Don't believe the liberal spin. ObamaCare is sputtering.

This month, the Supreme Court may well deliver a fatal blow to ObamaCare in King vs. Burwell, by ruling that the health insurance subsidies handed out through federal exchanges in 36 states are illegal. Many liberals seem to think that the only thing preventing the president's crowning domestic achievement from becoming a rip-roaring success is this largely specious and semantic lawsuit. But here's the thing: ObamaCare is teetering due to its own internal contradictions that have nothing to do with the lawsuit.

ObamaCare's supporters would like everyone to believe that with Healthcare.gov now functioning, everything is just fine and dandy. Contrary to what the conservative press (which I guess would include me) has been saying about the many problems of ObamaCare, Vox's Ezra Klein declared last September that "in the real world, it's working." In February, his fellow Voxland inhabitant Sarah Kliff rattled off eight ways in which the law had proved its critics wrong.

But has it? Not really.

For starters, the exchanges have enrolled about 3 million fewer people than the Congressional Budget Office projected in 2010. And far fewer of the enrollees are from the ranks of the uninsured than hoped. Medicaid enrollment is lower too, for the simple reason that states refused to expand the program.

The core of President Obama's sales pitch to America was that the program, which he called the Affordable Care Act, would "bend the health care cost curve" and save an average family $2,500 on their premiums each year. How would it accomplish this feat? Essentially, he said, by forcing uninsured "free loaders" who show up in the emergency room to obtain free care to either buy (subsidized) coverage on the insurance exchange or sign up for the expanded Medicaid program. The point was that if they had coverage, they'd get cheaper care sooner in a doctor's office rather than more expensive care later in a hospital emergency room.

Via: The Week

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How Obama Became the Superhero of Excuses

You helped elect an untested presidential candidate, a man almost as liberal as you. He promised to heal the oceans, make health care an inalienable right, and transform Washington's toxic culture. You mocked Republicans, independents, and squishy Democrats who had the audacity to criticize your guy, much less doubt the inevitability of his victory. President Obama won—twice—and then didn't live up to anybody's expectations, including his own.

What do you do? Well, if you're Ezra Klein and a coterie of inflexibly progressive pundits, you repurpose an attack used against President George W. Bush's bombastic approach to geopolitics. You call anybody who questions Obama's leadership style a Green Lanternist. In a post for Vox stretching beyond 2,500 words, Klein makes his case against Obama critics.

"Presidents consistently overpromise and underdeliver," he begins, a fair start. Surely, the editor-in-chief of Vox is going to make the obvious point that presidents and presidential candidates should know enough about the political process (including the limits on the executive branch) to avoid such a breach of trust.

Klein is a data guy. He must know that the public's faith in government and politics is on a decades-long slide, a dangerous trend due in no small part to the fact that candidates make promises they know they can't keep. In Washington, we call it pandering. In the rest of the country, it's called a lie. Klein yawns.

Now, wait. A Harvard-trained lawyer and constitutional scholar like Obama didn't stumble into the 2008 presidential campaign unaware of the balance of powers, the polarization of politics, the rightward march of the GOP, and other structural limits on the presidency. He made those promises because he thought those goals were neither unreasonable nor unattainable. Either that, or he was lying.

Via: National Journal

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Good news: Bloomberg’s gun-control group offering printable placemats for Thanksgiving dinner

More or less annoying than the Thanksgiving ObamaCare talking points from OFA? I’m going to say “more,” not because of the subject matter but because the thought of sitting down to eat after a lecture about health insurance only to find more leftist propaganda staring back at me might make me flip the table. Simple request for America’s O-bots this week: Choose. You can either encourage me to throw my money away on an ObamaCare plan I can’t afford or convince me to give up my gun because that’ll reduce the odds of another mass shooting by one one-hundred-millionth or whatever. Thanksgiving is a day for indulgence, but only within reason.

Click here for full size. Can a placemat do what a months-long White House campaign last winter couldn’t, my friends?

Question: Given that so many liberal activists have decided that Thursday is a day for Raising Awareness, is it worth shifting to a preemption strategy? All I want to do is watch football and eat but that kind of passivity might land me in the audience for some twentysomething cousin’s 45-minute meditation on how “if you like your plan” wasn’t technically a lie. Maybe the only solution is to prepare a list of topics and start running through it as soon as the guests’ coats are off. Baseball’s new instant-replay rule, the terribleness of “Homeland,” America’s awakening to the fact that Chinese-food cartons are supposed to be opened and used as plates — there’s no shortage of ways to play conversational keep-away from the earnest young liberal who read this awesome Ezra Klein post the other day about enrollment targets that he wants to tell you about. Be proactive. And take comfort in the fact that, come next Thanksgiving, lefties will be looking to play their own game of conversational keep-away.

Via: Hot Air

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Ponzi-palooza: Obama Versus Bernie Madoff

But let’s compare the similarities. First up, the rabid, “you’re a fool if you don’t give this man all your money” tone of the early true believers:

Obama’s finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don’t even really inspire. They elevate.They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair. The other great leaders I’ve heard guide us towards a better politics, but Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves, to the place where America exists as a glittering ideal, and where we, its honored inhabitants, seem capable of achieving it, and thus of sharing in its meaning and transcendence.

— JournoList founder and Washington Post journalist Ezra Klein, at the start of 2008.

Jerry Reisman, who met him at the Glen Oaks Country Club in Westbury, New York, said: “He moved in some of the best social circles in New York. He worked the best country clubs. He was utterly charming. He was a master at meeting people and creating this aura. People looked at him as a superhero.“People didn’t want to know what he was doing. If it’s too good to be true, it isn’t true. But people didn’t care. They were greedy.”

Smug, too. Jeffrey Gural, chairman of real estate firm Newmark Knight Frank told the New York Times that he was teased by his friends after Madoff refused to let his family invest in the fund because he would not put up a minimum of $20 million. He said: “They thought Bernie Madoff was a genius, and that anyone who didn’t give him their money was a fool.”

The revelation that they were the fools has left Madoff investors devastated.

— “Bernard Madoff: how did he get away with it for so long?”, the London Telegraph, December 20th, 2008.

Those who were swindled no doubt feel nostalgia for the good times they initially enjoyed. Not to mention, that initial rush of smug superiority that came from being “in the know,” unlike the ignorant naifs outside of their social circle:

Meade pointed me to that just now, and it made me laugh (and cringe). I knew I’d already talked about an Obama nostalgia movement — here, 3 days ago — but I see I was talking about it as far back as October 2011.

Via: PJ Media
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5 liberals who SLAMMED the president’s Obamacare speech

In an address from the White House Rose Garden Monday on the less-than-stellar launch of the Obamacare online exchanges, President Obama sought to ease a worried nation. But he didn’t even succeed in assuaging the concerns of his liberal supporters in the media.

Here are five liberals who weren’t particularly impressed with the Great Orator’s Monday oration:

Ezra Klein

The liberal Washington Post blogger criticized the launch of the Obamacare exchanges last week as a total failure. Judging by his tweets, he wasn’t particularly heartened by the president’s Rose Garden speech:

Andrew Sullivan

The liberal blogger, who at one time insisted he was actually a conservative, is one of President Obama’s biggest proponents. But he too was underwhelmed by Obama’s speech.

“I have to say I found his remarks far less contrite than they should have been,” he wrote on his blog. “Where is the unqualified apology? Where is the commitment to basic accountability for this clusterfuck? Instead, we have all these positive rationalizations and excuses in a confusing technical lecture”

“Obama needs to get ahead of this, and stop being as defensive as he was this morning,” he added. “He does not have the credibility to sell us on the ACA when he does not cop more aggressively to his own failure to stay on top of this most important domestic initiative.”

In another blog post, Sullivan linked to several articles demonstrating that the Obamcare call centers were not operating efficiently either.

Krystal Ball 

Ball, one of the liberal hosts on MSNBC’s “The Cycle,” didn’t quite criticize President Obama’s speech Monday, but she was highly critical of the Obamacare roll out.

“I was prepared for some glitches but this is a catastrophe,” Ball said, before suggesting Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius should possibly resign.

Benjy Sarlin

The MSNBC.com reporter, who used to work at the liberal website Talking Points Memo, also took to Twitter to bash the president’s speech.

Matt Yglesias  

Even liberal Slate blogger Matt Yglesias, who predicted Obamacare’s implementation would be a “huge political success,”  was critical of the assurances in President Obama’s speech.

Via: Daily Caller

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3 Liberals Who Are EMBARRASSED By ObamaCare's Disastrous Implementation ... How Many More Are Out There?

While many liberals are busy explaining away the disastrous launch of Obamacare’s online exchanges, these men of the left are big enough to admit all has not gone well.

1.) The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein

The liberal pundit is a big Obamacare booster, but he concedes that the program’s launch has been something less than triumphant.

“So far, the Affordable Care Act’s launch has been a failure,” Klein wrote in a Monday post entitled, “Five Thoughts on the Obamacare disaster.” “Not ‘troubled.’ Not ‘glitchy.’ A failure. But ‘so far’ only encompasses 14 days. The hard question is whether the launch will still be floundering on day 30, and on day 45.”

“A lot of liberals will be angry over this post,” he continued toward the end of his article. “A lot of conservatives will be happy about it. But it’s important to see the Affordable Care Act as something more than a pawn in the political wars: It’s a real law that real people are desperately, nervously, urgently trying to access. And so far, the Obama administration has failed them.”

“The Obama administration’s top job isn’t beating the Republicans,” he added. “It’s running the government well. On this — the most important initiative they’ve launched — they’ve run the government badly. They deserve all the criticism they’re getting and more.”

2.) Comedian Jon Stewart

The liberal host of “The Daily Show” isn’t exactly an Obamacare fan — it appears he would prefer a single-payer system. Nonetheless, he conducted a brutal interview of Health and Human Services Director Kathleen Sebelius last week, in which he mocked the launch of Obamacare’s online exchanges for being an unmitigated disaster.

“We’re going to do a challenge. I’m going to try and download every movie ever made and you are going to try to sign up for Obamacare — and we’ll see which happens first,” Stewart joked after opening a laptop computer.

During the interview, Stewart also questioned the fairness of delaying the employer mandate while not doing the same for the individual mandate, and accused Sebelius 0f lying to him. That’s probably not the type of interview the secretary expected when she signed on to do the show.

3.) Former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs

Even Robert Gibbs, who was once one of President Obama’s closest aides, is shocked by the incompetence of Obamacare’s implementation.

“This is excruciatingly embarrassing for the White House and for the Department of Health and Human Services,” Gibbs said Monday on MSNBC, where he is now a contributor. “This was bungled badly. This was not a server problem, just too many people came to the website. This is a website architecture problem.”

Via: Fox News

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Ezra Klein: Obamacare Rollout Has So Far ‘Been a Big Failure’

October 14, 2013 9:50 am

Liberal MSNBC contributor Ezra Klein continued his criticism of the Obamacare website Monday on Morning Joe, saying it was a “big failure” so far on the part of the Obama administration.

“The way this IT is going out is a disaster,” he said. “They have done a terrible job on this website. We’re a couple weeks in now. People can’t sign up. People have tried 20, 30, 40 times. It’s one thing for that to be true in the first three or four days, it’s another for it to be true two or three weeks in.”

There is a concern the website has deeper, more systemic problems beyond just glitches and too much traffic, Klein said.

“One of the Obama administration’s jobs, separate from all of the political stuff we talk about here, is to simply run things like this well, to run their signature legislative initiative well, to do government in a way that makes people confident and able to use it,” he said. “On that so far, this has been a big failure.”

Via: WFB

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