Ghostly Galleon

Lhota’s Years Working for the Dolans (New York Times headline, 10/29/2013)

Next up from the Times: de Blasio's Years Working for the Sandinistas

(Just kidding!)


Today's Funny Brought to You by Healthcare.gov 
However, insurers said they saw the problems as more significant, affecting 25 percent to 30 percent of enrollments. In some cases, they said, the government lists a dependent as the head of a household, with the result that a 10-year-old child is shown as having three or four dependents and is identified as the policyholder for a family. (NYT, 10/29/2013)

Which reminds us again that Saturday Night Live - that bastion of coastal Liberalism - is having a field day with Obamacare. 

Meanwhile over on MSNBC yesterday they were focused on ..... Dick Cheney. Yes, Dick Cheney. Some Liberal writer has written a book about Cheney and MSNBC convened a panel of Liberals to discuss. The majority of the time was spent snickering about the former Vice-President, a frail old man with severe health problems. They even managed to say "Darth Vader." This is the level of professionalism of MSNBC. 


Take Aways
Take away 620 jobs with an average salary of $100,000 at a company that pays $1.15 million a year in local taxes and it’s going to hurt.

Windham County needs help weathering that as the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant shuts down by the end of next year, several local leaders said Monday at a meeting with two legislative committees. (Burlington Free Press, 10/28/2013)

Vermont Progressives, politicians and the media, have just woken up to the economic realities of closing Vermont Yankee. 

OK geniuses, what's the plan?


Contrarians
House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer conceded to reporters today that Democrats knew people would not be able to keep their current health care plans under Obamacare and expressed qualified contrition for President Obama’s repeated vows to the contrary.

“We knew that there would be some policies that would not qualify and therefore people would be required to get more extensive coverage,” Hoyer said in response to a question from National Review.

Asked by another reporter how repeated statements by Obama to the contrary weren’t “misleading,” Hoyer said “I don’t think the message was wrong. I think the message was accurate. It was not precise enough…[it] should have been caveated with – ‘assuming you have a policy that in fact does do what the bill is designed to do.’” (Nationalreview.com, 10/29/2013)

Everybody satisfied with that explanation?

Anybody satisfied with that explanation?


Highlights from the Suddenly Engaged Liberal Media
President Obama repeatedly assured Americans that after the Affordable Care Act became law, people who liked their health insurance would be able to keep it. But millions of Americans are getting or are about to get cancellation letters for their health insurance under Obamacare, say experts, and the Obama administration has known that for at least three years. (NBCnews.com, 10/29/2013)

...the Republicans understated the number of issues on which the president has claimed to be in the dark. A compilation by the Republican National Committee titled “The Bystander President” cited the NSA spying on Merkel, the Obamacare rollout and an investigation of the IRS’s targeting of political groups (the White House counsel knew of the inquiry but said she didn’t inform Obama). The RNC also mentioned the failure of clean-energy company Solyndra, which had received government funding (Carney had said Obama read about it in “news accounts”), and the attempts to go after reporters’ phone and e-mail records (which the president also found out about from reading the news, Carney said).

The RNC didn’t mention that Obama had allegedly known nothing about an FBI investigation of an affair involving David Petraeus that led him to resign as CIA director. Neither did it mention two other claims that conservatives often question: Obama’s ignorance of a guns-on-the-border sting operation called “Fast and Furious” that went awry, and his unawareness of requests for additional diplomatic security in Libya before a U.S. outpost in Benghazi was attacked. (Dana Milbank, Washington Post, 10/28/2013)

Something went wrong. People could not sign up. Why? Not sure. Who’s at fault? Apparently no one. An act of God. Something that could never have been foreseen. Another president might have had someone in the White House calling every day — no, twice a day — to make sure the program was going to work. But no, it was a shock to everyone, and when the White House rolled out its gigantic cake — maestro, some music please — no one jumped out.

Pathetic. (Richard Cohen, Washington Post, 10/28/2013)

Occasionally journalism happens.