Let 'Em Eat Cake

That might be President Obama's reaction towards those who are complaining about the new costs (the economic costs, not the other costs) of the "Affordable" Care Act. And, to the extent that people did vote for Obama and (by re-electing him and voting in more of his ilk into the Senate) tacitly approved of Obamacare, I actually would agree with him. Don't like Obamacare? Don't vote Democrat.

Meanwhile, a local news station (God bless 'em) brings us this epic live coverage of employees in Pittsburgh reacting to their new healthcare under Obamacare. Live.

I wonder if it gets made into a Republican ad? It is, in any case, a rather excellent job of reporting. And, it should be repeated by news affiliates and played by Republican (and heck, third party) politicians from now until the next round of elections are over.

Of course, Obama and his progressive harpies and their Democratic allies in the House and Senate are all-too-happy to double down on Obamacare, costs and all (and on all of its costs for us and potential costs for them).

Buying Insurance Under Obamacare

Here's a nifty video which explains how it works:


Actually, this video misses a few points.

For one, there isn't a long line at the coffee shop in front of the protagonist. For another, the protagonist isn't being forced to violate any of his beliefs or morals, in short to violate his conscience, in order to buy the coffee for himself or his employees. But the video does do a reasonably good job, as far as it goes.

OFA's Awful "Talking" Ad

There's not really any other way to describe Organize For America's (@BarackObama on Twitter) new ad. It's just as classless as the last round, and is again urging people to hijack the holidays to sell Obamacare. This time, they're using a nearly-adrogynous racially neutral onesie-wearing douche bag of a model.

He looks to be young, meaning part of the target demographic of folks who are (or were) enthralled by Obama's razzle-dazzle campaign-bedazzle bullshit. There are really three things which come to mind which others have said, and one more which I would add.

• Everything about the ad screams "douchebag." I mean, really: plaid onesie pajamas? Discussing serious issues (however much Obama et al. may be treating healthcare reform as a joke, it is serious) with supposedly serious grown men while sitting around in pajamas? The hot chocalate thing is fine, I guess, if taken on its own. But the rest makes the thing laughable at best.
• This is, moreover, another attempt by Obama (et al.) to place himself (and his policies) at the center of the holidays. Because you know, the holidays are about serving the party and celebrating the dear leader, not about spending time with family or celebrating traditions (religious or otherwise) or anything so unhip as that. It's an ongoing trend with Obama, everything's about him.
• If Obamacare had done a better job of selling itself, we wouldn't even need to spend the holidays trying to sell it for him. The complete top-down incompetence in implementing the websites and exchanges is a part of the problem, as is the fact that he has been a) lying and b) changing the rules of the game since day one. However, even that is only a part of the problem, since Obamacare itself would be aweful without those problems.
• My own observation: I notice that the age of the guy in the ad appears to be young(ish?). It's hard to get a good estimate, based on his lack of distinction from "generic guy/gal", but I would guess 20-something [edit: over 26, as some have pointed out]. Well, with the way Obama's economy has been treating 20-somethings, I guess that many of them really do have nothing better to do this winter than sit around in pajamas and drink hot chocalate. It's not like many people in this age group have full-time jobs to go to.

2017 cannot arrive soon enough.

Rant: Obamacare and Schadenfreude

Jonah Goldberg's latest at National Review is a delight to read. Some will say that we are rejoicing over others' suffering. I am not rejoicing over the suffering of those who have seen their premium skyrocket and their policies get cancelled. Granted, a large number (a majority, perhaps?) can certainly be said to have brought it on themselves--they did, after all, vote to re-elect Barack Obama to the Presidency and a Democratic Party majority in the Senate. Lesson learned? Perhaps, perhaps not. We'll see what 2014 brings.

But no, this set of just deserts is not the cause of conservative glee. I'm certainly sorry even for those who were duped into voting for Obama, and even for those who continue to insist that it still wasn't a mistake to re-elect him. I don;t want them to suffer, I just want them to not be in power, since they generally make bad decisions which the rest of us have to live with.

Here is the real source of conservative glee in all of this:

As a matter of public policy and fiscal health, this is a mixed bag. It’s good that poor sick people without insurance coverage are getting something. On the other side of the scale, we have the fact that the country is racing toward entitlement-fueled bankruptcy. So if you can overlook that, yippee!

But as a political and ideological matter, this is beyond fantastic. For years we’ve been told that Democrats were more “reality-based,” that “facts have a liberal bias,” in the words of Paul Krugman, and that if they could just have their way, they could fix all of our problems. No one represented this arrogant promise more than Barack Obama himself. But, with an irony so rich it would be made of Corinthian leather if it was a car seat, the only way he could get his signature legislation passed was to baldly and brazenly lie about it, over and over and over again. He created a rhetorical cloud castle where no one would lose his insurance, every family would save thousands of dollars, and millions of the uninsured would suddenly get coverage. Anyone who doubted this was called a fool or a liar, or even a racist. It was, in the parlance of liberalism, a “false choice” to assert that Obamacare couldn’t be a floor wax and a dessert topping.

It is indeed a very Christian sentiment, "How the haughty are brought low" (Isaiah 2:17, 5:15; Luke 1:52). And I can think of few people in living memory more haughty than President Obama, and to a lesser extent his enablers and their supporters. How many times during the "#Shutdown" were we told that Republicans just wanted to take Obamacare hostage by delaying it? That they should be made to kneel like good subjects before the throne of Barack Almighty, kiss his ring, and beg his forgiveness for opposing the Obamacare Bill?

And now, scarcely a month and a half later, all we are hearing from the Democrats in Congress is that we need some sort of delay for Obamacare. Suddenly they're suggesting that maybe we should hold off on the whole thing until it myriad "bugs"--a euphemism for the various unfortunate features and predictable if unintentional bad effects--can be fixed. That very suggestion was actually called "racist" when Republicans were making it.

My suggestion is that we scrap the whole damn thing, starting with the worthless and tyrannical HHS mandate, and nearly equally tyrannical though apparently Constitutional individual mandate. If we're going to require everyone to have healthcare insurance, we could at least be sensible in what we require the healthcare plans to cover--big and unexpected costs, emergency services (for true emergencies), perhaps a check-up/physical once per year. The rest should be at best optional. And if we're going to admit that the purpose the Obamacare is to subsidize debauchery and hedonism for Millenials (and beyond), that we should scrap the whole thing. It really is reasonable and fair to make people dig into their "beer money" to buy their own contraceptives, whether at $9/month (the actual cost) or $18k over 4 years (the claimed cost).

Then there's the fact that many American have lost their insurance--the insurance that they largely chose for themselves--to Obamacare in spite of the president's "promise" (really an outright lie) to the contrary:


The president and his administration have doubled down on this lie by first claiming that he "misspoke" when he made this promise, that he had never really made this promise. When he realized that people have a tough time believing that he misspoke when he uttered nearly the exact same phrase 36 times (or probably more), he switched to claiming that the insurance lost was "substandard." This apparently means that it didn't cover contraception and maternity leave for 70 year old men. That contraception coverage is crucial--why else would the penalty for not covering contraception/sterilization/some abortions be steeper than not providing any healthcare at all ($100/employee/day = ~36,500/employee/year for the former and $2000/employee/year for the latter)?

But in the meantime, it is certainly entertaining to sit back and watch our haughty president and his arrogant supporters squirm a bit. And not just because they have been lying repeatedly to the American people for the last several years.