Obamacare to cause 32% raise in healthcare costs; Administration defends

The Washington Guardian reports price increases coming as a result of Obamacare:

In a report that could prove a big political headache for the administration, the Society of Actuaries estimated Tuesday that insurers will have to pay out an average of 32 percent more for claims on individual health policies under the Affordable Care Act,  a cost likely to be passed on to consumers.

In response, the Obama administration questions that conclusion, though, claiming that higher costs will be offset by . . . , well, . . . you have to read it to believe it:

The administration questions the design of the study, saying it focused only on one piece of the puzzle and ignored cost relief strategies in the law such as tax credits to help people afford premiums and special payments to insurers who attract an outsize share of the sick.

Obama may think that money grows on trees but the rest of us know that those credits and subsidies will ultimately be paid for by the only place that the government gets its money: taxpayers.  So, the administration's plan is to offset higher insurance costs by raising taxes!

If Obamacare wasn't such a disaster, it would be easier to enjoy the comic relief provided by its defenders.

Of course, it is a disaster.  The future of Obamacare is clearly seen in the "harrowing neglect and abuse" (click for BBC story) that the British experience daily under their National Health Service.

Krugman: failure to believe in global warmism is a sin

Paul Krugman

In an otherwise uninteresting rant on the evils of the private automobile and the freedom that it provides, the New York Times' Paul Krugman writes:

And the thing is that these are externalities that everyone can see. You can deny global warming (and may you be punished in the afterlife for doing so — this kind of denial for petty personal or political reasons is an almost inconceivable sin). But can anyone deny that more drivers means more traffic congestion?

Liberals apparently do not object to mentioning concepts like the "afterlife" or "sin" unless it is a conservative who does the mentioning.

Incidentally, if the failure to believe in global warming alarmism really were an "inconceivable sin," then 30,000 American scientists would be going to hell.

Hat tip: WattsUpWithThat.

PREVIOUSLY on liberals and religion:
•Obama declares that God has "commanded" us to fund green energy.
•Pew study: Democrats believe in ghosts
•Obama declares he is on a mission from God
•Keith Olberman professes belief in God!
•Democrats declare that God directs the weather
•Obama campaign becomes a "transcendent" "religious" movement
•Atheism is a belief shared by Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, and Democrats
•Obama supporters tell of spiritual conversion

Reagan 1 Liberals 0: US deploys star wars

From NBC News:

US to deploy more ground-based missile interceptors as North Korea steps up threats

By M. Alex Johnson, staff writer, NBC News

The U.S. is deploying 14 new ground-based missile interceptors in Alaska to counter renewed nuclear threats from North Korea and Iran, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Friday.

The new interceptors will be based at Fort Greely, an Army launch site about 100 miles southeast of Fairbanks, Alaska, and are projected to be fully deployed by 2017, Hagel said. The additions will bring the U.S.-based ground interceptor deployment from 30 to 44, including four that are based in California.

One of the most bitter political battles in the 1980s was over missile defense. Liberals claimed it was impossible. They claimed that "all experts agree" that it is 'impossible to hit a missile with a missile.' Once again, their "experts" were wrong.  By deploying missile defense, the Obama administration is tacitly admitting it.

PREVIOUSLY on liberal "experts" getting things wrong:
•Earth Day: environmentalism and a history of failed predictions
•Federal Judge rejects Federal environmental "science" as "arbitrary and capricious"
•2 more examples of politicized science: Gulf oil spill and California's air regulations
•AIDS advocates distorted science
•Politicized science of crime statistics
•Politicization of medical science
•Bee colony collapse disorder: the cause is whatever your politics say it is
•The collapse of the UN IPCC's credibility
•Yet another UN IPCC Glacier-gate scandal
•UN IPCC claims of melting Himalayan glaciers exposed as fraud
•UN IPCC responds to Climategate with wild accusations
•Global warming and the test of science, III
•Global warming and the test of science, II
•Global warming and the test of science, I
•141 scientists wrote letter to UN challenging global warming hysteria.
•NASA's global warming scientists caught hyping false data
•The resemblance of global warming true-believers to Islamists

How rich is North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un?

There is an old Chinese proverb, "become a government official, get rich,"  meaning that the government service is filled with opportunities for graft.  Although the proverb dates back to imperial times, it continues to be true in modern communist/socialist countries.  Just like Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, North Korea's Kim Jong-Un has become fabulously wealthy.  The South Korean newspaper Cho Sun has details:

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has stashed away some US$4-5 billion in bank accounts in other people's names in Austria, China, Lichtenstein, Luxembourg, Russia, Singapore and Switzerland, intelligence agencies believe.

Where does his money come from? The usual: illegal trade in weapons and drugs, counterfeit currency, and such:

Most of Kim's slush funds are foreign-currency revenues generated by North Korean businesses attached to the military or other government entities. Some of the money comes from legitimate activities, such as sales of agricultural and fisheries products or minerals and North Korean laborers working abroad. But the bulk comes from illicit activities such as selling drugs, dealing in counterfeit money, cigarettes, liquor or exporting weapons.

What about the international sanctions imposed on N. Korea? The Russian mob knows how to get around them:

Since high-ranking North Korean officials and state agencies have been banned from engaging in financial transactions overseas, Pyongyang is apparently relying on the Russian mafia to launder money and operate secret slush funds.

Although liberals often claim to have great faith in international sanctions, here as elsewhere, they seem to have little practical effect.

Hat tip: GatewayPundit.

Low information voters explain the sequester

From Jimmy Kimmel Live, a reporter-on-the-street asks citizens what they think of Pres. Obama pardoning the sequester and sending it to Portugal:
It makes you fear for the survival of America's experiment with democracy.

Hat tip: George.

The Second Anniversary of the Fukushima Disaster: how bad was it?

From the left-wing Democracy Now, Amy Goodman introduces her report on the 2nd anniversary of Fukushima as follows:

AMY GOODMAN: We go now to Japan, which is marking the second anniversary of one of the world’s worst atomic disasters. It was March 11, 2011, when a massive 9.0-magnitude earthquake triggered a devastating tsunami that struck Japan’s northeast coast. It left more than 20,000 dead or missing. [Emph. added]

So, Fukushima was the "world's worst atomic disaster" and left "20,000 dead or missing."  Not quite.  Did you catch the verbal slight of hand?  Ms.  Goodman is pulling a fast one.  The 20,000 dead are due to the all-natural Gaia-approved tsunami and earthquake.

How many people actually died because of the "world's worst atomic disaster"?

Zero.

For liberals, facts are whatever George Soros says they are

Liberals are often accused of accepting at face value any "facts" that George Soros tells them to.  Occasionally, we get literal proof of this assertion.  Today, for example, we learned from Salon that liberal journalist and former NPR personality Juan Williams plagiarized a post from the George Soros-funded Center for American Progress for use in his column in TheHill.

PREVIOUSLY on the Center for American Progress:
•Some sequester dishonesty

Some sequester dishonesty

Obama's "Organizing for Action" group is sending around this graphic (click on it for a larger view):

The graphic is originally from Center for American Progress (click here) which based it on a House Democrat report (click here, PDF).  The dollar amounts are in millions.  The time span is ten years.

Let's just look at the left-most bar which claims that a $97 million cut over ten years will increase homelessness by "100,000."  That number is straight out of the House Democrat report (p.20) which says:

"Further cuts to Homeless Assistance Grants will mean that about 100,000 people won't be housed next year."   

Now, do the math: the  $97M spending cut amounts to a mere $8 per homeless person per month: 97 million / 100,000 people / 10 years / 12 months per year = $8.   Obviously, there is no way that they are "housing" anyone for that.  It is a fraud.

The larger scam is that US deficits are in the trillion dollar per year range while the whole graphic is about only $320 million per year.  So, the whole graphic is about 0.03% of the deficit.

RELATED:  Even the Washington Post's liberal fact checker has noticed that Obama's telling falsehoods about the sequester.

Insider: Obama's foreign policy subservient to domestic politics

According to a former diplomat, Pres. Obama has handed control of foreign policy to his domestic political advisers.  The Telegraph reports:

Vali Nasr, a university professor who was seconded in 2009 to work with Richard Holbrooke, Mr Obama's special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, records his profound disillusion at how a "Berlin Wall" of domestic-focused advisers was erected to protect Mr Obama. 

"The president had a truly disturbing habit of funnelling major foreign policy decisions through a small cabal of relatively inexperienced White House advisers whose turf was strictly politics," Mr Nasr writes in The Dispensable Nation: America Foreign policy in Retreat.

Become a socialist, get rich

Obama, Chavez

The left talks incessantly of "income inequality" without ever noting that socialist countries have large income inequalities also.  The recently deceased Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is estimated to have amassed a personal fortune of $2 billion.  Yasser Arafat's net worth was estimated as in excess of $1 billion, much of which was diverted from foreign aid for his dirt-poor Palestinian people.  Forbes estimated Fidel Castro's net worth at over half a billion while his countrymen remain impoverished.

Has any heard a leftist complain about this?

"Green energy" and crony capitalism

Cause of Action, a nonpartisan nonprofit group, investigated Obama's 'green energy' loan program found a 95% correlation with political contributions:

Cause of Action was able to determine, through publicly available data combined with a FOIA production[1], that for corporations[2] who have received a loan guarantee of any amount, the likelihood that it made campaign contributions increases significantly. Of the data available, 95% (.95) of DOE loan recipients with less than $1 billion in annual revenue documented political contributions by the organization or senior level staff. Comparatively, only 31% (.319489) of similarly sized organizations that did not receive loans made political contributions in one way or another.

Hat tip: Steven Hayward

PREVIOUSLY on "green energy" as a scam:
•Mafia profits off of "green energy" scams
•Environmentalists at war with environmentalists over green energy
•Surprise: EU's carbon trading riddled with fraud
•Obama declared that God has "commanded" us to fund green energy.