Monthly Archives: November 2013

Rule By Law

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This time using the excuse of AGW to drive the fiat governance.

President Barack Obama has issued another of his diktats Executive Orders, this time placing the Executive Branch squarely in charge of “responses” to “climate change” and wholly cutting the people’s representatives, our Congress, out of the discussion.  Never mind that human impact on climate change has yet to be demonstrated—or even hinted at very strongly.  His EO forms a task force to advise the Federal government of how to respond to climate change impacts.

Of course, it’s also an Obama-esque bipartisan group:

The task force includes governors of seven states—all Democrats—and the Republican governor of Guam, a US territory.  Fourteen mayors and two other local leaders also will serve on the task force.

All but three of those appointed are Democrats.

Obama claimed, in his accompanying White House statement,

…that even as the United States acts to curb carbon pollution, officials also need to improve how states and communities respond to extreme weather events like last year’s Superstorm Sandy.  Building codes must be updated to address climate impacts and infrastructure needs to be made more resilient.

This is just more costs inflicted by Feds on states and consumers—ostensibly to guard against climate “change,” but more to increase Federal power and intrusion into our business and private lives.

There’s more:

A possible mandate to bring sweeping new changes to land use and resource policies.

Just like the EPA’s attempts to regulate rain water runoff as a pollutant and to regulate water puddles in people’s backyards.

And

More control and refocus of climate change data….

Which will include a drive to control the release of those data and how they’re being used by the Federal government—just like this administration is doing with Fast and Furious, Benghazi, IRS targeting, Obamacare software, etc.

So I ask: who will guard us from government’s rule by law at the expense of rule of law?  And a follow up: who will protect us from the mendacity of false climate panic-mongering?

Losing Insurance vs Gaining Insurance

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CBS News has been busily gathering hard numbers on this—at least on the losing side, since President Barack Obama and his HHS Secretary are too terrified to release any gaining numbers.

CBS’ Jan Crawford said that CBS News has checked with actual insurance companies; she’s found that in four states alone, the numbers are huge—in just the first few weeks of the ObamaMart rollout:

California: 279,000 had their insurance policies cancelled out from under them

Michigan: 140,000

Florida: 300,000

New Jersey: 800,000

Adding in the cats and dogs, and 2 million Americans have had their insurance policies cancelled, and the number is rising[Period]

This compares, again with data gleaned from insurance companies, and unrefuted by the Obama administration, with 6 folks who signed up on the first day and some 250—total—who’d signed up through the third day after ObamaMart’s rollout.

CBS also takes care to note that this is driven by the Obamacare law, not by Evil Insurance:

Obamacare forces them to drop many of their plans that don’t meet the law’s 10 minimum standards, including maternity care, emergency visits, mental health treatment, and even pediatric dental care.

Because a man needs maternity care, and an empty-nest couple needs that pediatric dental care.

Also,

That means consumers have to sign on to new plans even if they don’t want or need the more generous coverage.  Industry experts say about half the people getting the letters will pay more—and half will pay less, thanks to taxpayer subsidies.

The subsidies also mean that those who are paying more are paying even more more in order to pay those subsidies.  Those subsidies, after all, are funded both by Obamacare taxes and by artificially inflated premiums against which those subsidies are balanced.  Yes, even those who get the subsidies “need” them because of those artificially inflated premiums.

Hmm….

What’s So Terrifying?

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In the face of CMS Administrator Marilyn Tavenner’s (she of the Federal government (!) organization charged with the task of integrating the various software packages that go into Obamacare’s disastrously failed HealthCare.gov) refusal to provide, under oath, actual enrollment numbers to the House Ways and Means Committee last Friday, coupled with HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ similar refusal, Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R, MI) now is threatening to subpoena the data, and to require those data to be delivered not just in a one time good deal response, but daily, as of 1700 that day.

These folks refuse all releases short of that subpoena, instead promising to release the first numbers in mid-November.  So far, to their credit, they’ve not said “Period,” but we can look forward to their stonewalling the subpoena.

Their refusal and their 6-week delay, at the least, drive the question: of what are they so afraid that they can’t bring themselves to release the data they have?  And they certainly have the data now: insurance companies have the data; they’re the ones having to service the signed-up-for policies.  Sebelius and Tavenner certainly have the data now: they’re in the HealthCare.gov databases used for collating and transmitting to the servicing insurance companies the sign-up actions.  Hackers have access to these data, why can’t a Congressional committee exercising its oversight duty?  Why can’t we Americans on whom this project has been foisted over our loud, long objections?

It’s not just the Ways and Means Committee that’s being stonewalled, either.  Also last week, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R, CA) was forced to subpoena HHS in order to get documentation “related to technical problems with HealthCare.gov, the testing that went into the website, and the number of people who have enrolled and attempted to enroll” through HealthCare.gov because Sebelius is hiding those data, also.  Which drives a similar question: of what is the administration afraid here, that they’re so resistant to releasing these data?

What are these folks covering up?

An interesting aside:

A new Kaiser Family Foundation poll that says the number of people who say they understand how the law affects their own family is up 8 points to 55%.  However, the per centage of people who have a generally unfavorable opinion of the law remained virtually unchanged at 44%, indicating that people don’t seem to like the law any better, even as they learn more about it.

This is weak porridge on which to draw firm conclusions, but it’s certainly indicative of where further inquiry would yield value.

What the President Didn’t Know

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As Fox News puts it, “a string of embarrassing episodes for the Obama administration that the president didn’t seem to know about until the public did” is making a number of folks wonder about the quality, or the mendacity, of the staff with whom President Barack Obama has surrounded himself.

I have a different question.  Call me cynical, but on what basis do we conclude that Obama actually didn’t know in advance about IRS abuses of conservative groups, NSA overreaches, the likelihood of disaster for his Obamacare rollout, the risk to and the threat against his State Department’s Benghazi consulate, his DoJ’s search-and-seizure of press phone records, …?

Why do we believe that Obama didn’t know full well about these problems?  Besides his own claim that all he does is read the newspapers, I mean?

China’s Nuclear Extortion

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The People’s Republic of China are publicizing both their capability of nuclear attack against us and the fact that their goal in such an attack is not so much to win a war as it is simply to visit as much destruction on us and to kill as many of us as they can—to eliminate us not merely as a nation, but as a society.

The PRC’s Global Times, for instance, talked freely about the destruction a Chinese nuclear attack, primarily from its submarine nuclear missile force, could inflict on the us.  Nominally, the paper was writing for its domestic readers, but it’s clear the government also was addressing our own leadership.

The GT article contained, among other things, a description of the destruction the PLA could inflict on Seattle, Los Angeles, and other western American cities, and of the radioactive fallout that would spread as far as Chicago.  It also contained this image of the reach of the destruction from their attack:

The shaded areas represent fallout spread 3, 7, and 30 days after the Chinese nuclear attack against our west coast.

The GT then got quite specific about PRC intentions:

Because the Midwest states of the US are sparsely populated, in order to increase the lethality, [our] nuclear attacks should mainly target the key cities on the West Coast of the United States, such as Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego.

The 12 JL-2 nuclear warheads carried by one single Type 094 SSBN can kill and wound 5 million to 12 million Americans.

If we launch our DF 31A ICBMs over the North Pole, we can easily destroy a whole list of metropolises on the East Coast and the New England region of the US, including Annapolis, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Portland, Baltimore, and Norfolk, whose population accounts for about one-eighth of America’s total residents[.]

And

Our JL-2 SLBMs have become the fourth type of Chinese nuclear missiles that threaten the continental United States, after our DF-31A, DF-5A and DF-5B ICBMs[.]

China Central Television; the People’s Daily; the PLA Daily (the print outlet for the PRC’s military establishment, the People’s Liberation Army; the China Youth Daily, the Guangmin Daily all ran much the same stories in a coordinated delivery of the PRC’s message.

The timing of this is curious.  The PRC is moving actively to seize all of the South and East China seas, to the direct detriment of our allies, friends, and trading partners, and so to our own detriment.  It comes, also, after our “pivot” to Asia and the Pacific.  And it comes against the backdrop President Barack Obama’s demonstrated hesitancy vis-à-vis our other enemies.  Why so late after Obama’s reluctance to act on the world stage?  Probably because the Chinese have had trouble believing an American President could be so timid.

The result of our lack of response to this will not be pretty.

 

h/t Ricochet (Maybe behind a paywall.  This is a site well worth the subscription fee.)