This Is A Fine Mess

The following is an excerpt from an American Spectator story today.  The Erlang Davis mentioned below is a former telephone assistant for Obamacare who was fired for truthfully answering a question about the disaster that was unfolding.

“Just as Tyrrell predicted, Obama and company, believing the opposite and in denial over the reality of the Soviet lesson, made Obamacare the very face of “Friendly Fascism” and “Stealth Fascism.” Today the entire Great Leap Forward in American health care as envisioned by the liberal “yokels back at academe, drunk on their higher knowledge of ‘how-to’ studies” is a disaster collapsing in on itself faster than a Florida sinkhole.

All at once, the reality of the collective consequences of liberalism is glaringly in the spotlight — making Tyrrell’s point with an uncanny precision.

The worship of Big Government? The laughably arrogant “we-know-what’s-best-for-you” sense of moral and intellectual superiority? These “smart” people can’t even run a website. The eternal liberal dependence on class warfare and racism? Yes indeed, the party of slavery, segregation, lynching, the Ku Klux Klan, racial quotas and illegal immigration never blinked at the shameful firing of an Obamacare operator — a black single mom — for the “crime” of answering Sean Hannity’s questions honestly. And doing so while keeping on a rich white woman named Kathleen Sebelius whose management of Obamacare has been as incompetent as it is dishonest. Sebelius, the privileged white liberal daughter of a white liberal governor and a white liberal governor herself, acceded to the firing of Erlang Davis, the black single mother whose only sin was answering Hannity’s questions and with no spin. Hannity, appalled, quickly re-contacted Davis and is picking up the tab for her year’s salary as well as finding her a job. “Are you surprised Kathleen Sebelius still has her job and you got fired for doing yours?” Hannity asked of Davis when he had her on his Fox TV show. To which Davis replied: “Yes sir.”

Well aside from the volumes this incident says about Hannity’s character, the incident speaks volumes about the core nature of liberalism itself and its dependence on both the sheerest, most blatant thuggery combined with a thick veneer of out-and-out racism. Which in turn goes directly to Tyrrell’s point that in reality Obama himself is turning out to be the pallbearer for a philosophy that is in fact unsustainable.

From one end of America to the other, some 16 million Americans are estimated to be losing their health insurance policies because of Obamacare. The Weekly Standard’s John McCormack leads us to health care expert Bob Laszewski, who writes:

The U.S. individual health insurance market currently totals about 19 million people. Because the Obama administration’s regulations on grandfathering existing plans were so stringent as many as 16 million are not grandfathered and must comply with Obamacare at their next renewal. The rules are very complex. For example, if you had an individual plan in March of 2010 when the law was passed and you only increased the deductible from $1,000 to $1,500 in the years since, your plan has lost its grandfather status and it will no longer be available to you when it would have renewed in 2014.

Over at Kaiser Health News the reporting says:

Health plans are sending hundreds of thousands of cancellation letters to people who buy their own coverage, frustrating some consumers who want to keep what they have and forcing others to buy more costly policies.

… An estimated 14 million people purchase their own coverage because they don’t get it through their jobs. Calls to insurers in several states showed that many have sent notices.

Florida Blue, for example, is terminating about 300,000 policies, about 80 percent of its individual policies in the state. Kaiser Permanente in California has sent notices to 160,000 people — about half of its individual business in the state. Insurer Highmark in Pittsburgh is dropping about 20 percent of its individual market customers, while Independence Blue Cross, the major insurer in Philadelphia, is dropping about 45 percent.

In Laszewski’s words? “This is a fine mess.”

Indeed.” American Spectator

 

 

Think We Lost? Think Again

I need to post an article occasionally to keep this blog alive.

Think we lost?  Read this article by the very liberal publication, The Nation:

Even When the GOP Loses, It Wins

The Editors | October 16, 2013  The Nation

Just hours before a default on our national debt and sixteen days into a wrenching federal government shutdown, it now appears that the barest measure of sanity has prevailed in Washington. The Senate has reached a deal to reopen the government at current funding levels through January 15 and to pass a debt ceiling hike though February 7. The measure is expected to clear the House tonight with scant but necessary Republican support.
 

Because the deal only includes minor concessions, the Beltway consensus is that it represents a resounding defeat for Republicans, who “surrendered” their original demands to defund or delay Obamacare. In the skirmish of opinion polls, that may be true, for now. But in the war of ideas, the Senate deal is but a stalemate, one made almost entirely on conservative terms. The GOP now goes into budget talks with sequestration as the new baseline, primed to demand longer-term cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. And they still hold the gun of a US default to the nation’s head in the next debt ceiling showdown.

Surrender? Any more “victories” like this and Democrats will end up paying tribute into the GOP’s coffers.

This debate started in 2011 when the president accepted that he couldn’t get support for jobs programs and instead called for “balanced” deficit reduction that included tax increases on corporations and the wealthy and spending cuts. In response, Republicans threatened to default on America’s debts, forcing through the Budget Control Act, which cut nearly $1 trillion in spending over ten years with no tax increases and exacted another trillion in cuts either by agreement of a “supercommittee” or, failing that, automatic across-the-board cuts of $1.2 trillion over ten years. Now the Republicans’ “surrender” locks in that sequester while pushing for further reductions to basic safety net programs—all while tax increases remain off the table and the threat of default is still pointed at the country’s head. Tea Party zealots may have lost their bid to torpedo healthcare reform, but the right continues to set the terms of the debate.

This is particularly perverse because austerity only adds to the country’s troubles. More than 20 million people still need full-time work. Incomes are still stagnant. The top 1 percent continue to capture what little growth there is. The International Monetary Fund says even that will slow, projecting a rate of 1.6 percent growth in the coming months. We are closer to a renewed recession than a healthy recovery. Meanwhile, deficits are falling more rapidly than at any time since the demobilization after World War II. More spending cuts will only cost jobs and slow growth.

We should be debating the real challenges ahead. How do we get the economy moving and create jobs? How do we empower workers to gain a fair share of profits? Can we forge a global effort to shut down off-shore tax dodges and end the obscenity of multinational companies pocketing millions in profits and paying nothing in taxes? Will we squander the opportunity to rebuild our decrepit roads, airports and sewers when interest rates are low and labor in abundant supply?

The GOP may be bearing the brunt of the public’s rage, but anger is also directed at Washington and government generally. Nearly eight in ten say the country is seriously off-track. The Tea Party may be plummeting in public esteem, but it is taking government down with it. There is simply no way to rebuild widely shared prosperity without a government with a clear strategy in the global economy. There is no way to make needed public investments and temper the extreme inequality that threatens our democracy without progressive tax reform. The terms of the Republican “surrender” take us in the wrong direction.