One Week In...

So...let's review where we are one week after the government "shutdown," thanks to President Petulant:

• The Park Service has been ordered to shut down numerous public memorials and monuments, including the WW2 Memorial, and the Vietnam Memorial. Most of these are open-air areas on the mall that people simply walk through, and are open 24 hours per day. It cost far more to send Park Service employees out with Barry-cades to close off access and stand guard than it would to simply allow people to walk through as they usually do. A Park Service employee, who asked not to be identified for obvious reasons, has been quoted as saying that the orders came directly from the White House, and told the Washington Times, "We have been told to make life as difficult for people as we can. It's disgusting."


• Vice President Joe Biden tweeted his thanks to a Park Service employee for trying to stand up to those scary WW2 vets who were invading the WW2 memorial - saying that he was proud of her.


• The National Park Service has also attempted to close part of the ocean. Charter Boat captains in Florida were informed that Florida Bay was "closed," and they were prohibited to take anglers into 1,100 square miles of open ocean. Fishing has also been prohibited at Biscayne National Park. Park Service rangers will be on duty to police the ban - once again spending more money on the closure than is normally spent when it is open.


• The National Park Service forced the closure of the Blue Ridge Lodge in North Carolina - a privately-run establishment that happens to be in a leased building on federal land. The 51-room inn was booked solid for October. The Park Service forced patrons to leave, and blocked the driveways leading into the establishment. His 100 employees are now idled.


• The National Park Service has been busily blocking the entrances to National Parks. At Mt. Rushmore, they not only blocked the entrance to the park, they also tried to block off access to turnouts on a public roadway to prevent people from pulling off the road to so much as take pictures of Mt. Rushmore.


• The historic 18th century Virginial Colonial Farm has been ordered to shut down despite the fact that it receives no federal funding and uses no federal resources - because it happens to be on federal land. Again, the Park Service showed up to barricade the parking lots and force people to leave. It was NOT forced to shut down during the last federal shutdown in 1995. They've already lost about $20,000 from events they've been forced to cancel, and the survival of the facility is now in jeopardy. (See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnmcAVupBHk&feature=share)


• 60 families have been forced to leave their privately-owned homes on Lake Mead, including an elderly couple that has owned a home on the lake since the 1970s.


• The Amber Alert Web site was taken off-line for a time - attempts to go there were redirected to a DOJ page saying that the government was closed. That has since been reversed, and the Amber Alert site is back up at last check.


• The GOP-led House has passed a number of bills that would fund specific portions of the government - the Democrat-led Senate refuses to consider any of them, insisting it's all or nothing. Dana Bash of CNN asked Senate majority leader Harry Reid about one such bill, which would have funded experimental cancer trials for children: "But if you can help one child who has cancer, why wouldn't you do it?" Reid replied, "Why would we want to do that?" and denounced the question as "irresponsible."


• Meanwhile, Camp David remains open, as does the golf course at Andrews Air Force Base, because, hey, it's essential that the President be able to play golf when he wants to.


• Also, the Washington Examiner is reporting that the Park Service has OK'd tomorrow's immigration reform rally that's scheduled to take place on the "closed" National Mall.

And the hits just keep on coming - just about every day brings another example of vindictive stupidity. Mark Steyn succinctly put it this way: "The thug usurpers of the bureaucracy want to send a message: In today's America, everything is the gift of the government, and exists only at the government's pleasure, whether it's your health insurance, your religious liberty, or the monument to your fallen comrades."

And those "glitches" on the healthcare.gov Web site? They may not be going away any time soon, according to http://hotair.com/archives/2013/10/07/how-much-worse-will-the-obamacare-website-glitches-get/ - I loved the quote from the founder of a software firm regarding the underlying code architecture: "As a software developer, I’m embarrassed for my profession. If ever delivered such crap, I’d be personally inconsolable. This couldn’t pass an introductory computer science class." As Peter Suderman wrote in a Reason.com blog, "...if the administration knew that the problems were due to more than just traffic, and that they would not be resolved in the first week, then they weren’t telling the truth. And if the administration did not know, then that suggests they may lack the understanding or capability to easily resolve the technical flaws with the exchanges. Either way, at this point, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the administration is either intentionally misleading people, or incompetent, or both."

Harry Browne, who was the Libertarian Party's presidential nominee in 1996 and 2000, observed that "Government is good at one thing: It knows how to break your legs, hand you a crutch, and say, 'See, if it weren't for the government, you wouldn't be able to walk.'" That's never been more accurate than today.

Thinking About Boston

Several years ago, Microsoft held its Worldwide Partner Conference in Boston. I was there, and on Friday of that week, I had about half a day free before I had to head for the airport - so I decided to walk as much of the Freedom Trail as time would allow, starting from my downtown hotel, which was only a couple of blocks off the trail. It was my first and (so far) only chance to be a tourist in Boston, but I would go back in a heartbeat if I had a chance to spend more time there.

It is difficult to describe the feeling of standing by the graves of people whose signatures you've seen on the Declaration of Independence, or walking past a building and seeing a sign telling you that the Declaration was first publicly read aloud from the window above your head, or walking past Paul Revere's home (now a museum that, unfortunately, I had no time to visit), or the Old North Church (of "One if by land, two if by sea" fame).

But what really struck me was the realization that I was 3,000 miles from home, and yet I had no fear or hesitation about walking the city streets. I didn't have to worry about what the policeman on the corner might do to me. The guy I saw wrestling a keg of beer off a delivery truck would look just as natural on the streets of Seattle if you just replaced his Red Sox cap with a Mariners cap. I was surrounded by people going about their business just as they did in my home town.

And I realized more strongly than I ever had before what an incredibly amazing country this is, and how unique it is in the entire sweep of human history, that I could be so far from home and yet have so much in common with the people all around me...because we were all Americans. There is no other country on earth where this is true, and there never has been - and that makes it very special...and I thank God that I was fortunate enough to be born here.

Thanks for listening.

Who Changed the Talking Points?

Greetings from the Left Coast!

This Benghazi thing just gets curiouser and curiouser. CBS is reporting that the office of the Director of National Intelligence ("DNI" - run by James Clapper, who is an Obama appointee) changed the Benghazi talking points before they were given to Susan Rice for use in her circuit of the Sunday news talk shows 5 days after the attack. However, the DNI spokesperson also said: "The intelligence community assessed from the very beginning that what happened in Benghazi was a terrorist attack." And according to the CBS report, "That information was shared at a classified level -- which Rice, as a member of President Obama's cabinet, would have been privy to."

So why did Clapper's office decide to make those changes? And are we to understand that Susan Rice simply took the talking points she was handed and headed out on the talk show circuit without knowing that they had been edited, even though, in the words of CBS, she would have been privy to the unedited version? Or was she, in fact, delivering a message that she knew to be false? Either of these alternatives would be cause for concern, although, obviously, the latter would be worse.

And what about the statements made by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on September 14 to the relatives of the slain when the bodies came home? It strains credibility to believe that, if the intelligence community "assessed from the very beginning that what happened in Benghazi was a terrorist attack," the Secretary of State would be ignorant of that four days after the fact. Yet, at that ceremony, she was still maintaining that the violence was due to "an awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with."

And, as if that's not enough, a spokesperson for the House Intelligence Committee chairman stated that, "The statement released Monday evening by the DNI's spokesman regarding how the Intelligence Community's talking points were changed gives a new explanation that differs significantly from information provided in testimony to the Committee last week." (Emphasis added) "Chairman Rogers looks forward to discussing this new explanation with Director Clapper as soon as possible to understand how the DNI reached this conclusion and why leaders of the Intelligence Community testified late last week that they were unaware of who changed the talking points."

I'm also looking forward to finding out why the new statement doesn't match testimony given last week to a Congressional committee. There's a word for not giving truthful testimony when you're under oath - it's called perjury.

Thanks for listening.

And So It Begins

Greetings from the Left Coast!

Social media is ablaze with indignation over announcements by several businesses, many of them in the restaurant industry, who have now announced that they will be either cutting back on the number of employees or cutting back their employees' hours to less than 30 hours per week as a result of the impending employer mandates that are part of the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. ObamaCare). Many are urging boycotts of these businesses, which seems a bit strange, because a successful boycott would necessarily harm the businesses and therefore lead to even fewer people having jobs.

But let's take an objective look at the facts about what businesses are now facing:

As of January 1, 2014, all businesses that have more than 50 full-time employees must provide them with health insurance or pay a fine. And there will be no such thing as "basic" health insurance - all plans must conform to the government mandate in terms of what must be covered, and what the deductible and annual/lifetime limits can be. One of the things that all business owners who do provide coverage will have to do over the coming year is to review that coverage to make sure it measures up to the government requirements.

The cost of a plan that does meet those requirements is estimated to average about $1.79 per hour per full-time employee. As Betsy McCaughey writes in today's New York Post, that's incidental if you're hiring neurosurgeons, but a significant incremental expense if you're hiring bus boys or sales clerks. In most cases, this will double the health care costs of employers in the retail and fast-food industries. Across all industries, for business of 101 - 1,000 employees, health care costs are expected to go up by about 9.5%. For businesses over 1,000, the increase will be roughly 4.5%.

According to a recent study by the McKinsey & Co. management consulting group, as many as a third of all employers are considering canceling their coverage altogether, because it will be less expensive to pay the $2,000 annual fine per employee than it will be to provide coverage that conforms to the government mandate. Those employees would then either go onto Medicaid (if they qualify), or purchase insurance through one of the state-run insurance pools. In the latter case, depending on their income, a portion of their premium would be subsidized by the government, paid for, in part, by those $2,000/employee fines. And, regardless of what you may have heard, part of the funding will also come from reducing payments to Medicare Advantage plans, and from slowing the growth in payments to Medicare providers such as hospitals, hospices, home health care agencies, and skilled nursing facilities - which is likely to make some of these providers less inclined to accept Medicare patients.

For some employers, hiring that 51st employee may turn out to be cost-prohibitive. Consider a restaurant with 50 employees, that currently pays minimum wage (not uncommon for employees that get a large portion of their income from tips) with few or no benefits. In fact, let's say this restaurant was paying more than Washington's minimum wage of $8.55/hour - let's say our restaurant is paying $10/hour, just to make the math simple. Today, hiring that 51st employee costs roughly $20,000 (2,000 hours x $10). But as of January 1, 2014, hiring that 51st employee would mean paying the $2,000 annual fine for employees 31 - 51: that's an additional $42,000. So hiring that 51st employee will actually cost the business $62,000, not $20,000. In all likelihood, that employer simply will not hire that 51st employee.

The other alternative, of course, is to reduce employee hours to less than 30 hours per week, which is the threshold under the ACA that defines a "full-time" employee. However, fines under the employer mandate also are imposed on workers who are not full-time, because a combination of employees working an aggregate of 120 hours per month will count as one full-time employee. This provision will be particularly painful for seasonal businesses, where it is often not cost-effective to provide insurance benefits to employees who will only be with the business for a short period of time.

Businesses have to make a profit or they don't survive, which means that all of their employees lose their jobs - which, by the way, is also the logical outcome of a successful boycott. When the government takes action that drives up the cost of doing business, something has to give, and not all businesses have the ability to simply raise prices to pass those costs on to their customers. The retail and fast-food industries in particular are extremely competitive. There is nothing in the ACA that requires a business to simply eat those increased costs, even if they are able to do so.

The most surprising thing to me is that anyone is actually surprised by this. Thanks for listening.

Four More Years? Some Predictions

Greetings from the Left Coast, which, once again, has lived up to its nickname by remaining solidly "blue."

Well, the people have spoken. And, incredibly, they have decided to give Barack Obama four more years. The second-guessing and what-went-wrong analyses will go on for at least that long. Certainly the media had a lot to do with it. If they had done their job in the first place, he wouldn't have been elected in 2008, let alone re-elected with the economy in the dismal shape it's in today. All you need to do is go back and review what the media said about the state of the economy in the run-up to the 2004 election, when, in fact, it was in much better shape than it is today, and compare it to their reporting this campaign season. Add to that their deliberate inattention to the Benghazi story, making it easy for their man to run out the clock, and Barack Obama becomes the first president in modern times to be re-elected with a smaller percentage of the vote than he got the first time around, despite having run the most despicable campaign I can remember in my 60 years on this planet.

In four years, we went from "hope and change" to seniors threatening to "burn this motherf***er down" and c**k-punch Romney if he won. We saw Obama follow precisely the path he accused others of in the last campaign: "When you don't have a record to run on, you paint the other guy as someone people should run away from." We saw the phoney "war on women," which was given legitimacy by a compliant media. We saw Romney falsely accused of indirectly killing a man's wife by being responsible for taking away her health insurance. We saw him falsely accused of wanting to take away women's access to contraceptives. Elect Romney, we were told, and he would overturn Roe v. Wade and completely eliminate "a woman's right to choose," which was patently ridiculous, because it is not possible for any president to simply overturn a Supreme Court decision. Republicans, we were told, were for dirty air and dirty water, and for letting autistic children fend for themselves.

But apparently enough voters believed all of that to put Obama over the top - a realization that saddens me. It isn't pleasant to realize that so many of my fellow citizens are that susceptible to lies and manipulation. We may have had an excuse in 2008 in that the media didn't do its job in telling us who Obama was and what he believed. But we've seen him govern for four years now, and we've seen that he is, as some of us tried to say in the beginning, an extreme left-wing ideologue who wants to reshape the nation to fit his ideology and has no desire to compromise. We've seen the results of his four years: continuing high unemployment, anemic economic growth, disdain for the separation of powers, and a willingness to simply ignore laws that he finds inconvenient to the pursuit of his goals. There is no excuse this time for not knowing who Barack Obama is. But we re-elected him anyway.

It's possible that we've finally reached the tipping point in the electorate that we've been warned about. When nearly 50% of the population pays no federal income tax, and 10% of the population pays 70% of all the federal income tax collected, we are in a dangerous place as a nation. Why shouldn't a large portion of the population vote for bigger government and more entitlements if they're not the ones who have to pay for it? If you add in those who simply can't be bothered to educate themselves on the issues beyond the 5-second sound bites on the six o'clock news, those people may now be in the majority. Only time will tell. And if you think I'm overstating the case, consider that the top Google search trend in the few days before election day was "who is running for president." Most of those searches came out of North Carolina, with Ohio and Pennsylvania coming in second and third, respectively. All three, of course, being "swing states" that were enormously important in the election, and that had been saturated by ads for months.

But, nevertheless, today's reality is that Barack Obama will be our President for four more years. So what should we expect? Here are some predictions that I really hope are wrong. We'll circle back in a few years and see how many I got right:

• The Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. ObamaCare) is here to stay. (This statement really isn't a prediction, it's now a fact of life.) Four years from now, we will be much too far down that road to unwind things, or to do more than implement some minor tweaks. As Obama knew all along, by the time the majority of Americans find out they've been lied to about the cost of the program, their ability to keep their own insurance if they like it, etc., it will be too late. It only remains to be seen how much damage will be done to the economy from companies deciding not to hire new employees because of the cost of providing them with health care, or cutting them back to fewer than 30 hours per week so they aren't required to do so, or dumping their health plans altogether and pushing their employees to the health insurance exchanges because it's less expensive for the employers to pay the annual fine than it is to pay the premiums.
• Sometime in the next four years, unless stopped by an Israeli attack, Iran will obtain nuclear weapons.
• The Muslim Brotherhood will turn Egypt into an Islamist state and renounce Egypt's peace treaty with Israel.
• At some point in the next four years, possibly as a result of increasing instability in the Middle East, the average price of a gallon of gas will top $5.00.
• Unemployment will not drop below 6% in the next four years, unless the number is manipulated by more and more people giving up on finding a job and dropping out of the labor force. We will be told that this is the "new normal."
• Economic growth will continue at its current anemic level of roughly 2% per year, which will not be enough to return us to pre-recession employment levels by the end of Obama's second term.
• Federal deficits will continue to average $1 trillion per year.
• Sometime in the next four years, America's credit rating will be downgraded again.
• President Obama will continue to blame Republicans in general, and former President Bush in particular, for our ongoing economic problems.

As I said, I sincerely hope that I'm wrong on all of the above. We'll find out over the next four years. Thanks for listening.

Another Teachable Moment

Bill O'Reilly was widely criticized for his comments about Hurricane Katrina being a "teachable moment." But now, in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, we find that many of the points he made after Katrina are still applicable, even though the other party is in power in Washington, and even though the disaster hit relatively affluent areas of New York and New Jersey rather than poor neighborhoods in New Orleans. He reiterates these points in a column yesterday on townhall.com:

Here's the big lesson from mega-storm Sandy: Mother Nature sneers at high tech, mocks modern convenience and couldn't care less about what kind of person you are. She will smack you if she wants to.

As we have become addicted to machines, many of us have forgotten about nature. We must have gizmos. Sandy laughed and took them away. Power, gone. Internet, dark. Cellphones, not happening. Even your landline phone, not available, because "all circuits are busy."

Suddenly, it's 1850 with one exception: battery-operated flashlights and radios.

So what is the lesson here?...

First: No government agency can help you when disaster strikes. Any assistance will be after the fact and painstakingly slow.

Second: In order to ride out any storm effectively, you should be self-reliant and resiliant. That means you have to anticipate problems and have some solutions at the ready.

Is the government helping storm victims? Yes, to the best of its ability - but anyone who reviews the myriad of stories coming out of New York in general,and Staten Island in particular, has to agree that the government aid has been, in O'Reilly's words, "after the fact and painstakingly slow."

If you've ever flown, you've heard the pre-flight briefing that says that, in a depressurization event, you should put your own oxygen mask on first, before trying to assist those around you. That's so you'll be conscious so you can assist those around you! The same thing applies to emergency preparedness, whether you're in a hurricane corridor, or in earthquake country, or "Tornado Alley," or a low-lying area that's vulnerable to a tsunami, etc., etc. Do everything you can to be personally prepared for an emergency - you'll then be better able to help other people while you wait for other assistance to arrive.

There are some great planning resources at http://www.ready.gov, and at http://www.redcross.org/prepare. Businesses can find some great tips at http://www.readyrating.org on how to make sure their business, and their employees, are prepared for emergencies. And if you're just too busy to put together a personal survival kit, you can order them ready-made at http://lifegear.com/survival-kits.html. A couple of years ago, I saw one of their kits in my local Costco for only $79.99.

There was a great article in this morning's Everett Herald about how ordinary volunteers in New York are making a big difference in helping storm victims. A key point to remember is that those people couldn't be doing what they're doing to help if they were victims themselves.

When Did History Begin, Anyway?

Greetings from the Left Coast!

Another of the most annoying lies of this election season is the one about how poor President Obama can't get things fixed because of the evil, obstructionist Republicans. It's as though the first two years of his Presidency never took place - you know, those two years when the Democrats had a majority in the House, and a filibuster-proof supermajority in the Senate, and the Republicans were completely powerless to stop anything. We talked about that just yesterday. It's how we got the stimulus bill that didn't stimulate, because the shovel-ready jobs turned out not to be as shovel-ready as we'd thought, and the 2,700 page health care bill that we had to pass so we could find out what was in it.

Since the Republicans took back the House in the 2010 election, they've at least passed a budget bill. The Democrat-controlled Senate refuses to even debate the House budget bill while also refusing to pass one of it's own. We haven't had an actual federal budget since 2009. We've just been kicking the can down the road by passing a series of "continuing resolutions" that simply agree to keep funding everything at its current level for a few more months...hence the unending string of trillion-dollar deficits. The last two budget proposals President Obama sent up the Hill failed to get even a single vote from anyone in his own party.

The only good thing about that is that at least spending hasn't continued to grow astronomically as it would have if his budget proposals had been approved. So remember that when you hear the spin about how federal spending has been flat over the last three years under President Obama. It isn't for lack of trying on his part - it's because the Democrats in Congress are too irresponsible to actually pass a budget bill, and too afraid to go on record as supporting the level of spending that they'd really like to have. They'd rather blame the Republicans and hope that we're too stupid to figure out what's really going on.

If President Obama is looking for someone to blame, all he needs to do is invite Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid over for breakfast, then pull up a fourth chair and prop up a mirror in it.