ANOTHER BRILLIANT PRODUCTION BY REMY: If You Like Your Plan You Can Keep It: The Rap (w/ Remy). “Sellin’ hope’s like sellin’ soap, son I’ll tell you why — you can’t make either one without a little bit of lye.”

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 201.

GLASS HOUSE, STONES, yada yada.

I THINK THIS IS PROBABLY RIGHT: Filibuster change damages courts, federal appeals judge says in op-ed. The additional degree of vetting/legitimacy provided by the possibility of a filibuster is important in an era where the judiciary is already seen by most as politicized.

WAPO: Are Democrats in denial about Obamacare’s midterm consequences?

IT’S NOT EVEN THE SPACE GARBAGE SCOW FROM QUARK: Obamacare Is No Starship Enterprise.

In the last week of September, the disastrous results of the project’s inept management and execution were becoming fully apparent. The agency pressed CGI to explain why a performance test showed that the site could not handle more than 500 simultaneous users. The response once again exhibited the blame-shifting that had plagued the project for months.

“We have not identified any inefficient and defective code,” a CGI executive responded in an email to federal project managers, pointing again to database technology that the Medicare agency had ordered it to use as the culprit, at least in part.

The technocratic idea is that you put a bunch of smart, competent people in government — folks who really want the thing to work — and they’ll make it happen. But “smart, competent people” are not a generic quantity; they’re incredibly domain-specific. Most academics couldn’t run a lemonade stand. Most successful entrepreneurs wouldn’t be able to muster the monomaniacal devotion needed to get a Ph.D. Neither group produces many folks who can consistently generate readable, engaging writing on a deadline. And none of us would be able to win a campaign for Congress.

Yet in my experience, the majority of people in these domains think that they could do everyone else’s job better, if they weren’t so busy with whatever it is they’re doing so well. It’s the illusion of omnicompetence, and in the case of HealthCare.gov, it seems to have been nearly fatal.

Yes, only Obama is a better speechwriter than his speechwriters, a better political adviser than his political advisers, a better pastry chef than the White House pastry chef . . . Ordinary mortals have limitations, and often aren’t aware of them.

IN AMERICA, IF YOU LIKE YOUR HOMOPHOBIC INCIDENT, YOU HAVE TO FABRICATE YOUR HOMOPHOBIC INCIDENT: Family Says They Did Tip Gay Server, Didn’t Leave Note. Funny, that’s like the racial-slur check hoax. Sounds fishy.

IRS SCANDAL UPDATE: Cincinnati Enquirer: Evidence of post-scandal fixes at IRS remains scant: Tax-exempt status of tea party was targeted.

FISCAL TIMES: Why Your Tax Returns Aren’t Safe with the IRS.

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JAMES TARANTO: California Dreamin’: ObamaCare’s bogus success story.

A representative sample of young people will be healthy and likely to stay that way for some time. But there is no reason to expect that the self-selected sample of young people who’ve undertaken the effort and expense of signing up for ObamaCare is representative. Sick people of any age have the greatest incentive to sign up. And the smaller the sample, the likelier it is to be skewed by selection bias.

Note that the total October enrollment of 30,830 comes to fewer than 1,000 a day, an order of magnitude smaller than the current pace of 10,000 a day claimed by Krugman. That, however, turns out not to be an apples-to-apples comparison. The 10,000-a-day figure, Covered California explains, is for “completed applications,” not actual enrollments, which totaled just 79,891 between Oct. 1 and Nov. 19. (A partial explanation for the disparity: Covered California estimates that 39% of applicants will be enrolled in Medi-Cal, so that their coverage will be completely at taxpayer expense.)

It remains to be seen whether even October’s less-impressive-than-advertised age distribution will hold up into November and beyond.

Read the whole thing. Say, did you know that Paul Krugman used to work as an Enron Adviser?

ENCOURAGING OBAMABOTS TO SPREAD OFA TALKING POINTS AT THE DINNER TABLE: ObamaCare Hijacks Thanksgiving.

ROLL CALL: Questions Over Iran Jam Leaders, Defense Bill Negotiators. “An interim deal with Iran on its nuclear program is complicating the future for the annual defense authorization bill, as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., must manage three clashing factions: senators intent on passing a new round of sanctions, a White House that opposes them and armed services negotiators who simply want to see their bill passed. Republicans hellbent on attaching Iran sanctions to the pending defense authorization bill froze Senate action before Thanksgiving, and the Senate is scheduled for only one more week of work before Christmas. The Iran agreement has only brought more voices into the fold, with Democrats such as Sen. Charles E. Schumer of New York and Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Robert Menendez of New Jersey, calling for new sanctions legislation.”

“CRONY CAPITALISM AT ITS WORST:” The Hill: GOP blasts union ‘bailout’ under O-Care.

WAR ON SCIENCE: FDA Wants 23andme’s DNA Test Off The Market.

PUSHING BACK AGAINST THE MACHINE: USA Today Memo: No More White House Press Office Photos.

MACHINE POLITICS IN WISCONSIN: “1 judge with tie to John Doe probe signed Scott Walker recall petition.”

From the comments:

Odd that there are only investigations into conservative groups breaking campaign finance laws.

Sort of like the IRS only vetting conservative groups tax-exempt status.

It would be very bad if day-to-day government workers are conducting partisan investigations.

The bureaucracy is a one-party state.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: University President’s Plan: Just Say No to Tenure:

Kean University’s president will ask the institution’s board next month to reject two-thirds of the professors up for tenure this year, further antagonizing a faculty that has been at odds with the administration for years.

I wonder how he feels about my plan to replace most administrators with low-paid, contract-worker “adjunct Administrators.”

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Among American workers, poll finds unprecedented anxiety about jobs, economy.

More than six in 10 workers in a recent Washington Post-Miller Center poll worry that they will lose their jobs to the economy, surpassing concerns in more than a dozen surveys dating to the 1970s. Nearly one in three, 32 percent, say they worry “a lot” about losing their jobs, also a record high, according to the joint survey, which explores Americans’ changing definition of success and their confidence in the country’s future. The Miller Center is a nonpartisan affiliate of the University of Virginia specializing in public policy, presidential scholarship and political history.

Job insecurities have always been higher among low-income Americans, but they typically rose and fell across all levels of the income ladder. Today, workers at the bottom have drifted away, occupying their own island of insecurity.

Fifty-four percent of workers making $35,000 or less now worry “a lot” about losing their jobs, compared with 37 percent of lower-income workers in 1992 and an identical number in 1975, according to surveys by Time magazine, CNN and Yankelovich. . . . Lower-paid workers also worry far more about making ends meet. Fully 85 percent of them fear that their families’ income will not be enough to meet expenses, up 25 points from a 1971 survey asking an identical question. Thirty-two percent say they worry all the time about meeting expenses, a number that has almost tripled since the 1970s.

Americans’ economic perceptions often divide along political lines; supporters of the incumbent president are usually more optimistic about the job market and the health of the economy. But that’s not the case with this new anxiety. Once you control for economic and demographic factors, there is no partisan divide. There’s no racial divide, either, and no gender gap. It also doesn’t matter where you live.

And these were the people Obama was supposed to help.

FRANKLIN FOER: ObamaCare’s Falure: A Threat To Liberalism.

There’s a term of art that the Obama White House uses to describe its neurotic supporters who instantly race to the worst-case scenario: They are known as “bed-wetters.” Two months into the dysfunctional life of healthcare.gov, however, that seems a perfectly appropriate physiological reaction.

Ouch.

CHICAGO TRIBUNE: ObamaCare Is Losing Altitude.

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STEPHEN GREEN: “Now I have nothing against Middle Eastern countries tending to their own affairs. And the fact that Wiggleroom has — at long last! — brought together Arab and Jew is a testament to a level of incompetence rarely seen even in Washington DC. But the fact is, the Wiggleroom-Kerry deal has made a general war in the Middle East more likely, not less. And the US is now so despised and resented there, that we will have very limited ability to influence or halt it diplomatically — which increases the chance that we will have to intervene militarily.”

POLITICO: As deadline nears, ticking clock on Democratic patience. “Some Capitol Hill Democrats are preparing to launch broadsides against President Barack Obama if the Affordable Care Act website isn’t fixed by the end of the month. That will come in the form of more aggressive scrutiny in Republican-led oversight hearings, open advocacy for further delay in the enrollment deadline and individual coverage mandate, and more calls for a staff shake-up in the White House.”

Related: Another ObamaCare security breach reported in Vermont.