THE EXCUSES FOR OBAMACARE’S FAILURE GET LAMER AS THE FAILURE GETS BIGGER: ObamaCare Didn’t Fail Because It’s Timid:

Judging from my interactions with readers and my friends and family who don’t happen to spend their days marinating in health-care policy, the view that Obamacare’s problems are due to Democrats not being sufficiently left-wing, or dishonest, is pretty common on the left. That makes it worth refuting, because — with all due respect to Kevin — it’s completely wrong.

I agree that higher subsidies and a stronger mandate would have made Obamacare less of a policy train wreck; we probably wouldn’t be so worried about a death spiral if they had passed. On the other hand, it would have made the program much more of a fiscal train wreck. Kevin suggests that they should have just raised taxes on the rich, but for reference, the total repeal of the Bush tax cuts was projected to raise only about two-thirds of the amount needed. And since they were projected to expire, that was not a source of revenue that Democrats could use to fund Obamacare.

Funding this extra entitlement by tapping the rich would have been, to put it mildly, unpopular with an important part of the Democratic base: urban professionals. They would have, in the course of a few years, seen about 10 percent of their gross income, and a considerably larger fraction of their take-home pay, vanish. Nor would they be excited when politicians came back to them for even more money to pay for little incidentals like our growing entitlement gap.

Nor, as Kevin suggests, could Democrats have simply hand-waved the cost away. Bills have to be scored by the Congressional Budget Office. The Congressional Budget Office would not have scored heartfelt paeans to the economic benefits of broader health coverage (and to the extent that they would have, most of those benefits were already in the score the bill got.) If Democrats had tried to pass a bill that cost $2 trillion over 10 years, the Congressional Budget Office would have scored it as such, and that is the cost that the media would have reported. This — not a tragic surfeit of honesty — is why Democrats didn’t take the-time-honored approach of telling wild lies about what their plans would cost.

In fact, they prevaricated as much as they could, from “If you like your policy, you can keep it” to gaming the CBO forecasting process with dodgy revenue-generating provisions like the CLASS Act long-term care program, and the requirement for people to issue 1099s to anyone who sold them more than $600 worth of stuff — things which were pretty obviously never going to actually take effect, but which helped lower the apparent cost of the bill at the time of the law’s passage, due to quirks in the CBO’s forecasting process . If they could have found more such dodgy mechanisms, they would have used them.

Democrats’ programs fail for a variety of reasons, but excessive honesty is never one of them.

FAKE NEWS: For the Obamas, looking cool is part of the job.

Don’t ever change, WaPo.

SETH BARRETT TILLMAN: Ed Kilgore, At NY Mag’s Daily Intelligencer, Asks President Obama To Use Recess Appointments: Kilgore’s Strategy Won’t Work & This Is Why.

RICHARD FERNANDEZ: More people believe in magic than we would care to admit.

MAD DUCK: Another 1.5M acre federal land grab.

SCIENCE: Children need microbes — not antibiotics — to develop immunity, scientists say. Let them play in the dirt.

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NEWS YOU CAN USE: 2016 Extra ‘Leap Second’ Longer Because Of Ocean Waves.

Don’t forget to set your clocks back.

JOHN KERRY LEAVING WITH A BANG, BUT NOT THE GOOD KIND OF BANG: Adriana Cohen: Look in the mirror Mr. Secretary.

Secretary of State John Kerry wants us to believe that Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu poses the greatest threat to Middle East peace and to a two-state solution — the dream of democratic Jewish and Palestinian states living peacefully side by side.

But it is Kerry himself, with his irresponsible public attack on Israel — on the heels of last week’s cowardly U.S. abstention from the vote on a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israel — who poses the greatest threat to peace.

The fact is, the Palestinians have only ever had a one-state solution, and it isn’t a democratic one. It involves Arab Palestinians overrunning Israel, driving out or killing all Jews. It’s what they teach their children. They talk about it openly. They work toward it diligently with suicide bombs, missile attacks and even knives. They refuse to even acknowledge Israel’s right to exist.

Kerry’s speech was meant to chide Israel. But its effect will be to embolden Palestinian terrorists, Hezbollah, Iran and even the Islamic State, all no doubt delighted to see this rift between the nation they like to call the Great Satan and the hated Zionists.

Kerry is blaming the victim at a time when anti-Semitism is dangerously escalating around the world.

You tend to think of Kerry as an amusingly goofy bumbler, but he’s actually dangerous.

Related: Howie Carr: Time for Gigolo John Kerry to dance off the stage.

To think that the Democrats nearly managed to make this guy President.

How bad are things? This bad: Schumer says Kerry may have “emboldened extremists” in his speech. But remember, bad as Kerry is, he’s quite clearly following Obama’s policy.

UPDATE: Peter Wehner: Obama’s Squalid Attack on Israel. Good thing we’ve got Trump coming in, right Peter?

IMPORTING TERROR: Italy says another 900 migrants rescued off Libya, bringing year’s tally to its ports to 180,300.

As James Wheeler noted on Twitter, that’s exactly how Anis Amri made his way to Europe before killing 12 and injuring 48 others in the Berlin Christmas attack.

LET’S HOPE: Washington Examiner: The Death Throes of Political Correctness.

Not everyone, not even a majority, is comfortable with the bizarre and dehumanizing ideas routinely foisted on less militant citizens in the name of self-affirmation for one group or another. The public is not interested in cultivating obsessive concern over microaggressions. Not everyone agrees when they are told, often angrily, that belief in marriage as a sacrament is merely a centuries-old excuse for oppression. Not everyone heeds the command to pretend that Caitlyn Jenner is a woman.

Many look on, aghast, at the brutal public shamings so frequently meted out to those who say almost anything mildly insensitive. They don’t like threats to individual rights made in the name of sensitivity. They notice that everything the political and cultural elite disagrees with is quickly defined as bigotry. Moral pressure even induced both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton to embrace the absurd idea that immigration law is per se racist.

Voters, especially the many non-traditional Republican voters who gave President-elect Trump his victory, did not have to be conservative or even political to see something was terribly wrong. All they had to do was have their eyes open. They only had to feel the anger that comes naturally to people who are commanded by the self-important to behave irrationally.

There are many explanations for the 2016 election. But at the heart of the matter remains the question: How did Trump, for all his manifest faults, become the champion of the working class voter, the little guy, the men and women who feel their opinions are scorned and their voices unheeded?

As Trump repeatedly did and said things that would have ended anyone else’s political career, he won rather than lost admiration. Why? Because by example, not just by precept, he rejected, day in and day out, every convention and custom demanded by an overbearing, supercilious and detested cultural elite.

Our “elites” are not so much elite as elitist. We are, as Peggy Noonan says, patronized by our inferiors. And people are tired of it.

A CORPORATION OF ONE: U.S. companies that employ nobody but the owner soar, but some worry it won’t help overall job growth.

The number of businesses classified as manufacturers with no employees has been rising steadily since the depths of the recession. The tiny operations often make food, craft beer, toiletries or other niche products. Their growth stands out in a sector that has been shedding workers for decades.

U.S. food manufacturers with no employee but the owner nearly doubled from 2004 to 2014. One-worker beverage and tobacco makers expanded 150%. Such chemical manufacturers—a category that includes makers of soap and perfume—grew almost 70%.

In all, there were more than 350,000 manufacturing establishments with no employee other than the owner in 2014, up almost 17% from 2004, according to the most recent Commerce Department data. By comparison, there were 292,543 establishments with other employees, down 12%. The shift creates a challenge for building back the number of jobs in the U.S. manufacturing sector.

Technology is making it possible for almost anyone to become an entrepreneur, and that’s supposed to be a bad thing?

BREAKING: Syrian Government Announces Truce Backed by Russia and Turkey.

The announcement follows the retaking of all of Aleppo, once Syria’s industrial capital and a stronghold of the opposition, by forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad, and negotiations in Moscow that involved Mr. Assad’s government, Russia, Iran and Turkey — but, pointedly, not the United States.

Not included in the agreement is the Islamic State, which controls territory in eastern Syria and across the border with Iraq; the Syrian affiliate of Al Qaeda, which is strongest in the country’s northwest; and “groups linked to them.”

It was not clear which of the scores of rebel groups scattered across Syria had agreed to the cease-fire, nor whether those that had not been consulted would abide by it. Throughout the war, rebel forces have failed to form a united leadership, and infighting among groups has been common.

It was also unclear what criteria the Syrian military and its Russian allies would use to define groups “linked” to the jihadists. In the past, they have dismissed much of the armed opposition as “terrorists” who could not be distinguished from jihadist groups.

The fighting ain’t over yet.

BIRTHRATES ALWAYS FALL UNDER SOCIALISM: Baby Bust: U.S. population growth crashes to 80-year low.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Obamacare Didn’t Fail Because It’s Timid.

Judging from my interactions with readers and my friends and family who don’t happen to spend their days marinating in health-care policy, the view that Obamacare’s problems are due to Democrats not being sufficiently left-wing, or dishonest, is pretty common on the left. That makes it worth refuting, because — with all due respect to Kevin [Drum] — it’s completely wrong.

I agree that higher subsidies and a stronger mandate would have made Obamacare less of a policy train wreck; we probably wouldn’t be so worried about a death spiral if they had passed. On the other hand, it would have made the program much more of a fiscal train wreck. Kevin suggests that they should have just raised taxes on the rich, but for reference, the total repeal of the Bush tax cuts was projected to raise only about two-thirds of the amount needed. And since they were projected to expire, that was not a source of revenue that Democrats could use to fund Obamacare.

Funding this extra entitlement by tapping the rich would have been, to put it mildly, unpopular with an important part of the Democratic base: urban professionals. They would have, in the course of a few years, seen about 10 percent of their gross income, and a considerably larger fraction of their take-home pay, vanish. Nor would they be excited when politicians came back to them for even more money to pay for little incidentals like our growing entitlement gap.

Nor, as Kevin suggests, could Democrats have simply hand-waved the cost away.

ObamaCare locked in the insurance-for-everything model, while adding on layer after layer of bureaucratic complexity on top of 51 uncompetitive insurance fiefdoms — then sold in part on “cost savings.”

It was never going to work, but even many of ObamaCare’s critics were surprise by how quickly that became apparent.

THE QUESTION IS: WHY? German anti-terror services ‘ranked Amri a low threat’

Counter-terrorism officials have a detailed file on Amri, they knew he was tightly linked to Germany’s radical Islamist network and had looked up instructions online on how to build pipe bombs, the newspaper reported.

The latest version of their file on Amri, which included information on his eight different identities, was updated on December 14 — just five days before he allegedly killed 12 people in the Berlin attack.

Duesseldorf police deemed Amri a Salafist and radical fundamentalist, while Dortmund police had rated him a sympathiser of the Islamic State group.

Amri had been a regular guest at a religious school in a Dortmund apartment run by a notorious radical known as Boban S. that was believed to be a recruitment ground for jihadists.

Nevertheless, on an eight-point scale assessing an individual’s potential danger, with “one” the highest threat, counter-terrorism experts rated him a “five” — meaning they considered an attack possible but unlikely.

Amri’s file was filled with red flags, and Moroccan intel had warned Germany twice about him.

WHY IN GOD’S NAME WOULD YOU WANT TO KEEP YOUR READING LISTS SECRET ANYWAY? Duke warns professors about emails from someone claiming to be a student, seeking information about their courses — many in fields criticized by some on the right.

Duke University professors took to social media on Tuesday to see if they could trust emails from someone claiming to be a student, seeking information about reading lists in their courses for the coming semester.

It is unclear how many Duke professors received the emails, and this is a time of year that some faculty members aren’t checking email regularly. But those who went public with the emails noticed that the courses about which the so-called student was seeking information all happened to be the types of classes that some right-wing bloggers like to criticize. The person sending the email sought information, for example, on courses called “Money, Sex and Power,” “Energy and Environmental Justice” and “Religion and Mass Incarceration.” The email messages, which did not come from a Duke email account, were very similar in asking for a reading list so the alleged student “could get a better idea of if the class is right for me.”

Professors who shared their emails said that they would try to answer such questions from a Duke student, but didn’t want to inadvertently help someone trying to attack either higher education generally or certain fields of study. Many cited the mood in academe in a time when new groups like Professor Watchlist are appearing. The list is for people to name faculty members who “promote anti-American values and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.”

On the other hand, if the Gender Studies reading list is overwhelmingly anti-male, it might support a “hostile educational environment” claim on behalf of male students, I suppose. But anyone can just visit the bookstore and photograph the reading lists with their phone. So if people are trying to hide something, they’re not doing a very good job.

Plus, from the comments: “If not wanting ‘to inadvertently help someone trying to attack either higher education generally or certain fields of study’ means not letting them know the content of your course, you’re either admitting that what you are teaching merits attack or that you are afraid of public debate.”

Yeah, all this stuff should really be online anyway. Public or private, these institutions are all supported by taxpayer money to a substantial degree.

KARL ROVE: A Preview of Obama’s Post-Presidency.

Mr. Obama still doesn’t understand that the GOP’s victories in ’10, ’14 and ’16 were repudiations of his policies. In the podcast, he argued that rural voters were wrong to vote Republican because his administration “devoted more attention, more focus, put more resources into rural America.” The idea that Democrats “abandoned the white working class,” he added, is “nonsense.” In other words, country folks should stay bought and the working class is too dumb to understand what’s good for them.

While saying it was time for “new voices and fresh legs,” Mr. Obama threatened that if “some foundational issues about our democracy” arise after he leaves office, he might “weigh in.” He also promised his presidential center would help young people become “organizers, journalists, politicians” by providing “tools for them to bring about progressive change.”

The IRS may get indigestion at such partisan use of a nonprofit, but Republicans should do cartwheels about these pledges, since it was Mr. Obama’s leadership that helped produce the biggest GOP dominance in nearly a century.

Mr. Obama will be the first ex-president since Woodrow Wilson to remain in Washington. Given the tone of his interviews, he could well become a carping, persistent presence in our nation’s capital.

We’re years past Carter being Obama’s best-case scenario.

PHILIPPINES DUTERTE: I threw suspect from helicopter.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has threatened to throw corrupt officials from helicopters mid-air, saying he has done it before.

“If you are corrupt, I will fetch you using a helicopter to Manila and I will throw you out,” said Mr Duterte, who is waging war on corruption and drugs.

It’s the latest claim by the president that he has personally carried out extra-judicial killings.
His spokesman played down the remarks, which he described as “urban legend”.

Earlier this month another spokesman Martin Andanar said his blunt-speaking boss should be taken “seriously but not literally” when he said he had shot dead three men while mayor of Davao.

Maybe he should be taken literally — nearly 6,000 Filipinos have been killed since May in Duterte’s extra-legal drug crackdown.

OF COURSE THEY DID: George Washington University Drops U.S. History Requirement — for History Majors!

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Drexel Freezes Faculty, Staff Staff Salaries Due To Decreased Enrollments. Drexel’s appeal is becoming more selective. And with that whole “white genocide” thing it may become more selective, still. . . .

DISCOVERY: You can go anywhere while wearing a Hi-Vis vest.

Well, they’re not expensive.

THE STATE REGULATORS SHOULD BE NAMED AND SHAMED: Interesting Supreme Court petition: State regulators retaliated against financial adviser for anti-Obama speech.

THE DEEP SEVENS RISE TO THE SURFACE: Satellite spots MASSIVE object hidden under the frozen wastes of Antarctica.

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