The fix may not be in on the shutdown, but it’s starting to take shape. Fear of a bad earnings climate has business leaders breaking with Teaparty Republicans and lining up behind moderate GOP members and the democratic President. The WH is only too happy to capitalize: [Read more…]
Over the course of this busy day its become clear the Republican government shutdown over Obamacare is profoundly unpopular, plus they’re getting blamed for it, hard. The timing couldn’t have been worse, by the end of this day millions of people will have learned the dreaded Obamacare is simply a website with a bunch of boring healthcare insurance policies. On a hilarious side note, Teaparty Jeremiad’s have lowered their Obamacare threat level from “Worst Nazi death law ever that will destroy the country and end freedom” to “there are … err.. dangerous intermittent site glitches”.
Even time is against them now; the longer this draws out the more likely a debt deal will have to be included. So the House pulled another lame stalling tactic: [Read more…]
Beth was born premature. “I could go on, and on but I will leave you with this; because of the Healthcare Reform Act, our daughter is excelling”
Almost like a modern Lourdes, the sick and desperate are finding salvation and speaking up about it today. But there’s no miracle involved, this virtual march for life is driven by medical science, delivered via the Internet, and made possible by Obamacare. Science and effective public policy can go a long, long ways together.
Below are a few of those stories. They speak for themselves, but it’s just stunning, downright evil I would argue, when a political party in America would feel such hatred for this down into their rotten core, that they happily shutdown the nation as a sort of collective punishment to We the People for electing someone they don’t like. [Read more…]
Yosemite Valley is quiet, NOAA is down, NASA is furloughed and it reaches all the way to Mars, where Curiosity has been put in indefinite sleep mode, and WW II vets have had to bust down the barriers to enter a memorial, all thanks to the Republican shutdown. But the healthcare sites are open for business and BOOMING. We knew it would be big, but I’m told it’s huge. Here’s a few numbers I’ve seen bouncing around. The New York HIX, called the NYStateofHealth, has logged well over two million hits in the first few hours. Similar numbers are expected for large states like California which just opened their HIX, Covered California, a few mins ago.
Word is the main site, Healthcare.gov, has now recorded more than one million unique IP hits and that was an hour ago when it was lagging and serving up a DOS splash screen. To put that in perspective, it’s more people on that one site than have ever been on Medicare.gov all at once since the site opened.
This is obviously a giant failure of the free market …
They’ve been warned by those who came before them, but fervent belief in a miracle outweighed common sense as the Teaparty managed to talk itself into thinking a shutdown over Obamacare would have wide support and punish the WH. Why wouldn’t they believe that? They believe Obama is responsible for everything bad and a lot of other “bad” stuff they just made up, and they think everyone agrees with them. The latest poll shows that that belief is slated for painful destruction in the reality-based wood chipper: [Read more…]
The US is shut down today for the first time in almost 20 years. And we’re shutdown today for the same reason we were shutdown back then: the struggle for power between We the People and a few super rich greed-crazed pigs. Progressives represent the first caucus, conservatives stand in, like always, for the pigs. It’s a natural fit, conservatives fan a deep-seated hatred of government, when they’re not in the WH and/or running it into the ground.
Like it or not, Obamacare is up and running!
I’m not sure what those conservatives were thinking, but judging by some of my conservative friends, they’ve been led to believe we would actually toss away Healthcare in trade for a six-week extension in government discretionary spending. It’s strange, but that’s the con that’s been run on the Teaparty grassroots. Conservatives in the House are now scrambling to figure out how they can get the nation running again without it being too obvious they were lying and fleecing their base the whole time: [Read more…]
Let the zombie apocalypse begin: October 1, 2014, and the creature is stirring to life! I was able to go to Healthcare-dot-gov, and even though the site is not technically at full function until 8 AM EDT and has been getting hammered since midnight, I was able to create screen names and passwords. I was even able to sign in briefly and begin the enrollment process on one state’s exchange. I set up several emails to check various domains, AOL, Yahoo, and Gmail. Sadly, no zombie government agents showed up at my front door, I have yet to receive a summons to serve on a liberal death panel and decide the fate of comatose grandma. No doubt it’s lost in the mail, that stupid gubmit can’t do anything right! But here’s some prelim info and results below. [Read more…]
Commensurate with the season, there are tricks and sometimes treats in obscure DC politics. As of a few minutes ago the US is technically shutdown, exactly like the Teaparty wing of the GOP intended and promised. But the latest political move in that saga by John Beohner is so strange it makes one worry the Speaker of the people’s House is suffering from something more serious than an embedded, intractable faction. And I don’t mean that in the usual funny way at the Speaker’s expense, it’s so irrational its almost cause for worry as far as Boehner’s state of mental health. It’s a little hard to explain why this so insider sad/funny if you don’t follow arcane procedures. The gist of it is he has requested the CR go to a conference. That has some people scratching their heads and that’s saying it nicely.
A crappy analogy might be a football coach being being interviewed on live TV and suddenly blurting out he demands the NFL draft commence in the third quarter of the ongoing football game. The announcers, officials, and fans on both sides would be a little confused and, probably, a little horrified. They would sure feel, shall we say, totally uncomfortable? As in imagine you were taking your family and your new date out to eat for the first time together, and that person happened to get blacked-out drunk and then publicly crap and piss their pants in the middle of dinner?
It’s just so strange, no one knows how to respond outside of giggling uncomfortably at Boehner. It took about five minutes for the main laughing jags and after-spasms to back off before I could calm down and write this [Read more…]