The President Is Losing His Plan | National Review Online

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/364038/president-losing-his-plan-yuval-levin

To address his very near-term political problem, the president has thrown the nation's health insurers under the bus, even though he desperately needs their cooperation and support to mitigate the immense problems that the implementation of Obamacare now confronts. The response of the insurers, in the form of a statement put out by their industry group Thursday afternoon, was harsher than anything they have had to say about Obamacare since its inception, and it seems pretty clear that their basic disposition toward the administration and the law will now be changing for the worse.

Government in bed with industry - a witch's brew.

Noonan on JFK: Well Said

Why, after all the historians’ revelations and the stories of the past 30 years—the women, the drug use, the Kennedy White House’s own farfetched efforts to do away with Fidel Castro, the fantastical nature of the Bay of Pigs, the failure of JFK to anticipate and answer the crude communist clichés of Kruschev at Vienna, etc., etc.—why do we continue to hold this special place for JFK? Because in the months and years after his death we fell in love with him as he was presented to us by those who knew and cared about him. Youth, beauty, charm, high intentions, wit, a certain fatalism and, deep down, a certain modesty. “Camelot.” But Camelot isn’t JFK. Camelot is the way we remember America before JFK died. Camelot is the America that existed, for one brief shining moment, before Lee Harvey Oswald began to shoot. a placid-seeming, even predictable place that we have not seen since.
http://blogs.wsj.com/peggynoonan/2013/11/16/why-we-still-talk-about-jfk/

Min Wage - Easier Sell for the Less Informed

Various state legislators and interest groups around the United States are pushing for increases in the minimum wage. In California, for example, even Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger now advocates raising the state minimum wage from its current $6.75 an hour to $7.75 by July 2007. But when the minimum wage law confronts the law of demand, the law of demand wins every time. And the real losers are the most marginal workers - the ones who will be out of a job.
http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba550

The federal minimum wage is currently $7.25 an hour, but some states and cities have minimum wages that are significantly higher. Furthermore, eight states raised their minimum wage, effective January 1, 2012.

Indeed: 

• Vermont raised its minimum wage from $8.15 an hour to $8.46 an hour.
• Oregon bumped its minimum wage from $8.50 an hour to $8.80.
• Washington state raised its minimum wage from $8.67 to $9.04 — the highest of any state.

Finally, San Francisco, which imposed a city-level minimum wage a few years ago, increased its minimum from $9.92 to $10.24.

Proponents of a minimum wage argue that a wage floor is necessary to lift people out of poverty, especially those earners who support families. However, the federal law sets a lower minimum for some classes of workers:  tipped employees must be paid a minimum of $2.13 an hour, and some farm workers are exempt.

Some people argue the minimum wage is not enough, and have proposed more generous “living” wages. A living wage aims to provide a minimum standard of living, accounting for the cost of housing and basic needs for an individual, or even a family of three or four. Some New York City officials are considering a bill requiring local businesses that receive government contracts to pay a “living” wage of at least $10.00 an hour, or $11.50 an hour if they don’t offer their employees health insurance. Los Angeles already requires companies that contract with the city or operate on city property to pay a living wage of $9.64 per hour with health benefits or $11.84 per hour without.

http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ib105

Pontificator in Chief

Without intending it, Kingsdale has, I think, identified a central source of Obamacare’s problems: The people who created the program had no idea how it would be put into effect. They just took it for granted that the law would be implemented and perform, more or less, as intended. This attitude blended carelessness, ignorance and arrogance, reflecting a broader problem in business and government.

There’s a class structure to huge public and private organizations. One class — usually the leaders of enterprises or departments — might be called the Pontificators. They enunciate broad, often-worthy goals and values. President Obama (indeed, almost any president) ranks as the Pontificator in Chief. In politics, elected officials and pundits (people like me) are lower down on the Pontificator scale. In business, these people cluster in the executive suites.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/robert-j-samuelson-obamacares-next-hurdles/2013/11/12/58ff8d94-4bbe-11e3-be6b-d3d28122e6d4_story.html

McArdle on the Obamacare Misery

The insurers are predictably furious. And it’s hard to blame them. One thing I haven’t seen anyone point out is that if insurers do go along with this, we’re talking about a massive cash transfer from the insurers to the customers in those grandfathered plans. Some of the left-wing commentators I’ve seen seem to be under the impression that health insurers make fabulous profits, and canceling plans was a venal move to further line their overflowing pockets with your hard-earned dollars. In fact, health insurance profits are quite modest(though relatively steady). Their business and rates are very heavily regulated, and never more so than post-Obamacare, when insurers with excess profits in the individual market have to contribute half their overage to a reinsurance fund. Those people suggested that insurers would decline to renew the policies so that they could keep all that extra cash.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-14/obamacare-is-whatever-obama-says-it-is.html

This part makes me sick - you knew the insurance companies were going to crony right up to government to make sure that they can still get theirs, and the crony/govt fiasco's are the worst:  "It’s a pretty bold move for Obama to hang the insurers out to dry like this, considering that he reportedly needs their technical help to get the exchanges working and some cooperation to keep rates low prior to next year’s midterm elections."
Can they afford to take the risk of rebellion?

Obama's AGW Crazy Train Running Wild

But as its name implies, the government’s accounting of the social cost of carbon focuses almost entirely on conjured “costs” while ignoring proven “benefits” of carbon dioxide emissions.

The administration has determined that each ton of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere today from human activities leads to a future cost to global society of about $40 (in today’s dollars).

This assigned $40 premium on carbon dioxide emissions proves to be a powerful sword that the administration has been wielding to slash the apparent costs of a flurry of proposed new rules and regulations aimed at reducing emissions.

Here’s how it works: any new proposed regulation viewed as reducing future carbon dioxide emissions gets a cost credit for each ton of reduced emissions equivalent to the value of the social cost of carbon. That credit is then used to offset the true costs.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/10/29/obamas_social_cost_of_carbon_is_at_odds_with_science_120499.html

This is why people hate anything to do with the idea of climate change.
1.  Start with a conjecture:  What if CO2 is a greenhouse gas that will un-naturally force changes in the climate?
2.  Conduct appropriate research to get the facts - everything from bristle cone trees to ice cores to sediment from unique bodies of water to CO2 concentrations, and do your best to model it.  So far, so good, this stuff not only can be done it should be done.
3.  Pretend that consensus has anything to do with the scientific method, announce that there is one within the "scientific community" that humans are causing "climate change".  (all aboard the scientific crazy train! Conductor Gore, would you kindly blow your horn)
4.  Make a bunch of federal regulations that make all of us poorer, and energy harder to make (so much for a supposed concern for the poor - but not even the poor can stop the Anthropogenic Climate Change Crazy Train!).

I used to laugh and refer to Algore and the Chicken Littles, but the power the Fed is wielding for this AGW vendetta is no longer funny.
Usually, it is hard to get the genie back into the bottle once out - and it'll be three more years before anyone will even try.  The way not to despair about this state of affairs is to ignore it.

What Could Go Wrong? We have four years to figure it out ….

"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," Cutler told the Post. "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."
http://www.nationaljournal.com/white-house/will-insularity-incompetence-and-lies-doom-obamacare-20131104