11-16-13 Hodgepodge

What Does He Mean by "Execute", Anyway?

Political blogger Ed Rogers makes short work of a proposed "fix" for those ObamaCare victims who discovered, upon "seeing what's inside", that they couldn't keep their plans:

A cursory discussion with almost anyone who knows anything about the insurance business would have alerted the president to the fact that his proposal is unworkable. The initial take from experts on both the right and the left is that the president did not fix anything yesterday. Insurance industry experts agree that the very idea that canceled health policies can be renewed or extended for one year is laughable -- especially with the cumbersome rules that would have to accompany any such temporary reinstatements or extensions. One must assume the White House consulted experts before President Obama announced his plan. So we can rule out delusion. Surely this was an informed decision … right? [link in original]

Rogers even goes on to speculate that ObamaCare could be repealed on a bipartisan vote should Democrats conclude that "blaming Republicans for depriving 48+ million Americans of health care is better than having 114+ million American households furious at your meddling with their health insurance" [links in original]. That would be a welcome windfall, so long as "and replace" doesn't happen.

But here's something that really bothers me, whether Obama is delusional and incompetent or more calculating than he seems: Here he is, again, meddling with contracts between consenting adults (but switching sides out of expedience), as if he is above the law and, indeed, above reality. It is bad enough that this law promises to further entrench the entitlement state and the parasitic mindset that goes with it. But Obama's activities as Chief Executive -- the very man sworn to uphold the law -- have been a veritable showcase of how best to undermine the law and turn us into a nation of men, and not laws.

Weekend Reading

"The political equivalent of the arsenic-cyanide spectrum is the fascism-communism spectrum." -- Harry Binswanger , in "Statism: Whether Fascist or Communist, It's the Deadly Opposite of Capitalism" at Forbes

"... Christmas shopping in a busy store can be festive and fun, but why deliberately seek out the hysteria and traffic jams?" -- Michael Hurd, in "Black Friday: Mob Psychology?" at The Delaware Wave

"[I]f anything gets to me, it's when a client pays me good money for advice, and then doesn't take it - returning again and again with the same problem." -- Michael Hurd, in "The Psychological Equivalent of Prison" at The Delaware Coast Press

"Since almost anybody can be included in the 'stakeholder' classification , the true function of this fuzzy term is to nullify the concept of a stockholder, who becomes just another 'stakeholder,' with no distinctive rights" -- Peter Schwartz, in "Why Is the Tea Party 'Extremist,' but Democratic Support for Big Government 'Moderate'?" at Forbes

"It's easy to see the lives saved by products that exist. But it's almost impossible to know which lives would have been saved by innovations that never made it to market." -- Paul Hsieh, in "Will Tomorrow's Medical Innovations Be There When You Need Them?" at PJ Media

My Two Cents

I will keep the following sentence from the Peter Schwartz piece in mind the next time someone brings up the Tea Party or the government "shutdown":

When House Republicans last month were willing to shut down the government unless ObamaCare was defunded, they were called "extremists" and likened to terrorists; when Democrats were willing to shut down the government unless ObamaCare was funded, they were called "moderates."

Such was the media snow job about the so-called shutdown that I have to admit that it never occurred to me, as obvious as it now seems, to put what the Democrats did that way. i am grateful to Schwartz for laying this out, even if he might have felt like he was rehashing the obvious when he wrote it.

An Open Letter to My Toddler Regarding His Use of My iPhone

Lauren Appel lays down the law:

Other Mommies seem convinced that posting an epistle is an effective way to communicate with their small children, so I felt it was worth a shot. The more I think about it, though, the more I realize I'm probably better off attaching my words here as a PDF and emailing it to your father. You can pick up the message the next time you are using his phone.

I sometimes blog here about some of the special moments fatherhood has afforded me, which are really just the tip of the iceberg of a whole transformative and positive experience. So, too, is the rich, new vein of humor I have enjoyed over the past couple of years.

--CAV