Archive for 2013
October 15, 2013
NEWS YOU CAN USE: What To Do When You Find A Parasitic Worm Living In Your Face.
PRESIDENT DOWNGRADE, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Fitch puts US AAA rating on rating watch negative. So how long until the federal government goes after Fitch?
OUT THIS WEEK FROM IRA STOLL: JFK: Conservative.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: School Suspends Teen for Wanting to Drive Her Drunk Friend Home. Is it child abuse to send your kid to public schools?
WHEN THE NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY spied on Martin Luther King. But if you suggest it might be subject to political abuse today, you’re paranoid.
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Shutdown Experience Shows Cutting Government Would Be Pretty Painless.
AT AMAZON, coupons galore in Grocery & Gourmet Food.
Also, get ready for winter storms and other disasters at the Amazon Emergency Essentials Store.
And, today only: Up to 30% Off Select Graco Baby Items.
SCIENCE: Cluster Headaches Are Linked With Unusual Brain Connectivity. “Compared with unaffected men, the cluster headache sufferers did have unusual hypothalamic connections. When headaches hit, these altered interactions often involved parts of the brain associated with pain processing. But hypothalamic connections were off-kilter between headaches, too, pointing to more persistent brain differences in those prone to cluster headaches.”
GOVERNMENTS DON’T WANT YOU TO BE ABLE TO DO WITHOUT THEM: Leading Economist Predicts a Bitcoin Backlash.
JOE PAPPALARDO: The Dark Side of the Nobel Peace Prize-Winning Chemical Weapons Inspectors. “The 2013 Nobel Peace Prize went to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which is supposed to investigate suspected chemical weapons makers and stop the proliferation of these terrible agents. But the organization’s record isn’t as rosy as it might appear.”
THEY NEED TO BE SENT TO A LONG AND UNPLEASANT RETRAINING SESSION: Lancaster Cops Still Unclear On Public’s Right To Record; Harass Same Citizen Who Recorded Them Last Week.
THE WOLF EFFECT: Calling for Kathleen Sebelius’ resignation, Sen. Pat Roberts heads further right. “On Tuesday, tea partier Milton Wolf announced he is running for the U.S. Senate in Kansas against longtime incumbent Pat Roberts. On Friday, Roberts called on health and human services secretary and former Kansas governor Kathleen Sebelius to resign for ‘gross incompetence’ in connection with the rollout of Obamacare. If you think those two developments aren’t connected, then you probably think the Kansas Jayhawks are headed for the national championship this year — in football.”
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 158.
CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE ON THE LEFT — BILL AYERS’ BOMBS. Civil disobedience on the right — illicit lawn maintenance at national monuments.
MEGAN MCARDLE: ObamaCare 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.
And then it gets worse. Megan concludes: “At what point do we admit that the system just isn’t working well enough, roll it back and delay the whole thing for a year?” About two weeks ago. But neither Obama, nor the Democrats, nor the press can admit that Obama made a mistake, so expect this thing to fester for a while longer.
Related: Obamacare’s Website Is Crashing Because It Doesn’t Want You To Know How Costly Its Plans Are. “A growing consensus of IT experts, outside and inside the government, have figured out a principal reason why the website for Obamacare’s federally-sponsored insurance exchange is crashing. Healthcare.gov forces you to create an account and enter detailed personal information before you can start shopping. This, in turn, creates a massive traffic bottleneck, as the government verifies your information and decides whether or not you’re eligible for subsidies. HHS bureaucrats knew this would make the website run more slowly. But they were more afraid that letting people see the underlying cost of Obamacare’s insurance plans would scare people away. . . . It’s quite possible that much of this disaster could have been avoided if the Obama administration had been willing to be open with the public about the degree to which Obamacare escalates the cost of health insurance. If they had, then a number of the problems with the exchange’s software architecture would have been avoided. But that would require admitting that the ‘Affordable Care Act’ was not accurately named.”
UPDATE: From Charlie Martin, a HealthCare.gov I-told-you-so.
JONAH GOLDBERG ON THAT OTHER ROGER SIMON: “Simon’s column reminds me of a point I’ve been making for years. Most mainstream journalists roll their eyes at the idea the MSM is biased. It’s a tired argument, I know. But it’s simply remarkable that when supposedly objective reporters move on to the opinion column racket they reveal themselves as utterly conventional liberal Democrats. When any longtime New York Times reporter rewarded with a column at the Times or elsewhere — Nick Kristoff, Bill Keller, Maureen Dowd, Anthony Lewis, EJ Dionne et al. — rips off the mask it turns out that they were exactly as liberal as conservatives suspected. . . . Just going by the law of averages, some of these reporters should turn out to be conservative or libertarian or at least ideologically heterodox. But it almost never happens. Indeed, when the Times needs to find a conservative columnist (Bill Safire, David Brooks, Ross Douthat) it always has to hire outside its own shop. Jay Carney got his job working for Joe Biden, and later, Barack Obama because his employers knew from the get-go that the Time reporter was ideologically simpatico with the administration. The same goes for Linda Douglas, not to mention Richard Stengel, Shailagh Murray, and many others. I wonder if any of them ever feel insulted when Democratic politicians just assume that supposedly objective reporters would make great partisan hacks?” Nope. They’re grateful that someone noticed.
IRS SCANDAL UPDATE: Most powerful White House Obamacare official at center of IRS scandal. “The White House official who exchanged confidential taxpayer information with the IRS is a longtime Obama advisor and progressive activist who is currently the most powerful official on Obamacare implementation within the White House.” Her name is Jeanne Lambrew.