Thoughts on the narcissistic incompetent Prevaricator-in-Chief.
I’d say that the day Victor Davis Hanson has been predicting for years has finally come to pass.
[Update]
“Sabotage! Them’s fighting words. Them’s also Bolshevik words, but never mind that for now.”
It’s also language similar to that used by Goebbels to demonize the Jews.
Anyone who was actually paying attention in 2008 could have told you this guy would try to govern from geosynchronous orbit. Most of his career in politics and elsewhere looks like an exercise in extreme detachment. It’s pretty obvious he was trying very hard not to leave a paper trail where ever he went. So no, Oz turning out to be some carnival side show phony isn’t much of a surprise.
Is Obama really that detached or is he just lazy? I see no evidence that he has ever worked hard at anything.
They aren’t mutually exclusive. His obvious laziness is the cause of his detachment. It’s easier not to care about actual results (that don’t directly affect you) than to be concerned with such things. Making speeches to friendly audiences is less work than actually dealing with congress, and going to bed is easier than making the call on what to do about ambassadors under attack. The job of being president is a whole lot easier if you just don’t give a shit.
Detached or lazy? I don’t know but Obama has the phone of every world leader tapped and is incapable of using that information to come out ahead.
Let us not forget the assistant liars.
“Sabotage! Them’s fighting words. Them’s also Bolshevik words, but never mind that for now.”
Yes. The production targets of each USSR 5-Year Plan would have been exceeded if not for sabotage by the Wreckers and the Breakers. Stalin said so! Therefore, by definition it is true!
The Left has already started the “Wreckers and Breakers” excuse for ObamaCare, by claiming the website problems were due to sabotage by the Republicans, who somehow managed to under-fund and just generally sabotage the the website development work. So far, the Republican sabotage approach doesn’t seem to have gained much traction, but I predict we’ll hear it again. (and again, and again and…)
“So far, the Republican sabotage approach doesn’t seem to have gained much traction, but I predict we’ll hear it again. (and again, and again and…)”
Predict we’ll hear it? We’ve been hearing it. Jim, oh, Jim, please remind us why this past week’s events are all the Republican’s faults. Please explain to us why half a billion dollars was underfunding the Web site development . . .
Half a billion would have been just about enough if the law itself was only three orders of magnitude smaller.
We will have to wait until the Sunday talk shows tell Jim what to think and say, then he’ll be back.
I feel bad for him. Every time he uses the administration’s defenses, they turn out to be fabrications leaving him twisting in the wind. Sure we are all upset by Obama’s lies but I wonder how Democrats feel to be suckered on a daily basis?
Well, how about we have our own morning show and frame the discussion for Jim’s convenience.
Why, someone tell me why, didn’t the President embrace the Fred Upton bill as a kind of emergency and temporary repair measure to Health Care Reform, maybe making a counter offer, perhaps outlining his requirements and say, Senate Democrats, offering his version of that bill?
It could have been framed as “I made a promise to the American people, in working with Congress I am going to keep my promise to the American people, and working together, we shall make progress towards the goal of providing quality health care to millions of American people . . . ”
Boehner has his double secret plan of undermining and dismantling the PPACA without outright appeal, but Limbaugh and others warn about the Republicans going all bipartisan on healthcare reform and achieving “buy-in.”
The law as it stands is having the consequence of persons losing health insurance to gaining it in, what, a 10:1 ratio right now? The best the President and his minions can do right now is dissemble about their own “if you like your insurance, you can keep it, period” claim while preparing talking points that if anyone says they lost their insurance on account of the PPACA, they are lying?
Why, why, and why could the President not “buy in” to some piece of emergency legislation, any piece of such legislation, to gain a year’s relief from the current situation? Is he completely inflexible and rigid and incapable of negotiations and compromise . . . on anything? Is he incapable of “triangulating”, that is, seeing the bigger political picture by saying no to his partisans to get “buy-in” from the opposition party? Is he incapable of . . . leading?
The whole point of Obamacare is to offload the healthcare costs of the expensively sick onto the healthy. That doesn’t work if the healthy can buy cheap insurance because… well… they’re healthy.
Actually, that is the point of every social scheme in health care that we already have.
Medicare is a bunch of young healthy people paying a skim off their slim early-career paycheck so that frailer, older people can get health care. Not only that, the doctors and other providers are treating older people at below-market rates, which makes health care much more expensive — for young people, healthy or otherwise, who have to pay coin under the current system. Forgot who said that at NRO, but “Obamcare” is just the “cherry on top of the sundae” of a whole system of government control over health care markets.
It is just that Medicare has a better narrative, a better Joseph Campbell-style myth, behind it. As a younger person, you pay the Medicare tax from wages — universally — and when you retire, you are “entitled” to health care because you along with everyone else has “paid into the system.”
With the Web site up and running, and with the subsidy to smooth things over, people were not supposed to have been bothered by the President’s glib promises about keeping your health plan and keeping your doctor because you would have been amazed about how seemless the shopping experience and what a great (subsidized) deal you were getting. C’mon, Jim, the President said as much in his remarks last week.
So Jim, as to your remark that 2 out of every 3 Federal software projects “fail” in some way, you as a software developer know that, I was a research engineer/software developer know that in hindsight too, but if I predicted that, I suppose I would have been a wingnut vainly hoping for Healthcare.gov “to fail.”
So Jim, I suppose you were never taken in by a foreign e-mail scam. I have received those e-mails and never responded. I have known Catholic priests from Nigeria who were saintly people, but at the U, I have known people coming in to the university community from every part of the world, and I have observed how cultures differ, and I have known some “real operators” who were out to “game the system” rather than get an education. I have watched enough Hollywood movies to also get the gist of how most “cons” work, and the typical scam e-mail read just like a movie plot.
So did the President admit as much, that he just got taken by a foreign e-mail scam? Did the President as much as admit that he is lacking in the life experience to make wise decisions as President?
Medicare is a bunch of young healthy people paying a skim off their slim early-career paycheck so that frailer, older people can get health care.
True. Which is why the young people who pay for it aren’t given a choice.
No-one is intentionally going to pay more for medical care today in the hope that they’ll get ‘free’ care paid for by other peoples’ kids in fifty years. Most Western governments probably won’t even exist in fifty years.
Ego.
As Andrew McCarthy points out, the law is the law and Obamacare remains the law of the land. So any insurance policy offered that violates the provisions of the ACA is illegal, and therefore unenforcible in court. If you were offered your old policy you could sue your insurance provider for fraud since the contract is illegal and you’re paying real money (giving you standing to sue), and Obama can’t grant immunity to the insurance provider, he can only promise he won’t prosecute them himself.
He can offer the services of the federal government in paying any expenses they accrue defending his dictate.
“If you were offered your old policy you could sue your insurance provider for fraud since the contract is illegal”
Are you certain of this? Hypothetically, speaking, couldn’t you purchase any old insurance policy, only it wouldn’t excuse you from having to pay the penalty, er I mean, the Roberts Tax? So whether the Administration wants to entice you to purchase such a policy so as to tamp down the political consequences and then (illegally) not make you pay the Roberts Tax, does this really involve the insurance companies?
Do you think that the insurance companies cancelling existing, non-compliant policies (unexpectedly!), that is, instead of allowing you to renew it, along with a warning that the policy is not ACA compliant, that this indeed is the “fault of the bad apple insurance companies”, that is, as a business decision that they don’t want to be driven out of business, that the insurance companies took a long, hard look at this and they don’t want to write non-compliant policies anymore?
The deal with this administration, along with its enablers, is that it is all someone else’s fault — the Bush administration, the Republicans in Congress, the TEA Party, the bad apple insurance companies, the ignorant people on the individual insurance market who want to continue “junk” insurance, their cronies to whom they sent the no-bid contracts (didn’t GW Bush have more competent cronies?).
And in a strict sense, what is happening is “the fault” of insurance companies . . . and the inability of the Administration to wrap their collective minds around how complicated their law is and the challenges that poses to the Web site, along with every other consequence of the law.
But isn’t that what true leadership is all about, that if you bring upon the people an enterprise that has the “fog of war” about it, you promise them “blood, sweat, toil, and tears” rather than “A seemless experience much like Amazon or Travelocity”?
I think Andrew’s point was that even if you did purchase a policy that is technically illegal, the policy’s provisions can’t be upheld in a court of law because an illegal contract is unenforcible, and thus void, much as if it were a contract to deliver cocaine and heroin at a specified price. You can’t take it to court, and so if the insurance company decided not to pay your health care costs as required in the contract, there’s nothing you could do about it.
His other point is that only the legislature could grant immunity from lawsuits, not the administration, so the insurance companies would be foolish to offer such policies because all their customers could sue them for fraudulently offering a policy that doesn’t meet the new ACA guidelines as required by law (“this policy doesn’t cover male pregnancies, so I’m suing”). Further, almost all corporate codes of conduct disallow employees from taking actions that are illegal, whether the law is being actively enforced or not.
So is Obama encouraging US companies to violate US law, and encouraging American citizens to likewise violate the law of the land? Yes he is. One could argue that his actions constitute racketeering, given two obvious offenses under RICO (fraud and obstruction of justice – ie obstruction of enforcement of the ACA law), which would make it a federal crime punishable by 20 years in prison and a $25,000 fine, plus treble damages in civil suits.
Aside from that bit of lawyerly fun are all sorts of provisions of 18 USC $1033, such as:
Of course Obama would argue that he’s not in the insurance business, even though he seems to be the leading insurance salesman in the US. ^_^
“I think Andrew’s point was that even if you did purchase a policy that is technically illegal, the policy’s provisions can’t be upheld in a court of law because an illegal contract is unenforcible, and thus void, ”
I am not concerning trolling or trying to be difficult — I am just trying to “get it right.”
Are you sure that a non-compliant health care plan is “illegal” or only that if you purchase such a plan that you are still liable for the “penalty”, i.e. “Roberts Tax” for “not having (the right kind)” of health insurance?
Seriously, I am thinking that the insurance companies are sending out the cancellation letters, not because the plans are “illegal” but that on the thought that they make no business sense. They were believed to make no business sense to the consumer because it was thought there would be a working Web site to purchase complying insurance. They are believed to make no business sense to the insurer because the whole purpose of the incentives in the ACA is to drive insurerers out of the business of selling the “wrong” plans.
It is kind of like burning coal for electricity. It is not (yet) illegal, but electric rates were to “necessarily skyrocket” to bring about the end of burning coal.
It is kind of like the Administration put economic pressure on the power companies to shut down their coal-fired electric plants, electric rates went up, ant Member of Congress felt the heat from irate constituents. So the President mumbles something about how he had no idea that shuttering power plants would drive rates up, he castigates “bad apple” electric companies for shutting perfectly working plants, and he issues an edict “allowing power companies to burn coal — for one more year”, whether or not that brings rates down, which he will blame on the power companies?
I think the difference was whether it was a matter of policy and executive branch regulations (like the coal plants), which the President can change, versus actual laws enacted by Congress and signed by the President, which he cannot change. So it comes down to whether it is actually illegal under the text of the ACA to sell such non-compliant policies, whether the decision to grandfather a policy in has legal wiggle room or whether it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, all Obama can do is waive prosecution or fines (enforcement actions), but he can’t actually make such policies legal again, as that would require an act of Congress. Plus, there’s no guarantee that he wouldn’t, for crass political reasons, go ahead and prosecute the insurance companies for selling non-compliant policies anyway, just because he hates insurance companies and lies like a dog. They would be foolish to trust him.
I think this is why so many are pointing out that Obama doesn’t have the Constitutional power to do what he just did.
It’s said that some are against things because Obama is for them. Suppose the opposite is also true… Obama is against what others are for even when it’s something he needs.
Something I’m not hearing is another aspect of insurance. The person paying doesn’t have to be the beneficiary. So part of the problem is societal breakdown. There are normal stages of life. Children as they grow to be adults used to take care of their parents. One way would be to buy insurance (both life and health.) Government screws up this process with it’s bias.