Democratic Staffers: Whoa, Our Rising Healthcare Costs Are 'Unacceptable'

Guy Benson | Nov 22, 2013



Pass the Kleenex:

Veteran House Democratic aides are sick over the insurance prices they’ll pay under Obamacare, and they’re scrambling to find a cure. “In a shock to the system, the older staff in my office (folks over 59) have now found out their personal health insurance costs (even with the government contribution) have gone up 3-4 times what they were paying before,” Minh Ta, chief of staff to Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.), wrote to fellow Democratic chiefs of staff in an email message obtained by POLITICO. “Simply unacceptable.” In the email, Ta noted that older congressional staffs may leave their jobs because of the change to their health insurance. Under the Affordable Care Act, and federal regulations, many congressional staffers — designated as “official” aides — were forced to move out of the old heavily subsidized Federal Employees Health Benefits program and into the District of Columbia’s health insurance marketplace exchange. Others designated as “unofficial” were allowed to stay in the FEHB program.

Welcome to the Obamacare party, people who helped their bosses foist this monstrosity upon an unwilling public. Many of these legislative aides are now saddled with much higher -- "unacceptable!" -- health costs, now that they're fending for themselves on DC's Obamacare exchange.

There's a reason why poll after poll shows the president and his healthcare law plummeting to new lows; it's somewhat comforting to know that at least some people on Capitol Hill aren't insulated from the fallout.

That said, it is most unfortunate that Republican staffers are living through the same tribulations thanks to a law they've fought tooth-and-nail from day one. Beyond the spiking costs for individuals and families, taxpayers are on the hook for an avalanche of new government spending because of Obamacare. One item on that list is the cost of fixing the broken websites, which had already cost $1.6 billion by the launch date ($600 billion for Healthcare.gov, and more than $1 billion for the state exchanges).

Since 30 to 40 percent of the federal site is still being built, with massive repair efforts underway across the country, that price tag will swell immensely. Government experts can't say how much it will cost just yet, but outside observers are confident it will be a lot:

Technology experts say healing what ails the Healthcare.gov website will be a tougher task than the Obama administration acknowledges. "It's going to cost a lot of tax dollars to get this done," says Bill Curtis, senior vice president and chief scientist at CAST, a French software analysis company with offices in the U.S.

Curtis says programmers and systems analysts start fixing troubled websites by addressing the glitches they can see. But based on his analysis of the site, he believes the ongoing repairs are likely to reveal even deeper problems, making it tough to predict when all the site's issues will be resolved.

In an interesting twist, one of the few elements of Healthcare.gov that was not catastrophically broken was the so-called "anonymous shopper" browsing function, wherein potential consumers could check and compare rates. Obamacare's IT chief testified under oath that this element of the website was scrapped because it failed so terribly in testing that they couldn't in good conscience roll it out to the public (this is the same guy who admitted that at least one-third of the web system still isn't built).

But a CNN exclusive reveals that the "anonymous shopper" function actually passed its pre-launch test, raising questions about whether Henry Chao committed perjury. If this portion of the Obamacare web experience was working fine technologically, why would they jettison it? It's pretty simple, really -- sticker shock, and pure politics:

The laws’ supporters and enforcers don’t want you to know that, because it would violate the President’s incessantly repeated promise that nothing would change for the people that Obamacare doesn’t directly help. If you shop for Obamacare-based coverage without knowing if you qualify for subsidies, you might be discouraged by the law’s steep costs. So, by analyzing your income first, if you qualify for heavy subsidies, the website can advertise those subsidies to you instead of just hitting you with Obamacare’s steep premiums.

The premium and out-of-pocket costs were going to look so steep, the administration chose to hide those numbers from the public until after people had logged on and gotten a sense of how much taxpayer assistance they'd receive to help pay for the costly coverage. They tossed out one of the few working elements of their website rollout to spare themselves the humiliation of another major broken promise, then lied about it to Congress.

Will Obamacare Be the Death of Liberalism?

Pat Buchanan | Nov 22, 2013


By 1968, Walter Lippmann, the dean of liberal columnists, had concluded that liberalism had reached the end of its tether.

In that liberal epoch, the 1960s, the Democratic Party had marched us into an endless war that was tearing America apart.

Lyndon Johnson's Great Society had produced four "long, hot summers" of racial riots and a national crime rate that had doubled in a decade. The young were alienated, the campuses aflame.

Lippmann endorsed Richard Nixon.

For forty years, no unabashed liberal would be elected president.

Jimmy Carter won one term by presenting himself as a born-again Christian from Georgia, a peanut farmer, Naval Academy graduate and nuclear engineer. Bill Clinton ran as a centrist.

So toxic had the term "liberal" become that liberals dropped it and had themselves rebaptized as "progressives."

Barack Obama, however, ran unapologetically as a man of the left. An opponent of the Iraq war, he had compiled a voting record to the left of Bernie Sanders, the socialist senator from Vermont.

And Obama proudly placed his signature achievement, Obamacare, right alongside, and in the tradition of, liberal giants FDR and LBJ.

This is the new progressivism of the 21st century, Obama was saying, and I the transformational figure who will usher in the post-Reagan era. Where Clinton failed, I will succeed.

But now that Obamacare is coming to be perceived as a political catastrophe, not only does it threaten Obama's place in history, it could invalidate, indeed, eviscerate the defining idea of the Democratic Party itself.

For Democrats are the Party of Government. They believe that government is more nobly motivated than a private sector that runs on self-interest and the profit motive, and that government can achieve goals private enterprise could never accomplish.

To liberals, government is us, the personification of the nation.

Social Security, Medicare, Medicare and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 are monuments to this belief. So, too, are the world wars fought and won under liberal presidents Woodrow Wilson and FDR.

It was 1968, the Tet Offensive, the assassinations, the urban riots, the campus anarchy, the smash-up of the Democratic Party in the streets of Chicago that caused the national recoil from liberalism that lasted for forty years.

Now consider what the rollout of Obamacare is doing, not only to this president and his administration, but also to the idea that government has the solution to America's problems.

Though they had as long as World War II to get it done, Obama's crowd could not even produce a working website. Now we learn the White House was alerted to the website problems in March but plunged ahead.

Obama's reputation for competence has been shredded, and, so, too, has his reputation for truthfulness.

With millions losing their health insurance because of Obamacare mandates, we learn that Obama and his team knew this was inevitable, even as they reassured us, "If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan. Period."

The brutal truth: Our president got his legacy program passed by deceiving the American people in a giant swindle.

Not only have millions lost their health care plans, tens of millions more may lose theirs at year's end when they learn that their employer's health care plans also do not meet Obamacare mandates.

Hillarycare cost the Democrats the House in 1994. Obamacare, the love child of Hillarycare, could cost Democrats the Senate in 2014.

But what makes this a disaster not just for a party but a philosophy is that Obamacare is liberalism incarnate. It is premised on the idea that progressives, starting from scratch, can redesign a health care system, 16 percent of the economy, and make it more fair, more just and more efficient for us all.

Obamacare was an act of hubris by an administration of talking heads most of whom never ran anything in their lives. And what we are witnessing is the antithesis of what we were promised.

So confident were they in the wonks that wrote the bill that Nancy Pelosi could say, "We have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it."

Seven weeks in, the website is not fixed. Millions have lost their health care plans. Quality hospitals are being cut out of the program as too costly. Individuals are being offered plans inferior to what they had in terms of benefits, but with far more costly premiums.

The crisis for Obama, his party, and his philosophy is that this is not only a nightly national story; it is a daily story in every state. And the anecdotes of debacles have been piling up, one upon another, for seven weeks. They do not cease, and there is no end in sight.

Nothing, it appears, will interrupt the litany of personal woes before Democrats, in panic, cut themselves loose of Obamacare and try to swim away from the Lusitania.

It will likely be a long time before another Democratic president dares again another such Great Leap Forward.


(Got that Hillary ? )

A Devastating Poll on Obama -- and Obamacare
By Michael Barone
Wednesday, November 20, 2013

“The Affordable Care Act’s political position has deteriorated dramatically over the last week.” That, coming from longtime Obamacare cheerleader and Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein, was pretty strong language. And it was only Wednesday.

That was the day after the release of a devastating Quinnipiac national poll. It showed Barack Obama’s approval rating at 39 percent, with his disapproval rating at 54 percent — sharply down from 45 percent approval and 49 percent disapproval on Oct. 1, the day the government shutdown began and healthcare.gov went into (limited) operation.

Democrats hoped that Republicans would take a shellacking in public opinion for the Oct. 1-16 government shutdown. They did, briefly. But Quinnipiac’s survey, conducted three weeks after the shutdown ended, indicated that the Obamacare rollout inflicted much more damage on the Democratic brand — and the party’s leader.

Quinnipiac’s numbers on Obamacare were also exactly the same as their numbers on Obama: 49 percent favored the health care legislation, 55 percent were opposed. Moreover, a near-majority — 46 percent — said the president knowingly deceived them when he assured Americans over and over that they could keep their health insurance plans.

There are few names a president can be called that are more damaging than liar.

The numbers are particularly daunting when you look at the groups that Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg identifies as major parts of “the big cultural and demographic wave that threatens to swamp the Republican party” — young voters and Hispanics.

Obama carried voters under 30 by 66 percent to 32 percent in 2008 and 60 percent to 37 percent in 2010. He carried older voters by 1 point in the first election and lost them to Mitt Romney in the second.

Obama did even better with Hispanics: 67 percent to 31 percent in 2008 and 71 percent to 27 percent in 2012. This was one of the few demographic groups among which he ran stronger than four years earlier.

But that was then, and this is now. Quinnipiac shows young voters disapproving of Obama 54 percent to 36 percent and Hispanics disapproving 47 percent to 41 percent.

Both groups rate him negatively on the economy, the federal budget, immigration, foreign policy and health care. Bare majorities, 51 percent of both groups, say Obama cares about people like them.

Obamacare, popular among both groups in 2012, is now an Obama albatross. Young voters oppose it 51 percent to 42 percent and Hispanics 50 percent to 44 percent. Majorities of both groups give Obama negative ratings on health care.

One must note that this is just one poll and that opinions may change as events unfold. But it looks very much like the astonishingly disastrous Obamacare rollout has moved opinion decisively against the president and his trademark policy.

And all those predictions — not just by Democrats — that the Republican Party faced extinction because of overwhelming opposition from Millennials and Hispanics look to be, like Mark Twain’s famous obituary, premature.

There’s one other interesting result from Quinnipiac. Has the Obama administration “been competent in running the government”? Overall, 53 percent said no and only 43 percent said yes. Young voters (47 percent said yes, 46 percent said no) and Hispanics (51 percent said yes, 46 percent said no) were only slightly more positive.

The fiasco of the healthcare.gov website undoubtedly contributed to this. But perhaps Americans are also starting to notice that this president is not performing his constitutional duty to faithfully execute the law — and in this case, a law he and his party wrote.

The Obama administration announced last July that it is not enforcing Obamacare’s employer mandate. It has admitted that it cannot verify the eligibility of applicants for Obamacare subsidies. (Come and get it!)

It says it will provide subsidies for those buying insurance through the federal health care exchanges in 36 states — even though the legislation nowhere authorizes that.

And last Thursday, as congressional Democrats were panicking and supporting measures to allow people to keep their current health insurance policies, Obama announced that he would not impose penalties on policies that don’t comply with the law.

That was plainly a transparent attempt to fob off the blame for cancelled policies on insurers and state regulators who complied with the law as written. It is a political ploy inconsistent with the rule of law.

Quinnipiac and other pollsters are not in the habit of asking Americans whether presidents are faithfully executing the law. The assumption has been that, unlike in Russia, they mostly are — or were.

The Framers of the Constitution regarded refusal to faithfully execute the law as tyranny. Barack Obama, with his Swiss cheese exceptions to Obamacare, seems to take a different view.


Obama will be lucky if he lasts for three more years; With guys like Ezra Klein (a longtime supporter and fan-boy ) pointing out how the wheels are falling off his "bus", much more of this and the DNC will throw his sorry butt UNDER "the bus"! (And it couldn't happen to a more deserving POS )

Will The Obamacare Lies Ever Stop?

November 22, 2013 by Chip Wood


Geez, you’ve got to feel sorry for Jessica Sanford. Do you remember her? She was one of the glowing examples of an Obamacare success that Barack Obama bragged about at a press conference last month. Turns out this much-hyped “success” was anything but.

Sanford is the mother of a child with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, known as ADHD. The medications to treat him cost $250 a month. For the past 15 years, she had been unable to afford health insurance. But thanks to Obamacare, the President bragged, she was able to buy an affordable plan through the State of Washington’s health insurance exchange.
Except, it turns out that she wasn’t.

When she first applied, Sanford was told she qualified for a federal subsidy, so a “gold” plan would only cost her $169 a month. Then she was told, “Sorry, we made a little mistake here. Your actual cost will be $280 a month.” Then she got another notice, stating that because she earned $50,000 a year, she actually would not receive any subsidy and her actual cost would be almost twice as much again.

Sanford finally gave up and said she’ll just pay the penalty for not joining Obamacare. She posted on Facebook: “Wow, you guys really screwed me over.”
Yes, indeed. And with millions of people being dropped from their existing plans, while only a tiny fraction of that number actually purchases new insurance through Obamacare, you can expect to hear similar stories repeated over and over again.

This has led to such mind-boggling irony as having former President Bill Clinton lecturing Obama on the need to be straight with the American people. Yup, the man who was impeached for lying about having sex in the Oval Office broke ranks with the White House and said, “I personally believe, even if it takes a change to the law, the President should honor the commitment the federal government made to those people and let them keep what they got.”

To a lot of folks, that sounded like a perfect set-up for the “Keep Your Health Plan Act” introduced in the House by Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.). So Obama had to do more than merely denounce the legislation and promise to veto it if it reaches his desk.

No, the President went even further. A day before the House was to vote on the measure, he told a hastily assembled press conference that he would now allow insurance companies to continue offering those supposedly defective insurance policies for another year.

So once again, the White House is engaged in a patently unConstitutional usurpation of power. The President, who is supposed to enforce the laws that Congress passes, claims he can change the law whenever he wants. After all, he’d done it earlier this year, when he unilaterally suspended the employer mandate.

Some Republicans pointed out that the President has no legal authority to issue such an order. Insurance companies say that Obama is basically inviting them to break the law. And State insurance commissioners say that Obama’s “fix” will be impossible to implement in a timely fashion.

Consider: Insurance companies had three years to get ready for Obamacare to take effect. Now they’re being given less than three months to comply with the changes Obama cavalierly insists they make.

When the Upton bill came up for a vote last Friday, 39 Democrats joined 222 House Republicans in voting “aye.” The number of defectors surely would have been higher had it not been for the dubious “compromise” the President offered the day before.

But this wasn’t the only bombshell that exploded over Obamacare this past week. Here are three others that are giving the Democrats an Excedrin headache:
On Tuesday, one of the top tech officers responsible for building the Obamacare website told a Congressional subcommittee that almost 40 percent of the IT systems supporting Healthcare.gov website have not even been built yet. “It’s not that it’s not working,” Henry Chao told a House Energy and Commerce Oversight and Investigations subcommittee. “It’s still being developed and tested.”

On the same day, four cybersecurity experts warned the House Science Committee that the Obamacare website is in danger of being hacked. The personal financial information of people who use it is at “critical risk,” they said. ABC News reported: “Three of the four witnesses agreed that the Obama Administration should take the site offline in order to address the security flaws.”

And finally, we learned this week that McKinsey & Co., an outside consulting firm that was hired to check on the progress of the Healthcare.gov website, told Administration officials back in March that the website would not be functioning properly by its Oct. 1 launch date.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius allegedly was briefed on their findings on April 4. Yet just two weeks later, Sebelius said in sworn testimony before Congress, “I can tell you we are on track.” Think anyone will suggest that perjury charges be brought against her?

All of this helps explain why opinion polls have gone from dismal to disastrous for Obama and the badly misnamed Affordable Care Act, the signature legislative achievement of his Presidency. The latest Quinnipiac national poll shows that just 39 percent of the public approves of his performance. His disapproval rating has climbed to 54 percent.

A month ago, Democrats were gloating at how badly the Republicans had been hurt by the reaction to the partial shutdown of the Federal government. The latest poll numbers indicate that the Democrats are suffering much more from the cataclysmic rollout of Obamacare.

Here’s what may be the most worrisome number of all for the President’s supporters. Some 46 percent of the people surveyed said that the President knowingly deceived the public, when he repeatedly promised that they could keep their health insurance plans if they wanted to.

The numbers just keep getting worse. The latest CBS poll says that the President’s approval rating has slipped even further, and is now down to 37 percent. That’s a drop of 9 percentage points in just the past month. Obama’s disapproval rating, according to the CBS poll, has climbed to 57 percent, an all-time high.

As bad as those numbers must seem to be to the denizens of the White House, the numbers for Obamacare are even worse. The same CBS poll found that 61 percent of Americans now disapprove of the President’s healthcare plan. Only 31 percent approve of it — a drop of 12 points in just the past month.

And here’s something that must have the residents of the White House tearing their hair out. Thanks to Obamacare, the President is losing the support of younger voters. Back in 2008, Obama got 66 percent of the vote of Americans under the age of 30. That landslide majority declined a little bit in 2012, but he still received 60 percent of the youth vote then.

Now, Quinnipiac says that young Americans disapprove of Obamacare by a margin of 51 percent to 42 percent. As shocking as that must be, check this out: The same poll says that young Americans disapprove of Obama himself by an even bigger margin — 54 percent to 36 percent. Not only do they give him a negative rating on his healthcare plan, they also rate him negatively on the economy, the Federal budget, immigration and foreign policy.

Granted, poll numbers can change quickly. It’s far from certain that voters will still feel the same way a year from now, when it will be time to vote for the men and women who will represent them in Congress. But given these numbers today, it’s easy to see why so many Democrats — especially those who will be seeking re-election in areas where Republicans have traditionally done well — are bordering on all-out panic.

Let’s do everything we can to make sure their worst fears are justified.

It Can Now be Revealed — the President’s Real Name

Bill Tatro | Jun 08, 2013

On the first Friday of each month, the financial markets, the mainstream media, and, in fact, the whole world eagerly await the U.S. monthly jobs report.

Tony Slydini, Doug Henning, Ricky Jay, Warren and Annabelle, and even Harry Houdini (some of the greatest magicians of all-time, apologies to others), would be truly proud of the art of misdirection repeatedly achieved by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and subsequently via the Obama administration.

In the 1970s, inflation was so rampant — created by the move to fiat currency while totally abandoning the gold standard — that instead of dealing with the problem, the administration utilized the art of misdirection. For example, the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973 had a very dramatic impact on gasoline prices which in turn created skyrocketing transportation costs and escalating food prices.

Indeed, double-digit inflation was headline news day in and day out. From a public relations perspective, in an attempt to mitigate this powerful inflationary effect, the administration simply removed energy and food from the equation by inventing a brand new term in economics called “core inflation.” Voilà! Thus, an extraordinary decrease in inflation was instantly created, or so the government said.

Fast-forward to the present-day, and misdirection has once again made its way into the headlines of the day. Each month, as the world waits with bated breath to discover the number of jobs allegedly created, the real story is the dramatic toll it takes on everyday lives as wages, total earnings, and hours worked continue to decline at a record pace.

AS CORPORATIONS STRIVE TO INCREASE EARNINGS PER SHARE, IMPLEMENT STOCK BUYBACKS, AND PAYOUT DIVIDENDS, THEIR ONLY RECOURSE IS TO BUTCHER AND DESTROY THEIR U.S. WORKFORCE.

Thus, it comes as no surprise that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer recently took great pride in announcing Microsoft’s intention of creating thousands of jobs — not in the United States — but in Beijing, China. This revelation presented a significant public relations problem for the Obama administration. However, a magical rationalization in the form of misdirection was quickly applied in order to spin the real story.

First, nothing up my sleeve, the box is empty, and there are no wires of any kind. Now observe!

An $80,000 per year job is lost to China for only $30,000, therefore creating a mystical savings to the corporation of $50,000 which generates a better earnings report, an increased dividend, and higher company bonuses. Next, three service jobs are supernaturally created at an annual salary of $22,500 apiece which represents a 300% increase in the BLS Friday jobs report.

And now the grand finale!

With sleight of hand, the president takes full credit for all the newly created jobs.

The next time the Sergeant at Arms of the House of Representatives introduces the president, instead of declaring, “Mr. Speaker, the president of the United States,” he’ll magically announce, “Mr. Speaker, the Great Obama-dini!”

MostMost Americans Say Obama Can’t Manage Government Effectively

November 25, 2013 by UPI - United Press International, Inc.

WASHINGTON (UPI) — Only four in 10 Americans said they think President Obama can manage the Federal government effectively, a CNN poll released Monday indicated.
Fifty-three percent of Americans also said they do not believe Obama is honest and trustworthy, the first time that a clear majority in CNN polling expressed that view, results of the CNN-ORC International survey indicated.

Forty percent of Americans said Obama can manage the government effectively, down 12 percentage points from June and is the worst score Obama received among the nine personal characteristics rated in the new poll, CNN said.
“A lot of attention has focused on the president’s numbers on honesty in new polling the past three weeks, but it looks like the recent controversy over Obamacare has had a bigger impact on his status as an effective manager of the government, and that may be what is really driving the drop in Obama’s approval rating this fall,” CNN Polling Director Keating Holland said.

Poll results also indicated 56 percent said he is not a person they admire, 56 percent said he doesn’t agree with them on important issues and 56 said he does not inspire confidence.
Obama is still seen as someone who cares about ordinary Americans, is likable and has a vision for the country’s future, results showed.

Results are based on nationwide phone interviews with 843 adults conducted Nov. 18-20 for CNN by ORC International. The margin of error is 3.5 percentage points.


They should have taken the poll on UHH, Chit-Chat Forum; he would have much worse! (Even with a few dozen trolls who would have voted for him in a heart beat. )

Sen. Lindsey Graham: Senate Will Challenge White House on Iran Deal

Monday, 25 Nov 2013 01:31 PM
By Audrey Hudson


Sen. Lindsey Graham said Monday that despite the Obama administration's interim deal with Iran the Senate would pass a bipartisan measure forcing sanctions against the rogue nation until its nuclear capability has been completely dismantled.

According to The Washington Free Beacon, the South Carolina Republican said on CNN's "New Day" that sanctions will come out of Congress in the next couple of weeks to ensure Iran dismantles its reactor rather than suspends construction as the deal requires.

"You stop enrichment, not just pause it," Graham said.

"Right now, the interim deal leaves their capability totally intact. The new round of sanctions will be focusing on the end game, and it is coming soon," Graham said.

Graham is the latest in a growing line of Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill who oppose the deal with Iran, which requires the country to curtail its nuclear program in exchange for billions of dollars in aid that would flow without sanctions.

The Obama administration has warned Congress not to move ahead with sanctions, but Graham's statement is the strongest yet that lawmakers are not willing to let the White House deal stand.

"This deal doesn't represent the fact that we are dealing with some of the most thuggish people in the world," Graham said.

A lot of Senate Dems are up for re-election next year; many are a lot more worried about "their butts" than they are about Oblameo's "Oblameocare" law.

Obama BFF (for Now) on Scene (for Now) to 'Save' Obamacare

John Ransom | Nov 29, 2013


In a Thanksgiving missive that reads more like a love letter to the man than a newspaper article, the Washington Post has announced that Denis McDonough, the White House Chief of Staff, is now in charge of the healthcare hairball.

“McDonough is now holding evening meetings every day with key players in the health care rollout,” says the Post, “offering support even as he holds agency leaders accountable.”

Support and accountability? Wow. Evening work too. Whoa.

In Obama’s White House?


If I were McDonough, I’d get my resume ready. Perhaps when he’s looking for work next time, he can just not mention the whole White House thing.

It’s almost as if Obama’s popularity is depending on the implementation of the healthcare law.

In any event, I’m wondering why McDonough wasn’t holding evening meetings, offering support and accountability for the law last January when he took over as Chief of Staff?

That’s what chiefs of staff do.

Of course, in this White House, they need more of a "caretaker" or a "minder" than a chief of staff, but that’s another topic for another day.

Herding cats doesn’t even begin to define the management problems of the administration, unless you allow for the cats to be drug-addled relics from the 1960s and 1970s.

In my own personal experience, I’ve had a few assignments in my life with a lot less public and personal importance than Obamacare. Yet I prepared like my life depended on them, because, um, you know… for those of us in the private sector, success counts for something.

Like our paycheck and job security.

There was that time for example, when an associate and I were trying to conduct a hostile takeover of a failing federally-insured bank to save it from shutting its doors. At the same time we were running a competitive primary to get him elected to Colorado State House.

The stakes weren’t that high.

Only my whole paycheck…from July to the rest of the year. And his paycheck, too.

Nights, weekends? Yes and yes.

Whatever it took, hard work-wise, to make the deal happen we did it.

In the end, we won; we saved the bank.

But the shareholders won, the depositors won and, best of all, the taxpayers who didn’t have to bailout a bad bank won too.

All of us have had experiences like this in life when we trying to do something hard…and we ended up successful.

We all know that the student that studies improves his odds a lot. All it takes is a bit of foresight and hard work in preparation.

So if you look at healthcare.gov as a sort of bad bank—it is after all federally insured against failure by the American taxpayers-- my question is: "Why keep the management that got us to this point in the first place"?

Is McDonough really the guy to save it? Or Obama?

“If you have something that significant,” says Rep. Elijah Cummings, the top Democrat on the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform as reported by the WaPo,” that’s the kind of thing I would think I’d have somebody sleeping with it day and night. When they go to the bathroom, they’re on the cell phone talking about it. When they go to sleep, they dream about it.”

Yeah.

BEFORE it became a problem.

“We went straight into problem solving,” McDonough told the Post. “We knew that going into this, that no plan survives first contact. We knew that we would be confronted with challenges along the way.”

Not really.

Because “first contact” is a term for war, not for well-crafted legislation.

Perhaps it was a Freudian slip. Perhaps the administration really does think legislation is like waging war on the populace.

It would explain a lot about how they do things.

My experience is that good laws survive “first contact” if you read and comprehend them before you vote for them.

Even bad laws can survive if implemented in smart ways.

But when you have the wrong guys implementing the wrong laws, you’re in for trouble.

No amount of catching up will fix the flaws in Obamacare.

No amount of patching will fix the flaws in Obama either.

Good luck to Mr. McDonough, but if hard work can fix this thing, he’s the wrong guy with the wrong boss and the wrong laws.

Let's try changing one those three first.


And Gitzo says.....
It will be fun listening to how our "in-house libs" will attempt to spin this piece, trying to make the author look like the "dummy" here; (with libs, it's ALWAYS "about" the other guy being "to blame"; ) (and they still haven't figured out why we call their idol, "Oblameo"! )

As everyone here who has ever started a forum thread knows, the FIRST thing you do is click the "Create New Topic" link at the upper, far left; clicking this will bring up a "new topic in general photography" text box, with an arrow at the far right; clicking this arrow brings up all of the different forums, and you select the one you want to start the topic in.

Why am I mentioning all of this, you ask? Well, a few weeks ago, I was about to start a new topic; I intended for it to be in the Chit-Chat Forum; but for the FIRST time in starting 162 new topics.........I inadvertently neglected to select "Chit Chat"; the new topic, (about U.S. Senator Ted Cruz ) came up on the general photography forum.

At this point, because it was about 4 a.m., (and not wanting to delete the whole thing and start over ), I thought about it some, then I sent Admin a PM, mentioning that it needed to be moved to chit chat.

The next day, when I got back on UHH, the first thing I noticed was that I had a PM; when I opened the PM, it was from Admin, saying that he had moved my post to the proper forum; I then went to the Chit Chat Forum, thinking that........well, who knows what to think on UHH, right ?

When I got to Chit Chat and found out about this MONUMENTAL, "obviously intentional "act".....(according to one guy ), here's what I found;

Reply #1. Beowulf; quote; "don't belong on this forum; political "crap" goes into Chit Chat".

Reply #2. Bill Cain; quote; "clown"

Reply #3. Olcoach; quote; "take this garbage where it belongs!"

Reply #4. MW Silvers; quote; "this belongs in Chit Chat, Gitzo; (thank you MW, I completely agree, but for once in 162 posts, I FORGOT to click on "Chit Chat"! (so shoot me ! )

Reply #5 Sharpshooter; Quote; "people who know before should be kicked off the forum"! ( why not just executed me at midnight in the electric chair, Sharpshooter ? ) That way, we wouldn't need to worry about recidivism ! (is that really a word? )

Reply #6 Bill Cain (yet again) "delete it" It seems that Bill can spend all day designing a ridiculous purple T-Rex dinosaur avatar, (which reminds one of the gay purple dino, "Barney" ), but he makes VERY brief comments!

Here's what I DID DO; when I first realized I had posted to the photography forum, the hour was already up, and as I'm sure everyone is aware, members can't delete ANYTHING, so I sent Admin a PM before I went to bed; (which apparently prevented a few heart attacks among the super-critical denizens of the photography forum. )


All in all, it was a VERY sobering experience! A few even wanted to know why I didn't "apologize" ! So, I'm thinking, that's a GREAT idea! So.....to all you like-minded conservatives and other "normal people".......I here-by apologize for forgetting to click on Chit-Chat, once in 162 times; To all of you libs and other "abnormal people".........( you KNOW who you are ), I suggest you "suck it up"!

Being a member of a big website such as UHH is a very enlightening experience; you find out that just like life everywhere on Planet Earth, there are LOTS an LOTS of very nice, "normal people", and a handful of "abnormal people", who are mostly DemocRATS, Libtards, secular-progressive-atheist ding-dongs, liberal Obama fan-boyz, low-information-vote-ten-timers, communists, socialists, and various other mal-contents. You KNOW who you are;.......(so do I )

If my generally conservative, common sense posts upset you, (and they certainly must, as much as you "P&M" ), I suggest you refrain from reading or commenting on them; of course, we ALL know that a low-info-libtard CAN"T resist reading common sense posts and calling them "stupid". (as others have suggested, you might want to try surgery. )

Walter Williams is a Professor of Economics at George Mason University in Virginia.
He has also been a newspaper columnist for almost as long as I can remember, and is probably one of the smartest men in the country, IMO. I would love to see him run for President in 2016.

Blacks and Obama

Walter E. Williams | Dec 04, 2013


In a March 2008 column, I criticized pundits' concerns about whether America was ready for Barack Obama, suggesting that the more important issue was whether black people could afford Obama. I proposed that we look at it in the context of a historical tidbit.

In 1947, Jackie Robinson, after signing a contract with the Brooklyn Dodgers organization, broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball. He encountered open racist taunts and slurs from fans, opposing team players and even some members of his own team. Despite that, his batting average was nearly .300 in his first year. He led the National League in stolen bases and won the first Rookie of the Year award. There's no sense of justice that requires a player be as good as Robinson in order to have a chance in the major leagues, but the hard fact of the matter is that as the first black player, he had to be.

In 1947, black people could not afford an incompetent black baseball player. Today we can. The simple reason is that as a result of the excellence of Robinson -- and many others who followed him, such as Satchel Paige, Don Newcombe, Larry Doby and Roy Campanella -- today no one in his right mind, watching the incompetence of a particular black player, could say, "Those blacks can't play baseball."

In that March 2008 column, I argued that for the nation -- but more importantly, for black people -- the first black president should be the caliber of a Jackie Robinson, and Barack Obama is not. Obama has charisma and charm, but in terms of character, values, experience and understanding, he is no Jackie Robinson. In addition to those deficiencies, Obama became the first person in U.S. history to be elected to the highest office in the land while having a long history of associations with people who hate our nation, such as the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama's pastor for 20 years, who preached that blacks should sing not "God bless America" but "God damn America." Then there's Obama's association with William Ayers, formerly a member of the Weather Underground, an anti-U.S. group that bombed the Pentagon, U.S. Capitol and other government buildings. Ayers, in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attack, told a New York Times reporter, "I don't regret setting bombs. ... I feel we didn't do enough."

Obama's electoral success is truly a remarkable commentary on the goodness of the American people. A 2008 NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll reported "that 17 percent were enthusiastic about Obama being the first African American President, 70 percent were comfortable or indifferent, and 13 percent had reservations or were uncomfortable."

I'm 77 years old. For almost all of my life, a black's becoming the president of the United States was at best a pipe dream. Obama's electoral success further confirms what I've often held: The civil rights struggle in America is over, and it's won. At one time, black Americans did not have the constitutional guarantees enjoyed by white Americans; now we do. The fact that the civil rights struggle is over and won does not mean that there are not major problems confronting many members of the black community, but they are not civil rights problems and have little or nothing to do with racial discrimination.

There is every indication to suggest that Obama's presidency will be seen as a failure similar to that of Jimmy Carter's. That's bad news for the nation but especially bad news for black Americans. No white presidential candidate had to live down the disgraced presidency of Carter, but I'm all too fearful that a future black presidential candidate will find himself carrying the heavy baggage of a failed black president.

That's not a problem for white liberals who voted for Obama -- they received their one-time guilt-relieving dose from voting for a black man to be president -- but it is a problem for future generations of black Americans. But there's one excuse black people can make; we can claim that Obama is not an authentic black person but, as The New York Times might call him, a white black person.

A lot of people think that raising the minimum wage would make life much better for "no-skilled" to "low-skilled" people needing employment; we hear it daily........"people can't survive on minimum wage". Guess what......that's only about half true, and the other half is the familiar "stinky stuff", commonly referred to, as "pure horse "puckey"; I don't remember any more what the year was when the so-called "Federal Minimum Wage" was first started, but I CAN tell you, it was years and years AFTER I graduated from high school (in 1950 ), and started supporting myself. I can also assure you that between 1950 when I graduated, and 1997 when I retired, the so-called "Federal Minimum Wage" never made 15 cents difference, one way or the other in my making a living.

Did the minimum wage make it "easier" for people just entering the labor market, "way back then"? The answer to that question is "yes and no"; (exactly like it is now, 2013, 63 years later ). If you really want to make "your life easier", by far the best way to do it is to "learn to make yourself useful"; the best way to start is by graduating from high school; hopefully, by then you should have learned to read and write, how to at least spell "hat", "cat" and "that", and you should have mastered at least, fourth grade arithmetic; also hopefully, you should have learned to "talk"; (so that adults can understand what you're talking about. ) Say you don't "like" adults? That's just fine, but tell me, how many teenagers do you know who "employ people"? You say you don't want an "ordinary job", and you'd prefer to go right to the "big money"; hey, that's just great! You can always be a "rock star", a "movie star", a "sports star", or a "TV star"; (but you'll still need to know a few things you probably haven't learned yet. )

There are a few other "careers" that quite a few people try, to "get right to the big bucks"........like "dope pusher", "car thief", or "burglar"; most of the people who choose that route are now either in jail, dead, or both; (and relatively few of them ever got rich before becoming "dead" ). But back to the minimum wage; it was yet another liberal "scheme" to jump the line and get ahead of the next guy; you can read below to see how well it has worked.


Insider Report from Newsmax.com
Headlines

1. Raising the Minimum Wage Has 'Unintended Consequences'

Raising the minimum wage would not necessarily reduce the $7 billion a year that fast-food workers receive in government benefits.

A widely reported study by university researchers, released in October, asserted that at least 52 percent of fast-food workers receive benefits from one or more government programs: Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program; Earned Income Tax Credit; Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps); and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.

The study fueled renewed calls for a significant increase in the minimum wage, which is $7.25 an hour at the federal level.
"Because pay is low and weekly work hours are limited, the families of more than half of the workers in the fast-food industry are unable to make ends meet," according to the study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
They described the $7 billion as "the public cost of low-wage jobs in the fast-food industry."

But other researchers dispute that, maintaining that if fast-food restaurants raised their wages, that would not guarantee a decline in government benefits, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Some restaurants might increase automation and cut jobs, leading to increased benefits for the laid-off workers. In some cases, a worker's family members could remain eligible for benefits even if wages were increased.
In other cases, workers might reduce their hours in response to a salary hike, and wage increases would boost the earned income tax credit received by some employees, according to the Journal.

"There are unintended consequences associated with raising the minimum wage," said Michael Saltsman, research director at the Employment Policies Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

The Journal also pointed out that the $7 billion is only about one-fifth or one-quarter as much as fast-food restaurants pay workers in wages and benefits, and it is less than 2 percent of the total benefits paid out by the four government programs.
UCLA economist Jerry Nickelsburg added that studies of the effect of minimum-wage increases are "all over the place."

The university study also disclosed that the restaurant/food services sector leads all industries in the share of workers with a family member enrolled in one or more public programs, 44 percent. Just 13 percent of fast-food workers receive health benefits from their employers.

In Louisiana, 73 percent of fast-food workers and their families receive benefits, the highest percentage in the nation. In California, 52 percent, or 227,000, get benefits.
Another analysis, by George Mason University senior scholar Antony Davies, estimates that raising the minimum wage in New Jersey by $1 an hour will increase unemployment by about 2 percent among workers without a high school education.

Gitzo again;
There are literally thousands of ways to "make money"; I know, because while I was driving a truck, I tried about half of them; some work great, some "not so great", and ALL take effort. By far the BEST way to make more money, is to find out who's making the most "bucks" doing something you can already do, (or learn to do ), then start "doing it". Example; one time when I was first married and had a couple of kids, I needed some plumbing done; when I found out what plumbers charge, I bought a couple of plumbing books and learned how to "plumb"; I never did quit my "day job" and become a plumber, but then again, I've owned dozens of houses since then, and I've never once had to pay a plumber for anything. The same thing holds true for house wiring; I actually like to do house wiring, but I never wanted to do it to make a living; but I could pay all of the electricians I've had to pay in the last 50 or 60 years with what I made in a week at my last job before I retired. ( and I still install an outlet here, a ceiling light there, and I never have to pay an electrician ! )

Or.......if you are just completely "turned off" all together by working, you can always make a living as a professional parasite, and you'll always have "the gubmint" dreaminig up more ways for you to "get free stuff"; who was it, maybe during Bill Clinton's sorry 8 years, that someone in "the gubmint" wanted to give all the welfare lay-abouts free viagra, because even "lay-abouts" "deserve" to "have fun too"; (or something equally as ridiculous as that. )

Hey Bill.....While your libertardian buddy, (Turdlow ) is busy all day long on leftie websites, trying to come up with some "facts" that will support his leftie-worldview, (and crying about people calling other people names ), you seem to be spending an equal amount of time, calling everyone who disagrees with YOUR leftie world-view an "asshole"; speaking of which, why don't you run to your bathroom and take a look in the mirror (which is usually located over the basin, but in a libtard's bathroom, it may even be on the ceiling over the bath tub? ) anyway, when you find the mirror, take a long look in it..........what you see staring back at you won't be a ridiculous, queer purple T-Rex dinosaur, but just another of the thousands of liberal assholes.

BTW.......I'm just curious.....is the LONG list of antique, obsolete old film cameras listed on your profile supposed to "impress" people, or are you merely trying to "impress" yourself that you still have all of that old junk still lying around ? Is that how aging libtards try to "impress" the world ? Have you really ever taken any pictures with any of that old junk ? If you have, maybe you should put them on the photography forum, to see if anyone is "impressed", because I can guarantee you, no one on this forum will ever be "impressed" by your intellect!