INSURANCE CANCELLED BECAUSE OF OBAMACARE? Send a pic of the notice to MyCancellation.com.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Brushing Your Teeth Could Prevent Heart Disease. “Taking care of your gums by brushing, flossing, and regular dental visits could help hold heart disease at bay. Researchers at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health have shown for the first time that as gum health improves, progression of atherosclerosis slows to a clinically significant degree.”

AT AMAZON, deals galore at the Veteran’s Day Store.

Also, up to 45% off Streamlight flashlights.

THE TEA PARTY STRIKES BACK: David Kirkham — who had a heart attack a couple of weeks ago but hasn’t let that slow him down much — writes: “We are holding an ‘I Like Mike’ rally today in Salt Lake City to counter the media narrative about Senator Lee that ‘his constituents don’t like him.’ There are over 1000 people here! I can’t get the entire crowd in the photo from the stage.”

UPDATE: Kirkham emails a final tally: “1500-2000 people showed up. 2 nasty protestors arrested.”

21ST CENTURY CENSORSHIP: Yelling “Toy Guns” on a Crowded Facebook Page. Who’s stupider? The school, the police, or the many complaining parents? Sadly, as smarter people abandon public schools, the dumber ones who remain have more impact. They should be subjected to public humiliation, in the hopes that they’ll learn, or at least serve as an example to the others.

MALWARE THAT CAN NETWORK INFECTED MACHINES using microphones and speakers. “What’s troubling about badBIOS is that it’s either infecting only Ruiu’s machines, or it’s infecting a lot of other machines but nobody knows about it because of its very sneaky nature. If it is infecting other computers, what is it doing, and why?” Hmm.

UPDATE: Via the comments, a skeptical take.

READER BOOK PLUG: From James Hudnall (Harsh Realm), Hell’s Reward (The Age of Heroes). According to one review, it’s like X-Men meets Game of Thrones.

BAD NEWS FOR ANESTHESIOLOGISTS — FIRST, COMPETITION FROM NURSE-ANESTHETISTS. NOW THIS: Computer-Controlled Anesthesia Could Be Safer for Patients.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: What I’ve Learned From Fighting With My Husband.

THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF THE SOVIET SATELLITE-KILLER: As soon as the Space Age got under way, the Soviet Union was trying to build antisatellite weapons—and kept trying for decades.

Related thoughts here.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 177.

JONAH GOLDBERG: Obama: The Myth Of The Master Strategist:

Often in error but never in doubt, Barack Obama could walk into the Rose Garden and step on a half-dozen rakes like Foghorn Leghorn in an old Looney Tunes cartoon, and the official line would be, “He meant to do that.”

And the amazing thing is that so many people believe it. “Mr. Obama is like a championship chess player, always several moves ahead of friend and foe alike. He’s smart, deft, elegant and subtle,” proclaimed then–New York Times columnist Bob Herbert in 2009. It’s an image of the president that his biggest fans, in and out of the press, have been terribly reluctant to relinquish — because it confirms the faith they invested in him. Nobody ever likes to admit they were suckered.

But the fiction of Obama as a man three steps ahead has taken a terrible beating if you have eyes to see it. The budget cuts under the so-called sequester are the law of the land because Obama thought he was outthinking his opponents when he gave budget-cutters budget cuts. Now he’s stuck railing against his own idea. His allegedly revolutionary decision to turn his presidential campaign into a personal political organization independent from the Democratic party has turned out to be the most expensive way ever to generate smarmy and ineffectual e-mail spam. And, if you want to believe that Obama’s goal in Syria all along was to elevate Vladimir Putin and alienate all of our Middle East allies, including Saudi Arabia and Israel, and to make Bashar Assad our strategic partner while he finds more politically correct ways to slaughter his own people, well, that’s nice. . . .

This is not a matter open to fair-minded dispute, never mind partisan disagreement. Even the president and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius agree that the rollout of Obamacare has been a “debacle” (Sebelius’s word). Revelations in the press and in congressional hearings show that the administration was warned prior to both the shutdown and the Obamacare debut that Healthcare.gov was as ready to go live as a kid’s make-believe refrigerator-box submarine is ready to explore the ocean depths.

If Obama were a chess master — or even a fairly adept checkers novice — he would have known that when you’re not ready to do something incredibly important, it’s best to buy time. He could have traded a delay (three months? six months?) for some major budget concessions, maybe even lifting the sequester. Perhaps his base wouldn’t have liked it, but he could have easily spun the compromise as a necessity given how irrational and “extreme” the GOP was being.

Publicly he’d say he was paying a ransom to “kidnappers” and “hostage takers.” He’d denounce Republicans for delaying precious insurance coverage for sick kids and frail oldsters just to score partisan and ideological points.

But privately, ah, privately, the master strategist would be stroking his proverbial white cat — or, in reality, his hypoallergenic black dog — while breathing a sigh of relief that he bought himself some time to fix his woefully mangled health-care reform.

Obviously he wouldn’t want to delay Obamacare. But that decision was out of his hands due to his administration’s incompetence. The only choice before him was whether he would get the blame for the delay or if the Republicans would.

Why Obama didn’t do this and why it didn’t occur to him are good questions. Hubris obviously played a role, as it does in nearly everything this White House does. But the best answer is he didn’t know how terrible things were over at HHS. In other words, the chess master didn’t even know what pieces he had on the board, which is usually not something we associate with chess masters.

As I have noted in the past, despite various people’s repeated insistence on his genius, there’s not much actual evidence that Obama is especially bright. While evidence to the contrary keeps piling up. . . .

GEORGE WILL: Citizen activists finally being empowered by judges. “Brick by brick, judges are dismantling the wall of separation that legislators have built between political activity and the First Amendment’s protections of free speech and association.”

IRS SCANDAL UPDATE: IRS’ Lois Lerner Gave Confidential Tea Party Tax Info to FEC, Breaking the Law.

LOVE THE GORDON-GEKKO-ERA CELLPHONE, though it’s only slightly more obsolete than Obama’s Blackberry . . . . The floppy disk is a nice touch, too.

But I have to say, this cover isn’t any funnier than this real-life picture from Memphis.

That was a fine bit of Alinsky-style guerrilla politics by State Sen. Brian Kelsey. The expression on Sebelius’ face says it all.

IF YOU LIKE YOUR INSURANCE, YOU CAN KEEP YOUR INSURANCE: James Taranto: When Fraud Is Legal: Under socialism, there’s no such thing as consumer protection.

The most salient difference is a way in which ObamaCare is worse than BHO Insurance Co.: The ObamaCare fraud was conducted irrespective of the volition of the “customers.” Obama and his compatriots were able to carry out their scam merely by twisting arms in Congress’s back rooms.

Legally, however, the two scenarios are entirely different. Whereas BHO Insurance Co.’s scam is against the law; ObamaCare is the law. Thus there is no evident legal recourse for those who were injured by Obama’s fraudulent promise. . . .

For the victims of governmental fraud, the only recourse is political, which is to say that it entails relying on the same government that perpetrated the fraud.

When it enacted ObamaCare, Congress relied on its constitutional authority to regulate interstate commerce. The Supreme Court held that Congress had exceeded that authority, but only with respect to one particular provision, the mandate that all individuals purchase medical insurance. There is little dispute that under more or less settled case law, Congress would be within its authority if it simply nationalized the insurance industry, or any other industry.

The regulation of commerce is a necessary and vital governmental function. Consumers and honest businesses need protection from unscrupulous market participants. That is nearly impossible when an industry is owned, or effectively controlled, by the government. To socialize an industry is to put it in a position to regulate itself. It legalizes fraud by recasting it as mere “political lies.”

Maybe people should suffer more for political lies. Incentives matter.

I POSTED THIS YESTERDAY, BUT IT’S WORTH REPEATING, ESPECIALLY SINCE IT WAS CNN MAKING THE POINT:

Senate Democrats voted unanimously three years ago to support the Obamacare rule that is largely responsible for some of the health insurance cancellation letters that are going out.

In September 2010, Senate Republicans brought a resolution to the floor to block implementation of the grandfather rule, warning that it would result in canceled policies and violate President Barack Obama’s promise that people could keep their insurance if they liked it.

On a party line vote, Democrats killed the resolution, which could come back to haunt vulnerable Democrats up for re-election this year.

Senate Democrats like Mary Landrieu, Jeanne Shaheen, Mark Pryor, Kay Hagan and Mark Begich – all of whom voted against stopping the rule from going into effect and have since supported delaying parts of Obamacare.

Expect to hear about this a lot.