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In an effort to describe the healthcare rollout, Bart Simpson is quoted by John Podhoretz, “I didn’t think it was physically possible, but this both sucks and blows.”
I could rage on and on about Monday’s gobsmacking announcement that the Obama administration is once again unilaterally delaying a key aspect of its health-care law and what this act of astonishing royalism suggests about the president and his fundamental disrespect for the American system of checks and balances.
But I’m not going to. Instead, with all the dignity that a 52-year-old man and father of three can bring to the task, I will offer these observations instead:
Neener neener neener.
Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah.
Face it, all of you who celebrated and wept and danced when it passed back in March 2010, all of you who viewed it as the historic moment of transformation for the United States: This law is a lemon.
As Bart Simpson once said, “I didn’t think it was physically possible, but this both sucks and blows.” …
Charles Krauthammer on a few of the ways obamacare hurts jobs.
… But Obamacare’s war on jobs goes beyond voluntary idleness. The administration is now conceding, inadvertently but unmistakably, Obamacare’s other effect — involuntary job loss. On Monday, the administration unilaterally postponed and weakened the employer mandate, already suspended through 2015, for yet another year.
But doesn’t this undermine the whole idea of universal health coverage? Of course it does, but Obamacare was so structured that it is crushing small business and killing jobs. It creates a major incentive for small businesses to cut back to under 50 employees to avoid the mandate. Your business becomes a 49er by either firing workers or reducing their hours to below 30 a week. Because that doesn’t count as full time, you escape both the employer mandate to buy health insurance and the fine for not doing so.
With the weakest recovery since World War II, historically high chronic unemployment and a shockingly low workforce participation rate, the administration correctly fears the economic consequences of its own law — and of the political fallout for Democrats as millions more Americans lose their jobs or are involuntarily reduced to part-time status.
Conservatives have been warning about this for five years. This is not rocket science. Both the voluntary and forced job losses were utterly predictable. Pelosi insisted we would have to pass the law to know what’s in it. Now we know.
Jennifer Rubin provides a link to Jon Stewart’s takedown of the president’s latest ambassador picks. Follow the link in her post and wait through a 30 second spot. It’s worth your time.
… How in the world can the Democrats confirm these people? Frankly, we’re going to get a whole lot more of these ridiculous nominees due to the evisceration of the filibuster. The temptation to do so increases, and the administration can’t very well turn to their big shot donors and say, “I’d like to, but the Senate you know . . .” If there were ever the perfect example of why the filibuster is needed this is it. …
… This is yet another instance in which politics trumps virtually everything else in the administration. Sending unqualified ambassadors to important nations is actually minor compared to shifting the Afghanistan withdrawal to get troops home before the 2012 election. It is ironic that the president who came into office as a purported wonkish intellectual, an ideal technocrat, has in so many instances reflected the worst of mindless partisan politics.
It’s hard to remember that voters took the transformational and inspirational rhetoric of 2008 seriously. All of that has gone by the wayside as Obama has dug in both rhetorically and ideologically. But what likely brings both Democrats and Republicans together is their horror at a president who lacks the competence and will to govern well. The ambassadorial picks are only the tip of iceberg, of course. It’s small compared to Obamacare or the disastrous Syria policy, but it is all of a piece.
And it’s not just our friends on the right who are disgusted by the ambassador picks. Here’s WaPo editors.
… All presidents appoint some ambassadors who are not professional diplomats. Most have been harmless; a few have been stellar. Mr. Obama, however, has considerably stretched the boundaries of previous presidential records, both in quantity and in apparent disregard for quality. The president promised in 2009 to increase professional appointments, and the State Department said last Friday that it aims for a 70-30 split between career and political ambassadors. Yet, so far in his second term, 53 percent of Mr. Obama’s appointments have been political, according to the American Foreign Service Association. A third have been fundraisers for his campaigns.
The bundlers are going not just to London, Brussels and Vienna, where their roles may be largely decorative, but also to countries where relations with the United States are troubled. In addition to Mr. Mamet, Mr. Obama is dispatching fundraiser and soap-opera producer Colleen Bradley Bell to Hungary, a NATO country whose government has a disturbing record of undermining democratic institutions. At her confirmation hearing, Ms. Bell was unable to spell out U.S. interests in Budapest other than “to promote business opportunities, increase trade.”
Mr. Obama’s new ambassador to Norway, George Tsunis, raised $1.3 million for the Democratic Party in 2012 but didn’t know at the time of his hearing last month that Norway has a king but not a president.
Ambassadorial appointments for small allies such as Norway or tough partners including Hungary and Argentina matter because their governments rarely receive the attention of high-level officials in Washington and yet require skilled diplomacy. It’s no wonder that Argentina, the third-largest economy in Latin America but a perennial trouble spot, was tended by career diplomats under the four presidents who preceded Mr. Obama. His use of the Buenos Aires embassy and so many others as political plums signals a disregard for U.S. foreign interests.
Tammy Bruce calls him the “Mrs. Fletcher of Politics.”
First, it’s important that you know I think President Obama was born in the United States. I also think he may be the love child of the television character Mrs. Jessica Fletcher of “Murder, She Wrote.”
Think about it: Wherever Mrs. Fletcher went, someone ended up dead. Wherever Mr. Obama goes, a part of America gets punched in the face, falls into a coma or dies. Oh, sure, both characters seem nice enough, but inviting either to dinner (or to run the country) portends something disastrous.
When Mr. Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize for waking up one morning, we should have known it would invite chaos. They give him the prize, he lobs missiles into Libya, loses Afghanistan and Iraq and Libya to al Qaeda, sides with a tyrant against the Egyptian people, and draws a faux “red line” for Syria (did he hear it in a movie?), managing to make Bashar Assad even more powerful than he was before.
Ask the Syrian people (those who haven’t been gassed to death yet), what they think of Mr. Obama’s foreign-policy prowess.
Recently, a Reuters report wondered if the Japan-China relationship was “at its worst.” Well, if Mr. Obama’s track record continues, it will be soon. …
Tech Dirt says yup Direct TV has dropped the Weather Channel and instead is showing people the weather.
The Weather Channel has been well-deserving of mockery over the last few years, whether its for their efforts to sex up storms by naming them (in the process creating a nation of weather neurotics who become hysterical about drizzle), or for an ocean of TV and website content that has absolutely nothing to do with the weather (here’s some funny faces, yuk yuk). As such, their recent battle with DirecTV over retransmission fees doesn’t find the company getting much sympathy. Especially when the channel tries to argue that people will die without their inane assortment of non-weather-related content.
Normally in such retransmission disputes the content company has some leverage over the satellite or cable TV provider because what they’re withholding has somewhat irreplaceable value to the viewer (say, like “Breaking Bad”). In The Weather Channel’s case, their belief that they somehow held an exclusive over weather forecasting, combined with the fact that they have increasingly gotten worse at their one and only job, has given DirecTV the upper hand in the ongoing feud. After pulling the channel from the lineup back in January, DirecTV continues to battle The Weather Channel in a very simple way — by simply offering viewers the weather for a change …
CNS News reports Lake Superior most likely will be frozen over this year.
Lake Superior hasn’t completely frozen over in two decades.
But an expert on Great Lakes ice says there’s a “very high likelihood” that the three-quadrillion-gallon lake will soon be totally covered with ice thanks to this winter’s record-breaking cold.
The ice cover on the largest freshwater lake in the world hit a 20-year record of 91 percent on Feb. 5, 1994.
Jay Austin, associate professor at the Large Lakes Observatory in Duluth, Minn., told CNSNews.com that he expects that record will be broken this winter when the most northern of the Great Lakes becomes totally shrouded in ice. …