Wednesday Digest October 23, 2013  THE FOUNDATION "In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself." --James Madison GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS Rollout Was Bad, but the Law Is Worse Barack Obama had just the solution to the train-wreck rollout of Healthcare.gov: He gave a speech. He assured us Monday in the Rose Garden that "nobody's more frustrated by that than I am" about his own website not working. Small comfort. "There's no excuse for the problems," he said. "There's no sugarcoating it." He had, of course, just spent 10 minutes trying to sugarcoat it and would continue to do so for the remainder of his lengthy remarks. In fact, the president spent 30 minutes not explaining what happened or why. Not to worry, though, there's good news: "The product is good," he says, and even though the website doesn't work, people "can still buy the same quality affordable insurance plans available on the marketplace the old-fashioned way, offline -- either over the phone or in person." So he gave an 800-number to call, but, if callers didn't get a busy signal, they were redirected to ... the website. And the website refers people to the phone number. Press "3" for the Pony Express. The speech was certainly little more than an infomercial intended for low-info voters. Obama was flanked by a baker's dozen people out of whom only a couple had successfully signed up for coverage, though he claimed, "Thousands of people are signing up and saving money as we speak." No, that was actually just one guy in Iowa trying a hundred times. And by all means, let the successful few tell us how much they've "saved." Obama's magnetic personality isn't going to fix the law's implementation just because he says the law is great. Because of the massive failure, the White House is even seemingly open to more delay while a "tech surge" works to rewrite millions of lines of code in some indeterminate time. How many more millions of dollars will that cost? HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius admitted that the site had "almost no testing" -- the consumer end wasn't tested fully until Sept. 26, five days before rollout, and it failed those tests -- and that Obama didn't know of the problems until after the rollout. Republicans calling for Sebelius' resignation, however, are missing the point: To suggest she should be held responsible for the Healthcare.gov debacle implies that a better HHS Secretary might have made it work. Fact is, the failure of the rollout is but a metaphor for the reality that no government bureaucracy is ever going to successfully manage 18% of the U.S. economy, much less a basic commerce website for insurance comparisons. Obama did say one thing Monday that was more true than he perhaps intended: "The Affordable Care Act is not just a website." Indeed, as The Wall Street Journal notes, ObamaCare's "real goal ... is to centralize political control over health care," and conservatives should keep that in mind as we continue to oppose the law and Democrats are saddled with full ownership of health care. RIGHT START Start your day off Right with our new early bird email, "The Right Start," featuring the Top Ten Right Hook posts of the previous 24 hours! Don't miss out -- add it to your subscription lineup today! ECONOMY Sept. Unemployment Numbers Finally Here Due to the government slowdown, the Labor Department didn't publish the September jobs report until Tuesday morning. As usual, the news is mixed at best. Employers added an unimpressive 148,000 jobs in September, which isn't even enough to keep up with population growth. August was atypically revised upward and July downward for a net gain of just 9,000 more jobs. Headline unemployment edged down to 7.2% from 7.3% last month and is at its lowest point since November 2008. As has been the case for the last couple of years, however, the rate decline is due in large part to more people leaving the workforce than finding work. More than 11 million people want a job and can't find one, and millions more are stuck in part-time work when full-time jobs are needed. According to Bloomberg, "Through August, the U.S. had recovered 6.8 million of the 8.7 million jobs lost as a result of the 18-month recession that ended in June 2009." All told, a record 90 million Americans aren't working -- 10 million more than when Obama took office. As Michael Feroli, chief U.S. economist at JPMorgan Chase & Co., put it, "It's not like we're falling off a cliff, but there's a failure to get any spark in employment." Indeed, the Obama "recovery" has been anything but, and it pales in comparison with previous recoveries under presidents of both parties. Government spending and regulations, as well as taxes for every taxpayer, have grown tremendously in the last five years, and that's taking its toll. NATIONAL SECURITY Interpol Chief: Fight Terrorism With Armed Citizens In September, terrorists waged a days-long attack on a Kenyan mall, killing dozens. This week, Ronald Noble, secretary general of the international policing agency Interpol, discussed the problem of "soft targets," using the mall as an example. "Societies have to think about how they're going to approach the problem," he said. "One is to say we want an armed citizenry; you can see the reason for that. Another is to say the enclaves are so secure that in order to get into the soft target you're going to have to pass through extraordinary security." But here's where we did a double take: "Ask yourself," he added, "If that [mall attack] was Denver, Colorado, if that was Texas, would those guys have been able to spend hours, days, shooting people randomly? What I'm saying is it makes police around the world question their views on gun control. It makes citizens question their views on gun control. You have to ask yourself, 'Is an armed citizenry more necessary now than it was in the past with an evolving threat of terrorism?' This is something that has to be discussed." Fortunately, there were a couple of armed citizens who took action in Nairobi, saving many lives. But for a European bureaucrat to understand something that the American Left vociferously opposes is really something. Armed citizens can't always prevent attacks, but they can at least be equipped to respond to evil. Our Founders certainly understood that national security begins with armed citizens. That's why they codified that God-given right in the Second Amendment. CULTURE New Jersey Legalizes Same-Sex Marriage Proving itself the kindred spirit to the radical left, New Jersey last week became the 14th state to legalize same-sex marriage -- that is if you can call a dictum from the state Supreme Court a true legalization. As background, a decision by a lower court to allow same-sex marriage in the Garden State is currently on appeal to the state Supreme Court, but Republican Gov. Chris Christie requested a stay of the ruling, pending review by the high court. Rejecting the request 7-0 -- and leaving no mystery on how it will rule on the appeal -- New Jersey's compulsively activist court announced that it could "find no public interest in depriving a group of New Jersey residents of their constitutional right to equal protection while the appeals process unfolds." Surprising virtually no Jersey conservatives, Christie -- who with one breath vetoed a same-sex marriage bill last year and with the next signed a bill this year banning "conversion therapy" for minors struggling with homosexuality -- promptly dropped his appeal, announcing through his spokesman that "the court has now spoken." Perhaps conservatives can take comfort that at least Christie didn't go as far as New Jersey Senator-elect Cory Booker, who immediately chose to officiate at several same-sex "marriages." But then again, with marriage -- the very building block of society -- on the line, conservatives are unlikely to forget the white flag waiving over the governor's mansion. 
BRIEF OPINION Political Futures Columnist Jonah Goldberg: "In the recent internecine conservative donnybrook over the government shutdown, the insurgents insisted they were in an ideological struggle with the establishment. But there was precious little ideology involved. Instead, it was a fight over tactics and power. The Republican Party almost unanimously opposed Obamacare, and the Republicans who've been in office far longer than Cruz & Co. have voted more than three dozen times to get rid of the disastrous program. And yet, the latecomers to the battle talk as if the veterans in the trenches were collaborators the whole time. ... But the real source of that frustration is not the insufficient conservatism of the establishment; it's the insufficient power and popularity of conservatism coupled with the very real failures of the GOP to reverse conservatism's fortunes over the last two decades." For the Record Columnist Mark Steyn: "We are on course to becoming the first nation of negative-millionaires. ... In Australia, each citizen's share of the debt is $12,000; in New Zealand, it's $15,000 per person; in Canada and Spain, $18,000; in the United Kingdom, $28,000; in Germany and France, $38,000; Italy, $44,000. And in the United States it's $54,000 per person -- twice as much as Britain, thrice as much as Canada, closing in on five times as much as Oz. On this trajectory, America is exiting the First World. And that's before counting the 'unfunded liabilities' that Washington keeps off the books but which add another million bucks per taxpayer. Nor does it include Obamacare, with which the geniuses of the 'technocracy' have managed to spend a fortune creating the Internet version of a Brezhnev-era Soviet supermarket. ... Either you think those numbers above are serious or you don't. And, if you do think they're serious and you're a 'lawmaker' ... when are you going to get serious? Next month? Next year? Or shall we all sportingly agree to leave it till 2015 after the bipartisan deal on a $20 trillion debt ceiling?" Editorial Exegesis The Wall Street Journal: "In an era where Google is making self-driving cars and Amazon offers next-day delivery for just about anything, the White House plunged ahead with a system it knew to be defective and is relying on the technology of the 19th century as the fall-back. ... The consequences of this mismanagement go beyond the technical. ... [T]he exchanges fiasco is revealing the larger truth that ObamaCare's claim to technocratic expertise was always a political con. ... [I]t was all a veneer for ObamaCare's real goal, which is to centralize political control over health care. That false front is clear now as we are told to ignore the faulty rollout because it will get fixed, eventually, and in any case the law is really about reducing inequality. ... The actual results will always matter less to liberals than their good intentions and expanding the reach of government." For more, visit The Right Opinion. 
CHRONICLE QUOTES Demo-gogues Sen. Dick Durbin: "[W]e should sit down and look at constructive ways to make ObamaCare, the Affordable Care Act, work better. ... In just a short period of time, 17 million Americans have tried to log on to this website [Healthcare.gov]. A half a million ... are moving towards signing up for health insurance. This is a popular program. Let's make it work better instead of trying to defund it." From the 'Non Compos Mentis' File Rep. John Conyers: "It's just unimaginable the actions that [Republicans] would turn to to get their way on a very small and modest bill -- ObamaCare. We're talking about universal health care for everybody -- single-payer, that's what the new direction is." The BIG Lie Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA): "[Healthcare.gov] was contracted out to the private sector, and the private sector with all the money they got, couldn't develop the website that we needed. It shouldn't have been done by government, but we should have had more competent people in the private sector, and if anybody's head should roll, it should be the contractors who didn't live up to their contractual responsibility." Alpha Jackass Hollywood director Oliver Stone: "I grew up conservative, remember. So I had a William Buckley view of the United States in the '40s and '50s -- that we were good guys, and that we were moral, and that we were doing the right thing. And now I think, how did we become this bully -- this international terror that dominates the world scene today? ... I do feel that the Jim Crow laws are very important, coming back, by the Supreme Court gutting the Voting Rights Act. ... [Republicans] don't want the Hispanic, Asian, black mixture to take over. ... I think that's what the gun laws are about, too. The states want states' rights. They want to keep the rules white. That's how I see this Tea Party." Village Idiots State Department Deputy Press Secretary Marie Harf: "[T]his administration has taken steps to increase the transparency. Not as much as, I'm sure, everybody would like in this room, but certainly whether it's the president giving speeches about counterterrorism, giving speeches just recently about our intelligence gathering and how we're reviewing that, we've actually taken steps to be more transparent both to our people but to other countries around the world. ... I think we can use whatever definition of 'transparent' we want." Short Cuts Humorist Frank J. Fleming: "The Obamacare website isn't so funny when you realize that the same government that made that also handles nuclear weapons." Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis!
Nate Jackson for The Patriot Post Editorial Team Join us in daily prayer for our Patriots in uniform -- Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen -- standing in harm's way in defense of Liberty, and for their families. |
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