Scary Stuff

If you're afraid of snakes, Science has found a visceral cause. There exists in our primate brains something called a pulvinar -- clusters of neurons specifically designed to make us fear the slithering legless reptiles.

So I ask myself: do our brains also contain special neuronal pockets making us fear spiders, bears and sabre-tooth tigers? And before Homo sapiens goes entirely extinct, will evolution go into speed-dial emergency survival mode and gift us with a special place in our cerebral cortices which enable us to spot a slimy politician from a mile away?

While you're pondering that one, I hope you've decided what to give out to your trick-or-treaters tonight. Since I am personally partial to Three Musketeers, I bought several bags of the "Fun Size" in anticipation that the usual lone child from my apartment complex will show up at my door and daintily pick out only a few from my 10-pound decorative pumpkin bowl. (I live on a busy highway with no sidewalks, not amenable to pedestrians, unfortunately.)

I was going to give out Kludgies in honor of Obamacare, but couldn't find any at ShopRite. Turns out the little goodies are still under development in the Neoliberal Confection Lab. From what I hear, the preliminary tests are not going well. For starters, the fake sugar they're using  leaves a bitter aftertaste. And tasters are paradoxically reporting that the candy either melts in their mouths too quickly, or gets stuck in their throats, making them gag. Maybe the glitches will be worked out in time for next  Halloween. People will have different reactions. Some will think they've been tricked. Others will be abjectly grateful for the treat, any treat. Still others will nod sagely and pontificate that the Kludgie sensation was always designed to be a different experience for different people. The poor person's poison is the better-off person's candy.

One thing's for darn certain. Kludgie portions will be pitifully small, but the marketers will try to fool us by calling them "fun size."

Oh well. They couldn't possibly be worse than Candy Corn and its close relative, Pumpkin Boobs (those orange sugar globules with the telltale green nipple), or Mary Janes, (which you could only possibly crave after first indulging in some real Mary Jane), Other most-hateds are Bit o'Honey and Tootsie Rolls. And watch out for those Whoppers. They might just remind you of your favorite worst politician.

 

 

 

And if these images aren't scary enough for you, 60 Minutes ran a segment that actually includes pornographic footage of Dick Cheney's ex-heart lying in an O.R. emesis basin like a slab of rotten bloated meat. You can see it here while gorging yourself on your imaginary Kludgies.

Crises, Real and Imagined

This week's edition of inside-the-Beltway angst centers around the pressing question:

Is Temp Emp (temporary emperor) Obama ignorant, detached, or just plain mendacious?

Look at the following four crises, and examine how they are affecting you personally in your own daily slog. What did you know about them, and when did the corporate media let you know it? (hint: #4 has not yet been deemed officially pressing) Look into your souls, Proles, and decide whether, in the grand scheme of things, the resolution of any of these crises would make your lives even one smidgen better.

1) Barack Obama was either aware or he wasn't that the renegade NSA is a shadow state unto itself before Angela Merkel called to complain. Reports that he initially couldn't hear what she was kvetching about because of the annoying echo feedback effect from those hidden Oval Office speakers could not be confirmed. But we can confirm for you that while not upset that the NSA is vacuuming up billions of our phone call records and emails, Intelligentrix Dianne Feinstein is hopping mad that the crème de la crème is being unfairly targeted. She could be next, heaven forfend.

2) Despite millions of subscribers getting cancellation notices, Barack Obama is still out there telling people that if they like their health insurance, they can keep it. Pundits are divided as to whether he's deliberately lying about this, or is simply as dumb as a box of rocks. Worst of all, are his handlers giving him plausible deniability on this too? The White House insists that he meant that if you like the insurance provided by predatory profiteers, you will never, on his neo-liberal watch, be forced into Medicare for All or even given the option of a public option. Also, who'd want to keep crap insurance anyway since O-Care forces some of the crappiness out, like kicking you off for getting sick. Plus, incisive legal eagle that he is, Obama also could have meant that if you like the way your shiny Blue Cross card looks in your wallet, by all means keep it for old times' sake. The plastic card police will not be raiding your house with scissors to make you cut it up into a million tiny pieces. As he has stated time and time again, your need for privacy is extremely important to him. Keeping a crap insurance card does not interfere with national security, after all. (defined as the overweening need for corporations and plutocrats to feel secure in their personhoods and their own wallets.

3) The White House is blaming the Republicans are blaming Kathleen Sebelius is blaming the contractors are blaming the White House for Obamacare website glitches. (The estimated 31 million Americans potentially being left out of the ACA? They are not part of the official circular firing squad, as far as the corporate media are concerned. Are you among the 8 million denied entry to the segregated Obamacare Pool in red states just because you're poor enough to qualify for expanded Medicaid? What do you know about this, and when did you know it? Or, are you so glued to your electronic gadgets and TVs, that you remain still blissfully unaware of your own slow boil in the simmering neo-liberal pot?)

4). Beginning Friday, almost 50 million people receiving assistance under the SNAP (food stamp) program will automatically lose the equivalent of 18 meals a month because neither right wing of the Money Party gives a flying f**k. Most importantly, the corporate media conglomerates controlling 90% of everything that you see and hear do not even consider the imminent starvation of a fifth of the population in the richest country on earth a crisis of the magnitude of Dianne Feinstein's angst, or Glitchgate, or even Benghazi. It's not on the Times' homepage anyway, where Beltway heartburn over Obama's personal remoteness trumps the hunger pangs of the masses.

Snatching food from the mouths of real people is the real crisis, people. The reason you're not hearing about it is the media are just having a hard time framing it around the needs and wants and interests of the rich. They can't frame it around political personalities. It's not a contrived Dem vs. Pub thing amenable to dueling talking heads.

 And there's a reason that the Temp Emp himself is stonily silent about it, and that very few Democrats are bothering to raise a stink about it. They're complicit. You see, part of the stimulus funding allocated for SNAP after the financial crisis was later "borrowed" to help pay for Michelle Obama's Let's Move initiative of healthier school lunches. It was Democrats robbing one poor segment of the population to give to another. And it's a given that the poor themselves always end up paying in the end.

And here's a scandal on top of a crisis. Guess who else is benefiting mightily from the first lady's healthy choices public relations campaign? Big business and corporate lobbies. As I have written about before, Flotus's current public-private partnership spiel is telling "folks" to drink more water -- preferably bottled water that you purchase from such corporate welfare giants as Coke and Pepsi. (their soda sales are down.) Go to the grocery story looking for beverages, and you're immediately assaulted by the sight of Evian and Poland Spring in toxic petroleum-based bottles bearing Michelle's Drink Up! imprint.

Apparently, testifying before Congress on national TV for the purpose of publicly shaming them into restoring food stamp funding is not on her neo-liberal agenda. Let Them Drink Water, meanwhile, is a recipe for a reprise of 1789.

 

 

 

 

Dangling Conversations

Bill Keller, New York Times executive editor-turned-columnist, devotes an unprecedented seven digital pages to his most recent piece, an apparently unedited email exchange with Glenn Greenwald on the role of contemporary journalism. Read the whole thing and see if you don't agree that Greenwald comes out the more lucid, fair-minded and even-handed.... despite Keller's pretty laughable claim that Glenn espouses a "partisan point of view."

So, journalism is activist.... who knew? I always thought the stories just kinda wrote themselves. And of course, every reporter in America has a duty to squelch his/her inner, inborn allegiance to one of the two right wings of the American uniparty, and fairly present the two equal sides of every argument. And Greenwald does not fall into this category, and Keller is out to find out why, why, why.

If you don't have time to read the whole thing, here's a brief synopsis:

Keller: So, you're an activist journo, who came into our exalted territory by way of lawyering and blogging. Ecccchhhhh!!!!! And now you're hypocritically going to work for a billionaire foreigner who started an internet marketplace (EBay) for the lower classes.  Ewwwwww.

Greenwald: Establishment journalism can be toxic, suffocating, neutering, boring, and conceited. Journalists are human beings with points of view. Get over it. All journalism is activist. The only things that count are accuracy and reliability.

Keller: We're more serious than you. We have editors in suits. We often respect our government. And ditto for national security (whatever that means.) So Nonny nonny boo boo.

Greenwald: Unquestioning fealty to authority is a clear and present danger. We should not value American lives more than non-American lives, and not mistake national security (whatever that is) with a government's desire for secrecy.

Keller: Stop pretending that nationalism and patriotism are dirty words! Stop it, stop it, stop it! And Julian Assange is a callously indifferent indiscriminate dumper and I can prove it! And by the way, how does it feel to sell out and become a star, a brand, for a foreign upstart?

Greenwald: WikiLeaks didn't dump all that false info on Saddam's WMDs. Or help elect Bush by withholding the story on his illegal wiretaps. Our new venture will operate on the premise that the purpose of journalism is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted and treat the powerful not with reverence, but with skepticism. By the way, your own reporter, James Risen, is being threatened with prison over his refusal to name names. By the way, our new venture will include both liberals and conservatives, but not in the vein of David Brooks.

Keller: Leave my David alone!! He is a compassionate plute in a suit.  Your scorn for fraudulent moderation is quite telling.... and extreme. Now I'll let you have the last word, because I am a standup guy and unlike some people around here, reasonable and reasoned. Good luck in your venture selling out to a foreign billionaire who caters to the underclass.

Greenwald: Brooks, like the paper that hired him, is a tool for the military industrial complex and the plutocracy controlling it and enriched by it. ("And with some noble  exceptions, The Times, by design or otherwise, has long served the interests of the same set of elite and powerful factions. Its reporting is no less 'activist,' subjective or opinion-driven than the new media voices it sometimes condescendingly scorns.")   This so called email debate was so much semantic gymnastics and weasel-wording on your part. But thanks anyway for wishing me luck.

My (somewhat ironic) comment:

I have to compliment Bill Keller for printing verbatim his exchange with Glenn Greenwald, when he very easily could have turned his column into another establishment smear job on a non-traditional journalist. (see the Julian Assange story by Keller from a few years ago, in which Assange's skipping and socks and personality quirks trumped his whistleblowing and leaks in the public interest.)

The conversational framing of this column is an indication that the Times is taking to heart some of the recent criticism about its proclivity to act as a mouthpiece for the government, too often giving unwarranted anonymity and protection to elected officials, the better to spread their propaganda.

Much of the credit for this seeming turnabout is also due to the Times's outstanding public editor, Margaret Sullivan. She has been at the forefront of criticizing everything from the paper's coverage of drone strikes, to the NSA revelations, and yes -- even David Brooks, when in a recent column he referred to mixed-race families as "mutts." (he said it was OK, because biracial people sometimes refer to themselves as mutts.)

Brooks had also attempted to pettily marginalize Edward Snowden as a misfit with girlfriend issues as soon as Glenn Greenwald broke the first NSA story. If anything, Glenn's criticism of him is way too mild. Brooks is a menace in centrist clothing, and a disgrace to journalism.

For further reading, here's a piece on Greenwald's de facto exile and the distinct possibility of his arrest should he ever venture back to the mainland of the Homeland. Were it not for Edward Snowden and Greenwald's reporting, Angela Merkel, the most powerful woman in the world, would never have learned that the United Stasians are listening in to her conversations. The international reputation of Barack Obama has been left dangling like a severed land line.

Grand Bargain Bait & Switch

When is a Grand Bargain not a Grand Bargain?

When the movers and shakers of the Beltway realize that "Grand Bargain" is now one of the most loathed phrases in America. When the bipartishits realize that the whole country is on to their collusion to defy the wishes of 80% of the American public by "reforming" the great social insurance programs of the 20th century. When they resort to weasel words and to Grand Bargain Denialism to throw the AARP and various progressive groups off the scent.

The liberal blogosphere was orgasming today over the news that Majority Leader Harry Reid has finally grown a pair and vowed to protect Social Security and Medicare from the budget chopping block!

 “If you give a bully a dollar today, they ask for a dollar and a half tomorrow,” he said in a radio interview with Nevada's KNPR. “It has taken a while for all my caucus to come to that understanding. And quite frankly, the president, wonderful man that he is, he doesn’t like confrontation and he likes to work things out with people.”

“I was too lenient. Don’t blame it all on him,” Reid added. 

He also ruled out the possibility that a budget conference committee convening next week will reach a "grand bargain" that would cut entitlements, raise taxes and reduce spending. 

“We are not going to have a grand bargain in the near future,” he said. 

Not so fast with the congratulations to Give Em Hell Harry, liberals. Read the fine print. By "near future," Reid means in the next six weeks, or until mid-December when the latest bipartisan gang has deadlined itself into striking another nibbler of a deal to only temporarily stave off disaster.

There's always early next year. The government could shut down again on January 17th, and the debt ceiling is again in danger of being breached right before Valentine's Day. And thus, in only a few short months, Reid will again be open to some grand-bargaining on "entitlements":

The Democratic leader signaled that he could be open to minor trimming of some Medicare or Social Security spending as part of deal that involves tax revenue. Obama in his last budget included more means testing for Medicare and lower Social Security benefits as part of a new inflation calculation. 

“The president has stuck his neck out ... there has to be some reciprocity here,” he said. 

Asked about entitlements, Reid said: “I am happy to do that on some grand bargain ... that is not going to happen this time.”

Reid said this even while admitting that Social Security is "the most successful program in the history of the world. It's not about to go broke."
 
Thus does Harry Reid echo the sentiments of chief GOP budget negotiator Paul Ryan, who has once again pivoted from Tea Party Crazyville and is safely back in Third Way New Democrat (centrist plutocrat cult) territory. Remember, it was only a couple weeks ago that Ryan, too, was heavy into Grand Bargain denialism.  Of course, it's just a matter of employing the right semantics and weasel words. Although, like Reid, he proclaims himself opposed to a Grand Bargain, he, too, still wants a grand bargain of entitlement cuts in the not-so-distant near future:

"If we focused on doing some big grand bargain, like those prior efforts ... then I don't think we'll be successful because we'll focus on our differences. Each party will demand that the other compromises a core principle and then we'll get nothing done."

Ryan, who will lead Republicans on the 29-member negotiating panel that convenes on October 30, said there is a better chance of finding common ground with Democrats on "smarter" spending cuts to replace the across-the-board reductions to discretionary spending. He said these include reductions and reforms to expensive federal benefits programs known as entitlements, such as Social Security, Medicare and some farm subsidy programs. (Karen here: he means cutting food stamps to starve people, but is too cowardly to say so right out loud.)

And don't despair, all ye who entered here in hopes of finding a stocking-full of cat food for Christmas. Because President Obama is suddenly agreeable to cutting reforming Social Security Disability in the current negotiations. (I knew there was a reason 60 Minutes just ran a propaganda hit piece falsely claiming that hordes of malingerers are bilking the system.)

And now I know what Obama really meant when he appeared before a group of disabled people last year and promised he would "have their backs."

As an antidote to the Grand Bargain propaganda campaigns of Plutopundit Tom Friedman and his pluto-pal Stan Druckenmiller, and all manner of Doomsday Coots in Suits, Paul Krugman has written a great column ripping them all a new one. My response:

Druckenmiller belongs to the Forbes 400 billionaires who now possess more wealth than 150 million other Americans combined. Yet there he goes, touring the country, whining to college kids and scapegoating Grandma as the Cruella DeVil stealing their hopes and dreams and puppies. Not he and the austerian masters of high finance!

They've got a bad case of plutocratic paranoia -- fear that the old, the disabled, poor families, and veterans are scraping by at their expense.

Druckenmiller, Pete Peterson and the whole gang of media-dubbed "thought leaders" think they own the place. Well, actually they do own the place. And they want to own the people inhabiting the place. They're the ideological descendants of feudal lords, plantation owners and robber barons. They want their labor free or cheap, and they want the right to discard it when it's outlived its usefulness.

And the people at the bottom are starting to get restless. McWorkers are demanding a living wage. Retirees are refusing to accept chained CPI cuts to their earned benefits. Teachers and students and other victims of privatization are striking. The SEC is threatening to enforce a Dodd-Frank rule that CEOs must reveal the obscene gap between their wealth and the peanuts they pay in wages. (average ratio is now 350 to 1 and climbing.)

The paranoid plutocrats know they've gone too far, but they're powerless to overcome their own addictions. It's past time to give them some hefty taxation therapy, wouldn't you say?

Known Knowns and Unknown Unknowns Strike Again

Whenever public officials want to pass one of the many bucks that keep fluttering toward their desks, they go to the propaganda cabinet and drag out their trusty Word Salad Spinners.  Perhaps the most famous example of this defense mechanism was when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld gave his tortured explanation for the debacle in Iraq:

There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don't know.

And now that Obama administration flacks are flailing like mad against the fluttering flustercuck that is the Healthcare.Gov website, those trusty word salad spinners are spinning to the fullest extent of the news cycle. Only problem is, the little spinners trying to defend their virtual health insurance Laundromat of a website are a tad unbalanced in their own logic. Their spin is not going at all smoothly. Thumps abound as spittle flies.

The Spinner-in-Chief himself is being forced to clunk along. From his latest heavy duty load cycle:  

Of course, you've probably heard that healthcare.gov,  the new website where people can apply for health insurance and browse and buy affordable plans in most states, hasn't worked as smoothly as it was supposed to work, (putting it self-servingly and mildly) and the number of people who've visited the site has been overwhelming, (too many towels stuffed in the low capacity delicate cycle?) which has aggravated some of these underlying problems. (the machine was designed only for low-suds detergent!). Despite all that, thousands of people are signing up and saving money as we speak. (Keep feeding the broken machine your quarters and maybe it'll fix itself) Many Americans with a preexisting condition, like Janice, are discovering that they can finally get health insurance like everybody else. (um.... how about those 15 million uninsured people not included in "everybody else." How about the majority of poor and minority women being denied admission to the health insurance washateria?)  

As Ezra Klein points out,

The best news for Obamacare is that almost everyone -- including the Obama administration -- realizes the crucial online portal is currently a disaster. 

That's not a universally held view. Salon's Joan Walsh chides those reporting on the law's failure, arguing that the law's problems "are real, and disturbing, and must be fixed asap," but "the president knows that without my telling him."

Actually, that's been the problem: President Obama didn't know that. Nor did White House chief of staff Denis McDonough. Nor did Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who will be testifying to that fact next week.

It would be one thing if Obamacare's problems had been unknowable. But they weren't. Staff at HHS and CMS saw this coming for months. Insurance companies began predicting a mess long ago. But the bad news was shaded and spun as it made its way up the chain of command. The alarming failures seen in the (inadequate) load tests were written off as bugs that would soon be fixed.

Klein says that even staffers who knew about the knowns were terrified to speak out about them. He and other reporters "got a wall of denials" on problems, and the White House seemed to believe its own denials.

This is what happens when the most transparent administration in history has a program in place called Insider Threat. As McClatchy Newspapers revealed last summer, Obama has mandated that all federal government employees spy on each other and report their co-workers for incipient or suspected whistleblowing, or even the voicing of concerns that something in the bureaucracy might not be working correctly. Disgruntlement on the job is listed among the red flags. Those staffers Klein talks about who knew about the unknowns of the Obamacare website were terrified to speak up simply because they're all terrified about losing their jobs for the crime of facing reality and for fear of bursting Obama's sacrosanct bubble.

The Ministry of Fear operating at the very highest levels of the government is seriously hampering the ability of American consumers to shop for health insurance product. Therefore, the president seriously needs to get his act together and give another speech about the need to balance our rights to become victims of health insurance predators with his need to look good. 

Treading Water Underwater

That's the excellent metaphor used by Binyamin Applebaum of the New York Times today in describing the most recent jobs report. We're drowning while continuing to flail.

And as per usual, the experts proclaim themselves mildly surprised and disappointed that we aren't bursting from the depths and performing a water ballet. They're still a little bummed that austerity for the masses and corporate welfare and quantitative easing for the plutocrats has not caused a sonic boom in hiring. All they can come up with to describe the destructive effects of the class war is that the situation continues to be "lackluster."

 The jobs stats, released 18 days late because of the partial government shutdown, don't even reflect the massive furloughs of hundreds of thousands of federal employees. And many government contract employees are either still not working or have had their hours cut. Some will get back pay, others will not. Even those who've have been promised back pay have been hit with late charges on their bills.

 So come November, the metaphor for the jobs report could well be this: Gasp and Gurgle.

The only true trickle-down is the shit that flows downhill. The richest of the rich are still raking in the dough, and they won't be happy till they swallow the very last crumb.

We know this because the Pain Caucus of the richest of the rich is still very much in charge of the bipartisan economic enhanced torture program. Dick Durbin, the aptly named Democratic Whip, lashed out against the mythical hordes of greedy geezers on Fox News the other day. He used his best threatening mob boss voice. Because when it comes to fomenting fear about retirees, it is simply no longer enough for deficit scolds like Dick to call them greedy. As pawns in the Grand Bargain for the Grandees, earned benefit recipients have become terrorists armed to the dentures. According to Dick, it's the invasion of the Body-Snatching Boomers Who Bomb!

"Social Security is gonna run out of money in 20 years," he lied. "The Baby Boom generation is gonna blow away our future. We don't wanna see that happen."




Millionaire Politician Warns America: The Only Thing We Have to Fear Is Grandma Herself!!!


Of course, even if deficits mattered, Social Security has never contributed a dime to the deficit. It actually has a surplus, and could be rendered solvent into perpetuity if the cap on FICA taxes was scrapped. Even taxing income up to $250,000 would ensure the program's solvency for another 75 years. Durbin the Democrat does not tell you this. He wants you to believe that there's a generational theft conspiracy going on, rather than tell the truth about the blatant ongoing theft of every single generation by a tiny handful of oligarchic robber barons.

Durbin, of course, is not really a mob boss. He's merely the consigliere of the Teflon Don in the White House who smilingly presides over the neighborhood block parties even as he orders the hits. Michael Hoexter has a penetrating piece on what it is, exactly, that could be making Boss Obama tick. What's with that paradoxical shtick of voicing concern for people at the same time he throws them under the bus?

Hoexter recommends that we pick all, some, or none of the following: Obama sincerely believes austerity is a virtue and helps to grow the economy. He sincerely believes that the free market is the greatest force for good the world has ever known, and that government is only secondary. He sincerely believes, like most fiscal conservatives, that the private sector owns the currency and that government is "borrowing" from the owners to fund social insurance programs, thus putting the owners at risk for bankruptcy. He sincerely believes in the Confidence Fairy (h/t Krugman) -- that only giving the oligarchs whatever they want will make them want to create jobs.

Obama does not believe any of the above, but is pretending to be a true believer in his capacity as official trickster and "front man" for Wall Street. He could suffer from a genuine psychological disorder, similar to the anorexic who equates starvation with good health. Perhaps, as the child of divorce, he is desperately searching for stern father figures in the Republican Party, seeking to appease them and win their approval. He really is a Prag-Prog ("pragmatic progressive") who thinks he can only succeed at nibbling around the liberal edges. Or, he's been a closet Republican all along.

In short: Obama is either an idiot, a borderline personality, a fraud, a coward, or a psychopath. Pick none, pick one, pick some, pick all. Or add your own.

In short: Obama and his minions need an intervention, pronto.

Health Care Is Hell

While we're waiting* for The Presider to give out bouquets to a few lucky duckies who've beaten the odds and already acquired their golden tickets to Obamacare Nirvana, let's take a gander at Health and Human Services' online apologia for its glitch-ridden rollout.

The first sign that these people are still not ready for primetime is their pledge to scour the earth to find "the best and the brightest" minds to fix the troubled HealthCare.Gov. site. The Best and the Brightest, as you may recall, is the title of a scathing book by David Halberstam about how a group of so-called White House intellectuals made a total botch of Vietnam. Think Team Obama is sending us a subliminal message?

The rest of their announcement is just simply Orwellian, if not weirdly jingoistic. Some snippets:

 Initially, we implemented a virtual “waiting room,” but many found this experience to be confusing.  We continued to add more capacity in order to meet demand and execute software fixes to address the sign up and log in issues, stabilizing those parts of the service and allowing us to remove the virtual “waiting room.” 

The earth-tone Naugahyde couches and ratty copies of People magazine have been removed in the interests of your mental clarity. Because we know that when you're feeling ill, you really need the fixes to be executed. So while you're waiting to see an actual health care provider in our maze of confusion, you may now proceed to shop around for your middleman in the thousand aisles in the virtual Walmart. And then on to the next phase of your medical shopping experience: The Tech Surge!!!!!

To ensure that we make swift progress, and that the consumer experience continues to improve, our team has called in additional help to solve some of the more complex technical issues we are encountering.

Our team is bringing in some of the best and brightest from both inside and outside government to scrub in with the team and help improve HealthCare.gov.  We're also putting in place tools and processes to aggressively monitor and identify parts of HealthCare.gov where individuals are encountering errors or having difficulty using the site, so we can prioritize and fix them.  We are also defining new test processes to prevent new issues from cropping up as we improve the overall service and deploying fixes to the site during off-peak hours on a regular basis.

Oh jeeze. In America, you are not automatically entitled to medical care as your basic human right. You're a soldier on the virtual battlefield who has to spill blood for it, a consumer in the marketplace who forks out the cash to buy it, a team player who has to compete in the arena for the prize, a loyal citizen ready and willing to even jump off the operating table to help your own surgeons scrub up!  Just as the troops are forever deployed by the American hegemon, so too are the Obamacare fixes. And the monitoring, of course, will be aggressive.

For a country embroiled a forever War on Terrah, I guess the bellicose symbols are bound to extend to our grand public-private partial insurance program. In his column yesterday, Ross Douthat wrote:

Like the Bush administration in Iraq, the White House seems to have invaded the health insurance marketplace with woefully inadequate postinvasion planning, and let the occupation turn into a disaster of hack work and incompetence.......

Where, Ross moans, is there a tech-savvy David Petraeus to save us from the terror?

Just what we need. Another wanker with a surge to throw gasoline on the sectarian flames of a civil war that never really ended.

* Update: Obama now has spoken for the consumers and wounded civilian warriors of America. Some money quotes:

"And I think it's fair to say that nobody's more frustrated by that than I am. Precisely because the product is good, I want the cash registers to work, I want the checkout lines to be smooth, so I want people to be able to get this great product."

"They're reaching out. They're offering to send help. We've had some of the best IT talent in the entire country join the team. And we're well into a tech surge to fix the problem. And we are confident that we will get all the problems fixed."

"But I just want to remind everybody, we did not wage this long and contentious battle just around a website. That's not what this was about. (Cheers, applause.) We waged this battle to make sure that millions of Americans in the wealthiest nation on Earth finally have the same chance to get the same security of affordable quality health care as anybody else. That's what this is about." (Applause.)

Got that, virtual consuming citizen soldiers of America? Some of you, not all of you, will have the chance and the privilege of purchasing health care product under the aegis of a virtual three-tiered class system. So please do not confuse this equality of opportunity with fairness of outcome. Depending on where you live, your money will either be gladly accepted by the free market of the wealthiest enclave of wealth on earth -- or it won't. Because like all wars, Class War is Hell. (Applause.)



"A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed at some indefinite time in the future.” --  Obama Administration Best and Brightest HHS IT Special Ops George S. Patton Jr.