You Vet Your Life

He's also a small arms expert.

In the face of increased terror activity in Europe and threatened terror activity domestically, Barack Obama has cinched up his big boy pants and made his strongest rhetorical attack to date...on Republicans.

"Apparently, they’re scared of widows and orphans coming into the United States of America," the president said of concerns about terrorists hiding among refugees. "First, they were worried about the press being too tough on them during debates.  Now they’re worried about three-year-old orphans.  That doesn’t sound very tough to me."

Actually, Mr. Obama, the worries are bipartisan and they're not about "widows and orphans." They're about you, the lies you tell, and the growing suspicion that your longterm plans for America have little to do with either national security or traditional American values.

Regarding Syrian refugees he's bringing into the country (not including those attempting to enter illegally across our federally-mandated open borders), the president says that his administration's process for vetting is "the most rigorous conceivable" and includes the use of "biometrics" which, apparently, was on his Word of the Day calendar.

And who should know more about vetting than a man who's managed to avoid being personally vetted for his entire adult life? To hear Barry tell it, the current standards for admitting Syrian refugees are more rigorous than those for being president.

Which is a good thing, now that we've seen how much damage one man can do.

UPDATE: GOING TO HEALTH IN A HANDBASKET

To paraphrase the Rolling Stones, "You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you can't even get what you need, dammit."

We are referring, of course, to the miracle of Obamacare. For three weeks, we've been trying to find a replacement health insurance policy for the one which was just cancelled (for 300,000 Texans) owing to the fact that the Affordable Care Act made it unaffordable for the company to offer anymore.

Try as we might, we weren't able to find ANY policy which would allow us to keep our doctors, our local hospital, our pharmacy, our money, or our dignity. Which is why we finally gave up and worked with a professional (we're not being snide - this guy saved our hiney and we're grateful) who gave us the semi-gratifying news that we weren't being stupid or imagining things, there really AREN'T any decent options available anymore.

In a two hour marathon session, we determined that our current doctors just aren't available under any Obamacare policy (a process which would have gone faster if the databases listing every freaking doctor within 25 miles were alphabetized. No, we're not kidding.)

In the end, we settled for a policy which would at least be accepted at the local hospital when our inevitable aneurysm strikes while reading the news.  It's a high deductible HMO policy for about $15,000 which required us to immediately pick a new doctor at random (nearly random; alphabetized or not, we chose a name that seemed like it might belong to an English speaker) who will be the new gatekeeper to prevent us from getting additional medical services from the HMO, while we continue to meet our actual doctors in back alleys and pay cash.

Make no mistake, the health insurance system is actively and rapidly collapsing exactly as it was designed to do under Obamacare. The nation's largest provider of health insurance is giving signals that it may exit the Obamacare market entirely in the near future, other providers are slashing coverage and choice of physicians in the face of poor enrollment numbers, and most of the much-vaunted insurance "co-ops" have already gone out of business.

But take heart. As much as it seems that the whole industry has gone to hell, rest assured that within the next several years we'll look back on the mess we have now as "the good old days."