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Readers!

 

My July fund-raising campaign to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary since I began Behind the Black is now over. I want to thank all those who so generously donated or subscribed, especially those who have become regular supporters. I can't do this without your help. I also find it increasingly hard to express how much your support means to me. God bless you all!

 

The donations during this year's campaign were sadly less than previous years, but for this I blame myself. I am tired of begging for money, and so I put up the campaign announcement at the start of the month but had no desire to update it weekly to encourage more donations, as I have done in past years. This lack of begging likely contributed to the drop in donations.

 

No matter. I am here, and here I intend to stay. If you like what I do and have not yet donated or subscribed, please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:

 

1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.

 

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Mangement failures in Obamacare

Finding out what’s not in it: A new GAO report cites epic management incompetence in the Obama administration that caused the disastrous Obamacare website failure.

Among the issues, investigators found that the administration kept changing the contractors’ marching orders for the HealthCare.gov website, creating widespread confusion and adding tens of millions of dollars in costs. Changes were ordered seemingly willy-nilly, including 40 times when government officials did not have the initial authority to incur additional costs.

As a result, the government has spent $840 million on Healthcare.gov and its supporting systems, according to the report.

As I’ve said repeatedly, when you ask the equivalent of the Department of Motor Vehicles to run one-sixth of the U.S. economy, you are guaranteeing this kind of failure. Worse, it is not as if this hasn’t happened before. We have had plenty of experience with failed and bungled government operations in the past four decades. Why do we then demand that we entrust more of our lives to their control?

As Albert Einstein wisely noted, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 

The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

4 comments

  • Cotour

    We all know that that is being said about Obama and the Obama administration because the people who wrote it are racists and they are just hatin on him.

    The president should be able to do what ever he thinks he should be doing including rewriting any law that he thinks should be rewritten or adjusted as per his judgement. He was elected twice you know!

    Why are some people so obstructive to the president? There can only be one explanation, they hate him because he is black! (well half of him anyway)

    All he is trying to do is help the middle class and the out of compliance “immigrants” survive, we all need to just get out of his way so that he can get some stuff done! No one is helping him, why?

    America is half full of a bunch of racist haters!

  • Edward

    You know, don’t you, that “changing the contractors’ marching orders” in the middle of a project is also one of the ways that defense contracts end up being over budget and over schedule, too. This makes it even worse than the DMV, because at least their rules don’t change nearly as rapidly.

    This is what the US government does best. Change the rules in the middle of the project, or web development, or Obamacare rollout, or the businessman’s calculations for budgeting next year, or the middle-class family’s budgeting for healthcare (which explains why there are still about as many uninsured this year as last, even though everyone is supposed to now have health insurance).

    It seems that everyone has figured out that being self-insured is now much less expensive than having Obamacare insurance.

    But there is still the basic problem that We the People do not adequately supervise our representatives (who supposedly supervise the incompetent government managers). from the article:

    “Beyond a maze of technical problems, Zients said he found ‘inadequate management oversight and coordination’ that ‘prevented real-time decision making and efficient responses.'”

    As for Einstein’s observation: we have the same idiots in charge for the 2013-2014 government as we did for 2011-2012. The results that we are getting aren’t much different, either.

    A little more tyranny than before, but that was the direction we were already going.

  • Cotour

    Edward, you know your just a racist! Admit it.

  • Edward

    It *must* be true, Cotour. I have been called such ever since college (I think that is where they created the tactic). ;-)

    Oh, but if they can’t find a way to call me racist, then I am a fascist. But I think they only call me that to forcibly suppress my opposition and criticism.

    http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/fascism?s=t

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