Tag: tpm

Three things about this unexpected dose of #obamacare reality over at TPM.

In order:

  1. The TPM reader’s situation (he’s comparing a $450*/year Obamacare tax to paying for a $3,800/year high deductible plan, and deciding that the tax is preferable) indicates that it turns out that we’ve been teaching math in our schools after all.  Gotta tell you: there’s nothing like a paycheck to focus the mind on the wonders of arithmetic.
  2. Two years from now, that 1% tax will be 2.5%.  Which means it goes up from $450/year to $1,350/year.  That’s still close to one-third the price of a policy – and that’s assuming there that the rates won’t go through the roof between now and then, which is not a safe assumption to make. That’s why they call them death spirals.
  3. Note that the reader still hasn’t actually stopped to think about the consequences of #2 at all, at all.  I will be magnanimous on that point, though: he’s a TPM reader. We were lucky to get one of them to admit that the math was problematical.

Via

 

Moe Lane

[*Remember: $95/year or 1% above first $10K.  Also: I dunno why this footnote got deleted.]

#rsrh So. President Obama mucks up his scientific history in energy speech…

…while he’s slamming the Republican party for supposedly not knowing anything about history.

  • Verdict?  Dog bites man!

Then, Talking Points Memo – Talking Points Memo – corrects the President for falsely claiming both that Rutherford B Hayes was a Luddite; and that Columbus’ contemporaries were flat-earth yokels.  While I will freely admit that I wouldn’t have known one way or the other about Hayes, I was under the impression that any adequately educated person already knew that it was widely conceded in 15th Century intellectual circles that the world was not flat.  TPM even notes that there’s a certain irony there, considering that the President was attacking his opponents for being ignorant.

  • Verdict? Man bites dog!

…And then the TPM comments section starts whining, pouting, and shaking their fingers at the article writer who dared suggest that their man-god President was fallible.

  • Verdict? Dogs bite man!  …Those little yapping ones, that is: the kind that look amazingly aerodynamic if kicked just right.

Via Instapundit… and man but the Online Left’s cranky today, or what?  I mean, seriously, it’s not our fault that Obama’s not as well-educated as he thinks that he is.

Moe Lane

Would-be Dearborn Mosque attacker anti-Bush felon.

This story got very quickly overshadowed by world events, but last week police arrested a man allegedly planning to blow up a Dearborn, Michigan mosque with ‘high-end fireworks‘*.  Needless to say, the Usual Suspects lined up to try the entire “right-wing violent nut inspired by [INSERT NAME HERE]” gambit – because Obama’s Tucson Speech apparently only applies to other people, not Think Progress and/or Talking Points Memo** – only to just now discover that the alleged attacker is… well, you make the call.

  • The accused was arrested and convicted in Vermont in 2004 for threatening George W Bush (as well as bomb threats against a VA facility), made an insanity plea because of various mental disorders, was released in 2005 from a Massachusetts facility because he was “cured,” and apparently started showing signs of going around the bend again in the last few months.
  • The accused has also claimed to be a convert to Islam – which is not a sign of mental illness; but the public, ‘rambling’ claims seem to have predated his allegedly going around the bend in both events.
  • And there’s a substance abuse problem there: pot smoking (which got him thrown out of a VFW post, although the racial epithets probably helped there) and booze (yes, it’s odd for a convert to Islam to go drinking in bars).

Continue reading Would-be Dearborn Mosque attacker anti-Bush felon.