TEST-DRIVING THE 39 MPG VW Passat TDI Diesel. “Through more than 17,000 miles of mixed driving, we’ve averaged 39 mpg. That makes the Passat the rare car with the extraordinary ability to turn Car and Driver staffers into motorists who can meet or even exceed EPA estimates. The mileage is even more impressive when you consider that we rarely modify our driving style when behind the VW’s steering wheel.”
Archive for 2013
October 29, 2013
BLOOMBERG: “The Obamacare rollout is leading to the cancellation of hundreds of thousands of health insurance plans nationwide, contradicting President Barack Obama’s repeated pledge that people who like their coverage can keep it.” The act never would have passed without that promise, which was known to the Administration to be false even as it was made.
THIS COULD BE THE SLOGAN IN THE ADMINISTRATION: “Your new job title is ‘Accomplice.'”
THE WISDOM OF a singing astronaut.
THE EASE OF EAVESDROPPING: “It’s astonishingly easy to become an Acela spy—even if you don’t really want to be a part of other riders’ business—as I have learned from years of experience.”
MARKET POWER: Rush Limbaugh’s children’s book is shipping and is currently #1 on Amazon.
IN THE MAIL: From Wesley Morrison, Let No False Angels.
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 173.
“SMART DIPLOMACY” UPDATE: Obama Strategic Drift Plays Into Russia’s Hands. “While the State Department has been promoting Ukraine’s integration with Europe, Commerce and the U.S. International Trade Commission are on the verge of taxing, and effectively banning steel pipes, one of Ukraine’s key imports to America, partly at the behest of a company owned by Russia.”
FISCAL TIMES: Is the Embattled IRS the Next Obamacare Nightmare?
THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR MITT ROMNEY, HARDWORKING AMERICANS WOULD LOSE HEALTH CARE COVERAGE. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! CBS NEWS: Obamacare: More than 2 million people getting booted from existing health insurance plans.
Related: False Promise: “To say that President Obama is on the record telling Americans they can keep their current health insurance is an understatement. He repeated the assurance so many times during the health-care debate that it was almost a verbal tic. . . . Rarely has a major domestic program been sold on the basis of a premise so patently untrue.”
OBAMACARE: THE BIG THINKERS FORGOT TO BRING IN THE BIG DOERS:
The White House frequently weighed in on items such as the user interface of the website or various policy details, but it didn’t appear much interested in the information-technology portion. The policy staff sat in their office in Bethesda drawing up a logical, incredibly detailed road map for the rollout, which they then mailed off to the IT folks. The IT folks subcontracted out whatever orders they were given, but they apparently did not do a good job of communicating their growing sense of dread to the rest of the people involved in this massive project. And so the White House merrily went around giving presentations — consisting of some screenshots enlivened with interactive features — that implied the new website would work just like Travelocity for health insurance.
The yawning gap between what the IT people knew and what everyone else seems to have realized is staggering. Now, I’ve worked on some projects in which the business units seemed to have some sort of selective deafness that only materialized when we tried to tell them that they couldn’t have their magic fairy computer system that did everything they could imagine, only better, in the three months they wanted it to take, or for the paltry sum that they were willing to spend. And I learned the hard way not to assume that the business units, or even the chief information officer, had heard and understood what you said. That is how I became gifted in the art of writing CYA memos when I was directed to do the unwise or the impossible. So I do have some sympathy for the IT folks.
But I’ve never seen a gap this complete — one in which the entire IT organization seems to have been panicking about the impossibility of their task, and then the inevitable failures, while the folks issuing the orders were blithely issuing last-minute change orders and telling everyone they could find how swell this was all going to be. Usually, when things are going this wrong, you do more than casually mention it; you sit the folks on the business side down and explain that unless the project is pushed back, it’s going to be an unmitigated disaster.
Someone, somewhere pretty high up in the food chain must have understood that the website could not be ready on time and would not do what the political folks were promising. That person failed to communicate not only the unlikelihood of making the Oct. 1 start date, but also the extent of the problems that would follow if they opened anyway. The policy and political staffs genuinely seem to have been expecting a few weird errors and a little bit of downtime, not a computer system that failed at pretty much every step.
There’s been some talk in the blogosphere recently about whether this calls the liberal project into question. I think that’s going a bit far, but I do think it calls into question the competency of President Barack Obama’s technocrats.
And the guy who hired ’em.
WELL, YES: Everyone spies: Intelligence insiders shrug amid outrage over US snooping allegations. But not everyone’s spying is handled in such an inept way when it leaks.
UPDATE: Spies Spy? Oh, the Horror!
J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS: Dick Durbin’s Senate Gun Trial to Feature Ghost of Trayvon Martin. “When was his hearing to examine Chicago gun laws and their impact on the 500 homicide victims and families in 2012 alone? Race played a prominent role in the media coverage (or mis-coverage) following Trayvon Martin’s death. Why aren’t hundreds of dead black children in Chicago worth the same amount of attention given to a single black teenager in Florida? We know the reason. Calling attention to the cesspool of Chicago will draw too much inconvenient attention to too many failed ideas and Democrat policies.”
Chicago’s high murder rate is because of gangs. And the gangs are in bed with the Chicago machine.
EDUCATION: Homeschooling A Boon To Army Brats. “One of the biggest challenges military families face is ensuring the children get a solid education despite frequent moves, which require them to shift between schools that may have very different curricula and educational styles. Unsurprisingly, then, some families prefer the relative stability afforded by homeschooling. As its popularity has grown, the military has become more supportive, in some cases providing course materials and workspaces for homeschooled students. . . . This is a smart approach. In our view, no single form of schooling is best for all students. Policy should be geared toward the creation of an ecosystem of options so that parents can choose one tailored to their children’s needs. Homeschooling should definitely be part of that mix, and military children are particularly good candidates for this approach.”
I agree. In fact, that’s precisely what I argue for in my forthcoming book.
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TRAIN WRECK UPDATE: Insurers Tell Congress: Beware Rate Shock If Obamacare Enrollment Extended.
The list is growing every week: The IRS scandal, the deteriorating security situation in Libya, spying on German Chancellor Angela Merkel, spying on journalists and the Obamacare mess. Those are just a few of the things we have been told at one time or another that President Obama he didn’t know about before learning about them in the media. Note to media: You have a critical job in briefing the president, so err on side of over-inclusion.
Then there are the things he had wrong or knew better but said anyway: There is a fatwa in Iran against nuclear weapons, “You will get to keep your health-care plan,” the Benghazi attack was related to an anti- Muslim video, and no predecessor had been compelled to negotiate a budget deal in the context of a potential government shutdown.
This prompts several questions: Who is running the government? Why is the president content not to know so many things? At this point one has to conclude he is intentionally ignorant. If he really wanted to be in the loop, people who didn’t inform him would be fired and the pace of “I didn’t know” excuses would slow. Instead it’s ticked up. Perhaps he refuses to hear bad news. Maybe his second-term team is hopelessly incompetent. Whatever the reason, Obama’s ignorance is no longer (if it ever had been) a valid excuse. His continual cluelessness is an indictment now of his administration’s collapse.
Yeah, pretty much. Related: “Mind-boggling attempts at blame-shifting.”
WHAT VICTOR DAVIS HANSON recommends you read in 2013.
WHAT THE BORDER GUARDS THINK of immigration reform. “In fact, we are urging all lawmakers to demand an investigation of DHS before moving immigration bills. ICE officers are being ordered by DHS political appointees to ignore the law. Violent criminal aliens are released every day from jails back into American communities. ICE Officers face disciplinary action for engaging in routine law enforcement actions. We are barred from enforcing large sections of the Immigration and Nationality Act, even when public safety is at risk.”
JAMES TARANTO: You’ve Come a Long Way, Elska: The truth about the “best countries for women.”
The report, as per Gummow, ranks countries “across four primary areas including economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, political empowerment and health and survival.” It uses a 1-point scale, with “1 representing total gender equality and 0 depicting inequality.” The U.S. gets a 0.7392, “which is actually worse than the score it received the year before when it was ranked 22nd.”
This exercise is silly in many ways, the funniest of which is the false precision. In reality, “gender equality” is not susceptible to quantitative measurement. The WEF derives its number by applying a made-up formula to an arbitrarily chosen group of data sets such as sex ratios within national legislatures. . . .
Gummow lists the 10 countries that received the highest “equality” scores from the WEF. Every Scandinavian country makes the top 10, and the top 4 are, in order, Iceland, Finland, Norway and Sweden. Denmark is a slight laggard at No. 8.
That is consistent with the common stereotype of “a female Paradise on earth,” as Alison Wolf puts it in her new book, “The XX Factor: How the Rise of Working Women Has Created a Far Less Equal World.” Wolf observes that “Scandinavians are seen by the world, and they see themselves, as flagbearers for sexual equality. They are peaceful, egalitarian and economically successful; and they pioneered social programs designed to guarantee opportunities for women.”
But there’s trouble in paradise. One measure the WEF study doesn’t use to gauge equality is occupational “gender segregation”–the degree to which men work in “male jobs” and women in “female” ones. Guess what? “The highest levels of gender segregation anywhere in the developed world are found in the labor markets of egalitarian welfare-state Scandinavia,” Wolf reports. “The International Labor Organization . . . has calculated that if you wanted to make all occupations ‘gender neutral,’ about a third of all Scandinavian workers would have to move to completely different occupations,.”
As Wolf explains, that inequality is a consequence of Scandinavia’s commitment to equality. Nordic women are well-represented in the kind of high-status professional jobs on which feminists tend to focus their attention. That is in part because the welfare state eases the temporal burdens of motherhood by providing extensive day-care services. Day-care workers are mostly female. And low-status traditionally male occupations have remained so; there aren’t a lot of female truck drivers in Iceland or Sweden.
So the Scandinavians have promoted equality in the elite workforce by diminishing it among nonelite workers.
That’s pretty much the feminist agenda in a nutshell.
WAIT, AREN’T THOSE THE “FIGHTERS” OBAMA WAS SUPPORTING IN SYRIA? “A flurry of recent attacks by al Qaeda-linked militants in Iraq—strengthened by their alliance with jihadist fighters in Syria—is threatening to undo years of U.S. efforts to crush the group, widening sectarian conflict in the Middle East.”