Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Steve Hayward sticks his neck out and predicts the healthcare law will be repealed.

Prediction: even if HealthCare.gov is fixed by the end of the month (unlikely), Obamacare is going to be repealed well in advance of next year’s election.  And if the website continues to fail, the push for repeal—from endangered Democrats—will occur very rapidly.  The website is a sideshow: the real action is the number of people and businesses who are losing their health plans or having to pay a lot more.  Fixing the website will only delay the inevitable.

It is important to remember why it was so important for Obama to promise repeatedly that “if you like your health insurance/doctor, you can keep your health insurance/doctor.”  Cast your mind back to the ignominious collapse of Hillarycare in 1994.  Hillarycare came out of the box in September 1993 to high public support according to the early polls.  This was not a surprise.  Opinion polls for decades have shown a large majority of Americans support the general idea of universal health coverage.  But Hillarycare came apart as the bureaucratic details came out, the most important one being that you couldn’t be sure you’d be able to keep your doctors or select specialists of your choice.  The Clintons refused to consider a compromise, but even with large Democratic Senate and House majorities the bill was so dead it was never brought up for a vote

Remember “Harry and Louise”?  Obama did, which is why he portrayed Obamacare as simply expanding coverage to the uninsured, and improving coverage for the underinsured while leaving the already insured undisturbed.  But the redistributive arithmetic of Obamacare’s architecture could never add up, which is what the bureaucrats knew early on—as early as 2010 according to many documents that have leaked.  The wonder is that Obama’s political team didn’t see this coming and prepare a pre-emptive strategy for dealing with the inevitable exposure of the duplicity at the heart of Obamacare’s logic.  Now that people are losing their insurance and finding that they may not be able to keep their doctor after all, Obamacare has become the domestic policy equivalent of the Iraq War: a protracted fiasco that is proving fatal to a president’s credibility and approval rating. …

Perhaps Hayward is right when even WaPo’s Chris Cilliazza can no longer ignore the disaster.

Who cares?

That’s a common reaction — particularly in the Democratic wing of the Twitter-sphere — anytime, like this morning, we post a piece detailing President Obama’s sinking poll numbers.  The thinking goes something like this: President Obama isn’t ever going to have to run for re-election again so focusing on his poll numbers — whether good or bad — is a meaningless exercise by political journalists.

Except that it’s not. At all.

Take a look back at the election results from the second midterm elections of presidents, which is what 2014 will be.  From the end of World War II up until the 1986 election, the president’s party lost an average of 48 seats in the House and seven seats in the Senate, according to the indispensable Congressional analyst Norm Ornstein.  That “six year itch” trend has slowed in more recent second term midterm elections — the average losses for the president’s party in the 1986, 1998 and 2006 midterms is 10 seats in the House and 4 seats in the Senate —  but the pattern of losses remain. (In only two six year itch elections since the Civil War — one of which happened in 1998 — has the president’s party not lost seats in Congress.)

There are a panoply of theories to explain the historical consistency of the six year itch. Here’s Fix mentor and non-partisan political handicapper Charlie Cook’s explanation: …

Jennifer Rubin lists 10 reasons for the administration to panic.

Sometimes a White House becomes obsessed with small dips in the polls and paranoid about transitory stories harmful to the president. This is not one of those times. It is time to call in a savior chief of staff in the mold of Howard Baker or look at some serious policy changes. Consider:

1. Instead of laudatory coverage, the administration is being slammed over its Iran negotiations, shedding doubt about the credibility of the president and his secretary of state. Like President Richard Nixon declaring “I am not a crook,” John Kerry was compelled to insist “We are not blind, and I don’t think we’re stupid.”

2. The administration has a knack for making bad situations awful. It misrepresented the president’s promise we could keep our insurance plans and doctors for days, until media pummeling made him give it up with a half-hearted apology. Now Kerry is spinning an unbelievable tale of the Geneva negotiations, making the Iranians’ account — which tracked all Western media accounts – seem the more honest of the two. (Iran negotiator Javad Zarif  tweeted, ” Mr.Secretary, was it Iran that gutted over half of US draft Thursday night? and publicly commented against it Friday morning?”) …

And Bill Clinton has left the reservation. The Hill has the story.

President Obama scrambled to find a coherent response Tuesday after former President Clinton jammed the administration by saying it should keep its promise that people could keep their health insurance plans if they liked them.

The White House said Obama agreed with Clinton, but it offered no concrete idea on how that could be done.

Anxiety is growing among congressional Democrats, with the House poised to vote this week on Republican legislation to let insurers offer their old plans even if they don’t meet the new standards required by ObamaCare.

Whatever Bill Clinton’s motives — Republicans say he is distancing his wife, Hillary Clinton, from the ObamaCare debacle in advance of a White House run — his comments sharply intensified pressure on the president to change his signature law. 

The White House opposes the pending House Republican bill but has no alternative yet. The quicker Obama comes up with an answer the better, House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said Tuesday. …

More on Bill Clinton’s move from Jonathan Tobin.

The five-year-long dance between the Clintons and President Obama has always been an interesting show, but never more so than now as the runner-up in the 2008 Democratic presidential contest starts to maneuver in preparation for 2016. Hillary Clinton spent her four years as secretary of state playing the good soldier for the president, doing little of value but also (and unlike her spectacularly inept successor John Kerry) causing him little trouble. She exited the cabinet with a presidential love fest that had to annoy Vice President Joe Biden, her only likely rival for 2016. But now that she is safely out of the Washington maelstrom and embarked on a path that she hopes will see her return to the White House as president rather than first lady, her relationship with Obama has undergone a not-so-subtle change. That has allowed some of the old antagonism between her and, in particular, her husband and the man who beat her in 2008 to resurface.

That antagonism was on display today as Bill Clinton joined the growing chorus of critics of the ObamaCare rollout in an interview published in a web magazine. Speaking much as if he was one of the angry red-state Democrats who think the president’s lies about ObamaCare can sink their hopes of reelection next year, the 42nd president stuck a knife into the 44thpresident by saying the law should be changed to accommodate the demands of those who are losing their coverage despite the president’s promises to the contrary: …

And David Harsanyi asks what is wrong with rooting for failure?

… There are other reasons to cheer failure, as well. As Ed Rogers at The Washington Post recently wrote, “the failure of Obamacare would discourage and hopefully deter those who think a bigger, more domineering U.S. government is the answer to our problems. And most important, the horrors of this debacle and the collapse of Obamacare would have a chilling effect on politicians who want to promote big government solutions.”

My hope is that Obamacare — not to mention numerous other initiatives supported by the president — fails for a whole host of reasons. And not only do I have my fingers crossed that Obamacare fails in the way that most policy fails us but I hope it fails so hard that any residual perception among voters that any part of it was prudent policy is completely eliminated. Anything less might mean that a substantial enough bloc of Americans would continue to operate under the false impression that top-down technocratic control of their decisions is a good idea. And that would be a genuine failure.

Wishful thinking, no doubt. And admittedly, there’s also a self-centered reason to root for your ideological opponents not to succeed. Their misfortune confirms your worldview — one that you’ve probably spent considerable time and effort cultivating. Anyone with a shred of intellectual honesty remains somewhat open to the possibility that he is wrong, but he is certainly under no obligation to root against his own beliefs. Not even if a president armed with a straw man demands it of him.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

The Twitter IPO made big news recently. The Sunday Business Section of the NY Times reported on a man who makes his living in the world of “social media.”  The article is long, but helps understanding Twitter and its functions.

About once a week, Gary Vaynerchuk posts a Twitter message that reads, “Is there anything I can do for you?” He means it literally. He is inviting his roughly one million followers to send requests for any kind of help or favor. And if you respond, he will try to punch you in the face.

This will not be a conventional punch in the face, but a Vaynerchukian punch, which turns out to be the opposite of violent. Mr. Vaynerchuk, 37, is a social media marketer with some very big clients, and he’s a tireless self-promoter. Anyone fitting that description is all but required to find novel ways to win attention and coin catchphrases, and his new favorite is “jab, jab, jab, right hook.” That is also the name of his coming book, which is due out this month and is subtitled “How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy, Social World.”

A jab, in Mr. Vaynerchuk’s lexicon, is anything of value — a joke, an idea, an introduction. Or a meal. Not long ago, a follower in Minnesota joshingly responded to one of his can-I-help tweets with a request for a cheeseburger. The next day, a cheeseburger was delivered to the guy’s home. When a follower in Canada wrote “Just ran out of Tabasco,” Mr. Vaynerchuk overnighted eight bottles.

It’s unclear how a smack in the jaw came, in Mr. Vaynerchuk’s ever-churning imagination, to mean a gift. But after he delivers a few jabs, he — or the many companies that hire him to promote their brands through VaynerMedia, his agency based in Manhattan — can then hit you with a right hook, which in his world translates into a request to buy something.

Jab, jab, jab, right hook means give, give, give, ask. “A funny thing happens when you give value up front,” he is fond of saying. “You guilt people into buying stuff.” …

 

… One of his services is ensuring that a company stays on top of the latest trends in social media; he’s like a friend who knows the addresses of all the cool parties. He is the reason that G.E. had a Vayner-produced video on Vine, the six-second-video-sharing app, on the day the platform went live.

He is also the reason the company mailed out 314 pies in March.

“How do you thank people on Pi Day?” asked Ms. Boff of G.E., who was talking about March 14, or 3/14, which is as close as the calendar gets to a numerical representation of pi. “Gary came up with this idea.” G.E. sent 314 pies to 314 people who tweeted about pi that day.

It may come as a surprise that a company with $147 billion in annual revenue would consider sending a few hundred pies across the country to be an important part of its marketing strategy.

“Most people still associate our brand with appliances and lighting,” Ms. Boff explained. “But that’s a very, very small part of G.E. We are early adopters; we are a brand that is about innovation, invention, discovering things. And early adopters are the kind of people we want to be talking to, the kind of people who might want to work at G.E., or partner with us, or invest with us. And we want to humanize the company. We want to throw open the doors and behave the way a person behaves.”

And it’s not just about the 314 people who got the pies. It’s also about the people who read about the pies — perhaps, for instance, in The New York Times.

Mr. Vaynerchuk’s clients also include companies that just want to sell products. In the foyer of the main entrance of VaynerMedia, which is spread around two floors of a high-rise on Park Avenue South, there’s an enormous blackboard where a writer with fine penmanship has chalked — and this is the G-rated version — “We love social media because it sells things.”

For many, that premise has yet to be proved. …

 

… Much of what is produced at Vayner, in fact, looks like a digital version of the kind of work ad agencies have produced for decades. The company’s employees include dozens of “micro content producers,” who make images and videos for clients, using Photoshop and other programs. Zach Lansdale, a senior art director who oversees content producers, was at his desk one day in late October, creating GIFs for Furby, a brand of electronic doll sold by Hasbro.

“People are going to be scrolling when they see this,” he said, looking at a Halloween-themed Furby ad emblazoned with “Toastbusters” across the top, a riff on “Ghostbusters.” “Our goal is to catch their eye for a split second.”

There is little difference between this ad — which, it should be noted, is a word rarely used here; it’s called “content” — and one you might see in a magazine. But thanks to the endless demographic and lifestyle information spun off by sites like Facebook, the Furby ad can be aimed at consumers who are likely buyers, or fans of the brand.

“We have a client who sells dog food,” said Chris Gesualdi, a Vayner supervisor who handles paid media. “We can get so granular on Facebook that we can find people who are interested in specific breeds. Like: ‘Hey, you’re interested in cocker spaniels? Here’s some content.’ ”

Where VaynerMedia starts to look really different from conventional ad agencies is in its emphasis on speed. Social media are also interactive and immediate, so everyone here is on high alert for any event, any news that could be leveraged by any brand.

“The people I’m trying to hire here are journalists and improv actors,” Mr. Vaynerchuk said. “Creative today is more about breaking news. We need clever, funny and quick. If orange juice trees burn down in all of Florida, is there a play for our Tropicana client?” …

 

… Most of Mr. Vaynerchuk’s clients split their marketing dollars between social media and some combination of television, radio and print, making it hard to divvy up credit (or blame). But in August last year, Mondelez International, a snack and food conglomerate spun out of Kraft Foods, started an experiment. It spent every single ad dollar for one brand, Nilla — those little vanilla wafers — online, and put VaynerMedia in charge of the account.

“No other marketing,” said Bonin Bough, the company’s vice president for global media and consumer engagement. “No TV, no in-store. This was a brand using social in isolation.”

VaynerMedia created a campaign called “Momisms,” a series of Facebook ads aimed at mothers, the key Nilla audience. Many ads had the brand’s yellow background, and in red lettering offered cute homiletic quips like, “The best families are like fudge, mostly sweet with lots of nuts!” Vayner would try five different ads at the same time, aiming at a small group of Facebook users. Once it learned which ads were most “liked” and “shared,” Vayner spent more to push those ads to bigger audiences.

It worked. The Nilla Wafers Facebook page grew from 15,000 to 356,000 likes. More important, Mr. Bough says sales are up 9 percent so far this year compared with the same period in 2012. And the advertising costs for that increase are a small fraction of a conventional media campaign. (He declined to get specific.) The reason is efficiency. Instead of huge outlays for campaigns that would be seen by vast audiences, on television for instance, Mondelez spent small sums on people who had demonstrated an affinity for the brand.

“All of a sudden,” Mr. Bough said, “you’re talking about a new paradigm of marketing, built around microcontent.”

It’s hard to draw long-term conclusions based on a sample size of one. But if campaigns like Momisms build sales, you can be sure that there will be more of them. Which gets us to the tricky part: The more campaigns there are, according to Mr. Vaynerchuk, the less effective they will be. …

Last week on November 6th, Pickings led with a blog post titled Government is Magic. That blogger, Daniel Greenfield has come up with another great post about people who live in the government cloud. This is long too, so that’s all you get today.

Uncertainty and struggle are what we most often associate with poverty. Not knowing if you can still afford to pay next month’s bills and worrying over how much more you can cut back when you’re already barely getting by. This way of life has become more associated with the middle class than with those at the very bottom.

The statistic that shows that average black household worth is at $4,955 while average white household worth is at $110,729 is often quoted, but these numbers are not comparing similar things. Comparing the naked numbers is as misleading as comparing the average salaries in Tokyo and Bombay. What matters is not how much money you have, but how you live.

The $110,729 and $4,955 don’t reflect different standards of living; but different ways of living. Much of that $110,729 is home equity. But why do you need to shoulder the burden of a mortgage, when the government will just give you housing for free?

It’s misleading to think of the $110,729 families as privileged and of the $4,955 families as oppressed.

The $110,729 and  $4,955 families both have large flat screen televisions, smartphones and the usual baseline consumer toys. They could both eat equally well, except that the $4,955 family doesn’t bother watching its food budget. It just takes whatever it wants off the shelf and worries about prices later.

In terms of personal satisfaction, the $4,955 family is happier than the $110,729 family.

To understand this, think of the “Cloud”. You can buy a laptop powerful enough to store all your programs and data. Or you can get by with a mobile device whose apps connect online to a “Cloud” of someone else’s servers which store your data. The laptop is heavier to carry than the mobile device, but makes you more independent. Or you can just live in the “Cloud” confident that no matter how you mess up your device; your data will be backed up.

America is being divided between the workers and the dwellers in the government cloud. …

Isn’t it nice to have a day without posts about Stupid?

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

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.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

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.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

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. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

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.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

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. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

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. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content.

WORD

PDF

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.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

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. …