Month: October 2013

The Cognitively Dissonant Eleanor Norton / Darrell Issa / Vincent Gray press conference.

I have been doing this gig for over a decade now; and I was engrossed by this press conference. Short version: DC Delegate Norton joined with DC Mayor Gray and House Oversight Chair Issa to rip Senate Democrats a new one over their refusal to pass a special House bill that would release DC’s funds.

Continue reading The Cognitively Dissonant Eleanor Norton / Darrell Issa / Vincent Gray press conference.

Yes, Mike Ditka, you should have run for the Senate in Illinois in 2004.

Via Deadspin, but that’s the message: Mike Ditka knows that he should have run for Senate in 2004. He so totally knows. He’s kind of sorry about not doing that.

And even though it’s Deadspin, this is true:

I’m not saying someone should write a sequel to The Man in the High Castle set in an alternate universe where Mike Ditka became president, but I’m totally saying it.

Although why anybody would consider this a dystopia is… oh, right.  Deadspin.  Which is to say, Gawker.

Moe Lane

The administration NEEDS a delay on #Obamacare, but they can’t bear to face that.

Bob Krumm is right: the President should be begging us for a year’s delay of Obamacare.  He’s also right about this:

That the President can’t compromise in a way that gives him everything he wants, plus the extra time he needs, is not about business.  It’s strictly personal.

…although I should qualify this: under normal circumstances the President should be begging us for a year’s delay.  The problem for the President is that his entire baraka – no, that’s not a pun; it’s precisely the word that I needed and meant – is tied up in being without flaw or blemish. Losing to Republicans will not be seen as threatening to weaken Obama; it will weaken him, not least in the eyes of his most slavish worshipers.  And worshipers is also precisely the world that I needed, and meant. Continue reading The administration NEEDS a delay on #Obamacare, but they can’t bear to face that.

#Obamacare exchange design priorities: insurance is nice, but your SSN is ESSENTIAL.

This passage from the latest round of Dear God, but these Obamacare exchanges are horribly designed articles leaped out at me:

It appears that a major reason why the federal exchange has borne the brunt of the problems is that the website asks you to set up an account, inclusive of your Social Security number, before shopping for prices on the exchange. This is in sharp contrast to the site sponsored by eHealthInsurance.com, that allows anonymous users to look at plans and prices. Verifying these accounts has bogged down the login process.

Keep track of this particular problem, because I suspect that it will not be solved by imitating eHealthInsurance’s design architecture.  The government will instead do its level best to make the existing login process less onerous… because they want to be able to associate a Social Security number to every account that’s been set up for Obamacare.  And they certainly do not want anybody who isn’t an account holder to see the prices; anonymous users would take one look at the hikes and stay anonymous*.  But if you’re in the system, then they can target you.  And you may use that verb any way that you like, too.

Continue reading #Obamacare exchange design priorities: insurance is nice, but your SSN is ESSENTIAL.

To follow up on that post from yesterday: yes, I would speak to @BarackObama off the record.

IF that was the only way to get President Obama to sit down, shut up, and actually listen to criticism.  Which hopefully he got yesterday.

Which, by the way, is why I am much more accepting of conservative pundits meeting with him off the record than I am of liberal pundits doing so.  I expect the conservative ones to have their respect for the office inform their advice… and I expect the liberal ones to have their worship (and, in some cases, fear) of the man to inform their advice.  And as you might expect, I think that the former is more likely to be beneficial to the country than the latter.

Anyway, that’s my thinking on this.

Moe Lane

@BarackObama desperately reaches out to Beltway Righty journalists.

Oh, to be a fly in the wall for this one: “President Obama held an off-the-record meeting with five conservative journalists on Tuesday afternoon.” Charles Krauthammer, Paul Gigot, Robert Costa, Kathleen Parker, and Byron York, supposedly. Of the five, Parker shouldn’t have been there, as nobody on the Right is going to take her seriously as a conservative voice on anything that’s not touching on life issues; Gigot is not particularly pinging my radar; and Krauthammer, Costa, & York are reasonable choices, although every man jack of ’em are firmly inside the Beltway.

I assume that the President tried his best to get them to try to calm the rest of us down, so let me save some time and gently note that this will not actually work.  This isn’t the Left; we’re not really all that fond of marching orders in the VRWC.  Then again, this may simply be sour grapes on my part; after all, the President was unlikely to invite, say, me over for tea.  Which is a pity – for him.  I could extract Barack Obama from this mess he’s put himself into in an afternoon.

Moe Lane

PS: I do not fault those five journalists for meeting with the President.  I heartily dislike President Obama myself by now, but if he invited me in I would go and be completely respectful of the position he holds (and solely for the position’s sake).