ASHE SCHOW: How Pajama Boy’s Defenders Missed The Point. “With Krupp, Americans learned that the person behind the mockery was exactly what they imagined him to be. OFA did not respond to a request for comment.”
Archive for 2013
December 21, 2013
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BILL WHITTLE: The End Of The Beginning.
JULIETTE “BALDILOCKS” OCHIENG: How Leftist Targeting Calculus Works. By the way, if you’re so inclined, you might hit her Donation button. I happen to know she could use it. I’ve donated myself. (Bumped).
STANDARDS: Cat Stevens Gets into Hall of Fame After All. “He called for the death of Salman Rushdie, but the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame calls his conversion to Islam ‘courageous.'”
THE ANCHORESS: I am “THE MOMMA BEAR of New Homophiles!” I saw The New Homophiles open for Three Doors Down at Toad’s Place back in the 90s.
IT’S CRONYISM ALL THE WAY DOWN: Michael Barone: Government takes General Motors loss to protect UAW cronies.
Remember how the Obama re-election campaign kept crowing that “General Motors is alive and Osama bin Laden is dead”? Well, Osama is still dead, and the government is now selling the last of its GM stock — at a loss to taxpayers of $10 billion. Who has gained? Bloomberg’s James Sherk has the answer: GM’s UAW-represented employees.
Sherk points out that the government agreed to — actually, it engineered — terms quite different from those of ordinary bankruptcies. UAW members, unlike employees of bankrupt airlines, took essentially no haircut, and there was even $1 billion for UAW employees of Delphi, to whom GM had no legal obligation. (Delphi was spun off from GM several years before).
But, hey, the UAW kicked in heavily to the Obama campaign and to Democratic campaigns generally, and so they got paid off, in an episode of what I called “gangster government.” Or in the style of Chicago politics.
That’s who they are, that’s what they do.
CAN YOU FEEL THE HOPE AND CHANGE YET? Poll: Only 29% Have Favorable Opinion of The Federal Government.
GOOD LUCK WITH THAT: Roll Call: Subdued Obama Hopes for Better 2014. I actually think that 2013 was not Obama’s worst year, but rather, in the words of that old Soviet joke, average. Worse than last year, better than next year. So: Average.
It’s hard to come up with new ways to describe the Obama administration’s improvisational approach to the Affordable Care Act’s troubled health insurance exchanges. But last night, the White House made its most consequential announcement yet. The administration will grant a “hardship exemption” from the law’s individual mandate, requiring the purchase of health insurance, to anyone who has had their prior coverage canceled and who “believes” that Obamacare’s offerings “are unaffordable.” These exemptions will substantially alter the architecture of the law’s insurance marketplaces. Insurers are at their wits’ end, trying to make sense of what to do next. . . .
For years, these pages have raised the concern that the “Affordable Care Act” will drive up the cost of health insurance. “What is remarkable about the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,” I wrote in 2010, is “its devastating consequences for the cost of health insurance.” A 49-state analysis I conducted along with two colleagues at the Manhattan Institute found that the average state will see underlying premiums increase by an average of 41 percent in the individual market, the market where people shop for coverage on their own, instead of getting it through an employer or the government. (Our state-by-state interactive map can be found here.)
But this most recent announcement from the Obama administration is the first time it has publicly admitted that Obamacare is making health insurance less affordable, not more so, for millions of Americans.
ObamaCare is a debacle, wrapped in a catastrophe, shrouded in a disaster.
Related: 2010 Obama Derides the Catastrophic Policies 2013 Obama Is Now Endorsing. Sen. Barrasso sounds amazingly prescient; President Obama . . . not so much.
UPDATE: From the comments: “This IS Obama’s Katrina. Except Obama isn’t Bush. He’s Ray Nagin.”
ANOTHER UPDATE: CBS: Top ObamaCare official wanted site shut down over security risks — and was overruled.
AMERICAN STUDIES ASSOCIATION UPDATE: Hypocrisy, Thy Name Is ASA.
Can you imagine twenty serious scholars in any discipline voting unanimously on any controversial issue? I can’t, so I thought it worthwhile to examine the composition of the ASA’s National Council and to peruse its members’ academic profiles, as described on the webpages of their home institutions. This simple exercise reveals a stunning lack of diversity of intellectual interests and perspectives in a sector of American society, the university, that explicitly places a very high premium on “diversity.” The apparent obsession with gender, gay and race studies (or of U.S. imperialism) among the members of ASA’s National Council seems to come at the expense of scholarship on just about everything else.
It was considered a lightweight major back when I was in school, and it’s undoubtedly gotten worse since then.
Related: Wesleyan U. President: Boycott of Israeli universities: A repugnant attack on academic freedom.
Also: Boston U. President rejects Israel academic boycott.
Plus: Andrew Klavan: Anti-Semitic Stalinist Eunuchs.
I think the proper response is for universities to refuse to fund attendance at ASA events, or purchase of ASA publications.
THE HILL: Obama names healthcare rollout his biggest mistake of dismal year. Dismal for him, worse for America.
President Obama rued the rollout of the healthcare website as his biggest mistake of the year during a White House news conference Friday, underlining the extent to which the issue has overshadowed everything else during a dismal 2013 for the 44th president.
Asked about his worst error, Obama said that he had stressed the need for consumers to have “a good experience, an easy experience” in the run-up to the launch of HealthCare.Gov.
He continued: “The fact is it didn’t happen in the first month, first six weeks, in a way that was at all acceptable. And since I’m in charge, obviously we screwed it up.”
Love that. I’m in charge; we screwed it up.
December 20, 2013
ED DRISCOLL: Oh, That Death of the Grown-Up.
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DON’T TAKE IT. IT’S BAD STUFF: Mass. police find heroin stamped with ‘Obamacare.’
OBAMA’S HALF BROTHER: ‘Barack Thought I Was Too White.’ “Barack thought I was too white, and I thought he was too black. He was an American searching for his African roots, I was a Kenyan, I’m an American but I was living in Kenya, searching for my white roots.”
EMBRACE THE SUCK: Caption This.
FASTER, PLEASE: Researchers have discovered a cause of aging in mammals that may be reversible. “The essence of this finding is a series of molecular events that enable communication inside cells between the nucleus and mitochondria. As communication breaks down, aging accelerates. By administering a molecule naturally produced by the human body, scientists restored the communication network in older mice. Subsequent tissue samples showed key biological hallmarks that were comparable to those of much younger animals. . . . Examining muscle from two-year-old mice that had been given the NAD-producing compound for just one week, the researchers looked for indicators of insulin resistance, inflammation and muscle wasting. In all three instances, tissue from the mice resembled that of six-month-old mice. In human years, this would be like a 60-year-old converting to a 20-year-old in these specific areas.”
Aging, I suspect, consists of a bunch of stuff like this, that can be addressed bit by bit.
RANDALL PARKER: Don’t Get Too Excited About The Prospect Of A Populist Rebellion. “Think you can benefit from a populist movement in America? I would not count on such a movement being either fair or rational. You might feel glee (or schaudenfreude if you put on airs) about populists battling billionaires. But regardless of which faction lands more blows America’s slow economic growth or economic contraction will continue for some time.”
YOU WILL FIND LOVE SOON: On the “wonders” of astrology.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Charter School Mania Hits Detroit.
NOTHING IS SAFE ANYMORE: The Dangers Of Laughter.