Hope n' Change isn't going to do much in the way of editorializing today. After this week's disappointing developments on the budget and Obamacare, and feeling like we're running as hard as we can just to find ourselves right back where we started, we're pausing today to catch our breath and drink deeply from the bottle attached to the side of our cage.
It is not a water bottle.
Enjoy your weekend - Monday we all need to be back in the wheel!
Random Bonus Cartoons:
26 comments:
Replace the word "ineptitude" in the third comic with "general government bureaucracy that anyone with half a brain or has ever visited the DMV should have been able to see coming" and it would be more accurate.
Still funny though.
I certainly feel like that hamster. Thank goodness it's Friday.
Good ones, Dr. J! Yep, we're in the wheel, and folks, it's the Wheel of Misfortune. I like the new Punk "Rock" group, too! I got a nice email from one of my Senators this morning:
"This government shutdown was completely unnecessary. Congress should have never gotten to the point where the government was shut down and on the verge of a default crisis, and neither Republicans nor Democrats should attempt to take a victory lap after last night's vote.
However, I am glad the Senate passed a bipartisan plan to re-open the government and avert a default crisis that would have been disastrous for our economy and our middle class families. I wasn't elected to shut down the government or play political games, and it's time for Congress to stop manufacturing crises and get to work on a long-term, bipartisan and balanced plan to get our fiscal house in order, grow our economy and give certainty to families and business owners.
Really, Kay? The Senate plan was bipartisan? CONGRESS is manufacturing crises? It's time for CONGRESS to stop playing games?
Lord, please save us from Senators like this who allow Harry Reid to decide EVERYTHING, then echo his twisted talking points.
Excellent, Stilt. A never ending treadmill of useless, non-productive energy output is what this administration is all about. And we can add an incredible waste of money as well. But, it's not his money so why should he be concerned? Actually, if you count progress on the road to socialism leading to a Marxist society then it is productive.
Ah! The glittering ineptitude of the nattering nabobs of crony capitalism in the Obama administration. As a web site designer myself, having to make a system written in 1965 in Fortran and Cobol intergrate with AutoCad and talk to the web, we were way past Web 1.0 tech, and that was 12 years ago.
From Hot Air:
Admin Refused To Bring In Outside Help
A note from Ed Klein regarding who is really running the country:
Valerie Jarret - Obama's Shutdown Architect
Ed Klein's The Amatuer was truly scary when you realize what we have in the WH and how VJ and Mooch dominate Obama.
When you look at The One's roots, you begin to see the ingrained problems: mother was a anti-american whacko, father was an alcoholic, a pedophile who took little Barry to visit the stump more than a few times, abandoned, raised by grandparents - taught life by a devout Communist, hated by the white kids 'cause he was black, by the black kids 'cause he wasn't pure black, extensive marijuana and drug use when brain was still in formative stage, and his history with women shows his preference for strong willed women who dominate him. God help us!
@Gothmog, HAMster... you'd better watch out. lamont insane obama is having such success it may soon be illegal to write that. He may change the name of that animal to LAMBster so it will be "halal", you know, so we don't "offend" those "camel-shagging beheaders"!
@Colby, I got the same e-mail from Michael BenNUT, nearly word for word boilerplate bullshit! I'm changing my "spell-check" to "Senaturd", and adding it as a synonym in my thesaurus for "mindless", "imbecilic", "worthless", and "vacuous"!
Grumpy Curmudgeon, BRILLIANT assessment of lamont! Nobody could have distilled his relational pathology more succinctly! (BTW, Fortran... Cobol... was it difficult to chisel that onto stone tablets?)
@Gothmog- I'm pretty sure that's what "ineptitude" actually means - and you're right, it was all predictable to anyone with half a brain. As John the Econ pointed out recently, it may well have been Ted Cruz's fillibuster which forced the administration to stick to their kamikaze-like timetable for opening the site. If so, then Cruz did the country an enormous service by having this vast, broken, and entirely unworkable system revealed before Barry's team could put lipstick on it.
@Colby- The Senate plan was bipartisan! It had everything the Dems wanted, plus $2+ billion in earmarks for Republican Mitch McConnell's home state.
And isn't it funny how the Dems are suddenly concerned that "uncertainty" about government can be injurious to the business climate? The hypocrisy makes me gag.
@Fred- I think progress towards increased socialism is very much the agenda of this White House, and Barry is achieving success after success towards that goal.
@Grumpy Curmudgeon- Geez, the story at the link you supplied is painful (and totally unsurprising). The Obama administration put petty politics ahead of creating a system that would actually work. This is crass partisanship which will cause deaths and untold damage to the economy for years to come.
The story about Valerie Jarret is entirely believable, too. She actually scares me more than Barry, who is largely an angry but reasonably telegenic meat puppet. Jarret is smart and, for lack of a better word, evil.
And you're right about Barry's background: this guy is a psychological minefield, filled with self-loathing which he has now directed against the country he feels is to blame.
@Reiuxcat- Exactly.
@Bruce Bleu- If the same people who implemented the software for Obamacare had designed the spying programs for the NSA, we could pretty much say whatever we want, wherever we want, without fear that it would ever reach the government's ears.
@Bruce Bleu: The chiseling wasn't too bad on the key punch cards, but flogging the mice that ran in the CPU slave gallery was hell.
From the Heritage Foundation: (you need to scroll to see the chart)
How Will Your Health Insurance Premium Fare?
I'd say Virginia really PO'd somebody, but then, most will get their gov't worker subsidy.
You could make a GIF out of that hamster on the wheel image & get in on some of that $600,000,000+ being poured into that ObamaCare exchange computer system. When people are waiting forever for the site to download, instead of getting a little "spinny thing", they could watch the hamster go round and round. Don't sell yourself short - should be worth $500,000 easy.
Stilt: While you're on the subject of small rodents, I think a rat in a maze would do well for describing the average person trying to negotiate the Healthcare.gov website. Of course you'd have to include Kathleen Sebelius "shocking" the poor critter at every turn.
On another note, I'll never again be able to listen to "Finlandia" without thinking of that demented hag. Too bad, it's a wonderful composition.
Obama is the KING of ineptitude!
The guy holds the TOP SPOT in this country or the world for that matter! Anyone with any brains could have used this position to do all manner of harm and chaos to this nation! Thank God he really is a stupid man, totally given in to his ego, mad for power! I think this can be chalked up to the fact that he had NO real world experience before being put in the driver's seat.
Stilt, if this had been you, or any one of my fellow bloggers here, I believe we could have done a hundred times more damage or a hundred times more good if that is what we wanted to do! Just be thankful for his DRIVE which overshadows his intellect by far!
Shame on all the people, the media, his inner circle, congressmen, who respect the bubble that he lives in! I read a report from an insider that he DOES NOT pay attention to what is going on in the news; rather, he watches tons of sports and gets his reports from his dumbed-down scared-to-death advisors and such!
Pretty pathetic state of affairs! Everyone have a nice weekend, totally ignore the news for a few days, it will do you good!
"Obama is the KING of ineptitude!"
Really?
He stood his ground, and the GOP got nothing. ObamaCare remains "settled law" and will continue to destroy the private marketplace for our health care. Meanwhile, while the shutdown had everyone distracted, he was able to replace Bernanke with another Neo-Keynesian, Janet Yellen. Instead of "tapering" QE, whe will keep interest rates at near-zero and will continue to allow the printing of dollars that will mask the real Obama deficit.
Did you listen to his petulant little speech yesterday? He sure thinks he won. While listening to that, I have no doubt that the GOP squishies who let this all get out of hand were all thinking to themselves "We did a deal with this clown?". They got rolled.
I do think the Tea Party got a small victory in that Obama and the vast bureaucracy gave the public a taste of the vindictive soft-fascism that is lurking just under their surface. If the Tea Party was smart, they'd be telling everyone who'd listen that this is just a taste of what the Federal government has in store for them when they refuse to go along with what they want in the future. Except in a few years, it won't just be national parks and passports they'll be withholding from you for not voting properly.
Unfortunately, I'm pretty certain that will not be enough. We have enough people in this country now who have been spared critical thinking skills, and honestly believe that a government that would close public spaces simply out of spite would never deny them their entitlements for the same reasons.
I'm afraid that the genetics behind "American Exceptionalism" have biw been too diluted.
Obama may be an aberration. Clearly he's not the all-wise Philosopher King the Left wants and yearns to believe he is.
I doubt he's well educated or well read in the way most reasonably bright people define those accomplishments. Certainly when off-teleprompter he stutters, mispronounces, misspeaks, uh's and um's like some Hawaiian private prep school stoner who didn't do his homework assignment.
No offense to golfers, but an overwhelming obsession with same little balls/same holes as last time/repeat endlessly is not a marker for Sherlockian intellect. I don't doubt he likes to watch sports, and that televised games can keep him on the edge of his seat with suspense.
It's seductively comforting to feel superior to your opponent intellectually. The Left particularly thrives on it, and is intoxicated by namecalling and demonizing generally. In wartime we usually designate the enemy leader as a 'madman', which if clinically correct would give us a huge advantage...we hope. Churchill, Hitler and Stalin each called the others madmen. Especially when they felt themselves in jeopardy of losing.
Obama's Cabal wants and is successfully imposing plans on our nation that are violently opposed to everything we believe in. If he himself is not Mensa material, it matters little--a figurehead doesn't have to be. Those who own this sock-puppet and pull his strings after plucking him from obscurity, and the lieutenants who have been appointed around him, seem quite clever enough for the evil, but not very complicated, destructions they are gleefully executing.
It's been said that contrary to his own successful propaganda, the trains under Mussolini weren't on time any more than they'd ever been. There's no need for Obamacare to 'work', and not working seems to be a planned feature, not a bug, probably the better to hasten Single Payer.
Obama deserves our contempt as well as our resistance, but let's not flatter ourselves. There may very well be a village in Kenya missing its idiot, but that idiot has his feet propped up in the Oval Office.
Inept? Only if you think his goal is to help.
As for the goal of fundamental transformation, well, he and his Panzer Korps are rolling unopposed into the outskirts of Paris.
Speaking of the Thirties, Stilton I'm glad you'll be reading 1935's IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE. The title came from the phrase Sinclair Lewis said he was tired of hearing people the elite repeat at dinner parties when he warned of the appeal of fascism.
Buzz Windrip's transformation seems almost benign compared to what Obama's puppeteers are imposing.
@Rufus T Firefly, Barack Obama is no aberration. Although the elite left feels comforted by the fact that he had the correct education at the correct institutions, the sad reality is that he's the product of affirmative action".
I'd go on, but some time ago I came across this that said it all so much better:
You Didn't Build It...because I Didn't Earn It. By Abraham H. Miller
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/07/you_didnt_build_itbecause_i_didnt_earn_it.html
"Obama knows he didn't have what it took to get into Columbia, and he didn't have what it took to get into Harvard Law. Let's face an inescapable reality. If Obama had great grades, his transcripts would be in a full-page ad in the New York Times."
"If you come of age in an environment where nearly everyone around you competed and worked hard to get where they are and you didn't, the way you defend against the inevitable ensuing feelings of inadequacy is to create a psychological rationale that no one, absolutely no one, got anywhere except with a leg up and a helping hand from others. Their "affirmative action" is just less conspicuous than yours, but the bottom line is that you are no different from them."
Deep inside, Obama knows he's a fraud. In a sense, he really is a victim of "Affirmative Action". The sad part is that we all are forced to go on the ride to justify such levels of mediocrity.
I have written a little observation of what I see as the over-riding problems with the Obamacare web - a little long to post here, but I think maybe worth the read - but it into what most people can follow.
Stupid Is To The Bone
@grumpycurmugeon
Thanks for the informing article. It really is unbelievable that with all the lead time to set all this up, it's still not working...but, makes me wonder, knowing how this bunch is...is it on purpose, with single payer in mind? Once you get a law into effect, it never goes away, and all the more easier to transform it into what you REALLY wanted to begin with! All I can do is shake my head.
@ John, yes exactly. If Obama had great grades, instead of spending millions (of DNC money? Who paid for those millions of legal fees to suppress Obama's birth and personal history records?Follow the money) to seal them, they'd have been bragging points. Of course, there may be other school issues Obama needs to keep secret more urgently, such as a 'foreign exchange student, Indonesian citizen' status. We can only guess.
GrumpyC, nice article. My IBM-engineer, computer-PhD cousin was appalled as he tried to navigate the Obamacare site. He was able to recognize glaring architecture and design issues like Indiana Jones exploring a booby-trapped tunnel. (And made no more progress than the non-PhD population)
We've all known from early on that Obamacare was just a transition step, a deliberately shaky temporary bridge to funnel the Sheeple from the existing system (world's best healthcare with some correctable omissions) to the ultimate destination,the NHS/old Soviet system now renamed 'Single Payer'.
The screaming fail of the rollout just confirms that. And it says that the transitional phase may be shorter than expected (even by its proponents).
In the wonderful Doublethink world of short-attention-span PMT (Progressive Magical Thinking), all the failures of Obamacare will be magically transformed into proof that We Need Single Payer Now! That's already the startup spin on the leftist blogs and the MSM.
The Left is incapable of grasping that there might be any area of human life which Government just can't do. Program failures are proof that MORE money, MORE power and MORE regulations are urgently required.
We are talking, after all, about a Left that espouses disproven Marxist fantasies despite the total failure of the USSR-- the reigns of terror, genocides, atrocities, police state, mass starvations and ultimate crash and burn, the whole pathetic failed experiment.
These are people immune to reason, and apparently incapable of it. Nothing more dangerous or intractable than mediocre people of low to average intelligence with a failed ideology who have convinced themselves they are Unique Geniuses following Perfect Truth.
Have a great weekend all. I'm going to Netflix up some classic 20C. American films this afternoon and enjoy some two-fisted red-blooded American exceptionalism. And a beverage suitable for our times.
Stilton, thank you as always for HnC. I know we're all glad things seem to be improving with your family.
Finally - Truth in Advertising:
Obamacare - Truth In Advertising
Guys:
Per Harry Reid, and I quote:
"It was never supposed to work"
"In the wonderful Doublethink world of short-attention-span PMT (Progressive Magical Thinking), all the failures of Obamacare will be magically transformed into proof that We Need Single Payer Now! That's already the startup spin on the leftist blogs and the MSM."
The only comeback conservatives have to this is the obvious: "If they can't even run a single web site that they've had 3 years to perfect, how can you possibly believe that they can run a whole medical system?"
Magic?
BTW, Obama will be addressing the problems with the 0-care site at 11:30a EDT. Not sure what he's going to say, other than trotting out the "Microsoft doesn't get it right the first time either" trope, and that his "best" people are working on it.
Does anybody actually know anybody who's actually been successful at it?
" The Ark is somewhere perfectly safe, I assure you, Dr. Brady, Dr. Jones. We have top men working on it right now."
"Who?"
Malignant pause."Top. Men."
This morning's presser was little more than just another commercial. The only thing interesting was when one of his "success stories" nearly collapsed during the speech. We know how she feels. Listening to him is quite tiring.
Basically, he said that if you already have insurance, you're in great shape. In fact, you're even better office since of all the new "freebies". (Of course, what he doesn't say is that my plan has almost doubled since he became President)
As for the failing website, he mentioned all of the ways you can take advantage of 0bamaCare without having to use the web site. You can actually wait on hold on the phone if the virtual waiting room isn't to your liking.
There was nothing new here. Just the usual BS. Everything is fine, so he seems to say.
Exactly what a number of us have been saying:
H/T: Hot Air:
The Tech Surge Isn't Going To Rescue Obamacare's Web
@Grumpy- Thanks for the link! That's going straight into the commentary for Wednesday!
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