Obama

You Can’t Keep Your Plan

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We just re-upped our health insurance for the employees of our small company. The price increase was breathtakingly astounding. The increase will be coming right out of the profit sharing. There isn’t really anything we can do.

Our policy is so good that we are forced to pay a one thousand dollar a month tax on it. Thanks.

It took Blue Cross a very long time to get us a quote because of the insane maze of new regulations. Due to this and time constraints, we basically had no choice besides sign up and take the increase, or cut everyone loose to the disastrous healthcare.gov site and give them a stipend of some sort – but we actually like our employees so no dice on that.

Besides, we have employees in two states – Illinois and Wisconsin. Wisconsin deferred to the federal plan, Illinois did a mixture. I am sure that will go very well. So that would create another issue we would need to address – how to stipend who so our employees are treated fairly.

All of our employees received a card from Blue Cross saying that their current plan will expire. And this is true. The new plan is similar, but not exact.

We have absolutely no idea what will happen next year, since our Blue Cross person said that the plan that we just signed up on will not be available when that rolls around.

Our employees are furious at the Obama administration for this debacle. Here’s hoping this will change some votes.

How to be an Executive Who Learns/Does Not Learn

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Here’s David Cote, CEO of Honeywell Inc:

Your job as a leader is to be right at the end of the meeting, not at the beginning of the meeting.

And here’s Barack Obama, President of the United States:

I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.

Is it likely that a person with the latter worldview will come out of a meeting knowing/understanding more than he did when he went into it?

Conservatives invented the mandate; say the Democrats.

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The latest meme I’ve noticed on the Obamacare implosion is that the Republicans are to blame. After all, it’s Romneycare, or it’s the idea of the Heritage Foundation.

In fact, the mandate was promoted by Hillary in 2008 and opposed by Obama. Of course, he doesn’t know much about what is going on so we can understand. In fact, the entire website fiasco, slipped by him, unnoticed.

President Barack Obama didn’t know of problems with the Affordable Care Act’s website — despite insurance companies’ complaints and the site’s crashing during a test run — until after its now well-documented abysmal launch, the nation’s health chief told CNN on Tuesday.

Of course he may just rewrite the code himself. After all, he is so talented that he is bored.

David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, quotes White House senior adviser and longtime Obama friend Valerie Jarrett: “I think Barack knew that he had God-given talents that were extraordinary. He knows exactly how smart he is. … He knows how perceptive he is. He knows what a good reader of people he is. And he knows that he has the ability — the extraordinary, uncanny ability — to take a thousand different perspectives, digest them and make sense out of them, and I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually. … So what I sensed in him was not just a restless spirit but somebody with such extraordinary talents that had to be really taxed in order for him to be happy. … He’s been bored to death his whole life. He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do.”

Oh well, at least we know if we really get in trouble, we have someone who can bail us out. I don’t doubt the comment about him never being challenged intellectually.

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Emmanuel Tea Party Goldstein

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You know, the last eight years or so have educated me – at least socially and politically as much as the eight years that I spent in high school, college and the first year in the military ever did. Who says you stop intellectually developing after your mid-forties? I suppose the most-eye-opening development is that I have now seen for real and in real-time that which I had only read about in history books; mainly the development, perpetuation, care and feeding of “The Big Lie.” As defined by the erratic but invaluable Wikipedia, that is “a lie so “colossal” that no one would believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”

But the ‘big lie’ has worked, over and over again and most especially and effectively when it is chorused from every corner and by every authority. The latest example and the one which I find most personally outrageous is this one; (found through Legal Insurrection at the National Review); one Alan Grayson, a Democrat member of the House of Representatives has sent out an email to his supporters casually equating the Tea Party with the KKK. As a southern Democrat, Rep. Grayson is, of course, an expert on the KKK, seeing that they served as the shock troops of Southern Democrats. Other leading Democrat Party figures have passed remarks just as disparaging of the Tea Party; I suspect that they are actually mistaking the straw-man Tea Party construction of their own mind, rather than the earnest, hardworking and mostly middle-class fans of fiscally-responsible, strict Constitutionalist and free-market policies which made up most of the Tea Party members I am acquainted with. How such a body of people can be made out to be the sinister Goldsteins and calumniated with such vicious enthusiasm, solo and chorus is almost beyond belief but they are, and it is only getting worse.

A good portion of the citizens of the United States are being ‘othered’ by those who disagree with them politically and philosophically and by people you would have thought would know better. The establishment media and pop-culture organs are aiding and abetting this, not realizing that it is only a short step from ‘othering’ to declaring open season literally. The next step is already being contemplated, although it is hard to tell how seriously the petition to arrest and try the leaders of the Republican Party for sedition, merely for having had the temerity to oppose the current administration. There is something bad in the water, when being in political opposition is considered ground for criminal charges. The comments appended to this story, and this one are dispiriting to read, for too many commenters voice enthusiastic agreement and approval. To be fair, a good few commenters warned against this criminalization of political dissent since the sauce for the Tea Party goose might just as easily be served up with the progressive gander. Taken all together, this does not augur well and it certainly heats up the cold civil war a couple of more degrees.

Dick Bove: DC Wants the Dow to Fall 1000 Points

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Watching CNBC. Bove says that because the stock market isn’t in a major sell-off the pols can’t get away with the kind of bad deal (my interpretation) that they want. He warns investors: “The only good strategy at the moment is to get out of the way. The politicians will get the panic they seek.”

CNBC spins this as: lawmakers need a reason to act to avoid gridlock. What Bove is actually saying is that there is a conflict of interest between the pols, particularly the Democrats, who want to bust the sequester and force the full implementation of Obamacare as scheduled, and American taxpayers. This is why Obama says, “this time I think Wall Street should be concerned”. Nice stock market you’ve got here, pity if something were to happen to it.

It appears that Obama is trying to do with the markets the same thing that he did with the national parks: make the government shutdown costly for ordinary Americans, whom he hopes will then find new cause to support him. The media will keep trying to reframe this crass partisan shakedown as Obama working to prevent disaster, but what he’s really doing is transparent to anyone who pays attention.