It’s Wednesday, November 6th, 2013…but before we begin, two quick thoughts.  First, New Yorkers are about to get the government they deserve.  Second, a note to anyone who knows”Dick” Powell of Norfolk, VA, today’s Idiot on Parade:

Richard Powell, a 60-year-old retired IT manager who lives in Norfolk, described himself as an independent who frequently votes for members of both parties. He said he cast his ballot for McAuliffe because he was more determined not to vote for Cuccinelli, whom he said overreaches on a variety of medical issues.

“I’m not in favor of abortion — let’s put it that way — but I find that restricting abortion causes far more social harm than allowing abortion, so that was an issue for me,” Powell said.

So if you see “Dick” (or, as his Hispanic friends refer to him, Ricardo Cabesa!), please tell him from us…

And in ignorant douchebag at that!

Now, here’s The Gouge!

At the top of today’s order, courtesy of Commentary Magazine, John Steele Gordon reveals how the Unaffordable Care Act was always predicated upon…

Ripping Off the Self-Insured

Larry Kudlow of CNBC has a question:

As a 60-something, relatively healthy person, I don’t want lactation and maternity services, abortion services, speech therapy, mammograms, fertility treatments or Viagra. I don’t want it. So why should I have to tear up my existing health-care plan, and then buy a plan with far more expensive premiums and deductibles, and with services I don’t need or want?

President Obama, on his campaign swing through Boston last week (oh, wait a minute, the campaign is over, isn’t it: someone should tell the White House), says that it is to require those rascally insurance companies (among the most heavily regulated enterprises in the entire U.S. economy) to finally offer insurance contracts that provide “minimum standards” of coverage. Minimum standards covering such things as lifetime limits and prescription drugs make sense to avoid people being driven into bankruptcy by severe illness.

But requiring a 60-year-old man to pay for insurance to cover his possible need for maternity care is not about meeting minimum standards. It’s about ripping people off. Imagine the howls of outrage if millions of homeowners were to receive notices from their house insurance companies saying their premiums were going up $300 a month next year to cover possible damage to their tennis court and swimming pool when they don’t have either.

This is not about minimum standards. It’s about funding insurance for people whose risks are higher but whose insurance companies are forbidden to charge a premium commensurate with those risks, thanks to ObamaCare. By insuring against events that can’t happen, such as men becoming pregnant, they will have funds to cover real risks they can’t charge for.

In other words, Larry Kudlow and millions of others are being forced to redistribute their income to others that the government deems more worthy, but without the money actually going through the government by means of taxes and the politicians therefore having to take the political consequences that come with raising taxes.

At the moment, this only affects people who carry their own insurance, who are a relatively small part of the health-insurance market. They are raising a stink, as well they might, but the Obama administration is betting there are not enough of them to move Congress to change the law. That is no small part of the reason Obama, without a scintilla of legal authority, postponed the employer mandate a few months ago. Ninety million people are covered by their employers and when their insurance is forced to meet the new “minimum standards,” those costs will be passed along.

Had the inevitable blowback from that come this year, in the midst of individuals complaining, the website a debacle, and a midterm election looming, I doubt Obamacare would have survived unscathed.

In a related item, James Taranto sets the Dimocrats and their MSM shills straight about…

Who Sabotaged ObamaCare?

Not Republicans, who opposed it openly and honorably.

…The story Goldstein and Eilperin [in blaming ObamaCare’s failure on Republicans] tell is one not of GOP sabotage but of Obama administration self-sabotage. The geniuses who were sure they were capable of running the entire medical industry were so unnerved by the prospect of political opposition that at every stage of the way they undermined the president’s own signature “achievement.”

This is in part a story of political incompetence and hubris. Obama and his allies in Congress were unable to win a single Republican vote–and it doesn’t seem to have occurred to them that a monstrously complicated law enacted by a slender partisan minority might prove especially difficult to implement. As Obama himself admitted yesterday in a rare truthful statement: “Now, let’s face it, a lot of us didn’t realize that passing the law was the easy part.”

That’s what America gets for electing a president with charisma but no known skills apart (arguably) from delivering speeches…

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303936904579179974072632600?mod=djemBestOfTheWeb_h

But never, never ever lose sight of the fact, as The Washington Times details, the Unaffordable Care Act was designed to fail…from the start; the problem for Der Obafuhrer isn’t the failure, rather that…

Obamacare, designed to fail, is failing too soon

President Obama’s legacy may include a stake in the heart of a cherished dream of the progressive left: complete government control of healthcare in America. Obama has always wanted a single-payer, government-run healthcare system, and he set out a complicated but achievable path to get to that goal through Obamacare. The eventual failure of Obamacare would set the stage for single-payer healthcare.

Unfortunately for him, he designed Obamacare to fail in the wrong ways at the wrong times, making it harder, not easier to achieve his goal of completely socialized healthcare.

If Obamacare dies an early and spectacular failure, it will be at least another 100 years before the American people will consider government-run healthcare again. This is why Obama will fight tooth and nail to impose this lead balloon on the American people.

http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/time-choosing/2013/oct/25/obama-has-failed-designing-system-was-intended-fai/

Which is why…

Next up, courtesy of the American Thinker, Carol Brown relates…

Piecemeal Media Revelations

Slowly — very slowly — it’s being revealed by major media outlets that Obama administration aggressively goes after journalists who criticize or question The One. But even as the media begin to drop hints here and there that Obama and his administration are essentially thugs (my word, not theirs), the media still refuses to snap out of their complicit haze.

A recent piece at Breitbart lists several examples where the media spoke about intimidation from the White House.  Yet, as the author aptly notes, “despite the shabby treatment they receive at his hands, the media continues to swoon for this president.”

I would go farther than that.  What the Obama administration is doing is more egregious than “shabby treatment.”  What we are witnessing is intentional and thuggish behavior perpetrated by Obama and members of his administration with the purpose of shutting down criticism.  The behavior of this administration should scare the daylights out of every American citizen. But it doesn’t.

It should serve to awaken the press like a blast of frigid air on their faces. But it hasn’t.

The press should be spelling out for the American public what is going on and educating them on what it means to have a “leader” who threatens the press – both from an historical perspective along with present day implications. But they’re not…

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/11/piecemeal_media_revelations.html

So much for the MSM heeding Hugo Black’s admonition “Paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people…”  With the possible exception of Barry’s repeated violations of his oath of office, we hold the MSM’s betrayal of its duties and obligations in the service of The Obamao constitutes the greatest act of treason against America since Benedict Arnold.

And in today’s Environmental Moment, the WSJ‘s Bret Stephens asks what inquiring minds have long wondered:

Does Environmentalism Cause Amnesia?

Climate-change alarmists warn us about coming food shortages. They said the same in 1968.

Warming is becoming a major problem. “A change in our climate,” writes one deservedly famous American naturalist, “is taking place very sensibly.” Snowfall, he notes, has become “less frequent and less deep.” Rivers that once “seldom failed to freeze over in the course of the winter, scarcely ever do so now.” And it’s having an especially worrisome effect on the food supply: “This change has produced an unfortunate fluctuation between heat and cold, in the spring of the year, which is very fatal to fruits.”

That isn’t a leaked excerpt from the latest report of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but it may as well be. Last week, Canadian journalist Donna Laframboise of the website No Frakking Consensus posted a draft of a forthcoming IPCC report on the alleged effects climate change will have on food production. The New York Times  then splashed the news on its front page Saturday. It’s another tale of warming woe:

“With or without adaptation,” the report warns, “climate change will reduce median yields by 0 to 2% per decade for the rest of the century, as compared to a baseline without climate change. These projected impacts will occur in the context of rising crop demand, projected to increase by 14% per decade until 2050.”

If this has a familiar ring, it’s because it harks back to the neo-Malthusian forecasts of the 1960s and ’70s, when we were supposed to believe that population growth would outstrip food production. This gave us such titles as “Famine 1975!”, a 1967 best seller by the brothers William and Paul Paddock, along with Paul Ehrlich’s vastly influential “The Population Bomb,” a book that began with the words, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

In case you’re wondering what happened with that battle to feed humanity, the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization has some useful figures on its website. In 1968, the year Mr. Ehrlich’s book first appeared, Asia produced 46,321,114 tons of maize and 439,579,934 of cereals. By 2011, the respective figures had risen to 270,316,205, up 484%, and 1,289,633,254, up 193%.

It’s the same story nearly everywhere else one looks. In Africa, maize production was up 247% between 1968 and 2011, while production of so-called primary vegetables has risen 319%; in South America, it’s 308% and 199%. Meanwhile, the world’s population rose to just under seven billion from about 3.7 billion, an increase of about 90%. It is predicted to rise by another 33% by 2050.

But what about the supposedly warming climate? According to the EPA, “average temperatures have risen more quickly since the late 1970s,” with the contiguous 48 states warming “faster than the global rate.” Yet U.S. food production over the same time has also risen by robust percentages even as the number of acres under cultivation has been steadily falling for decades.

In other words, even if you believe the temperature records, a warming climate seems to correlate positively with greater food production. This has mainly to do with better farming practices and the widespread introduction of genetically modified (GMO) crops, and perhaps also the stimulative effects that carbon dioxide has on photosynthesis (though this is debated). Warming also could mean that northern latitudes now not suited for farming might become so in the future.

But whatever the reason, the world isn’t likely to be getting any hungrier. Quite the opposite: Purely natural (as opposed to man-made) famines are becoming unknown. As the Irish economist Cormac Ó Gráda noted in a 2010 paper, “in global terms, the margin over subsistence is now much wider than it was a generation ago. This also holds for former famine zones such as India and Bangladesh, whereas China, once the ‘land of famine,’ nowadays faces a growing problem of childhood obesity.” Only in Africa is food scarcity still an issue, but even there recent food crises in Malawi and Niger did not result in major loss of life.

What does hurt people is bad public policy. Exhibit A is the U.S. ethanol mandate—justified in part as a response to global warming—which diverted the corn crop to fuel production and sent global food prices soaring in 2008. Exhibit B is the cult of organic farming and knee-jerk opposition to GMOs, which risk depriving farmers in poor countries of high-yield, nutrient-rich crops. Exhibit C was the effort to ban DDT without adequate substitutes to stop the spread of malaria, which kills nearly 900,000 people, mostly children, in sub-Saharan Africa alone with each passing year. The list goes on and on.

Environmentalists tend to have conveniently short memories, especially when it comes to their own mistakes. They would do better to learn from history. Just take the quote about the warming climate with which this column began. It’s from “Notes on the State of Virginia” by Thomas Jefferson, published in 1785.

Fortunately, the bullsh*t’s flowing so deep even the more innocent among us sense something stinks:

On the Lighter Side…

Finally, yet another sordid story ripped from the pages of the Crime Blotter involving yet another innocent young Black victim of White oppression and Tea Party-inspired racism who could pass for The Great Divider’s son:

FL Police: 16-Year-Old Black Man Murdered 22-Year-Old White Man Because He Had a Bad Day

On Thursday, Clearwater Police arrested 16-year-old Mychal King for the alleged murder of Jason Taylor Paul. According to police, King admitted to killing Paul because he had a hard day and “just wanted to kill the first person he saw.” 

Paul was riding his bike home late when he was stabbed to death in January. He was 22-years old, working two jobs and saving to go to school to become a veterinary technician.

No word on whether The Obamao will interrupt his “Lying in Support of My Earlier Lies” tour to claim kinship with King.

Magoo