Monthly Archives: October 2013

Lies of Obamacare: Whopper City revisited

Featured image On her Fox News show The Kelly File, Megyn Kelly is running as fast as she can to keep up with the lies of Obamacare. On her Thursday evening show she had on Avik Roy to discuss his Forbes column “Obama Officials In 2010: 93 Million Americans Will Be Unable To Keep Their Health Plans Under Obamacare.” The video is below. »

Six. Six! Six??

Featured image 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: »

Miss Universe: A Swimsuit Selection

Featured image The finale of the 2013 Miss Universe pageant will be broadcast from Moscow a week from Saturday, November 9. We did our first preview post on Monday. There hasn’t been a lot of pageant news lately. Miss Ghana claimed to have been kidnapped, ostensibly so the runner-up could take her place. The battle was fought out mostly on Facebook. The facts remain murky, but the rightful Miss Ghana is now »

Lessons from the long October

Featured image This year, October seemed to last for two months, with enough drama for four. The first half featured the partial government shutdown – a political victory for Democrats. The second half featured the Obamacare rollout fiasco – a political victory for Republicans. Yuval Levin agrees with Ross Douthat that the juxtaposition of the shutdown and the launch of the exchanges has put on display the deficiencies of both populism and »

What Hispanics Think About Obamacare

Featured image Those who argue that Republicans should embrace immigration reform are fond of telling us that Hispanics are natural conservatives. That is, I think, a dubious proposition even when applied to the social issues. But how does it hold up across the rest of the political issue spectrum? Obamacare is an excellent test case; if most Hispanics are natural conservatives, they should be instinctively suspicious of a big government power grab. »

Reid Vapid Pressure Reaches New All Time High

Featured image I have written before about the “Reid Vapid Pressure” scale for the loathsome and egregious Senate Majority Leader, whose bottomless vapidity is always turned up to the highest end of the scale, suggesting that he had reached an all-time high.  Silly of me for thinking he couldn’t exceed himself. The latest exhibit of this titanic moron’s mediocrity came yesterday, when at the unveiling of the Winston Churchill bust in the »

Trick Or Treat!

Featured image I am old enough to remember when the phrase “trick or treat” had meaning: if the person whose doorbell you rang didn’t give you a treat, you would play a trick on him; soap his windows, for instance, or tip over his outhouse. Well, OK, the outhouse tipping was before my time. For Halloween 2013, Michael Ramirez updates the concept: »

Lies of Obamacare: Whopper City

Featured image Avik Roy has an important Forbes column the foundational lie of Obamacare on which we have been focusing most closely. “Obama Officials In 2010: 93 Million Americans Will Be Unable To Keep Their Health Plans Under Obamacare.” Roy rebuts administration spin as well as the details of the important NBC News piece that contributed to the focus on the issue. The disruption of current health plans is expected to be »

The Healthcare Mash

Featured image Halloween finds me in San Francisco, where the obvious question would be: how can you tell?  In any case, I’ll be dressed up as something truly frightening tonight: a college administrator. Meanwhile, our pal Remy Munasifi (Go Remy!) is out with “The Healthcare Mash.”  Now, Remy is The Man, but he’s going to need to go a ways to catch up with my “Hitler Learns About the Obamacare Launch” video, »

Obamacare and part-time employment

Featured image It’s difficult to crank out economic analysis while live-blogging an event. So during yesterday’s Sebelius hearing, when Democrats argued that Obamacare isn’t inducing employers to push employee hours below 30 per-week, so as to avoid paying for health insurance, I simply reported the argument and said that “some fact-checking is in order.” The argument seemed fishy. House Democrats were saying that in recent years, part-time employment has declined as a »

Lies of Obamacare: Obama edition

Featured image President Obama went to Boston and spoke at Fanueil Hall to promote Obamacare yesterday. The White House has posted the text of his remarks here. The New York Times has posted video of the speech along with Michael Shear’s story on the speech. As always, the whole thing is worth a look. Obamacare: It’s not just a leftist Democratic fiasco. It’s Republican too! That was the theme of the speech. »

Washington Redskins won’t change their name

Featured image And that’s too bad in a way. As a reader points out, many Americans, Indian and otherwise, are offended these days by the “Washington” part of the name. In any event, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, having met with Redskins owner Dan Snyder earlier in the week, delivered the message to representatives from Oneida Indian Nation, the group that has been leading the charge for a name change. The Nation’s representatives »

Will China Save the Middle East? (With comment by Paul)

Featured image Through the post-war era, and especially after the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States has been the guarantor of something approximating peace in the Middle East. The U.S. accepted that role largely because of its need for Middle Eastern oil imports. But times have changed: domestic energy development, especially fracking technology, unleashed on private lands beyond the reach of the Democratic Party’s Luddites, is rapidly turning the United »

Obama Lies, Health Care Dies

Featured image Barack Obama gave a speech in Boston today in which he tried to cover his rear with respect to the growing Obamacare debacle. In the modern style, he purported to take responsibility for the administration’s web site issues, even as Kathleen Sebelius has assured Congress that Obama is not to blame. But a buggy web site is the least of Obamacare’s problems. The story that has gained tremendous momentum is »

How quickly they remember

Featured image A new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll finds that President Obama’s job approval has fallen to 42 percent, a new low in this survey. 51 percent of respondents disapprove of his performance. Earlier this month, buoyed by the partial government shutdown for which Republicans took most of the blame, Obama’s approval rating stood at 47 percent. At the end of 2012, following his reelection, Obama had an approval rating of »

“Don’t do this to me”

Featured image Listening to, and live-blogging, Kathleen Sebelius’ testimony this morning, I somehow didn’t hear what may become the money moment of the entire affair. Pressed by Rep. Gardner as to why she has not, and will not, enroll in the ObamaCare exchanges (as Gardner has tried to do), Sebelius muttered “don’t do this to me.” (see video below) The unwillingness of top government officials and members to subject themselves to that »

A Fragment on “Extremism”

Featured image The left never tires of trotting out that Republicans are “extremists,” but have you noticed it takes a large amount of hysteria to carry this off?  Fortunately, liberals and the media (but I repeat. . .) are fully up to the job.  I made some remarks about this Monday night: Behold the amazing spectacle of an administration that, confronted with a soldier radicalized in jihadist ideology who shoots a dozen »