no evidence that a trickle down “theory” — by which we assumes he means market economies — works. Greg Mankiw, professor and chairman of the economics department at Harvard, points out on this blog, that “as far as I know, the pope did not address the tax-exempt status of the church. I would be eager to hear his views on that issue. Maybe he thinks the tax benefits the church receives do some good when they trickle down.”

Supposedly religious institutions get a $71 billion dollar tax break every year — far too little, in my estimation. I assume the Church believes it does an effective job helping the needy. The Pope doesn’t stash all his money in a Swiss bank account. It trickles downwards to the poor. The Apostolic Exhortation, in fact, calls for the decentralized Roman Catholic Church. Surely, Pope Francis can’t believe that the centralization of charity (or, in the government’s case, welfare) is a better idea than allowing locals to meet the needs of their communities?

Actually, he might. Because, as compelling and as charismatic as he is, if we, in The City of Man, took the Pope’s advice on economic issues, we’d end up with millions more living in poverty.

And James Pethokoukis has more.

Pope Francis has offered a sharp critique and challenge to market capitalism and its proponents, focusing on materialist consumerism and rising inequality within nations. While the pope’s comments are excellent cause for reflection, they should not obscure the reality that innovative free enterprise is the greatest wealth generator ever discovered and the economic system most supportive of human freedom and flourishing.

In a new research note, JP Morgan Chase economist James Glassman doesn’t mention Pope Francis by name, but clearly — at least to me — had his comments in mind as he addressed the record of market economies:

“Those concerned about global poverty have more to be thankful today than to complain about. The commonly-heard complaints that today’s economic systems fail to address the plight of the poor ignore several fundamental facts.

Poverty is not a modern phenomenon. Second, the developed economies are still recovering from deep recessions and in time will reach their full potential. That is, of course, why central bank policies remain so stimulative. Those hurt by the recession will be restored as the developed economies continue to recover. And third, despite the cyclical problems of the developed economies, the average global living standard is at a record high—the highest known in the records compiled by economists and still climbing, thanks to the support from the developed economies.

In other words, market-oriented economic systems are doing more to cure global poverty than any other effort in the past.” … 

Another example of today’s cascading economic stupidity is the developing campaign to raise the minimum wage. John Steele Gordon posts;

Steve Coll has a comment in this week’s New Yorker calling for a higher federal minimum wage. He points out that it’s awfully hard for a family of four to live on the current minimum wage, which would produce a family income of about $15,000 a year. That is certainly true, but Mr. Coll leaves out a few things. A family of four with an annual income of $15,000 would be eligible for food stamps amounting to $7,584 and an earned income tax credit of $5,372. That raises the family income to $27,911, which is quite an improvement. The family would also be eligible for Medicaid, school lunch and breakfast programs, perhaps housing assistance and other forms of help. He also leaves out the fact that very, very few people earning the minimum wage are the sole breadwinners of a family of four. Most are entry-level employees, often teenagers, with no developed skills.  Most people who take a job at the minimum wage are earning above that level within a year, having learned marketable skills.

To be polite, Mr. Coll is being tendentious. To be less polite he is being grossly intellectually dishonest.

The minimum wage is a favorite liberal hobbyhorse, heavily promoted by labor unions. It is typical progressivism: a liberal politician (or journalist) says, in effect, “See that man over there? He needs help.” Then he points to an employer and says, “You, help him.” Finally, he points to himself and, addressing the man needing help, says, “Don’t forget where the help came from.” …

In Barron’s Paul Theroux, travel writer and novelist, who first went to Africa in 1963 as a Peace Corp volunteer, writes about the damage done there by philanthropy.

The desire of distant outsiders to fix Africa may be heartfelt, but it is also age-old and even quaint. Curiously repetitive in nature, renewed and revised every decade or so, it is an impulse Charles Dickens described, in a wickedly accurate phrase, as “telescopic philanthropy.” That is, a focus from afar to uplift the continent: New York squinting compassionately at Nairobi.

Never have so many people, so many agencies, so many stratagems, so much money been deployed to improve Africa — and yet the majority of the movers are part-timers, merely dropping in, setting up a scheme in the much-mocked “the-safari-that-does-good” manner, then returning to their real lives, as hard-charging businessmen, Hollywood actors, benevolent billionaires, atoning ex-politicians, MacArthur geniuses, or rock stars in funny hats. …

 

… In its naked reality, Africa, the greenest continent, is still the most beautiful, the least developed, the wildest on earth. Vast plains, big animals, hospitable people, who have been enslaved, sidelined, colonized, and converted willy-nilly either to Christianity or Islam. This receptive amphitheater of goodwill and big game, inspires megalomania among its foreign visitors who strut upon it — it has always done so, for those who seek the singularity of a little excitement and glory. I sometimes think that if the poorer counties of America’s Deep South had rhinos and elephants, instead of raccoons and possums, the philanthropists might direct their attentions to those parts, too.

A rich white donor in black Africa is a study in high contrast that puts one in mind of the gallery of role models: Tarzan, Mr. Kurtz, King Leopold, Cecil Rhodes, Livingstone, Mrs. Jellyby, Albert Schweitzer, Hemingway, Henderson the Rain King: the overlords, the opportunists, the exploiters, the visionaries, the hunters, the care-givers, the baptizers, the saviors, all of them preaching the gospel of reform and seeking a kingdom of their own, if not an empire.

Henry David Thoreau, the 19th-century American author, believed that all such outgoing people had something discreditable in their past that through giving they aimed to expiate.

And all are characterized by the rather touching innocence of a billionaire faced with the brutal truth that the relative simplicity of acquiring wealth is nothing compared to the extreme difficulty of giving money away, for the common good.

The real helpers are not the schemers and grandstanders of the eponymous family foundations or charities; they are nameless ill-paid volunteers who spend years in the bush, learning the language and helping in small-scale manageable projects, digging wells, training mid-wives, teaching villagers that unprotected sex spreads HIV; and among these stalwarts are the long-serving teachers who have liberated Africans by simply teaching them English, and are still doing so, even as they make the local governments lazier.

The so-called White Fathers (the Society of Missionaries of Africa) I met in Malawi who ran upcountry clinics used to say, “I guess I’ll be buried here.”

No one ever says that now, and significantly none of the people I spoke with for this piece ever expressed a wish to spend any serious length of time in Africa. None speaks an African language. To the detriment of their aims, they are on better terms with the African politicians than the common ruck of African people.

Years living simply on the ground in Africa convinced me that there was more for me to learn from Africans than to teach. I saw there were many satisfactions in the lives of people who were apparently poor; many deficits in the lives of the very wealthy. I saw that African families were large and complex and interdependent; that old age was revered, that Africa’s link to the distant past — to the dawn of the world — was something marvelous and still intact in many places.

Most of all, I was impressed by the self-sufficiency of ordinary people. Without much in the way of outside help, the people in the countries I knew managed to endure, usually through the simplest traditional means, and finally to prevail. Africa has the schools, the money and the resources to fix its own problems; it’s appalling to think of donors telling them otherwise, of the whole continent terminally indebted and living on handouts.

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Corner Post from Mark Steyn on the growing Arctic and Antarctic ice.

News from Santa’s Grotto:

Global warming hysterics at the BBC warned us in 2007 that by summer 2013, the Arctic would be ice-free. As with so many other doomsday predictions by warmists, the results turn out to be quite the opposite.

Meanwhile, down the other end at Santa’s summer vacation condo:

Antarctic sea ice has grown to a record large extent for a second straight year, baffling scientists seeking to understand why this ice is expanding rather than shrinking in a warming world.

Antarctic ice is now at a 35-year high. But scientists are “baffled” by the planet’s stubborn refusal to submit to their climate models. Maybe the problem with Nobel fantasist Michael Mann’s increasingly discredited hockey stick is that he’s holding it upside down.

Nonetheless, the famously settled science seems to be re-settling:

Scientists Increasingly Moving To Global Cooling Consensus

Global warming will kill us. Global cooling will kill us. And if it’s 54 and partly cloudy, you should probably flee for your life right now. Maybe scientists might usefully consider moving to being less hung up on “consensus” – a most unscientific and, in this context, profoundly corrupting concept.

Here’s the Daily Mail, UK article that prompted Steyn’s post. 

A chilly Arctic summer has left 533,000 more square miles of ocean covered with ice than at the same time last year – an increase of 29 per cent.

The rebound from 2012’s record low comes six years after the BBC reported that global warming would leave the Arctic ice-free in summer by 2013.

Instead, days before the annual autumn re-freeze is due to begin, an unbroken ice sheet more than half the size of Europe already stretches from the Canadian islands to Russia’s northern shores.

The Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific has remained blocked by pack-ice all year. More than 20 yachts that had planned to sail it have been left ice-bound and a cruise ship attempting the route was forced to turn back.

Some eminent scientists now believe the world is heading for a period of cooling that will not end until the middle of this century – a process that would expose computer forecasts of imminent catastrophic warming as dangerously misleading.

The disclosure comes 11 months after The Mail on Sunday triggered intense political and scientific debate by revealing that global warming has ‘paused’ since the beginning of 1997 – an event that the computer models used by climate experts failed to predict.

In March, this newspaper further revealed that temperatures are about to drop below the level that the models forecast with ‘90 per cent certainty’.

The pause – which has now been accepted as real by every major climate research centre – is important, because the models’ predictions of ever-increasing global temperatures have made many of the world’s economies divert billions of pounds into ‘green’ measures to counter  climate change.

Those predictions now appear gravely flawed. …

The Verge takes us behind the scenes of a FOX NFL broadcast.

It’s 90 minutes to game time in Foxboro, Massachusetts, and Troy Aikman’s not speaking to anyone.

Around him, a dozen or so crew members, assistants, and friends chatter as they finish last-minute preparations, making sure Gillette Stadium is ready for football. They’re testing cables and video feeds, rechecking stats, and setting up the fabric “NFL on FOX” backdrop that will turn this bland, gray, carpeted room into the tiny booth millions will soon see on TV.

Through it all, Aikman stays silent. He’s surrounded by four computer monitors displaying every stat and feed he’ll need for the next several hours, but he’s focused on a small tablet on the desk in front of him. He’s scrubbing back and forth in a single play, over and over, looking for something only he can see. The gold Super Bowl ring on his left hand occasionally catches the mid-afternoon sun as it shines into the booth, just above the first level of stands at the 50 yard line.

In an hour and a half, the New Orleans Saints and the New England Patriots will kick off one of the most important and most anticipated games of the young NFL season. Aikman will stand next to Thom Brennaman, his play-by-play partner for the day, and call the game for an audience that will total 26.7 million viewers. The game will be decided on a last-second desperation pass, will shape one quarterback’s legacy and two teams’ seasons, and will be endlessly discussed and replayed in the days and weeks to come.

But Aikman’s not worried about any of that. For him, and the entire Fox Sports NFL crew in the annals of the stadium below, it’s just another Sunday.

To watch a football broadcast is to see much more than a football game. There are only about 11 minutes of actual action during a three-hour game, which means 95 percent of the time there’s something else going on. The graphics, replays, highlights, and analysis that make a football game into the at-home experience millions of people know and love — it’s all from Fox, and it’s all done on the fly. Nearly everyone on the crew says that while they broadcast the game, what they really do is make television. …

… All 31 NFL arenas are different, and everything from stadium height to the type of lighting can affect the broadcast. (Light frequencies can clash with the high-frame-rate cameras, producing dark and light frames instead of a consistent shot — Callahan says Detroit causes problems every time.) But after years together, this crew knows the oddities of every one. Fred Aldous, Fox’s audio consultant, even has presets for every stadium on his enormous audio mixing console. “The colder it gets, the better off, because everybody bundles up… they’re wearing a sound blanket, if you will.” That’s why Aldous loves mixing in Green Bay. “This stadium,” he says, pointing toward the field behind him, “it’s nice because it’s an open stadium.” The sound escapes from the field, he says, rather than just reverberating throughout the stadium. …

… It’s the end of the game. Tom Brady’s just thrown a 17-yard touchdown to Kenbrell Thompkins, winning a seemingly lost game with five seconds to spare. Nearly half the game’s 68,756 fans left early, and the cheers from the parking lot and the highway drown out the ones from the stadium. The replay — a perfect shot of the moment, Thompkins snatching the ball in the back-left corner of the end zone — loops on the giant screens in Gillette, and presumably on every TV in every bar in Boston. There will be much celebrating tonight.

Underneath the stadium, the Fox crew starts to break down, to load its massive production back into 53-foot trucks. In two hours, they’ll be gone. And next week, they’ll pull into Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia and do it all again.

That’s just what they do on Sundays.

Eliana Johnson reports for WSJ on the healthcare “navigators.”

Even when the Obama administration was under the impression that the launch of the Affordable Care Act was going to work splendidly, with a first-rate website, the plan still called for “navigators” to help people sign up. Now, with the ACA website Healthcare.gov hobbled, and even many of the president’s supporters grumbling that the law may need a radical rethinking, the work of the tens of thousands of these helpers is more vital than ever.

How’s it going? Not well, to judge from a visit with navigators in North Carolina, one of 34 states that decided not to open their own health-insurance exchanges.

Durham is a relatively low-income city—nearly 19% of the residents are below the poverty level—that is 41% African-American and 14% Hispanic. It is the type of place that the White House expects to benefit most from ObamaCare. Yet the navigators I spoke with there earlier this month say interest has been sparse. Organizations like the Alcohol and Drug Council of North Carolina and the LincolnCommunityHealthCenter that received federal funds to hire navigators are contemplating how to reach out to potential enrollees, given that waiting for phone calls or walk-ins is not proving fruitful.

Occasionally, the navigators even make house calls. I accompanied Nyi Myint, a navigator with the Alcohol and Drug Council of North Carolina, to the home of Kimberly Munier, a self-employed single mother. Her Blue CrossBlue Shield plan was canceled over the summer, and she asked Mr. Myint for help with the federal exchange.

He begins by laying a wrinkled paper on the kitchen table, a green-and white-certificate indicating that he has completed the “Navigator Curriculum.” It is not a particularly official looking document: In the top left corner, it reads, “Print Close Window.” “This is how they sent it to us,” he says, laughing. …

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Just one item today. Vanity Fair had a riveting account of a private detective’s hunt for a man he believed was a serial rapist. This is a story about someone who is good at his job. Which is how you know it’s not about the miscreants in DC.

From the start, it was a bad case.

A battered 21-year-old woman with long blond curls was discovered facedown in the weeds, naked, at the western edge of Miami, where the neat grid of outer suburbia butts up against the high grass and black mud of the Everglades. It was early on a winter morning in 2005. A local power-company worker was driving by the empty lots of an unbuilt cul-de-sac when he saw her.

And much to his surprise, she was alive. She was still unconscious when the police airlifted her to JacksonMemorialHospital. When she woke up in its trauma center, she could remember little about what had happened to her, but her body told an ugly tale. She had been raped, badly beaten, and left for dead. There was severe head trauma; she had suffered brain-rattling blows. Semen was recovered from inside her. The bones around her right eye were shattered. She was terrified and confused. She bent English to her native Ukrainian grammar and syntax, dropping pronouns and inverting standard sentence structure, which made her hard to understand. And one of the first things she asked for on waking was her lawyer. That was unusual. …

 

… The police detectives did what they could at the hotel, combing the woman’s room for evidence, interviewing hotel employees, obtaining images from all of the surveillance cameras for the morning of the crime, going over the guest lists. The hotel had 174 rooms, and so many people came and went that it would have taken months working full-time to run checks on every one of them, something beyond the resources of a police department in a high-crime area like Miami-Dade. The sex-crimes unit set aside the file with no clear leads, only more questions. After several weeks, “we were dried up,” recalled Allen Foote, the detective handling the case.

So the action was all headed toward civil court. The hotel engaged a law firm to defend itself from the woman’s lawsuit, and the firm eventually hired a private detective named Ken Brennan to figure out what had happened. …

 

… He had a fixed policy. He told potential employers up front, “I’ll find out what happened. I’m not going to shade things to assist your client, but I will find out what the truth is.” Brennan liked it when the information he uncovered helped his clients, but that wasn’t a priority. Winning lawsuits wasn’t the goal. What excited him was the mystery. …

 

… Brennan started where all good detectives start. What did he know for sure? …

 

… Brennan was now convinced. This is the guy. No matter what the victim had said—that she had been attacked by two or maybe three men, that they were “white,” that they spoke with accents that sounded Hispanic or perhaps Romanian—Brennan was convinced her attacker had to be this man.

The detective was struck by something else. His suspect was entirely collected. Cool and calm, entering the elevator with the woman, exiting with the suitcase, pulling it behind him out to the parking lot, then strolling back less than an hour later. Brennan had been a cop. He had seen ordinary men caught up in the aftermath of a violent crime. They were beside themselves. Shaking. Panicky. If a man rapes and beats a woman to the point where he thinks she’s dead, and then hauls the body out to dump it in the weeds, does he come strolling back into the same hotel as if nothing happened? An ordinary attacker would have been two states away by noon.

What this man’s demeanor suggested to Brennan was chilling.

He’s good at this.
He’s done this before. …

 

,,, Brennan was stubborn. He was now months into this effort to identify and find the man responsible for raping and beating a woman he had never met. There was no way that what he was being paid for the job was worth the hours he was putting in. Nobody else cared as much as he did. What the hotel’s insurers really wanted, Brennan knew, was for him to tell them that the victim was a hooker, and that she had been beaten by one of her johns, which would go a long way toward freeing them from any liability. But this wasn’t true, and he had told them at the outset that the truth was all they would get from him. Detective Foote was openly skeptical. He had given Brennan all the information he had. He had more pressing cases with real leads and real prospects.

But Brennan had a picture in his head. He could see this big man with glasses coolly going about his business day to day—smug, chatting up the girls, no doubt looking for his next victim, comfortable, certain that his crimes left no trail. …

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Today we have a long look at the Iran agreement. Streetwise Professor is up first.

The United States, and the other countries in the 5+1 group, have reached some sort of agreement with Iran which trades a relaxation in sanctions for some temporary limitations on Iran’s nuclear program.  Most of the discussion has focused on the specifics of this deal, but that is short sighted.  All parties admit that this is just an interim step along the path towards a more permanent settlement.  We need to look forward and try to anticipate where that path will lead.  It is unlikely to lead anywhere good, from an American perspective, and likely to be highly favorable to Iran.

The dynamic will favor Iran because it is easy for them to delay or evade any substantive cutbacks in their efforts to obtain nuclear weapons, and because it will be difficult for Obama to resist Iranian demands.  Look at the protracted and frustrating and largely futile attempt to stop the North Korean nuclear program: Obama’s personal investment in the Iran initiative will make the US even more likely to make concessions in order to keep the process alive.

Other news illustrates exactly how this process works.  The Russians have repeatedly violated the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Agreement but the administration has refused to make these violations public because . . . well, you have to read it to believe it:

Inside the meeting, Kerry expressed anger and frustration about the Russian cheating and warned that if the violations became widely known, future efforts to convince the Senate to ratify arms control treaties would be harmed.

In other words, we can’t possibly acknowledge treaty violations because that would impede our ratification of treaties  . . . that would be violated. Treaty-making becomes an end unto itself, rather than a means of securing American interests.  That mindset gives anyone we are negotiating with a tremendous advantage: they know they can play us for patsies because we are so obsessed with the process, rather than the results. …

 

… In sum, Obama has entered into an agreement that will not be honored, will subject him and the US to increasing demands that he cannot refuse, will strengthen and embolden a sworn enemy of the United States, will destabilize the region and increase the risks of conflict, and betrays and confuses our allies.

Given that this endeavor is inimical to American interests, reputation, and prestige (both of which affect our ability to advance our interests) one wonders about the motivation.  Folly or blunder based on a desire to achieve a legacy or a fundamental misunderstanding of reality are actually the least frightening alternatives.  The more sinister possibility is that Obama is acting on a view of American interests and proper place in the world that is at odds with the mixed idealist-realist view that has shaped US policy since at least WWII.   I usually adhere to the maxim not to attribute something to malice which can be explained by stupidity, but it gets harder to do that every day.

Comments from Mark Steyn.

… In Geneva, the participants came to the talks with different goals: The Americans and Europeans wanted an agreement; the Iranians wanted nukes. Each party got what it came for. Before the deal, the mullahs’ existing facilities were said to be within four to seven weeks of nuclear “breakout”; under the new constraints, they’ll be eight to nine weeks from breakout. In return, they get formal international recognition of their enrichment program, and the gutting of sanctions – and everything they already have is, as they say over at Obamacare, grandfathered in.

Many pundits reached for the obvious appeasement analogies, but Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal argued that Geneva is actually worse than Munich. In 1938, facing a German seizure of the Sudetenland, the French and British prime ministers were negotiating with Berlin from a position of profound military weakness: it’s easy to despise Chamberlain with the benefit of hindsight, less easy to give an honest answer as to what one would have done differently playing a weak hand across the table from Hitler 75 years ago. This time round, a superpower and its allies, accounting for over 50 percent of the planet’s military spending, were facing a militarily insignificant country with a ruined economy and no more than two-to-three months’ worth of hard currency – and they gave it everything it wanted.

I would add two further points. First, the Munich Agreement’s language is brutal and unsparing, all “shalls” and “wills”: Paragraph 1) “The evacuation will begin on 1st October”; Paragraph 4) “The four territories marked on the attached map will be occupied by German troops in the following order.” By contrast, the P5+1 (U.S., U.K., France, Russia, China plus Germany) “Joint Plan of Action” barely reads like an international agreement at all. It’s all conditional, a forest of “woulds”: “There would be additional steps in between the initial measures and the final step…” In the post-modern phase of Western resolve, it’s an agreement to reach an agreement – supposedly within six months. But one gets the strong impression that, when that six-month deadline comes and goes, the temporary agreement will trundle along semipermanently to the satisfaction of all parties. …

 

… Some years ago, I heard that great scholar of Islam, Bernard Lewis, caution that America risked being seen as harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend. The Obama administration seems to have raised the thought to the level of doctrine. What has hitherto been unclear is whether this was through design or incompetence. Certainly, John Kerry has been unerringly wrong on every foreign policy issue for four decades, so sheer bungling stupidity cannot be ruled out.

But look at it this way: It’s been clear for some time that the United States was not going to take out Iran’s nuclear facilities. That leaves only one other nation even minded to keep the option on the table: Israel. Hence the strange new romance between the Zionist Entity and the Saudi and Gulf Cabinet ministers calling every night to urge them to get cracking: In the post-American world, you find your friends where you can, even if they’re Jews. But Obama and Kerry have not only taken a U.S bombing raid off the table, they’ve ensured that any such raid by Israel will now come at a much steeper price: It’s one thing to bomb a global pariah, quite another to bomb a semi-rehabilitated member of the international community in defiance of an agreement signed by the Big Five world powers. Indeed, a disinterested observer might easily conclude that the point of the plan seems to be to box in Israel rather than Iran. …

The UK’s Spectator is harsh.

‘Yes, we can heal this nation. Yes, we can repair this world. Yes, we can!’ With these exuberant assurances, the young candidate, buoyed by an unexpectedly strong showing in the Iowa caucuses, vowed to carry on his crusade. One year later, in January 2009, the candidate became president and set out to make good on his promises.

That Barack Obama possessed the ability to heal the nation and repair the world seemed in many quarters all but self-evident. As he donned the mantle of the ‘most powerful man in the world’, the expectations that had lifted him into the Oval Office qualified as nothing short of messianic. A dark and depressing interval of American history, symbolised by place names such as Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, was ending. A new era of hope had begun. Nothing seemed beyond reach. So at least many Americans believed.

In surprising numbers, observers further afield shared these happy expectations. For a brief moment, Obama’s rising star cast its light well beyond America itself. He was, or appeared to be, everyone’s president. As if speaking for all humanity, the Nobel Committee ratified this proposition, awarding its annual peace prize on an anticipatory basis, the recently inaugurated president not actually having done anything to promote peace. Obamamania was sweeping the planet.

Well, going on six years later, the fever has long since broken. In beleaguered, war-torn Syria, polio may be making an unwelcome comeback. But the infection that was Obamamania is gone for good.

As for the President himself, the verdict is in: when it comes to repairing and healing, no, he can’t. In retrospect, it’s hard to fathom why so many people succumbed to the illusion that he could. …

 

… Altogether, Obama’s record of achievement has to rate as modest. No wonder the cheers have turned to jeers. ‘When I hear a man applauded by the mob,’ H.L. Mencken observed, ‘I always feel a pang of pity for him. All he has to do to be hissed is to live long enough.’ Obama has lived long enough to make the journey from rock star to something between laughing stock and object of pity. …

While we’re on foreign affairs, let’s have a look at events in Venezuela, courtesy of John Hinderaker of Power Line who says they’re “doubling down on stupid.”

Venezuela is reaching the end point of socialism: economic collapse. Its government, headed by Hugo Chavez’s successor and acolyte Nicolas Maduro, has followed the classic left-wing playbook, with the result, inter alia, that you can no longer buy toilet paper in Venezuela. Producing such a complex product evidently is beyond the capacity of the state.

Naturally, Venezuela suffers from rampant inflation, currently running at over 50% annually. So the government has imposed price controls. With an election impending, President Maduro has vowed to intensify enforcement of penalties for “price gouging.”

“Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro said a stricter wave of inspections for suspected price-gouging would begin on Saturday in an aggressive pre-election “economic offensive” aimed at taming the highest inflation in the Americas.

“We’re not joking, we’re defending the rights of the majority, their economic freedom,” Maduro said on Friday, alleging price irregularities were found in nearly 99 percent of 1,705 businesses inspected so far this month.

Maduro, who has staked his presidency on preserving the legacy of late socialist leader Hugo Chavez, launched a theatrical – and often televised – wave of inspections this month to force companies to reduce prices.

He says “capitalist parasites” are trying to wreck Venezuela’s economy and force him from office.”

I suppose they are actually trying to stay in business, but undoubtedly one of Venezuela’s biggest problems is a shortage of “capitalist parasites.” Don’t laugh, it could happen here, too.

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Charles Krauthammer says the administration will be remembered for its outbreak of lawlessness.

After indignant denunciation of Republicans for trying to amend “the law of the land” constitutionally (i.e. in Congress assembled), Democrats turn utterly silent when the president lawlessly tries to do so by executive fiat.

Nor is this the first time. The president wakes up one day and decides to unilaterally suspend the employer mandate, a naked invasion of Congress’s exclusive legislative prerogative, enshrined in Article I. Not a word from the Democrats. Nor now regarding the blatant usurpation of trying to restore canceled policies that violate explicit Obamacare coverage requirements.

And worse. When Congress tried to make Obama’s “fix” legal — i.e., through legislation — he opposed it. He even said he would veto it. Imagine: vetoing the very bill that would legally enact his own illegal fix.

At rallies, Obama routinely says he has important things to do and he’s not going to wait for Congress. Well, amending a statute after it’s been duly enacted is something a president may not do without Congress. It’s a gross violation of his Article II duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.

A Senate with no rules. A president without boundaries. One day, when a few bottled-up judicial nominees and a malfunctioning health-care Web site are barely a memory, we will still be dealing with the toxic residue of this outbreak of authoritative lawlessness.

New York Observer has a piece from a fan of the president, who had his healthcare policy cancelled and was offered less coverage for 94% more. Call this the feel good story of the week. When will these fools learn the government always f**ks up?

We received the letter in the mail a couple months ago. The good people at Regence Bluecross Blueshield were pleased to inform us that due to Obamacare our current low-monthly premium, comically-high deductible medical policy would no longer exist come January 1, 2014. Pleased, because a new and better plan would be offered in its place. Old monthly premium: $578 for a family of four (non-smoking, helmet-wearing, and paternally snipped). New premium: $1,123. A 94% increase.

Once the sound of boiling blood dissipated, in my head I heard my Republican friends chuckling at the sight of a liberal Democrat hoisted ten stories high on his own petard. How’s the view up there, Obamacare Ollie? 

For the past 15 years my wife and I have made our living as freelance writers. (To young readers, I say: Do not do this. Your bliss is marvelous, but its following will need to be supported by a banker, plumber, union machinist or tenured faculty member.) As such, our health insurance is our own concern. Over the years we’ve held on to our coverage by letting our co-pay and deductible rise and our covered procedures fall. You may be aware that the three-tiered state exchange policies are labeled Gold, Silver, and Bronze, reflecting their price and level of coverage. If our policy still existed it would fall into the column of Wood. 

But Wood we had—and Wood we liked. 

No more. O.K., into the state exchange we go. I voted for it. Fair enough. …

… Last week the frustration of people like Peter and me—Obamacare supporters who lost their current plans—was heard by the White House, which promptly panicked. On Thursday, President Obama announced a policy change that would allow insurance companies like Regence to keep customers like me on the old Wood plan for one more year. To that I say: Hah! Thanks for nothing. …

… seething at a President I helped elect. Out here in the Land of the Brand of You, we don’t want cheap twelve-month extensions. We’re willing to suck it up and pay our fair share for health insurance. We want the exchanges to work. We’re not demanding a last-minute reprieve that threatens the stability of the entire system. What we’re asking for is clarity and competence.

Which leads us to Rich Lowry’s Politico piece on the “bad faith presidency.”

At the end of the day, the root of President Obama’s mendacity on Obamacare was simple: He didn’t dare tell people how the law would work. He couldn’t tell people how the law would work.

Forthrightness was the enemy. It served no useful purpose and could only bring peril, and potentially defeat. It had to be banished. Instead of candor, Obama made the sale on the basis of dubious blandishments and outright deceptions.

If this is the only way to pass your signature initiative—and a decades-long goal of your party—it ought to give you pause. But Obama was a natural at delivering sweeping and sincere-seeming assurances that weren’t true. This kind of thing is his métier.

If he were awoken at 3 a.m. and told he had to make the case for nationalizing the banks by denying he was nationalizing the banks, he would do an entirely creditable job of it, even without a TelePrompTer. The salesmanship for Obamacare represents in microcosm the larger Obama political project, which has always depended on throwing a reassuring skein of moderation on top of left-wing ideological aims.

All politicians are prone to shaving the truth, giving themselves the benefit of the doubt and trying to appear more reasonable than they are. Obama has made it an art form. Bad faith is one of his signal strengths as a politician, and makes him one of the greatest front men progressivism has ever had.

He will never admit his deep bias toward the growth of the federal government for its own sake, or that he doesn’t care that much if Iran gets the bomb, or that he is liquidating the American leadership role in the Middle East. No, no—he is just trying to make government work, giving diplomacy a chance and pivoting to Asia, respectively. …

Even the left media think the administration lies. Dana Milbank posts on their control of photos.

Is the Obama White House airbrushing history?

It was a hallmark of the Stalin era: Fallen Soviet leaders vanished from official photographs. Nobody accuses President Obama of such subterfuge (well, nobody except for those who believe he forged his birth certificate), but a change in longtime practice in the White House has raised questions about the integrity of images Americans see of their president.

The White House has increasingly excluded news photographers from Obama’s official events and is instead releasing images taken by in-house photographers, who are government employees. These photos often appear online and in newspapers, even though they lack the same standards of authenticity that govern those taken by photojournalists.

“As surely as if they were placing a hand over a journalist’s camera lens, officials in this administration are blocking the public from having an independent view of important functions of the executive branch of government,” the White House Correspondents’ Association, joined by the Associated Press and other news organizations, wrote in a letter to White House press secretary Jay Carney last week. “You are, in effect, replacing independent photojournalism with visual press releases.”

New York Times photographer Doug Mills likens the administration’s actions to Tass, the Soviet Union’s news agency.

The most famous of the photo press releases was the image from the White House Situation Room on the day U.S. forces killed Osama bin Laden; the image was digitally altered so that material on the table in front of the secretary of state could not be seen.

Peter Wehner thinks the lies will cost him dearly.

… That deep well of sympathy–that willingness to give the president the benefit of the doubt and the attachment and connection voters felt for Mr. Obama–has been crucial to his success for his entire political life. He has always been viewed as a likeable and decent man, even when his campaign employed fairly ruthless tactics. But the days of broad public faith and trust in this president appear to be over. And no wonder.

The fact that the president knowingly misled the public on such a crucial element of his health-care program so many times, over such a long period of time, with such apparent ease, has penetrated the public consciousness in a way nothing else ever has. Incompetence has now been twinned to mendacity. And not surprisingly, that deep well of sympathy is drying up.

Mr. Obama will discover that trust, once lost, is hard to recover. 

Andrew Malcolm with late night humor. Even Letterman can’t avoid the failure.

Leno: Did you see Obama stopped using ‘ObamaCare’ in speeches? Now its ‘Affordable Care Act.’ A really bad sign when Obama is running from his ObamaCare. ‘No,’ he says, “it’s BidenCare now.”

Letterman: OK, the Obama White House hired a consulting firm on ObamaCare. The consultants told him the website was not ready. Not ready. But the White House went ahead anyway. Turns out, the problem is the Obama White House doesn’t know how to open emails.

Letterman: So now the Obama White House has hired a consulting firm to teach them to pay attention to consultants. All taxpayer dollars.

Fallon: Obama was asked how he finally reached the nuclear agreement with Iran. He said “With patience, compromise…oh, and we lied.”

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Streetwise Professor posts on leaks from the intelligence communities that highlight mistakes made by the administration in the Syrian debacle. Good timing since the “smart diplomats” are on to their Iranian adventure.

… The story is based on accounts of US intelligence intercepts provided by government officials.  And that is interesting in itself.

Unlike many intelligence leaks (e.g., the Osama raid, Stuxnet, the junk bomber) these are not calculated to make Obama and the administration look good, to portray them as aggressively and cleverly attacking America’s enemies.  To the contrary, they are uniformly damning.  Not just the revelation that the Russians think that Obama was (and is) an easily played chump.  But the revelations that the US had observed previous CW attacks.  That they observed the build up to this one, but didn’t react because they thought it was just going to be another “minor” attack like the earlier ones: apparently none of these met the Obama “whole bunch” test.  The revelations that the US was slow in responding in part because the intercepts had not been translated.

Which raises the question: who is leaking this damning information, and why? Is this the Intelligence Community’s payback for Obama throwing them under the bus over Snowden (which I noted and predicted in the aftermath of the Merkel cellphone kerfuffle)?  Or the consequence of the internecine battles over foreign policy in this administration?

Regardless, it is a uniformly depressing story.   But it can teach some lessons.  The most obvious of these is that the Russians will say anything to advance their interests, even if that something is 180 degrees from the facts.  Keep that in mind in events involving Syria in the future.  And also keep it in mind when you read anything the Russians say about Iran.

And keep in mind this administrations fecklessness and cluelessness when evaluating any deal it reaches with Iran.  Combine this with the fact that the Russians will run interference for Iran, just as they did with Syria, and the overwhelming odds are that no deal is far better than any deal Obama is likely to strike.

More from Victor Davis Hanson.

The Iranian agreement comes not in isolation, unfortunately. The Syrian debacle instructed the Iranians that the Obama administration was more interested in announcing a peaceful breakthrough than actually achieving it. The timing is convenient for both sides: The Obama administration needed an offset abroad to the Obamacare disaster, and the Iranians want a breathing space to rebuild their finances and ensure that Assad can salvage the Iranian-Hezbollah-Assad axis. The agreement is a de facto acknowledgement that containing, not ending, Iran’s nuclear program is now U.S. policy.

After all, to what degree would an Iranian freeze really retard development of a bomb, or simply put it on hold? In other words, has Iran already met some of its requirements for weaponization, and now simply wishes to take a breather, rebuild its economy, and strengthen its image in the West — before the final and rather easy development of a deliverable bomb? …

John Bolton, former US ambassador to the UN, provides analysis.

… In exchange for superficial concessions, Iran achieved three critical breakthroughs. First, it bought time to continue all aspects of its nuclear-weapons program the agreement does not cover (centrifuge manufacturing and testing; weaponization research and fabrication; and its entire ballistic missile program). Indeed, given that the interim agreement contemplates periodic renewals, Iran may have gained all of the time it needs to achieve weaponization not of simply a handful of nuclear weapons, but of dozens or more.

Second, Iran has gained legitimacy. This central banker of international terrorism and flagrant nuclear proliferator is once again part of the international club.  Much as the Syria chemical-weapons agreement buttressed Bashar al-Assad, the mullahs have escaped the political deep freezer. 

Third, Iran has broken the psychological momentum and effect of the international economic sanctions. While estimates differ on Iran’s precise gain, it is considerable ($7 billion is the lowest estimate), and presages much more.  Tehran correctly assessed that a mere six-months’ easing of sanctions will make it extraordinarily hard for the West to reverse direction, even faced with systematic violations of Iran’s nuclear pledges.  Major oil-importing countries (China, India, South Korea, and others) were already chafing under U.S. sanctions, sensing President Obama had no stomach either to impose sanctions on them, or pay the domestic political price of granting further waivers. 

Benjamin Netanyahu’s earlier warning that this was “the deal of the century” for Iran has unfortunately been vindicated. Given such an inadequate deal, what motivated Obama to agree?  The inescapable conclusion is that, the mantra notwithstanding, the White House actually did prefer a bad deal to the diplomatic process grinding to a halt. This deal was a “hail Mary” to buy time. Why?

Buying time for its own sake makes sense in some negotiating contexts, but the sub silentio objective here was to jerry-rig yet another argument to wield against Israel and its fateful decision whether or not to strike Iran. Obama, fearing that strike more than an Iranian nuclear weapon, clearly needed greater international pressure on Jerusalem. And Jerusalem fully understands that Israel was the real target of the Geneva negotiations. How, therefore, should Israel react? …

More criticism from Jonathan Tobin.

… Instead of avoiding war, what Kerry has done is to set in motion a chain of events that may actually make armed conflict more likely. It’s not just that Israel must now come to terms with the fact that it has been abandoned and betrayed by its American ally and must consider whether it must strike Iran’s nuclear facilities before it is too late. Saudi Arabia must now also consider whether it has no choice but to buy a bomb (likely from Pakistan) to defend its existence against a deadly rival across the Persian Gulf. The Western stamp of approval on Iran will also embolden its Hezbollah terrorist auxiliaries and make it even less likely that Tehran’s ally Bashar Assad will be toppled in Syria.

By deciding that the U.S. was too weak to stand up to Iranian demands, Obama and Kerry have put the Islamist regime in a position where it can throw its weight around in the region without any fear of U.S. retaliation.

The choice here was not between war with Iran or a weak deal. It was between the U.S. using all its economic power and diplomatic influence to make sure that Iran had to give up its nuclear program and a policy of appeasement aimed at allowing the president to retreat from his promises. The Middle East and the rest of the world may wind up paying a terrible price for Obama’s false choices.

Bret Stephens says it is worse than Munich.

To adapt Churchill : Never in the field of global diplomacy has so much been given away by so many for so little.

Britain and France’s capitulation to Nazi Germany at Munich has long been a byword for ignominy, moral and diplomatic. Yet neither Neville Chamberlain nor Édouard Daladier had the public support or military wherewithal to stand up to Hitler in September 1938. Britain had just 384,000 men in its regular army; the first Spitfire aircraft only entered RAF service that summer. “Peace for our time” it was not, but at least appeasement bought the West a year to rearm.

The signing of the Paris Peace Accords in January 1973 was a betrayal of an embattled U.S. ally and the abandonment of an effort for which 58,000 American troops gave their lives. Yet it did end America’s participation in a peripheral war, which neither Congress nor the public could indefinitely support. “Peace with honor” it was not, as the victims of Cambodia’s Killing Fields or Vietnam’s re-education camps can attest. But, for American purposes at least, it was peace.

By contrast, the interim nuclear agreement signed in Geneva on Sunday by Iran and the six big powers has many of the flaws of Munich and Paris. But it has none of their redeeming or exculpating aspects. …

And Roger Simon sums up by saying “Iran will not have a nuclear bomb. Period.”

Sorry for the corny title of this article — I was going to call it “It’s the Centrifuges, Stupid!” — but as a Hollywood movie executive famously said in a script meeting, “Obviousness is your friend.” He was right about screenplays and he’s right here. No one believes Barack Obama about anything anymore. Why should they? The new Iran deal is Obamacare II, only worse, a thousand megatons worse. …

 

… This is the desperate move of a president in free fall, only it’s a move being made with millions of lives at stake. If the sanctions in place brought Iran to the table, why wouldn’t ratcheting up the sanctions, as Congress sought to do, get Iran actually to agree to dismantle its program, to shrink back the extraordinary number of centrifuges we know them to have, a number vastly higher than any peaceful nation could possibly need?

Now we will never know.

So we have left it all to Israel and, incredible as it may seem, Saudi Arabia to put a stop to this madness. What will they do? I wouldn’t want to be them. It’s no fun at all Perhaps a new prayer should be added to the Jewish liturgy. “Thank G-d I wasn’t born Benjamin Netanyahu.”