George Rebane
The Next Big Lie. Lies are the established communications staple of the Obama administration. There is no longer even an attempt to give truth a fly-by. The next big lie out of the WH will be that healthcare.gov has been fixed as promised when 30 November arrives. They’ve walked back ‘fixed’ to some hokey level of usability like 80%. Not a chance since more than half of the system’s back end has yet to be designed. For a succinct “reader’s guide to the coming Affordable Care Act traumas”, get a snoot full here.
The WSJ’s annual CEO Council was held the other day. It featured luminaries like President Obama, Gov Chris Christie, Sec Commerce Penny Pritzker, Sec Treas Jacob Lew, Rep Paul Ryan, and the ever popular Larry Summers. Bottom line, “the disconnect between what’s going on in Washington and what corporate leaders are asking for was as sharp as ever.” (details here) But the most inane ‘recommendation’ that came out of the conference was, “Business and government should build better bridges to each other – rather than viewing each other as adversaries – to advocate for free enterprise and shared prosperity.” We get this bovine scat while both ends of the ideological spectrum still agree that such “better bridges” already exist, and all that the rest of us get out of it is corruption and crony capitalism.
The temporary agreement with Iran has turned out to be the latest Obama foreign policy foible, and a “nuclear triumph” for the mullahs (details here). Nuff said.
Socialism’s advance took it in the shorts in Switzerland. There the voters overwhelmingly rejected a referendum on ‘pay equity’ that would have limited to 12:1 the pay of the highest-to-lowest workers. It seems that the Swiss know that its passage would have beggared the country by choking off foreign investment and driving out their wealthy. (‘What’s wrong with that?’ is the predictable question from the Left.)
Finally, the HHS is looking for new fields onto which to put its infamous stamp of failure. HHS has defined bone marrow as an organ, and seeks to prohibit its harvesting and sale to people in dire need of such an infusion. True to the socialist ideal, they believe that only government mediated altruistic donations should be allowed when it comes to organ transplants. Today marrow extraction is a fast, non-invasive, and safe procedure. Nevertheless there is a shortage, and 13,900 patients are standing in line while death approaches. Even the notorious Ninth Circuit Court is not willing to go along with HHS on this one. Funny liberal logic – a woman’s right to be in control of her body when it comes to killing her fetus is sacrosanct, but the rest of us don’t have the right to market our body parts when there is a willing donor and a willing recipient.
[update] Think back, to the extent that you believe in instant injection of liquidity, it was Bush's TARP that brought us out of the recession in the spring of 2009. No economist has found a shred of evidence that any of the subsequent Obama era ARRAs or QEs or Dodd-Frank or Obamacare have done anything to the economy except throw sand in the gears, and make our 'recovery' the laughing (crying?) stock of the world. I was again reminded of this as I am reading Mauldin's Code Red, an essay on the world's economies and financial status. More about that later, but it is interesting that the media have totally ignored that, and lapped up the intervening crap pumped out by the White House.
[29nov13 update] CARB – those folks bringing California all the destruction and devastation of AB32 – are daily discovering the utterly stupid regulations to which their ineffective clean air act has given rise. The latest concerns diesel engine filters that have caused big rigs to break down and even burst into flames (one incident caused a forest fire). Instead of pulling the regulation, they are going to start holding hearings (more here and here). In the meantime truckers are suing the agency and making plans to leave the state. If these people at CARB didn't have government guns to enforce their idiotic prescriptions, we could put them into the proper institutions where such mental cases would receive appropriate care, and where they would never have to interact with the outside world again.
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