Cartoon from Tom Toles at the Washington Post, April 2, 2014:
“ObamaCare: Nobody goes there. It’s too crowded.” Tom Toles in the Washington Post, April 2, 2014.
Why you need to know a little history to get good jokes:
Yogi Berra is famous for his sayings, some of which sound foolish at first, but which generally pack a lot of wisdom or sharp observation.
Berra grew up in St. Louis, which has many famous restaurants. On some occasion, someone suggested the group should go eat at Ruggeri’s, and Yogi’s reply became famous:
On why he no longer went to Ruggeri’s, a St. Louis restaurant: “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”
- Berra, Yogi (1998). The Yogi Book. New York: Workman Publishing. p. 9. ISBN 0-7611-1090-9.
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
Yeah, I always complain about biased sources.
Biased, ignorant, dumb, Dunning-Kruger, idiotic…but in the end it all means the same thing. Anybody who doesn’t agree with Mr. Darrell. It’s a masterful model of how to go through life not learning anything.
On the other hand, you deftly ignored my chief complaint: The letter you offer says not a single thing about the issue you were complaining about before. Still nothing there.
You never defined any difference between “illegal” and “illegal.” Your “chief complaint” seems to be a result of not having read the letter, other than to recognize it’s a letter from a state you don’t like. It’s become a masterful model of how to go through life not learning anything.
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Yeah, I always complain about biased sources.
On the other hand, you deftly ignored my chief complaint: The letter you offer says not a single thing about the issue you were complaining about before.
Still nothing there.
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In response, you produce a letter of complaint from the Attorney General of West Virginia (Motto: “Bring Your Own Bottled Water”), whining about a DIFFERENT fix.
Ed complains about the source AGAIN! So now West Virginians are part of the enemy, too. Boy, that Barack Obama sure does unify people — a new enemy every time someone notices what He’s doing wrong.
And Ed Darrell’s got nuthin’.
From the letter:
We have a system of government in which the legislative branch creates the law, and the executive branch is tasked with enforcing those laws. We also, regretfully, have liberals who see the Constitution as nothing more than an obstacle to be overcome. They continue to bleat away about how good this law is, and it’s so obvious they’re in “I must repeat it incessantly because I know it isn’t true” territory.
But if it’s true that this is a good law, and it is SUCH a good law that anybody who objects to it even minutely must be some sort of awful person or bigot, then the question naturally arises: How come they couldn’t get it right the first time?
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Classic, Morgan. You make one claim of “illegal action” by Obama. I challenge you to describe what is illegal in making executive adjustments to the way the exchanges work for Congress and staff.
In response, you produce a letter of complaint from the Attorney General of West Virginia (Motto: “Bring Your Own Bottled Water”), whining about a DIFFERENT fix.
If he thought the fix was illegal, why didn’t he sue? Better to write an inaccurate letter than be shown a fool in court, wasting taxpayer money.
Okay, I’ll analyze it. But let the record show that, once again, faced with hard standards of evidence to back your claims, the Cons propose to move the goalposts.
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Ed quibbles about source, but it is content that distresses him so.
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Morgan pointed us to Patterico’s Pontifications. Certainly as bombastic as advertised, but not ex cathedra More like “ex latrina (maybe a latrina — the GOP cut our Latin class).
Grassley Amendment to ObamaCare, which Grassley intended to screw ObamaCare. Surprisingly (to the GOP), the Grassley Amendment came back to bite Grassley and every other Republican in the gluteals.
The House GOP Caucus pleaded with President Obama to fix the problem their Senate colleague had caused them.
Grassley had thought his amendment so far-fetched that no one would accept it, and therefore he could lead the defeat of the bill by saying “Congress won’t participate.” After giving Grassley ample time and room to pull back his poison pill, the Democrats accepted it as a cost of doing business with barbarians.
Most barbarians think farther down the road. Who could have seen this coming? Well, look at the history of Title IX of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Republicans who don’t know history and have maleficent intentions are doomed to repeat history and drag many more along with them.
But this is not Obama’s acting outside the bounds of authority, or the law. It’s Obama solving a GOP-caused problem for the GOP, and everyone else in Congress and on staff.
That’s an outright lie. Obama would have been happy to accept a legislative fix. But to get there, the GOP would have had to confess that they screwed up big time, and pass the law. As Speaker Boehner probably explained it, that’s far too much a loss of face for the GOP. Couldn’t Obama just, you know, find some way to make the problem go away?
Obama plays the long game. He knew the GOP are ingrates, and would never thank him, like the nine who Jesus healed, who didn’t eve offer a wave as they gamboled off with their newfound health.
And true to form, here Patterico even slams Obama for doing the right thing.
The intention of the law is NOT to decrease health insurance coverage. Obama is at a minimum following the intentions of the law, in allowing an employer-paid health care system to continue to be employer-paid. That’s not the foolish consistency Morganites generally choke on; it’s a valuable consistency of someone who doesn’t forget his long-term goals, and what’s good for the nation.
Who benefits if salaries for staffers are effectively slashed? No one.
The real issue here was the employer contribution — nothing to do with out-of-pocket medical costs. Let’s be clear. Congress is a big organization, bound by ERISA to provide employer-paid health care. The Grassley Amendment did not consider ERISA rules in its attempt to smash the law. GOP error; not so destructive as the GOP hoped, but destructive enough that it hurts the GOP, too.
Congressional employees make contributions to their health care plans as the rest of us do, some more than others depending on the plan they chose.
So let’s be clear: This was an unintentional result of a GOP proposal to scuttle the whole bill.
Patterico assumes even Grassley didn’t know what he proposed. Reality is that this issue was discussed, but the GOP made it clear they would not allow a fix, which is normal for any large piece of legislation. They were certain they could kill the law and it would never apply to them.
Now, Morgan, can you do what neither the Wall Street Journal nor Patterico bothered to do? Can you be intellectually honest, and scholarly adept, and show us the provision of the law that prevents the fix Obama used?
This flap, and the squeals of mock horror and disgust from the snarky right, remind me of that old story:
Just stick to the facts. Can you? Patterico didn’t.
Not a general “spending requires an appropriations bill.” Show us where the Affordable Care Act prevents exactly what Obama actually did, and where other law disallows it, too.
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I would say “fervid imagination,” but “fevered imagination” is more accurate.
Yes, Obama’s “exercise of power” to the point of excess is stuck in your fevered imagination.
Presidents must act, and the Constitution gives them the duty, and most of the power, to act as the executive of the government, the head of the executive branch. Presidents execute the laws, in the legal definition of “execute,” which means to carry out the law.
If you were challenged to explain what violation of any law or point of the Constitution was committed in making the law work, what could you possibly say accurately that would support your claim, without resort to whole snark and complete fabrication?
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If Obama was an emperor/dictator like you and your fellow right wing whackos want to claim, Morgan, you and your fellow right wing whackos would either be in prison or dead. There would be no Republican party. Hell there wouldn’t be a Congress at all or a US supreme court for that matter.
You guys are making that claim purely on the basis of your delusional belief that “Augh! He signed executive orders! That makes him a dictator.”
And, if Republicans and conservatives were as hateful and destructive as lefties claim they are, there would be no lefties. What of it?
But since you raised the issue, are you trying to claim that President Obama has confined His exercise of power to what has been granted to His office under the Constitution? Particularly with regard to His signature landmark legislation?
Try to provide an answer without “Bush” or “Reagan” or “Republicans” in it…if you can. I doubt you can at this point.
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If Obama was an emperor/dictator like you and your fellow right wing whackos want to claim, Morgan, you and your fellow right wing whackos would either be in prison or dead. There would be no Republican party. Hell there wouldn’t be a Congress at all or a US supreme court for that matter.
You guys are making that claim purely on the basis of your delusional belief that “Augh! He signed executive orders! That makes him a dictator.”
THe problem with that argument, morgan, is that President George W Bush, President George H Bush and President Ronald Reagans all signed executive orders too and each of them signed far more of them than Obama has done. And both Reagan and W signed executive orders amending laws or simply saying they weren’t going to enforce them. If you want an example for each of them..Reagan and Iran/Contra and W with his executive order that somehow the Geneva Conventions and it’s rules against torture simply didn’t apply to captured terrorists.
If anyone is acting like a dictator in this country right now it would be the Republican party who seems to think that no matter how elections turn out they should get their way and that the Democrats simply have to do what the Republicans want. Your party is the minority and yet for 5 years now it has insisted on acting like it is the party in charge and that the Democrats never get to do anything that the Republicans don’t like. That despite being the President and the fact that the majority of the country voted for him, Obama has to bend down and kiss republican ***.
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James K, you had previously said and I quote:
Morgan, like all good teabaggers, hates the idea of the poor and the middle class not being completely at the mercy of corporate executives.
That’s your attachment to reality for you.
So who cares what you have to say?
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Under the Iraqi Constitution created under the guidance of President George W Bush, Iraqi’s have these rights:
“The individual has the right to security, education, healthcare and social security.”
And yet there you and your fellow Republicans sit, Morgan, trying to take away our social security and are saying that we don’t have a right to health care.
Of course Iraqi’s also have the right to peacefully strike..another right you Republicans are trying to take away from us.
Tell us Morgan why does your party think Iraqi’s should have more rights than we Americans?
if Iraqi’s have the right to health care then shouldn’t Americans have the same right?
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So to summarize: The answer is yes, this is the picture of success in the eyes of Ed and James. Right? ObamaCare is the way we want to see these things go. This is what good law looks like.
Eh…it’s just too much work for me. Once you conflate choice with force, your argument just sort of dissolves on its own. At least in my world, the world of reality, it does. If you fellas want to live in a fantasy-land where “choice” is a euphemism for our government masters forcing us to buy things and taxing us if we don’t buy them…well, you go right ahead.
But if that’s what it takes to make an idea look like a good one, there’s a phrase to describe ideas like those: Bad ideas.
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And tell me, Morgan, if my insurance company had kicked me off insurance because of my being born with only one functioning kidney..what choice would I have?
If i hadn’t been able to get insurance in the first place because of that..what choice would I have had?
What choice did Kyle van Nocker and his family have when their insurance company refused to pay for Kyle’s treatments for the disease he had? Kyle van Nocker being an 8 year old boy that died after his family’s insurance company refused to pay for his treatements and the family went bankrpt trying to pay for the treatements out of their own pocket?
What choice did they have, Morgan?
Are you saying that 8 year old boy deserved to die? Are you saying the family should have just written off their own son as a lost cause? Are you saying that family deserved to go bankrupt because of the choices their insurance company made?
I mean if you’re oh so for choice..you should have no problem explaining what choice did that boy and his family have?
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To quote Ed: C’mon, Morgan, don’t hide behind Tea Party posters. Explain how expanding options to 26 million Americans is, in reality, limiting their choice, or anyone else’s.
Well that’s simple, Ed. What Morgan is really whining about is that the ACA limits rich corporate jagoffs ability to choose to **** over the country and the poor and middle class Americans.
That is what he’s really complaining about. That the insurance companies can no longer cause 75% of all bankruptcies, that they can no longer kick people off insurance once they get sick, that they can no longer refuse to cover people for “preexisting conditions” like “being female.” in the case of women, that they can no longer spend as little as possible on health care and that they can no longer raise premiums by whatever amounts they want.
Morgan, like all good teabaggers, hates the idea of the poor and the middle class not being completely at the mercy of corporate executives.
Unless Morgan is able to turn off his brain and let the 1% control him like some amoral malignant Pinnochio, Morgan simply isn’t happy.
Oh and Morgan, the next time you call Obama an “Emperor” I’m going to take a great deal of pleasure in making you prove it. And then I’ll take a great deal of pleasure in destroying that claim and proving you an idiot.
I suggest you turn on your brain long enough to get Glenn Beck’s hand out of your *** like that.
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To quote: Dunno what to tell you, Ed & JK. If you have confidence in your own ability to learn, there’s no reason to fear choice.
That claim is laughable considering how much you and your fellow conservatives hate and fear women being able to choose when it comes to abortion. If at any point anyone is in a position to choose something you conservatives don’t like..you conservatives trip over yourselves trying to take that choice away.
Sorry, what’s really going on is that Ed and I can’t figure out why you and your fellow conservatives claim to be such moral Christians and yet you’re so very willing to let insurance companies cause 75% of all bankruptcies, kick millions of people off insurance when they get sick, raise premiums by double digit percentages every single year and let people die rather then pay for their health care. Do you really honestly think Jesus Christ would let that situation stand?
99% of the people who didn’t have health insurance, Morgan, aren’t in that position because of any choice of theirs. So no..it isn’t Ed and I have that have a problem with choice..it’s you. Because you and your fellow conservatives hate the idea that people now have the ability to choose to get insurance without the insurance companies being in a position to completely and totally **** them over for it.
You and your fellow conservtives are oh so very willing to let the insurance companies continue to rape and pillage the people of this country no matter how many people they hurt, no matter how many people they let die..no matter how much economic damage they cause to this country.
So no, child, you and yours are not the paen of choice here. The only thing that we are all agreed upon, Morgan, is that 1: you are a morally depraved little fool and that 2: you so hate Obama that you’re willing to let your fellow Americans suffer and die in the furtherance of that hatred.
You spout off about choice but yet you blithely ignore the fact that the ACA restored choice to the people instead of letting big fat corporations and their fat executives have all the choice..even if including that choice made the middle class and poor suffer and die.
Ed and I have confidence in our own ability to learn. You, apparently, don’t since you keep on spouting the same stupid drivel and nonsense no matter how many times you get proven wrong. You’d rather do no thinking for yourself and let the 1% that have bought and paid for your precious GOP treat you like nothing but an unthinking little whore. At no point in all the years that I’ve been dealing with you here, Morgan, have you shown any capability for 1: thinking for yourself and 2: learning.
So I find the “Emperor Obama” claim laughable because you’ve let the Emperor Koch’s buy and own you. You’re just a good little mindless kochsu…..
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How is offering more choice, not choice?
C’mon, Morgan, don’t hide behind Tea Party posters. Explain how expanding options to 26 million Americans is, in reality, limiting their choice, or anyone else’s.
Did you take our poll on personal experience with #ObamaCare, or do you choose not to talk at all times when information migh be passed?
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Morgan missed Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson.
You mistakenly apply choice where it’s mostly not appropriate to figure out what’s going on, and you fail to recognize the facts of what is going on.
1. Only idiots — you included, Morgan, if you fit — don’t have health care insurance. Even millionaires — the smart ones — have insurance. No sense throwing away a million bucks on a problem if you don’t need to, but maybe more critically, when one hits the emergency room in a semi-conscious state, it’s best to get the gold-standard treatment possible when your insurance card is in your wallet. It’s the same with frequent flyers and the affinity clubs; any rich guy can do well with a three-hour layover at O’Hare, buying space, purchasing snacks when you don’t want a meal, and getting a drink at Berghoff’s or one of the bars in the airport; but the cost of the affinity card is less than a couple of those layovers, and the Admiral’s Club is much nicer than the stool at Berghoff’s. Millionaires generally don’t get there by making stupid purchase decisions.
Most of the people without health insurance are not idiots, unlike Paul Ryan and John Boehner (both of whom signed up through the ObamaCare exchanges, incidentally, demonstrating their apparent idiocy isn’t so thorough as it is a hypocritical facade). They would prefer to have insurance. They only reason they have not exercised that “choice” is because the choice was foreclosed to them. When the choice is available, and they know it, they line up to exercise the choice. That’s what happened with ObamaCare.
2. This won’t tax a non-denier’s math capabilities; please follow. We have 310 million people living in America, roughly. At the high water mark, or storm surge level, 50 million were uninsured. Not their choice — they couldn’t afford it or it was foreclosed to them due to pre-existing conditions, or their having exhausted the “lifetime” cap, or some other fool thing.
That means 260 million had insurance.
About 12-14 million of those insured got it through individual policies they purchased directly from insurance companies, because they didn’t have insurance through their employers.
In a “normal” year, about 5 million of those people got a nasty letter from their insurance carriers informing them they had been cancelled. In the first year of nearly-full ObamaCare operation, the number of cancellations fell by a half-million, to 4.5 million.
So ObamaCare seems to have benefited 500,000 insurance policy holders right off the bat. People who didn’t have their virtual Morgan-windows broken, who would have seen the bats coming through the glass without ObamaCare.
Already ObamaCare is moral miles ahead of your alternative, using your broken-window economics example.
Of the 4.5 million who got cancellation letters, all but 10,000 had new policies by December 31. Using your broken windows metaphor, that means 0.2% of Americans had their windows broken by ObamaCare. 99.8% were left untouched or made whole, that tiny percentage that lost coverage they had.
I may be off a bit, but everything I’ve found on that 10,000 indicates they are mostly Tea Party-paid actors who refuse to bother to look on ObamaCare exchanges for fear they will find policies that work that are cheaper than their old insurance; some of them, perhaps all of them, can probably get insurance through their new employers at KochMonster Enterprises. Cranks, in other words.
(At this point, even Morgan should understand why his broken window business example is wholly inappropriate; ObamaCare is in the business of insuring windows against breakage, and doesn’t break any just for the heck of it; success depends NOT on broken windows, but on the number of windows covered with insurance-for-profit; must we explain that the insurance is offered by private companies whose bottom line suffers when ANY window is broken? Broken windows metaphor offerors really need to read Hazlitt — but they tend to avoid any economist of any sense-making, even the most conservative.)
The real figures show about 7.1 million people got new insurance on the exchanges — no broken windows, just coverage for anything that breaks. See ACAsignups.net:
Excuse me, I goofed. 7.28 million insured, not 7.1 million; that 180,000 additional insured is 18 times the number of sad-sack cranks who refused to sign up for ObamaCare when they got “cancelled.” Chew on that for a minute.
So, “broken windows?” Something less than 0.2% of 1.4% of all Americans had their windows “broken,” and not by ObamaCare, but by private insurance companies who had misled or outright lied to people. Good riddance to that “glass.”
0.2% of 1.4%? Yeah, 4.5 million cancellations out of 310 million people is 1.4%, and only 0.2% of those got the broken insurance windows. Of the total 310 million US residents, broken windows visited, or 0.0028%. 10,000 out of 310 million isn’t a lot.
Can you find five such people?
255 million Americans had essentially no change in their insurance plans, except for improvements (no copay vaccinations, annual physical, contraception for females covered). That’s 82.25% of Americans with no change. Hardly someone going down the street bashing in car windows.
If only 7.28 million got new ObamaCare coverage, that pushes the total to 262 million (rounded down). 84.5% of Americans.
If we add in those who got new Medicaid coverage, at the low level of 5 million, we’re up to 267 million. 86%.
2 million more got new coverage off the exchanges. 269 million. 86.7%.
Add in the 1.6 million sub-26ers (kids under the age of 26 who now hitchhike on their families’ coverages): 271 million (time to round up with all the rounding downs we’ve left off). 87.4%.
Look at the ranges ACAsignups.net offers: Coverage to 13.3 million at the low side, and 26.4 million at the high. What if the totals are the high estimates? 260 million + 26.4 million = 286 million (rounding down again). 92.2%
Any way you cut it, from the most pessimistic estimates that only 13 million more Americans now have insurance — roughly equal to the populations of our 13 smallest states, Wyoming, Vermont, North Dakota, Alaska, South Dakota, Delaware, Montana, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Maine, Hawaii, Idaho, and West Virginia — to the most optimistic estimates of 26 million — greater than the total population of Texas — ObamaCare is smashingly successful at reducing the uninsured population and extending health care insurance coverage to Americans who need it, thereby driving down inflation, driving down health care costs as a portion of GDP, and fulfilling our moral obligations to our fellow citizens.
Good news: Broken glass? Only those windows — non-tempered — broken by the Obama H8ers in search of shards to slash their own wrists.
Better news: Suicide recovery and mental imbalance are both covered by insurance now, due to ObamaCare.
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Then it is settled, and we all agree: ObamaCare is all about the fear of choice. Fear of the consequences of one’s own decisions, and fear of the consequences of others (except for Emperor Barack and His phone and pen).
Dunno what to tell you, Ed & JK. If you have confidence in your own ability to learn, there’s no reason to fear choice. So, we have two strangers on the Internet who do not have confidence in their own ability to learn, schooling other strangers on the Internet, who do have this confidence and don’t need Barack Obama to make decisions for them. The blind leading the not-blind.
I guess that’s why long lines, and lack of choice, look like success to you. Hard to make bad decisions that will get you hurt, if you’re spending all your time in a line.
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Market failure in Afghanistan, according to Morgan:
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Typical Republican failure to understand economics…Were there no demand, there’d be no line.
I’ll go ahead and state the obvious: The line-to-demand connection only works where choice is involved, and choice is not involved when the purchase is a legal requirement. AND when the government is going around destroying what people already have.
Everything we feared about Communism, that we we would lose our houses and savings and be forced to labor eternally for meager wages with no voice in the system….has come true under capitalism.
Any examples you have to show, no doubt happened because of government regulation or theft, not because of the free exchange of goods and services.
It’s true that freedom does not necessarily lead to prosperity. Prosperity comes from good choices. Freedom, and capitalism, only apply to the ability to make the choices at all. So if your freedom has led to your suffering, which I don’t doubt, well, that’s when you learn what you need to learn and try it again. That can be scary to a small mind. You’ll just have to work through it, JK. I can’t help you with it.
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“It’s amazing what you can achieve when you make something mandatory and fine people if they don’t do it and keep extending the deadline for months.” — Jimmy Fallon.
I dunno, Ed. I think I like to wait in shorter lines, or no lines at all, for the things I need. Guess you and I just have different definitions of success.
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Well keep in mind, Ed, that conservatives want to prove this statement to be true: Everything we feared about Communism, that we we would lose our houses and savings and be forced to labor eternally for meager wages with no voice in the system….has come true under capitalism.
As long as the rich get richer and the middle class and the poor get left further and further behind and made to suffer and be poorer..conservatives are happy.
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Mark said, at Pseudo-Polymath and at Stones Cry Out:
Were it a bread line, you’d have a point. But it’s not. It’s a line to get tickets to the hottest thing in town — healthcare, in this case.
Typical Republican failure to understand economics: When demand is high, you celebrate and try to keep supply up. Were there no demand, there’d be no line . . . and in this case, there’s no line for the actual service, just to get the insurance coverage.
Or, did you understand that, Mark, and you’re confused by your manifold errors earlier, when you claimed the program wouldn’t work, and that no one would sign up?
Probably time you give up that crystal ball gazing, and go to work solving problems in America instead. Honest work is always confusing to Republicans at first, but even they can get used to it.
Tell us again how the long lines mean nobody goes there. If you tell the story often enough, at some point you may understand the punch line.
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Their failure to stop a worthwhile, wise-use-of-public-resources program that improves health care, is not a failure that harms people, nor one anyone should lament.
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But to certain folks it will be a failure no matter what the outcome.
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P.S.: Morgan, did you take the poll to tell us of your experience with ObamaCare? https://timpanogos.wordpress.com/2014/03/31/how-has-obamacare-the-affordable-care-act-affected-your-family-please-take-this-poll/
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$400 million campaign from GOP to make sure no one signed up.
Pronouncements from November 1 through March 31 that the CBO projection of 7 million signups would not be met.
Claims that physicians will quit rather than accept new patients denied by growth of physicians (3% from 2010 to 2012).
Claims that ObamaCare would skyrocket costs denied in the future with plunge of annual healthcare cost inflation from 20% to 4%, lowest in 50 years.
Decreasing costs of health care.
11 million people benefited BEFORE November 1, with no-copay vaccinations increasing vaccination rates, with millions of people covered by their parents’ insurance after college graduation, and decreasing costs.
GOP were right in saying ‘Nobody will go there.’
If the lines are longer to sign up, Morgan, you lost.
Haven’t lost your denialism, though, have you.
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It’s a success because the lines are longer? Just wow.
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[…] responses to bread lines is confusing. They seem to envy the shortages and lines of the Communist era countries. I’m confused why […]
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[…] responses to bread lines is confusing. They seem to envy the shortages and lines of the Communist era countries. I’m confused why […]
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