Monthly Archives: October 2013
October 26, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
Hundreds of thousands of Americans have already lost their health insurance due to Obamacare, and soon millions will have lost it. Conservative commentators have noted that, from all that appears, more people have lost their health insurance than have signed up for plans in health insurance exchanges. The comparison is specious, however, because those who lose their insurance become new candidates for the exchanges. Indeed, having previously been insured, and
»
October 26, 2013 — 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
»
October 26, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Well, I’ve obviously failed here at Colorado. You may have heard that the dean of students has put forth the edict that we should be sensitive about our choice of Halloween costume: For example, the CU-Boulder community has in the past witnessed and been impacted by people who dressed in costumes that included blackface or sombreros/serapes; people have also chosen costumes that portray particular cultural identities as overly sexualized, such
»
October 26, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Fox News Channel’s Megyn Kelly grilled Ezekiel Emanuel last night on the foundational lies of Obamacare, with a focus on Obama’s relentlessly repeated falsehood that if you like your health plan, you can keep it. The older brother of Rahm Emanuel and Ari Emanuel, Ezekiel Emanuel is a physician, a former Obama adviser, a vocal proponent of Obamacare and a big advocate of the government takeover of health care. When
»
October 25, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
The Obama administration is pressing ahead with its plan to impose racial quotas on the financial industry via the Dood-Frank law. Dodd-Frank requires agencies with financial sector regulatory responsibilities to “establish an Office of Minority and Women Inclusion” that will develop diversity and inclusion standards for workplaces and contracting. Accordingly, these agencies have published in the Federal Register a proposed “Policy Statement Establishing Joint Standards for Assessing the Diversity Policies
»
October 25, 2013 — John Hinderaker
The Left’s obsession with Charles and David Koch continues unabated. Today’s exhibit: this New York Times article on a press conference by California campaign finance officials on a fine that they levied against an Arizona group called the Center to Protect Patient Rights. For the Times, the Kochs are the story; the article is headlined, “Group Linked to Kochs Admits to Campaign Finance Violations.” The violation occurred in connection with
»
October 25, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
Yuval Levin has a very important piece up on NRO about the prospect of an insurance death spiral under Obamacare. My takeaway is that we’re more likely to see a runaway cost spiral than an insurance death spiral. Levin begins by explaining the death spiral scenario: An insurance death spiral, or adverse selection spiral, would be a kind of second-order consequence of the website fiasco: The fact that it is
»
October 25, 2013 — Steven Hayward
At the risk of sounding like a bad homage to Abbott & Costello, who knew that The Who’s Roger Daltrey is a Churchill fan? From a press release from Speaker John Boehner’s office: Roger Daltrey to Perform at Winston Churchill Ceremony October 24, 2013 WASHINGTON, DC – Multi-platinum recording artist Roger Daltrey, CBE, founder and lead singer of English rock band The Who, will perform next week at a U.S. Capitol ceremony honoring
»
October 25, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
Dick Durbin lied when he claimed that a Republican House leader told President Obama, “I can’t even stand to look at you.” Indeed, there’s no reason to believe that any Republican House leader even feels that way. But it’s probably true that many members of the House can’t stand to deal with either Obama or such slimy Senate operators as Harry Reid and the aforementioned Durbin. And this sentiment may
»
October 25, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Scott is way ahead of me this morning, owning to his time zone advantage, in flagging the latest news about the Obamacare faceplant, though we should also flag the Wall Street Journal‘s lead story today about how problems of “coordination” are behind the trouble. If anyone in Obamaland had ever read Hayek, like I’ve been saying, they’d have known this would founder on “coordination” problems. Kim Strassell’s Friday WSJ column
»
October 25, 2013 — Steven Hayward
I sometimes say that America’s social and political decline began with the end of the great Chevrolet ad campaign of my childhood, the one that had the famous tag line, “See the U-S-A, in a Chev-ro-let!” It channeled that whole “sea-to-shinig-sea, amber-waves-of-grain” thing, along with the image of the independent American family. By the time I got my driver’s license in the 1970s, Sunday drives were a thing of the
»
October 25, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Yesterday I asserted that Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin made up the charge that a Republican leader told President Obama in a meeting during the shutdown: “I cannot even stand to look at you.” Durbin himself did not attend the meeting at which the offending statement was supposedly made and the White House itself pulled the rug out from Senator Durbin. Someone wants us to believe that Durbin was carrying
»
October 25, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Yesterday’s adventures brought us the appearance of the contractors for the Obamacare Web site that, according to supporters of the law (or “law” or, until recently, sacred “law of the land”) has been plagued by a dire combination of glitches and kinks. The contractor witnesses appeared before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The Wall Street Journal’s account of the witnesses’ testimony is secured snugly behind the Journal’s jealously guarded
»
October 24, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
I wrote here about how Douglas Gansler, Maryland’s attorney general and a candidate for governor, regularly ordered state troopers assigned to drive him to turn on the lights and sirens on the way to routine appointments, directing them to speed, run red lights and bypass traffic jams by using the shoulder. Like a teenager might do, given the opportunity. Now, comes further evidence that Gansler is a kid at heart.
»
October 24, 2013 — John Hinderaker
With regard to the Senate’s immigration bill, Barack Obama said this morning: If there’s a good reason not to pass this common-sense reform, I haven’t heard it. So anyone still standing in the way of this bipartisan reform should at least have to explain why. This is classic Obama: it is possible that he is so lazy and so disengaged from reality that he literally has not paid attention to
»
October 24, 2013 — John Hinderaker
The news from Saudi Arabia is simply stunning: the kingdom, one of America’s traditional Gulf allies, has refused to take a seat on the United Nations’ Security Council. Its head of intelligence describes the king’s refusal as “a message for the U.S., not the U.N.” The Washington Post’s David Ignatius explains how disastrous the Obama administration’s policies have been, in the eyes of the Saudis: Saudi concern about U.S. policy
»
October 24, 2013 — John Hinderaker
Today on his radio show, Rush Limbaugh picked up on the theme of a post I did last night:
»
