Finding out what’s in it: Obamacare threatens to destroy volunteer fire departments.
It seems the law requires that volunteers be considered employees who must be covered by their organization. The money quote that sums up the entire law: “Welcome to federal regulations.”
The lawsuit by a doctor against Obamacare.
Though the law has harmed him and his business directly, what is interesting and important about his lawsuit is that it is demanding that Obama enforce the law as written.
Obama tells Chris Matthews what he really thinks of the IRS harassment of conservatives.
[Y]ou’ve got an office in Cincinnati, in the IRS office that — I think, for bureaucratic reasons, is trying to streamline what is a difficult law to interpret about whether a nonprofit is actually a political organization deserves a tax exempt agency. And they’ve got a list, and suddenly everybody’s outraged.
I seem to remember Obama himself expressing outrage to the press soon after the scandal broke and promising an investigation. Obviously, he lied about his outrage. He also lied about the investigation, since it is now more than six months later and the so-called investigation has yet to contact any of the victims of the IRS harassment.
Gee, he seems to lie a lot, doesn’t he? I also wonder if he has any outrage over the IRS’s auditing of that cancer patient and his insurance agent soon after the patient appeared on Fox criticizing Obamacare. I suspect not.
Here’s another report on the planetary sciences/NASA dispute this week over funding and grant scheduling.
From this report it appears that the complaints by the planetary science community might have been a bit overstated. It doesn’t appear that NASA is cutting the planetary sciences grant program in any significant way.
I suspect that the reason the planetary scientists are so touchy is because they do not trust the Obama administration, based on its previous efforts to eliminate the planetary program entirely. (It is also possible that they are right.)
A new poll shows Democrats as out-of-touch extremists. Hat tip to Doug Ross.
The public overwhelmingly believes the country is headed in the wrong direction, that current economic policies aren’t working, that President Obama is doing a bad job, that government should be smaller and that ObamaCare should be repealed. But not Democrats.
On issue after issue, in fact, Democrats are the outliers by wide margins, according to an analysis of the December IBD/TIPP survey. They are, by and large, Pollyanna-ish about the economy, they can see no evil when it comes to Obama or ObamaCare, and they are extremists when it comes to the size and role of the federal government.
This close-mindedness is increasingly disturbing. How can we fix our problems if one significant portion of the population refuses to consider that they might be wrong?
Let the space price war begin.
Two money quotes:
This latest launch is bad news for Russia, Europe, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin. SES paid $55 million to SpaceX for the launch; rivals typically charge $100 million to $200 million. SpaceX has a backlog of about $4 billion worth of launches, many for commercial customers that it can now begin to serve.
and this:
We’ll really get a sense of SpaceX’s abilities over the next year. The company plans to launch rockets at a much more ferocious clip, to refine their reusability and to prepare for sending humans to the International Space Station. You can also expect to see SpaceX tormented by politicians with ties to existing launch contractors and military suppliers. May we live in interesting times.
A new poll suggests that the young are finally abandoning Obama and the Democratic Party.
They aren’t rushing to the Republicans very much either, but this detail is significant:
According to the poll, 57 percent of millennials disapprove of Obamacare, with 40 percent saying it will worsen their quality of care and a majority believing it will drive up costs. Only 18 percent say Obamacare will improve their care. Among 18-to-29-year-olds currently without health insurance, less than one-third say they’re likely to enroll in the Obamacare exchanges.
In other words, they are finally beginning to pay attention, and have discovered that their blind faith in Democrats was a big mistake. They might not like Republicans, but if Republicans offer to kill Obamacare the young will likely favor Republicans in the coming elections.
How to opt out of Obamacare, legally and intelligently.
The FBI has been stonewalling the House investigation into the IRS scandal.
Obama claimed he was outraged by this scandal and would hunt down the perpetrators. He lied of course. He instead apparently told the FBI to block all investigations wherever possible.
Think you have finally enrolled in Obamacare? Think again.
It appears that even if you have struggled through and chosen a plan, the website might not tell the insurance company. Thus, you think you have a plan but the insurance company knows nothing about it. What fun!
More details here.
In a 376-5 bi-partisan vote, the House has approved a one year extension to the liability exemption of the 2004 Space Amendments Act.
Though this is helpful, it still leaves intact the regulations imposed by that 2004 law, all of which make difficult the future of space tourism. That this extension was passed in conjunction with an effort by Congress to overhaul the law is encouraging.
O joy: According to one online hacker/security expert, no security was ever built into the Obamacare website.
The issue is not so much that the website is a dangerous place to enter personal information (bad as that is) but that no one should be surprised by any of this. Allowing the equivalent of the Motor Vehicle Administration to run the whole health insurance industry was guaranteed to produce these problems, as conservatives repeatedly noted in 2010.
