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Before items about “public service” miscreants, how about some good news? WSJ had an article this weekend on Boeing’s 787 battery fix.
… By the end of the first week on the ground, Boeing “had 500 engineers dedicated to understanding” the complex technical issues, Mike Sinnett, the 787′s chief engineer, said last month.
Their next focus was to try to pinpoint the specific cause of internal battery short circuits, and develop a targeted engineering solution. Boeing teamed up with government investigators from the U.S. and Japan, but the goal remained elusive.
With both batteries from the incidents badly burned, frustrated experts acknowledged that a bevy of sophisticated tests produced inconclusive results. Mr. Sinnett and his bosses changed course again.
Boeing and its Japanese battery supplier, GS Yuasa Corp. shifted to crafting wide-ranging internal battery fixes aimed at combating a variety of potential causes. They included placing additional insulation around individual power cells within the battery, while more closely monitoring voltage fluctuations. Inspections at the factory, before batteries are assembled and shipped, also were tightened substantially.
The FAA and Mr. LaHood demanded additional safeguards, according to people familiar with the government’s deliberations. That is when Boeing engineers ratcheted up efforts to fine-tune the concept of a containment box, which they asserted amounted to a virtually foolproof solution.
The box serves several purposes: withstanding higher temperatures than the old design, and keeping dangerous chemicals from leaking. It also vents smoke outside the plane, and in the event of overheating automatically sucks oxygen from the battery. That is intended to snuff out any fire in a fraction of a second.
Boeing invested some “200,000 hours of engineering, design, analysis and testing” in the ultimate package of fixes, Ray Conner, head of Boeing’s commercial airplane unit, said last month. But even with its much-publicized battery woes, Mr. Conner called the 787 “far safer than anything that has been produced” by aircraft makers. …
Craig Pirrong says this president is no LBJ.
Obama threw a grand mal temper tantrum yesterday in the Rose Garden, lashing out at those he holds responsible for the defeat of the lame, completely symbolic, and utterly ineffectual gun legislation in the Senate. Such a paradox. According to Obama, the proposals are wildly popular, not to mention the epitome of “common sense.” (Note: whenever anyone asserts something is “common sense” it’s because they can’t muster a rational argument in its favor.) Nonetheless, they went down in flames in the Senate. And they would have had zero chance in the House. How can that circle be squared? According to Obama-the malign influence of the gun lobby.
In essence, Obama was admitting that he is no match for Wayne LaPierre. How pathetic is that?
Obama can’t even get his own party completely on board, let alone Republicans.
Somewhere, probably in hell, LBJ is shaking his head in disbelief. …
Ann Althouse says the second term is not starting out well.
1. It’s been so bad that the media dropped their erstwhile foible of talking about everything that happens in terms of what it means for Obama. And here it is, the first lap of his new term, when there’s more reason than usual to talk about how things are working out for the President.
2. Obama made gun control his big issue leading into the new term. He tried so hard to deploy his speaking skills to channel the nation’s emotion after the Sandy Hook massacre, and in the end he couldn’t even wrangle all of the Democrats in the Senate, and he was reduced yesterday to surrounding himself with human vessels of tragedy and “a scowling Vice President Biden” and pronounce it “all in all… a pretty shameful day for Washington.” …
… 9. What’s happening with Obamacare? That was the achievement of Obama’s first term. If there’s one thing he ought to do with this second term, it’s make sure that thing gets implemented in a way that works with some degree of smoothness, at least enough that — when people finally notice what’s been in the works for so long — we don’t freak out entirely. But: “A senior Democratic senator who helped write President Barack Obama’s health care law stunned administration officials Wednesday, saying openly he thinks it’s headed for a ‘train wreck’ because of bumbling implementation.’”
Speaking of obamacare, John Fund caught HHS spending millions on PR in an effort to “put lipstick on the obamacare pig.”
The Department of Health and Human Services has just handed out a $3.1 million PR contract to improve the public image of Obamacare. Advertising Age reports that the firm Weber Shandwick will help “roll out a campaign to convince skeptical — or simply confused — Americans the Affordable Care Act is good for them and convince them to enroll in a health plan.”
Obama officials insist the ads won’t be political, but critics recall that just before the 2010 midterm election, HHS spent $3.2 million on “educational” TV ads praising Obamacare. The spots featured the late actor Andy Griffith, a favorite of seniors, who told his fellow retirees that “more good things are coming” from Medicare. But FactCheck, a nonpartisan project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, noted that the ads made no mention of the dramatic cuts to 10 million Medicare Advantage recipients, who are likely to see their privately managed care scaled back. “The words in this ad ring hollow, and the promise that ‘benefits will remain the same’ is just as fictional as the town of Mayberry was when Griffith played the local sheriff,” FactCheck concluded in July 2010.
Indeed, the facts today are that Obamacare remains as unpopular now as when it was passed in 2010, and Democrats are increasingly worried it will return to haunt them in the midterm election next year, the first to take place after the stepped-up implementation of the law. …
Karl Rove has more.
In congressional testimony last week, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius blamed Republican governors for her department’s failure to create a “model exchange” where consumers could shop for health-insurance coverage in states that don’t set up their own exchange.
Nice try, but GOP governors aren’t the problem. Team Obama’s tendency to blame someone else for its shortcomings is tiresome. The Affordable Care Act requires HHS to operate exchanges in states that won’t operate their own. Since the act became law in March 2010, it has been abundantly clear that the agency would have to deploy a model exchange. It is Ms. Sebelius’s fault there isn’t one.
There is more to this failure. Even exchanges organized by Democratic and Republican governors may not be functioning by the health-law’s Oct. 1 deadline, because HHS has been slow with guidance and approvals.
Last month Gary Cohen, an official with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services who oversees technology for the exchanges, told members of America’s Health Insurance Plans (a trade association) that he was “pretty nervous” about implementation. He hoped enrollment is “not a third world experience.” …
Now we learn from Hot Air, a union official has called for repeal.
Labor unions largely came out swinging in favor of ObamaCare’s passage in 2010, but many have been growing increasingly wary of ObamaCare’s incoming provisions, fearing that the law’s requirements will raise the costs of health plans for unions members and make them less competitive compared to non-unionized workers. On Tuesday, one such labor union that initially backed the health care overhaul became the first union to officially revoke their support for the law. Ouch. …
Yuval Levin makes some suggestions as to how the GOP should proceed as the train wreck becomes more obvious.
As the calamity that is Obamacare unfolds upon the country, champions of genuine, market-based health-care reform will need to manage a careful balance: As Ramesh and I suggested in NR earlier this month, the conceptual and practical foundations of the law mean that it cannot be tinkered into harmlessness (let alone into a good system) but must be replaced with a different approach built on different foundations. Yet the fact that President Obama will be in office through 2016 means that no wholesale reform is likely to become law during that time. So Republicans need to find ways to highlight the law’s failures and put before the public their alternative vision and the policies that vision implies. Reforming Obamacare isn’t a workable option, but replacing it will have to begin with small steps where such steps are possible.
I think House Republicans have provided a modest but useful example of what that can look like with their bill to take money out of Obamacare’s “Prevention and Public Health Fund” (which is basically a slush fund used to pay for propaganda efforts on behalf of the law and to fill assorted implementation funding gaps created by the law’s haphazard design) and use it instead to allow more people with pre-existing conditions to make use of a high-risk pool to buy private insurance. …