Category: Barack Obama

Obama Administration Gets Its Benghazi On Over In Afghanistan

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by Smitty

This is just despicable:

KABUL — A growing number of Afghan interpreters who worked alongside American troops are being denied U.S. visas allotted by Congress because the State Department says there is no serious threat against their lives.
But the interpreters, many of whom served in Taliban havens for years, say U.S. officials are drastically underestimating the danger they face. Immigration attorneys and Afghan interpreters say the denials are occurring just as concerns about Taliban retribution are mounting due to the withdrawal of U.S. forces.

Not only is our rodeo clown administration laying a death sentence on everybody who ever provided any assistance to the U.S., it’s worse than that. Stand by, once these guys are certain that they’ve been sold out, we can expect some unexpected, tragic news. If you take a really bad inner-city gang warfare scene, throw in a religious twist and kitchen sink explosives, you have an idea of Afghanistan. It’s a land of highland Inigo Montoyas, and we’ll never live down this sort of backstabbing.

I guess if we didn’t have the travesty of Benghazi to reflect upon, this dishonorable idiocy might seem startling.

via Insty

Even in Deep-Blue California, ObamaCare Still Inspires Deep Doubts, Poll Finds

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Donald Douglas points out that President Obama got nearly 60 percent of the vote in California last year, but the president’s signature health-care program is still widely unpopular there:

Sixty-five percent of respondents said people wouldn’t be able to afford the health insurance they’ll be required to have under the law’s individual mandate. Forty percent think the program will have a negative effect on what they pay for coverage, compared with 21% who expect a positive outcome.
According to the survey, 46% of registered voters expect the Affordable Care Act to be a drag on the overall economy and 34% see an economic boost. Nearly 60% think the law’s new requirements will raise healthcare costs and keep businesses from hiring more workers.

Read the whole thing.

 

But It Does Get A Vote, And Can Swing An Election To The No-Talent Rodeo Clown

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by Smitty

[Click the image for the full cartoon.]
So, where are we on the Kübler-Ross curve? I’m accepting of the fact that all appeals to intellect have failed. No teachers, short of Pain and Time, are going to have any effect.
One can find a little balm for the wound in having joined in the chorus of warning. But really: aren’t actual results more interesting than I-told-you-so’s?

Just about the only good news about ObamaCare is that it may FINALLY communicate what we’ve said for five years: BHO is not merely your garden-variety politician having a casual relationship with truth. Chuck Todd does not seem convinced that OccupyResoluteDesk is aware he lied about keeping insurance plans.

It doesn’t seem to add value to run around calling people “liar”. This is, rather, a great moment to get people to step back and give everything some sober consideration:

I used to think I could predict where things were heading. The only rational response to the idiotic course this country has steered since, oh, Reagan, would be reform. The flaw in my thinking was the word “rational”. If there is a logic to what’s gone on the last five years, it is the ‘logic’ of the crotch.

The crash seems inevitable. The question is “How bad?” I’m betting against a full-on dystopia, but who can be certain?

Via Instapundit, PJ Media floats the question: “Does Jay have a double standard?” Well, sure. But Ted Cruz packs such intellectual heat that even a bugbearista like Candy Crowley can’t make him blink.

The path to recovery seems to be:
1. Locate Ted Cruzes.
2. Elect them.
3. ???
4. Profit

The Shocking (But Actually Predictable) Stupidity of ObamaCare Bureaucrats

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Ace of Spades gave the “Flaming Skull” alert to a quote from a Washington Post article about the ObamaCare botch that had been included in a summary by Megan McArdle at Bloomberg.

On Twitter last night, Ace seemed genuinely astonished by this. But really, who had any illusions that a bunch of liberal bureaucrats were competent to be trusted with the implementation of such a thing?

Here’s one quote from McArdle’s summary:

The memo [from David Cutler to Larry Summers in September 2010] is eerily prophetic: The key people were analysts with no experience in project management, technology, startups or the insurance business; responsibility was too diffused; the staff didn’t understand either the magnitude or the urgency of what they had taken on; and neither the Department of Health and Human Services nor the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, to which most of the job had been delegated, had the personnel or technical experience to manage it well. The job of shepherding the project was given to Nancy-Ann Min DeParle, the director of the White House Office of Health Reform and a very wonky wonk who happens to be married to one of my favorite writers. According to one official, the president believed that “if you were to design a person in the lab to implement health care, it would be Nancy-Ann.”

Uh, a history major with a Harvard Law degree? Look, I understand Obama has profound faith in the miraculous powers of Harvard Law graduates — he is supremely confident in his own transcendent genius — but why Nancy-Ann? Because she worked three years in the Clinton-era HHS? And another quote from McArdle:

[M]any of the bad decisions were designed to avoid Republican criticism. There was another reason that the exchanges’ architects were tucked away inside CMS: to try to stay out of the public eye. Other such decisions followed. CMS carefully obscured the unwillingness of a large number of states to build exchanges — despite the fact that this would greatly increase the complexity of the job — lest Republicans seize on that fact.

Was avoiding scrutiny — preventing Republicans from finding out what was going on — a policy decision or a political decision? And if politics was behind decision-making in what should have been a policy-oriented project, doesn’t this tell us something crucial?

Ah, but guess what? I still haven’t gotten to the quote that caused Ace to issue the “Flaming Skull” alert. Yes, it is that bad.

 

Say Good-Bye to Old ObamaCare Lies, and Say Hello to New ObamaCare Lies!

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When you catch a liar lying, what else do you expect, except a new lie offered as an explanation of the old lie? “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan” — repeated endlessly by Obama during the past three years — is now defunct, so President Blame-Shifter and friends are now trying to say that this falsehood was not their fault.

It was those slutty insurance companies, all tarted up in short skirts, high heels and lipstick, drunk on profit and practically begging to be raped.

Ace of Spades explains what common sense should tell us:

On Megyn Kelly last night, Judge Napolitano pointed out the power of adding Period to the end of most of these vows. When one says “Period,” one means there is no fine print. There are no caveats, conditions, or qualifications. “Period” means that the vow you just heard is self-contained; there is no extraenous material elsewhere you have to check to determine what the promise means.
But that’s exactly what he’s saying “Period” doesn’t mean now. Now he’s claiming “Period” meant — actually, he’s claiming “we” said this, which is a lie — “unless there have been any changes [whatsoever] to your policy.”
Such as $5 increase in your copay to keep pace with rising medical costs. Yes, a $5 change in your copay ungrandfathers your policy. The HHS deliberately wrote these rules to terminate as many policies as possible.

Read the whole thing, because the new lie is in some ways worse than the old lie. The old lie merely insulted our intelligence. The new lie insults our dignity. Basically, this is Obama saying, “Sorry about doing that in your mouth, America.”

Except, of course, he’s not the least bit sorry about it.

Obama has no remorse, because he has no conscience.

He is, after all, a Democrat.

 


President Blame-Shifter Wants to ‘Pivot’ Away From ObamaCare Debacle Story

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Yeah, that story is so . . . October.

Here we go: President readying for another
pivot — far away from Obamacare
— Twitchy

Shock: Obama, Biden Stop Mentioning Obamacare
in Speeches; Obama Hopes to, Get This,
Pivot to a Different Subject
— Ace of Spades

New White House ObamaCare strategy: Let’s
talk about something other than ObamaCare
— AllahPundit, Hot Air

You know what this reminds me of? President Clinton claiming that the Lewinsky scandal was distracting him from “doing the work the American people sent me here to do,” as if sodomizing interns was not a distraction. The Wall Street Journal:

Problems with the government’s health-care website are forcing President Barack Obama to redraw his plans for the rest of the year as he looks for ways to regain political momentum.
Scrapping a planned push to drive people to the balky website, the White House is organizing a flurry of events on the economy and immigration, as well as health care, a senior administration official said. . . .
The president’s senior aides had at one time planned for him to be holding events aimed at encouraging Americans to shop for insurance on the new federal health-care website, with stops in places with high numbers of uninsured people.But the problems plaguing the site have forced them to shift strategies.

It’s amazing how the media cooperates in these administration propaganda campaigns: “Senior aides” tell reporters what the White House message strategy is and the reporters then help push the White House message. Then the media report the story of how successful the White House message strategy was — as if they were covering something other than their own coverage. It’s a Mobius loop of bullshit.

 


The ObamaCare Quagmire

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“Obama: Anatomy of a World Leader,” by Alex Gray (detail)

“I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”
— Barack Obama, June 3, 2008

Attempts by the White House and liberal media to spin their way out of this mess are failing almost as badly as ObamaCare itself.

The simple facts are against them, and the elaborate rationalizations cannot hide the truth. A quick sample of headlines today:

Health Consumers Finding Out
They Were Sold a Lemon
— Megan McArdle, Bloomberg

I had great cancer doctors and
health insurance. My plan was cancelled.
Now I worry how long I’ll live.
— Edie Littlefield Sundby, Wall Street Journal

Will Insularity, Incompetence,
and Lies Doom Obamacare?
— Ron Fournier, National Journal

Obamacare: Memo reveals health care adviser
warned W.H. was losing control 3 years ago
— CBS News

Feinstein: Hey, you could have kept your
plan … until we enacted ObamaCare
— Ed Morrissey, Hot Air

What this resembles, quite frankly, is the way George W. Bush’s popularity tumbled in his second term after the insurgency in Iraq started inflicting significant casualties on U.S. troops with no apparent end in sight. Bush was re-elected in 2004 because voters believed (by a relatively narrow majority) that we should “stay the course” in Iraq, and that the insurgency was being defeated. But as 2005 gave way to 2006 and the U.S. death toll in Iraq kept mounting, the perception began to grow that we had taken on an impossible task, that our troops were stuck in a pointless mission they could not win, and there was a political backlash that caught most Republicans by surprise.

ObamaCare is a quagmire, and Democrats have no exit strategy.

 

Obama and the New York Times Decide Which Health Plans Are Worth Keeping

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Be grateful for enlightenment from Our Moral Superiors:

Congressional Republicans have stoked consumer fears and confusion with charges that the health care reform law is causing insurers to cancel existing policies and will force many people to pay substantially higher premiums next year for coverage they don’t want. That, they say, violates President Obama’s pledge that if you like the insurance you have, you can keep it.
Mr. Obama clearly misspoke when he said that.

Doug Ross: “These people make Chris Matthews look objective.” Letting ordinary Americans have choices is acceptable to Our Moral Superiors, as long as they get to decide which choices we have.