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Mark Steyn notes some of the background of the Canadian company picked by Sebelius to design the healthcare site.

…  CGI is not a creative free spirit from Jersey City with an impressive mastery of Twitter, but a Canadian corporate behemoth. Indeed, CGI is so Canadian, their name is French: Conseillers en Gestion et Informatique. Their most famous government project was for the Canadian Firearms Registry. The registry was estimated to cost in total $119 million, which would be offset by $117 million in fees. That’s a net cost of $2 million. Instead, by 2004 the CBC (Canada’s PBS) was reporting costs of some $2 billion – or a thousand times more expensive.

Yeah, yeah, I know, we’ve all had bathroom remodelers like that. But in this case the database had to register some 7 million long guns belonging to some 2.5 million to 3 million Canadians. That works out to almost $300 per gun – or somewhat higher than the original estimate for processing a firearm registration of $4.60. Of those $300 gun registrations, Canada’s Auditor-General reported to Parliament that much of the information was either duplicated or wrong in respect to basic information such as names and addresses.

Sound familiar?

Also, there was a 1-800 number, but it wasn’t any use.

Sound familiar?

So it was decided that the sclerotic database needed to be improved.

Sound familiar?

But it proved impossible to “improve” CFIS (the Canadian Firearms Information System). So CGI was hired to create an entirely new CFIS II, which would operate alongside CFIS I until the old system could be scrapped. CFIS II was supposed to go operational on Jan. 9, 2003, but the January date got postponed to June, and 2003 to 2004, and $81 million was thrown at it before a new Conservative government scrapped the fiasco in 2007. Last year, the Government of Ontario canceled another CGI registry that never saw the light of day – just for one disease, diabetes, and costing a mere $46 million.

But there’s always America! “We continue to view U.S. Federal Government as a significant growth opportunity,” declared CGI’s chief exec, in what would also make a fine epitaph for the republic. …

Who’s at fault if the healthcare site crashes and burns? Asked and answered by Michael Barone.

… First, a president who is not much interested in how government works on the ground. As a community organizer he never did get all the asbestos removed from the Altgeld housing project.

Politico reports that his “universal heath care” promise was first made when his press secretary and speechwriter need a rousing ending to a 2007 campaign speech to a liberal group.

Second, lawmakers and administrators who assume that, in an Information Age, all you have to do was to assign a task to an IT team and they will perform it. Cross your fingers and it gets done.

Third, government IT procurement rules are kludgy. Apple didn’t bid on this. The IT work went to insider firms that specialize in jumping through the hoops and ladders of government procurement rules.

Unfortunately, the consequences of a meltdown are enormous when a system is supposed to be used by everybody. If a private firm’s software fails, it can go bankrupt. No one else much cares.

But if Obamacare’s software crashes, the consequences will be catastrophic — for the nation and for the Democratic Party.

Barone offers a reader’s comments on his column above.

Poor design choices and a compressed development timetable spelled disaster for Healthcare.gov…

A reader who says that he has done large software installations for one of the big accounting firms wrote the following in an email. It seems to validate the concerns discussed in my Washington Examiner column on the Obamacare IT mess.

“1. The integration aspect is most difficult. In this case, the integration of various Federal Systems to determine subsidies is proving a daunting task. You are dealing with legacy systems that don’t integrate very well. Also the integration with the insurers consisting of sending an insurance application to the insurance company, a much easier task, was also screwed up.

2. The software architecture used to build the website was all wrong. Using Java scripts for a heavy duty production website was a bad move from a software design point of view. Obama has liberal buddies in Silicon Valley like Eric Schmidt at Google who should have advised him on how to implement a website with the latest technology. …”

Turns out Kathleen Sebelius has a record of failure at government website projects. Of course! That’s why she’s at the highest levels of this administration. Daily Caller with the story.

Obama administration Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ failure at designing websites to provide government services began during her term as governor of Kansas, long before the Obamacare website debacle, Kansas political insiders told The Daily Caller.

Sebelius oversaw numerous costly and disastrous government website projects during her six-year governorship (2003-2009), including a failed update of the Department of Labor’s program to provide unemployment pay and other services and similar updates pertaining to the Department of Administration and the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) services.

The Department of Labor’s overhaul of its computer programs was a notable boondoggle, according to 14-year former Kansas state senator and former state Labor Secretary Karin Brownlee. …

Daily Caller also tells us an exec at CGI, the failed website designer is a class mate of Michelle’s.

First Lady Michelle Obama’s Princeton classmate is a top executive at the company that earned the contract to build the failed Obamacare website.

Toni Townes-Whitley, Princetonclass of ’85, is senior vice president at CGI Federal, which earned the no-bid contract to build the $678 million Obamacare enrollment website at Healthcare.gov. CGI Federal is the U.S. arm of a Canadian company. …

And, The Daily Caller found out CGI has been put in charge of part of Hurricane Sandy relief. The country is in the best of hands.

CGI Federal Inc., the mastermind behind healthcare.gov, is assisting the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in the distribution of $1.7 billion in relief for Hurricane Sandy.

In a memo obtained by FreedomWorks titled, “Minutes of the 295th meeting of the members of the Housing Trust Fund Corporation held on May 9, 2013, at 8:30 a.m.,” CGI Federal is tasked with implementing the Disaster Housing Assistance Program. Additionally, they are asked to aid in the implementation of the Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery Program, an assistance program that had recently obtained $1.7 billion.

Item five of the meeting agenda reads:

Mr. Nelson presented that the State received a $1.7 billion allocation in CDBG Disaster Recovery aid from HUD to aid impacted businesses and residences.  He stated that the State’s Action Plan was approved on April 26, 2013 and HTFC is currently in a phase of implementing the program.  He stated that in this phase, the corporation needs to stand-up its recovery programs as soon as possible to deliver critical resources, and in order to do so, the corporation requires immediate access to consultant services to assist in policy and procedure development, training, surge capacity, and call center assistance, and stated that CGI Federal Inc. could provide such services.

The resolution was passed and scheduled to “take effect immediately.”

The Associated Press revealed Tuesday that a mere $700 million of the $60 billion federal aid package – 1.2 percent of the total funds – has been given to victims of super storm Sandy.

Nearly a year after the devastating storm, a majority of the 24,000 families that have requested monetary assistance have yet to receive a penny from the federal aid package.

Our look at the healthcare mess is summarized by John Fund’s column today in the National Review.

So we now have a date. “We’re confident by the end of November, Healthcare.gov will be smooth for a vast majority of users,” Jeff Zients, the point man in charge of the “tech surge” the White House is unleashing to fix the site’s problems, told reporters last week. “The Healthcare.gov site is fixable. It will take a lot of work, and there are a lot of problems that need to be addressed.”

But the commitments might hinge on what the word “fixable” really means. …

… The administration may also know less than it is claiming to know. It is astonishing that Zients, after only three days on the job, could make the assurances he did without having conducted a full technical review of the system, including requirements, architecture, design, and implementation. The scope of Healthcare.gov is staggering. Its 500 million lines of code dwarf the size of almost all known IT projects. According to CNN Money, it took just half a million lines of code to send the Curiosity rover to Mars. Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system has some 80 million lines of code. And a typical online-banking system might feature between 75 million and 100 million lines.  …

… We are on the verge of seeing dark catch-phrases such as “Kafkaesque” and “Catch-22” recede in favor of a new one to describe bureaucratic nightmares: “Healthcare.gov.” A true Halloween horror story. …

… So we now have a choice. We can believe the Obama administration’s happy talk that the website will be “fixed” — whatever that means — in five weeks, or we can look to the general consensus of outside IT experts who are highly dubious. Given the administration’s track record and lack of transparency to date, it’s not even a close call as to who has the greater credibility. 

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To give us all a relief from postings about the latest outrage from this administration we’re treated today with articles on aircraft carriers in some foreign navies, the advance of LED lighting, and the claim that cheating is the favorite pastime of America’s favorite pastime.

A blog named War is Boring starts us off with Your Aircraft Carrier Is A Piece of Crap. First the post is about Russia’s Admiral Kuznetsov, then two countries, India and China, who purchased decommissioned carriers from the Russians. The close is about Brazil’s purchase of a French carrier.

The Admiral Kuznetsov, Russia’s only aircraft carrier, was launched in 1985 and joined the fleet in 1991. Since then the 55,000-ton, fossil-fuel-powered flattop has managed just four frontline deployments—all of them to the Mediterranean, and all of them just a few months in duration.

By contrast, American flattops typically deploy for at least six months every two years. The nuclear-powered USS Enterprise, commissioned in 1962, completed 25 deployments before leaving service in 2012.

One of Admiral Kuznetsov’s major problems is her powerplant. The vessel is powered by steam turbines and turbo-pressurized boilers that Defense Industry Daily generously described as “defective.” Anticipating breakdowns, large ocean-going tugs accompany Admiral Kuznetsov whenever she deploys.

Poor maintenance makes life difficult and dangerous for Admiral Kuznetsov’s 1,900 sailors. A short circuit started a fire off Turkey in 2009 that killed one seaman.

Her pipes are bad. “When it’s this cold, water freezes everywhere including pipes which may cause a rupture,” English Russia reported. “To prevent this, they just don’t supply almost 60 percent of the cabins with water (neither in winter nor in summer). The situation with latrines is just as bad. The ship has over 50 latrines but half of them are closed.” 

Almost 2,000 men. Twenty-five latrines. Do the math. …

.. In 2004 New Delhi inked a $1.5-billion deal for the 1982-vintage Russian flattop Admiral Gorshkov. In Russian service, the 45,000-ton vessel had carried a few helicopters and small Yakovlev jump jets; the Indians paid to have the flight deck expanded and a bow ramp fitted to accommodate up to 16 MiG-29 fighters.

Renamed Vikramaditya, the flattop was due to enter service in 2008. But the poorly-managed Russian shipyard was overwhelmed by the scale of the refit. The cost doubled and trials were bumped back to September 2012. And when the crew pushed the conventionally-powered ship to her theoretical top speed of 32 knots, her boilers overheated.

“India didn’t want to use asbestos as heat protection for the boilers,” Defense Industry Daily explained. “Instead, the boilers’ designer had to use firebrick ceramics. Which, as we see, didn’t work so well. Especially on a ship that Russia put up for sale in 1994, after a boiler room explosion.” Our emphasis. …

… Not all shitty aircraft carriers are Russian. The U.K. and France have both sold to poorer navies decommissioned flattops that probably should have been permanently retired. In 2000 the Brazilian navy acquired the former Foch from Paris for $12 million. …

Next we’re treated to parts of the Wikipedia entry on the first Chinese carrier. We have only the parts about the purchase and the 17,000 mile tow to China.

… In mid-2000, the Dutch International Transport Contractors tugboat Suhaili with a Filipino crew was hired to take Varyag under tow. Chong Lot could not get permission from Turkey to transit the dangerous Bosphorus strait; under the Montreux Treaty of 1936 Turkey has obligations to permit free passage, but has certain sovereignty and refusal rights. The hulk spent 16 months under commercial tow circling in the Black Sea. High-level PRC government ministers conducted negotiations in Ankara on Chong Lot’s behalf, offering to allow Chinese tourists to visit cash-strapped Turkey if the travel agency’s ship were allowed to pass through the straits. On November 1, 2001, Turkey finally relented from its position that the vessel posed too great of a danger to the bridges of Istanbul, and allowed the transit.

Varyag was escorted by twenty-seven vessels, including eleven tug boats and three pilot boats, and took six hours to transit the strait; most large ships take an hour and a half. The Russian press reported that sixteen pilots and 250 seamen were involved. At 11:45 a.m. on November 2, the hulk completed its passage and made for Gallipoli and Çanakkale at 5.8 knots (10.7 km/h; 6.7 mph). It passed through the Dardanelles without incident.

On November 3, Varyag was caught in a force 9 gale and broke adrift while passing the Greek island of Skyros. Sea rescue workers tried to re-capture the hulk, which was drifting toward the island of Euboea. The seven-member crew (three Russians, three Ukrainians and one Filipino) remained on board as six tugboats tried to reestablish their tow. After many failed attempts to reattach the lines, a Greek coast guard rescue helicopter landed on Varyag and picked up four of the seven crew. One tug managed to make a line fast to the ship later in the day, but high winds severely hampered efforts by two other tugs to secure the ship. On November 6, Aries Lima (reported as both Dutch and Portuguese), a sailor from the tug Haliva Champion, died after a fall while attempting to reattach the tow lines. On November 7, the hulk was taken back under tow and progress resumed at about three knots.

The Suez Canal does not permit passage of “dead” ships — those without their own on-board power source — so the hulk was towed through the Strait of Gibraltar, around the Cape of Good Hope, and through the Straits of Malacca. …

Craig Pirrong reacts to the Chinese carrier in a post from last November.

In the comments, (a reader) mentions the successful Chinese landing of a J-15 jet on its new aircraft carrier as evidence of China rising.

It is an advance for China, definitely. But a baby step when you consider the complexity of carrier operations, especially at a true operational tempo, with 120 sorties (takeoffs and landing) per 12 hour flight day, sometimes surging to 190 per day. The ballet of the deck is an amazing-and amazingly dangerous-thing. Especially when you start doing it with live ammunition hanging from wings and waiting on deck, and especially when you do it day after day and crews become fatigued.

The US Navy has been doing this for close to a century. The accumulated experience and knowledge will take the Chinese a generation to match. (Only four navies-the US, Japan, the UK, and France have operated carriers in a serious way.)

And by the time China catches up with that, the US will have moved on. It is already moving on. For on virtually the same day China landed a manned jet on a carrier, the US loaded an X-47B Unmanned Aerial Vehicle onto the USS Harry Truman for flight testing:

So while China takes its first steps into the 20th century doing what the US (and the UK) first did in 1945-land a manned combat jet on a CV-the US is moving into the 21st by testing unmanned combat jet on a CV.

So who is really making history? And is a gap closing, or opening?

Pirrong’s forecast of drone operations on a carrier has come about. Gizmodo has the story of landings and takeoffs from carriers. First launch was in was in May and the first landing was in July. At the end of the article we have some links to videos of the events.

It’s not often that we get to witness aviation history being made, but when we do, it’s often awesome. Such is the case with the U.S. Navy’s X-47B which just became the first unmanned aircraft to land on an aircraft carrier.

Landing a drone on an aircraft carrier was not a cheap or easy task. The so-called “Salty Dog 502″ has been in training to accomplish such a feat for years now, and the program has cost the government over $1.4 billion. It won’t spend anymore, because the Navy is retiring its two X-47B’s and sending them to Navy museums in Florida and Maryland. The aircraft deserve nothing less than being enshrined. “Your grandchildren and great grandchildren, and mine, will be reading about this historic event in their history books,” Rear Admiral Mat Winter told the press ahead of the landing. “This is not trivial.”

How untrivial is it? Some of the top brass say that Wednesday’s accomplishment is second only to the introduction of naval aircraft way back in 1911. And the thought of robot planes zipping on and off of floating runways is probably just as scary to the people of 2013 as the idea of planes on boats was to the people of 1911. …

Forbes article about LED lights coming into their own.

The 23-story Bank of America Plaza in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.,– known as the Las Olas City Centre – is the latest iconic skyscraper to undergo an exterior lighting makeover with the aim of reducing energy consumption without sacrificing safety or aesthetics.

Its project, spearheaded by the building’s developer and manager Stiles, involved scrapping 144 metal halide fixtures on the tower’s signature ziggurat, along the rooftop and several faces in exchange for a system that uses 288 Philips Color Kinetics LED fixtures. The system can change colors and is being used to promote events or causes – like what has traditionally been done with the Empire State Building, which underwent its own facelift several years ago.

The overall impact of the installation is a 77 percent reduction in the power draw, which will translate into an annual savings of $26,897 in energy and operating costs.

The investment that it took to make the upgrade hasn’t been disclosed, but installations like these typically pay for themselves over several years when electricity savings and rebates are taken into account. In this case, the project was part of a retrofit undertaken with the aim of earning a Gold certification for the entire building under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system.

If changing just a few fixtures can result in savings of this nature, imagine what happens when you transform an entire city.

Overhauls across both Las Vegas and Los Angeles offer a vivid illustration of what’s possible – especially when you consider that street lights can account for up to 40 percent of a given city’s electricity bill. …

Now we get to the piece about cheating in baseball from Pacific Standard.

… 1994: Albert Belle was one of the best power hitters of any generation, and his 1994 season kicked off three straight MVP-caliber seasons. Unfortunately, those other two seasons failed to match the transcendent absurdism of Belle’s ‘94 campaign.

In the first inning of a July 15 game against the Chicago White Sox, Belle, then of the Cleveland Indians, was accused of using a corked bat by White Sox manager Gene Lamont. The bat was confiscated and locked away in the umpires’ dressing room for later inspection, which set off one of baseball’s great capers.

Belle’s use of corked bats was an open secret in the Indians clubhouse, and the team could ill-afford to lose their best hitter to a suspension. Desperate for a solution, Indians relief pitcher Jason Grimsley was enlisted to retrieve the bat. Grimsley accessed a false ceiling, crawled across it to reach the dressing room, and swapped out the bat with an uncorked one belonging to teammate Paul Sorrento. During the sixth inning of the game, the umpires’ custodian noticed signs of a break-in, and the Chicago police were called in. Major League Baseball even flew in a former FBI agent to investigate the theft.

Still unaware of what exactly happened, Major League Baseball demanded the Indians produce the confiscated bat or risk the FBI getting involved. The team acquiesced, and an inspection of the bat revealed it was indeed corked. Belle was eventually suspended for seven games, but Grimsley’s involvement remained secret until a 1999 interview with The New York Times. As for why he replaced Belle’s bat with one belonging to Sorrento, the correct answer is the simple one: all of Belle’s bats were corked. No one knows how any part of this story could be any more perfect. …

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It’s “smart diplomacy day.” First with Daniel Henninger on the president’s disappearing credibility.

The collapse of ObamaCare is the tip of the iceberg for the magical Obama presidency.

From the moment he emerged in the public eye with his 2004 speech at the Democratic Convention and through his astonishing defeat of the Clintons in 2008, Barack Obama’s calling card has been credibility. He speaks, and enough of the world believes to keep his presidency afloat. Or used to.

All of a sudden, from Washington to Riyadh, Barack Obama’s credibility is melting.

Amid the predictable collapse the past week of HealthCare.gov’s too-complex technology, not enough notice was given to Sen. Marco Rubio‘s statement that the chances for success on immigration reform are about dead. Why? Because, said Sen. Rubio, there is “a lack of trust” in the president’s commitments. …

… Bluntly, Mr. Obama’s partners are concluding that they cannot do business with him. They don’t trust him. Whether it’s the Saudis, the Syrian rebels, the French, the Iraqis, the unpivoted Asians or the congressional Republicans, they’ve all had their fill of coming up on the short end with so mercurial a U.S. president. And when that happens, the world’s important business doesn’t get done. It sits in a dangerous and volatile vacuum.

The next major political event in Washington is the negotiation over spending, entitlements and taxes between House budget chairman Paul Ryan and his Senate partner, Patty Murray. The bad air over this effort is the same as that Marco Rubio says is choking immigration reform: the fear that Mr. Obama will urge the process forward in public and then blow up any Ryan-Murray agreement at the 11th hour with deal-killing demands for greater tax revenue. …

OK, so Henninger is from the Journal. How does David Ignatius from WaPo look at the US/Saudi crackup?

… What should worry the Obama administration is that Saudi concern about U.S. policy in the Middle East is shared by the four other traditional U.S. allies in the region: Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Israel. They argue (mostly privately) that Obama has shredded U.S. influence by dumping President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, backing the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi, opposing the coup that toppled Morsi, vacillating in its Syria policy, and now embarking on negotiations with Iran — all without consulting close Arab allies.

Saudi King Abdullah privately voiced his frustration with U.S. policy in a lunch in Riyadh Monday with King Abdullah of Jordan and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed of the U.A.E., according to a knowledgeable Arab official. The Saudi monarch “is convinced the U.S. is unreliable,” this official said. “I don’t see a genuine desire to fix it” on either side, he added.

The Saudis’ pique, in turn, has reinforced the White House’s frustration that Riyadh is an ungrateful and sometimes petulant ally. When Secretary of State John Kerry was in the region a few weeks ago, he asked to visit Bandar. The Saudi prince is said to have responded that he was on his way out of the kingdom, but that Kerry could meet him at the airport. This response struck U.S. officials as high-handed.

Saudi Arabia obviously wants attention, but what’s surprising is the White House’s inability to convey the desired reassurances over the past two years. The problem was clear in the fall of 2011, when I was told by Saudi officials in Riyadh that they increasingly regarded the U.S. as unreliable and would look elsewhere for their security. Obama’s reaction to these reports was to be peeved that the Saudis didn’t recognize all that the U.S. was doing to help their security, behind the scenes. …

Karen Elliot House former publisher of the WSJ was moved to come out of retirement for a comment on our feckless foreign policy.

… To understand the U.S.-Saudi rift, it is essential to realize that from the capital in Riyadh the world looks more threatening than at any time since the founding of modern Saudi Arabia in 1932. There have been other menacing times. Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1960s sought to destabilize the Al Saud by fomenting trouble in neighboring Yemen. In 1979, religious fanatics took over the Grand Mosque in Mecca and had to be ousted by military action. The Saudis feared, in 1990, that their kingdom was next after Iraq’s Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. In all those troubled moments, the U.S. was either a trusted if silent supporter of the Saudis or an active defender, as in the 1990 Gulf War.

Today, the Saudis find themselves alone regarding Syria, trapped in a proxy war with Iran, their religious (Sunni Saudi Arabia vs. Shiite Iran) and political enemy. The Saudis had sought and expected U.S. help in arming the rebels against Syrian ruler Bashar Assad, but the military aid never materialized. Instead, last month at the United Nations General Assembly gathering, President Obama eagerly sought a private meeting with Iran’s new president, Hasan Rouhani, to discuss its nuclear program. Mr. Obama seemed desperately grateful merely to get him on the phone.

A few days later, the Saudi foreign minister abruptly canceled his own speech to the General Assembly. Then last week, Saudi Arabia took the extraordinary step of turning down a Security Council seat it had long sought. According to a Reuters report this week, Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan, head of the kingdom’s intelligence and national security operations, told European diplomats that both moves at the U.N. were intended as a blunt message to the Obama administration.

Only a year ago, Saudi officials expressed great confidence that Assad would be ousted from Syria by this fall. Instead, the Saudis now find themselves trapped with their foot on the snake Assad: They can’t step away, lest the snake strike, but lacking American help, they don’t have the means to kill the snake either. …

John Hinderaker of Power Line posts on the Saudi king’s opinion of the president.

… Heh. Welcome to the club, Your Highness. Anyone looking for honesty, consistency, loyalty or even common sense will have to seek out someone other than Barack Obama.

Still, the administration’s falling out with the Saudis is shocking. My opinion of the administration’s foreign policy is very low, but I never imagined they could destroy our relationship with our most important Gulf Arab ally.

And how are things in Europe you ask? Michael Rubin has answers.

… The situation with Europe is no better. Obama bent over backwards to insult Great Britain, presumably acting upon a grudge based on its treatment of his Kenyan grandfather. Yesterday, the White House sought to assuage German Chancellor Angela Merkel, but its carefully parsed words did not deny that the US government had previously tapped the phone of a woman who grew up under the Stasi.

What Obama—and so many of his realist mentors—never understood is that calculating interests is not a sterile endeavor. His advisors counseled him to view the world through the filter of short-term interests, and he obliged. When it came to understanding alleged allied anger, he took his echo chamber seriously, and conflated polemic and truth.

Cultivating allies is like paying a mortgage: The reward comes years later, and it would be silly to walk away 29 years into a 30 year mortgage just because it’s hard to balance that last payment with the reboot image and buy a new car. In effect, Obama ignored the value of alliance and friendship paved over decades by predecessors.

Alliances have value, and so do reputations. The two Bush’s, Clinton, and Reagan each understood the importance of standing with friends, and prioritizing long-term interests over short-term gain. By embracing stark realism, however, Obama has demonstrated so many realists’ failures to calculate the value of friendship, and to understand how investment in allies pays dividends over time. Alas, Obama did not. Now, far from being the president who would repair America’s image, Obama has become its soiler-in-chief, and it will take years if not decades to restore the trust of those which Obama has treated so cavalierly.

More on our European disaster from The NY Times’ Roger Cohen.

Germany, of course, has already concocted a compound word for it: Handyüberwachung. That would be spying on cellphone calls.

The U.S. surveillance in question targeted the phone of Chancellor Angela Merkel. Or at least she was convinced enough of this to call President Obama, express outrage at a “serious breach of trust” and declare such conduct between allies “completely unacceptable.”

The White House’s assurance to her that the United States “is not” and “will not” monitor her communications was tantamount to confirmation through omission that in the past it has.

Merkel is measured. For her to lift the phone and go public with her criticism leaves no doubt she is livid. As she said last July, “Not everything which is technically doable should be done.” This, on the now ample evidence provided by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, is not the view of the N.S.A., whose dragnet eavesdropping has prompted fury from Paris to Brasília.

Obama, in his cool detachment, is not big on diplomacy through personal relations, but Merkel is as close to a trusted friend as he has in Europe. To infuriate her, and touch the most sensitive nerve of Stasi-marked Germans, amounts to sloppy bungling that hurts American soft power in lasting ways. Pivot to Asia was not supposed to mean leave all Europe peeved.

But all Europe is. …

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Jennifer Rubin on the absentee presidency.

… This is a president who set up a system in which he imagines he is relieved of responsibility. Someone else’s job. Not his problem. Didn’t know. Doesn’t matter why. He ‘s “madder” than anyone he keeps telling us, but not mad enough to make certain senior advisers tell him what is going on. He wants to be the victim (I’m mad!) and not the boss (Why didn’t I know this? Anyone who acts that way is fired!). This is intentional ignorance, inexcusable in a president.

Obama likes worlds of his own creation. That is what a memoir is and to a large extent that is what a campaign is — a narrative about your presidency. He is always infallible in his own yarns. The other side is evil and the facts are on his side. That, however, is a make-believe world. Here in this world, he is not a problem-solver, does not engage with opponents and wrestle with conflicting goals, and has no interest in getting his hands dirty. He’s too big for the presidency, apparently. He’s the inspirer, the slayer of the Republicans. …

The Federalist lists the eight biggest falsehoods in the rose garden infomercial on healthcare.

… Falsehood #1: “I’m joined today by folks who’ve either benefited from the Affordable Care Act already, or who are helping their fellow citizens learn about what this law means for them and how they can get covered.”

According to Byron York, some of the people who were behind President Obama hadn’t actually benefitted from ObamaCare.  For example, the White House description of Nathaniel Hojnacki stated that he was “planning to enroll after he had explored his coverage options on the DC exchange.”   York counted at least three other people there who had not yet “benefited” from ObamaCare.

Falsehood #2: “Despite all [of the problems with the website], thousands of people are signing up and saving money as we speak.”

Does the President have a live feed that shows him real-time updates on how many people are saving money on healthcare.gov?  And if so, why doesn’t he share it with the rest of us?

Getting information out the Administration about enrollment in healthcare.gov has been like pulling teeth—from an alligator.  Thus far all we know is that 500,000 people have at least started applications for insurance via the federal and state exchanges.   We don’t know how many have completed the application process.

And completing an application doesn’t mean you will qualify for insurance.  The data insurers have received from the exchanges are often riddled with errors, making it impossible to determine if the applicants qualify for insurance, let alone save money.

Enroll Maven, a website that tracks enrollment in the ObamaCare exchanges based on news reports, can confirm only 167 people have actually enrolled in an insurance plan on the healthcare.gov.  Chances are slim and none that Obama has any idea how many people have enrolled and have saved money, and slim is headed for a death spiral. …

The Dallas Morning News carried an AP story that illuminates some of problems with the roll out.

Crammed into conference rooms with pizza for dinner, some programmers building the Obama administration’s showcase health insurance website were growing increasingly stressed. Some worked past 10 p.m., energy drinks in hand. Others rewrote computer code over and over to meet what they considered last-minute requests for changes from the government or other contractors.

As questions mount over the website’s failure, insider interviews and a review of technical specifications by The Associated Press found a mind-numbingly complex system put together by harried programmers who pushed out a final product that congressional investigators said was tested by the government and not private developers with more expertise.

Project developers who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity — because they feared they would otherwise be fired — said they raised doubts among themselves whether the website could be ready in time. They complained openly to each other about what they considered tight and unrealistic deadlines. One was nearly brought to tears over the stress of finishing on time, one developer said. Website builders saw red flags for months.

A review of internal architectural diagrams obtained by the AP revealed the system’s complexity. Insurance applicants have a host of personal information verified, including income and immigration status. The system connects to other federal computer networks, including ones at the Social Security Administration, IRS, Veterans Administration, Office of Personnel Management and the Peace Corps. …

Here’s the big news! LA Times reports on British Medical Journal touting bacon. Well, sort of. 

The British Medical Journal has issued a clarion call to all who want to ward off heart disease: Forget the statins and bring back the bacon (or at least the full-fat yogurt). Saturated fat is not the widow-maker it’s been made out to be, writes British cardiologist Aseem Malhotra in a stinging “Observations” column in the BMJ: The more likely culprits are empty carbs and added sugar.

Virtually all the truths about preventing heart attacks that physicians and patients have held dear for more than a generation are wrong and need to be abandoned, Malhotra writes. He musters a passel of recent research that suggests that the “obsession” with lowering a patients’ total cholesterol with statins, and a public health message that has made all sources of saturated fat verboten to the health-conscious, have failed to reduce heart disease.

Indeed, he writes, they have set off market forces that have put people at greater risk. After the Framingham Heart Study showed a correlation between total cholesterol and risk for coronary artery disease in the early 1970s, patients at risk for heart disease were urged to swear off red meat, school lunchrooms shifted to fat-free and low-fat milk, and a food industry eager to please consumers cutting their fat intake rushed to boost the flavor of their new fat-free offerings with added sugar (and, of course, with trans-fats). …

Daily Beast says someone at the white house actually got fired. The offense; truth telling tweets.

A White House national security official was fired last week after being caught as the mystery Tweeter who has been tormenting the foreign policy community with insulting comments and revealing internal Obama administration information for over two years.

Jofi Joseph, a director in the non-proliferation section of the National Security Staff at the White House, has been surreptitiously tweeting under the moniker @natsecwonk, a Twitter feed famous inside Washington policy circles since it began in February, 2011 until it was shut down last week. Two administration officials confirmed that the mystery tweeter was Joseph, who has also worked at the State Department and on Capitol Hill for Senators Bob Casey (D-PA) and Joe Biden. Until recently, he was part of the administration’s team working on negotiations with Iran.

During his time tweeting under the @natsecwonk name, Joseph openly criticized the policies of his White House bosses and often insulted their intellect and appearance. At different times, he insulted or criticized several top White House and State Department officials, including former National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, Secretary of State John Kerry, and many many others.

The Daily Beast saved a long record of @natsecwonk’s tweets prior to the shutting down of his Twitter feed.

“I’m a fan of Obama, but his continuing reliance and dependence upon a vacuous cipher like Valerie Jarrett concerns me,” he once tweeted.

“Was Huma Abedin wearing beer goggles the night she met Anthony Wiener? Almost as bad a pairing as Samantha Powers and Cass Sunstein ….,” he tweeted on another occasion, insulting a top Clinton aide, a then Congressman, and two White House senior officials in one tweet.

Andy Malcolm closes our week with late night humor.

Conan: Facebook is preparing for its launch in the Jewish state of Israel by changing the “Like” button to the “Could Be Worse” button.

Conan: At an Olympic exhibition game, the U.S. and Canadian womens’ hockey teams got into a full-on, all-female brawl. Olympic referees ruled the incident, “unsportsmanlike,” “unprofessional” and “super-hot.”

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Want to know how bad things are in DC? Jeff Jacoby says there’s no chance JFK could get nominated by the dems now.

As Democrats begin maneuvering for the 2016 presidential race, there isn’t one who would think of disparaging John F. Kennedy’s stature as a Democratic Party hero. Yet it’s a pretty safe bet that none would dream of running on Kennedy’s approach to government or embrace his political beliefs.

Today’s Democratic Party — the home of Barack Obama, John Kerry, and Al Gore — wouldn’t give the time of day to a candidate like JFK.

The 35th president was an ardent tax-cutter who championed across-the-board, top-to-bottom reductions in personal and corporate tax rates, slashed tariffs to promote free trade, and even spoke out against the “confiscatory” property taxes being levied in too many cities.

He was anything but a big-spending, welfare-state liberal. “I do not believe that Washington should do for the people what they can do for themselves through local and private effort,” Kennedy bluntly avowed during the 1960 campaign. One of his first acts as president was to institute a pay cut for top White House staffers, and that was only the start of his budgetary austerity. “To the surprise of many of his appointees,” longtime aide Ted Sorensen would later write, he “personally scrutinized every agency request with a cold eye and encouraged his budget director to say ‘no.’ ”

On the other hand, he was a Cold War anticommunist who aggressively increased military spending. He faulted his Republican predecessor for tailoring the nation’s military strategy to fit the budget, rather than the other way around. “We must refuse to accept a cheap, second-best defense,” JFK said during his run for the White House. He made good on that pledge, pushing defense spending to 50 percent of federal expenditures and 9 percent of GDP, both far higher than today’s levels. Speaking in Texas just hours before his death, he proudly took credit for building the US military into “a defense system second to none.”  …

Andrew Malcolm reports on our soldiers’ lack of training.

While the president of the United States pitched his crumbling healthcare program like a late-night infomercial barker, the Army’s chief of staff made a shocking admission about national defense.

Gen. Ray Odierno told a Washington conference Monday that the U.S. Army had not conducted any training in the last six months of the fiscal year ending Sept. 30.

And, he said, there currently are only two Army brigades rated combat-ready. That’s a total of between 7,000 to 10,000 troops and less than one-third what the combat veteran regards as necessary for proper national security.

“Right now,” Odierno said, “we have in the Army two brigades that are trained. That’s it. Two.”

Odierno also revealed that troops shipping out to Afghanistan now are prepared only to train and assist Afghan troops, not to conduct combat operations themselves. But, of course, there’s no guarantee the Americans won’t find themselves in combat while accompanying Afghan soldiers.

All this to obey Obama administration orders to drastically cut the Army and military spending and meet cuts under sequestration. Since the Obama Pentagon began the troop draw-down two years ago under the president’s orders, more than 33,000 active duty soldiers have been cut. …

Even though we want to look away, it is time for seeing what’s going on with the healthcare rollout. Megan McArdle starts us off.

Another week has passed, which apparently means that it’s time for another terrifying article from Sharon LaFraniere, Ian Austen and Robert Pear on the federal health-care exchanges.

Federal contractors have identified most of the main problems crippling President Obama’s online health insurance marketplace, but the administration has been slow to issue orders for fixing those flaws, and some contractors worry that the system may be weeks away from operating smoothly, people close to the project say.

Administration officials approached the contractors last week to see if they could perform the necessary repairs and reboot the system by Nov. 1. However, that goal struck many contractors as unrealistic, at least for major components of the system. Some specialists working on the project said the online system required such extensive repairs that it might not operate smoothly until after the Dec. 15 deadline for people to sign up for coverage starting in January, although that view is not universally shared.

Time to panic? No. But it’s time to prepare to panic. It sounds like the earliest anyone is projecting fixes is sometime in the middle of November. That’s the time when it absolutely has to work — and if it doesn’t, we should panic. Maybe not “Get in the shelter, Homer!” panic, but I’d definitely think about rebalancing the 401(k) and maybe voting in some politicians who will treat this with the gravity it deserves, rather than giving Rose Garden speeches saying that everything’s basically A-OK if you don’t look at the parts that don’t work! Because make no mistake: If this piece doesn’t work, then most of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act doesn’t work. …

In 2004 a NY Times columnist said the Katrina problems came from the fact that DC was run by people who hate government. David Bernstein takes that to mean the healthcare failures are the result of an administration filled with secret libertarians. Of course, it might also be proof of Pickerhead’s Iron Rule — Government always f–ks up!

Why is the Obamacare Rollout Failing?

Why, it’s obviously because President Barack Obama and his top aides hate government, and therefore can’t be trusted to run a major government program. When the government is run by political forces committed to the belief that government is always the problem, never the solution, that belief tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Key priorities are neglected; key functions are privatized; and key people, the competent public servants who make government work, either leave or are driven out. What we really need is a government that works, because it’s run by people who understand that sometimes government is the solution, after all.

Doesn’t make any sense to you? It made just as little sense when Paul Krugman made the argument in 2008, imaginatively (to say the least) positing that George W. Bush and John McCain were wild-eyed libertarians, and that the former’s purported libertarianism was the cause of FEMA’s incompetence in dealing with Katrina.

I ridiculed the premise at the time (and again a year later), noting that “After eight years of “no child left behind,” Medicare expansion, aid to Africa for AIDS, drug warring, abstinence education, nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan, and so forth and so on, and more of the same promised by McCain, the better question is, is there any problem that Bush and McCain DON’T think government should solve?”

As I recall, others rejoined that no, Krugman is right, incompetence by the Bush Admnistration is OBVIOUSLY due to Republicans all totally hating government. It must come as a surprise to Krugman and his defenders that government can prove itself to be wildly, disastrously incompetent even when run by people whom even Krugman would have to admit aren’t going to be confused with libertarians any time soon (assuming, of course, that Krugman actually ever believed the nonsense he wrote).

Andrew Malcolm also reminds us our country could have avoided the pain if only Mike Ditka had wanted to run for the senate in 2004. Of course, if he had, the country would have watched Ditka get destroyed.

… It didn’t need to be this way.

We’re reminded this week that, but for the business decision of one famous man, Obama’s once rising star could have been blown out of the sky and the country saved years of anguish by an election defeat in 2004. That’s when the ambitious ex-state legislator Obama sought and got the Democrat nomination for a U.S. Senate seat from Illinois.

With 70% of that November’s vote, Obama crushed the Republican Party’s last-minute sacrificial lamb, Alan Keyes, who had portrayed himself as a GOP primary presidential contender back in 2000 but was really just trying to jack his speaking fees with some free TV fame.

That’s what people often remember.

What they often forget is Republicans came close that year to enlisting as their U.S. Senate candidate from Illinois the NFL Hall of Famer and Super Bowl Champion Player and Coach Mike Ditka. After an illustrious career as a belligerent tight end for Chicago, Philadelphia and Dallas, Ditka coached as a Cowboys assistant before becoming head coach of the Bears and, later, the New Orleans Saints. …

BBC News reports on something floating on a river in the Czech Republic we need on the Potomac.   

As parliamentary polls get under way in the Czech Republic this week, artist David Cerny has floated a huge purple statue of an extended middle finger down the River Vltava in Prague.

The outsized purple hand has been mounted on a barge floating on the river.

It is pointed at PragueCastle, the seat of President Milos Zeman.

Mr Cerny has shocked and mocked politicians and public figures in the past, says the BBC’s Rob Cameron.

This latest piece is clearly his message to the leftist President Zeman and the political party recently set up by his supporters, our correspondent says. …

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French intellectual, Pascal Bruckner, writes in City Journal about the apocalyptic foolishness that has taken over our culture.

As an asteroid hurtles toward Earth, terrified citizens pour into the streets of Brussels to stare at the mammoth object growing before their eyes. Soon, it will pass harmlessly by—but first, a strange old man, Professor Philippulus, dressed in a white sheet and wearing a long beard, appears, beating a gong and crying: “This is a punishment; repent, for the world is ending!”

We smile at the silliness of this scene from the Tintin comic strip L’Étoile Mystérieuse, published in Belgium in 1941. Yet it is also familiar, since so many people in both Europe and the United States have recently convinced themselves that the End is nigh. This depressing conviction may seem surprising, given that the West continues to enjoy an unparalleled standard of living. But Professor Philippulus has nevertheless managed to achieve power in governments, the media, and high places generally. Constantly, he spreads fear: of progress, of science, of demographics, of global warming, of technology, of food. In five years or in ten years, temperatures will rise, Earth will be uninhabitable, natural disasters will multiply, the climate will bring us to war, and nuclear plants will explode. Man has committed the sin of pride; he has destroyed his habitat and ravaged the planet; he must atone.

My point is not to minimize the dangers that we face. Rather, it is to understand why apocalyptic fear has gripped so many of our leaders, scientists, and intellectuals, who insist on reasoning and arguing as though they were following the scripts of mediocre Hollywood disaster movies. …

 

… Over the last half-century, leftist intellectuals have identified two great scapegoats for the world’s woes. First, Marxism designated capitalism as responsible for human misery. Second, “Third World” ideology, disappointed by the bourgeois indulgences of the working class, targeted the West, supposedly the inventor of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism. The guilty party that environmentalism now accuses—mankind itself, in its will to dominate the planet—is essentially a composite of the previous two, a capitalism invented by a West that oppresses peoples and destroys the earth. Indeed, environmentalism sees itself as the fulfillment of all earlier critiques. “There are only two solutions,” Bolivian president Evo Morales declared in 2009. “Either capitalism dies, or Mother Earth dies.”

So the planet has become the new proletariat that must be saved from exploitation—if necessary, by reducing the number of human beings, as oceanographer Jacques Cousteau said in 1991. …

 

… To wake people up requires ever more extreme rhetoric, including a striking number of analogies to the Holocaust. Noël Mamère, a French politician in the Green party, has accused another politician, Claude Allègre, of being a négationniste about global warming—a French word that refers to those who deny the Jewish and Armenian genocides. Economist Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has explicitly compared the Danish statistician and eco-skeptic Bjørn Lomborg to the Führer. The American climate scientist James Hansen has accused oil companies trying to “spread doubt about global warming” of “high crimes against humanity and nature” and called trains transporting American coal “death trains.” Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman has written that “global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers.” …

 

… What is surprising is that the mood of catastrophe prevails especially in the West, as if it were particular to privileged peoples. Despite the economic crises of the last few years, people live better in Europe and the United States than anywhere else, which is why migrants the world over want to come to those places. Yet never have we been so inclined to condemn our societies.

Perhaps the new Green puritanism is nothing but the reaction of a West deprived of its supreme competence, the last avatar of an unhappy neocolonialism that preaches to other cultures a wisdom that it has never practiced. For the last 20 years, non-European peoples have become masters of their own futures and have stopped regarding us as infallible models. They are likely to receive our professions of environmentalist faith with polite indifference. Billions of people look to economic growth, with all the pollution that accompanies it, to improve their condition. Who are we to refuse it to them?

Environmental worry is universal; the sickness of the end of the world is purely Western. To counter this pessimism, we might list the good news of the last 20 years: democracy is making slow progress; more than a billion people have escaped absolute poverty; life expectancy has increased in most countries; war is becoming rarer; many serious illnesses have been eradicated. But it would do little good. Our perception is inversely proportional to reality.

The Christian apocalypse saw itself as a hopeful revelation of the coming of God’s kingdom. Today’s has nothing to offer. There is no promise of redemption; the only hope is that those human beings who repent of their errors may escape the chaos, as in Cormac McCarthy’s fine novel The Road. How can we be surprised, then, that so many bright minds have become delirious and that so many strange predictions flourish?

Contrast all that worry to the weather this year in the United States where we have had one of the least extreme weather years ever. Or course, we’re a small part of the world. But, when AlGore is telling us the world is coming to an end, we learn God does have a sense of humor since our climate is the mildest in years. Climate Depot had the story.

‘Whether you’re talking about tornadoes, wildfires, extreme heat or hurricanes, the good news is that weather-related disasters in the US are all way down this year compared to recent years and, in some cases, down to historically low levels.’

Tornadoes: ‘lowest total in several decades’

Number of wildfires: ‘On pace to be the lowest it has been in the past ten years’

Extreme Heat: The number of 100 degree days may ‘turn out to be the lowest in about 100 years of records’

Hurricanes: ‘We are currently in the longest period since the Civil War Era without a major hurricane strike in the US (i.e., category 3, 4 or 5)’

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Mark Steyn found one item worth celebrating from the shutdown theatre. Then he gets back to Armageddon as usual.

The least dispiriting moment of another grim week in Washington was the sight of ornery veterans tearing down the Barrycades around the war memorials on the National Mall, dragging them up the street, and dumping them outside the White House. This was, as Kevin Williamson wrote at National Review, “as excellent a gesture of the American spirit as our increasingly docile nation has seen in years.” Indeed. The wounded vet with two artificial legs balancing the Barrycade on his Segway was especially impressive. It would have been even better had these disgruntled citizens neatly lined up the Barrycades across the front of the White House and round the sides, symbolically Barrycading him in as punishment for Barrycading them out. But, in a town where an unarmed woman can be left a bullet-riddled corpse merely for driving too near His Benign Majesty’s palace and nobody seems to care, one appreciates a certain caution. …

… My friends on the American right fret that if we’re not careful we’ll end up like Europe. But we’re already worse than many parts of Europe, and certainly than the non-European West — by any measure you care to use. According to the IMF, the Danish government’s net debt is 10.3 percent of GDP, Australia’s is 12.7 percent, New Zealand’s 28.8 percent, the Netherlands’ 35.5 percent, Canada’s 35.9 percent, Germany’s 56.2 percent, France’s 86.5 percent — and the United States’ 89 percent. If you take America’s total indebtedness, it averages out to three-quarters of a million dollars per family: We are on course to becoming the first nation of negative-millionaires. But let’s just stick with the federal debt, the figure for which those bipartisan schmoozers are officially responsible: In Australia, each citizen’s share of the debt is $12,000; in New Zealand, it’s $15,000 per person; in Canada and Spain, $18,000; in the United Kingdom, $28,000; in Germany and France, $38,000; Italy, $44,000. And in the United States it’s $54,000 per person — twice as much as Britain, thrice as much as Canada, closing in on five times as much as Oz. On this trajectory, America is exiting the First World.

And that’s before counting the “unfunded liabilities” that Washington keeps off the books but which add another million bucks per taxpayer. Nor does it include Obamacare, with which the geniuses of the “technocracy” have managed to spend a fortune creating the Internet version of a Brezhnev-era Soviet supermarket. …

WSJ Editors think the HHS Sec and her aides should be available to answer questions posed by congressional committees.

The Affordable Care Act’s botched rollout has stunned its media cheering section, and it even seems to have surprised the law’s architects. The problems run much deeper than even critics expected, and whatever federal officials, White House aides and outside contractors are doing to fix them isn’t working. But who knows? Omerta is the word of the day as the Obama Administration withholds information from the public.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is even refusing to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in a hearing this coming Thursday. HHS claims she has scheduling conflicts, but we hope she isn’t in the White House catacomb under interrogation by Valerie Jarrett about her department’s incompetence.

The department is also refusing to make available lower-level officials who might detail the source or sources of this debacle. Ducking an investigation with spin is one thing. Responding with a wall of silence to the invitation of a duly elected congressional body probing the use of more than half a billion taxpayer dollars is another. This Obama crowd is something else. …

John Hinderaker posts on the hopelessness created by this administration.

Of all the bitter fruit of the Barack Obama disaster, the most bitter may be the sense of hopelessness that has descended on Americans, especially the young. Has there ever been anything like it in our history? Even on the eve of the Civil War, was there this much pessimism about our future? Gallup wasn’t around in those days, but I wonder.

For a simple measure of how the Obama administration has crushed any sense of hopefulness in the American people, take a look at the survey that Rasmussen Reports does periodically on whether America’s best days are behind her, or still in the future. It’s a great question that tells a lot about how Americans are feeling. …

It’s not too late to sink obamacare says Jennifer Rubin.

… With some direction from leadership, Republicans previously at each other’s throats can unite around the common goal of showing why Obamacare is untenable. They’ve made the philosophic and economic arguments but now they have the goods, the evidence. That — and the Ryan negotiations — should occupy the lion’s share of Congress’s time until the end of the year.

Republicans need to have at the very least a proposal to help those for whom Obamacare is unaffordable. They can start with a proposal to allow individuals to escape the insurance that they’re being told they must have and is more expensive than their existing insurance. The promise of Obamacare — keep your insurance if you have it — wasn’t “lose your coverage and pay more.” Republicans should be the heroes of the lower- and middle-class Americans who are being punished by a horribly designed program. (And if sign-ups stay low, the subsidy from healthy young people to poorer, older people will only worsen.)

And for those uninsured Americans at or below the poverty line, Republicans should propose that in exchange for states covering individuals up to the poverty line (or higher), the feds would give governors waivers to reduce costs, fight fraud and provide better coverage for less. Reform Medicaid before you expand it. Let the Democrats insist that people who can’t afford the Affordable Care Act must sign up or be fined. Let the Democrats be the ones to refuse to improve the Medicaid program. …

National Review looks askance at the Nobel Peace award.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize today to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). The justification for the prize was largely the anti-chemical-weapons group’s work in Syria. “Recent events in Syria, where chemical weapons have again been put to use, have underlined the need to enhance the efforts to do away with such weapons,” said the Committee.

While there is no doubt that the OPCW is a professional and important organization, it’s premature to issue an award before the results can be obtained about the fate of Syrian president Bashar Assad’s 1,000 tons of chemical weapons scattered around the country. It is worth recalling that the OPCW and the international community apparently failed to confront Turkey about its alleged use of chemical weapons to target the militant Kurdish group PKK.

This is just the latest episode in a long tradition of the Nobel Committee showering recipients with the Peace Prize before concrete results materialized (e.g., President Obama, the European Union).

The award this year — a kind of mirror image of last year’s prize to the EU — is a sign of self-congratulatory failure. The overwhelming deaths (now believed to be near 120,000) and the conflict that’s tearing Syria and the region apart were caused by Assad’s conventional weapons, supplied by the Russians, Iranians, and Hezbollah.

Here’s the problem in a nutshell: Chemical weapons have killed over 1,000, and conventional weapons have murdered over 100,000. Disturbingly, the West and members of the OPCW have played a role in helping Assad gain his chemical capability, anyway. Germany delivered “dual-use” chemical agents to Assad’s regime over the years, selling military usage agents to the country as late as 2011, including chemicals that can be used for the deadly nerve gas sarin. The U.S. accused Assad of killing over 1,400 people on August 21 with sarin gas.

My preference, however utopian given the left-leaning tendencies of the Noble Committee, would have been to award the U.S. armed forces the prize. After all, the U.S military has achieved remarkable counterterrorism successes over the years — and its threat, not the OPCW’s authority, has made the elimination of Assad’s chemical warfare stockpile possible.

The award to OPCW is a feel-good action without substance. It will be interpreted by Secretary of State Kerry, Russian President Putin, and Syria’s Assad as their victory. The losers are the Syrian people.

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It will be a long time before Americans forget what the park service did during the shutdown. You’ll enjoy John Fund’s account of the grilling the head of the service received before a house committee.

Wednesday’s House Oversight Committee hearing about the closures of national parks and monuments during the government shutdown, proved one thing: Under President Obama, The traditional “Washington Monument Strategy” of closing popular services first has become the “Washington Bully Strategy.”

Representative Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, a former prosecutor, almost drove National Park Service Director Jonathan Jarvis into incoherence with his relentless questioning. Gowdy wanted to know why Jarvis had allowed “pot-smoking” Occupy Wall Street protesters to camp overnight illegally in Washington’s McPherson Square park for 100 days, yet put up barricades to keep veterans out of war memorials on the first day of the shutdown. By not issuing a single citation to the Occupy campers, Gowdy argued, the Park Service was treating them better than the nation’s military veterans. “Can you cite me the regulation that required you to erect barricades from accessing a monument that they built?” he demanded.

Jarvis responded that, while he was required by the Anti-Deficiency Act to close all parks and memorials, any veterans who wanted to enter the war memorials could have done so if they had “declared” they were there to exercise their First Amendment rights. 

“Who were they to declare it to? A barricade?” Gowdy sniffed. …

… The Park Service closed the City Tavern in Philadelphia, a meeting place for those who signed the Declaration of Independence, even though the tavern, at IndependenceNationalHistoricalPark, opens directly onto two major city streets. Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute joked to Representative Issa’s committee,  “had King George III’s ministers in the colonies had the authority and the foresight to close [the tavern] down, they might have prevented the American Revolution.”

Ebell also noted the number of barricades and printed signs needed to close 401 parks and monuments on the shutdown’s first day required foresight and planning. The speed of the closures and the procurement of barricades has also convinced former secretary Norton that a lot of thought had gone into how to conduct the Park Service’s blitzkrieg. “I imagine that the decision was made at the highest levels of Park Service leadership, in co-operation with the White House,” she told NRO. …

Certified leftist Peter Beinart says the media has the results of the shutdown fight all wrong.

… Most of the press is missing this because most of the press is covering the current standoff more as politics than policy. If your basic question is “which party is winning?” then it’s easy to see the Republicans as losing, since they’re the ones suffering in the polls. But the partisan balance of power and the ideological balance of power are two completely different things. The Nixon years were terrible for the Democratic Party but quite good for progressive domestic policy. The Clinton years were, in important ways, the reverse. The promise of the Obama presidency was not merely that he’d bring Democrats back to power. It was that he’d usher in the first era of truly progressive public policy in decades. But the survival of Obamacare notwithstanding, Obama’s impending “victory” in the current standoff moves us further away from, not closer to, that goal.

It’s not just that Obama looks likely to accept the sequester cuts as the basis for future budget negotiations. It’s that while he’s been trying to reopen the government and prevent a debt default, his chances of passing any significant progressive legislation have receded. Despite overwhelming public support, gun control is dead. Comprehensive immigration reform, once considered the politically easy part of Obama’s second term agenda, looks unlikely. And the other items Obama trumpeted in this year’s state of the union address—climate change legislation, infrastructure investment, universal preschool, voting rights protections, a boost to the minimum wage—have been largely forgotten.

Democrats keep holding out hope that losing yet more public support will break the ideological “fever” that grips the Republican Party and help GOP moderates regain power. The problem, as the last few weeks have shown, is that the GOP keeps defining moderation down. For instance, the Washington GOP’s plummeting approval ratings may well boost the presidential prospects of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, just as the Gingrich Congress paved the way for the comparatively moderate George W. Bush. Like Bush, Christie is described as moderate because he has Democratic allies in his home state and because his rhetoric is not as harsh on cultural issues. But in the White House, Bush’s economic policies were hardly moderate. To the contrary, from taxes to social security to regulation, he governed well to the right of Ronald Reagan. Christie likely would as well. As governor, after all, he’s vetoed a hike in the minimum wage, cut the earned income tax credit, vetoed a millionaires’ tax three times and adopted basically the same attitude towards public sector unions as Wisconsin’s Scott Walker.

Yet for the next three years, the press will likely describe Christie as “moderate” for the same reason it now describes a “clean” CR as Republican surrender: Because the GOP keeps moving the ideological goalposts and the press keeps playing along.

Michael Graham agrees with Beinart.

… Ask yourself: A year from now, when the stupidity of the shutdown fight is long gone, who would you rather be: Team “Obamacare Sucks And We’ve Got Too Much Debt”?

Or Team “I Voted to Shut Down the Government Rather Than Change Obamacare or Spend Less Money”?

I know what you’re thinking, Democrats. “They’re Republicans. They’ll find a way to screw this up.”

And two months ago, you’d be right. But Tea Party politicians are still, in the end, politicians.

And to quote U.S. Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), a former prosecutor and current Tea Party fave: “I didn’t lose many cases in court, and I haven’t won many cases here in Congress. It’s time to re-evaluate my tactics.”

NY Times reports on changes to basic assumptions about early humans that grew out of discoveries in Georgia in 2005.

After eight years spent studying a 1.8-million-year-old skull uncovered in the Republic of Georgia, scientists have made a discovery that may rewrite the evolutionary history of our human genus Homo.

It would be a simpler story with fewer ancestral species. Early, diverse fossils — those currently recognized as coming from distinct species like Homo habilis, Homo erectus and others — may actually represent variation among members of a single, evolving lineage.

In other words, just as people look different from one another today, so did early hominids look different from one another, and the dissimilarity of the bones they left behind may have fooled scientists into thinking they came from different species.

This was the conclusion reached by an international team of scientists led by David Lordkipanidze, a paleoanthropologist at the GeorgianNationalMuseum in Tbilisi, as reported Thursday in the journal Science.

The key to this revelation was a cranium excavated in 2005 and known simply as Skull 5, which scientists described as “the world’s first completely preserved adult hominid skull” of such antiquity. Unlike other Homo fossils, it had a number of primitive features: a long, apelike face, large teeth and a tiny braincase, about one-third the size of that of a modern human being. This confirmed that, contrary to some conjecture, early hominids did not need big brains to make their way out of Africa.

The discovery of Skull 5 alongside the remains of four other hominids at Dmanisi, a site in Georgia rich in material of the earliest hominid travels into Eurasia, gave the scientists an opportunity to compare and contrast the physical traits of ancestors that apparently lived at the same location and around the same time. …

 

Metal Floss posts on why baseball players chew sunflower seeds.

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Richard Epstein writes on the opening healthcare problems.

It is now common knowledge that the bugs in the Obamacare website have been embedded in the system from the start. For the past two weeks, not only have many individuals found it impossible to access the website, but they are often frozen in place once they pass through the initial portal. The problems will just get worse. The current law requires extensive communications between enrollees and their chosen insurance carriers, as well as massive interaction with both federal and state organizations. As a result, web traffic builds up behind bottlenecks and leads to massive frustration. As I warned last May, watching Obamacare unravel is a painful business. 

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has tried to put a positive gloss on the messy situation with the dubious observation that the system glitches are due to heavy consumer demand. Her statement subtly implies that the nation’s alleged need for the program is the cause of its momentary glitches. She claims that things are “getting better by the day.” Not so. The government site was not built for heavy traffic, nor was it tested before going live. It is no mean feat to try to fix a balky computer system on the fly.

As a result of these problems, calls to delay the implementation of the individual mandate are now reaching a fever pitch, such as Peggy Noonan’s to delay the individual mandate a year. The bugs need to be worked out before ordinary people are slapped with fines for failing to enroll in the derelict system before the penalty deadline now set for March 31, 2014.

Thus far, the Obama Administration has been mum on the sources and extent of the difficulties. But make no mistake about it: they reflect the broader structural weaknesses of the program, which were hidden from view by the disastrous launch. Nonetheless, the system’s basic design is flawed, and its gaffes will become only more apparent as implementation moves forward. …

Shikha Dalmia thinks things are worse then is commonly understood.

By all accounts, the roll out of Obamacare’s insurance exchanges has been a fiasco of epic proportions. But diehard supporters claim that this is a minor roadblock that won’t affect the law’s long-term future. “Obamacare is here,” lectured liberal columnist Eugene Robinson. “Get used to it.”

Robinson might be right. Then again when funny man Jon Stewart echoes Tea Party “wackos” to demand a one-year delay of the individual mandate, the lynchpin of the edifice, you know all is not well. And Stewart is hardly alone. CNN anchor Wolfe Blitzer is also recommending a delay.

The reality is that the way President Obama ramrodded this law through Congress has left him very little margin for error. The next couple of months will make or break the program.

Two weeks into the launch and its problems only keep multiplying. Consumers still can’t log into the federal exchange website, let alone compare plans, apply for the promised subsidies and buy coverage. The site—whose staggering $634 million construction cost is more than that of LinkedIn and Spotify combined—has already been shut down once for repairs, but the problems persist.

Thing are so bad that the administration won’t even reveal basic information about enrollment rates. Nor will it make its IT folks available to explain the technical glitches, insisting that “pent up demand” is overwhelming capacity.

But experts whom Reuters consulted believe that the architecture of the websites is fundamentally flawed and needs to be radically overhauled. For example, when individuals “apply” for coverage, the website automatically opens over 90 separate files and plugins to stream information from the user’s computer. The flood of traffic paralyzes the connection. …

Megan McArdle says the law needs a drop dead date.

Exactly how bad are things on the federal health-care exchanges? The working assumption among most journalists, including me, is that they would be fixed in a few weeks — that is, by the end of this week. But yesterday’s New York Times brought a deeply reported piece from Robert Pear, Sharon LaFraniere and Ian Austen. There is too much information in the piece for an excerpt to do it justice, so I’ll summarize, with some editorial comments — but you should read the whole thing to get the full flavor:

– One person familiar with the project says it’s only about 70 percent of the way there, and has heard estimates of somewhere between two weeks to two months to fix it. As a programmer I know points out, “two weeks to two months” is the programming equivalent of “40 days and 40 nights”: “A long time, but I have no way of knowing how long.” When I used to hear estimates like that, I used to assume it would be coming in on the late end of that range, earliest.

– The administration delayed writing major rules until after the 2012 election, because it didn’t want to give Republicans any ammunition for their campaign. (This actually was noted at the time: “When it comes to health care, delaying regulations could help the president politically by avoiding discussion of the controversial health reform law. But that makes life difficult for states and industries that need to prepare for the coming changes,” wrote the National Journal. But most of us didn’t understand just how badly this was affecting implementation.)

– Despite evidence to the contrary, the administration kept insisting that everything was absolutely on track to launch Oct. 1.

– This passage is so extraordinary that it requires excerpting:

“Deadline after deadline was missed. The biggest contractor, CGI Federal, was awarded its $94 million contract in December 2011. But the government was so slow in issuing specifications that the firm did not start writing software code until this spring, according to people familiar with the process. As late as the last week of September, officials were still changing features of the Web site, HealthCare.gov, and debating whether consumers should be required to register and create password-protected accounts before they could shop for health plans.”

Suddenly, two months sounds optimistic. ..

Michael Astrue who was HHS General Counsel and Commissioner of Social Security says these problems are not mere “glitches.”

… The department will surely ameliorate some problems in the coming months simply by buying additional capacity and fixing sloppy code. More enduring problems, however, will continue to plague HHS. 

HHS blundered when it allowed states to rely on self-attestation to verify eligibility for public subsidies in states that built their own exchanges. Experience with the Earned Income Tax Credit and other programs strongly suggests that in states that rely on self-attestation a high percentage of those who receive subsidies—probably 20-25 percent—will be ineligible. HHS has refused to explain how it will recoup payments from ineligible recipients. The official responsible for preventing this waste, fraud, and abuse, the HHS inspector general, has been silent about this problem as well.

HHS also blundered when it built its computer system in violation of the Privacy Act. In short, if you enroll in a health plan through an exchange, family members and recent ex-spouses can access the system and change your coverage without the legally required written permission. Traditional consumer and privacy advocates, such as Public Citizen and the American Civil Liberties Union, have taken a dive on this issue, and again the HHS inspector general has remained silent.

HHS opened the door to large-scale fraud by providing funding for tens of thousands of “navigators”—people who are supposed to persuade the uninsured to apply for coverage and then assist them in the application process. Instead of hiring well-screened, well-trained, and well-supervised workers, HHS decided to build political support for the Affordable Care Act by pouring money into supportive organizations so they could launch poorly trained workers into their communities without obtaining criminal background checks or creating systems for monitoring their activities. …

We start our weekend with late night humor from Andrew Malcolm.

Letterman: The Washington Redskins are under a lot of pressure to change their name because so many people are offended by the word ‘Washington.’

Leno: A CBS News Poll says 72% of Americans blame Republicans for the government shutdown while 61% blame the Democrats. See, this is why we have a debt crisis. That adds up to 133%.

Letterman: Have you seen the new $100 bill? A lot of people are upset. First of all, it’s only worth $10. And Ben Franklin’s face has been replaced by Ben Affleck.

Fallon: A new study says American workers lack the problem-solving skills of workers in other countries. Asked about that, American workers said, “But what should we do about it?”

Leno: Syrian President Assad says he may run for reelection next year. Says he’s looked over the election results for 2014 and they look good for him.

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Robert Samuelson on the importance of the growth missing from this administration’s economy.

When the history is written, I suspect the brutal budget battle transfixing the nation will be seen as much more than a spectacular partisan showdown. Careful historians will, I think, cast it as a symbolic turning point for post-World War II institutions — mainly the welfare state and the consumer credit complex — that depended on strong economic growth that has now, sadly, gone missing. The story behind the story is that prolonged slow growth threatens to upend our political and social order.

Economic growth is a wondrous potion. It encourages lending because borrowers can repay debts from rising incomes. It supports bigger government because a growing economy expands the tax base and makes modest deficits bearable. Despite recessions, it buoys public optimism because people are getting ahead. The presumption of strong economic growth supported the spirit and organizational structures of postwar America.

Everyday life was transformed. …

… What looms — it’s already occurred in Europe — is a more contentious future. Economic growth serves as social glue that neutralizes other differences. Without it, economic and political competition becomes a game of musical chairs, where “one person’s gain is another’s loss,” King writes. There’s a “breakdown of trust,” as expectations are continually disappointed. It’s an often-ugly process that is convincingly confirmed by Washington’s current political firestorm.

Mary Katherine Ham lists some of the citizens’ victories over the thugs in the park service.

Call it the shutdown of shutdown theater. A couple of small parks have taken to the courts to dispute their bullying at the hands of the National Park Service during the government shutdown. One could argue civil disobedience has been shutting down shutdown theater since it began— in D.C., in the Badlands, in Yellowstone—but at least one of these victories might be able to set a useful legal precedent to prevent at least some of Washington Monument Strategy in the future. It’s a political strategy that should die an ignominious death. It’s the opposite of public service.

In Northern Virginia, McLean Youth Lacrosse won its fields back from the feds after the National Park Service shut down a park that sits on federal land but its administered by county government. That’s the entity the lacrosse league paid $5,000 to use the park, not the National Park Service. (Parenthetically, I’m not surprised it was the lacrosse parents of McLean that went to court on this. They have the right attitude and means to make it happen, and I hope their victory can help other youth hurt by the federal government who might not have the means to sue.) …

 

Dilbert creator, Scott Adams, gives career advice.

If you’re already as successful as you want to be, both personally and professionally, congratulations! Here’s the not-so-good news: All you are likely to get from this article is a semientertaining tale about a guy who failed his way to success. But you might also notice some familiar patterns in my story that will give you confirmation (or confirmation bias) that your own success wasn’t entirely luck.

If you’re just starting your journey toward success—however you define it—or you’re wondering what you’ve been doing wrong until now, you might find some novel ideas here. Maybe the combination of what you know plus what I think I know will be enough to keep you out of the wood chipper.

Let me start with some tips on what not to do. Beware of advice about successful people and their methods. For starters, no two situations are alike. Your dreams of creating a dry-cleaning empire won’t be helped by knowing that Thomas Edison liked to take naps. Secondly, biographers never have access to the internal thoughts of successful people. If a biographer says Henry Ford invented the assembly line to impress women, that’s probably a guess.  

But the most dangerous case of all is when successful people directly give advice. For example, you often hear them say that you should “follow your passion.” That sounds perfectly reasonable the first time you hear it. Passion will presumably give you high energy, high resistance to rejection and high determination. Passionate people are more persuasive, too. Those are all good things, right?

Here’s the counterargument: When I was a commercial loan officer for a large bank, my boss taught us that you should never make a loan to someone who is following his passion. For example, you don’t want to give money to a sports enthusiast who is starting a sports store to pursue his passion for all things sporty. That guy is a bad bet, passion and all. He’s in business for the wrong reason.

My boss, who had been a commercial lender for over 30 years, said that the best loan customer is someone who has no passion whatsoever, just a desire to work hard at something that looks good on a spreadsheet. Maybe the loan customer wants to start a dry-cleaning store or invest in a fast-food franchise—boring stuff. That’s the person you bet on. You want the grinder, not the guy who loves his job. …

Joe Nocera of the NY Times with the second review we’ve had that is not enthralled with the latest from Malcolm Gladwell.

To judge by “David and Goliath,” Malcolm Gladwell’s favorite word is “we.” In fact, it’s been his favorite word since his first book, “The Tipping Point,” launched his enormously successful career writing about how the world doesn’t necessarily work the way “we” think it does.

His book “Outliers” was about (among other things) how success requires ingredients that are different from ones “we” normally assume — to wit, talent counts for far less than hard work, luck and background. Before that, “Blink” proposed that one’s first impression turns out to be right surprisingly often — contrary to the belief many of “us” hold. And “David and Goliath”? It’s about the advantages of disadvantages — and the disadvantages of seeming advantages. Or, as Gladwell puts it: “We have a definition in our heads of what an advantage is — and the definition isn’t right. And what happens as a result? It means that we make mistakes. It means that we misread battles between underdogs and giants. It means that we underestimate how much freedom there can be in what looks like a disadvantage.”

The “we” of course does not include Gladwell. That’s the whole point of a Malcolm Gladwell book. He has delved into the literature; he has interviewed lots of people — scientists, economists, deep thinkers and others who wind up in the book — and he has divined meaning and found counterintuitive connections that would otherwise elude the rest of us.

Those connections can be quite dizzying. In “David and Goliath,” Gladwell links people who are dyslexic with a hero of the civil rights movement and the citizens of London during the blitz. According to him, they all managed to turn disadvantages into advantages. On the flip side — those whose advantages aren’t so advantageous after all — include students who are not at the top of their Ivy League classes, teachers of extremely small ­classes and very wealthy parents.

As always, Gladwell’s sweep is breathtaking, and thought-provoking. What it is not, however, is entirely convincing. …

 

One of the biggest disappointments from Bush the W was his support of the ethanol foolishness. Scientific American suggests we might be coming to our senses.

Federal environmental regulators are expected to significantly reduce their biofuel blending mandates for next year, marking a historic retreat from an ambitious 2007 law, according to industry and trade sources.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is considering a proposal that would set next year’s target for use of renewable fuels at 15.21 billion gallons, less than the 18.15-billion gallon 2014 target established in the law, according to the sources, who said the new figures have circulated in Washington policy circles over the past week. …