Obamacare horror stories (via Matt Walsh's blog)

I encourage you all to read Matt Walsh's excerpts from people when he
asked how is Obamacare hurting them personally.

Link at bottom, but first, my rant:

I realize the Left loves to deal in these personal tragedy, anecdotal
vignettes to sell their latest attempt at expanding the modern welfare
state, but, read these (and this is a
loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong post) and talk to your
self-employed friends, or your friends who work for small businesses,
and discover for yourself what is happening beyond the faux government
shutdown and the disastrous, incompetence-laden Obamacare rollout.

It'd be nice if reporters who cover, perhaps, the insurance industry,
would explain how it's the lower and middle, middle-class who are
going to get hosed the most from this piece of crap legislation.

Those of us who work for Fortune 500 companies, I expect we'll get to
keep the health insurance we like (though I lost the insurance I
"liked" last season, so we'll see what Obama has in store for me Nov 1
when we have open enrollment for 2014).

Since the Obama administration is nothing if not Fascist (in the
traditional sense of the word, not the modern, incorrect pejorative
sense), so if you work in Corporate America, consider yourself amongst
the privileged few.

Those who choose security over freedom shall have neither.

Read these:
http://themattwalshblog.com/2013/10/21/the-definitive-guide-to-how-obamacare-is-destroying-american-lives/

Practical (and MSM proof) defunding strategie

Andrew C. McCarthy tweets today an article from Mike Cannon: Terrific @mfcannon piece says stop squabbling & get busy on these practical #DefundObamacare strategies tinyurl.com/lr5n5or

Sent from my iPad

The GOP: A Fricking Disaster

The national GOP is a disaster.  

I am a conservative, and I have posted before that today, the home for Conservatism is the GOP.   I do appreciate the energy of the Tea Parth caucus and those who became active in politics because of it. Opposition to debt and Obamacare were the primary drivers for the tea party, so to go to the wall over these two things seemed a logical course of action for them.

I get that.

I also get that in order for there to be real, meaningful action on those two fronts, we will need a vast Senate majority and a Republican president.  It would behoove the Tea Partiers to understand this as well.  It would also be useful if they'd give their strategy some thought.  

The kind of intellectual purity I get from these people reminds me of libertarians! and how many of them are there in any national office. Exactly zero.

I appreciate the principles. I share them.

Know what else I appreciate?  Winning elections.  Because when you win elections, you get to put your principles into practice.  I would like to remind my tea party friends of this.  Get smart, develop a strategy that enables us to chip away at the Left's horrible plans, and that puts us back on a path to electoral victory.  

I wish the country were composed of 51% Tea Party advocates, but it isn't. Fortunately, most of the country shares many of the principles that birthed the Tea Party, but, they also want good government and competence in leadership.  This latest fiasco demonstrated none of that. Fortunately for us, both sides lived down to the occasion.

I don't think the damage to the GOP will be lasting, but I do think the whole exercise was pointless and it cost us a week of actual news stories about the failure of the Obamacare rollout.  And for that, I am extremely disappointed in the way this was handled.

NAPOLITANO: A rising torrent of debt and destruction - Washington Times

Andrew Napolitano opines about the debt limit deal.

SPOILER: It's bad.

NAPOLITANO: A rising torrent of debt and destruction - Washington Times

Shutdown, through MSNBC's eyes

I get about 5 minutes per week of MSNBC told through Tony Kornheiser's radio show, where Tony spouts off something he heard on Morning Joe that fits in his worldview, and David Aldridge and Jeanne McManus parrot what they heard Rachel Maddow say or they read in the Post, the New York Times, or The New Yorker.

Anyway, according to them, the open air memorials and parks around Washington (and the rest of the country) were barricaded because of Ted Cruz and Sarah Palin.  Yes, that's right, in the MSNBC world, these two (one not even an elected representative) have somehow gotten the National Park Service to erect barricades and put up orange cones to keep these places closed.  Because the optics of Republicans shutting down memorials and keeping WW2 vets out is so good for the party.

At the same time, they call us stupid.

You can not make this crap up.

Bring out your dead...

CBS is trolling for your "Shutdown Stories" on twitter (see https://twitter.com/CBSNews/status/389362517031792642).

Today's is a group who wanted to raft the Colorado, but can't because it's shut down.  The park entrance, not the actual river, which at last report was still flowing despite Barack Obama's promise to roll back the tides and lower the ocean levels.  You recall, he didn't actually promise to stop rivers from flowing, so, that's one campaign promise kept (are you scoring, fact checkers everywhere?).

If anything, these stories should tell us the depth and breadth of the government has become so vast that we can't seem to do anything in our life, especially if it's risky, without the government there to guide us.

Yesterday, Alyssa Milano tweeted the always scary link to a story about food inspections being shut down due to the FDA not having funding,

To the Liberal mind, it makes perfect sense that these two events are a tragedy.  By God, do we all want to die, either in a horrible rafting accident, sans the briefings given by the Park Service, or via poisoned food? Surely only the Feds can save us from these horrible events?

Apparently, all they really need the NPS to do is open the gates to the park, so this group seems to have considered the safety issues and taken them on themselves.  I wonder, can they put in at another spot, and when they cross Federal park land, will the NPS try to stop them?

Anyway, on the FDA front, I know you're all thinking about the horrible things that happen to our food supply and that the only thing between us and a violent botchelism death is a bureaucrat inspecting a chicken plant in Alabama. 

I would suggest that it is in food producers best interest to avoid making their customers sick or dead, and that the safety of our food supply could be reliably assured without an army of 2000 food inspectors.  After all, we did that for about 150 of the country's first years in existence, and, despite what you were taught in middle school, most of our ancestors survived long, fruitful lives without the scourge of bad food over their head.  Not to mention that food would be easier to produce, more plentiful, and, I am sure tastier.  

Obamacare: Here to Stay (a while)

In light of the recent "opening" of Obamacare's exchanges, I have much to say.

Our personal experience with this law is one I think many across the nation will be feeling, and it's emblematic of the lies told personally by this president to get this POS law passed.  Of course, many people are discovering that "You can keep your doctor (or plan), if you like them," was an outright lie, and "The average American will see their premiums reduced by $2500" was an outright lie, and "Birth control will be free" is an outright lie (it's free under certain conditions),  

Now that the law is written and the regulations are in place, and the exchanges (nominally) operating, the opposition's best strategy is to let this thing impact Americans.  While I appreciated Ted Cruz's attempts to force repeal of the law, it should have ended as an education effort with some CR to fund the government in place.  We are not going to repeal this law without a Republican president and Senate, and those who think we can are imbeciles.  During a week when we should have been issuing press releases solely about the horrible nature of the rollout and the negative consequences on Americans, we instead were subjected to the shutdown.  

The Dems have done their own calculus on this one,  it should be obvious to anyone with a pulse that they have decided that while they are being hurt, the GOP is getting hurt worse, and the added benefit is that there is an internecine struggle between Tea Partiers and mainstream Republicans that threatens to impact Senate control in 2014.  I realize that the Tea Party created tremendous momentum in 2010 and returned the House to the GOP! but it also cost the GOP Senate control that year with choices like Sharon Angle, Cnristine O'Donnell, and Linda McMahon.  

With that history in mind, let's accept that until at least the legislative branch is firmly in our control, no effort to repeal Obamacare will succeed.  It took anti-abortion foes 20 years to realize what the Left has always known - that you chip away at institutions, one stone at a time.  That strategy is leading to the gradual elimination of the abortion-on-demand industry and it will also need to be followed with Obamacare.  

Making the chipping easier will be the law itself.  People are going to hate this law.  The rate increases, the bureaucratic bungling, the taxes, will all lead to widespread dissatisfaction.  The people will demand fixes, and when we're fixing it, vice killing it (usually portrayed as killing it with no alternative) the Left will have little choice but to go along.

Which leads me to the awful performance of the exchanges.  I know a thing or two about the rollout of large IT projects.  This one has truly been awful.  No self-repecting company would have gone to market with this garbage.  However, the government has near unlimited financial resources to bear, so if Obamacare opponents think this will be the death knell for the program, they are wrong.  Eventually, the exchanges will work.  Yes,  their performance is emblematice of the scope of this thing and the administration's generall incompetence, and they make great objects of ridicule, but they will eventually work.

What won't work is Obamacare if sufficient numbers of young people do not sign up and pay inflated premiums.  And, recall, anything will seem inflated when you had been paying $0.  This will be the true test, and it's the one I think will fail. 

You can read older posts on my thoughts on what will work, but in general it involves decoupling insurance and employment.

Debt limit

Haven't posted in ages, so I hope you have missed me.

Blogger finally has a decent iPad app, so it's easier now.  

This week we will hit the limit on the nation's credit card.  Conservatives want some concessions from Obama in exchange for giving him more credit.  

Whether you agree on what those concessions should be, let's talk about the big lie that is default.

Liberals want you all to believe that failure to allow the country to take on more debt means we would default on our obligations to our debtors.  It would not necessarily happen that way because the Obama admin would still be receiving tax revenues and would have the power to choose how to spend tho see revenues.  Since we all agree default is not an option, those revenues would go towards paying our debtors.  At the same time, the government would have no other option than to stop incurring new debt.  What this would mean is a partial government shutdown, one severe enough where the tax revenues coming in could fund the debt payments and continuing operations.

There is no dispute amongst anyone that tax revenues can fund the debt payments.  Apparently, the Obama admin wants us to believe they wouldn't pay them.  That must be their plan, because otherwise, they wouldn't be threatening these dire consequences.  

The truth is more likely that the O admin doesn't want people to learn that they are lying, and that the partial shutdown wouldn't be that bad anyway.

That's part of the reason that now, during the current budget impasse, they are intentionally shutting down parks and roads and overlooks - to make you all believe that this is really something awful.

It's not.