Why I hate Obamacare

Why I hate Obamacare

Mike Walker, Col USMC (retired)

It has nothing to do with Gruber or bad websites or false statements like: “If you like your health plan, you can keep your plan.” Those are correctable irritants.

I hate Obamacare on two counts.

The first was just addressed by Senator Schumer: Some 85% of Americans had health care from either their employer or the government BEFORE Obamacare.

The creators of Obamacare decided that it was time for BIG GOVERNMENT to fix what was not broken and tinker with EVERYONE’s health care.

That has proven a colossal failure.

It is the second failure, however, that really makes me hate Obamacare. 

What about the uncovered 15%?

While BIG GOVERNMENT in Washington was failing badly at “playing God” with the 85% that were covered, the 15% who needed health care got shoved under the bus.

Just to show how terribly misguided the Obamacare zealots are, many are now cheering and patting themselves on the back after announcing that only 4% got covered while 11% got nothing.

Really? You maroons goofed up 100% of the system in order to leave 11% uncovered. That is failure writ large.

The Republicans just took control of both chambers in the Capitol. They claim to have the answers to Obamacare's problems. Really?

Here is some sage advice: Help the 11% first and then save the rest of us.

Mike

Soviets Won the Second World War?

Soviets Won the Second World War?

Col Mike Walker, USMC, retired

All,

The “Soviets Won the Second World War” mythology is running around again.

We will put aside the cogent point that there never would have been a Second World War if Stalin had not allied himself with Hitler to invade Poland in September 1939 and move on the argument at hand.

Historian Norman Davies once wrote: 

“The Soviet war effort was so overwhelming that impartial historians of the future are unlikely to rate the British and American contribution to the European theatre as much more than a sound supporting role.”

That is over-the-top silliness. 

Indisputably, the Eastern Front was not just the largest and most dominant land campaign of the Second World War but in recorded history and was essential to the Allied victory.

However, the case is not at all clear that the war can be characterized as a “400 division clash” in the East versus a “15 to 15 division” fight in the West as Davies further argued. That claim crumbles before serious and objective analysis.

A. The critic’s numbers do not add up

First, the war was global for the United States (US) and the British Commonwealth (UK) troops who made up of the bulk of the remaining anti-Axis combatants, save China.
  

The Soviets never had to build, equip, man and train the vast naval forces needed to defeat the U-boat threat in the Atlantic, battle the Imperial Japanese Navy in the Pacific and simultaneously deploy and sustain large ground and air forces worldwide.
  

To put this in perspective, the U.S. Army comprised only 8.5 million of the 16 million Americans who served in uniform during the war.

Second, the “400 division clash in the east versus a “15 to 15 division” fight in the west” argument is hard to follow.  The 400 division number is true enough when counting the total forces on the front but when the Nazi armies peaked in the east during the 1942-1943 period, their 200 plus divisions included approximately:

10 Italian divisions

18 Romanian divisions

9 Hungarian, divisions

15 Finnish divisions

Not an insignificant portion of the Nazi order of battle.

The Allied ground campaign in the West was more extensive than the critics are willing to admit.

On the Nazi side, the rough disposition of their forces (to include other Axis armies) in mid-1944 (before D-Day) shows that the Eastern Front was still dominant:

Approximately 200 divisions on the Eastern Front

28 divisions in the Balkans

17 divisions in Italy

8 divisions in Norway

61 divisions in the West

As the war progressed after D-Day, the number of Nazi divisions sent to the West continually increased and the number in the East continually declined.

By January 1945, the numbers were:

Approximately 145 divisions on the Eastern Front

15 divisions in the Balkans

28 divisions in Italy

15 divisions in Norway

79 divisions in the West

There was net decrease in the number of Nazi divisions during this period due to losses suffered on the war fronts. 

It would be wrong to down play the importance of the Western Allied onslaught during this period. Consider this statistic: After D-Day, the US Army alone captured on average the equivalent of one German division per week, every week throughout 1944. As the war on the Eastern front progressed, prisoners were often not taken which attributed to disparity in deaths and POWs taken.

When the Allies began the final 1945 offensive following the Battle of Bulge, Eisenhower had three Army Groups involved:

US 6th Army Group under Devers with 22 divisions

US 12th Army Group (main effort) under Bradley with 48 divisions

British 21st Army Group under Montgomery with 17 divisions

The 1^st Allied Airborne Army with 1 division was in strategic reserve

The US/UK forces also had the British 8th Army and US 5th Army in Italy that together totaled another 16 divisions. 

All in all, Eisenhower had 104 divisions in Europe by late 1944/early 1945. The “15 on 15” statement is nonsensical.

Fighting Japan, the US/UK ground forces had another 38 divisions deployed:

Six divisions with the British 14th Army in Burma plus 21 US Army, 6 US Marine and 5 Australian Divisions in the Pacific

B. Size Matters

Significantly, a US infantry division was manned at 13,700 soldiers compared with 10,400 for the Soviets and similar size difference existed for armored units (which had both more tanks and troops per unit) and Commonwealth units were larger still.

If we adjust for those differences, the Western Allies had the equivalent of 232 “Soviet size” divisions on the front lines by late 1944, extending from the Dutch-Belgian-French front to Italy to Burma and on to the Pacific.

C. Lend-Lease was vital to Red Army Success

Subtract out Lend-Lease and the power of the Red Army was significantly degraded.

The US provided over 7,000 tanks and the British another 5,000 as well as 11,000 US and 9,000 British aircraft. The overall amount of fuel and food supplies shipped to the Red Army was enough to keep 80 Russian divisions in the field.

Not surprisingly, putting in place the global logistics chain represented a major Allied commitment of resources and many Allied sailors lost their lives sailing through enemy laden artic waters to “deliver the goods.” 

D. The role of the USAAF-RAF strategic bombing campaign on the Soviet war effort has been undervalued 

After the failed German 1943 Kursk offensive, the Luftwaffe shifted the overwhelming majority of its fighter squadrons to Germany and other parts of Western Europe to battle RAF Bomber Command the emerging US Eighth Air Force. This eliminated the Luftwaffe as a major threat to the Red Army. 

Between 1939 and 1945, the Luftwaffe added slightly more than 13,000 88-mm flak guns for air defense duty. The army only received 3,500 such guns in the same period, but they were effective anti-tank guns of the war. 

Had those weapons been deployed in numbers to the Eastern Front, they would have turned Wehrmacht anti-tank defenses into vast killing fields for the Red Army’s armored forces. 

Finally, the strategic bombing of German oil production largely grounded the Luftwaffe and went far in making the Soviet 1945 breakout at the Baranov bridgehead on the Vistula River a success when the 1,200 German panzers massed there were rendered useless for lack of fuel.

There was never a case where a Red Army offensive defeated a mobile panzer force of that size while operating on ideal tank terrain. Allied strategic bombers first forced the removal of the Luftwaffe fighters, then removed thousands of deadly tank-killer "88s" from the battlefield and finally turned a huge panzer army into a mass of expensive and largely static pillboxes. Those factors were arguably decisive.

Western air power indirectly played a major role on the Eastern Front in 1944 and 1945.

E. Conclusions

The Eastern Front surely dominated the ground war, but when looking at the combined size and scope of the Western Allies ground, sea, air and material efforts, it could be argued that the West’s aggregate commitment of people, machines and resources was greater. 

Measuring war solely by buckets of blood spilt, however tragic, is a crude and misleading metric. No one played a “supporting role” in gaining the Allied victory. The real truth is that the Allies needed each other. All proved indispensable.

Semper Fi,

Mike

Meet the Snobocrats

Meet the Snobocrats

Victor Davis Hanson, National Review Online

Last week, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Jonathan Gruber, one of prominent architects of Obamacare, was exposed as little more than an elitist fraud.

Gruber was caught on videotape expressing the haughty attitude that drove the Affordable Care Act, deriding the “stupidity” of Americans as a way to justify misleading them.

Gruber apparently thinks such deception is okay because yokel voters could not handle the truth about the looming chaos he helped to engineer in their health coverage.

Unfortunately, Gruber’s disdain for the proverbial masses — he was paid nearly $400,000 in consulting fees — is thematic of the last six years.

Another master-of-the-universe drafter of Obamacare was Ezekiel Emanuel. He scoffed on national television that the number of people covered by Obamacare at that point was “irrelevant.”

Emanuel also drew attention for his recent adolescent rant in a men’s magazine about the desirability of everyone dying at 75 to save society the expense of maintaining what he sees as the unproductive elderly.

Former speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi lectured of Obamacare that “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what’s in it.” The same elitist message reverberates: that government and academic elites are smarter than average Americans, and so need not explain what they are doing.

This is a pattern of Obama administration ruling elites who express disdain or lack of concern about the people they are supposed to serve. Former energy secretary Steven Chu made a series of astounding statements about energy use, the most inane being that America would be better off if gas costs soared to Europe’s sky-high prices.

Susan Rice, the former U.N. ambassador and current national-security adviser, has misled in chronic fashion. She was untruthful about the Benghazi killings on national television, claiming that the attacks on the American consulate were the result of a spontaneous riot over a video. Rice defended the administration’s surreal Sergeant Beau Bergdahl prisoner swap by claiming that the AWOL soldier had served with “honor and distinction.” She again prevaricated on national television when she boasted of a diplomatic breakthrough in getting Turkey to provide U.S. bases and support against the Islamic State.

The list of deceptions and untruths goes on. Remember IRS bureaucrat Lois Lerner’s cute trick of planting a questioner at a conference to leak her own past targeting of conservative groups? The Veterans Administration hierarchy did not just cause the deaths of its own patients, but tried to cover up the scandal.

Do we recall how Attorney General Eric Holder contemptuously called Americans collective “cowards” because they did not necessarily share his identity-politics idea of race relations? Holder was the first attorney general in the nation’s history to be held in contempt of Congress.

President Obama habitually believes that his own superior talents make him immune from accountability.

He has referenced his own talent by bragging, “Just give me the ball,” or, “I’m LeBron, baby.” In 2008, he bragged to an interviewer, “I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m going to think I’m a better political director than my political director.”

That same sense of superiority explains his campaign boast that, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”

No wonder Obama believes that he can just give millions of foreign residents amnesty by executive order — against the will of Congress, the American people, the courts, and his own prior warnings that the president has no such power of fiat.

What explains the sense of entitlement of a few self-anointed grandees believing that they are somehow superhuman and not accountable to common notions of truth?

Progressivism has always assumed that the supposed noble ends of fairness and quality justify any means necessary to achieve them.

Influential Americans also have developed a sick idea about higher education, equating wisdom and character with a degree stamped from an Ivy League or exclusive university.

The media has abdicated its watchdog role. Barack Obama, Jonathan Gruber, Eric Holder, Lois Lerner, and Susan Rice are empowered by understandably assuming that they should be exempt from media criticism.

Wealth and status assure elites that their own lives are never affected by the laws they pass or by the concrete ramifications of their own ideology.

In the view of the snobocrats, the harm that follows from Obamacare, blanket amnesty, or out-of-control bureaucracies should always affect someone else — someone thought to be too stupid to figure out what hit them.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals.  © 2014 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Good old boys...

The farther we get from this guy the more he is going to stink as his media filter evaporates. The left still believes that he is a natural leader. He has not led anything except fund raising.

The Gruber Confession

The Gruber Confession

By Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post

It’s not exactly the Ems Dispatch (the diplomatic cable Bismarck doctored to provoke the 1870 Franco-Prussian War). But what the just-resurfaced Gruber Confession lacks in world-historical consequence, it makes up for in world-class cynicism. This October 2013 video shows MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber, a principal architect of Obamacare, admitting that, in order to get it passed, the law was made deliberately obscure and deceptive. It constitutes the ultimate vindication of the charge that Obamacare was sold on a pack of lies.

“Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” said Gruber. “Basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass.” This was no open-mic gaffe. It was a clear, indeed enthusiastic, admission to an academic conference of the mendacity underlying Obamacare.

First, Gruber said, the bill’s authors manipulated the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which issues gold-standard cost estimates of any legislative proposal: “This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes.” Why? Because “if CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies.” And yet, the president himself openly insisted that the individual mandate — what you must pay the government if you fail to buy health insurance — was not a tax.

Worse was the pretense that Obamacare wouldn’t cost anyone anything. On the contrary, it’s a win-win, insisted President Obama, promising that the “typical family” would save $2,500 on premiums every year.

Skeptics like me pointed out the obvious: You can’t subsidize 30 million uninsured without someone paying something. Indeed, Gruber admits, Obamacare was a huge transfer of wealth — which had to be hidden from the American people, because “if you had a law which . . . made explicit that healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed.”

But of course you couldn’t, as millions discovered when they were kicked off their plans last year. Millions more were further shocked when they discovered major hikes in their premiums and deductibles. It was their wealth that was being redistributed.

As NBC News and others reported last year, the administration knew this all along. But White House political hands overrode those wary about the president’s phony promise. In fact, Obama knew the falsity of his claim as far back as February 2010, when, at a meeting with congressional leaders, he agreed that millions would lose their plans.

Now, it’s not unconstitutional to lie. Nor are laws enacted by means of deliberate deception thereby rendered invalid. But it is helpful for citizens to know the cynicism with which the massive federalization of their health care was crafted.

It gets even worse, thanks again to Gruber. Last week, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case claiming that the administration is violating its own health-care law, which clearly specifies that subsidies can be given only to insurance purchased on “exchanges established by the state.” Just 13 states have set up such exchanges. Yet the administration is giving tax credits to plans bought on the federal exchange — serving 37 states — despite what the law says.

If the plaintiffs prevail, the subsidy system collapses and, with it, Obamacare itself. Which is why the administration is frantically arguing that “exchanges established by the state” is merely sloppy drafting, a kind of legislative typo. And that the intent all along was to subsidize all plans on all exchanges.

Remember: The whole premise of Obamacare was that it would help the needy, but if you were not in need, if you liked what you had, you would be left alone. Which is why Obama kept repeating — PolitiFact counted 31 times — that “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan.”

Re-enter Professor Gruber. On a separate video in a different speech, he explains what Obamacare intended: “If you’re a state and you don’t set up an exchange, that means your citizens don’t get their tax credits.” The legislative idea was to coerce states into setting up their own exchanges by otherwise denying their citizens subsidies.

This may have been a stupid idea, but it was no slip. And it’s the law, as written, as enacted and as intended. It can be changed by Congress only, not by the executive. Which is precisely what the plaintiffs are saying. Q.E.D.

It’s refreshing that “the most transparent administration in history,” as this administration fancies itself, should finally display candor about its signature act of social change. Inadvertently, of course. But now we know what lay behind Obama’s smooth reassurances — the arrogance of an academic liberalism, so perfectly embodied in the Gruber Confession, that rules in the name of a citizenry it mocks, disdains and deliberately, contemptuously deceives.

OBAMA’S “PRAGMATISM”

OBAMA’S “PRAGMATISM”

PAUL MIRENGOFF , Powerline

Peter Berkowitz’s latest column is called “The Poverty of Obama’s Pragmatism.” My first thought was, what pragmatism. 

Obama is, after all, an ideologue. He seeks radically to transform America both at home and in its role abroad. When Obama seeks to redistribute income and to lessen America’s footprint in world affairs, he does so based on a pre-set ideological vision of how things should be, not on an empirical analysis of what course of action will work best in the real world.

But this approach, though not consistent with the common understanding of “pragmatism,” fits comfortably within the tradition of American pragmatist philosophy. As Peter explains:

Rather than dissolving metaphysical questions, [American philosophical] pragmatism encourages the delusion that they have been dissolved. When pressed, philosophical pragmatism becomes a series of rhetorical ruses designed to impel those who wish to explore the deep conflicts between moral, political, and religious views to shut up and go away.
Obama’s political pragmatism operates in similar fashion. It preaches that disputes between left and right that appear unresolvable are illusory, while systematically resolving them in the left’s favor.

Exactly.

Claims that Obama is a pragmatist in the ordinary, non-philosophical sense are based on confusion between substantive pragmatism and political pragmatism. Obama is a politician and thus has often felt compelled to act in politically pragmatic way.

Left to his own devices, Obama would not have increased U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan. Nor is it likely that he would have devoted resources to finding Osama bin Laden. But political considerations forced his hand.

The case of Afghanistan is particularly instructive. Obama tried to split the policy difference by “surging,” but with fewer troops than the military wanted and with a pre-announced withdrawal date.

This move looked politically pragmatic, but certainly was not pragmatic in substance. The true pragmatist always focuses on what is likely to work. Launching a military offensive while telling the enemy how long the campaign will last was inherently unlikely to work.

Obamacare is also instructive. Here too, Obama was politically pragmatic. He relied on congressional Democrats to figure out what would work politically — i.e., what would pass Congress — without worrying about what was in the actual legislation. A genuine pragmatist would never act this way because the legislative details will always have a strong bearing on whether a law will work in practice.

It turns out, however, that even Obama’s political pragmatism is impoverished. Its political consequence is incoherent policies that have undermined both the president and his party.

Going after bin Laden while ignoring the resurgence of al Qaeda throughout the Middle East and North Africa produced disastrous results that are now clear for all to see. Radically reforming the health insurance system without a clear understanding of how the legislation would work, or even what it says, has produced one surprise after another — nearly all of them bad. The Supreme Court may be poised to deliver the final surprise.

Obama is the only president in my lifetime to experience wave-election defeats in two mid-term elections. The first could, perhaps, be explained away as the product of a terrible economy and a highly controversial reform (Obamacare) that had not yet conferred its benefits.

Last week’s wave cannot be so explained. The explanation lies instead in what Peter calls “an inexpedient brew of dogmatic progressivism and disdain for government process.”

Pragmatists in the true sense should be appalled.

Why Many Did Not Vote on Tuesday

Why Many Did Not Vote on Tuesday

Mike Walker, Col USMC (retired)

All,

Here is a corollary to the President’s explanation as to why so many Americans did not vote on Tuesday.

The President focused on Congresses low approval ratings and blamed it on them.

An equally valid point -- based on the President’s own low approval numbers -- is that many stayed home because they believe the President will not listen to them.

They concluded (correctly?) that nothing will make the President change course so voting is a waste of time.

Mike

The CSG Plague, Mike Walker

The CSG Plague

Mike Walker, Col USMC (retired)

All,

We are facing a grave foreign policy and national security policy problem and I would argue, the gravest in my lifetime.

Why?

We have a domestic political agenda masquerading as international policy.

The cause is simple and the recent donnybrook with Israeli Prime Minster Netanyahu captures the problem perfectly.

The foreign policy-national security wonks in the White House are more or less a Chicken S—t Gang (CSG), to use their colorful terminology.

The CSG survives because we all want friendly relations with Russia and Iran, we want a just settlement between the Israelis and Palestinians and we wanted U.S. troops out of Iraq. We all wantworld peace and a strong global economy.

Why is that bad?

The CSG exists to tell us the bad news about bad things abroad. 

The purpose of having a foreign policy-national security group in the White House is not to tell us what we want to hear. Its job is to tell President and us what we do not want to hear.

Simply put, their job is to differentiate what we need from what we want and then ensure that our needs are met.

That requires the CSG to get out of their domestic bubble, something they have proven incapable of doing. That is why we are in the predicament we are in around the world.

Examples of the CSG in Action

The Reset With Russia. This proved a complete fiasco but the CSG wanted to be chums with Putin so the needs of the United States be damned. By the way, the CSG also threw two good allies, Poland and the Czech Republic, under the bus to “please” the Kremlin.

Crushing the 2009 Green Revolution in Iran. This was the first time the CSG gang got caught off balance (shouldn’t we be on the side of peaceful liberal progressives in Iran?) and it defaulted to its wants strategy. The CSG wanted to prove it could be friends with the Islamic Republic and so sad – too bad for the opposition in Iran.

What did the CSG care if the regime beat, tortured, imprisoned and often killed the peaceful agents for change in Iran? In the view from inside the CSG bubble, the American people would soon forget about all that and the CSG still wants to be pals with the Ayatollahs, a hoped-for part of the CSG’s legacy.

Abandoning the liberal progressives in Syria. This was a replay of the stale CSG game plan with Russia and Iran. The CGS wanted to be pals with Assad so Assad adopted Tehran’s policy of brutally suppressing peaceful opposition. Out went the good guys, leaving only the bag guys standing in Syria.

The Total Iraq Pullout. This was another fiasco and it is now becoming clear that the CSG sabotaged the Status of Forces Agreement with the Iraqis (see Ambassador Jefferies 3Nov2014 WSJ column).

But the CSG had no choice: Life in the bubble is defined by domestic American politics. To meet the CSG’s domestic political wants, doing what was right – what America needed – did not matter. The CSG foolishly walked out and three years later, Iraq walked right back in.

Benghazi. Hey, the election was in two months and POTUS had to be in Las Vegas the next day for a fundraiser. The CSG knew what it wanted so the solution was simple: blame it on the video and be done with it.

The Red Line in Syria. The CSG was sure that if the President spoke, Assad would obey. Once again, life in the bubble prevented the CGS from formulating a realistic policy for the real world. The CSG made the President look feeble and incompetent. Even from inside the bubble, that was a bad call.

The Rise of ISIL/ISIS. This is very much the monster created by Herr Doktor CSG Frankenstein. When the CSG orchestrated the precipitous withdrawal from Iraq, pushed for an incoherent policy in Syria and ignored all the warning signs that ISIS/ISIL was a real danger you get the mess we are faced with today.

No other outcome does a better job of explaining why life in the domestic bubble inevitably leads to international catastrophe. The CSG has failed America.

Why does the CSG get away with it?

First, we like our wants addressed whereas needs can be bitter medicine. We can be part of the problem.

Second, our independent safeguards have done a poor job. Too many in the media have redefined news casting. Hard-nosed objective reporting has been replaced with info-goop, an entertaining editorial sprinkled with cherry-picked facts posing as news. Again, it is a pursuit of wants at the expense of needs.

Third, the CSG has overwhelmed the traditional checks and balances within the Administration. When push comes to shove, the CSG can and has overridden the judgment of State, Defense, CIA, NSA, JCS and any other dissenting voice you care to add. For that failure, the blame lies squarely on the shoulders of President Barak Obama.

Now we face the greatest danger: A Nuclear Iran

The CSG and Iranian Centrifuge Nonsense. The CSG's biggest misperception is that the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program is for nuclear medicine and electricity.

If Iran wanted to be the world leader – bar none – in nuclear medicine it would have reached that goal over a decade ago and at a small fraction of cost it has spent on its “peaceful” nuclear program.

Why would anyone invest several hundred billion dollars to obtain nuclear material that could be had for millions? The answer is you would not. The purpose of Iran’s atomic program is notnuclear medicine.

Nor is it electrical power. Iran’s first nuclear plant opened three years ago. It operates entirely off of nuclear fuel bought on the international market – none that was produced in Iran. Iran could open additional reactors without any need for the thousands of refinement centrifuges.

The Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear program serves one primary purpose: to allow the production of nuclear weapons for use against its enemies.

Al Qaeda and its various mutations like ISIL are very serious threats but they pale before the threat of a nuclear-armed Islamic Republic.

If you want to raise the cost to the United States in treasure to a new level and that in blood exponentially then “reset” our relationship with Iran along the line followed by the CSG. The result will be catastrophically worse than the Russian failure that ended in invasions of Crimea and Ukraine.

At this point in time, no deal with the Islamic Republic is the only thing America needs. And speaking of needs, the CSG needs to be tossed out of the coop and the sooner the better.

Mike