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Mullings by Rich Galen
An American Cyber-Column By Rich Galen
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Told J'ya

Rich Galen

Monday November 4, 2013

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  • A Mullster wrote to ask me whether I was ready to admit I was wrong about Obamacare; that my chastising the House GOP for shutting the government down while demanding that the ACA be repealed, defunded, or delayed was in error.

  • I was not wrong. Everything that has happened with regard to the health care law actually makes my case.

  • My point was, and continues to be, if Texas Senator Ted Cruz and the House Cruzettes had chosen a different path, they could have escaped the ire of the American people by letting Obamacare take the spotlight and fall right on its legislative butt.

  • Nothing about Obamacare is good news for the President or Democrats in Congress. You know the litany:
    -- The web site doesn't work (it was shut down for 12 hours over the weekend)

    -- Millions of Americans - middle class Americans - will be paying far more in premiums with far higher co-pays than they have before.

    -- The President lied about our being able to keep our current health care plan if we liked it.

  • This thing is never going to work. Even if they get the website fixed.

    SIDEBAR

    Apple began selling its new iPad Air tablet at 12:01 AM Pacific Daylight Time in its on-line store. That was 3:01 AM Eastern.

    You had to make a number of choices: Color; amount of memory; Wi-Fi-only, or Wi-Fi and LTE; and, if so, which Telecom service you wanted.

    I had practiced all afternoon so I could click quickly in case the system crashed under the weight of a bunch of Californians trying to be the first in the digital line.

    I set my alarm for 2:50 AM. I logged into the Apple site at about 2:58. The site still said it was under construction, but I just kept hitting the "refresh" key.

    At 3:01 AM � nothing happened.

    At 3:02 the site went live. By 3:06 I had spent nearly $1,000 - and that included about one minute going back and forth over whether I wanted it engraved. In the end, I didn't.

    END SIDEBAR

  • I'm pretty certain that Apple sold more iPads before dawn last Friday than the whole federal government has gotten people signed up for Obamacare over the past month.

  • In fact, it was reported, by CBS News over the weekend that on the first day of Obamacare six people were able to get signed up.

  • Six.

  • At six people per day, the Obama Administration will meet its target of seven million people by the year 5209.

  • But, back to the website issue. A remarkable bit of reporting by Washington Post Reporters Amy Goldstein and Juliet Eilperin, in a front pager point out that from the very beginning of the process - just after the bill became law in the Spring of 2010 - the bureaucratic tugging combined with the political pulling meant there was no way this was going to be ready by October 1, 2013.

  • That has resulted, three-and-half years later, in "casting doubt on the administration's capacity to carry out such a complex undertaking."

  • They quote a Harvard professor and health advisor to Obama's 2008 campaign, David Cutler, as saying:
    "They were running the biggest start-up in the world, and they didn't have anyone who had run a start-up, or even run a business."

  • The blistering coverage of the failing Obamacare roll-out didn't begin until after the Cruz and the Cruzettes shut up and allowed the government to re-open. Even with that the President's job approval rating has dropped to just 40 percent according to the latest Gallup three-day tracking poll.

  • Congressional Democrats, most of whom voted for Obamacare without the benefit of a single Republican vote in the House, have so far escaped being roasted along with the Administration.

  • I haven't seen this question anywhere, but I'm willing to bet that if a pollster asked a representative sample of Americans whose fault the early failure of Obamacare is, a whole bunch would blame Congressional Republicans.

  • So. I was correct. If the GOP had allowed the new fiscal year - October 1 - to start without all the shut-down drama, they would have been in a much stronger position to say to the American people about Obamacare:

  • Told J'ya.

  • On the Secret Decoder Ring page today: Links to that excellent Washington Post story, to the six-people-on-the-first-day story, and to the Gallup tracking poll. And, if you missed the subscription drive and you'd still like to get in on it, the info is there.

    Also a topic-appropriate Mullfoto.

    -- END --

    Copyright © 2013 Barrington Worldwide, LLC



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