RUTHFULLY YOURS

rack Obama’s career has been one characterized by displays of brazenness. In a figure on the rise, this audacity is an attractive trait. Obama even adopted that word as his personal mantra, naming his second auto-biography after it and self-styling his 2008 presidential campaign on his bold refusal to sit on the sidelines amid the “fierce urgency of now.” With Barack Obama’s promise fully exhausted, that bold impertinence isn’t nearly as appealing as it once was.

The staleness of the president’s routinized audacity was perhaps most acutely felt by everyone who was not in the room with the president at a Democratic fundraising event in New York City on Monday night. There, the president quipped snidely about the field of Republican presidential aspirants and the CNBC debate moderators who were widely chided for their displays of bias and haplessness. What could the president’s speechwriters have been thinking when they sent him up onto that stage armed with the following dud:

Has the stabbing intifada come to the United States? A 34-year-old Orthodox Jewish man was stabbed in the back by an assailant in Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn Wednesday night, reports CrownHeights.info.

The victim, an off-duty EMS worker for the Hatzalah ambulance corps in Brooklyn, was walking westbound along Eastern Parkway just before Rogers Avenue when the incident occurred. Police say the assailant walked past him in the other direction, then turned around and stabbed him in the back.

The man radioed for help from his fellow volunteers at the rescue organization Hatzalah, and then managed to walk to the intersection of Eastern and Rogers, leaving a trail of blood behind him. He collapsed just as a Hatzalah ambulance arrived at the scene.

The victim was given first aid and rushed to Kings County Hospital in critical condition. Sources report that doctors are optimistic he will survive.

Regardless of whether there is a President Cruz or a President Rubio in January 2017, regardless of the existence or size of a Republican majority in Congress, the so-called Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) has failed. The grand vision of an efficient pseudo-market in health insurance under enlightened federal management — the heart of Obamacare — is not coming to pass. Obamacare, meaning the operating model that undergirded the law that Congress passed and President Barack Obama signed with great fanfare — is dead, and it will not be revived. What remains is fitful chaos.

A brief refresher:

The fundamental problem with ACA is that under it, insurance ceases to be insurance. Insurance is a prospective financial product, one that exploits the mathematical predictability of certain life events among very large groups of people — out of 1 million 40-to-60-year-old Americans, x percent will get in car wrecks every year, and y percent will be diagnosed with chronic renal failure — which allows actuaries and the insurance companies that employ them to calculate premiums based on risk, thus funding the reimbursement of certain expenses incurred by the insurance pool’s members. Insurance is, by its very nature, always forward-looking, considering events that have yet to come to pass but that may be expected and, to a reasonable extent, predicted with some level of specificity. Under ACA, insurance is retrospective. ACA mandates that insurance companies cover pre-existing conditions, meaning events that already have happened, which renders the basic mathematical architecture of insurance — the calculation of risk among large pools of people — pointless. Insurance ceases to be insurance and instead becomes something else, namely a very badly constructed cost-sharing program.

The dismantling of America leaves one breathless as we face of an avalanche of horrors. We’ve been dealing with a long roll out of evil with more to come. It shocks the mind trying to absorb it all. What can citizens do to stop the fundamental transformation of our nation? How can we function effectively to save our country? And how do we do so in a leadership vacuum?

I have no magic answers. Just a few humble thoughts.

First, a bit of context.

It’s hard to maintain the will to fight when we lose so many battles. It’s frustrating to be thwarted at every turn. And it’s especially disheartening (if not also terrifying) knowing the stakes are so high. In the face of all of this, how does one ward off cynicism and apathy?

These are some of my thoughts.

For starters, I think we are inundated with more information than we can possibly absorb. And because we are patriots, many of us feel compelled to act. (At least I hope that’s true.) But in the face of a dizzying array of assaults against us and against our constitutional republic, it’s difficult to know where to turn and/or what to do. And, as already noted, it’s hard to believe one’s voice or actions will matter. No doubt many feel that taking action is foolish and a waste of time. It’s easy to run sound bites in our head that absolve us of responsibility. “It’s over.” “We’re passed the tipping point.” “R.I.P. America.”

And so, perhaps, we do nothing.

One difference between the developed and developing worlds is honest, transparent government that treats investors fairly. By that standard, the Obama Administration’s handling of the Keystone XL pipeline shows the U.S. is sliding closer to Third World politics than Americans would like to admit.

On Monday TransCanada Corp. asked the State Department to stop its review of the proposed pipeline from Canada to the Gulf Coast that has been held hostage to liberal politics for seven years. The company said it wants a pause to give Nebraska time to finish its review of the pipeline route.

That may be true, but everyone knows that TransCanada’s bigger problem is the State review that President Obama has dragged out to the end of his term. The company’s reasonable fear is that Mr. Obama will reject the permit in the weeks before the global climate-change fiesta in Paris in December. He would then use this as a chit to prod other countries to sign onto bigger CO2 reductions.

HOUSTON—In a victory for social conservatives, voters in the nation’s fourth-largest city on Tuesday overwhelmingly rejected a ballot measure to extend nondiscrimination protections to gay and transgender people.

Known as the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance, or HERO, the measure would have banned discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, race and a dozen other categories. It was backed heavily by Houston Mayor Annise Parker and a cadre of national Democratic political figures, and proponents poured more than $3 million into the push to pass it.

Supporters conceded defeat on Tuesday evening shortly after the Associated Press called the election in favor of opponents. Roughly 61% of voters opposed the measure and 39% backed it, with 96% of precincts and early voting totals tallied.

The defeat of the bitterly contested ordinance represents a rare recent win for social and religious conservatives, four months after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of gay marriage. Opponents of the measure had argued that the ordinance would infringe on businesses’ religious freedoms. In placards and advertisements, they asserted that it would allow people born as men to freely enter women’s bathrooms.

Ten years ago, Front Page Magazine writer Danusha Goska went to heckle David Horowitz.

Then he said something about the minority cities of New Jersey that changed her whole way of thinking. “He pointed out that Camden, Paterson, and Newark had decades of Democratic leadership.”

“That one stray comment from David Horowitz, a man I regarded as the enemy, sparked the slow but steady realization that my ideals, the ideals I had lived by all my life, were poisoning my students and Paterson, my city,” she writes.

On Fox News Sunday, Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina echoed the case that David Horowitz has been making for decades.

Here is what is undeniable, women have been hurt under this administration policies, the extreme poverty rate among women is the highest ever record. The poverty rate among women, 16.1% is the highest in 20 years. Women have been harmed by this administration’s polices just as African Americans have, just as the poor have been.

“Progressive polices are bad for the people they have claimed to help. That is true of women as well as men,” she said.

The VA Solved Its Disability Backlog by Putting Other Veterans in a Jam
It has been a frustrating semester for veterans trying to get their education benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs.

“Still waiting on checks from August, September, October and now November,” one man wrote in a comment on the VA’s Facebook page for beneficiaries of the Post-9/11 GI Bill. “What do you expect people to do? How do you expect people to survive?”

That complaint has been festering for months, even as the VA struggled to resolve another problem: the disability-claims backlog that emerged as a national scandal last year. As it happens, the two issues are related. As the longstanding deadline for resolving the disability-claims backlog approached, Veterans Benefits Administration officials shifted manpower from the education claims to the disability crisis — thereby making progress on one logjam by creating another.

In July, a VA spokesman acknowledged that the department was going to miss the September 30, 2015, deadline for clearing the disability-claims backlog that had been set in 2013. Officials now hope to solve the problem by the end of 2015.