Month: October 2013

Reset to Zero: #Obamacare exchanges wipes passwords, incomplete accounts.

There’s a word for this.

Amid all the attention, bugs, and work happening at Healthcare.gov in light of the Affordable Care Act, potential registrants talking to phone support today have been told that all user passwords are being reset to help address the site’s login woes. And the tech supports behind Healthcare.gov will be asking more users to act in the name of fixing the site, too. According to registrants speaking with Ars, individuals whose logins never made it to the site’s database will have to re-register using a different username, as their previously chosen names are now stuck in authentication limbo.

You know the word, too. I won’t repeat it here, because of couth – but you know what I mean, ya, you betcha.

Via

Scenes from the #shutdown counter-protests.

The implications of this should trouble the Obama administration:

…because, those people? Those people are not taking Barack Obama seriously. At all.

Poor guy.

Via Twitchy.

Newsday columnist concludes: #Obamacare is a mug’s game.

I’m not entirely certain that the math is right, but the calculation sure is:

Bad coverage on the state exchange for my family, with $6,000 deductibles per person, would cost a total of about $9,000 per year. And unless you have a real sickly year, insurance with deductibles that high is just a very expensive form of not having coverage at all. Good coverage would run us about $15,000 per year.

But the maximum fine for refusing to buy coverage is 1 percent of your pay this year, and 2.5 percent in the future. That’s because if the plan included fines high enough to induce the purchase of coverage, the law would not have passed. So a family man like me has to make $360,000 per year, once the fine goes up, to make buying even the cheapest coverage a better deal than the fine. Continue reading Newsday columnist concludes: #Obamacare is a mug’s game.

Democrats still not quite grokking that #shutdown is a tool for the GOP.

Shh, Byron York.

The rebels ultimately hope to push Democrats to accept some sort of compromise that delays or in some way limits Obamacare. But if they fail — and Democrats have remained rock-solid on Obamacare to this point — they envision a situation in which, for as long as the shutdown goes on, they are able to fund popular government programs while leaving some key Democrat-friendly outposts shuttered. For example, while they want to fund the Pentagon, are the Republican rebels OK with the fact that most of the Environmental Protection Agency is shut down? They are. Are they worried about furloughs at the National Labor Relations Board? Not particularly.

This is much more fun if it’s a surprise.

Moe Lane

PS: Seriously, someone did consider the possibility that the GOP would not exactly be weeping over the idea of demonstrating just how much of the federal government can be sent home in case of an alien invasion or something?  I swear to God, I should be a consultant.

Hardcore antiwar Left attempts to hijack public anger at @barackobama over #shutdown.

You might have noticed last night the groundwork for a future attempt (probably later today) to incite outrage about war veterans getting arrested at a Vietnam Veterans memorial.  Turns out that these particular war veterans get arrested every year – in New York – as part of their general antiwar protesting.  Don’t believe me?  Believe the Atlantic, then:

The gathering took place in part to protest the twelfth anniversary of the war in Afghanistan. A similar protest and set of arrests occurred last year at the memorial. In the video embedded below, a veteran tells police that they are there to bring awareness to the “immense atrocities” committed in Vietnam, and that “some of you are so much younger, and history has been denied you, so you just need to know why we are here.”

As you can see, this has nothing to do with Barack Obama or the government shutdown at all.  Or, really, our veterans – given that this group thinks that those who served in Vietnam are unindicted war criminals. Continue reading Hardcore antiwar Left attempts to hijack public anger at @barackobama over #shutdown.

New White House strategy: giving out participation trophies for #obamacare.

Seriously, the idea was to provide health care, yes? Not to fill up database slots for the sake of filling up database slots.

Not generate accounts that nobody can actually access. And note that I am being kind and not pushing the observation that a far too high percentage of those accounts are likely to be ghost, duplicate, rogue, and/or glitch entries. No, I don’t know why I am being kind, either. Maybe I have a cold?

Moe Lane

This is the Coolest Thing, for a given value of “Coolest Thing.” @shaenongarrity

Specifically, the Coolest Thing that is at the intersection of Kolchak – The Night Stalker; The X-Files; and Shaenon Garrity’s incredibly fun Monster of the Week webcomic (last link explains the tag line).

scully-kolchak

I am not saying that you have to be as enthusiastic as I am about Scully dressed as Kolchak; but if you plan to read this site very often then you probably should accept the fact that, yes, this is what I am all about. Continue reading This is the Coolest Thing, for a given value of “Coolest Thing.” @shaenongarrity

Dems tentatively annoint Mary Burke as sacrificial victim in ’14 Wisconsin governor’s race.

This is who they got?  Really?

Mary Burke, former Governor Jim Doyle’s economic development architect…

(interrupting) Wisconsin lost 133,000 jobs during Doyle’s last term. Even the left-leaning Politifact couldn’t get around that minor detail, though goodness knows that they tried.  And even the left-leaning Politifact can’t deny that Wisconsin has gained 62,000 jobs under Scott Walker’s first two years, although goodness knows that they tried there, too.

Continue reading Dems tentatively annoint Mary Burke as sacrificial victim in ’14 Wisconsin governor’s race.

White House confirms: the #obamacare signup numbers are really, really bad.

Which is why they won’t release them for at least a month.

The Obama administration is not planning on releasing enrollment numbers on Obamacare until November, senior administration officials said Monday, as they continued to insist that delays with the healthcare.gov website were entirely the result of high volume.

“We will release monthly data when it is available,” a senior administration official told CNN. “We have not given an exact date, but it will be after end of month and we will work with states to collect their data to have a good picture of what’s happening across the country.”

But the administration has released numbers on the total numbers of visits to the federal site, approximately 8.6 million as of Friday, according to Health and Human Services data. A number cited as evidence of interest in the program. However, it is not clear how many of those who have visited the site were able to successfully use it, or stopped because of technical issues and slow speeds.

Continue reading White House confirms: the #obamacare signup numbers are really, really bad.