After Snubbing Thatcher Funeral, Obama and Michelle to Visit South Africa for Mandela
By Ben ShapiroOn Friday, the White House announced that President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama would travel to South Africa next weeks to pay their respects to Nelson Mandela. Obama has already announced that the White House will fly the flags at half-staff though December 9 in Mandela’s honor.
When former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher died, President Obama did not lower the White House flags, nor did he attend her funeral, instead sending ex-Secretaries of State George Shultz and James Baker III. The Sun reported, “[Downing] Street is most angered by rejections from Obama, First Lady Michelle and Vice-President Joe Biden. And none of the four surviving ex-US leaders – Jimmy Carter, George Bush Sr., Bill Clinton and George Bush Jr. – is coming either.”
The Post-Work Economy
A permanent dependency class means a citizenry deprived of dignity.
By Mark SteynOne consequence of the botched launch of Obamacare is that it has, judging from his plummeting numbers with “Millennials,” diminished Barack Obama’s cool. It’s not merely that the website isn’t state-of-the-art but that the art it’s flailing to be state of is that of the mid-20th-century social program. The emperor has hipster garb, but underneath he’s just another Commissar Squaresville. So, health care being an irredeemable downer for the foreseeable future, this week the president pivoted (as they say) to “economic inequality,” which will be, he assures us, his principal focus for the rest of his term. And what’s his big idea for this new priority? Stand well back: He wants to increase the minimum wage!
Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos of Amazon (a non-government website) is musing about delivering his products to customers across the country (and the planet) within hours by using drones.
Drones! If there’s one thing Obama can do, it’s drones. He’s renowned across Yemen and Waziristan as the Domino’s of drones. If he’d thought to have your health-insurance-cancellation notices dropped by drone, Obamacare might have been a viable business model. Yet, even in Obama’s sole area of expertise and dominant market share, the private sector is already outpacing him.
Who has a greater grasp of the economic contours of the day after tomorrow — Bezos or Obama? My colleague Jonah Goldberg notes that the day before the president’s speech on “inequality,” Applebee’s announced that it was introducing computer “menu tablets” to its restaurants. Automated supermarket checkout, 3D printing, driverless vehicles . . . what has the “minimum wage” to do with any of that? To get your minimum wage increased, you first have to have a minimum-wage job.
....What do millions of people do in a world in which, in Marxian terms, “capital” no longer needs “labor”?
.....“Work” and “purpose” are intimately connected: Researchers at the University of Michigan, for example, found that welfare payments make one unhappier than a modest income honestly earned and used to provide for one’s family. “It drains too much of the life from life,” said Charles Murray in a speech in 2009. “And that statement applies as much to the lives of janitors — even more to the lives of janitors — as it does to the lives of CEOs.” Self-reliance — “work” — is intimately connected to human dignity — “purpose.”
So what does every initiative of the Obama era have in common? Obamacare, Obamaphones, Social Security disability expansion, 50 million people on food stamps . . . The assumption is that mass, multi-generational dependency is now a permanent feature of life. A coastal elite will devise ever smarter and slicker trinkets, and pretty much everyone else will be a member of either the dependency class or the vast bureaucracy that ministers to them. And, if you’re wondering why every Big Government program assumes you’re a feeble child, that’s because a citizenry without “work and purpose” is ultimately incompatible with liberty. The elites think a smart society will be wealthy enough to relieve the masses from the need to work. In reality, it would be neo-feudal, but with fatter, sicker peasants. It wouldn’t just be “economic inequality,” but a far more profound kind, and seething with resentments.
There’s no such thing as a global citizen
By Jakub GrygeilThe call for global solutions to global problems has become a familiar refrain: If only we could see past our petty national interests, we could come together to solve everything from climate change to poverty to terrorism. Schools like mine are increasingly being called upon to educate “global citizens” who belong to the world rather than to their nation of birth or state of choice — and who seek challenges to address rather than enemies to defeat.
But the global citizen is like the Himalayan Yeti: a figment of the imaginations of a few, not a living member of the political fauna of the world. And it isn’t something we should try to create.
According to a global-citizenship education guide issued by Oxfam, it is important to teach students that the world is unfair and unequal, and that they can and need to change it. Those terms are, by and large, empty vessels to be filled by the holder of power or the ideological flavor du jour, but most often they refer to a version of the argument that the North is richer than the South and this social injustice (another common term) must be addressed. This formulation does have a modicum of substance, albeit of a tired ideological variety reminiscent of post-colonial grievances. It also carries a set of preferred actions. The global citizen knows to drink only fair trade skim lattes.
Farm Bill: Money for Nothin'… I Want My Subsidy
By Daren Bakst
The four principal farm bill negotiators have tentatively
agreed on a framework for a new farm bill. A central aspect of this
framework would be hilarious if it weren’t so sad.
The House and Senate farm bills both eliminate a program called direct payments because it pays farmers who don’t even plant a single seed. In other words, farmers get money for nothing.
Now, the negotiators are replacing the direct payments program with new programs that would also pay farmers for doing nothing.
This is how it works: Under direct payments, farmers don’t get paid for what they actually plant, but instead get paid for what are called “base acres.” As the Government Accountability Office (GAO) explains, “base acres” are:
To come back with new programs using this same base acre approach is absurd and an insult to taxpayers. We can look forward to farmers continuing to get paid for nothing.
.....Presumably, proponents will claim that the alternative is to base subsidies on actual planting decisions, not historical averages. Such a practice is more likely to distort planting decisions. This may be true, but it only shows that both approaches are flawed.
As is usual, Congress presumes that getting rid of one program means another program has to take its place. Farmers have far too many subsidies as it is. Direct payments shouldn’t be replaced, and Americans shouldn’t be forced to hand over money for nothing.
The House and Senate farm bills both eliminate a program called direct payments because it pays farmers who don’t even plant a single seed. In other words, farmers get money for nothing.
Now, the negotiators are replacing the direct payments program with new programs that would also pay farmers for doing nothing.
This is how it works: Under direct payments, farmers don’t get paid for what they actually plant, but instead get paid for what are called “base acres.” As the Government Accountability Office (GAO) explains, “base acres” are:
a measure of a farm’s crop production history based on the number of acres planted on the farm during certain past years. The term base acres refers to a farm’s average planted acreage of specific crops during those years; the term does not refer to specific physical acres on that farm.Payment is therefore based on the historical production of a crop, not on what is actually planted. This has led to serious waste. According to GAO:
Cumulatively, almost one-fourth of the total value of direct payments made during this period [2003-2011] went to producers who did not, in a given year, grow any of the crop associated with their base acres—as they are allowed to do.The payments may have been easy money for some farmers, but nothing is free: A total of $10.6 billion in taxpayer dollars was doled out for nothing. There were even some recipients who received direct payments even though their land was “fallow” (i.e. they had not grown any crops on their land for the most recent five years).
To come back with new programs using this same base acre approach is absurd and an insult to taxpayers. We can look forward to farmers continuing to get paid for nothing.
.....Presumably, proponents will claim that the alternative is to base subsidies on actual planting decisions, not historical averages. Such a practice is more likely to distort planting decisions. This may be true, but it only shows that both approaches are flawed.
As is usual, Congress presumes that getting rid of one program means another program has to take its place. Farmers have far too many subsidies as it is. Direct payments shouldn’t be replaced, and Americans shouldn’t be forced to hand over money for nothing.
Minimum Wage Activist: I Want $15 per Hour so I Don’t Have to Work so Much
By Michael Schaus....Ostensibly the demand is being made because the current minimum wage is not a ‘livable” wage. (Apparently you just keel over if you are employed for under 15 dollars per hour.) Protestors and union activists say that workers making minimum wage are incapable of escaping poverty, and such a low wage hinders the economic recovery of America. . .
And then… We have this moment of honesty from a young woman who protested her burger-flipping job in Hartford, Connecticut:
“And that $15 an hour, that would mean I would have to work a little less days (sic) instead of every day, all day.”
Right. If we up the pay for this lowly fast food worker, then she won’t be burdened with the obligation of going to her job all day, every day, just like the rest of us.
The protestor, however, is a prime example of how liberalism injures the very people it claims to empower. Imagine this single mother’s surprise when, after having the minimum wage increased to 15 dollars per hour, she finds herself laid off. Or maybe she will be one of the lucky few who are able to keep their job (with a pay increase) that will now be asked to work twice as much to make up for the laid off portion of Wendy’s workforce.
The truth is, it is hard to make a living on $7.25 an hour. But minimum wage, just like the jobs that offer such a lowly level of compensation, is not designed to be a wage that empowers a livelihood. Flipping burgers, or mopping the floor at your local Wendy’s is not supposed to be a career choice.
Covered California hands out consumer's personal info to insurance companies
By Rick MoranWho needs hackers when you've got Covered California, the Obamacare state exchange, giving out personal information on potential customers without their consent?
But it's OK - really. They're just trying to be helpful.
LA Times:
Raising concerns about consumer privacy, California's health exchange has given insurance agents the names and contact information for tens of thousands of people who went online to check out coverage but didn't ask to be contacted.
The Covered California exchange said it started handing out this consumer information this week as part of a pilot program to help people enroll ahead of a Dec. 23 deadline to have health insurance in place by Jan. 1.
State officials said they are only trying to help potential customers find insurance and sign up in time. But some insurance brokers and consumers who were contacted said they were astonished by the state's move.
Obama Stars in The No-Name Law That Sank His Party
By Clarice Feldman
When
the Pelosi-Reid-Obama troika triumphantly celebrated cramming through
the ACA (Affordable Care Act) over majority sentiment, they crowed that
this was the president's signature achievement and ACA soon took on the
name of its creator, ObamaCare. Though not one of them, nor any of the
Democrats in the Senate who voted it into law uni-partisanly had read
it, they all assured us that we'd grow to really, really like it. Boy,
were they wrong.
We've paid almost a billion dollars to a Canadian firm whose vice-president is a college buddy of Michelle Obama's from their black radical days at Princeton to create a webpage to enroll people mandated by this law to do so, Obama having turned down the U.S. firm IBM's offer to create it for free. It doesn't work. Moreover, the continuing problems with this webpage -- and law -- are so substantial and intractable that the White House propaganda machine has stopped referring to it as ObamaCare or even the Affordable Care Act. Everyone now knows that for most people, the plan loaded with mandated coverage to curry favors with privileged tranches of voters like college girls who want free contraceptives and abortion coverage and to permit anyone to sign up after they found out they need costly care, not before, is far more expensive than what they were previously paying for medical insurance. It's some kind of no-name thing. Either that or, to be an honest descriptor, we could call it the UFA (Unaffordable Care Act). Under any name it's dramatically swamping the president and his party's standing among voters.
Younger voters who passionately supported the president in both election shots are running away from UFA, a law which depends on them to foot a disproportionate share of the financial burden:
For one thing, there's no way to pay for the mandated insurance by December 23 as the law requires purchasers to do.
By way of example, HHS named as a winner of their video propaganda outreach one entry which is titled "Forget About the Price Tag."
In a White House Youth Summit, Obama "called on young people to do whatever they can to promote his signature health care law -- including plying their customers with cheap booze. "If you are a bartender, have a happy hour," Obama said as the crowd laughed. "And also probably get health insurance because a lot of people don't have it." Obama also encouraged young people who are student body presidents or workers at nonprofit organizations to help people get enrolled. "If you've got a radio show, spread the word on air," Obama added. Obama called on young people's sense of patriotism to join...."
Increasingly, more substantive problems with UFA were making themselves known. Many top hospitals were refusing to participate. Many doctors were retiring rather than go along with this quality care killer. Indeed, it was reliably reported by Washington Examiner's Richard Pollack that seven out of ten California doctors were refusing to participate in that state's health exchange. Reminds me of Sam Goldwyn's observation that when people don't want to come to the theater nothing can stop them.
So far, the law applies to a relatively small number of people -- when it expands to cover employer mandates and more millions are thrown into the UFA pool, the disaster will snowball. As my friend DoT notes: "Once the employer mandate kicks in they'll be hunting Democrats with dogs in this country."
Noemie Emery explains why Obama's "inverse genius" is causing so much voter angst and disdain:
So, if Obama wasn't managing his namesake signature legislation, apart from ribbon cuttings, offending our allies, giving away the store to our enemies, firing our military officers, and blowing through the national treasure, what has he been doing? He's been acting as the star of his own production, Obama, the President and starring in a series of preposterous publicity poses the White House photographers then release to show, for example, that the meaning of the deaths of famous people and the commemoration of historical figures are really significant only as they reveal his reactions to these events.
So while Obama paid no obvious attention to the provisions in the 2,000-plus pages law or the thousands of regulations HHS churned out along with the inoperability of a critically defective, grossly overpriced website, what was he doing?
Ace of Spades explains that Obama and his most ardent fans, including, of course, the New York Times and Chris Matthews, see the presidency as a drama in which the hero, not his MacGuffin [object of the quest], is all that matters.
We've paid almost a billion dollars to a Canadian firm whose vice-president is a college buddy of Michelle Obama's from their black radical days at Princeton to create a webpage to enroll people mandated by this law to do so, Obama having turned down the U.S. firm IBM's offer to create it for free. It doesn't work. Moreover, the continuing problems with this webpage -- and law -- are so substantial and intractable that the White House propaganda machine has stopped referring to it as ObamaCare or even the Affordable Care Act. Everyone now knows that for most people, the plan loaded with mandated coverage to curry favors with privileged tranches of voters like college girls who want free contraceptives and abortion coverage and to permit anyone to sign up after they found out they need costly care, not before, is far more expensive than what they were previously paying for medical insurance. It's some kind of no-name thing. Either that or, to be an honest descriptor, we could call it the UFA (Unaffordable Care Act). Under any name it's dramatically swamping the president and his party's standing among voters.
Younger voters who passionately supported the president in both election shots are running away from UFA, a law which depends on them to foot a disproportionate share of the financial burden:
A new poll from Harvard University's Institute of Politics shows young people increasingly cooling to President Obama and his signature domestic achievement, Obamacare. Fifty-four percent of young people (ages 18 to 29) disapprove of the job Obama is doing. A total of 47 percent of young people, including 52 percent of those between the ages of 18 and 24, say they would choose to recall Obama if they could.And each day we learn of new, more difficult to resolve, problems with it.
Obamacare is undoubtedly a major force in this change among so-called Millennials (61 percent say they disapprove of his handling of health care). The poll found that 57 percent of young people disapprove of Obamacare, with just 38 percent approving of the law. The numbers were not significantly different when those polled were asked how they felt about the "Affordable Care Act" as opposed to "Obamacare." A plurality said the law would make their health care worse (44 percent for "Obamacare" and 40 percent for the "Affordable Care Act") while a majority (51 percent for "Obamacare" and 50 percent for the "Affordable Care Act") said they believed the amount they would pay for health care under the law would increase.
As Ron Fournier at National Journal points out, younger Millennials (those under the age of 25) are in particular turning against Obama.
For one thing, there's no way to pay for the mandated insurance by December 23 as the law requires purchasers to do.
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: People are receiving cancellations. They know they lost their insurance. There is no way to talk around it.Hit and Run describes the payment issue's evolution on Just One Minute:
The other thing that the Obama administration, the White House, is pushing is the success of the exchanges because they got 30,000 people supposedly enrolled. Let's assume it's enrolled. They aren't enrolled.
BRET BAIER: There's nobody that really paid their premium.
KRAUTHAMMER: Exactly. Shopping and semi-enrolled -- aspirationally enrolled, let's put it that way -- in two days. Well, if you do the math on that and you continue that enrollment up until the deadline of the 23rd of December, you come out with a number, which means that of the 5 million people who have lost insurance, 6% will have it restored. All the rest will not have it. And that's without adding a single person who never had insurance in the first place. It is a disaster with the numbers that the White House is touting.
"In addition to fixing the technical problems with healthcare.gov, the significant 'back-end' issues must also be resolved to ensure that coverage can begin on January 1, 2014. In particular, the ongoing problems with processing "834″ enrollment files need to be fixed." AHIP President, Karen Ignagni said (via WaPo), December 1.
"The back end sounds like some obscure curlicue in the process," Krauthammer said. "It's the cash register! It's the point at which you make the purchase. And if you don't have correct information or any information, you don't have a purchase. You don't have enrollment. You don't have a plan, you have a catastrophe."-- stuff Krauthammer said, December 3
Dun dun dun!Requiring people to buy insurance when you don't have a cash register to take their money is typical of the law and website's conundrums and when you learn Obama apparently manages by telekinesis, you can understand why:
"Now, this is like having a really good product in the store and the cash registers don't work... so we are working overtime to get this fixed."-- stuff Obama said,
...wait for it...
November 6.
The Government Accountability Institute report found that since Obamacare was signed on March 23, 2010, Obama met with "various Cabinet secretaries a total of 277 times," but his presidential schedule did not "document a single one-on-one meeting" with Sebelius. There was, though, "one instance of Secretary Sebelius meeting jointly with the President and Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner." Breitbart Big GovtObama shut down the federal government rather than delay UFA's individual mandate provision though he keeps exempting new favored blocs and delaying various provisions. Instead he's cranked up the propaganda machine, particularly the stuff aimed at the young. The efforts have been ridiculous, a clear sign, I suppose of how little regard he has for the intellectual capacity of those who voted disproportionately for him (a point on which he and I are in rare agreement}.
By way of example, HHS named as a winner of their video propaganda outreach one entry which is titled "Forget About the Price Tag."
In a White House Youth Summit, Obama "called on young people to do whatever they can to promote his signature health care law -- including plying their customers with cheap booze. "If you are a bartender, have a happy hour," Obama said as the crowd laughed. "And also probably get health insurance because a lot of people don't have it." Obama also encouraged young people who are student body presidents or workers at nonprofit organizations to help people get enrolled. "If you've got a radio show, spread the word on air," Obama added. Obama called on young people's sense of patriotism to join...."
Increasingly, more substantive problems with UFA were making themselves known. Many top hospitals were refusing to participate. Many doctors were retiring rather than go along with this quality care killer. Indeed, it was reliably reported by Washington Examiner's Richard Pollack that seven out of ten California doctors were refusing to participate in that state's health exchange. Reminds me of Sam Goldwyn's observation that when people don't want to come to the theater nothing can stop them.
So far, the law applies to a relatively small number of people -- when it expands to cover employer mandates and more millions are thrown into the UFA pool, the disaster will snowball. As my friend DoT notes: "Once the employer mandate kicks in they'll be hunting Democrats with dogs in this country."
Noemie Emery explains why Obama's "inverse genius" is causing so much voter angst and disdain:
By threatening their lives as well as their budgets, Obama has created a huge class of losers, who statistically overrun the small class of winners and outweigh them in savvy, no doubt. "A significant minority of losers or self-perceived losers and a few high profile bad outcomes are more than enough to cause real political problems," as Kaiser Foundation head honcho Drew Altman informs us. They're not a minority, and they have, and they will.Math is so hard for Democrats.
As National Journal's James Oliphant tells us, the plan will insure about 25 million, about half of the number serviced by Medicare, at the expense of almost everyone else in the country, who stand to lose something -- in anxiety, money, or care. Those helped "represent just a relative handful of people, many of whom sit at the lower end of the political spectrum, and engage little with the political process ... that's what's going to make any sort of renewed national sales pitch so difficult. Among the politically active, the damage is done."
So, if Obama wasn't managing his namesake signature legislation, apart from ribbon cuttings, offending our allies, giving away the store to our enemies, firing our military officers, and blowing through the national treasure, what has he been doing? He's been acting as the star of his own production, Obama, the President and starring in a series of preposterous publicity poses the White House photographers then release to show, for example, that the meaning of the deaths of famous people and the commemoration of historical figures are really significant only as they reveal his reactions to these events.
So while Obama paid no obvious attention to the provisions in the 2,000-plus pages law or the thousands of regulations HHS churned out along with the inoperability of a critically defective, grossly overpriced website, what was he doing?
Ace of Spades explains that Obama and his most ardent fans, including, of course, the New York Times and Chris Matthews, see the presidency as a drama in which the hero, not his MacGuffin [object of the quest], is all that matters.
It's the Hero that the rapt fan is interested in, not the MacGuffin.Right now I, too, see Obama as star of his own movie, he's standing on the prow of the Titanic as it sinks beneath the waves.
The left is just interested in the character, the Hero... [Ed: he fisks the NYT's sappy account of Obama's Christmas book buying]
President Obama has never visited the rugged mountains of Chechnya, but if he digs into one of the novels he bought last weekend, "A Constellation of Vital Phenomena," he will be transported to a land of unremitting violence and tragedy, where the innocent are caught up in war as often as the guilty.Perhaps Mr. Obama is seeking a deeper understanding of the roots of the ethnic bloodletting after Chechnya vaulted back to the front pages this year with the Boston Marathon bombings. Or perhaps he is thinking about his troubled relationship with Russia.Either way, the novel would give the president a more visceral feel for one of the world's most brutal conflicts than the graphic intelligence papers that cross his desk."I imagine someone in his position gets a lot of facts and figures," Anthony Marra, the author of the book, mused the other day. "But the novel is really about the experience, about the psyche and the soul."A reading list offers a rare window into the presidential mind, a peek at what a commander in chief may be thinking about beyond the prosaic and repetitive briefings that dominate his days.Yes who cares about those repetitive boring briefings. I mean, there's nothing interesting going on, certainly, apart from the intense drama of his signature policy initiative going up in flames.
[snip]
I'm not sure if we can call a several-times-per-week [ed: of Obama's reference to "his journey"] occurrence rare.
In fact, I'm pretty sure it's the concern for Obama's actual record that's rare. The intense interest in Obama the Personality is the common thing.
The right has repeatedly belittled Obama as a "Celebrity." And indeed that is what he is. His fans are primarily interested in Barack the Man, Barack the Personality.
And not so much as Barack Obama, the executor of federal law.
[snip]
[The books he purchased] are volumes about identity and reinvention, about what it means to be American, and about family, love, betrayal and redemption.
Yup -- movie themes. Book themes. Story themes.
[snip]
The New York Times, like Chris Matthews, is not interested in policy. It is solely interested in the travails and triumphs of their Hero, Barack Obama.
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