Obamacare Deadline Delayed Again

This is beyond laughable. The deadline to enroll in Obamacare has been extended another 24 hours until 11:59 p.m. on Christmas Eve.

At midnight Monday, the official deadline arrives for Americans to sign up through the new federal health insurance exchange for health plans that begin Jan. 1. But, without any public announcement, Obama administration officials have changed the rules so that people will have an extra day to enroll, according to two individuals with knowledge of the switch.
Over the weekend, government officials and outside IT contractors working on the online marketplace’s computer system made a software change that automatically gives people a Jan. 1 start date for their new coverage as long as they enroll by 11:59 p.m. on Christmas Eve.

The president himself has yet to enroll in an insurance plan.
The roll-out of Obamacare is starting to resemble the deadlines for my Econ 102 class second semester of my senior year of college. Just a reminder, the Affordable Care Act is a federal law, not a blow-off course in college to fill up credits.

Too Convoluted to Succeed

Why Dodd-Frank won’t prevent another financial crisis

By Nicole Galinas
....After Obama became president, though, it took Congress more than two years to pass Dodd-Frank, named for former senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut and former congressman Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the sponsors of the law in each house. The law takes up 849 pages—that’s more than twice as long as the 407-page stimulus law and only 57 pages shorter than the Obamacare legislation. By contrast, the Sarbanes-Oxley law of 2002—Congress’s post-Enron attempt to fix financial markets—is just 66 pages. Going further back, the Securities Act of 1933—a cornerstone of financial regulation that helped prevent meltdowns for five decades, until financial lobbying began to erode its power—runs just 93 pages. The Glass-Steagall Act, another 1933 law that separated long-term commercial banking from shorter-term investment banking, ensuring that the risk of one activity didn’t infect the other, totaled 53 pages. And even after decades’ worth of amendments, the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 adds up to only 371 pages.
That Dodd-Frank tried to do too much at once is evident not only in its length but also in its mind-numbing complexity and vast scope. Dodd-Frank addresses everything from how to achieve “financial stability” to how to wind down failing firms through an “orderly liquidation authority” to how to regulate derivatives as well as mortgages. Almost as an afterthought, the law creates an enormous new bureaucracy, the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection. The CFPB, as it’s commonly known, is so potentially consequential that its sponsors should have introduced it as a separate piece of legislation (see “Dodd-Frank’s Protection Racket,” Summer 2012).
Dodd-Frank also creates 17 smaller bureaucracies, a list of which reads like a parody of overactive government: the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC); the Office of Financial Research (OFR); the Investor Advisory Committee (IAC); the Research and Analysis Center (RAC); the Financial Research Fund (FRF); the Orderly Liquidation Authority (OLA); the Orderly Liquidation Fund (OLF); the Office of Minority and Women Inclusion (OMWI); the Federal Insurance Office (FIO); the Office of Credit Ratings (OCR); the Office of Municipal Securities (OMS); the Office of Fair Lending and Equal Opportunity (OFLEO); the Office of Financial Education (OFE); the Office of Service Member Affairs (OSMA); the Office of Financial Protection for Older Americans (OFPOA); the Consumer Advisory Board (CAB); and the Private Education Loan Ombudsman (PELO).
The most competent regulators would have had trouble setting up, staffing, and overseeing such a sprawl of new offices, even without the need to investigate precrisis wrongdoing and learn from recent mistakes. But posting help-wanted notices and ordering water coolers was the easy part. Dodd-Frank required regulators to write 398 separate rules, many as complex as the law itself. Though Dodd-Frank is the law of the land, regulators haven’t been able to apply it yet, since they need to figure out how to write all its rules and enforce them. (Obamacare has run into the same complexity problem. The law has been on the books for more than three years, but regulators have delayed implementation of key parts of it, including the requirement for employers to provide health care for their workers.)
Dodd-Frank “is better conceived as a mandate to regulatory agencies” to write rules than as “a definitive piece of prescriptive legislation,” says Louise Bennetts, associate director of financial-regulation studies at the Cato Institute and former senior associate at Davis Polk & Wardwell’s New York law office. The rule-making undertaking has so far produced—or rather, consumed—18,789 pages of text, containing 15 million words, according to a report that Davis Polk prepared for its clients on Dodd-Frank’s third anniversary. Yet flummoxed rule-makers, missing deadline after deadline, are only 40 percent finished with their mammoth task. As Davis Polk notes, of the 280 now-expired deadlines that Congress set, regulators have failed to meet 172; they haven’t even announced proposals for another 64. Treasury officials insist that the work is accelerating, but the slow pace “has been remarkably consistent,” Davis Polk observes.
...Dodd-Frank’s biggest failure is to have perpetuated too big to fail. The cataclysm of 2008 proved that Washington was terrified to let large or complex financial firms go bankrupt. But bankruptcy is a natural, healthy occurrence in a capitalist system. The goal should have been to figure out how to allow these firms to go under. Dodd-Frank’s approach, by contrast, was to make the world safe from bankruptcies, not for them. “Dodd-Frank kills the capitalist system,” says Rosenblum bluntly.

ANDREW McCARTHY
The most underreported foreign news story of 2013 is the pogrom against Christians in Islamic countries. It is doubtful that there is a close second place finisher. The story is gruesome and the rationale for both the killing and the silence about it lies in a mainstream interpretation of Islam – one that is far more prevalent in the Middle East than the West will admit.
The pogrom is the inexorable result of Islamic teaching and Western indulgence. It is, after all, directed at Christians because there are no more Jews left to persecute. The latter have long made their exodus from Muslim countries where Jewish communities once flourished. Despite this fact, and despite that fact that Muslims living in Israel enjoy more freedom and self-determination than in any Arab country of the Middle East, the West – very much including the United States – has legitimized the premise that Jews should be driven from East Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, just as they were pressured to evacuate Gaza, in order to birth a Palestinian state....
CLAUDIA ROSETT
The most underreported foreign story of 2013 is the decline of American power. Not that there hasn’t been plenty written about it. But there hasn’t been nearly enough. Since World War II, America has led the free world. That is changing, at an accelerating pace, with enormous implications around the globe. As America retreats, as America disarms, as America abandons its free-wheeling capitalist ways, gums up its economic engines, stiff-arms its allies and defers to its enemies, the openings grow ever larger for the shaping of a different and darker world order.
We are entering an era of opportunism — cruder and more dangerous than in a very long time. If America no longer plays the leading role in shaping the rules, then who does? Beijing’s politburo? Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin? The sprawling, unaccountable and morally corrupt system of the United Nations? All of them together, in a rising axis of technologically enhanced despotisms, while smaller powers try to cut whatever deals they can with the regional godfathers?...
MICHAEL LEDEEN
Our “reporters” just don’t want to dig into the largely untold story of the ongoing, mostly secret, negotiations between the Obama administration and the Iranian regime over the fate of several Americans held in Iran. And yet, if the Iran-Contra story is a reliable guide, it is altogether possible that hostage negotiations are at the heart of the “relationship” that Obama is trying to forge with the mullahs.
I was the “secret back channel to Iran” for a few months in 1985. That channel was originally arranged by the Saudis, who arranged for the Israelis to meet Manouchehr Ghorbanifar, who in turn arranged for the Israelis and the Americans (both me and a retired CIA official) to meet high-ranking Iranians. The conversations covered several subjects, but the “hook” that catalyzed the meetings was the fact that Iran, and its creature Hezbollah, held several American hostages, the most notable of whom was William Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut....
RICHARD FERNANDEZ
One of the most underreported stories of 2013 is the one simmering in the background, known mostly to the public through the horror-comic figure of Kim Jong-un: North Korea. RAND’s recent paper, “Preparing for the Possibility of a North Korean Collapse,” should be required reading for those interested in the subject.
It paints the picture of a mangy tiger stuck atop a pole, unable to climb further, yet incapable of going down. The problem for everyone — South Korea, Japan, the United States (and surprisingly even North Korea itself) — is what happens when the North Korean tiger eventually falls to the ground. Academics in Beijing having openly given the Kim Family Regime (KFR) ten years to survive, tops.
And when it collapses an imploding North Korea will at best unleash a World War Z-style horde of starving, desperate refugees on both China and South Korea, or at worst precipitate a regional nuclear war. The problem, we learn, really begins with Ronald Reagan. In 1990, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Chinese and Russian subsidies to Pyongyang dropped dramatically. North Korea, already impoverished, went into a tailspin without those checks and sits with half the GDP of 15 years ago and unable to rise....
DAVID GOLDMAN (AKA “SPENGLER”)
China just made the first soft landing on the moon in four decades, the first in four decades. That drew a yawn from the American media: after all, we did it when the Boomers were in junior high school. It wasn’t exactly a Sputnik moment like 1957, when the Russian leap into space sent America’s military-industrial establishment into overdrive. But China’s technological capacity is reaching critical mass. In a few years we will see the old China of smokestacks and cheap labor fade into the past and a new high-tech China emerge, ready to compete with the West. There’s no single technological feat that defines this development: China doesn’t need to innovate, only emulate. But the combined effect of a whole array of technological improvements adds up to a daunting challenge to the West.
The Plenum of the Chinese Communist Party in November launched a set of reforms that formalize trends already underway. The change is as drastic as in 1978, when Deng Xiaoping reversed Mao’s peasant-based economic policy and launched the smokestack-and-export economy that has carried Chinese growth so far. Household income in China has grown by 16 times – that’s 1,600% — since 1987, the greatest advance of living standards in history. It has turned a peasant population into urbanites with vastly superior education, health, and expectations.

HEADSLAM HEADLINES

Obama Took More Vacation on Average Than Private-Sector Workers 20 Yrs on Job - See more at: http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/ali-meyer/obama-took-more-vacation-average-private-sector-workers-20-yrs-job-0#sthash.2dyMKQAu.dpuf