gdp's Comments

Commentary Magazine : Who Lost the Shutdown Matters

Mon, 21 Oct 2013 05:39:37 +0000

I don't know how they disentangle this Pooh bear from the hole they stuck health care in...they put all these pieces together to keep the private insurers in the game and the market exchanges spill over to the private, if not via direct mandates via fungible costs that have to be picked up by someone somewheres. Outside employer coverage, I I can't get medically underwritten insurance on the private market as a 62 year old with prior conditions. I just can't get it. They won't write a policy. Because, as you note, it wouldn't be "insurance" on an actuarial basis--they'd be in the business of providing health care. Personally, no, I don't want to die sick, broke, and in the street. Sorry Sean and Rush, emergency rooms are not free. They bill. I had insurance when unemployed through federal programs COBRA and HIPA--and regulations already on the books *before Obamacare* mean that when employed my preconditions can't be singled out and put on a year waiting period for coverage (because I've maintained continuous coverage). Single employees pay significantly less than family plans, for years and years now. Conservatives have suggested that mandated maternity (and abortion?) care have raised premiums for any policy covering a woman insured--could be. On COBRA and HIPA I paid on average $687 a month with deductible expense sharing about $5,000 in the COBRA. Under HIPA, no longer based on my original employer/employee pool, I paid about $687 a month with if memory serves about a $5,000 - $7,000 deductible and another $5,000 - $7,000 *expense sharing* exposure (though the expense sharing is doled out percentage wise incident by incident). If I had no employer insurance, as a subsidized member of the exchanges, even without an additional tax subsidy, the rate drops to about $300 to $400 or so monthly with about $5,000 to $7,500 deductible. For a 62 year old with prior conditions, my rates vis a vis the former private market are good, Until the young and healthy's inability, failure, raised-middle-finger refusal to opt for policies they consider exorbitant ($200 a month for $5K deductible) rachets all the rates upwards. I have no answers. I see from today's news that Sebelius and Pelosi are going well no, if the exchanges don't work in December that's not all that important. But they are saying they are getting the "best and the brightest' to work on the exchanges to fix them. Well what did they have before, the worst and dumbest?

Commentary Magazine : Tea Party Despair and ObamaCare

Mon, 21 Oct 2013 02:25:57 +0000

"As I say" another member of the Ta-taa Party. Little self-referential humor for a blog. To repeat, your remark that the "entire population" has to sign on to a program is just one example of the malarky inscribed on your valentines to self. Nobody has to be angry to laugh at you. You are a natural target for mockery. You realize that your whole self-inflated personna was the butt of countless Seinfeld jokes. Because you're an arsehole. So in the manner of jbkurack I myself now have the perfect jbkburackian conclusive answer to anything jbkurack says, long or short, dashed off or composed after laborings deep into the night: "Like I said, an arsehole" You know the people who comment here don't like you but they'd meet you for lunch (not that you'd want to go). You won't get past Wehner or Tobin's servant entrance.

Commentary Magazine : The Tea Party Mindset

Mon, 21 Oct 2013 01:16:43 +0000

The Tea Party *is* a large base segment of the GOP electorate for determining the GOP's policies. Which is why I keep getting RNCC fund raising e-mails copping their themes. However politics doesn't stop between elections. Peter's post patronizes the GOP's own electorate (and seeks to derail its intervention in the primary process) but counsels no confrontations with the current President and Democratic Senate in order to win over the general electorate. Well that's a strategy but no guarantee that you'll get any better disposal than Romney got. whrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

Commentary Magazine : Tea Party Despair and ObamaCare

Mon, 21 Oct 2013 00:33:16 +0000

blah blah blah "that the entire population can sign off on and legitimize." Sure. "The entire population" eh? And you think you are so so the smartest most sober person in the room. "The entire population" of the United States eh? That's enough is it? Maybe not. Which is why the Democratic Party wishes to add illegal aliens legalized under the next immigration reform bill Wehner and Tobin will support (just wait) to ACA. They'd like to sign up the entire population of the United States and the entire population of Mexico!! That's two populations!! Can't get any more legitimate than that.

Commentary Magazine : Tea Party Despair and ObamaCare

Mon, 21 Oct 2013 00:30:08 +0000

so you've adopted HillelA's MO of adding meaningless snarky graffiti -- tagging snippy personal insults with a crooked rhetorical pinkie holding them up. "Ill give you that". A mind that could hold, express, or accept the cockamamie notion the Founding Fathers would be horrified that one branch of government would impose "its views" on the other is not small, tiny or merely blown; it's out in space lodged head down in the planet in orbit beyond Saturn. That's why they designed a checks and balances system to begin with. They expected it. How they might feel about a President who then routinely fudged the Constitution or pretended to follow it by rewriting laws via executive fiat, well they expected that too. The question is what are you going to do about it? One answer, like it or not, is the Tea Party.

Commentary Magazine : Tea Party Despair and ObamaCare

Sun, 20 Oct 2013 18:50:47 +0000

But Obama isn't interested in compromise. He's all about the zealotry and the kamikaze mission. Because he knows the establishment will always defensively stall their carrier in panicked dead-in-the-waters freeze; their craft blows up, his plane survives. So now Madison constitutional shuck and jive complements some chestnuts about Burke. And the very same establishment that councils prudence and patience on Obamacare (whose dead weight non-functioning exchanges may drag down the private health insurance system well in advance of November 2014) also blithely ignores the evidence of their senses and promotes the same kind of federal gargantuan "reform" in immigration. Obama traduces the Constitution today. The Tea Party did not set the republic on a course of stumbling from CR to CR, debt ceiling rise to debt ceiling rise. That Commentary now views House GOP parliamentary strategy as not just misjudged but a "horror" (the horror the horror) attempt to "impose its views" on the President is as naive as it is ignorant. It's hard to come up with two sentences that could pack so many absurd inanities between high-minded references to the Founding Fathers and the final period. Mindblowing.

Commentary Magazine : Who Lost the Shutdown Matters

Sun, 20 Oct 2013 18:07:48 +0000

Ted Cruz has returned to defund. Indeed he still claims that defund, the maximalist strategy could have worked. A GOP operative made the same point you do about the actuarial unsoundness about a one year delay in the mandate because the young healthy don't sign up--but they aren't signing up *now*--you could shift forward the other timelines. I would have preferred the GOP take the lead in acting during the shut down to reopen the clearly dysfunctional ACA by a considered time-out, adjusting requirements vis a vis insurers as necessary and separating out if possible the leakage of the exchange failures into the private markets. Not to kill it or de facto defund it but to limit the damage. This really is, on the implementation level (which is a symptom of the underlying law's weaknesses but also a failure in its own right) an epic fail. Usually the not uncommon failure of government data bases aren't mission critical and can be worked around. If Army procurement accounting cannot be audited because cost accounting systems are out of whack, *procurement still continues*. But here the functioning of the data systems, the web portal and data warehousing hubs, *was itself mission critical*--if they failed the whole thing doesn't work. imo Cruz is willing to suffer high-risk tactical set-backs to achieve his ultimate goals (say defunding Obama care) because he believes there will be other hands with other cards dealt to play. Still, the system may bounce unpredictably under repeated stress applied to the fracture points of Obama CR by CR and debt ceiling by debt ceiling government. And I think Cruz is disingenuous or mistaken in claiming that the Senate leadership fold prevented the defunding from working. But the exchanges could well continue to cascade and an actuarial death-spiral take hold as young can't sign up or opt out. If Obama refuses to reconsider (enabled by MSM blackout post shudtown) then the defund/repeal option will become increasingly attractive. And the "establishment" tut-tutting just-take-a-deep-breath-relax-and-think-of-2014 response, overtaken by events, will move from complacent, head-in-the-sand to deluded. John McCain's career before his Vietnam trial may also bear on appreciating his reaction to upstart Cruz. He himself was ant-authority, an "upstart", protected however by the status of his father, John S. McCain Jr., Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Command (CINCPAC), commander of all U.S. forces in the Vietnam theater from 1968 to 1972. McCain's record at Annapolis reads like Poe's at West Point. His dare devil flying cost the Navy one plane and cut power lines in Spain. So "old bull" McCain may see his younger self in Ted Cruz's pushing the envelope. The reaction is not necessarily a he's-a-chip-off-my-block empathy but identity/turf alarm bells.

Commentary Magazine : Who Lost the Shutdown Matters

Sun, 20 Oct 2013 16:38:03 +0000

The Tea Party opposed by Commentary, do not draw the conclusions you started out with. They don't see the connection between Commentary or Jeb Bush or Peter King or McCain and their support of Israel. So I don't see why anyone's response should be well they refuse to build coalitions with the Tea Party--I will rethink my support of their "pet policies" if the Tea Party itself doesn't make that connection. They wear pants too and use forks when they eat. Some things aren't quid pro quo. Personally, as a production techie I think it's shameful that the exchanges don't work. I don't think that the ACA is the worst abuse of the Obama administration but is a symptom in its overreaching and failure to date of the Obama administration abuses. I don't think it could have been defunded. I do think that in one or two weeks the individual mandate could have been delayed which would have been a good thing for everyone if they had passed a clean debt limit bill and left the partial shut down in effect. Go visit Israel. It's an easy country to tour as the distances aren't great and you can cover half the north south length in a day or less. See what it's like. It's a real country and exists quite apart from whether Commentary does support it or not or whether Commentary doers support the Tea Party or condemns it. Israel has great beaches, lots of historical places to visit, Jerusalem is beautiful. But taking a tour of the country can bring home it's actuality--it's more than the sum of the arguments about its politics and the Palestinians. Negotiations with Iran for Obama are top menu items, win, loose or draw on domestic issues. I think he would negotiate no matter what--also the more he loses at home the more attractive some kind of Iranian "achievement". If the Iranian's don't push the West's nose in the dirt by demanding immediate lifting of all sanctions they'll get a deal. Who knows maybe even then. Even if Congress doesn't go along Obama could get out his "waiver" pen. The deal is in the works. That train has left the station. Here's the problem with an Iranian nuclear strike on Israel. Even if they put together 5-20 weapons, Israel has a submarine nuclear capacity in addition to their air-launched capacity. Iran will cesae to exist as a functioning modern state. Tens of millions of Iranians will be killed and though the Jewish state may be de facto liquidated the Iranian religious theocracy will, to put it mildly, be discredited.

Commentary Magazine : The Tea Party Mindset

Sun, 20 Oct 2013 15:27:58 +0000

The Tea Party is not talking about imminent apocalypse. Mark Levin, to use one example, has proposed a plan for a convention to amend the Constitution called by the states that is a very long term commitment--"years if not decades". Peter Wehner's response, self-serving on the cuff psychologizing and even more self-serving complacency is flabbergasting: "This is, rather, a [sorta] difficult time..that requires sobriety and wisdom, public officials of courage and good judgment who are willing to act boldly but not recklessly..." Funny, the bottom-up participation of Republican *voters* is backgrounded in this Confucian nutshell Nirvana of high-minded high-tone nomenklatura. Presumably they are mobilized with other required demographic interests every two years by sober campaign consultants of courage and good judgement who are willing to act boldly but not inexpensively. Unaddressed is how all this bold but not too bold sobriety can break through the corrupted, increasingly dominant, dysfunctional and cynically ruthless Democratic Party machine that currently has the GOP bottlenecked in 1/2 of 1/3 etc. But he sure knows that GOP challenges to gerrymandered incumbents get in the way. He turns Tea Party and conservative objections to the Democrat's Borg hegemony into a cartoon of loony-toonz Tea Partiers who want to burn his BFFs at the stake. Peter, there's a difference between primaries and Burning Man. Really. The only men being burned here are the straw men of your own argument. --scene from Peter Wehner's upcoming documentary: "The Ugly Truth behind Tea Party Primary Challenges: Exposed!!! " http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0Szoz8LxDA

Commentary Magazine : Who Lost the Shutdown Matters

Sat, 19 Oct 2013 21:06:43 +0000

Also this on how terribly awry Obamacare has gone: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/361577/asses... Delay was always a better bet than defund because it overlapped a key interest of the Democrats themselves: not to have Obamacare just lie face up on the beach stranded on actuarial high tide rotting in pieces as only the most committed (and at risk) insurance net "takers" would persist in signing up. The administration may well be forced on its own to delay or even pull parts or the entirety of the mandate. The GOP split played out between the "let it collapse on its own and we have a selling point for 2014" faction and the "we must kill it now" faction. But to strangle it you had to get to a very well protected crib. For delay you needed to get the other side to agree that maybe they don't want their baby choking to death on bug infested baby food. Delay was considered late and abandoned early. ---- The writer adds: "Obamacare was also always going to be a test of the sheer capacity of the administrative state to actually do what it claims the authority and ability to do. At this point, it looks as though we may be witnessing a failure of the administrative state on a level unimagined even by its staunchest critics. We may be. But we’ll have to see." The administrative state was able to go to the moon and successfully fight WWII. The post office and the DMV both work two zillion percent more efficiently than this fiasco. But we are now seeing for sure a test case for the current Democratic regime's ability to implement--not long term, at all--their big big promises. This is "immigration reform" on Obama. Does the GOP really need to go for those broken eggs?

Commentary Magazine : Who Lost the Shutdown Matters

Sat, 19 Oct 2013 19:35:46 +0000

imo there's some kind of perceived threat to power and prestige in the social networks that Commentary connects up with via Wehner for one--as well as the general temperamental disconnect between the base worker bees and Bushie party functionaries and like minded colleagues and professional politicians. This isn't a "neocon" thing. Feels like some real inside GOP baseball locker room animosities being vented here. And a felt need to use Cruz as an excuse for their original planned roll-over-and-play-dead strategy of passivity. Otherwise there's no explanation at all. Personally I'm far to the left of many readers here on many issues. I don't believe that social democracy has to be inherently corrupt, crony-based, contemptuous of legal norms, hostile to economic growth and production, incapable of rational implementation, or hostage to every post-SDS-infantile leftist race/class/gender fad that comes down the pike. But the Democratic Party we have has decided to become all these things. And pedal to the metal. In the days of Tammany Hall the grift and graft of the machine at least gave you some functioning municipal services at a markup for the boodle and a turkeys at Thanksgiving and Christmas. However Cruz played his cards they were planning on sitting the round out. They had nothing.

Commentary Magazine : Who Lost the Shutdown Matters

Sat, 19 Oct 2013 18:09:33 +0000

I don't think Option Two--defund--was a long shot I think it was a never shot. Delay of the individual mandate to sign up on the 404 crashed exchanges might have worked but you couldn't have your cake and eat it too. Due to the non-CR permanent appropriation status of the ACA (not requiring a CR, even in shut down), you couldn't refund the "rest of government" without running the risk of effectively handing the President all he wanted. Option One is what the GOP political class does best--process process process aimed at election inflection points. The wudda cudda shudda attacks on Cruz are a smokescreen for the intention to just wait things out until the 2014 mid terms. Clean CR, clean debt ceiling with some budget "negotiations" with the Democrats conceded the upper veto hand. That is a recipe for what Mark Steyn calls a "Potemkin Parliament": http://www.nationalreview.com/article/361644/pote... ---- Government by “continuing resolution,” a term foreign to most foreigners, ought to be embarrassing to any self-governing, not to say self-respecting, people....How can you “control” spending under such a system? Congress has degenerated into a Potemkin parliament, its ersatz nature embodied by those magnificent speeches senators give to themselves, orating for the benefit of TV sound bites into the cavernous silence of an empty room, an upper chamber turned isolation chamber. The “law of the land” means machinations and procedural legerdemain culminating in a show vote on unread omnibus fill-in-the-blanks pseudo-legislation to be decided after the fact by the regulatory bureaucracy.... ---------------------- But Obama care was a locked box in a house--you let the entire house fall down and there it was unaffected. Maybe you could cut off payment to the guys to open up the safe and retool the contents but the OPM and WH lawyers could as easily rule that in. The leverage couldn't be the box but with all that debris. You couldn't "fund all the rest of the government." If the GOP House sent up everything but Obamacare they might have discovered that he'd already drunk that milkshake up with his long straw. ------------------------- "One of the great ironies of the impending government shutdown is that most Obamacare funding, the issue at the heart of the battle, won't be affected by the spending freeze. The funding for the Affordable Care Act is a permanent appropriation — meaning it was approved in a prior session of Congress (in 2010, when the act was passed) and doesn't have to be approved again. Republicans may argue that the Affordable Care Act isn't mandatory spending if no one's enrolled when the government shuts down, but during past shutdowns funding for entitlement programs has been safe. Funding for the techies fixing the all the glitches within the online exchange, however, isn't so set in stone. According to Reuters earlier this month, the White House Office of Management and Budget said contractors can keep working through a shutdown, as long as the government agency they're working for has "already obligated funds representing the entire price under a contract." However, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the government agency in charge of implementing Obamacare, declined to say whether that applied to Obamacare IT professionals." http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2013/09/h...

Commentary Magazine : Who Lost the Shutdown Matters

Sat, 19 Oct 2013 17:46:22 +0000

still Israel had nothing to do with the stand off between the "squishes' and the "suicide brigade" (all of whom so far are in the yay column on Israel)--and someone who connects this dispute via a "stab in the back" to a Jewish publication's "pet policies" might want to consider the duck walk and duck quack. No one expects the ducks to support Israel. Just don't call them ducks. God forbid. Quack!

Commentary Magazine : Who Lost the Shutdown Matters

Sat, 19 Oct 2013 14:12:21 +0000

your language can be "colorful"

Commentary Magazine : Who Lost the Shutdown Matters

Sat, 19 Oct 2013 04:28:23 +0000

A more gracious surrender would have been to more artfully present Obama with a clean CR and debt ceiling as he demanded. And? Fine. Obamacare couldn't be defunded. Or delayed. OK "And they continued to call for compromise and demand that President Obama negotiate with the Republicans to end the standoff. ..." How sad. The President refused negotiations. Directly. Repeatedly so that the guys in the back row could pick it up. What is it about the President's plainly spoken English some self-proclaimed pragmatists find so mysteriously open to interpretation? Paul Rand himself is telling his colleagues and friends that the bi-partisan budget conference *he's participating in* will likely go nowhere but he has to make that effort. But more worrying is the rationale that evading a direct confrontation with the President and a shut down (if not via immediate concession then how? oh yeah "negotiations" he refused to have) was exactly what he didn't want!!! Giving into him or "insisting" he talk to you would be the true empowerment. This comes across as a political version of battered spouse syndrome and the prelude to another effort to retool the GOP as the vanguard of the moderate center. To paraphrase: "Having taken the party over the cliff in an electoral debacle, Romney's former advocates seek to repeat the exercise in the future and that is why they are still doing their best to abuse those who knew better all along. If Republicans let them, they’ll have no one but themselves to blame for what follows."

Commentary Magazine : Who Lost the Shutdown Matters

Sat, 19 Oct 2013 03:05:55 +0000

but HillelA the next line is, ah "The best lack of conviction..." Wonder where the liminal Barack Obama falls on that spectrum....

Commentary Magazine : Who Lost the Shutdown Matters

Sat, 19 Oct 2013 02:57:44 +0000

in context it was a doggy whistle feel free to insult me

Commentary Magazine : Who Lost the Shutdown Matters

Sat, 19 Oct 2013 02:57:07 +0000

don't bet on this from people with militia monikers dragging Israel into a discussion about domestic politics focusing on what Commentary did or didn't do as if somehow Commentary is emblematic of treachery and will--these writers here--jeopardize support for Israel when the Tea Party itself doesn't make these connections

Commentary Magazine : Who Lost the Shutdown Matters

Sat, 19 Oct 2013 02:20:37 +0000

Here's the deal: tw Ted Cruz supports Israel: http://therightscoop.com/full-speech-ted-cruzs-sp... Let's say the stipulated Commentary betrayal doesn't change that support. Does that mean Ted Cruz stabbed Ted Cruz in the back? Or will you then have to stab him in the back? Now here's a political culture where being stabbed in the back really does mean being stabbed in the back: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FvgP5hO99o But not here in the topic under discussion. when the Tea Party supports Israel, when Ted Cruz Israel, and someone starts on a discussion of intra-mural GOP domestic disagreements between the establishment and the Tea Party --*all of whom support Israel*--and goes lickity split to accusing a Jewish publication of "stabbing them in the back" and threatening "loss of support" for "their pet policies" -- that person doesn't support Israel out of the starting block. They sure didn't get the A to B from the guys involved in the dispute itself. Commentary doesn't run the GOP though they know people who know people etc and some of their writers are connected. It was gentiles Boehner and McConnell and Rand etc. (who support Israel) who pulled the plug on the debt ceiling and CR limit fight for their own reason in opposition to Cruz and Lee etc. who also support Israel. But you get from this that *you* shouldn't support Israel because that's a default setting on a tension spring.

Commentary Magazine : The Israeli-Palestinian “Distraction” Fallacy

Fri, 18 Oct 2013 20:43:20 +0000

um, but Israel *isn't* a "Zionist oppressor" and *is* "the region’s most successful economy, a modern state built in 65 years"--so what is the point? If Arabs can agitate their political erogenous zones with fantasies of "Israel the Zionist oppressor" how does Israel to stop being something they are not so that their neighbors will let go of the fantasy of who they are? Just as Egyptian Copts are regular accused of defaming Islam, burning Korans, insulting the Prophet, kidnapping Muslim women and on an on. But since they aren't actually doing any of these things there is nothing they can do to prevent the Arab imaginative tail from wagging the Arab body politic.