Ok then. Links? I guess the NorthEast is up for another helping of snow now that they’ve got a slap in the face the cold weather we just had. We’re predicted to have the first “above freezing day” in quite some time … but I don’t believe it will quite happen. The last four days the temperature predictions have all been about 4-5 degrees (F) on the high side.

1. So there’s a study (probably needing verification) that mammograms don’t help statistically. So some jump to policy. Others ignore this side of the equation, the Queen of Hearts had it apparently (“Off with their heads”) … she missed by a foot or so.
2. The knee jerk liberal economist apparently forgot that interest rates remain toxic low level, why? Oh, the debt is why. With that much national debt worldwide if we had healthy 5-7% interest rates loans, nations never ever make their interest payments.
3. More on the knee jerk effect.
4. Shania Twain and medical science  .. It only breaks when it’s beating.
5. What teachers don’t do. Why? This makes no sense when you think about it. But when you do, it’s obvious.
6. I don’t get the “courage” allusions. Look a year ago (?) a basketball player came out and became nationally famous. Turns out he was a 12th man and would never have a spot of mention anywhere without “bravely” coming out (to unexpected national fame). Now an “expected 4th round pick” comes out and gets the same national fame and every team is talking about it. Brave to face fame and fortune? Please.
7. Breaking news! NOW spokesmen fail literacy tests! Please. I read the column too. Here’s an out of context (for maximum misunderstanding) of what they misconstrue: In theory that means, as FIRE notes, that “if both parties are intoxicated during sex, they are both technically guilty of sexually assaulting each other.” In practice it means that women, but not men, are absolved of responsibility by virtue of having consumed alcohol. So how does NOW read that, … that Taranto is “enhancing a rape culture.
8. Speaking about intentionally misunderstanding. Seems Twain missed one. Twain said that there are “lies, damned lies, and statistics”, to which we can add “and progressives practicing journalism”. Or should I say “mal-practicing”.
9. Well, yesterday we had “scary bad aunt” and today we have a good uncle.
10. Liberals misbehavior on display. People who have manners, all know not to speak ill of the dead. And on this matter, WTF anyhow?
11. So, the Obamacare scorecard … 1 million more covered at a cost of 120 billion a year and 2.5 million jobs. A little more aid for the needy like that and we’ll all be underwater. And … now we have a recipe to dismantle it.
12. Affirmative action noted. The film (and the historical) Tuskegee Airmen disproved the (flawed) assumption behind affirmative action. If you make things hard on a group that group will become elite. The reverse is true as well. If you want to make them substandard, make things easier for them. Works every time. The only choice then is that supporters of aff action are either stupid or evil (they don’t realize how to make an group better or … they do and want to harm the group they pretend to help).
13. What not to play soccer while wearing.

Yo!

1. So, monkey-boy thinks he’s safe in the trees eh? Crocodile says … not so fast!
2. If you have the big bucks, you can(!) get the girl, err, the photo.
3. Somebody else isn’t a fan of the FDA monopolizing choice with respect to risk.
4. Horrible, if true, … but it is interesting to note the dichotomy between studying and practicing ethics.
5. Sanity scarcity.
6. Words fail me, I mean I think he’s spot on but … geesh. I mean I know the standard trope is that lib/progressives think conservatives are evil and conservatives typically on the other hand think their counterparts are merely naive or misguided. Perhaps the evil thing is a better fit, but that presumes intention.
7. On a lighter note, speaking of evil.
8. Continuing (the lighter note thing) … oh no! Don’t do that! If you’re going to use American Football teams just do some variation of the current Superbowl champs with a local twist, how about “SteppeHawks” for this year. And change the name every year, that’d be fun.
9. On a not-lighter note, uhm, that description of the “romantic aunt” sounds a lot like like incest-ridden pedophilia (two words you just never ever ever want to see together, incest and pedophile). Just replace “aunt” with “uncle” … yech.
10. Well, that combination will torque the tail of the atheist.
11. Obamacare, screwing the middle class by design. Just google “Doc Shock” if you don’t believe it.
12. Unneeded legislation … I mean, what airline in their right mind would voluntarily allow that? Why, oh why, would Washington think it needs to pass laws against things nobody is doing or would do?
13. Who was the knucklehead who thought Cuban health-care was better than that of the US?
14. Kinda like this guy who forgot Caesar was a Tribune.
15. Global warming models and their results. Climate scientists can now slink to the back of the room and shut up for a while. Please?
16. All right thinking people abhor female genital mutilation right? But they also (apparently) praise voluntary sex change (genital mutilation as well) and other voluntary body modification. Coherence? Not!

As predicted, that is, by Megan McArdle:

In December, I predicted that “doc shock” was going to be a major problem for the U.S. health-care overhaul, as people found out that the narrow networks insurers use to keep premiums low often don’t cover the top-notch doctors you’d like to see if you get really sick:

…

And indeed, it’s already started, according to the Wall Street Journal:

…

Health-care wonks can insist that narrow networks aren’t news, but clearly, these networks are news to the folks in the plans — and now that they know, they aren’t happy.

Read the whole thing. They’re trying to fix this by passing laws, but that’s been done before with the whole HMO thing years ago. The result was costs continuing to rise.

I mean, if you can make it say whatever you want, if you can change it on a moment’s notice, is it really a law?

Most employers won’t face a fine next year if they fail to offer workers health insurance, the Obama administration said Monday, in the latest big delay of the health-law rollout.

The Treasury Department, in regulations outlining the Affordable Care Act, said employers with 50 to 99 full-time workers won’t have to comply with the law’s requirement to provide insurance or pay a fee until 2016. Companies with more workers could avoid some penalties in 2015 if they showed they were offering coverage to at least 70% of full-time workers.

It’s such a great law, we have to keep delaying it! Well, for big employers. For the small ones and the individual, you’re stuck with it.

Oh, and why was this done?

The move came after employers pressured the Obama administration to peel back the law’s insurance requirements. Some firms had trimmed workers’ hours to below 30 hours a week to avoid paying a penalty if they didn’t offer insurance.

Because the administration saw the effect it was having on the economy, that’s why. It was causing such problems, that it just had to be delayed. Until after the mid-term elections.

Well, a busy weekend … working Sat & Sun. 5 more to go for a break.

1. Food and community under stress.
2. Arabian anarchy.
3. Government overreach. But don’t worry, government is uniquely situated to more fairly apply justice … or not.
4. Here’s one reason why, the big brained guys running things … aren’t (hint: aren’t as smart as they pretend).
5. Turning down a lot of money … for what?
6. Things break more often when subjected to more stress. Who knew?
7. Art criticism … is based on something  called an aesthetic basically a criteria which you establish and then use to judge artistic merit.
8. Speaking of art and beauty, the rarity of beauty in modern art gets remarks like this to be offered. This is a topic I’ve ranted (or mentioned) before. One reply is that much of the beauty that remains in our culture is encased in in things like the SR-71.
9. Speaking of aesthetics … one might be suggested here, eh?
10. I haven’t seen the movie … so did have that joke?
11. Knowing God … what I was taught is that has a Trinitarian answer, you cannot know the Father (except through the Son), specifically the Father is unknowable.
12. Thankful for my alma mater at which more often then not, we read the whole damn book (including for example “read War and Peace for next class, which fortunately was after the one week Spring break … and more fortunately for me I had two about 24 hour train rides in which to easily do that reading).
13. Smoking may be illogical, but addiction is psychological and chemical.
14. For your valentine.

Scott Walker, the governor of the state of Wisconsin, survived a recall effort by unions in his state. I’d hope, though I wouldn’t bet, that they are glad that effort failed.

Because since then, he and the Republicans in his state legislature, have been busy cutting taxes and balancing their budget. The result has been that, over 3 years, they’ve cut taxes by about a billion and a half dollars, and the economy is chugging along a good clip, such that just this year they have almost a billion dollar surplus.

We ought to be asking our federal government to look at this. How did they do it? Let’s listen to Governor Walker describe it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuzZRgEAw1k

Tough decisions, predicted by his detractors to destroy the economy, instead turned the economy around, gave them a surplus, more in their rainy-day fund, and which will be returned to the people instead of turned into a slush fund.

Now, you might not have heard about this from your typical media sources. A Republican governor, hated by the unions, putting conservative policies into place, with the result being a booming economy, just doesn’t fit the narrative. And when it comes time to vote again in Wisconsin, I hope the people there remember who fixed their economy, and who opposed those very policies.

Heck, I hope the rest of the country remembers that, if they get to hear about it. A state that generated a billion dollar surplus without mortgaging their future is a model that Washington, DC should be following. If they really cared about the economy.

Reflect a moment on the Olympics, the US and many Western leaders have decided “not to attend”, Google followed suit with a rainbow Olympic rings display, and publicly gay (privately … who knows) stuffed shirts were sent as part of the US delegation and many others. This was supposedly in response to how Russia is perceived to deal with public homosexuality.

Consider the following. Make an honest list of the top 10 economic, liberty, social, legal, and cultural issues facing the Russian people and the Russian Federation today. Order these by which have the highest priority and will do the greatest good. If you are honest (and I will charitably assume that is the case), gay rights did not appear on the list. Extend it to 20. Gosh. Still not there. In fact, I’d be willing to bet, if you put the time and effort it that gay rights might not even (if you are honest) make the top 100.

So …. why is that a putative issue for our leaders? Could it be because all politics is local and this is a safe way of pretending to do something about gay issues in their country without having to actually, you know, do anything about those issues? Crocodile tears all around.

One of the big promises of ObamaCare was that, with a much larger pool of insured people, the cost to the average individual or family would go down. That’s how insurance works, right? You spread out the risk over a bigger population, and the required payouts become less than the premiums taken in. More people, less risk, lower costs.

You’d think so. But as it turns out, the insurance offered by one of those eeevil corporations, Wal-Mart, beats the equivalent ObamaCare plan handily. David Todd, an independent insurance agent based in Little Rock, Ark., compared the health plans.

Todd looked at a 30-year-old woman who could qualify for the government subsidy. “The nonsubsidized premium is $205 a month for this 30-year-old. If they get a subsidy, then the premium is zero. But that person has to come up with $6,300 if something catastrophic happened,” he said.

The Walmart monthly premium for the same 30-year-old woman would be about $40. Her deductible would be $2,750, minus $250 in cash advance, for a total net deductible of $2,500.

Todd said some Obamacare exchange family plan deductibles can go as high as $12,000 before benefits kick in.

This is what the government considers “subsidized”; pay thousands up front and get your money back, depending on when you spent it, over a year from now. OK, but what is the actual coverage like? Very good question. Let’s take a look at some of the particulars.

Walmart also offers a free preventive health plan that mirrors the Obamacare plan. Its employees can take advantage of a wide range of free exams and counseling, including screenings for colorectal cancer, cervical cancer, chlamydia, diabetes, depression and special counseling for diet and obesity.

Their children can get more than 20 free preventive services, ranging including screenings for genetic disorders, autism and developmental problems to obesity, lead poisoning exposure and tuberculosis. There are also 12 free vaccinations, and free hearing and vision testing.

Walmart employees pay as little as $4 for a 30-day supply of generic drugs and only $10 for eye exams through a separate vision plan.

Oh, and in Chicago, where this comparison was done, Wal-Mart employees have access to about 2 ½ times as many doctors than those with ObamaCare do. What does it say about ObamaCare that doctors and hospitals would rather do business with a private company than with the government?

Well, it says that we’re going about this all the wrong way.

Well better late than, uhm, tomorrow.

1. Let’s see, you can’t make it legal to shoot them down and at the same time you can’t fly them. The libertarian argument gets better every day.
2. The President feels the fetus is guilty … (of what?) or something like that. Just remember, liberals like Rawls at least pay lip sevice to it, but just don’t pay attention to the consequences.
3. The Boston bomber and penalty.
4. Obamacare and economic consequences. More on the same … attack a straw man is one strategy in Obamacare defense (apparently someone doesn’t realize that if you stop working to pay for your medical care and instead stop working and let taxes (other peoples money) to handle it … that’s not a net gain for the country).
5. And one more “how not to defend” Obamacare.
6. A book suggested. I picked up the first one, as I’ll be on the road starting tomorrow night until Thursday night.
7. Or you could just figure out it’s just a cat or a dog, and get a new one.
8. Hello? The surprise would be the government doing it well. Duh.
9. “more likely to seek treatment” … that would be on planet liberal-pipe-dreams-come-true. Back on this world, the mentally ill rarely seek treatment voluntarily because they are, wait for it …, mentally ill. This can be put along side of the “those without insurance don’t have it because they can’t afford it (as opposed don’t really want it and want to spend their money elsewhere).
10. Self parody. In which the poster notes in his second part “one of those annoying columns that comes so close to making an important point, only to swerve away into inanity” and then in his response, does exactly that. Examine for example, ” Ironically, government is far, far better at this — by maintaining a monopoly on sanction, they can make punishments more precise and ultimately more just” … in the context of the IRS “justly” decided to single out one parties groups for antagonistic vetting at the prompting of the President.
11. In which “strange” probably means “kinda neat”.
12. And the problem is … likely that the NSA doesn’t have the data but ordinary people do. Ordinary people, on might note, having such information is less problematic than the government.
13. Quantity and quality.
14. Trust and vendors.
15. Don’t worry, wait 2 more years and the expected costs will double again, … why not worry? Well, it was all part of the original “cunning plan.” All part of the “Obama = BlackAdder” (with Biden as Baldrick) theme.
16. Scurillous for whom? I’d hope Ms Hurley would have far better taste than spending time with a sleaze like that.

Dana Milbank explains that the Congressional Budget Office issued glowing reports years ago about how ObamaCare was going to save money. The Obama administration trumpeted those findings far and wide. I noted at the time that the system was gamed because the administration knows the rules by which the CBO comes up with estimates, and wrote the bill to get the best looking numbers at the start. It wouldn’t matter that later estimates would be worse; it would have already been sold to the American people.

But now, things are looking much worse.

The congressional number-crunchers, perhaps the capital’s closest thing to a neutral referee, came out with a new report Tuesday, and it wasn’t pretty for Obamacare. The CBO predicted the law would have a “substantially larger” impact on the labor market than it had previously expected: The law would reduce the workforce in 2021 by the equivalent of 2.3 million full-time workers, well more than the 800,000 originally anticipated. This will inevitably be a drag on economic growth, as more people decide government handouts are more attractive than working more and paying higher taxes.

This is grim news for the White House and for Democrats on the ballot in November. This independent arbiter, long embraced by the White House, has validated a core complaint of the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) critics: that it will discourage work and become an ungainly entitlement. Disputing Republicans’ charges is much easier than refuting the federal government’s official scorekeepers.

The President’s spokesman, Jay Carney, tried to spin it as people who would "spend more time with their family", or perhaps become entrepreneurs. The latter guess is just that; a guess trying to make it sound wonderful. The former is a euphemism for living off the dole because the benefits are better.

Carney noted that these were "personal choices", but he conveniently neglects to mention that they are personal choices spurred on by the government. People respond to incentives; that’s why things like tax deductions work the way they do. ObamaCare is pushing people to dependency.

The CBO numbers prove it.

I knew that many Canadians were leaving their borders to come to the US to avoid the long waits they have to endure up there. I just didn’t know how many. Well a free-market think tank, the Frasier Institute, has published the numbers for 2013. Turns out just under 42,000 folks fled the country, at least temporarily, to jump the line and get the timely care they needed. That was down just slightly from the just over 42,000 that came here in 2012.

This brings up a question in my mind. With the advent of ObamaCare down here, where will these folks go now? And I guess the next obvious question would be, where will we go?

Well, the 3-6 inches of snow turned out to be closer to 6 than 3, perhaps 5 here.

1. I’m on a 6 month “fix it with diet” deal with my doctor or these are likely in my future. Apparently I “lost the genetic lottery” as exercise which normally has a big effect in normalizing your LDL/HDL ratio doesn’t work for me.
2. Misunderstanding miracle.
3. Yesterday I linked a piece noting the silent assent which permitted Mr Hoffman’s death. It’s not like this isn’t a somewhat regular thing.
4. We’re just glad it doesn’t include the partially female athletes.
5. So, does Madison avenue have a clue? Or do the Democrats? Here is a suggestion that November might be a litmus test for that question.
6. So, decades ago, science fiction writer Poul Andersen wrote a series of books featuring the exploits and adventures of a Dominic Flandry. Mr Flandry’s problem was he was knowingly fighting a lost cause, his people (a large human dominated stellar empire) was failing due to cultural decadence. He knew it was a lost cause, but soldiered on regardless. This post reminds me of that. As does this one. And this one.
7. Meanwhile lawmakers concentrate on what is important.
8. Apparently the “new atheists” are “very certain” about many things, kind of like the global warming crowd. Odd then that this is in the context of a Physics community (which involves measurements far more accurate and simpler systems) that isn’t sure if protons decay.
9. Let’s see, first sexual slavery/trafficking and the Super-Bowl was a problem, then it wasn’t. It seems the former might have been more accurate.
10. The real reason.
11. Seriously?
12. Climate and negative feedback. Uhm, the climate has been amazingly stable for hundreds of millions of years. If you don’t think there are lots and lots of negative feedback mechanisms keeping on the rails, then check your shoes, you probably never learned to tie them for that’s clearly pushing your cognitive boundaries.
13. That’s not a “car” engine. It’s a jet fighter plane that forgot to wear its wings.

G’day.

1. Beating a dead horse as it were.
2. Yikes.
3. The crux of the liberal notion that in government lies the solution.
4. Mr Hoffman, justly mourned or a death enabled.
5. Clever.
6. The upcoming political moves by the Admin noted.
7. Lame duckisms.
8. Two governments move toward economic suicide.
9. Obamacare looking more and more like a cunning plan.
10. Well, heck, that describes everyone who came of age in the Nixon era.
11. Mr Obama interview notes “politicians are liars“.
12. Cool tech.
13. 29ers, the new trend. Thank your Democrat leaders for that.
14. Hawkings and the black hole.
15. Some towns have snow removal problems, others don’t.
16. Obama and his “art history” diss … setting aside why he didn’t go for the actual popular fluff majors.

One of the reasons used against the idea of requiring ID to vote is that there has been so little voter fraud detected, that this is a solution looking for a problem. Well, the Department of Investigations in New York City recently finished up a report that shows that voter fraud can be pretty darn easy. Worse, we would have no idea at all that it was actually happening.

Undercover agents from the DOI tried to cast ballots as felons or dead people at 63 polling places last fall. Of the 63 attempts, 61, or 97%, were successful. Now, when they voted, they did so with a write-in for a fictitious “John Test” to keep from affecting the vote count. Ultimately, the DOI published its findings a few weeks ago in a 70-page report accusing the city’s Board of Elections of incompetence, waste, nepotism, and lax procedures.

Of the two attempts that failed, in the first case, a poll worker followed the agent outside and the “voter” was advised to go to the polling place near where he used to live and “play dumb” in order to vote. In the second case, the investigator was stopped from voting only because the felon whose name he was using was the son of the election official at the polling place. So basically, we’re talking about a 100% success rate, completely undetectable, with just a few changes in circumstances.

So the Board of Elections immediately got down to business and started coming up with ways to avoid this in the future. Heh, no, of course not. This is government we’re talking about! John Fund, who wrote the article I’m referring to, put it this way. “The Board approved a resolution referring the DOI’s investigators for prosecution. It also asked the state’s attorney general to determine whether DOI had violated the civil rights of voters who had moved or are felons, and it sent a letter of complaint to Mayor Bill de Blasio.”

Yup, they pointed fingers instead of fixing the problem. That’s why the legislature needs to deal with this, so entrenched bureaucracies don’t stick us with a broken system that’s easily gamed. And, as I’ve noted before, when Georgia got its voter ID law, minority participation went up, and higher than majority participation did. A win-win situation, and one that gets around a government board that is too busy with their little fiefdom to do the right thing. Who could be against that?

So, everybody thinks … and perhaps rightly that Chechin terrorists are a looming threat for the safety of the Sochi Olympics. I don’t understand the following in that respect. So, you’re a dissident or rebel in Chechnia or elsewhere. Why would you set a bomb or attack in Sochi? If you do, you and your cause will be universally reviled the world over. How to you benefit from that? I fail to understand the motives behind an act like that. Why do you want your cause hated and reviled?