Category Archives: Throw Da Bums Out

Worser

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“The way this thing is going, it is a good thing we have a word like worser,” Bob Schieffer said yesterday morning on Face the Nation.

And the hits just keep on coming.

Lies.

“If the website doesn’t work, nothing else matters,” Barack Obama, 2010.

The Washington Post reports that in 2010 a pointed memo warned Mr. Obama’s top economic aides that no one in the administration was “up to the task” of constructing the insurance exchange and all the other intricacies of translating the 2,000-page Unaffordable Care Act into practice. The Washington Post. Not the Washington Times. Not the WashingtonExaminer.com. The Washington Post.

Didn’t matter.

“They were running the biggest start-up in the world, and they didn’t have anyone who had run a start-up, or even run a business,” said Harvard’s David Cutler, a health adviser to Mr. Obama’s 2008 campaign.

And the hits just keep on coming.

Damned lies.

“If you like your plan, you can keep your plan,” Barack Obama, 23 times from 2008 through 2010, and again in 2011. And again in 2012.

Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA) may have rolled out the official Doublespeak: “As I understand it, you can keep it up to the time the bill was enacted, then after that it’s a different story. I think that part of it, if true, was never made clear.” Your liberal friends will be quoting this now.

And the hits just keep on coming.

Statistics.

It’s not even the biggest startup. Amazon.com attracts about 65 million customers every month. Healthcare.gov must handle the 15 million people who buy their health insurance on the individual market. About 2.7 million of them tried in the first few days, or about half what Amazon handles each and every day during the Christmas season.

I use amazon.com and find it easy and intuitive. And the widgets I buy arrive in a truck 5 to 8 days later. I’ve tried to use healthcare.gov several times. It ain’t easy or intuitive and I still don’t have any idea of what policy I’ll have 58 days from now when my current policy evaporates.

And the hits just keep on coming.

I'm from the Government

Whether the website works isn’t the problem. The website is symptomatic of the problem.

“They didn’t have anyone who had run a start-up, or even run a business.”

And that, in a nutshell, is the problem. My liberal friends devoutly believe that you don’t actually need to know anything to run a business. Or, apparently, to run a government.

“It’s very hard to think of a situation where the people best at getting legislation passed are best at implementing it. They are a different set of skills,” Dr. Cutler said.

That’s our choice. Do we trust a government that trains for disaster, then rolls out FEMA; that has the greatest web gurus in the world, then gets caught spying on Angela Merkel; that has 3-1/2 years to build a Blue Cross website, then rolls out Ms. Feinstein’s sorry excuses? Do we trust that government to stitch our wounds and mend our broken bones?

My liberal friends are devout. And wrong.

And the hits just keep on coming.

 

We Don’t Need No Steenking Details — Part II

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5 years to develop Exchange website and 2 years of testing?

Say what?

“They had the architecture. They had the pieces,” software engineering manager Liz Arden said. “With any kind of competent team, this is a one-year project with the testing integrated in the development.”

“The White House said that it would fix the insurance marketplace by Nov. 30, raising the question of how people whose current policies do not comply with the law will get new coverage in time,” the Wall Street Journal reported.

Uh huh.

That’s the same White House that said, “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan.” That’s the same White House that, with rose [garden] colored glasses just days before HealthCare.gov went live, pitched how much we would love it,

The bad news? The Administration will eventually bow to pressure to extend the deadline leaving all of us *with* private insurance out in the cold. See, the policy I have (and the policy you have) is no longer available December 31.

I am one of the millions with individual or small group policies who lose our insurance on December 31. That would be the insurance policy Mr. Obama promised we could keep.

What am I supposed to do when the law says I have to buy a policy and there is no policy to buy because the federal government (we’re here to help) pulled a FEMA on us.

Oh.

FEMA.

Now I understand.

Never mind.

I'm from the Government
 

Keeping Our Promises

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“Dear Valued Customer:

“Your health care coverage with Blue Cross/Blue Shield ends December 31, 2013. Please make other arrangements.”

The new Blue Cross BlueOptions Everyday Health 1431 plan has about twice the deductible, out of pocket max, and copays as the plan I have now. My current Blue Cross plan costs $431/month. ACA forced Blue Cross to drop that plan in favor of one that will cost at least $1,039.87/month.

Yep. Keeping our promises to the American people.

Or not.

Update: Brian Williams had this to say about that on NBC Nightly News.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Drive, He Said (Part II)

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North Roosevelt Boulevard in Key Weird got a new traffic pattern last week, four days earlier than planned.

North Roosevelt BoulevardThe $41.5 million reconstruction of the 2.9 mile city street is a little more than halfway complete after 15 months of work and business owners continue to lose customers — meaning money. They’ve been pushing the Florida Department of Transportation to end to the work early. Based on FLDOT reports, the project is 66.3% complete after 544 days of construction that started on April 23 and is expected to culminate in September.

2014.

When 2014 rolls around, the 2.9-mile street will have a magnificent new seawall with a 20-foot-wide, landscaped promenade, alongside four lanes of traffic plus a center turn lane, and a six-foot sidewalk.

I’ve (tried to) drive North Roosevelt during this shutdown. A “difficult traffic mess” is an understatement. Reopening parts of the unfinished street should help businesses attract the customers who have avoided them for the last two years. And Fantasy Fest started Saturday.

The plans look good but I have a fundamental distrust of Florida’s road constructors.

This North Roosevelt tie up follows the almost-seven-year boondoggle on the 18-mile stretch, three years to lay sewers and repave Overseas Highway through Marathon, and more. The 18-mile stretch, that important artery that connects the Keys with the United States, was redesigned for safety. Particularly during hurricane evacuations. That’s probably why it gets closed pretty much every time there’s a fender bender. And Route 1 through Marathon is yet another choke point, right in the middle of the Keys. At least when they finished that project, there were still two lanes going each direction. And no traffic circles.

Y’all think we should throw the bums out of Washington. All of them. I agree but I reckon it’d be better to start with the DOT and work our way up.

 

Half Staffed

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The shutdown has hit backcountry guides in the Florida Keys. The National Park Service told charter guides that they cannot take clients fishing in Florida Bay until the Feds return to work. That puts the prime fishing between the southern tip of the mainland to the Keys — more than 1,100 square miles — off limits until further notice.

US Flag -- Mayday at Half StaffThe shutdown has hit veterans who demanded access to the World War II Memorial following the government shutdown Tuesday. The site is one of several hosting protests. Park rangers erected barricades and police tape to block veterans and other visitors. Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R-TX) confronted a ranger for keeping visitors out. “The Park Service should be ashamed of themselves.” (Say what? The park rangers didn’t shut down the government. Mr. Neugebauer and his 534 Congress Critters did.)

The shutdown has hit Vermont’s Billings Farm and Museum of Woodstock in the wallet, too. The Billings Farm and Museum is the gateway to Vermont’s rural heritage and a working dairy farm but it is also right across the road from the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park.

“It’s a national disgrace,” a visitor from London said. “You don’t get government shutdowns in Germany, in China, or other civilized places. It’s a disgrace. What does [your] government normally do that makes it safe to walk” around there?

The shutdown has not hit the U.S. Congress who appear to be on vacation. Again.

Even Mark Halperin, the senior political analyst at Time Magazine, acknowledged that the Demorats’ strategy depends not on the facts but on the mainstream media blaming Repuglicans for the shutdown.

Determined to jettison the Constitution, this Administration and this Congress don’t know how prescient the Founding Fathers were. After all, if the framers in that hot, sticky, Philadelphia hall had hewed a little more closely to our British cousins, we would have already had the No Confidence vote and recall election.