Displaying posts published in

August 2016

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Epic Fail: Obamacare Enrollment Less than Half of What was Expected By Rick Moran

By on August 29th, 2016

Enrollment in Obamacare insurance programs on the state exchanges is less than half of what was predicted by the Congressional Budget Office in 2013.

The CBO projected 24 million people would sign up on the exchanges in 2016. The actual number is 11.1 million. In addition to the lax enrollment numbers, it is estimated that 25% of all counties in America will have only one option for insurance on the exchanges next year.

Obamacare advocates continue to insist that the program is still viable even with reduced enrollment. But experts say they’re whistling past the graveyard.

Washington Post:

“Enrollment is key, first and foremost,” said Sara R. Collins, a vice president at the Commonwealth Fund, a nonpartisan foundation that funds health-care research. “They have to have this critical mass of people so that, by the law of averages, you’re going to get a mix of healthy and less healthy people.”

A big reason the CBO projections were so far off is that the agency overestimated how many people would lose insurance through their employers, which would force them into the exchanges. But there have been challenges getting the uninsured to sign up, too.

The law requires every American to get health coverage or pay a penalty, but the penalty hasn’t been high enough to persuade many Americans to buy into the health plans. Even those who qualify for subsidized premiums sometimes balk at the high deductibles on some plans.

And people who do outreach to the uninsured say the enrollment process itself has been more complex and confusing than Obama’s initial comparison to buying a plane ticket.

“This exchange will allow you to one-stop shop for a health-care plan, compare benefits and prices, and choose a plan that’s best for you and your family,” Obama said in a speech in 2009. “You will have your choice of a number of plans that offer a few different packages, but every plan would offer an affordable, basic package.”

In some markets, a shortfall in enrollment is testing insurers’ ability to balance the medical claims they pay out with income from premiums. In an announcement curtailing its involvement in the exchanges this month, Aetna cited financial losses traced to too many sick people signing up for care and not enough healthy ones.

The health-care law has been a political lightning rod from the beginning, and Republican legislators have used insurance companies’ withdrawals from the exchanges to reignite calls for the law’s repeal.

Kaiser tracks public data on insurer participation in the exchanges to project how many options counties will have, but the numbers are not final. This year, exchanges in about 7 percent of counties had just one insurer. Earlier this month, Aetna announced that it will pull out of 11 of the 15 states where it offers coverage on the health-care exchanges. Humana made a similar decision weeks earlier, planning to exit several states. And last spring, UnitedHealth Group said it would remain in three or fewer exchanges next year.

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Professor argues university’s sports mascot too angry By Thomas Lifson

By on August 29th, 2016

The University of Iowa’s team mascot, Herky the Hawkeye may be damagung some of the students there. Or so Professor Resmiye Oral seems to think. In a letter to the Athletic Department she voiced her concerns, as the Iowa City Press-Citizen reported:

“I believe incoming students should be met with welcoming, nurturing, calm, accepting and happy messages,” Resmiye Oral, a clinical professor of pediatrics at UI, wrote recently in an email to UI athletic department officials. “And our campus community is doing a great job in that regard when it comes to words. However, Herky’s angry, to say the least, faces conveying an invitation to aggressivity and even violence are not compatible with the verbal messages that we try to convey to and instill in our students and campus community.”

The email was included in a message Oral sent Tuesday morning to other members of the UI Faculty Senate, where she is one of the representatives from the UI Carver College of Medicine.

In a phone interview Tuesday, Oral said she has been concerned for some time with the lack of emotional variety displayed in the images of the university’s long-standing mascot — specifically the Fighting Herky, the “Old School” Flying Herky and the Tigerhawk logo developed by retired Hawkeye coach Hayden Fry.

These students at the 2016 orientation just held do not look terribly traumatized by the “angry, to say the least” Herky standing behind them:

In fairness, the good professor does not want to enforce a blissed out bird on the students:

Her intention, she said, is to bring diversity to how Herky feels, not to eliminate the ambitious, competitive, go-getter Herky.

But what about aggressive and angry?

Perhaps the professor, who received her medical degree in Turkey, is not fully attuned to the ritual combat Americans relish on the gridiron. After all, even a figure as benign as Methodist Bishop John Wesley has been immortalized by the Ohio Wesleyan University Battling Bishops.

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How the Clintons Gave American Foreign Policy its Muslim Tilt By G. Murphy Donovan

By on August 29th, 2016

The Clinton role in the rise of Islamic irredentism has now come full circle. Bill Clinton might get the credit for the original Muslim tilt. Bosnia (1992-95) set the table for a series of interventions that gave birth to the so-called Arab Spring and any subsequent triumphs of Islamofascism. Ironically, Bill Clinton could be both righteous about civil wars in the Balkans and oblivious to genocide in Rwanda simultaneously.

Muslim lives matter, Black Africans, not so much.

In the past decade, with an assist from an uncritical media, a “long war” chimera has emerged to rationalize indecision and serial failure abroad. After being told that al Qaeda was on the run and the Islamic State was the “junior varsity,” Americans are now told that Muslim wars are so “complicated” that solutions to religious fascism and terror must be deferred to the indefinite future. The “long war” scenarios now being spun by the Pentagon and the Obama/Clinton camp are excuses for inaction, the political equivalent of kick-the-can.

Such apologetics, if not appeasement, is nothing new. America has been risk averse since World War II. Ironically, while eschewing formal war declarations, the cloak and dagger faction of national security community is still populated by the same Cold War cowboys that flourished during the containment years. Anti-Communist rationale has now morphed into a pernicious, if not indiscriminate democratic imperialism, a series of hair-brained regime change operations with no regard for consequence — or the day after.

The instability and chaos that plague the 21st Century are created problems. Policies such as regime change, counter insurgency, nation building, and “humanitarian” intervention are probative. Withal, the US State Department, and the various US national security apparati, has facilitated the spread of terror, the immigrant tsunami, the rise of the Islamic State, the resurgence of jihad (nee Crusades), and the spread of Islamism worldwide.

When Donald Trump claims that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton created ISIS, his rhetoric might be figurative, but the underlying truth is literal. The political vacuums created by toppling secular authoritarian Muslim states have been filled by our worst political nightmare, religious fascism.

Bosnia, like much of the Balkans, is just one of the sectarian fault lines of civilization. Indeed, it was Muslim unrest that precipitated Serb pushback, civil war, and the eventual collapse of Yugoslavia. The so-called “ethnic” cleansing that followed had more to do with religion than race. Bosnians are, for the most part, Muslims with a bloody fascist pedigree.

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Comey’s Corrupt and Shameful Conduct Revealed By Jonathan F. Keiler

By on August 29th, 2016

James Comey’s rationale for not referring Hillary Clinton’s email crimes to the Justice Department rested almost entirely on a single, quite thin, legal and ethical plank, which was that she did not act intentionally when she sent and received classified emails over her home-brew server. Though his argument for deferring prosecution was mostly specious, it did contain at least a shred of credibility in that as Comey described the situation to the American public and Congress, Hillary had no motive to intentionally put American national security at risk. However, the recent evidentiary revelation (many would say confirmation) that Hillary established the server with the deliberate intent of shielding her illicit influence-peddling for her family “Foundation” while secretary of state shows that the issue of her motivation could not be seen by any “reasonable” prosecutor as exculpatory. Comey’s refusal to recommend prosecution, while knowing these facts at the time, proves he was not reasonable, and also that he is incompetent and culpable for not doing so.

At Comey’s July 5 briefing to the nation, he attempted to justify his actions. His first claim in this regard was that the FBI, having uncovered through laborious effort many work-related emails that Clinton did not turn over to State, “found no evidence that any of the work related emails were deleted in an effort to conceal them.” Then Comey noted that Hillary’s attorneys were deliberately overbroad in determining which emails were work-related and “relied on header information” and “search terms” rather than reading them, and that when they finished, the lawyers “cleaned their devices in such a way as to preclude complete forensic recovery.” Despite this, Comey then said he had “reasonable confidence there was no intentional misconduct in connection with that sorting effort.” Then, before launching into a description of all the ways Hillary and her minions were “extremely careless,” Comey said, “[W]e did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate the laws governing the handling of classified information[.]”

Comey concluded his statement with several more references to intent, and the lack thereof. He famously said:

Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case. Prosecutors necessarily weigh a number of factors before bringing charges. There are obvious considerations like the strength of the evidence, especially regarding intent.

Less famously but just as importantly:

[W]e cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts. All the cases prosecuted involved some combination of: clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information; or vast quantities of materials exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct; or indications of disloyalty to the United States; or efforts to obstruct justice. We do not see those things here.

The first of these to statements is a specious rationalization. The second is a bald-faced lie in support of that rationalization.

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Peter Smith The Road to Earthly Perdition

By on August 29th, 2016

“One of the principal building blocks of our civilisation is the primacy of reason — to think, to understand and form logical judgments on the basis of experience, evidence and facts. Twist experience, evidence and facts to suit a political narrative and reason fails, sophism prevails. We now have many such sophistries plaguing and undermining our values and culture.”

The ‘stolen generations’ myth is a small clue to puzzle, but a vital piece it is. The Left’s game is to erode the foundations of our civilisation until it crumbles, which explains why false and destructive narratives emerge. The bigger question is why we allow them to attain such purchase?

In the minds of most people the story of ‘the stolen generations’ evokes images of large numbers of part-Aboriginal children being systematically and unjustifiably taken from their families and put in institutions or fostered out. At the same time, in a separate and distinct compartment of their minds, these same people will agree that at some extreme point of parental neglect, or abandonment, children, whatever their ethnicity, have to be removed for their safety and wellbeing.

South Australian Bishop Chris McLeod was a visiting preacher at my Anglican church a short time ago. In his sermon he explained that his mother had been part of ‘the stolen generations’. She had been taken from her family and cared for in an Anglican orphanage and, subsequently, in an Anglican household. He did not elaborate further.

I don’t want to comment on the Bishop’s position. I knew nothing about him until hearing his Sunday sermon and know very little now. I know nothing about the feelings of his mother.

What I want to comment on is the likely reception of the Bishop’s remarks by the congregation. I might be wrong but I doubt anybody besides me would have read Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History (Volume III). To a man and woman they would have slotted the Bishop’s remarks into what they ‘know’ to be a cruel and racist part of Australia’s past; ditto for almost any group of Australians.

All Australians are aware of Kevin Rudd’s apology. Why apologise for something that didn’t happen? The story of ‘the stolen generations’ has become an historical fact or, more correctly, a factoid.

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Iran Accuses Man Involved in Nuclear Deal Negotiations of Spying Iran doesn’t name the accused or the country he was said to be of working with By Aresu Eqbali and Asa Fitch

By on August 29th, 2016

Iran said Sunday that it had arrested a person involved in the negotiations of its nuclear deal with six world powers last year and accused him of spying.

An Iranian judiciary spokesman, Gholam Hossein Mohseni Ejehi, said the accused was detained and released on bail after a few days, but didn’t identify him by name.

The spokesman also didn’t say when the arrest occurred, which country the person was accused of spying for or what sensitive information he may have disclosed.

“If this charge…is proved or not is another matter, because there is a difference between pursuing someone on a warrant and the charge being proved,” Mr. Ejehi said, according to the official Islamic Republic News Agency.

While details were scarce, the arrest is an unexpected turn of events in the wake of a nuclear deal that was hailed by its proponents as a springboard for friendlier relations between Iran and the world.

Under the deal last July, Iran agreed to scale back its disputed nuclear program in exchange for relief from international sanctions that crippled its economy. The deal formally took effect in January.

Reports by hard-line Iranian news outlets said last week that Abdolrasoul Dori-Esfahani, a financial expert who played a role in the nuclear talks, had been detained on suspicion of espionage. Tehran’s top prosecutor also said this month that an Iranian dual-national had been arrested and accused of having contacts with British intelligence. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Coming Out of the Basement During the author’s girlhood, ‘the Jews were as long ago as the Egyptians and as exotic as Indians.’ Then, at 19, she learned she was one. By Joshua Rubenstein

By on August 29th, 2016

The 20th century’s darkest moments have inspired more than a few illuminating memoirs, and Agata Tuszyńska’s “Family History of Fear” belongs in their number. It is one of a cluster of remembrances that, drawing on family history, look back on genocide and war and record their aftereffects. Such narratives can be personal and yet also encompass the fate of whole nations trying to reconstitute themselves after so much ordeal.

Ms. Tuszyńska, a poet and writer from Warsaw, begins by giving us the origins of her own story before broadening her gaze to include earlier generations. She was born in 1957 to a Jewish mother and Polish father. Her mother, with her dark eyes and dark hair, was “happy to have brought a little blue-eyed blond into the world”: She had not wanted to weigh her daughter down “with a burden heavier than I could bear,” Ms. Tuszyńska writes. “She didn’t want her child to have to grow up with a feeling of injustice and fear.”

Ms. Tuszyńska’s mother, Halina, had every reason to want her daughter to avoid the burden of history. As a child, Halina had survived the war when her own mother—Agata’s grandmother—had walked with Halina through a courthouse on the edge of the Warsaw ghetto that opened onto the “Aryan” side of the city. She discreetly removed her armband—the telltale sign that they were Jews—and began an odyssey of survival, seeking hidden shelters and staying clear of the German occupiers. “Mother wanted to erase the past. To be as far as possible from the basements where she had to hide.”
ENLARGE
Photo: wsj
Family History of Fear

By Agata Tuszynska
Knopf, 381 pages, $27.95

For much of Ms. Tuszyńska’s own girlhood, she tells us, she felt that “the Jews were as long ago as the Egyptians and as exotic as Indians.” Then, when she was 19, she learned that her mother was Jewish—and that she herself was a Jew. Ms. Tuszyńska was determined to “reverse the course of forgetting” and explore the shrouded history of her family.

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Look Who’s Getting That Bank Settlement Cash Tens of millions of dollars disguised as ‘consumer relief’ are going to liberal political groups By Andy Koenig

By on August 29th, 2016

Imagine if the president of the United States forced America’s biggest banks to funnel hundreds of millions—and potentially billions—of dollars to the corporations and lobbyists who supported his agenda, all while calling it “Main Street Relief.” The public outcry would rightly be deafening. Yet the Obama administration has used a similar strategy to enrich its political allies, advance leftist pet projects, and protect its legacy—and hardly anyone has noticed.

The administration’s multiyear campaign against the banking industry has quietly steered money to organizations and politicians who are working to ensure liberal policy and political victories at every level of government. The conduit for this funding is the Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities Working Group, a coalition of federal and state regulators and prosecutors created in 2012 to “identify, investigate, and prosecute instances of wrongdoing” in the residential mortgage-backed securities market. In conjunction with the Justice Department, the RMBS Working Group has reached multibillion-dollar settlements with essentially every major bank in America.

The most recent came in April when the Justice Department announced a $5.1 billion settlement with Goldman Sachs. In February Morgan Stanley agreed to a $3.2 billion settlement. Previous targets were Citigroup ($7 billion), J.P. Morgan Chase ($13 billion), and Bank of America, which in 2014 reached the largest civil settlement in American history at $16.65 billion. Smaller deals with other banks have also been announced.

Combined, the banks must divert well over $11 billion into “consumer relief,” which is supposed to benefit homeowners harmed during the Great Recession. Yet it is unknown how much, if any, of the banks’ settlement money will find its way to individual homeowners. Instead, a substantial portion is allocated to private, nonprofit organizations drawn from a federally approved list. Some groups on the list—Catholic Charities, for instance—are relatively nonpolitical. Others—La Raza, the National Urban League, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition and more—are anything but. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Keeping Turkey in the U.S. Orbit Leaders from Kiev to Jerusalem to Tokyo are familiar with Ankara’s discontent with Obama.

By on August 29th, 2016

Turkey is living through a 24/7 state of emergency. The latest alarm came Thursday with an assassination attempt on the leader of the secular opposition. Kemal Kilicdaroglu was traveling the country’s northeast when his convoy came under fire. A member of his security detail was killed in the shootout, but Mr. Kilicdaroglu was unharmed and evacuated by helicopter. The perpetrators escaped, though Mr. Kilicdaroglu’s aides say his bodyguards may have killed one of them.

“Even though we are attacked, we will continue with determination in the path that we believe in,” Mr. Kilicdaroglu said in an interview Friday at the headquarters of the Republican People’s Party, or CHP. The separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, took credit but said government security forces, not Mr. Kilicdaroglu, were the intended target.

In today’s Turkey such incidents capture headlines only to be overshadowed a few hours later by the next thing to go bang. Sure enough, hours after the Kilicdaroglu attempt, a truck bomb on Friday killed 11 Turkish police officers near the Syrian border. The PKK also claimed responsibility for that attack.

Life goes on. Men and women still gather in outdoor bars to sip raki, watch soccer and shoot the breeze. The margin of personal freedom remains wider than in most of the region. Even so, the mood is dark. With July’s failed coup, nearly three million Syrian refugees, a fresh PKK insurgency in the southeast and the menace of Islamic State, the Turks feel they can’t catch a break.

The Turkey emerging out of these manifold crises is more insular, paranoid and illiberal. This means Ankara may no longer be as solidly anchored in the West as it has been since the Cold War. Washington assigns the blame for this turn to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and rightly so in Turkey’s domestic sphere. But the president isn’t alone to blame for Ankara’s troubles abroad.

Mr. Erdogan’s project to concentrate power in the presidency was well under way before the coup attempt on July 15. Most serious observers here believe followers of the Pennsylvania-based cleric Fethullah Gülen organized the ill-fated coup. Few have forgotten that the Gülenists were the authoritarian handmaidens to Mr. Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, or AKP, before the two Islamist camps turned on each other in 2013. In the mid-2000s, when Messrs. Erdogan and Gülen were still allies, well-placed Gülenists in the judiciary persecuted and sidelined a common enemy: the old secular establishment.

The failed coup has accelerated Mr. Erdogan’s will to power. But it has also rallied much of the country behind his grievance narrative. Turks, secular and pious, feel betrayed. The West lectures them about the post-coup purges, they complain, without acknowledging the deep trauma of the coup itself: the putschist pilots who buzzed their apartments, the tanks that rolled down their streets.

Meanwhile, pro-government media feed the population a steady diet of ever-nuttier propaganda suggesting U.S. involvement in the coup attempt. Mr. Kilicdaroglu, the opposition leader, says the ruling party’s dominance over media leaves little doubt that it is “guiding the public.” A Western diplomat puts it nicely: “The government shapes public opinion and then claims to be constrained by that same opinion.”

Then again, externalizing responsibility for one’s destiny is nothing new in this part of the world. The relevant question for the American national interest is how to prevent this strategically crucial country from drifting further toward Russia’s orbit and away from the U.S.-led security order—or what remains of it after eight years of President Barack Obama.

Here the Turks ought to be listened to. Not all of Ankara’s lashing out at Washington derives from Mr. Erdogan’s cynicism and ideological hubris. Some of it is in reaction to the same sudden shift in U.S. policy under Mr. Obama that has jolted allies world-wide. Leaders from Kiev to Jerusalem to Tokyo are familiar with Ankara’s discontent.

Turkey has felt the jolt most acutely in Syria. Mr. Erdogan took Mr. Obama at his word when the American said in 2011 that Bashar Assad “must go.” He also took seriously Mr. Obama’s red line on chemical weapons. Turkey’s much-maligned early policy in Syria included overt support for moderate rebels and a laissez-faire policy that enabled the movement of more hard-line jihadists into the country. Ankara expected that Washington would favor its traditional allies and disfavor others: namely the Iranian mullahs, Mr. Assad and their various Shiite proxies.

Mr. Obama scrambled that friend-enemy pattern. He awkwardly ignored the red line, and the U.S. carried out secret talks that would culminate in a nuclear deal with Tehran and tie America’s hands against Mr. Assad. Then came a second shock to the Turks. America increasingly relied on Syrian-Kurdish factions with close ties to the Turkish PKK as its main ground forces in the country. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Hillary and the Soros Agenda By Rachel Ehrenfeld

By on August 29th, 2016

These days, George Soros’ connections are getting quite a bit more attention than they did in the 1990s. But by the end of Bill Clinton’s reign Soros had already obtained a very influential position with the Clintons, especially with Hillary.

In her excellent profile of Soros in The New Yorker, on January 23, 1995, Connie Bruck relates how Strobe Talbott, Bill Clinton’s friend, who served as Ambassador-at-Large and Special Adviser on the New Independent States to Secretary of State Warren Christopher, saw Soros. According to Talbott, Soros was “a national resource – indeed, a national treasure.” He described the billionaire as a sort of shadow arm of the State Department. “I would say that it [Soros’ foreign policy] is not identical to the foreign policy of the U.S. government, but it’s compatible with it, “he told The New Yorker. “It’s like working with a friendly, allied, independent entity, if not a government. We try to synchronize our approach to the former Communist countries with Germany, France, Great Britain, and with George Soros.”

When Soros opened his own D.C. office to be close to the action, one of his minions explained that it would serve as “his State Department.” Soros conceded, “Of course what I do could be called meddling because I want to promote an open society.” According to Soros, such an” Open society transcends national sovereignty.” He also proposed “modification of the concept of sovereignty” because “sovereignty is basically somewhat anachronistic.”

Soros wrote memos on every foreign policy and monetary issue imaginable, and these memos were read widely at the very highest echelons of the Clinton White House. Soros has also used the services of the Washington lobbying firm Raffaelli, Spees, Springer & Smith, where he was represented by Clinton hack Terry McAuliffe, who in 2005 became the Democratic National Committee Chairman, and in 2008 chaired Hillary’s presidential campaign (McAuliffe has been Governor of Virginia since 2014). Between his payments to McAuliffe and the hundreds of thousands of dollars he gave to various official Democratic PACs, Soros was clearly able to purchase himself quite a bit of clout in the Democratic Party, and gain the adoration/co-dependency of its members that continues to this day.

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