Obama's Embarrassing Race Remarks

By M Catharine Evans

A celebrity gossip website posts a recording of a conversation between an allegedly racist, septuagenarian basketball team owner and a former 20-something girlfriend, and the President of the United States, 9,500 miles away in Malaysia, weighs in with another race speech?

When asked about Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling’s conversation with someone named V. Stiviano, Obama jumped right into the question without any firsthand knowledge of the situation.

The Harvard-trained lawyer based his opinion on the mainstream media news story which based its story on a gossip site. Did Obama speak to the parties involved before he commented on the incident? Before the voice was even confirmed to be Sterling’s, Obama called the remarks “incredibly offensive.”

The president certainly does rush to judgment a lot when it comes to race issues. The Cambridge police were “acting stupidly” in the Gates case, Trayvon Martin, whom Obama had never met, could have been his son if he had one, and now we have Obama using the Sterling issue to talk about the racial divide.

Funny, how no reporter asks about Steve Utash, the 54-year-old white guy in Detroit beaten into a coma by blacks or random “knockout game” attacks by black youths on whites. It just never seems to come up at these press conferences.

But an audio recording of a white sports team owner telling his former African-American-Mexican girlfriend, currently being accused of embezzling $1.8 million from the Sterling family, not to bring blacks or Magic Johnson to Clippers games, has prompted Mr. Obama to deliver yet another history lesson on the black experience.

From Youtube:

When ignorant folks want to advertise their ignorance, you don't really have to do anything, you just let them talk. That's what happened here,

The United States continues to wrestle with the legacy of race and slavery and segregation, that’s still there, the vestiges of discrimination

We’ve made enormous strides, but you’re going to continue to see this percolate up every so often…And I think that we just have to be clear and steady in denouncing it, teaching our children differently, but also remaining hopeful that part of why statements like this stand out some much is because there has been this shift in how we view ourselves.

[the NBA has] an awful lot of African American players, it’s steeped in African American culture. And I suspect that the NBA is going to be deeply concerned in resolving this.

Obama chose his target well this time. According to the Department of Justice Sterling does not have a ‘sterling’ record when it comes to race relations. In 2009 he ponied up $2.73 million in a federal discrimination lawsuit after his company allegedly refused to rent apartments to blacks and Hispanics in greater Los Angeles.

Oddly, the lawsuit and subsequent fines did not prevent the Los Angeles chapter of the NAACP from naming Sterling “humanitarian of the year” in their upcoming 100th anniversary gala scheduled for May 15. Speaking on Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” NAACP Interim Vice-President Lorraine Miller stated that her group will not be honoring the racist Mr. Sterling and is strongly urging the leaders to rescind the humanitarian award. The organization will be holding a press conference early Monday morning according to press reports. I hope NAACP officials can explain why Sterling’s “outrageous” and racist remarks made to one of his lady friends trumps his refusal to rent to blacks when it comes to handing out awards. Bizarre.

Even more bizarre is Obama in Malaysia, of all places, stammering and stuttering on camera, about a dirty old man’s problems with his trophy girlfriend hanging out with blacks.

Obama Slanders America Again

By Phaedra Dugan

President Obama on Saturday compared the human rights situation in Malaysia, a country with corrupt elections, no freedom of the press, limited freedom of religion, and a censored Internet, to that of the United States. Answering a reporter’s question about why he didn’t meet with the imprisoned opposition leader, Anwar Ibrahim, or talk about human rights while in Malaysia, President Obama said that Malaysia has “some work” to do on these issues, “just like the United States, by the way, has some work to do on these issues.” It was yet another slam on our own country from abroad and a misguided example of the moral equivalency that plagues the American left.

According to a report on Malaysia by Obama’s own State Department, Sharia law is enforced in Malaysia and “Muslims may not legally convert to another religion… although members of other religions may convert to Islam.” The same report states that Sharia courts in Malaysia can send anyone who attempts to leave Islam to a reeducation camp lasting “approximately six months.”

....The president has made it abundantly clear that he is embarrassed by America’s role in the world: our size, our power and our strength. His human rights comparison of Malaysia to the United States is not only bewildering, it is heartbreaking. He thinks our country is neither exceptional nor great, and that we have no business being moral leaders to others. We are not, in his eyes, a shining city on a hill. Many of us disagree with him, and are grateful that we will not be caned, fined, or imprisoned for our views. We look forward to a time when we once again have a president who is proud of our country.

Lawmakers return to vote on business tax breaks, possible contempt charge against ex-IRS official

By Susan Ferrechio

With six months to go until the critical midterm election, Congress will return to work this week with a agenda that steers clear of legislation that might divide the ranks of either party or damage re-election prospects of vulnerable incumbents.
The House agenda for May, authored by the Republican majority, does not include plans to take up either immigration reform or a proposal to replace the new health care law, two major issues that GOP leaders have pledged to take up at some point this year.
Instead, lawmakers will focus on bills that are far less likely to rankle the conference, including a bill to help expand charter schools and legislation to extend a popular tax breaks for businesses. The House also plans to start the appropriations process with votes planned on three fiscal 2015 spending bills.
In a memo to GOP rank and file, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor told lawmakers that the House in the coming weeks will “will build on our work over the last three months,” which included passing legislation to lessen government regulation and undo parts of Obamacare.
The House next month may also vote on holding a former top Internal Revenue Service official in contempt of Congress for refusing to testify about her role in singling out Tea Party groups for extra scrutiny when they applied for tax exempt status.
...In the Senate, lawmakers will confirm a round of judges on Monday and prepare to debate a bill to extend business tax breaks while Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid plots his next move on a stalled minimum wage bill.
Reid has postponed wage hike legislation several times due to opposition from a handful of Democrats whose seats are threatened in November.
....The Senate in May will have much less difficulty confirming a new Health and Human Services secretary.
...The House agenda this week includes legislation that would eliminate the need to produce more than 300 federal reports that have been deemed wasteful or repetitive. They’ll also take up a bill that would make it easier for the pubic to view government expenditures online. The House will also consider two spending bills, one that would fund military construction and veterans affairs and the other would pay for legislative branch expenses.

Supreme Court to address key privacy rights cases

By Sean Lengell

The Supreme Court this week will address a pair of cases that will re-examine -- and possibly redefine -- privacy rights in the digital age.
The debate centers on whether police need a warrant to search the cellphones of people they arrest, pitting law enforcement and the federal government against privacy advocates and defense lawyers.
In each of the two cases the justices will address back-to-back Tuesday, criminal defendants were convicted and sentenced to prison partly because police obtained key evidence from their cellphones after a warrantless search.
The Fourth Amendment says that police generally need a warrant before they can conduct a search and that the warrant must be based on "probable cause" evidence that a crime has been committed.
...Privacy advocates and defense lawyers say that because cellphones potentially contain vast amounts of personal information unrelated to a person's arrest, they should be off limits to a police search without a warrant.
"Beyond the advanced capabilities of the phones themselves, modern cell phones incorporate computers that allow individuals to access the Internet, presenting additional privacy concerns," Riley's attorneys said in a brief to the high court. "Thus, a search incident to arrest could, at the touch of a button, become a search of private and confidential information such as medical records, banking activity and work-related emails."
But the Justice Department says such searches are vital to ensure evidence isn't tampered with or destroyed.

The week ahead in economics: Looking back at early 2014, staffing the Fed and housing reform

By Joseph Lawler

The week ahead will be an important one both for looking back at what’s happened to the economy so far in 2014 and for learning about what’s in store for the rest of the year.
Releases of the two biggest economic indicators should shed light on the strength of the economy through the early part of the year.
On Wednesday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis will release the advance estimate of gross domestic product -- total economic output -- for the first quarter of the year. Following mixed news about the strength of relative sectors, including disappointing numbers regarding the housing market, analysts have dropped their expectations for growth to about 1 percent, on a yearly basis, down from 2.6 in the fourth quarter of 2013.
...Then the April jobs report is due from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday morning. After the March release showed 192,000 new jobs, investors expect this week's update to indicate that the number crept above the 200,000 mark. While that number would be slightly above the post-recovery average, it would also be evidence that there is not going to be a spring bounce-back from the winter weather that some analysts thought was disguising strong underlying labor market growth in the early months of the year.
The Fed's monetary policy committee members won't have the aid of knowing the jobs numbers when they meet on Tuesday and Wednesday to review the central bank's plans for its quantitative easing and near-zero interest rate programs. But analysts expect Janet Yellen and company to continue to reduce the size of the Fed's monthly bond purchases, by another $10 billion to $45 billion, while leaving its guidance for low rates unchanged.
Yellen also will speak at a community banking convention in Washington on Thursday.

The Fed's Board of Governors is currently understaffed, but the Senate Banking Committee will hold a vote to approve two new Obama nominees on Tuesday. One, Stanley Fischer, has been the head of Israel's central bank, a Citigroup executive, a top official at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and a prominent academic at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The other, Lael Brainard, served in Obama's Treasury Department. The panel also will vote on the renomination of Jerome Powell, who has been a Fed governor since 2012. If approved, the candidates face a vote in the full Senate before being installed.
In the same meeting, the committee will mark up the bipartisan bill to close down the bailed-out government-sponsored mortgage enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and overhaul the housing finance system. Although any measure faces long odds of being passed this Congress, the Senate bill will likely be the benchmark for legislative efforts in the medium term.
On Wednesday morning, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan will hold another hearing on the War on Poverty, this one featuring Robert Woodson, an anti-poverty social activist who is one of Ryan's mentors.

Euphemizing Affirmative Action

By George F Will

Anodyne euphemisms often indicate an uneasy conscience or a political anxiety. Or both, as when the 1976 Democratic platform chose “compensatory opportunity” as a way of blurring the fact that the party favored racial discrimination in the form of preferences and quotas for certain government-favored minorities in such matters as government hiring, contracting, and college admissions.
Since then, “affirmative action” has become the ubiquitous semantic evasion. Last Tuesday, however, in her 58-page dissent that she summarized from the bench to emphasize her strenuous disapproval of the court’s ruling in a case from Michigan, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, entered the euphemism sweepstakes. She suggested adopting the phrase “race-sensitive admissions policies.” Not that Michiganders are apt to be mollified by such semantic ether designed to tranquilize them regarding practices they correctly consider discordant with American values.

In 2003, the Supreme Court upheld the use of race as one factor in evaluating applicants for admission to the University of Michigan’s law school. In response, three years later 58 percent of Michigan voters amended their state’s constitution to forbid discriminating against or giving “preferential treatment to any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin.” Michigan, like the seven other states (New Hampshire, Florida, Nebraska, Oklahoma, California, Arizona, and Washington) that have similar bans on one remedy for supposedly inadequate diversity in enrollments, can continue to use other ways to rectify this.

Although the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment says “No state shall . . . deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals divided 8 to 7 in ruling that Michigan’s constitutional amendment mandating equal treatment violates the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection. It reached this, shall we say, counterintuitive conclusion by reasoning as follows:
The amended state constitution “restructures” the political process in a way that complicates the task of Michiganders who favor racial preferences. Rather than just persuade the administrators of Michigan’s institutions of post-secondary education to adopt racial preferences, they first must mount a statewide campaign to amend Michigan’s constitution. If this reasoning is correct, the U.S. Constitution requires that states make it as easy as possible for their governments to do what the 14th Amendment, if its plain language is properly construed, forbids.
Well, then: Does the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment commit a similar sin by proscribing “establishment of religion,” thereby restructuring the political process to the discriminatory detriment of those who favor such establishment and cannot advance their preference without amending the Constitution?
In the controlling opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy, joined by only Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, stressed that this ruling did not concern the merits of racial preferences, which are permitted within certain judicially enunciated parameters. Rather, it concerned who should decide the merits. Last Tuesday, the court held that this decision must not be placed beyond the reach of electoral majorities.

Mike Lee’s Shadow Party

The Utah senator pushes his reform agenda for the GOP.

By Eliana Johnson

...At a time when some of his closest allies and other tea-party favorites, such as Rand Paul and Florida senator Marco Rubio, are focused on building their fundraising networks and campaign operations in advance of potential presidential bids in 2016, Lee’s attention is elsewhere.

“I’m encouraging my fellow Republicans, incumbents and candidates alike, to take note of the fact that we do much better when we promote our agenda,” the senator says. “We can’t always just be the party that’s about being against what we don’t like in Washington. We need also to be the party that’s for things we want to have happen in Washington.”
Lee’s work to articulate a vision of conservative governance is reminiscent of the conservative reform movements that arose in the 1970s, when groups such as the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority, and the Republican Study Committee were founded. The policy proposals and ideological fervor that emanated from them helped to sustain the dozen years of Republican governance that followed, first under Ronald Reagan and then under George H. W. Bush. Reagan famously distributed the Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership, which contained thousands of policy proposals, at the first meeting of his cabinet, and his administration proceeded to implement many of them. “I think there are some important similarities,” Lee says.
Lee has said that Republicans need to be generating ideas during the wilderness years of the Obama presidency that will make people want to vote for them rather than merely to vote against their opponents. While many of his colleagues delivered fire-breathing speeches to the youthful, libertarian-leaning crowd gathered at last month’s Conservative Political Action Conference, Lee was more cautionary. “The kind of leaders” the conservative movement needs “won’t just tell you what they’re against,” he said. “They’ll tell you what they’re for, and why.”
The senator recalls that in 2012, like in 1976 when Gerald Ford lost to Jimmy Carter, “conservatives in many quarters were blamed not only for really losing the White House but also were blamed for losses in various Senate and House races across the country.”
Lee is out campaigning because he wants to see candidates elected who he thinks will help enact his agenda. For him, a candidate’s prospects for victory are secondary to his ideological fervor. “Whether or not that candidate is going to win certainly is not the most important thing,” he says. “It is far more important to me what kind of a perch that candidate would take if elected.”
He subjects the candidates who seek his backing to an extensive vetting process. In interviews, according to an aide, they are asked to evaluate a series of up to 20 specific policy proposals. If the candidates don’t sign on to Lee’s legislative initiatives, they are asked to offer alternatives.

Oligarchy in the Twenty-First Century

Think rich conservatives rule the world? Think again.

By Matthew Continetti

....The world of unequal incomes that liberals self-righteously lament, the world of concentrated, inherited wealth, of politics dominated by the concerns of a few, is a world constructed by liberal methods according to liberal ideals. “The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class,” Marx and Engels wrote in 1848. And there can be no denying that the ruling ideas of our age—diversity, multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, gun control, free trade, unrestricted migration, sexual autonomy, feminism, environmentalism—are liberal ones.
The popular rhetoric of income inequality, the attacks on Charles and David Koch, the assertion that the system is rigged against the common man, the accusations that a vast right-wing conspiracy has despoiled the American landscape and society and polity—these are the means by which the ruling class masks its true position and justifies its continued agglomeration of power and of wealth.
The campaign against inequality and the call for higher taxes and the regulatory burdens placed on extractive industries further the self-interest of the liberals who rule our world partly because those liberals are already established in society and have already made their money, partly because like David Cohen or Tom Steyer or George Soros or Elon Musk or Warren Buffett they stand to benefit financially from their preferred outcomes, but also because there are fortunes to be made, there is status to be gained, in justifying the continued expansion of the welfare state, in designing plans for the redistribution of tax dollars, in demonizing those sections of the elite, and that minority of Americans, which dissent from the ruling ideas.
Seven of the 10 richest counties in the country voted for Barack Obama in 2012, many of them by huge margins. Six of the 10 are in the Washington, D.C., metro area, which has benefited from government employment and payment regulations, from government contracting, and from consulting, lobbying, and lawyering for clients petitioning the government. The median income of Falls Church City, Va., is $121,250 dollars. In 2012, Falls Church City voted for Obama 70 percent to 30 percent.
Democrats represent eight of the ten richest congressional districts in the country. Democrat Carolyn Maloney represents the district with the highest per capita income of $75,479. Outgoing congressman Henry Waxman represents the district with the second-highest per capita income of $61,273. The only two Republicans on the list are Rep. Leonard Lance, whose New Jersey district ranks seventh, and outgoing Rep. Frank Wolf, whose Virginia district ranks tenth. The average per capita income of Democratic House districts is $1,000 more than Republican ones.
Congressional Democrats have a higher median net worth than congressional Republicans. House Democrats have a higher median net worth ($929,000) than House Republicans ($884,000), while the median net worth of Senate Republicans ($2.9 million) is higher than that of Senate Democrats ($1.7 million). But it is not like the Senate Democrats are hurting financially. They have lost some wealthy members in recent years (Herbert Kohl, John Kerry, Frank Lautenberg). Of the 10 richest members of Congress, only three are Republicans.
The top 20 entries in the Forbes list of the 400 wealthiest Americans include conservative bogeymen such as Charles and David Koch (tied at number 4) and Sheldon Adelson (number 11). But these men are overwhelmed by Democratic fundraisers such as Warren Buffett (number 2), Michael Bloomberg (number 10), Jeff Bezos (number 12), Larry Page (number 13), Sergey Brin (number 14), and George Soros (number 19), as well as by billionaires who have donated more evenly between parties, such as Bill Gates (number 1) and Larry Ellison (number 3). Members of the Walton family, who fill four of the top 10 spots, have also donated to both parties, but in recent years have leaned Republican.
That does not include the Waltons’ charitable giving, however, which includes sizable donations to the left-wing Tides Foundation and Obama aide John Podesta’s Center for American Progress. Indeed, the partisan makeup of the super-rich is less interesting, and less important, than their ideological unity. The issues that the richest Americans care most passionately about, from gay marriage to comprehensive immigration reform to gun control to drug legalization to foreign aid, are liberal issues. Only the Kochs and Adelson are famous for making defiant and public stands against the spirit of the age.
The list of the 20 most highly compensated CEOs contains many Republicans, and some conservative ones. But it also contains plenty of Democrats and liberals. Ticket-splitter Ellison, who was paid $78.4 million in 2013, tops the list. Next is Disney CEO Bob Iger, who received $34.3 million in compensation in 2013, and is a generous Democrat. Other highly paid CEOs whose giving since 2009 has favored Democrats include outgoing Ford chief Alan Mulally, Larry Merlo of CVS, Kenneth Chennault of American Express, and Paul Jacobs of Qualcomm. When you make more than $19 million a year the line separating Democrats from Republicans becomes hazy. Is Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs a movement conservative? Is GE’s Jeffrey Immelt?
Eight of the 10 largest private foundations are liberal. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest foundation with $37 billion in assets, to which Warren Buffett has pledged his trust, has delivered grants to the Tides Center and the Center for American Progress. So have the Ford Foundation ($11 billion in assets), the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation ($10 billion), the Hewlett Foundation ($8 billion), the MacArthur Foundation ($6 billion), and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation ($6 billion). The Kellogg Foundation ($8 billion) has donated close to $30 million to the Tides Foundation and to the Tides Center, and the Packard Foundation ($6 billion) has chipped in another $30 million to Tides affiliates, as well as founding, at a cost of $71 million, the environmentalist Energy Foundation.
Of the top 10 foundations, only number 7, the Lilly Endowment (with $7 billion in assets) leans conservative. Other notably liberal foundations in the top 100 include Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Kresge Foundation, George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, the Heinz Endowments, and Soros’s Open Society Institute. The notorious conservative foundations that constitute the “counter-establishment” do not even crack the top 100. The Lynne and Harry Bradley Foundation, the largest conservative foundation, has assets of $640 million. The Charles G. Koch Foundation in 2012 had assets of $277 million. Conservative foundations are out-gunned.
So, too, are conservative media. The right has talk radio, Fox News Channel, the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal editorial pages, the Washington Times, the Weekly Standard, National Review, and a bunch of plucky websites. Liberals have the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Financial Times, NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, PBS, NPR, MSNBC, BBC, the Huffington Post, Slate, the Atlantic Monthly, the New Republic, the Daily Beast, GQ, Esquire, Time, Vogue, and many, many others. Not a single prominent institution of higher education, not a single prominent institution of high culture, can be described in any way as conservative. New York magazine admits that the “vast left-wing conspiracy is on your screen.”
The campaign of Barack Obama outraised the campaign of Mitt Romney. Overall, in 2012, the “red team” slightly outspent the “blue team” by a little more than $100 million. It made no difference. Not a single one of the top “all-time” institutional donors between 1989 and 2014 tilted Republican, according to a list compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. Senate Democrats are winning the 2014 money race. Even as they denounce Supreme Court rulings that loosen restrictions on political speech, liberal billionaires pledge gifts of $100 million and $50 million to Democrats in the 2014 election, and meet anonymously and in secret to coordinate giving to the multitude of organizations that make up the professional left. So effective has been the fundraising of hedge-fund billionaire Tom Steyer that President Obama, having delayed the Keystone pipeline yet again, is likely to kill it.
“It’s very difficult to make a democratic system work when you have such extreme inequality,” Piketty told the Times last Sunday, “and such extreme inequality in terms of political influence and the production of knowledge and information.” In fact the mechanisms of democracy seem to be working precisely as the capitalist and petty-bourgeois liberals would like them to work: the question among Democrats these days is just how permanent their majority is likely to be.
What we are in danger of losing because of the “extreme inequality in terms of political influence and the production of knowledge and information” are the classical liberal values of negative freedom, of religious liberty, of equality before the law, of free markets. The inequality of income our bipartisan ruling class sanctimoniously condemns is the very tool it uses to shore up the inequalities of power and communication from which it benefits. Affluent, self-righteous, self-seeking, self-possessed, triumphalist, out of touch, hostile to dissent—this is what oligarchy looks like in the twenty-first century. And it is all in front of one’s nose.

San Francisco Hippies Trash Golden Gate Park & Leave 5 Tons of Trash Behind After Weed Festival

By John Hawkins

Dirty hippies are dirty? Who’d have thunk it?

The mellow, “peace now,” countercultural, environmentally conscious “420” celebration deposited 10,000 pounds of garbage on what is known as Hippie Hill in Golden Gate Park, leaving volunteers and park workers to clean up the mess.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle’s website SF Gate, this year’s celebration drew a massive amount of revelers estimated at between 10,000 and 15,000. The pot smokers’ untidiness will cost the city more than $10,000 in cleanup costs.
The immense load of empty bags of chips, candy wrappers, and snack containers left behind was evidence that it was indeed the remnants of weed smokers with a case of the munchies on steroids.

So, how is it that a bunch of liberals who undoubtedly think of themselves as Mother Gaia-loving liberals could leave behind so much trash?
Easy.
Because they’re liberals and thus, their beliefs about themselves are based on their intentions, not what they actually do. If they just drop any trash wher ever they happen to be standing, that’s okay because they love the environment, man! This is how they think. This is how they ruin everything they touch.

Politico: By the Way, Healthcare.gov is Still Missing 'Massive, Critical Pieces'

By Guy Benson
...Since the disastrous Obamacare launch in October, we've followed the troubled website's progress. We've noted testimony from administration officials that much of Healthcare.gov's so-called "back end" was still under construction, threatening to wreak untold havoc on consumers and providers. Now that some of the most dysfunctional state exchanges are weighing whether to fold their operations into the federal system -- with shambolic Cover Oregon being the first to take the plunge -- how is said federal operation holding up? Ahem:

The Obamacare website may work for people buying insurance, but beneath the surface, HealthCare.gov is still missing massive, critical pieces — and the deadline for finishing them keeps slipping. As a result, the system’s “back end” is a tangle of technical workarounds moving billions of taxpayer dollars and consumer-paid premiums between the government and insurers. The parts under construction are essential for key functions such as accurately paying insurers. The longer they lag, experts say, the likelier they’ll trigger accounting problems that could leave the public on the hook for higher premium subsidies or health care costs. It’s an overlooked chapter in the health care law’s story that has largely escaped scrutiny because consumers aren’t directly affected. Yet it bolsters the Republican narrative that the government has mishandled the implementation of Obamacare.

That's not so much a "Republican narrative" as it is a "patently obvious reality." As crucial pieces of the website continue to be built -- seven months after everything was supposed to be ready to do, and with updated "deadlines slipping" -- all sorts of problems may rear their head. Phantom enrollments, potentially leading to tragic confusion. And as the story points out, the potential for higher costs to families and taxpayers. One health insurance CEO recently stated that a significant portion of 2015's premium spikes are a direct result of the administration's haphazard and unpredictable "fixes" to Obamacare. One wonders how a messy data reconciliation process might continue to impact costs in the coming years. Another point we've made repeatedly is that the White House's chest thumping on enrollment figures is useless without an accurate sense of how many "enrollees" have actually completed the full process to obtain coverage. We know, for instance, that the administration missed badly on its target for "young invincible" sign-ups. We don't have any official national stats on payment delinquency, or the percentage of "new" enrollees who previously had coverage. Healthcare.gov's back end problems may very well require "sharp revisions" to the White House's PR-pumping enrollment figures, Politico reports:

Without a fully built and operational system, federal officials can’t determine how many of the 8 million Obamacare sign-ups announced last week will have actually paid their premiums. They won’t even know how many enrollment attempts were never completed. That, in turn, could affect the amount of money the government spends on premium subsidies. And once the system finally does all come on-line, the data delays could force a sharp revision in that celebrated 8 million figure...Senior officials said early last month that they hoped to have the entire system ready by the summer. Now, even summer appears to be a question mark. Officials at CMS — the federal agency overseeing HealthCare.gov and new insurance exchanges — refused to provide an update on just how much of the back end remains incomplete, the current issues they face and their latest timetable...“We have the mother of all reconciliations coming,” said insurance industry consultant Robsert Laszewski, using the official term for the correction. “It may be that the administration will not be able to give us a credible enrollment number until then because we really need a reconciliation to accomplish that.” CMS warned late last year that without a permanent system in place by mid-March, the whole law could unravel and expose taxpayers to a huge risk. The agency has since pulled back from that dire projection...The unfinished back end also has experts worried that the administration is relying on inaccurate estimates to calculate Obamacare’s financial impact.

Obama administration officials won't tell the media how close they are to meeting their goals, which doesn't exactly inspire confidence. As Americans wait for them to get their act together, the entire payment system is being held together by duct tape and loose estimates -- which, again, could result in patients falling through the cracks, and could stick US taxpayers with higher than necessary expenses. In spite of the media's "winning streak" cheerleading, many elected Democrats are heeding party pollsters' advice not to campaign on the unpopular law. The Huffington Post notes that many Senate Democratic candidates' websites omit any mention of the law, while The Hill reports that to many Democrats, "Obamacare is a four letter word:"

In a review of battleground races, The Hill found that out of 50 Democratic candidates with active campaign websites, only 11 mention the healthcare law by name, either as "ObamaCare," "Affordable Care Act," or "ACA." Fourteen more mention the law, but not its name, and half the candidates omit it entirely from their websites. President Obama has trumpeted that more than 8 million people have enrolled in ACA-related plans. Meanwhile, congressional Democrats have been more cautious, focusing on jobs and the economy.

But not the "recovery," mind you, because that's a loser for them, too.