It’s Monday, September 30th, 2013…and the countdown to Obamageddon…

…continues!

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up on the last edition of September, Shane Smith forwarded the following from Michelle Malkin:

Obama Lied, My Health Plan Died *

* As did ours!

Like an estimated 22 million other Americans, I am a self-employed small-business owner who buys health insurance for my family directly on the individual market. We have a high-deductible PPO plan that allows us to choose from a wide range of doctors.

Or rather, we had such a plan. Last week, our family received notice from Anthem BlueCross BlueShield of Colorado that we can no longer keep the plan we like because of “changes from health care reform (also called the Affordable Care Act or ACA).” The letter informed us that “(t)o meet the requirements of the new laws, your current plan can no longer be continued beyond your 2014 renewal date.”

In short: Obama lied. My health plan died.

Remember? Our president looked America straight in the eye and promised: “If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period. If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what.”

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., also lied when she pledged: “Keep your doctor, and your current plan, if you like them.”

Particularly as they’ve exempted themselves!

This isn’t just partisan business. It’s personal. Our cancellation letter states that Anthem is “not going to be selling new individual PPO plans.” When we asked whether we could keep our children’s doctors, an agent for Anthem told my husband and me she didn’t know. The insurer has no details available yet on what exactly they’ll be offering. We either will be herded into the Obamacare federal health insurance exchange regime (launching October 1), a severely limited HMO plan, or presented with costlier alternatives from another insurer. If they even exist.

My family is not alone. Across the country, insurers are sending out Obamacare-induced health plan death notices to untold tens of thousands of other customers in the individual market. Twitter users are posting their Obamacare cancellation notices and accompanying rate increases:

Linda Deright posted her letter from Regency of Washington state: “63 percent jump, old policy of 15 yrs. cancelled.” Karen J. Dugan wrote: “Received same notice from Blue Shield CA for our small business. Driving into exchange and no info since online site is down.” Chris Birk wrote: “Got notice from BCBS that my current health plan is not ACA compliant. New plan 2x as costly for worse coverage.” Small-business owner Villi Wilson posted his letter from HMSA Blue Cross Blue Shield canceling his individual plan and added: “I thought Obama said if I like my health care plan I can keep my health care plan.”

Few among Washington’s protected political class are paying attention, because they enjoy their lucrative government benefits and are exempted from Obamacare’s destructive consequences. But one of my state’s congressional representatives, GOP Rep. Cory Gardner, also lost his individual market plan. Unlike most politicians on Capitol Hill, Gardner chose not to enroll in the federal health insurance program. He told me that he opted to participate in the private market “because I wanted to be in the same boat as my constituents. And now that boat is sinking!”

Gardner points to recent analysis showing individual market rate increases of 23 percent to 25 percent in Colorado. “After my current plan is discontinued,” he wrote last week, “the closest comparable plan through our current provider will cost over 100 percent more, going from roughly $650 a month to $1,480 per month.” He now carries his Obamacare cancellation notice with him as hardcore proof of the Democrats’ ultimate deception.

Maryland announced that its post-Obamacare individual market rates could also rise by a whopping 25 percent. The National Association for the Self-Employed is recommending that its small-business owners and freelancers plan for at least a 15 percent increase nationwide. One of the reasons for those rate hikes, of course, is that Obamacare’s mandated benefits provisions force insurers to carry coverage for items that individual market consumers had deliberately chosen to forgo.

Americans who had opted for affordable catastrophic coverage-style plans now have fewer and fewer choices. This includes a whole class of musicians, photographers, artists, writers, actors and other creative people who purchased health plans through the individual market or through small professional organizations. As St. Vincent College arts professor Ben Schachter reports in the Weekly Standard, groups like the College Art Association, Modern Language Association and the Entertainment Industry Group Insurance Trust are dropping their plans. Young, healthy members of these groups “are far more likely to see their rates go up — or to face the individual mandate penalties.”

Thanks to Obama, access is down. Premiums and health care spending are up. Research and development on lifesaving drugs and medical devices are down. Hours and benefits have been cut because of Obamacare costs and regulatory burdens by at least 300 American companies, according to Investor’s Business Daily. And the Obamacare layoff bomb continues to claim victims.

Obamacare is destroying the private individual market for health insurance by design, not accident. For hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of self-employed job creators, three fundamental Obamacare truths are becoming as clear as Obama’s growing nose: 1) You can’t keep it. 2) We’re screwed. 3) The do-gooders don’t care.

That Der Obafuhrer continues to promote his plan to Socialize American medicine comes as no surprise; after all, it’s…

…his nature.  That Republican leaders on Capitol Hill have yet capitalize on the Unaffordable Care Act’s most obvious Achilles’ heel, namely the President’s exemption for Senators, Congressmen and their staffers, is simply inexcusable.

Speaking of the inexcusable, courtesy of the WSJ, John Bolton offers a blow-by-blow description of…

How Rouhani Is Playing Obama

His conciliation strategy is intended to buy time and legitimacy to build a bomb.

 

And Rouhani’s not the only one playing The Obamao like a cheap fiddle.

Monday ends the worst month of the Obama presidency. The Syrian diplomatic and political debacle was bad enough, but last week at the United Nations President Obama embarked on a campaign for “progress” with Iran that will prove much more dangerous for American interests. Just as Vladimir Putin had played him for a fool over Syria, Mr. Obama was initially snubbed by Iranian President Hasan Rouhani despite frantic White House efforts to produce a handshake.

On Friday, after a brief Obama-Rouhani telephone call, Mr. Obama said that a “comprehensive solution” between countries is possible. And this despite Thursday’s meeting of foreign ministers, including Secretary of State John Kerry and Iran’s Mohammad Javad Zarif, that was little more than a photo-op.

Mr. Obama’s yearning fits smoothly into the PR campaign by President Rouhani, Iran’s new frontman. The campaign has included showcasing Iran’s only Jewish parliamentarian (a staunch opponent of Israel), offering dialogue with the West (catnip for the gullible), and a soothing Washington Post op-ed.

Separating propaganda, hype and disinformation from Iran’s real objectives is critical. Unfortunately, too many already believe that Mr. Rouhani’s election marked a substantive rather than a cosmetic policy shift. Instead of blustering about Iran’s nuclear program and threatening Israel, Mr. Rouhani has sounded conciliatory, carefully using his first weeks in office to cloud Western memories of his predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

President Rouhani knows what his Western audience wants to hear. As Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator in 2003-05, he followed the same playbook, and it worked. By offering what appeared to be concessions, Iran acquired precious time and legitimacy to overcome scientific and technical glitches in its nuclear-weapons program, particularly at Isfahan’s uranium-conversion facility.

“Due to an unexpected volume of calls, your hold time is currently estimated at…3 hours…and…50 minutes.”

In articles and speeches, Mr. Rouhani boasted of his successes. In 2006, he taunted the West, saying “by creating a calm environment, we were able to complete the work on Isfahan.” Even such open disdain has not triggered enough U.S. or European embarrassment to protect against being suckered again. Iran’s “moderates” are now targeting the Obama soft spot in Western opposition to Iran’s nuclear program, and methodically exploiting it.

In marked contrast, Mr. Obama enters negotiations gravely weakened by his Syria failures. Yet soothed by his media choir, he seems unaware how deeply he has been wounded. He confidently believes he is well-placed to treat with the ayatollahs despite a series of foreign-policy failures.

Over the past year, Mr. Obama failed in his stated objective to oust Syria’s Assad regime from power; failed to impress Assad that his “red line” against using chemical weapons was serious; failed to exact retribution when that red line was crossed; failed to rally anything but small minorities in either house of Congress to support his position; and failed to grasp that agreements with the likes of Syria and Russia prolong, rather than solve, the chemical-weapons problem.

Mr. Obama is inverting Dean Acheson’s maxim that Washington should only negotiate from strength. Even if there were some prospect that Iran could be talked out of its nuclear-weapons program, which there is not, the White House approach is the wrong way to start discussions. Given the president’s palpable unwillingness to use the military to enforce his Syria red line—let alone to answer the Sept. 11, 2012, Benghazi terrorist attack—and his paucity of domestic political support, Iran’s ayatollahs know that the president’s “all options on the table” incantation regarding their nuclear program carries no weight.

Iran undoubtedly wants relief from international sanctions, which have exacerbated decades of incompetent economic policy. But there is no evidence that the sanctions have impaired Iran’s nuclear or ballistic-missile programs. Instead, Tehran has increased its financial and military assistance to Assad and Hezbollah in Syria.

“No, seriously, I’m not kidding; he’s still holding!”

Mr. Rouhani’s strategy is clear: Lower the rhetorical temperature about the nuclear issue; make temporary, cosmetic concessions, such as allowing inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency at already-declared nuclear sites; and gain Western acceptance of its “reactor-grade” uranium enrichment. Once that goal is attained, Iran’s path to nuclear weapons will be unobstructed and within Tehran’s discretion.

Iran will demand in return that international sanctions be eased, focusing first on obtaining small reductions to signal Western “good faith.” Mr. Obama and Europe already seem eager to comply. Western diplomats will assert defensively that these concessions are merely a matter of “sequencing,” and that they expect substantive Iranian concessions. They will wait a long time. Mr. Rouhani fully understands that once sanctions start rolling back, restoring them will be hard, perhaps impossible, absent a major provocation.

Mr. Rouhani will not supply one. Instead, he will continue making on-again, off-again gestures seducing the West into protracted negotiations. Meanwhile, Iran’s nuclear-weapons and ballistic-missile programs will proceed unimpeded in unknown, undisclosed locations. This was his 2003-05 playbook.

Extended negotiations will enable Mr. Obama to argue that a “diplomatic process” is under way to resolve the Iranian nuclear threat. No phrase is more beloved at the State Department. Mr. Obama will then use this process on Israel to prevent pre-emptive military action against Iran’s nuclear program.

In time, even Hamlet came to understand that “one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.” Maybe one day President Obama will figure it out.

With all due respect to John Bolton, he’s totally misreading this President; the real question is who’s… 

…the greater villain.  And more importantly, for precisely which side The Dear Misleader’s actually playing!

Since we’re on the subject of those driven by solely by power, ideology and money, we turn next to today’s Environmental Moment, where, as Breitbart.com reports, Progressives have once again proved if their data doesn’t fit, they just omit:

UN Climate Change Report Ignores 15-Year ‘Pause’ in Warming

 

An exhaustive United Nations report that claimed with 95% certainty that humans are responsible for global warming left out data that found the planet has stopped warming over the last 15 years, because it did not fit with the climate change agenda it wanted to advance.

The report, produced by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),  could not explain “why the planet has largely stopped warming over the past 15 years.” So it just ignored it. According to the climate data from the U.K.’s weather-watching Met Office, “global surface temperatures rose rapidly during the 70s,” but they have “have been relatively flat over the past decade and a half, rising only 0.05 degrees Celsius (0.09 degrees Fahrenheit).”

In September, a draft of the U.N. report simply could not explain why the surface temperatures have not warmed. “Due to natural variability, trends based on short records are very sensitive to the beginning and end dates and do not in general reflect long-term climate trends,” the report now reads. “There may also be … an overestimate of the response to increasing greenhouse gas and other anthropogenic forcing.”

Judith Curry, professor and chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said if the “if the pause continues beyond 15 years (well it already has), they are toast.”

There have been many reports that have shown how climate models have vastly overestimated “warming.” For instance, a study in the journal Nature Climate Change “compared 117 climate predictions made in the 1990’s to the actual amount of warming” and 114 of those predictions overestimated the amount of warming. Other studies have found that various climate models used by the United Nations have “forecasted two times more global warming than actually occurred.”

As Breitbart News reported, a group of 50 international scientists released a comprehensive new report, which cited thousands of peer-reviewed articles the United Nations-sponsored panel on climate change ignored, “concluded that evidence now leans against global warming resulting from human-related greenhouse gas emissions.”

In a related item, as The Daily Caller records, what was that about scientific “consensus?!?

Top MIT scientist: Newest UN climate report is ‘hilariously’ flawed

 

Not all scientists are panicking about global warming — one of them finds the alarmism “hilarious.” A top climate scientist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology lambasted a new report by the UN’s climate bureaucracy that blamed mankind as the main cause of global warming and whitewashed the fact that there has been a hiatus in warming for the last 15 years.

“I think that the latest IPCC report has truly sunk to level of hilarious incoherence,” Dr. Richard Lindzen told Climate Depot, a global warming skeptic news site. “They are proclaiming increased confidence in their models as the discrepancies between their models and observations increase.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change claimed it was 95 percent sure that global warming was mainly driven by human burning of fossil fuels that produce greenhouse gases. The I.P.C.C. also glossed over the fact that the Earth has not warmed in the past 15 years, arguing that the heat was absorbed by the ocean.

“Their excuse for the absence of warming over the past 17 years is that the heat is hiding in the deep ocean,” Lindzen added. “However, this is simply an admission that the models fail to simulate the exchanges of heat between the surface layers and the deeper oceans.” “However, it is this heat transport that plays a major role in natural internal variability of climate, and the IPCC assertions that observed warming can be attributed to man depend crucially on their assertion that these models accurately simulate natural internal variability,” Lindzen continued. “Thus, they now, somewhat obscurely, admit that their crucial assumption was totally unjustified.”

Scientists have been struggling to explain the 15-year hiatus in global warming, and governments have been urging them to whitewash the fact that temperatures have not been rising because such data would impact the upcoming climate negotiations in 2015. The Associated Press obtained documents that show the Obama administration and some European governments pressured UN climate scientists to downplay or even omit data that shows the world hasn’t warmed in over a decade.

“Germany called for the reference to the slowdown to be deleted, saying a time span of 10-15 years was misleading in the context of climate change, which is measured over decades and centuries,” the AP report said. “The U.S. also urged the authors to include the ‘leading hypothesis’ that the reduction in warming is linked to more heat being transferred to the deep ocean.”

Global warming skeptics have exploited such data to show that the science behind manmade global warming is faulty and politically driven. “[I]n attributing warming to man, they fail to point out that the warming has been small, and totally consistent with there being nothing to be alarmed about,” Lindzen said. “It is quite amazing to see the contortions the IPCC has to go through in order to keep the international climate agenda going.”

Not quite so amazing when one considers the amount of money and prestige these scam artists would forfeit were their climate con subject to true scientific scrutiny…not to mention foreordaining the fate of their fabricated fight against fossil fuels.

On the Lighter Side…

Next, brought to us by Balls Cotton and the Washington Times, the great Victor Davis Hanson tells it like it is as only a very few can:

The late, great middle class

 

The American middle class, like the American economy in general, is ailing. Labor-force participation has hit a 35-year low. Median household income is lower than it was five years ago. Only the top 5 percent of households have seen their incomes rise under President Obama.

Commuters are paying more than twice as much for gas as they were in 2008. Federal payouts for food stamps, unemployment insurance and disability insurance have reached unprecedented levels. Meanwhile, the country is still running near-record budget deficits and is burdened by $17 trillion in aggregate debt. Yet the stock market is soaring.

How can we make sense of all this contradictory nonsense? Irony.

Mr. Obama promised to restore the middle class. In truth, he has enacted the very policies that have done it the most damage in years. (Perhaps, more accurately, ever!) That paradox may explain why his base of support remains the very rich and the very poor. Goldman Sachs, federal bureaucrats and aid recipients are helped in a way that the strapped hardware store owner, Starbucks barista and part-time welder are not.

For all the talk of infrastructure or stimulus, the latest $6 trillion in federal borrowing seems to have been wasted on bailing out insider banks and green companies, growing the federal workforce, regulating the private sector into stasis, and subsidizing those who are not working.

The Federal Reserve still keeps interest rates at near zero. That mostly helps Wall Street, where money flows madly in search of any sort of return. Most real interest rates for consumer purchases somehow remain exorbitant. Banks obtain their money cheaply and lend it out expensively. No wonder that so many Wall Street and banking executives — Timothy F. Geithner, Jack Lew, Peter Orszag, Gene Sperling, Larry Summers — revolve in and out of the highest levels of this “no revolving door” administration.

Middle-class workers see little chance of retiring when their meager savings earn almost no interest, so they are apt to stay on the job longer. In circular fashion, their continuance only makes unemployment rates for young entry-level workers even worse.

Mr. Obama always threatened higher taxes on the well-off. He achieved that goal with a new 39.6 percent federal rate on upper incomes — well apart from state and payroll taxes. Yet such steep taxes do not much affect the superrich. Their income is often exempted through sophisticated tax-avoidance or, more often, earned through more lightly taxed capital gains.

Small employers in many states have no such recourse and now pay more than half their incomes in assorted federal, state and local taxes. Naturally, they are hiring fewer people and making fewer capital investments.

That greater tax hit might have been worth it had the new rates been part of a balanced-budget agreement like the Bill Clinton-Newt Gingrich deal of 1997 that froze spending levels and for a time stopped our ruinous borrowing. Not this time. We end up with the worst of all worlds: once again a 39 percent top tax rate, but now with out-of-control federal spending and more multibillion-dollar budget deficits.

By virtually shutting down gas and oil leases on federal lands, the administration has declined the chance to create millions of new energy jobs and to lower fuel prices. For now, cheaper power bills and gasoline prices, and the creation of more jobs in energy, depend entirely on those who drill on private lands — despite, not because, of federal efforts.

Even the many sires of Obamacare now deny their past parentage. Unions want out of it. Congress demands exclusion from it. Well-connected businesses won exemption from it. The poor who mostly do not pay federal income taxes will get a largely free, bureaucratized federal health care system. Many of the rich praise Obamacare but will quietly use their own money to avoid it. The middle class will see their premiums soar and the quality of their coverage erode.

These are surreal times. Wealthy elites who help to shut down jobs in energy, timber and mining are deemed liberal — but not always so the middle classes, who suffer the consequences in lost jobs and higher prices.

Universities voice progressive bromides, but they care mostly for the tenured and the technocrat, not the part-timer and the indebted student. Despite soaring tuition, campus is now the haunt of the very wealthy who can afford exorbitant tuition and the very poor who are often exempted from it. The less romantic middle class goes $1 trillion into debt for their high-interest student loans.

Never has it been so good to be invested in a vastly expanding federal government — either to distribute or receive federal subsidies. Never has it been so lucrative to work in banking or on Wall Street. And never has it been so bad to try to find a decent job making something real.

To paraphrase the Roman historian Tacitus, where we have made a desert of the middle class, we call it a recovery.

And, incredibly, millions of fools continue to believe him.

Finally, we’ll call it a day with yet another titillating tale torn from the pages of the Crime Blotter, this one with touching sense of family:

Mother And Son Arrested For Strong-Arm Robbery Spree Outside Houston

 

Meet Gabrell Marie Melton and Eugene Brimzy III. The mother-son duo was charged yesterday with a purse-robbing spree that targeted female victims shopping at Walmart and Burlington Coat Factory outlets outside Houston, Texas.

According to police, the duo attacked shoppers as they entered or exited mall stores. Three victims–including a 70-year-old woman who was battered by Brimzy–had their purses ripped from them by the pair. Cops allege that Melton, 38, and Brimzy, 21, drove around the city of Humble Wednesday hunting for victims.

The kin were apprehended after witnesses provided a description of their getaway car. They were named yesterday in criminal complaints charging them with aggravated robbery and robbery, both felonies.

Yeah…crime family; you know, like the Corleones…absent the brains!  Still, Brimzy’s mugshot pose does indicate a sort of animal cunning we seem to recall seeing before…

Magoo