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Angelo Cordvilla posts on how democracy is destroyed by lies.

Democracy has no cure for a corrupt demos. Politicians’ misdeeds taint them alone, so long as their supporters do not embrace them. But when substantial constituencies continue to support their leaders despite their having broken faith, they turn democracy’s process of mutual persuasion into partisan war.

Consider: In 1974 President Richard Nixon lied publicly and officially to cover up his subordinates’ misdeeds. His own party forced him to resign. In 1998 President Bill Clinton lied under oath in an unsuccessful attempt to cover up his own. But his party rallied around him and accused his accusers. In 2013 President Barack Obama lied publicly and officially to secure passage of his most signature legislation. But when the lies became undeniable, his party joined him in maintaining that they had not been lies at all.

The point is that Nixon’s misdeeds harmed no one but himself because no one excused them. But Clinton’s and Obama’s misdeeds contributed to the corruption of American democracy because a substantial part of the American people chose to be partners in them.

The difference between the mentalities of Republicans circa 1974 and of Democrats twenty-five and forty years later is the difference between a society before and after democratic corruption. …

Nobody protects the lies of the administration better than the NY Times. Michael Goodwin calls them out. 

Poor Barack Obama. Ending his fifth year as the world’s most powerful man, he is running out of scapegoats and fairy tales. Blaming George W. Bush has lost its punch, and the ObamaCare debacle is shredding the myths he is competent and honest.

Still, before he rides off into that sunset of self-pity and low poll ratings, he ought to invite his remaining friends over for a heart-to-heart. That way he can tell The New York Times that its fanatical support does him no favors.

Instead, it feeds his arrogance and reinforces his belief that he can solve any problem with another speech. The unflattering truth doesn’t stand a chance — ­until it is too late.

Not that the president would admit any of that, of course, but the Obama Protection Racket, led by the Times, cuts both ways. It is a key reason he has defied political gravity for so long, and also why he is now in deep trouble. As watchdogs became lapdogs, the presidential bubble grew impenetrable, isolating him from ordinary Americans and the trickle-down pain of his policies.

From the broadcast networks to MSNBC and most large papers, Obama got the benefit of every doubt. The double standards were a daily disgrace so routine, they mostly provoked a shrug instead of outrage.

The ObamaCare debacle is the exception that proves the rule. Wall-to-wall complaints are forcing the media to report that the law’s Web site is a lemon and that its rules are causing millions of people to lose insurance plans they liked. …

Craig Pirrong says the only the French and the Russians will save us from more obama foolishness in the Middle East.

There are few things more dangerous than a president in search of a legacy.  Especially those who are in political straits.

A besieged Obama is in search of a legacy in foreign policy by achieving a rapprochement with Iran.  No doubt he is being egged on in this by his Rasputin, Valerie Jarrett, who, you know, is an expert about Iran because she lived there until she was four.

Never mind that even the French think this is insane.  (This being the second time in the past 3 months that the French have made Obama look like the surrender monkey.  Quite an accomplishment.) …

… The Russians, in other words, want turmoil in the Middle East.  An American rapprochement with Iran that would reduce tensions in the Gulf-at least in the short run-and bring Iranian oil back onto market is the last thing that Russia needs right now.  Which could well lead the Russians to throw a spanner in any deal.

So this is what we’ve been reduced to.  To relying on French realism and stalwartness and Russian cynicism and cupidity to prevent Obama from making a blunder of historical proportions in his narcissistic search for a legacy.

If it works out this way I will never doubt Bismarck again.

In fact, the LA Times said it was France that killed the preliminary deal. The Iranians were hot and delivered a world class insult to the One by saying “For us there are red lines that cannot be crossed.”

A marathon round of international talks in Geneva fell short of a widely anticipated deal early Sunday after French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius objected, saying the terms of a preliminary accord were too easy on Tehran. Many nations fear Iran has been secretly seeking a nuclear weapons capability, despite its claims to want nuclear power only for energy and medical purposes.

Fabius broke an informal rule of the six-nation diplomatic group that has been negotiating with the Iranians by going public with his criticism of the preliminary deal, which was aimed at opening the way for comprehensive negotiations over the nuclear program.

“One wants a deal … but not a sucker’s deal,” Fabius said.

When the negotiations ground to a temporary halt, Iran was quick to point a finger.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani told the National Assembly that Tehran would not be intimidated by any country’s “sanctions, threats, contempt and discrimination,” according to Iran’s student news service. “For us there are red lines that cannot be crossed.”

Selena Zito writes on the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. Someone will be absent from the ceremonies.

… Lincoln brought the country to a revival at an unlikely time with his address. He gave new meaning to the definition of sacrifice in service to the country, for the purpose of preserving the country.

Lincoln was asked to speak here only as an afterthought. The request for Obama to speak has been sought for more than a year.

It would be an occasion for him to honor a crucial time in our past, to create a historical bridge to today.

His dismissal of the request shows a man so detached from the duty of history, from the men who served in the White House before him, that it is unspeakable in its audacity.

Ask almost any person in this historic town; even his most ardent supporters here are stunned.

Obama long ago veered away from any affinity he may have believed he had with Lincoln, which gives credibility to the criticism that his connection to Lincoln was always a political calculation rather than a true bond.

Late night from Andrew Malcolm. 

Leno: The Obama White House website still says if you like your health plan, you can keep it. That’s false, of course. The president says they’re trying to correct it, but his website people can’t seem to log-on.

Conan: President Obama met the Stanley Cup champion Chicago Blackhawks. Obama was excited to tell the hockey players that ObamaCare includes dental.

Conan: The ObamaCare website won’t be accessible at night due to maintenance. And it won’t be accessible during the day due to “it sucking.”

Leno: As you may know, Thanksgiving began in 1621 when Pilgrims feasted with Indians and told them, “If you like your land, you can keep your land.”

Conan: Marvel Comics is introducing its first superhero who’s a female Muslim. She can even fly, which comes in handy because she’s not allowed to drive.

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Charles Krauthammer writes on rhetoric trumped by reality.

The Obamacare Web site doesn’t work. Hundreds of thousands of insured Americans are seeing their plans summarily terminated. Millions more face the same prospect next year. Confronted with a crisis of governance, how does President Obama respond?

He campaigns.

“I’ve got one more campaign in me,” he told grass-roots supporters Monday — a series of speeches and rallies, explains the New York Times, “to make sure his signature health care law works.”

Campaigning to make something work? How does that work? Presidential sweet-talk persuades the nonfunctional Web portal to function?

This odd belief that rhetoric trumps reality leads to strange scenes. Like the ShamWow pitch, Obama’s nationally televised address trying to resell Obamacare. Don’t worry about the Web site, he said. I’ll get it fixed. And besides, there are alternatives, such as an 800 number he promptly gave out. Twice. …

… This rather bizarre belief in the unlimited power of the speech arises from Obama’s biography. Isn’t that how he rose? Words. It’s not as if he built a company, an enterprise, an institution. He built one thing — his own persona. By persuasion. One great speech in 2004 propels him to the presidential level. More great speeches and he wins the White House.

But then comes governance. A speech in Cairo, utterly crushed by the Arab Spring. Talk of a Russian reset, repeatedly thrown back at him by a contemptuous Russian dictator. Fifty-four speeches to get health care enacted — only to see it now imperiled by the reality of its ruinous rollout and broken promises.

I’m not surprised that Obama tells untruths. He’s surely not the only politician to do so. I’m just surprised that he chooses to tell such obvious ones — ones that will inevitably be found out.

Who will tell Obama that lies so transparent render rhetoric not just useless but ridiculous?

Joel Kotkin explains how healthcare reform makes life more difficult for the self-employed.

Obamacare’s first set of victims was predictable: the self-employed and owners of small businesses. Since the bungled launch of the health insurance enrollment system, hundreds of thousands of self-insured people have either had their policies revoked or may find themselves in that situation in the coming months. More than 10 million self-insured people, many of them self-employed, could meet a similar fate.

Unlike large companies or labor unions, which have sought to delay or duck implementing the Affordable Care Act, what could be called the yeoman class lacks the political might to make much of a dent in Washington policies. Indeed, in the Obama era, with its emphasis on top-down solutions and Chicago-style brokering, Americans who work for themselves probably are more marginalized today than at any time in recent memory.

Virtually every major initiative of this administration – from taxation and regulation to monetary policy and Obamacare – has been promulgated with little concern for the self-employed. Many feel themselves subject to an apparent attempt to transfer middle class incomes to the poor just as ever more wealth concentrates in the “1 percent.” Not surprisingly, 60 percent of business owners surveyed by Gallup expressed opposition to the administration.

The divide between the yeoman and the political community marks a major departure from the norms of American history. After all, people came to America in large part to secure “a piece of the pie,” whether through owning a small business or a farm, goals often unattainable in Europe. Thomas Jefferson, notes historian Kenneth Jackson, “dreamed of the U.S. as a nation of small yeoman farmers who would own their own land and cultivate it.” …

George Will has more on the foolishness of cash for clunkers.

… Most of the 677,842 sales were simply taken from the near future. That many older vehicles were traded in — and, as required by law, destroyed. Gayer and Parker accept as reasonable an estimate that the cost per job created by the program was $1.4 million. Although the vouchers did not come close to covering the cost of the new cars, voucher recipients seem not to have reduced their other consumption. This, say Gayer and Parker, suggests that participants in the program “were not liquidity constrained,” which is a delicate way of saying “there was no change in other consumption patterns,” which is a polite way of saying that “cash for clunkers” merely caused people to purchase vehicles “slightly earlier than otherwise would have occurred.”

Because the program was not means-tested, it had only a slight distributional effect of the sort progressives favor: Voucher recipients had lower incomes than others who bought new cars in 2009. Against this, however, must be weighed the fact that the mandated destruction of so many used vehicles probably caused prices for such vehicles to be higher than they otherwise would have been, meaning a redistribution of wealth adverse to low-income consumers.

As for environmental benefits from Cash for Clunkers, the reduction of gasoline consumption was small and “the cost per ton of carbon dioxide reduced by [the program] far exceeds the estimated social cost of carbon.” But it was — herewith very faint praise — more cost-effective than the subsidy for electric vehicles or the tax credit for ethanol. …

Stop treating old people like they are babies says Robert Samuelson.

Two analysts at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis have produced an important study that should (but probably won’t) alter the climate for Washington’s stalemated budget debate. The study demolishes the widespread notion that older Americans need exceptional protection against spending cuts because they’re poorer and more vulnerable than everyone else. Coupled with the elderly’s voting power, this perception has intimidated both parties and put Social Security and Medicare, which dominate federal spending, off-limits to any serious discussion or change.

It has long been obvious that the 65-and-over population doesn’t fit the Depression-era stereotype of being uniformly poor, sickly and helpless. Like under-65 Americans, those 65 and over are diverse. Some are poor, sickly and dependent. Many more are financially comfortable (or rich), in reasonably good health and more self-reliant than not. With life expectancy of 19 years at age 65, most face many years of government-subsidized retirement. The stereotype survives because it’s politically useful. It protects those subsidies. It discourages us from asking: Are they all desirable or deserved? For whom? At what age?

No one wants to be against Grandma, who — as portrayed in the media — is kindly, often suffering from some condition, usually financially precarious and somehow needy. But projecting this sympathetic portrait onto the entire 65-plus population is an exercise in make-believe and, frequently, political propaganda. The St. Louis Fed study refutes the stereotype. Examining different age groups, it found that since the financial crisis, incomes have risen for the elderly while they’ve dropped for the young and middle-aged. …

Andy Malcolm with late night humor.

Leno: President Obama didn’t know we spied on allies. He didn’t know about the ObamaCare problems. Now he says he doesn’t know how ‘Breaking Bad’ ended.

Letterman: Obama says the ObamaCare website has glitches. If a J. Crew pants order comes in the wrong color, that’s a glitch. ObamaCare is a Carnival Cruise.

Fallon: Syrian hackers targeted President Obama’s Twitter and Facebook accounts. Weird because Obama then hired them to fix the ObamaCare site.

Leno: As every year, hospitals all over the U.S. are X-raying children’s Halloween candy. Unfortunately, thanks to ObamaCare, now there’s a $1,000 co-pay.

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Andrew Malcolm wants to clear up what the meaning of “lie” is.

Let’s clear up some foggy prevarications polluting President Obama’s ongoing snow job for ObamaCare:

If you tell a spouse you’re going to Sam’s Club when you really mean Costco, that’s no big deal. Those membership stores are the same, except one peddles better hot dogs. That’s called misspeaking.

However, if you’re president of the United States peddling a legislative tumor like ObamaCare, one that you know will drastically change almost one-fifth of the nation’s economy, one that openly claims to help a few million uninsured Americans while secretly disrupting the lives, families, finances and medical care of more than 100 million Americans, and you say things like this:

“No matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise to the American people: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period. If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away, no matter what.” — Pres. Barack Obama to the American Medical Assn., June 15, 2009.

Or, if you say something like this:

“And if you like your insurance plan, you will keep it. No one will be able to take that away from you. It hasn’t happened yet. It won’t happen in the future.” — Pres. Obama, April 1, 2010. …

… The president’s remarks on national TV were interrupted by a Republican representative, Joe Wilson of South Carolina. He shouted out, “You lie!” The breach of decorum raised quite a stir at the time.

Turns out, Rep. Wilson wasn’t just rude. He was prescient.

John Hinderaker on the apology.

Tonight’s headlines tell us that President Obama has apologized for the fact that Obamacare has caused millions of Americans to lose their health insurance. That is, of course, a striking headline, but if we read what Obama actually said, it is apparent that his objective was not to offer a sincere apology, but to continue the Obamacare cover-up. Here is the interview; I created a partial transcript which is commented on below:

Obama said:

“What happened? Well, first of all, I meant what I said, and we worked hard to try to make sure that we implemented it properly. But obviously we didn’t do a good enough job.”

This is Obama’s fundamental lie. Unless Obama never read the Obamacare statute and was never briefed on it by his aides or by Congressional Democrats, he knew perfectly well that most Americans were going to lose their existing health insurance under Obamacare. …

The larger lie packed into that apology is highlighted by Paul Mirengoff.

Moreover, this statement from the same interview may come back to haunt Obama:

“We are talking about 5% of the population who are in what’s called the individual market. They’re out there buying health insurance on their own. And even though it only affects a small amount of the population, it means a lot to them, obviously to get this letter canceled.”

But, as John says, this 5 percent is only the tip of the iceberg. Once employer plans begin to be cancelled en masse, Obama will be seen to have doubled-down on deception, rather than coming clean in an interview in which he purports to do so.

Voters probably will want to know why their president, when apologizing for not having explained in advance to folks in the individual market that they would lose their coverage, misled folks in employer plans into believing that the problem did not extend to them.

Most will conclude, or be reinforced in their belief, that Obama is an inveterate dissembler. …

Peter Wehner on the many deceptions.

… Mr. Obama is not your ordinary, run-of-the-mill fabulist. It appears as if he’s in the process of becoming an inveterate one. He was, after all, building one untruth upon another. I say that because by now it’s obvious to nearly everyone, including liberals, that the president and his aides knew that when he made his initial claim that under the Affordable Care Act you will be able to keep your health-care plan “no matter what”–that you would keep it “period”–he knew the assertion was false. Yet he repeated it over and over again. (I’d urge you to watch this short video produced by New York magazine, which is a montage of Obama quotes claiming “you can keep your plan no matter what.”) …

Another routine lie from the administration. The president met for two hours Wednesday with Dem senators. Yet, the meeting wasn’t on the schedule. Sen. Mark Begich of Alaska let the cat out of the bag. Roll Call has the story.

President Barack Obama heard an earful at the White House Wednesday from Senate Democrats running for re-election next year who are fuming about the Affordable Care Act’s rocky rollout.

During a two-hour meeting that was not on the president’s public schedule, the president met with 15 Senate Democrats facing the voters next year, as well as Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chairman Michael Bennet, D-Colo.

Sen. Mark Begich of Alaska issued a release after the meeting torching the administration.

“It is simply unacceptable for Alaskans to bear the brunt of the Administration’s mismanagement of the implementation of the Affordable Care Act and that is the message U.S. Senator Mark Begich delivered to President Obama today,” his office said in a statement blasted to reporters.

The release went on to say that Begich complained about “an unworkable website, technical glitches and inaccurate information about peoples’ individual situations. Begich demanded the administration fix the problems immediately so Alaskans, including the 55,000 eligible for subsidies to lower monthly premiums, can realize the many benefits due to them as a result of the health reform law. …

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Michael Barone posts reflections on VA and NJ voting yesterday.

1. The Obamacare rollout fiasco and Obama’s lies hurt Democrats.

You only have to look at Democrat Terry McAuliffe’s narrow 48 percent to 46 percent margin in Virginia to see that. McAuliffe outspent Republican Ken Cuccinelli by a wide margin (as much as 10-to-1, some bloggers suggested) and was leading 46 percent to 37 percent in the last days of October in the Real Clear Politics average of recent polls on Oct. 31. In Virginia, the state that voted closest to the national average in the last two presidential elections, McAuliffe ended up with 48 percent, 3 percentage points behind Barack Obama’s 2012 percentage of the state, while Cuccinelli’s 46 percent was just 1 percentage point behind Mitt Romney’s showing.

Did Obamacare hurt? Well, the exit poll showed Virginia voters opposed rather than favored it by a 53 percent to 45 percent margin.

In contrast:

2. The government shutdown didn’t much hurt Republicans.

Northern Virginia was perhaps more impacted by the shutdown than any other part of the country. Yet when the exit poll asked who was more to blame, 47 percent of voters said Republicans in Congress and 46 percent said Obama. Considering that individuals almost always poll better than groups of people—particularly Republicans (or, for that matter, Democrats) in Congress, this is a devastating result for Obama.

It reminds me of the story of the Teamsters Union business agent who was in the hospital and received a bouquet of flowers. The card read, “The executive board wishes you a speedy recovery by a vote of 9 to 6.” However, in this case, the margin was narrower. …

Barone is a friend of ours. How about a leftie from Politico?

How the heck did that happen?

Most public polls leading up to Election Day had Democrat Terry McAuliffe coasting to victory, some by double digits, in the Virginia governor’s race. Instead he squeaked by, beating Republican Ken Cuccinelli by less than 3 percentage points.

The much-closer-than-expected outcome blunts the narrative that this was a clean win for Democrats going into 2014 and guarantees an intense blame game among Republicans about what might have put Cuccinelli over the top.

Based on a review of returns, exit polls and conversations with operatives, here are six takeaways from the surprise election of the night:

Obamacare almost killed McAuliffe.

The main news stories of the last two weeks of the race were about the botched rollout of the health exchanges and troubling revelations about people getting kicked off their health plans.

Cuccinelli called the off-year election a referendum on Obamacare at every stop during the final days.

“Despite being outspent by an unprecedented $15 million, this race came down to the wire because of Obamacare,” Cuccinelli said in his concession speech Tuesday night.

When President Barack Obama crossed the Potomac for McAuliffe on Sunday, he glaringly avoided even mentioning his signature accomplishment — trying instead to link Cuccinelli with the federal government shutdown.

Exit polls show a majority of voters — 53 percent — opposed the law. Among them, 81 percent voted for Cuccinelli and 8 percent voted for Libertarian candidate Robert Sarvis. McAuliffe won overwhelmingly among the 46 percent who support the health care overhaul.

Cuccinelli actually won independents by 9 percentage points, 47 percent to 38 percent, according to exit polls conducted for a group of media organizations. They made up about one-third of the electorate. …

More on the results from Jonathan Tobin.

The Virginia governor’s race was supposed to prove how the Tea Party destroyed the GOP. Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli was supposed to be too extreme and too much of a right-winger to be competitive. McAuliffe, who had a double-digit lead as late as two weeks ago, was coasting to victory on the strength of the national disgust over the government shutdown that hit Northern Virginia with its large number of federal employees hard. But once the shutdown ended and the country began to take notice of the ObamaCare rollout fiasco, the dynamic in Virginia changed. While liberal pundits will probably be tying themselves in knots to discount the ObamaCare factor, there’s little question that Cuccinelli’s big comeback that wound up turning a rout into a narrow election was primarily due to the way the president’s signature health-care legislation changed the political mood of the nation. A website that didn’t work was one thing. But the last week, during which the president’s broken promises about keeping coverage were exposed (a problem made worse by the disingenuous spin by the president and his press spokesman), not only motivated more of the GOP base to turn out in Virginia but had to have lost Democrats some swing voters.

The real lessons from the Virginia vote turn out to be a lot more complicated than the simplistic idea that the Tea Party’s rise would lead to a permanent Democratic majority. The reason why Cuccinelli fell short in Virginia was due in part to the way the national party abandoned his cause and allowed him to be massively outspent. This is something angry Tea Partiers won’t forget. …

And Noemie Emery says healthcare may not be “settled law.” Because now the Dems are going after it.

… In one week, this “settled law” got a lot more unsettled. Obama, wrote Jules Witcover in the Baltimore Sun, “faces the prospect of spending the rest of his second term distracted by the imperative of defending the law all over again, amid evidence that Republican warnings of its impracticability were not all partisan ranting. … Just as the Nixon tapes … kept alive the Watergate calamity … Obamacare seems destined to haunt its parent throughout his White House tenure and beyond.”

Being haunted by health care all over again after being put through a wringer in the 2009-2010 cycle is a bridge too far for a number of Democrats, some of whom are starting a call for, if not quite “delay, repeal and replace,” at least “delay, change, but for God’s sake do something.”

Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., who must face re-election in 2014, says she’s drafting a bill allowing the self-insured to keep their old policies.

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., and nine other senators asked Obama to delay the enrollment period deadline beyond March 31.

Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., is joining Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., in writing a bill to delay the imposition of penalties until 2015, and suggests other changes are needed:

“They’d better be worried about having a product,” he said in a New York Times interview. “Affordable health care means trying to get more people insurance. … Making people who had insurance buy a different product that costs more for less coverage? You can’t … defend that.”

To many Democrats, this sounds like 2010 redux, except for two ominous things: The employer mandate, set for next year, may cancel existing plans for as many as 93 million Americans just in time for 2014 midterms, and Obama is no longer the force that he was. …

Ed Driscoll says even the Maryland Mikulski drone is calling it a “crisis of confidence.” Driscoll’s closing sentence has the magical phrase “cargo cult.”

“When a loyal leader on your own team says there is a “crisis of confidence” surrounding your signature initiative, you’ve got trouble,” Roll Call notes:

“That’s the phrase Democratic Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski of Maryland used repeatedly Tuesday morning to describe the rollout of the new health care law as she questioned Marilyn Tavenner, the head of the health agency tasked with overseeing the law’s implementation.

“I believe that there’s been a crisis of confidence created in the dysfunctional nature of the website, the canceling of policies, and sticker shock from some people,” said Mikulski, who has generally been a strong ally of the administration.

She cited a news report that 73,000 people in her own state are getting cancellation notices, “so there has been fear, doubt and a crisis of confidence” — and she’s worried people, particularly the young, won’t enroll as a result.” …

… Welcome back Carter — but then, arguably, from the implosion of the doomed Great Society onward, liberalism, progressivism, leftism, Obamaism — whatever it chooses to call itself this week — has never recovered from its own seemingly permanent crisis of confidence, simply because its own FDR-LBJ-style cargo cult view of the glories of big government is itself unachievable, as with all forms of magical thinking.

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Take some time to carefully read this blog post titled Government is Magic. The post is from a blog called Sultan Knish and in it you’ll be reminded of what a cargo cult is. Then you’ll understand that our country has become one big cargo cult.

Our technocracy is detached from competence. It’s not the technocracy of engineers, but of “thinkers” who read Malcolm Gladwell and Thomas Friedman and watch TED talks and savor the flavor of competence, without ever imbibing its substance.

These are the people who love Freakonomics, who enjoy all sorts of mental puzzles, who like to see an idea turned on its head, but who couldn’t fix a toaster.

The ObamaCare website is the natural spawn of that technocracy who love the idea of using modernity to make things faster and easier, but have no idea what anything costs or how it works.

It’s hard to have a functioning technocracy without engineers. A technocracy made in Silicon Valley with its complete disregard for anything outside its own ego zone would be bad enough. But this is a Bloombergian technocracy of billionaires and activists, of people who think that “progress” makes things work, rather than things working leading to progress.

Healthcare.gov showed us that behind all the smoother and shinier designs was the same old clunky government where everything gets done because the right companies hire the right lobbyists and everything costs ten times what it should.

If the government can’t build a health care website, how is it going to actually run health care for an entire country is the obvious question that so many are asking. And the obvious answer is that it will run it the way it ran the website. It will throw wads of money and people at the problem and then look for programs it doesn’t like to squeeze for extra cash.

The Navy had to be cut to the bone and the Benghazi mission had to make do without security so that a Canadian company which began employing a classmate of Michelle Obama’s could score over half a billion to build a broken website. Obama mocked Mitt Romney’s criticism of his Navy cuts by telling him that we don’t fight with bayonets and horses anymore. Bayonets and horses are outdated. In our glorious modernity, we spend fortunes to build websites that don’t work instead. …

 

… The United States government is the ultimate giant unworkable mess. It is a living cargo cult where everyone marches around following routines that are supposed to yield great prosperity, but never do. The processes themselves are broken and make no sense, but the cargo culturers of the government cannot and will not hear that. They know that the government will magically make everything work.

Because government is progress. Government is modernity. Government is magic.

The cargo culters on the islands, who once witnessed the might and power of the American military during WW2 make American flags and uniforms, they build airstrips and wooden control towers, and wait for the planes to land and make them rich. They don’t understand why these things should work, but they do them anyway because that is how they remember it happening.

Our own cargo culters invoke FDR and JFK, they talk about the New Deal and the Great Society, they make grand promises and roll out big programs, and then they wait for it all to work. They don’t understand themselves how or why it would work. But government is magic and the appearance of a thing is just as good as a real deal.

Build a website and it will work. Pass a law and they will come. Get a degree and you’re competent.

There is no need to know how to do a thing. You don’t need engineers or competent men. All you need to do is remember the great dreams of the past, listen to a few inspirational JFK speeches and then carve a computer out of wood and wait for free health care to arrive.

In cargo cult America, the food is free, the cell phones are free and the money can be printed forever because government is magic.

All of this reminded Pickerhead of Reynolds’ Law as given to us by Philo of Alexandria.

I haven’t been blogging much lately, because I haven’t had many thoughts that haven’t been better expressed elsewhere. But I have to draw attention to a remark of Glenn Reynolds, which seems to me to express an important and little-noticed point:

“The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.”

I dub this Reynolds’ Law: “Subsidizing the markers of status doesn’t produce the character traits that result in that status; it undermines them.” It’s easy to see why. If people don’t need to defer gratification, work hard, etc., in order to achieve the status they desire, they’ll be less inclined to do those things. The greater the government subsidy, the greater the effect, and the more net harm produced. …

In his blog Pejman Yousefzadeh posts on a recent NY Times editorial that tries to come to grip with the failures of the healthcare rollout. Here’s a paragraph from the Times’ piece that provides a perfect example of the cargo cult among the bien pensants – We want something good to happen. So we pass a law and the wonderful things will naturally flow from out pure intentions.  Here’s the editors of the Times with the reasoning that allows them to overlook disaster; 

… This overblown controversy has also obscured the crux of what health care reform is trying to do, which is to guarantee that everyone can buy insurance without being turned away or charged exorbitant rates for pre-existing conditions and that everyone can receive benefits that really protect them against financial or medical disaster, not illusory benefits that prove inadequate when a crisis strikes. …

The Churchill bust banished by the president is now in the CapitolBuilding. Andrew Malcolm with the story.

You may recall one of the first things the brand-new 44th president did 1,749 days ago was have the honored bust of Winston Churchill, Britain’s legendary war leader, prime minister and author, removed from the Oval Office.

Many people suspect Barack Obama harbors ill-disguised ill feelings toward Great Britain stemming from its long colonial rule of Kenya, homeland of Obama’s father.

Besides exiling the Churchill bust, Obama has been involved in notoriously cheesy gift exchanges with Britons, including Queen Elizabeth, who once received an i-Pod chock-full of Obama’s own speeches. Obama has also been photographed numerous times with his feet on the historic presidential desk, another gift from Britain made from pieces of a British man-o-war.

Such suspicions of a Chicago politician from the South Side are, of course, silly and ridiculous. A man of Obama’s effete education, pettiness and arrogance would never stoop to such juvenile behavior, or if you’re reading this in Britain or Canada, behaviour.

So, it was with some emotion and perhaps a little political nose-thumbing this past week that Republican House Speaker John Boehner presided over the installation of a new, larger-than-life Churchill bust in a place of honor in the U.S. Capitol. Ex-Sen. John Kerry even attended. …

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Avik Roy of the Manhattan Institute maintains a healthcare blog at Forbes called The Apothecary. In a post last week, he showed how the insurance cancellations for individuals will soon be followed by cancellations for employer plans.

… Section 1251 of the Affordable Care Act contains what’s called a “grandfather” provision that, in theory, allows people to keep their existing plans if they like them. But subsequent regulations from the Obama administration interpreted that provision so narrowly as to prevent most plans from gaining this protection.

“The Departments’ mid-range estimate is that 66 percent of small employer plans and 45 percent of large employer plans will relinquish their grandfather status by the end of 2013,” wrote the administration on page 34,552 of the Register. All in all, more than half of employer-sponsored plans will lose their “grandfather status” and become illegal. According to the Congressional Budget Office, 156 million Americans—more than half the population—was covered by employer-sponsored insurance in 2013.

Another 25 million people, according to the CBO, have “nongroup and other” forms of insurance; that is to say, they participate in the market for individually-purchased insurance. In this market, the administration projected that “40 to 67 percent” of individually-purchased plans would lose their Obamacare-sanctioned “grandfather status” and become illegal, solely due to the fact that there is a high turnover of participants and insurance arrangements in this market. (Plans purchased after March 23, 2010 do not benefit from the “grandfather” clause.) The real turnover rate would be higher, because plans can lose their grandfather status for a number of other reasons.

How many people are exposed to these problems? 60 percent of Americans have private-sector health insurance—precisely the number that Jay Carney dismissed. As to the number of people facing cancellations, 51 percent of the employer-based market plus 53.5 percent of the non-group market (the middle of the administration’s range) amounts to 93 million Americans. …

Huffington Post wrote on the next big healthcare problem – security. This is long. We have a truncated version. Follow the link if you want it all.

Defending President Barack Obama’s much-maligned health care overhaul in Congress, his top health official was confronted Wednesday with a government memo raising new security concerns about the trouble-prone website that consumers are using to enroll.

The document, obtained by The Associated Press, shows that administration officials at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services were concerned that a lack of testing posed a potentially “high” security risk for the HealthCare.gov website serving 36 states. It was granted a temporary security certificate so it could operate.

Security issues are a new concern for the troubled HealthCare.gov website. If they cannot be resolved, they could prove to be more serious than the long list of technical problems the administration is trying to address.

“You accepted a risk on behalf of every user…that put their personal financial information at risk,” Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., told Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius during questioning before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. “Amazon would never do this. ProFlowers would never do this. Kayak would never do this. This is completely an unacceptable level of security.” …

Here’s another left-winger; Ron Fournier on the rollout.

Insularity, incompetence, and deception doomed the launch of the Affordable Care Act, according to postmortems on President Obama’s health insurance law. The president now has two choices: A) Accept the verdict and learn from it, or B) stick with insularity, incompetence, and deception.

Early signs point to Obama compounding rather than correcting his team’s errors.

Staying the course is a losing option for Obamacare and the more than 40 million Americans who need health insurance. The trouble is far deeper than a “glitchy” website, according to numerous media reports, including an in-depth investigation by The Washington Post. Among other things, The Post uncovered a 2010 memo from a trusted outside health adviser warning that no one in the administration was “up to the task” of constructing an insurance exchange and other complexities of the 2,000-page law.

The good news is there is time to learn from–and recover from–the early stumbles. Here are four important lessons from the postmortems. 

1) Reach out beyond your inner circle. Obama ignored efforts by Harvard professor David Cutler and his own economic team to get him to appoint an outside health reform “czar” with a background in technology, insurance, and business. Instead, the president stuck with his health policy team led by Nancy-Ann DeParle, a former Clinton appointee with a checkered record in the private sector. His team was built to pass legislation, not implement it.

“They were running the biggest start-up in the world, and they didn’t have anyone who had run a start-up, or even run a business,” Cutler told The Post. …

One of W’s speech writers, Marc Thiessen, devotes his column to the revelation that obama’s promise about keeping your healthcare insurance was known to be a lie by him and his advisors.

The Wall Street Journal broke the news this weekend that, even as President Obama was telling the American people they could keep their health plans, “some White House policy advisors objected to the breadth of Mr. Obama’s ‘keep your plan’ promise. They were overruled by political aides.”

Overruled by political aides? This is simply damning.

It’s not easy to get a lie into a presidential speech. Every draft address is circulated to the White House senior staff and key Cabinet officials in something called the “staffing process.” Every line is reviewed by dozens of senior officials, who offer comments and factual corrections. During this process, it turns out, some of Obama’s policy advisers objected to the “you can keep your plan” pledge, pointing out that it was untrue. But it stayed in the speech. That does not happen by accident. It requires a willful intent to deceive.

In the Bush White House, we speechwriters would often come up with what we thought were great turns of phrase to help the president explain his policies. But we also had a strict fact-checking process, where every iteration of every proposed presidential utterance was scrubbed to ensure it was both accurate and defensible. If the fact-checkers told us a line was inaccurate, we would either kill it or find another way to make the point accurately. I cannot imagine a scenario in which the fact-checkers or White House policy advisers would tell us that something in a draft speech was factually incorrect and that guidance would be ignored or overruled by the president’s political advisers.

This whole episode is a window into a fundamentally dishonest presidency. …

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit writes about the hubris of the political class.

Back when President Obama was first elected, the folks at Amazon offered a presidential reading list. My own recommendation for him was James Scott’s Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes To Improve The Human Condition Have Failed. Obama should have taken it.

Scott, a Yale professor and no right-winger, produced a lengthy catalog of centrally planned disasters: Everything from compulsory villagization in Tanzania, to the collectivization of agriculture in the Soviet Union, to the “Authoritarian High Modernism” that led to immense, unlivable housing projects and the destruction of urban life in cities around the world. The book stands as a warning to hubristic technocrats: You may think you understand how things work, and how people will respond to your carefully (or, often, not-so-carefully) laid plans, but you are likely to be wrong, and the result is likely to be somewhere between tragedy and farce. The world is more complicated than planners are capable of grasping — and so, for that matter, are the people who inhabit it.

So far, of course, the Obama administration’s health care policy hasn’t even gotten to the point of being tripped up by these sorts of issues, because, for the past month, the website hasn’t been capable of enrolling enough people to matter. But the inability of the world’s most lavishly funded government to produce a working website after more than three years of effort ought surely to encourage caution about its ability to administer the plan that the website was simply intended to enroll people for. …

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Mark Steyn has more on the rollout.

… We are assured by the headline writers that the president was “unaware” of Obamacare’s website defects, and the National Security Agency spying, and the IRS targeting of his political enemies, and the Justice Department bugging the Associated Press, and pretty much anything else you ask him about. But, as he put it, “nobody’s madder than me” at this shadowy rogue entity called the “Government of the United States” that’s running around pulling all this stuff.

And, once he finds out who’s running this Government of the United States rogue entity, he’s gonna come down as hard on him as he did on that video-maker in California; he’s gonna send round the National Park Service SWAT Team to teach that punk a lesson he won’t forget.

Gloria Borger and CNN seem inclined to swallow the line that the president of the United States is not aware that he is president of the United States: for the media, just a spoonful of manure makes the Obamacare medicine go down. It remains to be seen whether the American citizenry will be so genially indulgent. Hitherto, most of what the president claims to be unaware of, they are genuinely unaware of: few people have plans to vacation in Benghazi, or shoot the breeze with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on her cell phone. But Obamacare is different: whether or not the president is unaware of it, the more than two million Americans (at the time of writing) kicked off their current healthcare plans are most certainly aware of it. …

… But that’s life in the Republic of Paperwork, isn’t it? The remorseless diversion of time and energy to “futzing around.” That’s why so much of American life seems to be seizing up, why so many routine features of human existence require time-consuming bureaucracy-heavy painstaking navigation (to borrow a term from Obamacare’s “customer-service representatives”).

America would benefit from an opposition party that offered a serious de-futzing of the nation: a platform on the scale of Mrs. Thatcher’s privatization program in 1979 or Sir Roger Douglas’ in New Zealand in the Eighties that offered to make ordinary life comprehensible to non-wonks once more.

Instead, the Obama crowd have bet that, after the usual whining, you’ll settle down and get used to it: higher co-pays, higher premiums, higher deductibles, higher mountain of paperwork, higher futzing. But the fact remains that nowhere in the western world has the governmentalization of health care been so incompetently introduced and required protection by such a phalanx of lies.

Obamacare is not a left/right issue; it’s a fraud issue.

Remember Cash for Clunkers? The administration brags on that. But the Brookings Institution, a left wing think tank, says it too was a failure. Seth Mandel at Contentions has the story.

The ongoing debacle that is the administration’s rollout of ObamaCare has reignited debate about technocracy and big-government liberalism. But Democrats who worry that their mode of coercive politics will be discredited by ObamaCare should be thankful it took this long.

A very well-timed reminder of this arrived yesterday from the Brookings Institution. Scholars at the left-leaning think tank analyzed the so-called “Cash for Clunkers” program, the 2009 “stimulus” program intended to get cleaner cars on the road by providing cash vouchers for those who trade in older gas guzzlers and buy newer, more efficient cars. The administration patted itself on the back when the program ran out of money, apparently pleasantly surprised that people took free money during an economic downturn. But Brookings confirms that this was, of course, a terrible program. Here are their major findings:

The $2.85 billion program provided a short-term boost in vehicle sales, but the small increase in employment came at a far higher implied cost per job created ($1.4 million) than other fiscal stimulus programs, such as increasing unemployment aid, reducing employers’ and employees’ payroll taxes, or allowing the expensing of investment costs.

Total emissions reduction was not substantial because only about half a percent of all vehicles in the United States were the new, more energy-efficient CARS vehicles.

The program resulted in a small gasoline reduction equivalent only to about 2 to 8 days’ worth of current usage.

In terms of distributional effects, compared to households that purchased a new or used vehicle in 2009 without a voucher, CARS program participants had a higher before-tax income, were older, more likely to be white, more likely to own a home, and more likely to have a high-school and a college degree.

That last part just seems like pouring salt in the left’s wounds. Not only was the program a massive failure, but it was also, by the way, a taxpayer-funded subsidy for white homeowners– …

Seth is a free marketer. What does the liberal Washington Post say about Cash for Clunkers? They say, “Almost anything would have been better stimulus than ‘Cash for Clunkers.’”

When the Obama administration first proposed its “cash for clunkers” plan in 2009, the reaction was generally favorable. Congress would spend $2.85 billion to encourage drivers to swap their old gas-guzzlers for newer, more fuel-efficient cars.

The program had something for everyone: It would lend a hand to the ailing U.S. auto industry. It would tamp down on oil consumption. And, once launched, the program proved so popular with consumers that it burned through $1 billion in its first five days. Sure, a few critics argued that the program wouldn’t be very cost-effective, but no one was really listening.

But, as it turns out, the critics were on to something. A new analysis from the Brookings Institution’s Ted Gayer and Emily Parker found that the program was fairly inefficient as economic stimulus and mostly pulled forward auto sales that would have happened anyway. It also cut greenhouse-gas emissions a bit — the equivalent of taking up to 5 million cars off the road for a year — but at a steep cost.

“Cash for Clunkers” wasn’t good stimulus

Gayer and Parker find that Americans traded in nearly 700,000 old cars (“clunkers”) through the program between July 1 and Aug. 24, 2009. Vehicle sales did rise during that period. But a detailed study suggests that consumers just bought some cars slightly earlier than they otherwise would have. Cumulative purchases over the year were basically unchanged: …

We posted on Cash for Clunkers four years ago in August 2009. Here’s Andy McCarthy from last August 2009.

Compared to the infinite complexity of healthcare and health-insurance, cash-for-clunkers is kindergarten stuff. You trade in your old car for a new one that gets (slightly) better mileage and the government gives you money — between $3500 and $4500.  How hard is that?

Pretty hard, apparently. The Washington Times reports this morning that this simple, basic Big Gummint program has spun totally out of control:  it was clearly not thought through (even a little), it was under-budgeted by 2 or 3 hundred percent (and counting), and it was woefully under-resourced — such that staff have to be hired from the outside or pulled away from other government functions (like running air-traffic control) in order to clear the back-log.  Clearing the back-log, by the way, is a 24/7 operation that’s also requiring additional budgeting for overtime pay and a training program. …

…All this from the people who, Mark Steyn reminds us this morning, tell you that the way to control healthcare costs is to set up a huge new entitlement program (even as the ones they’ve already set up sink deeper into a multi-trillion dollar sea of unfunded liabilities). Why do we trust them to do anything other than the very few things for which you actually need a government? …

Volokh Conspiracy links to a You Tube short on The Death Throes of A Corvette. The idiots of the obama administration are proud of the fact they had a program that ruined 700,000 cars and made used cars more expensive for the people they claim they want to help.

Ed Morrissey in a post, also from four years ago, says the big winners in the program were foreign auto makers.

The Obama administration spent three billion dollars subsidizing the destruction of 700,000 vehicles in order to boost car sales.  Which auto makers actually benefited from these American tax subsidies?  Reuters reports that foreign car manufacturers gained market share, while the two bailed-out American automakers lost significant portions of theirs in the big summer sale. …

… Both GM and Chrysler had curtailed their production during their bankruptcies but had worked to have inventory ready for the new sales year.  By launching C4C in the middle of the summer, when most dealers are already cutting prices to move inventory off the lot, the administration practically guaranteed that C4C would leave them on the sidelines.  Chrysler had the worst inventory problems, but GM also had serious inventory issues.  Ford, which didn’t take the bailout, had continued production and had inventory ready to sell.

Shouldn’t the owner of GM and Chrysler had known this?  Didn’t anyone on the Auto Task Force — say, Ron Bloom, the auto czar with no automaking experience — bother to check whether their companies were ready to compete in this program, and whether July was a smart time to launch this even apart from that?  This is what happens when government enters the private sector; it makes decisions based on politics rather than sound business sense, and it picks leaders based on cronyism and political payoffs rather than expertise and competence.

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Peter Wehner calls it a “truly wicked blow” as Jimmy Carter criticizes the president.

… Who is Jimmy Carter to indict anyone on grounds of incompetence. And yet the more I reflect on it, the more I think Mr. Carter may be on to something.

What exactly are the impressive achievements of President Obama?  The revival of the American economy? Surging job growth? The success of the stimulus package and the number of “shovel ready jobs”? Moving us toward energy independence? Reducing the debt? Reducing poverty and the number of Americans on food stamps? His oversight of agencies like the IRS? The Fast and Furious program? Ending America’s political divisions and unifying his countrymen? Perhaps his skillful handling before, during, and after the terrorist assault on the American diplomatic outpost in Benghazi? His successes in Syria? Egypt? Iraq? Iran? Peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis? And don’t forget his signature domestic achievement, the Affordable Care Act, which may rank among the worst major government programs in modern American history, a failure in both conception and implementation.

So it may be that Jimmy Carter has a right to sit in judgment of Barack Obama. Which is among the worst things that could be said about America’s 44th president.

Charles Krauthammer writes on the “affordable” care act laid bare.

Every disaster has its moment of clarity. Physicist Richard Feynman dunks an O-ring into ice water and everyone understands instantly why the shuttle Challenger exploded. This week, the Obamacare O-ring froze for all the world to see: Hundreds of thousands of cancellation letters went out to people who had been assured a dozen times by the president that “If you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan. Period.”

The cancellations lay bare three pillars of Obamacare: (a) mendacity, (b) paternalism and (c) subterfuge.

(a) Those letters are irrefutable evidence that President Obama’s repeated you-keep-your-coverage claim was false. Why were they sent out? Because Obamacare renders illegal (with exceedingly narrow “grandfathered” exceptions) the continuation of any insurance plan deemed by Washington regulators not to meet their arbitrary standards for adequacy. Example: No maternity care? You are terminated.

So a law designed to cover the uninsured is now throwing far more people off their insurance than it can possibly be signing up on the nonfunctioning insurance exchanges. Indeed, most of the 19 million people with individual insurance will have to find new and likely more expensive coverage. And that doesn’t even include the additional millions who are sure to lose their employer-provided coverage. That’s a lot of people. That’s a pretty big lie.

But perhaps Obama didn’t know. Maybe the bystander president was as surprised by this as he claims to have been by the IRS scandal, the Associated Press and James Rosen phone logs, the failure of the Obamacare Web site, the premeditation of the Benghazi attacks, the tapping of Angela Merkel’s phone — i.e., the workings of the federal government of which he is the nominal head. …

Craig Pirrong asks if this is the Sergeant Shultz presidency or the second Hoover administration?

Both, actually.

The administration’s response to every one of the mounting pile of FUBARs is “Obama didn’t know.”  The latest: Obama didn’t know about impeding Healtcare.gov fiasco.  And he didn’t know that the NSA was collecting electronic intelligence on Merkel and other foreign leaders.  Add this to the IRS, Benghazi, etc., etc., etc.

This happens so frequently that it is becoming as regular a bit in the Obama Show as Sergeant Schultz’s “I know nothing! I see nothing!’ bit was in Hogan’s heroes.  Obama’s denials are about as plausible as Schultz’s.  It’s just not nearly as funny in real life.

As the fiascos mount, scapegoats must be found!  It is going to get very, very crowded under the bus. …

… of course scapegoats must be found! And you guessed it: the insurance companies are being rounded up and rounded on, most notably by the loathsome, mendacious and incompetent Valerie Jarrett:

“FACT: Nothing in #Obamacare forces people out of their health plans. No change is required unless insurance companies change existing plans.”

Get ready for the daily five minutes of hate.  Where by “five minutes” I mean twenty-four hours.

Wherever you cast your gaze, your eyes light on a debacle.  Consider that Russia is exploiting Obama’s inept handling of Egypt, where he managed the clever feat of getting everyone to hate him (no Cairo Speech II, I’m guessing-nor Brandenberg Gate II either):

Russian President Vladimir Putin is considering paying a state visit to Egypt to take advantage of frayed ties between Washington and Cairo and possibly gain access to Mediterranean ports, the Sunday Times of London reported.

Nearly 40 years of US policy up in smoke. The Choom Gang rides again.

The headline says it all: it emphasizes that Putin is exploiting the “US vacuum.”  That is the Obama foreign policy in two words: the second coming of the Hoover Administration.

Indeed, the appellation “Hoover Administration” is fitting in so many ways, because you know what vacuum cleaners do, right?

Roger Simon thinks the Fool should be indicted for cluelessness.

When I read Sunday evening in the Wall Street Journal that Barack Obama was “unaware” until last summer that the U. S. spied on thirty-five world leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, I was frankly stupefied. (Well, maybe not entirely stupefied, but at least semi-stunned.)

No wonder Obamacare and practically everything else from foreign policy to energy policy is an unmitigated mess. This president and his administration have taken hands-off leadership and leading from behind to unprecedented levels.

What exactly does our president do for a living? What’re we paying him for?

Either the administration officials who leaked this information to the WSJ are lying or Barack Obama should be impeached.

Forget “high crimes and misdemeanors.” For those you have to do something and be conscious. Barack Obama should be impeached for cluelessness. …

It would be funny, except the man lies. He lies like the dems vote in Chicago; early and often.  Jonah Goldberg on the president’s really big lie.

… The burning question about Barack Obama is whether he was simply “playing to win” and therefore lying on purpose, or whether his statements about Obamacare were just another example of, as Obama once put it, “I actually believe my own bullshit.”

“No matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise to the American people,” he told the American Medical Association in 2009. “If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what.”

No matter how you slice it, that was a lie. As many as 16 million Americans on the individual health-insurance market may lose their insurance policies. Just in the last month, hundreds of thousands have been notified by their insurers that their policies will be canceled. In fact, it appears that more Americans may have lost coverage than gotten it since Healthcare.gov went “live” (a term one must use advisedly). And when the business mandate finally kicks in, tens of millions more probably will lose their plans. …

Jennifer Rubin turns our attention back to one of the president’s lying minions – Sebelius.

In the semi-disastrous testimony of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius — with such doozies on Healthcare.gov as, “The Web site never crashed. It is functional, but at a very slow speed and very low reliability,” with a split scene of the site down — there was more than a new batch of gotcha moments for the Republicans to gloat about. There is a fundamental assumption critical to not only Obamacare, but also to the liberal welfare state more generally, namely that it requires a sophisticated and competent bureaucracy. In its collapse and in the testimony of Sebelius, we saw that this assumption may simply be wrong. Forget ideology for a moment. If the liberal welfare state can’t run its own creations, it is not sustainable.

Here are some specifics from the hearing:

1. She claims not to know how many people have enrolled because the site is not functioning. This contradicts what insurances companies have said and suggests a systemic problem that, if not addressed, makes it impossible to determine basic information like whether HHS has enough young people enrolled to pay for the sicker, older people. …

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Liberty and Law blog on the increasing militarization of the police.

Increasingly, the US government’s many police forces (often state and local ones as well) operate militarily and are trained to treat ordinary citizens as enemies. At the same time, the people from whom the government personnel take their cues routinely describe those who differ from them socially and politically as illegitimate, criminal, even terrorists. Though these developments have separate roots, the post-9/11 state of no-win war against anonymous enemies has given them momentum. The longer it goes on, the more they converge and set in motion a spiral of civil strife all too well known in history, a spiral ever more difficult to stop short of civil war. Even now ordinary Americans are liable to being disadvantaged, hurt or even killed by their government as never before.

Government’s violent treatment of citizens has become generalized and unremarkable. Consider.

This month in WashingtonDC, Federal police riddled with bullets a woman suffering from post-partum depression who, had she been allowed to live, might have been convicted of reckless driving, at most. She had careened too close to the White House and Capitol, but had harmed no one and her car had stopped. In the same month, California sheriffs’ deputies killed a 13 year-old boy who was carrying a plastic toy rifle. It is not illegal to carry a rifle, never mind a toy one. America did not blink. A half century ago, Alabama sheriff Bull Connor’s use of a mere cattle prod to move marchers from blocking a street had caused a national crisis.

In a casual conversation, a friendly employee of the US Forest Service bemoaned to me that he was on his way to a US Army base, where he and colleagues would practice military tactics against persons who resist regulations. A forester, he had hoped to be Smokey the Bear. Instead, he said, “we are now the Department of Provocation.” In fact every US government agency, and most state and local ones now police their ever burgeoning regulations with military equipment, tactics, and above all with the assumption that they are dealing with people who should not be dealt with any other way. …

We have a very long article from Wired Magazine on how kids learn, focusing on a middle school teacher in Mexico. Here’s an excerpt from the day the assistant principal of the school learned one class in his school had ten students who were in the 99.99 percentile in countrywide standardized math test results. And one student, a twelve-year-old girl, had the highest grade in the country.

Juárez Correa (the teacher) also brought something else back from the Internet. It was the fable of a forlorn burro trapped at the bottom of a well. Since thieves had broken into the school and sliced the electrical cord off of the classroom projector (presumably to sell the copper inside), he couldn’t actually show them the clip that recounted the tale. Instead, he simply described it.

One day, a burro fell into a well, Juárez Correa began. It wasn’t hurt, but it couldn’t get out. The burro’s owner decided that the aged beast wasn’t worth saving, and since the well was dry, he would just bury both. He began to shovel clods of earth into the well. The burro cried out, but the man kept shoveling. Eventually, the burro fell silent. The man assumed the animal was dead, so he was amazed when, after a lot of shoveling, the burro leaped out of the well. It had shaken off each clump of dirt and stepped up the steadily rising mound until it was able to jump out.

Juárez Correa looked at his class. “We are like that burro,” he said. “Everything that is thrown at us is an opportunity to rise out of the well we are in.”

When the two-day national standardized exam took place in June 2012, Juárez Correa viewed it as just another pile of dirt thrown on the kids’ heads. It was a step back to the way school used to be for them: mechanical and boring. To prevent cheating, a coordinator from the Ministry of Education oversaw the proceedings and took custody of the answer sheets at the end of testing. It felt like a military exercise, but as the kids blasted through the questions, they couldn’t help noticing that it felt easy, as if they were being asked to do something very basic.

Ricardo Zavala Hernandez, assistant principal at José Urbina López, drinks a cup of coffee most mornings as he browses the web in the admin building, a cement structure that houses the school’s two functioning computers. One day in September 2012, he clicked on the site for ENLACE, Mexico’s national achievement exam, and discovered that the results of the June test had been posted.

Zavala Hernandez put down his coffee. Most of the classes had done marginally better this year—but Paloma’s grade was another story. The previous year, 45 percent had essentially failed the math section, and 31 percent had failed Spanish. This time only 7 percent failed math and 3.5 percent failed Spanish. And while none had posted an Excellent score before, 63 percent were now in that category in math.

The language scores were very high. Even the lowest was well above the national average. Then he noticed the math scores. The top score in Juárez Correa’s class was 921. Zavala Hernandez looked over at the top score in the state: It was 921. When he saw the next box over, the hairs on his arms stood up. The top score in the entire country was also 921.

He printed the page and speed-walked to Juárez Correa’s classroom. The students stood up when he entered.

“Take a look at this,” Zavala Hernandez said, handing him the printout.

Juárez Correa scanned the results and looked up. “Is this for real?” he asked.

“I just printed it off the ENLACE site,” the assistant principal responded. “It’s real.”

Juárez Correa noticed the kids staring at him, but he wanted to make sure he understood the report. He took a moment to read it again, nodded, and turned to the kids.

“We have the results back from the ENLACE exam,” he said. “It’s just a test, and not a great one.”

A number of students had a sinking feeling. They must have blown it.

“But we have a student in this classroom who placed first in Mexico,” he said, breaking into a smile.

Paloma received the highest math score in the country, but the other students weren’t far behind. Ten got math scores that placed them in the 99.99th percentile. Three of them placed at the same high level in Spanish. The results attracted a quick burst of official and media attention in Mexico, most of which focused on Paloma. She was flown to Mexico City to appear on a popular TV show and received a variety of gifts, from a laptop to a bicycle.

Juárez Correa himself got almost no recognition, despite the fact that nearly half of his class had performed at a world- class level and that even the lowest performers had markedly improved.

His other students were congratulated by friends and family. The parents of Carlos Rodríguez Lamas, who placed in the 99.99th percentile in math, treated him to three steak tacos. It was his first time in a restaurant. Keila Francisco Rodríguez got 10 pesos from her parents. She bought a bag of Cheetos. The kids were excited. They talked about being doctors, teachers, and politicians.

Juárez Correa had mixed feelings about the test. His students had succeeded because he had employed a new teaching method, one better suited to the way children learn. It was a model that emphasized group work, competition, creativity, and a student-led environment. So it was ironic that the kids had distinguished themselves because of a conventional multiple-choice test. “These exams are like limits for the teachers,” he says. “They test what you know, not what you can do, and I am more interested in what my students can do.”

Now for some red meat before the weekend. Seth Mandel posts on obamacare and arbitrary power.

Following on the heels of CBS’s Benghazi report, NBC News is joining in the “now it can be told” parade. With the president safely reelected and ObamaCare surviving its key challenges at the Supreme Court, it is now apparently safe to start reporting on the fact that the health-care reform law was constructed on a very transparent falsehood. “Obama administration knew millions could not keep their health insurance” screams the headline, and the article notes that “the administration knew that more than 40 to 67 percent of those in the individual market would not be able to keep their plans, even if they liked them.”

President Obama stuck by the ludicrous promise that those who liked their insurance could keep their insurance–“period,” as the president liked to emphasize. This was never true, as conservatives pointed out time and again. The law was specifically designed to prevent this promise from being kept. But the media kept repeating it, so the president kept saying it. What’s new in the NBC report is not that Obama knew he was peddling a false promise; of course the White House knew what it was up to. Rather, what’s interesting is the degree to which the Obama administration concentrated on making sure that people couldn’t keep their policies, even if it meant rewriting key parts of the law’s regulations after the fact:

“None of this should come as a shock to the Obama administration. The law states that policies in effect as of March 23, 2010 will be “grandfathered,” meaning consumers can keep those policies even though they don’t meet requirements of the new health care law. But the Department of Health and Human Services then wrote regulations that narrowed that provision, by saying that if any part of a policy was significantly changed since that date — the deductible, co-pay, or benefits, for example — the policy would not be grandfathered.”

ObamaCare continues to be the epitome of arbitrary government. Not only was the law unpopular when it was passed, but the administration then kicked the public while it was down by changing the law on the fly and ensuring that a key promise used to pass the law would be unfulfilled. Unilaterally extending deadlines, waiving requirements for interest groups, delaying aspects of the law: it turns out we didn’t have to pass the law to find out what was in it, since it simply didn’t matter what was in it. …

Seth Mandel has more with an emphasis on Sebelius, the face of modern American fascism.

At one point early in her appearance before a House committee this morning, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius gave the country a moment of clarity in response to a question. “Hold me accountable for the debacle. I’m responsible.” Yet almost every other thing she said in her testimony was aimed not only at evading her own responsibility for the disastrous rollout of ObamaCare but also to obfuscate the lies the administration has told about the program as well as the utter lack of accountability about the expenditure of vast sums on a website that is not only dysfunctional but insecure.

The most egregious of her comments was to claim in an exchange with Rep. Joseph Pitts that “the website has never crashed.” Ironically, at the very moment that she was saying this, the website had crashed. That sort of denial is almost clinical in nature. But what was most telling about Sebelius’s performance was not so much the ongoing denial that uncounted millions are losing the coverage they were told they could keep or her difficulty in answering any detailed questions about why the website had been so poorly designed or why her department had failed to supervise the project adequately or account for its lack of functionality or security. Instead, it was the arrogant, cavalier nature of her responses to questions about the debacle. …

.. ObamaCare was a bill that was rammed through Congress on a partisan vote in which the normal legislative process was ignored and questions were swept under the rug. It was sold to the public with lies and it is now being implemented in a fashion that is hurting at least as many citizens as those it is supposed to help. But at no point in this process has the administration shown itself willing to listen to the people being inconvenienced or harmed or even, as Sebelius repeated today, to give an exemption or a delay in the personal mandate as a result of the website debacle.

In a perverse way this makes sense, since it is in keeping with the top-down spirit of this attempt to have the government begin the process of taking over American health care. In the view of the president and Sebelius, the lies and the failures are mere details that are insignificant when compared to their ambitions and what they believe are their good intentions.

There is no better example of the arrogance of unchecked power than this legislation and the manner in which its authors have foisted it upon the country. While a divided Congress is unlikely to hold Sebelius or the administration accountable for this, it will be up to the American people to remember this awful, arrogant performance and the huge credibility gap of this administration the next chance they have to hold Washington, if not Sebelius, accountable.

Late night humor from Andrew Malcolm.

Leno: A New York man was arrested for trying to join al Qaeda. He said it was so much easier than trying to enroll in ObamaCare. One click and he was in.

Fallon: The economy gained 148,000 jobs last month. Of course, they were all hired to fix Obama’s ObamaCare website.

Conan: Looks like Joe Biden really is running for president in 2016. Trying to appear presidential this week, Biden launched a website that doesn’t work.

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Charles Krauthammer was on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart last week. It is not often a guest gets the whole program, but Charles did. We have links so you can watch. Daily Caller with the story.

On Wednesday’s edition of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer faced off against left-leaning show anchor Jon Stewart on conservative ideology and the way it is presented.

In this rare appearance on Stewart’s program, Krauthammer was promoting his new book, “Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes, and Politics,” and explained how in working on the book he realized when he had made the transformation from liberal to conservative.

STEWART: Thirty years — do you ever look back on some of these writings and think, ‘What was I thinking?’
KRAUTHAMMER: It’s worse than that. The worst part of writing the book was going all the way back and reading the million words I’d written. By the end of this process I was near suicidal. I couldn’t believe I had written some of that stuff.
STEWART: So, what has the growth process been like?
KRAUTHAMMER:  The growth process? Well, I was once a liberal.
STEWART: So the early writings showed hope?
KRAUTHAMMER: And then came change. …

John Fund posts on the sting used to catch the White House minion who tweeted nasty items about Valerie Jarrett.

President Obama’s aides went to extraordinary lengths to uncover the identity of a senior official who was using Twitter to make snarky comments about White House staffers. Suspicion gradually centered on Jofi Joseph, the point man on nuclear nonproliferation at the National Security Council. So at a meeting in which everyone was in on the scam an inaccurate but innocuous news tidbit was revealed. When Joseph used his anonymous Twitter handle #natlsecwonk to broadcast the tidbit he was caught and promptly fired. He was not fired for revealing any secrets, but for making disparaging comments about thin-skinned administration players ranging from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel.

What apparently intensified the campaign to identify the “snarker” was a comment about Valerie Jarrett, the senior Obama adviser who has her own Secret Service detail and appears to exercise an inordinate amount of power behind the scenes. Joseph tweeted “I’m a fan of Obama, but his continuing reliance and dependence upon a vacuous cipher like Valerie Jarrett concerns me.”

Jarrett, an old Chicago friend of both Barack and Michelle Obama, appears to exercise such extraordinary influence she is sometimes quietly referred to as “Rasputin” on Capitol Hill, …

… Whether Jarrett’s influence is all too real or exaggerated is unknowable. What is known is the extent to which she has long been a peerless enabler of Barack Obama’s inflated opinion of himself. Consider this quote from New Yorker editor David Remnick’s interview with her for his 2010 book The Bridge.

 “I think Barack knew that he had God-given talents that were extraordinary. He knows exactly how smart he is. . . . He knows how perceptive he is. He knows what a good reader of people he is. And he knows that he has the ability — the extraordinary, uncanny ability — to take a thousand different perspectives, digest them and make sense out of them, and I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually. . . . So what I sensed in him was not just a restless spirit but somebody with such extraordinary talents that had to be really taxed in order for him to be happy. . . . He’s been bored to death his whole life. He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do.”

Up against a court flatterer of that caliber it’s no surprise that Jarrett has outlasted almost everyone who was in Obama’s original White House team — from chief of staff Rahm Emanuel to political guru David Axelrod to Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. All are known to have crossed her, and all are gone. As one former Obama aide once told me: “Valerie is ‘She Who Must Not be Challenged.’”  

When the revealing histories of the Obama White House are written it will be fascinating to learn just how extensive her role in the key decisions of the Obama years was.

Bret Stephens on president bystander.

Is there a method to President Obama‘s style of leadership, his methods of decision-making, his habits of attention, oversight and follow-through? In recent months I’ve been keeping a file of stories that might suggest an answer. See what you think.

“President Barack Obama went nearly five years without knowing his own spies were bugging the phones of world leaders. Officials said the NSA has so many eavesdropping operations under way that it wouldn’t have been practical to brief him on all of them.

“They added that the president was briefed on and approved of broader intelligence-collection ‘priorities,’ but that those below him make decisions about specific targets.”

—The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 28, 2013

“HealthCare.gov is the highest-profile experiment yet in the Obama administration’s effort to modernize government by using technology, with the site intended to become a user-friendly pathway to new health insurance options for millions of uninsured Americans.

“‘This was the president’s signature project and no one with the right technology experience was in charge,’ said Bob Kocher, a former White House aide who helped draft the law.”

—The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 28, 2013

“For the people who go out, on to the edge, to represent our country, we believe that if we get in trouble, they’re coming to get us, that our back is covered. To hear that it’s not, that’s a terrible, terrible experience.”

— Gregory Hicks, former deputy chief of mission in Libya, on “60 Minutes,” Oct. 27, 2013

Call Mr. Obama’s style indifferent, aloof or irresponsible, but a president who governs like this reaps the whirlwind—if not for himself, then for his country.

Stephens is from the Journal. Here’s Richard Cohen from the Washington Post. one of his fans no less.

Where is Casey Stengel when we need him? In 1962, as the manager of the brand new and determinedly hapless New York Mets — 40 wins, 120 losses — he looked up and down his bench one dismal day and wondered, “Can’t anybody here play this game?” That phrase kept coming at me recently as I watched the impressively inept performance of the Obama administration in both foreign and domestic policy. On a given day, this administration makes the ’62 Mets look good.

This is a surprise — at least to me. If Barack Obama has an image, it is of the infinitely cool, cerebral leader. The man can give a rousing speech, but he is, at heart, a planner and a plodder. Both of his presidential campaigns were exercises in micromanagement — digital all the way. Obama was the better candidate, but he had, by far, the better organization.

Yet this same man has lately so mishandled both domestic and foreign policy that he is in mortal peril of altering his image. This unsettling and uncharacteristic incompetence became shockingly clear when Obama failed to come to grips with the Syrian civil war. I did not agree with the president’s do-nothing policy, but at least it was both a policy and intellectually coherent. What followed, though, was both intellectually incoherent and pathetically inconsistent — a “red line” that came out of nowhere and then mysteriously evaporated and a missile strike that was threatened and then abandoned. It was a policy so wavering that if Obama were driving, he would be forced to take a breathalyzer.

The debacle of the Affordable Care Act’s Web site raised similar questions about confidence. This was supposed to be Obama’s Big Deal. The president has other accomplishments — navigating out of the Great Recession was no minor feat — but restoring the status quo does not get your face on Mount Rushmore. It takes achievement, a program — something new and wonderful. The Affordable Care Act was supposed to be it. …

And Jennifer Rubin. She’s not a fan.

The list is growing every week: The IRS scandal, the deteriorating security situation in Libya, spying on German Chancellor Angela Merkel, spying on journalists and the Obamacare mess. Those are just a few of the things we have been told at one time or another that President Obama he didn’t know about before learning about them in the media. Note to media: You have a critical job in briefing the president, so err on side of over-inclusion.

Then there are the things he had wrong or knew better but said anyway: There is a fatwa in Iran against nuclear weapons, “You will get to keep your health-care plan,” the Benghazi attack was related to an anti- Muslim video, and no predecessor had been compelled to negotiate a budget deal in the context of a potential government shutdown.

This prompts several questions: Who is running the government? Why is the president content not to know so many things? At this point one has to conclude he is intentionally ignorant. If he really wanted to be in the loop, people who didn’t inform him would be fired and the pace of “I didn’t know” excuses would slow. Instead it’s ticked up. Perhaps he refuses to hear bad news. Maybe his second-term team is hopelessly incompetent. Whatever the reason, Obama’s ignorance is no longer (if it ever had been) a valid excuse. His continual cluelessness is an indictment now of his administration’s collapse.

But it also got me wondering. There may be a whole list of things of which the president is unaware or confused that accounts for his erratic performance. Perhaps he does not know that. . .

His is the weakest economic ”recovery” since the Great Depression.

The top 10 percent of taxpayers account for 70 percent of the income tax paid.

The Iranian breakout time for a nuclear weapons capability is now as short as a month and new sites are still being announced.

He did not “end” wars in the Middle East. Sectarian violence is mounting in both Iraq and Libya.

Millions of people may eventually be dropped by their current health-care insurance plan, dwarfing the number who have signed up for Obamacare.

Our allies in the Middle East — virtually all of them — are shaken by U.S. timidity.

The list goes on. You would think the president at some point would be embarrassed to be the least-informed man in Washington, D.C.