kenlacrosse

Call it the "Sergeant Schultz defense."  In response to almost any controversy, we are told that President Obama "knew nothing," recalling the famous line from Master Sergeant Hans Georg Schultz, the inept POW camp guard in the 60s TV sitcom, Hogan's Heroes.

Of course, the actor who played Schultz (John Banner) had a reason for feigning ignorance; he was potraying a character who was supposed to be bumbling.  Mr. Banner preferred it that way; he was a Jewish refugee who fled the Nazis in the late 1930s, a path followed by co-stars Werner Klemperer and  Leon Askin.  All three lost family members in the Holocaust, and they found it ironic that many of their on-screen roles were Nazis or German soldiers. 

So what is Mr. Obama's excuse?  Pick any scandal, from Benghazi to the IRS targeting of conservative groups, and the President was out of the loop.  Never mind that he participated in a White House meeting on the security of our diplomatic facilities the day before the attack in Libya (emphasis ours), or that the IRS commissioner visited 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on numerous occasions, while the agency was systematically denying tax-exempt status to various Tea Party organizations.  Borrowing a line from another famous know-nothing (Vichy police Captain Louis Renault in Cascablanca), Mr. Obama must have been "shocked....shocked to learn such things were going on during his administration.

Ordinarily, such sophistry wouldn't get past the mainstream media, but with most of the press corps carrying water for the administration, they've been willing to take Mr. Obama at his word, however dubious it may be.  So whenever the President runs into trouble, he simply borrows a page from the guard at Stalag 13, and feigns ignorance.  Of course, it certainly helps that the mainstream media has helped sustain this charade; whenever the President claims he learned about the latest scandal in the morning paper, the stenographers in the White House press corps go to dramatic lengths to figure why he was uniformed.

Consider the latest revelations from the NSA global surveillance scandal.  In recent weeks, we've learned that the agency has spied on virtually everyone, including the Pope; leaders in Brazil and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.  News that NSA intercepted Ms. Merkel's cell phone conversations prompted an angry call from the German leader to President Obama.  In response, we assume that he gave the same, lame explanation that he's been offering the American public.  That's right, the American President had no idea that the NSA was monitoring the communications of his foreign counterparts.

Naturally, that excuse has more holes than a block of Swiss.  First, isolating the phone traffic of the German Chancellor--out of billons of cell calls made daily--was a rather impressive feat of spycraft.  Secondly, the contents of such conversations aren't part of the daily haul, disseminated to all consumers with access to TS/SCI information, via JWICS.  If we had to guess, we'd say the Merkel conversations were part of a SAP/SAR initiative (Special Access Program/Special Access Required).  That means that only a handful of individuals in the U.S. government were briefed on the material, and participants had to sign a special non-disclosure agreement for that specific program.

It's also likely that such high-value intelligence found its way into the Presidential Daily Brief on a recurring basis.  So, if the reporting didn't identify Ms. Merkel by name, her identity was probably no secret, based on how the "source" was described.  If one of the participants in a phone call is identified as "a foreign leader," and the conversation relates to German government business, then it's fairly easy to deduce that we were eavesdropping on Ms. Merkel, even if you're as uncurious as Barack Obama.

And if that's no enough, there are enough senior intelligence officials involved with the PDB to answer any questions about sources and methods that might arise.  So far, no one in the press corps has bothered to ask if Mr Obama ever inquired about how we were getting such good information on the personal thoughts and positions of the German Chancellor.

To be fair, plausible denial is a standard tactic in the intelligence business.  When the Russians shot down that U-2 flown by Francis Gary Powers in 1960, Washington first claimed that the aircraft (and its CIA pilot) were on a weather reconnaissance mission.  Needless to say, that excuse didn't last very long, despite Washington's best efforts to distance the Eisenhower administration from a major intelligence embarassment.  The U-2 incident reminds us that even plausible cover stories are sometime overcome by the truth, and there's a certain moment when you have to come clean.  It will be curious to see how long Mr. Obama and his handlers cling to the "no nothing" defense.    

Indeed, Mr. Obama's denials may be undercut by his own spooks.  Intel vets basically quickly dismissed at the President's claims, according to Shane Harris and Noah Shachtman at Foreign Policy:

A former White House official, who served in a prior administration, said it was essentially impossible that the president wouldn't know foreign leaders were being monitored by U.S. intelligence agencies, and principally the NSA, as part of regular operations aimed at keeping him informed about diplomatic relations and negotiations. Information on foreign leaders that is based on recorded calls or other signals intelligence is "unique," the former official said, and its nature is obvious to anyone reading or hearing an intelligence report or receiving a briefing. 

"If you saw it, you'd know that it came out of somebody's mouth," the former official said. "I cannot believe that [Obama's national security staff] didn't brief the president on foreign leaders when he was going in to visit with them." Much of that information would have comes from signals intelligence. And the failure to inform the president that a piece of information came from spying on a leader could be a fireable offense, the former White House official said. "It's almost a dereliction not to tell him."

To date, no one has been dismissed from the White House staff--or the NSA--because Mr. Obama "wasn't informed" about surveillance activities directed against dozens of world leaders. 

Draw your own conclusions.

           

A funny thing happened while everyone was focused on the implosion of Obamacare. President Obama quietly abandoned all of his first term ambitions in the Middle East. The New York Times says the president has decided to reduce all of his policy goals in the region to three things.

At the United Nations last month, Mr. Obama laid out the priorities he has adopted as a result of the review. The United States, he declared, would focus on negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran, brokering peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians and mitigating the strife in Syria. Everything else would take a back seat. …

Not only does the new approach have little in common with the “freedom agenda” of George W. Bush, but it is also a scaling back of the more expansive American role that Mr. Obama himself articulated two years ago, before the Arab Spring mutated into sectarian violence, extremism and brutal repression.

He was going to heal the rift with Muslim world, remember? He was going to end al-Qaeda where it began, do you recall? He was going to build a world without nuclear weapons, it may be noted. Well forget that: it’s down to holding the final perimeter instead.

The Times fails to point out he is likely to fail in three out of the three self-chosen goals. It is improbable that he can broker a meaningful peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians, stop the Iranian nuclear bomb or shut down the Syrian civil war. Though they might describe it as “review” of foreign policy, it is actually a shutdown process; the act of shooting all the remaining sheep in the corral prior to boarding up the ranch and putting up the “for sale” sign.

His foreign policy meltdown may mirror the condition of his flagship domestic program which may also be in a terminal condition.  Scott Gottlieb at Forbes notes that lost amid the outrage over the non-functionality of the Obamacare website lies something even worse. Its designers overlooked that only the uninsurable are likely to stay in the Obamacare exchanges. Gottlieb calls it a “death spiral”.

Given the failed launch of Obamacare, there’s a real chance that the entire scheme falls into an “insurance death spiral” — but not as visibly (or rapidly) as the way these sorts of unsuccessful insurance pools usually unravel.

A death spiral happens when only the sickest beneficiaries get into an insurance pool, causing the cost of medical claims to rise, and in turn raising future premiums.

These higher premiums, in turn, dissuade healthier beneficiaries from buying coverage. This exacerbates the strains and makes sure the pool continues to attract only the sickest consumers who are most in need of the medical coverage, and willing to pay the rising premiums. This is how the downward spiral ensues. …

As the pool inside the exchange becomes older, sicker, and costlier, more plans will have an economic incentive to get out of the Obamacare market altogether.

13 NUTRITION LIES that made the world sick and fat.

(Steven Hayward)

Six.  (6).  That’s how many people enrolled in Obamacare on the first day.  Six.  That’s not even a rounding error failure.  SIX!

Obamacare is shaping up as the single biggest public policy failure since. . . No, start over: it is the largest public policy failure ever.  It’s the Tacoma Narrows Bridge of public policy–it’s going to wobble worse and worse, and then . . . well, watch the video:

PUSHBACK: BROWN UNIVERSITY PROF. RECALLS WHEN A REAL FASCIST VISITED CAMPUS, CONDEMNS RAY KELLY SHOUTDOWN. “Yours was an act of cowardice and fear, unworthy of any of the causes you claim to hold dear.”

Love, love, love this — but wish it were in Washington, DC instead of San Antonio.

More details:

The United States’ first national monument to a soldier’s best friend, recognizing the sacrifices of dogs in combat, was dedicated by the U.S. military on Monday.

Inscribed with the words “Guardians of America’s Freedom,” the nine-foot tall bronze statue at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, features four dogs and a handler.

“These dogs were patriots just as much as anybody else who served,” said military dog handler John Baker of Fallon, Nevada, whose 212th Military Police Company Detachment A was known as “Hell on Paws.”

Lackland is home to the U.S. Armed Forces center that has trained dogs for all branches of the military since 1958.

I get it. The dogs are trained in SA. But the monument would get millions more visitors in DC.

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

(Scott Johnson)

A distinguished writer and friend whom we greatly admire writes with timely thoughts based on painful experience, submitted for your consideration:

I’m always searching for a unified field theory of liberalism that reconciles its craziness, destructiveness and sanctimony. I thought the “liberalism is a mental disorder” meme came close, but in the end was too easy. It’s like having a madman as a villain in a story–you don’t have to explain, motivate or justify his behavior. It’s the difference between “Friday the 13th” and “Crime and Punishment.”

A recent sad experience with a friend undergoing rehab has left me with another analogue. I now think liberalism is an addiction and displays all the behaviors commonly associated with addictive behavior.

Well, not “liberalism” per se. That policy-agenda is really an elaborate metaphorical delusion built to camouflage the true drug these poor souls crave so desperately: moral superiority.

It’s as powerful as heroin or cocaine. It supplies a terrific high: all sense of personal failure, betrayal, guilt, ineffectiveness, irrelevance, of being nothing and nobody, disappears in a flash. Instead our hero feels extraordinarily good about himself. He is helping. He is compassionate. He is without sin. He is sensitive, caring, part of the solution and not the problem. He feels handsome, daring and heroic. He thinks it will get him laid. How could he not love this?

He cannot see the harm he is doing, either at the micro level or at the cataclysmic macro level; he cannot see how his “generosity” with other people’s money, for example, has devastated the black community, turned it bitter, hopeless, impulsive, violent and addicted itself to free stuff from the gub’mint as well as the crutch of “racis” to justify everything.

But you have seen this most explicitly in the last few weeks, as Obamacare, a hopelessly idiotic delusional program meant to redistribute wealth (in the form of medical care) to the unfortunates who’ve never paid a tax in their lives, has crashed and burned. As anybody who knows anything about the addictive state knows, when the addict is threatened with the cut-off of his supply, he becomes a monster.

I saw this with my friend, who it turned out had been lying to me for years about his addictions. He loved me; I kept him alive. But he could not help himself from using me and feeding me a tapestry of lies to keep the money coming. I thought I was “helping,” just as liberals think they are helping. But I learned, finally, that I was just enabling. This is a lesson liberals will never learn.

As the collapse of Obamacare reveals, they go into reflexive monster mode. Like any addict, they will lie, cheat, steal, even become violent when their supply is threatened. They have no moral qualms about betraying their closest friends because the moral part of them is dead. They see only the end of their high and that becomes the defining issue of their life. They will do anything to protect it. That is why they are such wily opponents and such aggressive defenders of what the whole of the rational world now realizes was fabrication, delusion and ultimately fantasy.

So if we look to liberate them from the agony they don’t even know they suffer from, we must look to the known cures of addiction. Terrible, hard work, draining and demoralizing, but I think we are up to it.

DON’T MAUNDER ON TRYING TO MINIMIZE THIS: Solar activity heads for lowest low in four centuries. “Lockwood thinks there is now a 25 per cent chance of a repetition of the last grand minimum, the late 17th century Maunder Minimum, when there were no sunspots for 70 years. Two years ago, Lockwood put the chances of this happening at less than 10 per cent.” But, he says, human warming will prevent a Little Ice Age.

Er, Fallen Angels was science fiction, right guys? Right?

(John Hinderaker)

With Obamacare rapidly turning into the debacle that Republicans always warned it would be, it is entertaining to watch Democrats furiously trying to spin reality away. This piece by Todd Purdum in Politico is a classic of the genre: “The Obamacare sabotage campaign.” It’s all the Republicans’ fault, don’t you know:

To the undisputed reasons for Obamacare’s rocky rollout — a balky website, muddied White House messaging and sudden sticker shock for individuals forced to buy more expensive health insurance — add a less acknowledged cause: calculated sabotage by Republicans at every step.

That may sound like a left-wing conspiracy theory — and the Obama administration itself is so busy defending the indefensible early failings of its signature program that it has barely tried to make this case. But there is a strong factual basis for such a charge.

How so? Purdum complains that Republicans appealed the constitutionality of Obamacare to the Supreme Court (where, of course, it survived), and Republican states declined to exercise their option to set up state exchanges. That’s a pathetically weak indictment, but Purdum’s real grievance is the Republicans’ bad attitude: they “with[held] any support for the new law,” waged a “war to stop Obamacare,” and “sent…burdensome queries to local hospitals and nonprofits.” Talk about sabotage!

All of that is just humorous, but this is deeply contemptible:

The GOP faithful then kept up their crusade past the president’s reelection, in a pattern of “massive resistance” not seen since the Southern states’ defiance of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954.

Because Obamacare is settled law! Like, say, the Bush tax cuts.

Of all Purdum’s complaints, this may be the silliest:

[J]ust last week, Rush Limbaugh advised his listeners that they could avoid penalties for failing to buy mandated insurance by arranging to avoid federal income tax refunds, since the IRS can only levy fines by withholding refunds, not by liens or criminal sanctions.

Rush got the idea, I believe, from us. But how dumb is Purdum’s whine? According to him, Republicans have a duty to help publicize some aspects of Obamacare–he complains that “some [Republican] states refused to do anything at all to educate the public about the law”–but they also have a duty to keep some portions of the act secret, like the fact that there isn’t actually any need to pay the mandated tax.

Purdum concludes by complaining that those pesky Republicans still haven’t given up:

The conservative battle against the Affordable Care Act continues on multiple fronts…

Obama himself has occasionally expressed frustration at the GOP’s implacable resistance to even the smallest gestures of cooperation on the law.

“In a normal political environment, it would have been easier for me to simply call up the speaker and say, ‘You know what, this is a tweak that doesn’t go to the essence of the law.’ It has to do with, for example, are we able to simplify the attestation of employers as to whether they’re already providing health insurance or not. ‘It looks like there may be some better ways to do this. Let’s make a technical change to the law.’

“That would be the normal thing that I would prefer to do,” the president said. “But we’re not in a normal atmosphere around here when it comes to Obamacare.”

Well, no: that is partly because of the manner in which Obamacare was enacted. Democrats drafted the bill in secret, conspicuously refusing any input by Republicans. They jammed it through Congress by suspending normal procedural rules during a brief moment when they controlled the House and had 60 votes in the Senate, without a single Republican vote in either chamber. Beyond that, the law is a disaster on the merits and is deeply unpopular with the American people. So it is a little much to expect Republicans to support the measure as a matter of “constituent service.”

For months, the White House has hoped that every politician’s instinct to render effective constituent service would trump political resistance to the law among Republicans.

Can the Democrats sell the idea that Obamacare’s failure is the Republicans’ fault? No. I doubt that even the press will lend them much support on this one. Barack Obama’s party owns Obamacare lock, stock and barrel, and no one will believe that the problem with the law is that Republicans have consistently opposed it.

First time accepted submitter Paddy_O'Furniture writes "Four prominent scientists have penned a letter urging those concerned about climate change to support nuclear energy, saying that renewables such as wind and solar will not be sufficient to meet the world's energy needs. Among the authors is James Hansen, a former top NASA scientist, whose 1988 testimony before the United States Congress helped launch discussions of global warming into the mainstream."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

LARRY KUDLOW: Liberal entitlement-state dream is crumbling.

As a 60-something, relatively healthy person, I don’t want lactation and maternity services, abortion services, speech therapy, mammograms, fertility treatments or Viagra. I don’t want it. So why should I have to tear up my existing health-care plan, and then buy a plan with far more expensive premiums and deductibles, and with services I don’t need or want?

Why? Because Team Obama says I have to. And that’s not much of a reason. It’s not freedom.

Fortunately, NBC News pulled the plug this past week on President Barack Obama’s promise that “if you like your own plan, you can keep it.” Ditto for keeping your own doctor. The plug was pulled because NBC learned that Team Obama knew—for three years—that stiff new regulations would prevent the grandfathering of existing health-care plans. And not just a few plans. But plans that could affect as many as 15 million individuals.

The day after that bombshell hit, the president tried to blame insurers rather than regulatory overkill for this Obamacare shortfall. Yet both the public and the mainstream media were having none of it. In what may turn out to be a landmark moment, Americans and the media at large have turned against the president and Obamacare.

There does seem to be a shift.

JAMES TARANTO: Another ObamaCare Victim: One man’s insurance cancellation is a cause for Schadenfreude.

He liked his health-insurance plan–or close enough: “It was there, and it did its job.” He seems to have believed President Obama, who said–and said and said and said–that if you like your health insurance, you can keep it.

Now our protagonist has become “one of the hundreds of thousands of people whose insurance coverage was canceled for not complying with the terms of the Affordable Care Act,” the euphemism for ObamaCare. “As a result, not only will I pay more, but I have had to divert many otherwise useful hours to futzing around with websites and paperwork.”

Before ObamaCare, he paid $668 a month for a high-deductible plan. He actually managed to get through to his “state” exchange (he lives in the District of Columbia) and price a more or less comparable plan. It’s $865 a month, and the deductibles are higher, by $600 within the plan’s network and $1,200 without. By our calculations that means he will pay $2,364 more a year in premiums, and a total of $4,164 more if he maxes out on the deductibles.

Don’t get him wrong. He doesn’t want your pity. “I am not presenting myself as any kind of hard-luck case,” he insists. “Maybe from some social justice perspective it’s perfectly fair and reasonable to load all the costs of health reform onto people like me.”

Still, it hurts him that “this administration has been less than candid about what those costs would be.” And he’s not sure all people like him will be quite so magnanimous about what the Daily Beast headline calls “The Obamacare Ripoff.”

“Those Washingtonians who earn too much to qualify for subsidies probably do not regard themselves as wealthy,” he writes. “An extra $2,400 a year to keep a high-deductible policy may feel to many of them like–if not a hardship–then certainly a serious nuisance.” He adds that those people “probably voted for President Obama” and “probably believed his promise that the ACA would deliver improvements for them personally.”

Now this is especially rich because in 2010, just after the House sent the Senate’s ObamaCare bill to the president’s desk, Frum wrote a blog post titled “Waterloo” that was a work of either liberal triumphalism or conservative despair, depending on where Frum’s true sympathies lie. . . . Frum in 2010 didn’t criticize the Republicans for allowing the Democrats to achieve unchallengeable majority status. Instead he criticized them for opposing ObamaCare rather than making peace with it.

Heh.

MEGAN MCARDLE: What Everyone Knew About ObamaCare And Wouldn’t Say.

It’s absolutely true that every policy wonk who was writing or speaking about the law in 2009 and 2010 understood that it would mean premiums going up for at least some people, many of whom would lose insurance that they would have preferred to keep. Who it would be depended a bit on how the law unfolded, of course, but at a minimum, young, healthy people who made more than $46,000 a year could expect to pay higher premiums for the same level of coverage. They had to; mathematically, it was not possible for coverage to expand and everyone’s premiums to go down — not unless you spent more in premium subsidies than the government could afford.

But I think it’s also clearly true that the majority of the public did not understand this. In 2008, the Barack Obama campaign told them that their premiums would go down under the new health-care law. And the law’s supporters believed it. . . .

The administration reiterated that, in Obama’s words, “We will keep this promise to the American people. If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period. If you like your health-care plan, you will be able to keep your health-care plan. Period.” They also promised that the average family would save $2,500 a year on premiums. There was no fine print about how some folks would lose their insurance, be forced into narrower doctor networks, and see premiums rise, even though they seem to have known what was going to happen.

And the wonk community did not exactly hasten to disabuse them. The risks of higher premiums for some were acknowledged in an aside, but they were not headlined. Unless you were reading volumes of writing about health care very carefully indeed, it wasn’t hard to miss that little detail — at least one former Democratic staffer whose boss voted for the law seems to have been unaware that this was a possibility until her rates increased.

For that matter, I still see regular commenters on the liberal wonk blogs that I read repeating the canards about cost savings from uncompensated care, preventive medicine and so forth.

It was a necessary lie, and the useful idiots are still parroting it.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: As Interest Fades in the Humanities, Colleges Worry. “Many distinguished humanities professors feel their status deflating.”

There’s nothing wrong with the humanities, when pursued with rigor; the world needs more people who can read, write, and think critically. But the currency has been diluted for years, and consumers are finally catching on. And if you think that the problem is that “inequality and climate change” aren’t being addressed in the English departments, then you’re part of the problem.

Plus this: “Students who are anxious about finishing their degree, and avoiding debt, sometimes see the breadth requirements as getting in their way.” Yes, well, that’s what happens when you jack up tuition without mercy for decades on end.

Oh fer cryin’ out loud:

A school administrator at has warned students at Quinnipiac University that “insensitive costumes” such as “a Mexican, hooker, gangster, or promiscuous nurse” are “as offensive as writing the ‘N-word’ on a blackboard.”

“Costumes that exaggerate, stereotype, generalize a particular ethnic culture [or] gender, [are] insensitive,” said the Connecticut school’s Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs and Chief Diversity Officer Diane Ariza, according to The Quinnipiac Chronicle, the school’s official newspaper.

It’s “slutty nurse.” SLUTTY. Or sometimes “sexy nurse.” Even “naughty nurse” will do. But “promiscuous nurse?” This gal could take the fun out of… well, out of a pretty girl wearing a fun, trashy Halloween costume.

You ready for the shocker? This meddlesome busybody killjoy’s real job title is “Chief Diversity Officer.” I’d suggest that some smartass student at Quinnipiac dress up tonight as a sexy chief diversity officer, but I think we all know such a thing is contradiction in terms.

I despise vandalism — it’s just nihilism given pubescent physical form. But there is not enough TP in the world for that woman’s house.

And that goes for this woman, too:

Most children expect to get candy when they go trick-or-treating. But, if they stop by one Fargo, North Dakota woman’s house, they might get an unexpected “fat letter.”

A station manager told valleynewslive.com in Fargo that a woman identified as Cheryl called into the Y-94 morning program saying that she wanted to make a stand against obesity during Halloween. Her idea? Give children who had extra pounds on them a letter instead of a sweet treat.

“You (sic) child is, in my opinion, moderately obese and should not be consuming sugar treats to the extent of some children this Halloween season,” the letter reads. “My hope is that you will step up as an adult and ration candy this Halloween and not allow your child to continue these unhealthy eating habits.”

My advice to Cheryl? Turn off your lights tonight and just pretend like you’re not home. And have a Hershey bar while you’re sitting there alone in the dark.

This is Halloween. It’s supposed to be silly and fun — for everybody.

But busybodies don’t know how to have fun and want to make damn sure nobody else has any, either.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Georgia Tech’s new online Master’s program draws wave of applications. “The Georgia Tech program is the first master’s degree from a top-ranked university based on the technology that drives MOOCs. The only difference is it is not ‘open,’ or free, as a MOOC is traditionally defined. Students have applied from 50 states and 80 foreign countries, according to the school. To graduate, they will never have to step foot on campus and will pay about $6,600, compared with about $44,000 for residential students.”

THIS DOESN’T SOUND GOOD: Study: Bat-to-Human Leap Likely for SARS-Like Virus. “A decade after SARS swept through the world and killed more than 750 people, scientists have made a troubling discovery: A very close cousin of the SARS virus lives in bats and it can likely jump directly to people.”

Below is an inspiring video of a 64 year old great grandfather who didn’t begin exercising until age 55. He now performs bodyweight feats that many half his age could never dream of doing. To suggest that his quality of life has improved since he began training is perhaps the greatest understatement of all.

What I enjoyed most about his regimen is that he does the majority of it outside on the bars. There is no dependence on state of the art equipment or facilities. He has literally become his own gym. He can train wherever he goes.

Ironically, while this 64 year old outperforms most young men, training gurus around the world continue to complicate physical fitness. Perhaps more people should follow this man’s example as opposed to those whose primary interest isn’t your well being, but rather the size of their wallet.

It is stories of those like this great grandfather that need more attention. If we all encouraged more people to get up and begin moving, many of today’s health related problems would dramatically improve. Physical fitness is not complicated. The most important aspect of getting in shape is to get up and get moving. There is no single best way. Several roads lead to the same destination. Rather than confusing those who wish to begin the journey, let’s instead focus more attention towards getting people to actually begin.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPG94VMWPww

+++++

Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification. – Martin H. Fischer

HISTORY: What Happened To All of Obama’s Technology Czars?

As usual, “screw up, move up” is standard bureaucratic operating procedure.

Let’s start with the “federal chief information officer.” In 2009, Obama named then 34-year-old “whiz kid” Vivek Kundra to the post overseeing $80 billion in government IT spending. At 21, Kundra was convicted of misdemeanor theft. He stole a handful of men’s shirts from a J.C. Penney’s department store and ran from police in a failed attempt to evade arrest. Whitewashing the petty thief’s crimes, Obama instead effused about his technology czar’s “depth of experience in the technology arena.”

Just as he was preparing to take the federal job, an FBI search warrant was issued at Kundra’s workplace. He was serving as the chief technology officer of the District of Columbia. Two of Kundra’s underlings, Yusuf Acar and Sushil Bansal, were charged in an alleged scheme of bribery, kickbacks, ghost employees and forged timesheets. Kundra went on leave for five days and was then reinstated after the feds informed him that he was neither a subject nor a target of the investigation. . . .

A mere 29 months after taking the White House job, Kundra left for a cushy fellowship at Harvard University. In January 2012, he snagged an executive position at Salesforce.com, which touted his “demonstrated track record of driving innovation.”

In 2011, Obama appointed former Microsoft executive and FCC managing director Steven VanRoekel to succeed Kundra. At the time, he promised “to make sure that the pace of innovation in the private sector can be applied to the model that is government.” Mission not accomplished.

Next up: Obama’s “U.S. chief technology officer.” In May 2009, the president appointed Aneesh Chopra “to promote technological innovation to help the country meet its goals such as job creation, reducing health care costs and protecting the homeland. Together with Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra, their jobs are to make the government more effective, efficient and transparent.”

Chopra’s biggest accomplishment? A humiliating cameo in December 2009 on “The Daily Show” with liberal comedian Jon Stewart, who mocked the administration’s pie-in-the-sky Open Government Initiative. Chopra resigned three years later, ran unsuccessfully for Virginia lieutenant governor and now works as a “senior fellow” at the far-left Center for American Progress, which is run by former Clinton administration hit man turned Obama helpmate John Podesta.

More comedy at the link.

(Steven Hayward)

From a Power Line reader in Iowa:

My insurance agent told me a week ago that I will be receiving notice that my insurance policy is not ACA compliant and will be discontinued. He told me my option is to start shopping for an Obamacare (ACA compliant) policy.

The policy is just on me. I am a 61 year old male with no health issues. I asked my agent, “Why is this policy not compliant with the ACA?”

Answer: “Your policy doesn’t include maternity care”.

Since I was able to go through strict underwriting standards to buy my current policy, I figured that on the exchange I will not be able to get a policy without paying significantly more since I will get no credit for being in good health. Furthermore I, a 61 year old male, will be paying for maternity coverage.

I hear those on the left saying that my policy is inferior and that I was “swindled” by buying such a product.  Not having maternity care for a 61 year old male hardly makes my policy inferior.

“If you like your policy, you can keep your policy.”

Yeah, right.

I then asked my agent to get a quote for me for an ACA compliant policy. The ACA compliant policy will cost $106 more per month or $1272 more per year.  And this ACA compliant policy will more than double the annual out-of-pocket expense from my $5,000 per year currently to $10,600 per year if I use out-of-network medical care.

To be fair, the ACA compliant policy does include maternity care for me.

“The average family will see an annual reduction in their premium of $2500 per year”

Yeah, right.

[Name withheld]

Urbandale, IA

ROBERT HEINLEIN NEEDS YOUR VOTE.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: “I Quit Academia,” an Important, Growing Subgenre of American Essays. “In its insularity and single-mindedness, academe is also very similar to a fundamentalist religion (or, dare I say, cult), and thus those who abdicate often feel compelled to confess. But there’s an important way that Ernst’s essay distinguishes itself: Most I Quitters are like me, which is to say failed academics, or like Lord, whose disillusion hit her midway down the tenure track. Ernst is part of the sub-subgenre of quitters who did the unthinkable, giving up tenure. He joins, for example, scientist Terran Lane, who left the University of New Mexico for Google, and writer Anne Trubek, who ditched idyllic Oberlin when freelance writing was able to pay her bills.”

Original essay here. “I’ve had one foot in the academic world and the other in the business world for a few years. It’s been fascinating to observe the differences between the values of a small start-up and a large university. . . . What makes me pessimistic about my own university and public universities in the United States in general is that their inability to adapt isn’t due simply to bad leadership or an unfavorable economy. It’s based on structural features that are self-reinforcing.”

All is proceeding as I have foreseen.

SO EVEN SOME OF THE (FEW) “COMPLETED APPLICATIONS” ARE BOGUS? Healthcare.gov processed an application I did not submit.

Sue the gay camp counselors! Seriously:

Scarborough, however, was quick to remind everyone of his harsher approach to treating homosexuality in the America. “Peter, the whole issue of a class action lawsuit, you and I have talked about this a little bit, I just wonder if you’ve explored that, talked to anyone about it.”

The proposed lawsuit would be based on the negative health benefits associated with homosexuality. It would aim to target counselors and others who encouraged kids to “just be gay,” when those kids went on to contract HIV.

I’m no longer shocked at the manic idiocy of busybodies, but this guy does show a special level of ignorance regarding HIV.

EQUIPPING POLICE with body cameras. “It’s hard to argue with video evidence from a camera that records everything a police officer sees – and it keeps the cops in line too.”

The New York Times describes a high level meeting aimed at getting to the bottom of the disastrous failure of the Obamacare website. The mystery deepened when it emerged that none of the contractors was in the slightest degree response for its non-function.

Contractors that built President Obama’s health insurance marketplace point fingers at one another and at the government, but each insists that it is not responsible for the problems that infuriated millions of Americans trying to buy insurance on the Web site, according to testimony prepared for a Congressional hearing on Thursday. …

Cheryl R. Campbell, a senior vice president of CGI Federal, a unit of the CGI Group … said … he federal exchange, she said, is “not a standard consumer Web site,” but “a complex transaction processor” that must simultaneously help millions of Americans shop for insurance and enroll in health plans. It must communicate instantaneously with computer systems developed by other contractors and with databases of numerous federal agencies and more than 170 insurance carriers qualified to do business in the 36 states where the federal marketplace operates, she said.

The president was just as surprised as anyone else, as health secretary Kathleen Sebelius attested to CNN.  She told the network when the chief executive  received reports of unexpected problems with his flagship website only after it had been launched.

In an exclusive interview with Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta asked when the President first learned about the considerable issues with the Obamacare website. Sebelius responded that it was in “the first couple of days” after the site went live October 1.

“But not before that?” Gupta followed up.

To which Sebelius replied, “No, sir.”

It just inexplicably went bad.

However as soon as the president learned of the site’s problems he swung into action, taking the opportunity to ask his many supporters for money to fix it. The Daily Caller writes

President Barack Obama is using the disastrous crash of his Obamacare website to extract cash and volunteer hours from his supporters.

“By now, you’ve probably heard that the website has not worked as smoothly as it was supposed to,” Obama told his supporters in an email sent out late Tuesday.

“That’s why I need your help,” he said, in a video pitch that links to an online fundraiser.

“The other side has already spent a whopping $400 million in anti-Obamacare TV ads,” says the language on the fundraiser site. “We don’t have to beat that, but we need to have the resources to fight back. Make a donation to support OFA today.”

With that solicited money the search for suspects can range further afield. The Center for American Progress Action Fund has its suspicions and it vowed to “expose the sabotage campaign in its many forms. Some methods of sabotage are obvious; other methods are more stealth. All of these methods, however, have one purpose: to make implementing Obamacare impossible, and thereby stop people from gaining access to better health coverage at more-affordable costs.”

They must suspect who the saboteurs are, though the Center for American progress has so far refused to name the malefactors. Meanwhile it emerged that persons unknown — perhaps the same miscreants — have may have implicated the administration in the wiretapping of German chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone. USA Today reports that the German Foreign Minister summoned US ambassador John Emerson to explain whether and why her phone is bugged.

Emerson will be the second U.S. ambassador ordered to report to officials of a major EU country this week as a result of the ongoing fallout over the NSA files leaked by government contractor Edward Snowden.

Charles H. Rivkin was summoned to meet with French officials after a major French newspaper reported that the National Security Agency had collected tens of millions of communications from French citizens, and had spied on diplomats.

For those who’ve never heard the term, Foreign Policy describes what happens when an ambassador gets “summoned”.

what happens during a diplomatic summons, anyway? In short, a country’s ambassador gets an earful from a foreign ministry, in a kind of high-level, public show of disapproval….

Generally, a summons will include two to four diplomats on either side. But if an ambassador comes in to meet with a cabinet minister or a massive delegation, she knows she is in real diplomatic hot water.

Two US ambassadors summoned being summoned within days of each other by France and Germany signifies that they are not happy about something. If only Obama knew who was causing the trouble.

According to the BBC “President Obama had assured Chancellor Merkel when he visited in June that German citizens were not being spied upon”. This only proves that whoever did it, Obama hasn’t the foggiest notion who it is.  However Obama is certain to leave no stone unturned in his effort to discover the root causes for these embarrassing failures.

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(Scott Johnson)

Washington Post Fact Checker Glenn Kessler gave United States Senator Tom Coburn the treatment yesterday. He awarded Senator Coburn three Pinocchios for Senator Coburn’s assertion that the United States has $128 trillion in unfunded liabilities. You may have caught the Wall Street Journal’s Saturday Interview with Stanley Druckenmiller; Druckenmiller actually provides a higher number (more here).

I reached out yesterday to Senator Coburn’s office for a response. Coburn spokesman John Hart responded:

Glenn Kessler’s piece on Dr. Coburn’s remarks today was more of a “gotcha” editorial than a fact check. According to Kessler’s own standard, Three Pinocchios means he found: “Significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions.” Yet nowhere in his post does he precisely define Dr. Coburn’s factual error or obvious contradiction. In fact, Kessler says he “could not locate that data” and asked for more information about the number in question but “did not receive a reply.” Yet, in the absence of evidence Kessler admits he couldn’t locate he nonetheless accused Dr. Coburn of committing a “significant factual error and/or obvious contradiction.”

Moreover, when Kessler went the website (www.usdebtclock.org) where Dr. Coburn found the data he confirmed it was very close to what Dr. Coburn claimed – $126 trillion.

It’s also worth noting that economists have cited even higher numbers. According to over 1,000 economists, including 15 Nobel Laureates, our real long term shortfall is $222 trillion. Their letter in support of the INFORM Act (S. 1351 | H.R. 2967), a bipartisan bill that reveals the full size our country’s fiscal imbalance, is here.

Finally, Kessler’s real objection seems to be that Dr. Coburn did not provide what Kessler believes to be “proper context.” It’s fine for a fact-checker to have his own opinion about proper context, but a disagreement about context does not rise to the level of “significant factual error and/or obvious contradiction.” The reality is TV appearances provide a guest very little time to provide context. The context in which Dr. Coburn made his statement reflected his concern that we are living way beyond our means and are making promises to future generations that we can’t keep without major reforms. That sentiment is shared across the political spectrum with the exception, perhaps, of interest groups on the left who like to build demagogic arguments around entitlement reform.

So we give Kessler Three Pinocchios for substituting his opinion for fact.

We thank Mr. Hart for his gracious response to our inquiry.

AND JUST LAST WEEK HE WAS ALL SURRENDER, DOROTHY! Daniel Henninger: Obama’s Credibility Is Melting:

All of a sudden, from Washington to Riyadh, Barack Obama’s credibility is melting.

Amid the predictable collapse the past week of HealthCare.gov’s too-complex technology, not enough notice was given to Sen. Marco Rubio’s statement that the chances for success on immigration reform are about dead. Why? Because, said Sen. Rubio, there is “a lack of trust” in the president’s commitments. . . .

When belief in the average politician’s word diminishes, the political world marks him down and moves away. With the president of the United States, especially one in his second term, the costs of the credibility markdown become immeasurably greater. Ask the Saudis.

Last weekend the diplomatic world was agog at the refusal of Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah to accept a seat on the U.N. Security Council. Global disbelief gave way fast to clear understanding: The Saudis have decided that the United States is no longer a reliable partner in Middle Eastern affairs. . . .

Bluntly, Mr. Obama’s partners are concluding that they cannot do business with him. They don’t trust him. Whether it’s the Saudis, the Syrian rebels, the French, the Iraqis, the unpivoted Asians or the congressional Republicans, they’ve all had their fill of coming up on the short end with so mercurial a U.S. president. And when that happens, the world’s important business doesn’t get done. It sits in a dangerous and volatile vacuum.

Yeah, but Mitt Romney once put a dog carrier on top of his car.

A SUCCESS FOR OBAMA’S SPACE POLICY: Space “Program” Increasingly In Private Control. And no, that’s not ironic. Obama’s space policy really is a success. I wish he’d take the same approach elsewhere. . . .