===
Obama has a history of being rolled by everyone from Russians to Muslims but never Republicans.
Why? I have a theory. Foreigners do not vote in our elections, only Americans, who generally are clueless and thus, Americans elected this president who turned monarch.
Even the dumbest American should realize the cost of sanctions has been so severe and effective that it has forced Iran to mend its posture. Therefore, why is Obama and Europe about to yield before getting anything concrete in return? Rolled again? (See 2 and 2a below.)
===
I have always been a renegade in my thinking. Consequently, I generally reject buying the interpretation of what just happened because Americans have short memories, are basically uninformed and their thinking can be easily shaped.
In time, if Obamacare implodes because it is bad law, cannot be technically implemented by government software bureaucrats and validates every lie Obama told to sell this disaster, Republicans, who warned against it, will come out looking better.
The press and media will protect their chosen monarch, will continue to keep him from being smeared by its effect but the cost, the inconvenience and the failure, when measured against the propaganda to make it appear otherwise, will come through even for the most uninformed.
The Tea Party Crowd own the correct message - America cannot keep spending without severe consequences. What they need to do is keep hammering away at the fact that Obamacare was ill conceived, never read before it was passed, and, for an administration that preaches fairness, is being unfairly applied because Obama caved to the demands of unions etc. The fact that it excludes Congress and his own family is atrocious and needs to be constantly emphasized.
Even the most uninformed understand selective exclusion and should react when they start experiencing the unevenness of the law's application, the pain of its cost and the effect on the delivery of health previously available.
Yes, health care must change but there are better proposals, fairer proposals, less costly and intrusive proposals and for the corrupt IRS to be in charge of its enforcement is outrageous. For the government to have access to personal records is an invasion of our privacy and this from an administration and lying president who promised otherwise.
So stay tuned. It ain't over til its over! (See 3, 3a, 3b and 3c below.)
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Dick
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1)Republicans Must Get Wise to Obama’s Hard-Line Fiscal Strategy
By Larry Kudlow
Judging from the speech Obama gave following the deal to end the government shutdown, Republicans better get wise to the president’s next fiscal gambit when the three-month stop-gap budget and debt measures come due. As was the case with his hard-line defense of Obamacare, the president likely will be inflexible on ending sequestration budget caps, pushing for massive tax hikes, and permitting only the most inconsequential entitlement reforms.
Obama is interested in busting the GOP in 2014. He’s not interested in true budget restraint or other economic-growth measures.
Example: This week, instead of a conciliatory work-together message for the negotiations ahead, President Obama gave us another Republican scold speech: “All of us need to stop focusing on lobbyists and bloggers and talking heads on radio, and professional activists who profit from conflict.”
But of course, it was Obama who wouldn’t negotiate. And it was Obama and his followers who demonized the GOP with words like “hostage,” “ransom,” and “terrorists.”
Another example: Out of nowhere in his post-shutdown speech, the president pledged to “close these corporate-tax loopholes that don’t help create jobs, and freeze up resources for the things that do help us grow, like education and infrastructure and research.”
Huh? Where did this come from? There’s no discussion of corporate tax reform in the whole speech, except for this one derogatory mention. So don’t count on progress for the single biggest growth and jobs creator, namely full-fledged business tax reform. It may be in Obama’s budget, but it’s not really on his agenda.
The real agenda is to jack up taxes on businesses and the wealthy. On top of this year’s $700 billion tax hike, the Democrats are going back to the $1 trillion tax-hike idea mentioned in recent years by Obama, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi.
True pro-growth tax reform should broaden the base, lower marginal rates, and simplify the code. The Democratic objective, however, is to raise as much additional taxpayer money as possible.
Why? Well, of course, to provide the spending fuel after they get rid of the budget-capping sequester. The Obama democrats are manic about this. They know that the sequester has effectively stopped their grandiose spending plans, and is actually bringing the discretionary budget back to 2007 levels. In fact, the real budget-winning move of recent years was the Republican reverse bait and switch (the bait came from the White House) in 2011 to embrace the sequester and implement it. It’s the only true pro-growth fiscal measure we’ve seen in the Obama years.
Closing tax loopholes is a good idea so long as it is accompanied by lower marginal tax rates on the other side. (Repatriating over $1 trillion in overseas corporate profits at a minimal sanction of 5 percent would also help grow the economy.) So companies, wealthy entrepreneurs, and small-business owners shouldn’t be fooled when they hear the president talk about closing tax loopholes. Why is he saying this? That’s easy: He wants to spend more money on his pet projects. More for the teachers’ unions, the local construction unions, the quick-fix, shovel-ready infrastructure projects, the clean-energy Solyndras, and all the other oddball social programs put in place by this administration.
Government spending cuts amount to tax cuts, which provide economic stimulus. But Obama and the Democrats want no part of it. Step back and read the president’s economic speeches in August and September. You see a pattern: Raise taxes on business and successful entrepreneurs, kill the sequester, and use the new tax revenues to spend more and grow the government -- and probably even finance Obamacare, which is going bankrupt even before it starts, and has become the laughingstock of the country with its catastrophic breakout.
Finally, while Obama again may occasionally say otherwise, the Democratic Party opposes all manner of entitlement reforms. All. That includes the chain-CPI reform (which would lower benefits), Medicare means testing, longer retirement eligibility, and higher co-pays for federal-employee benefits.
Labor doesn’t want this stuff. House and Senate Democrats don’t want it. And I seriously doubt if the president would push for it. Which means, in terms of the new budget conference (another fiscal cliff?) due to report in mid-December, the GOP better be super careful not to end the sequester budget caps in return for phony entitlement reforms.
Republicans had no coherent message going into the shutdown fiasco. But they can change that. They can now adopt a clear policy that maintains the sequester budget caps, pushes hard for pro-growth tax reform, and makes no apologies for rolling back the taxing, spending, mandating, budget-busting behemoth that is Obamacare.
The budget and debt battle of the next three months is actually going to be war. Obama knows this. Does the GOP?
1a)How Washington Really Redistributes Income
Stan Druckenmiller makes an unlikely class warrior. He's a member of the 1%—make that the 0.001%—one of the most successful money managers of all time, and 60 years old to boot. But lately he has been touring college campuses promoting a message of income redistribution you don't hear out of Washington. It's how federal entitlements like Medicare and Social Security are letting Mr. Druckenmiller's generation rip off all those doting Barack Obama voters in Generation X, Y and Z.
This was not the Wall Street consensus. He also said that a "technical default," in which the government is a week or two late in making payments on its debt, would be "horrible" but not "the end of the world" if it produced reforms that put U.S. finances on a sounder footing.
1a)How Washington Really Redistributes Income
The renowned money manager goes back to school to explain how entitlements are helping the Baby Boomers rip off future generations.
Stan Druckenmiller makes an unlikely class warrior. He's a member of the 1%—make that the 0.001%—one of the most successful money managers of all time, and 60 years old to boot. But lately he has been touring college campuses promoting a message of income redistribution you don't hear out of Washington. It's how federal entitlements like Medicare and Social Security are letting Mr. Druckenmiller's generation rip off all those doting Barack Obama voters in Generation X, Y and Z.
"I have been shocked at the reception. I had planned to only visit Bowdoin, " his alma mater in Maine, he says. But he has since been invited to multiple campuses, and even the kids at Stanford and Berkeley have welcomed his theme of generational theft. Harlem Children's Zone President Geoffrey Canada and former Federal Reserve Governor Kevin Warsh have joined him at stops along the tour.
Mr. Druckenmiller describes the reaction of students: "The biggest question I got was, 'How do we start a movement?' And my answer was 'I'm a 60-year-old washed-up money manager. I don't know how to start a movement. That's your job. But we did it in Vietnam without Twitter and without Facebook and without any social media. That's your job.' But the enthusiasm—they get it."
Even at Berkeley, he says, "they got it. There is tremendous energy in the room and of course they understand it. I'd say it's a combination of appalled but motivated. That's the response I've been getting, and it's been overwhelming."
Movement or no, this is a good week to check in with Mr. Druckenmiller, as President Obama won the budget battle without policy concessions to break the federal debt limit and continue borrowing beyond $17 trillion. I last spoke to the Pittsburgh native and father of three daughters during the 2011 debt-limit brawl, and he created a stir by supporting entitlement changes as a condition of raising the debt cap.
This was not the Wall Street consensus. He also said that a "technical default," in which the government is a week or two late in making payments on its debt, would be "horrible" but not "the end of the world" if it produced reforms that put U.S. finances on a sounder footing.
"Some characters in the administration have mischaracterized my view," he says now, in the conference room of his office high above midtown Manhattan. Then as now, he argues that major reform to protect future generations would be worth a short period of market turbulence.
"If there's something really big on the other side in terms of entitlement reform, it's worth using the debt limit. And God forbid even if you go a day or two over it in terms of interest payments," he says, the country would be better off "if and only if you got big, big progress on a long-term problem." Contemplating the recent Beltway debacle, he adds, "the problem with what we just went through is there was no big thing on the other side."
Not that Mr. Druckenmiller endorsed the most recent Republican strategy. "I thought tyingObamaCare to the debt ceiling was nutty," he says, and I can confirm that he was saying so for weeks before the denouement.
But he adds that "I did not think it would be nutty to tie entitlements to the debt ceiling because there's a massive long-term problem. And this president, despite what he says, has shown time and time again that he needs a gun at his head to negotiate in good faith. All this talk about, 'I won't negotiate with a gun at my head.' OK, you've been president for five years."
His voice rising now, Mr. Druckenmiller pounds his fist on the conference table. "Show me, President Obama, when the period was when you initiated budget discussions without a gun at your head."
Which brings him back to his thieving generation. For three decades until 2010, Mr. Druckenmiller ran the hedge fund he founded, Duquesne Capital. Now retired from managing other people's money, he looks after his own assets, which Forbes magazine recently estimated at $2.9 billion. And he wonders why in five years the massively indebted U.S. government will begin sending him a Social Security check for $3,500 each month. Because he earned it?
"I didn't earn it," he responds, while pointing to a bar chart that is part of his college presentation. Drawing on research by Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff, it shows the generational wealth transfer that benefits oldsters at the expense of the young.
While many seniors believe they are simply drawing out the "savings" they were forced to deposit into Social Security and Medicare, they are actually drawing out much more, especially relative to later generations. That's because politicians have voted to award the seniors ever more generous benefits. As a result, while today's 65-year-olds will receive on average net lifetime benefits of $327,400, children born now will suffer net lifetime losses of $420,600 as they struggle to pay the bills of aging Americans.
One of the great ironies of the Obama presidency is that it has been a disaster for the young people who form the core of his political coalition. High unemployment is paired with exploding debt that they will have to finance whenever they eventually find jobs.
Are the kids finally figuring out that the Obama economy is a lousy deal for them? "No, I don't sense that," says Mr. Druckenmiller, who is a registered independent. "But one of my points is neither party should own your vote. And once they know they own your vote, you're not going to get any action on this particular issue."
When the former money manager visited Stanford University, the audience included older folks as well as students. Some of the oldsters questioned why many of his dire forecasts assume that federal tax collections will stay at their traditional 18.5% of GDP. They asked why taxes should not rise to fulfill the promises already made.
Mr. Druckenmiller's response: "Oh, so you've paid 18.5% for your 40 years and now you want the next generation of workers to pay 30% to finance your largess?" He added that if 18.5% was "so immoral, why don't you give back some of your ill-gotten gains of the last 40 years?"
He has a similar argument for those on the left who say entitlements can be fixed with an eventual increase in payroll taxes. "Oh, I see," he says. "So I get to pay a 12% payroll tax now until I'm 65 and then I don't pay. But the next generation—instead of me paying 15% or having my benefits slightly reduced—they're going to pay 17% in 2033. That's why we're waiting—so we can shift even more to the future than to now?"
He also rejects the "rat through the python theory," which holds that the fiscal disaster will only be temporary while the baby-boom generation moves through the benefit pipeline and then entitlement costs will become bearable. By then, he says, "you have so much debt on the books that it's too late."
Unfortunately for taxpayers, "the debt accumulates while the rat's going through the python," so by the 2040s the debt itself and its gargantuan interest payments become bigger problems than entitlements. He points to a chart that shows how America's debt-to-GDP ratio, the amount of debt compared with national income, explodes in about 20 years. That's where Greece was when it hit the skids, he says, pointing to about 2030.
Breaking again with many Wall Streeters but consistent with his theme, Mr. Druckenmiller wants to raise taxes now on capital gains and dividends, bringing both up to ordinary income rates. He says the current tax code represents "another intergenerational transfer, because 60-year-olds are worth five times what 30-year-olds are."
And 65-year-olds are "much wealthier than the working-age population. So the guy who's out there working—the plumber, the stockbroker, whatever he is—he's paying the 40% rate and the coupon clippers who are not working anymore are paying a 20% rate."
Ah, but what about the destructive double taxation on corporate income? The Druckenmiller plan is to raise tax rates on investors while at the same time cutting the corporate tax rate to zero.
"Who owns corporations? Shareholders. But who makes the decisions at corporations? The guys running the companies. So if you tax the shareholder at ordinary income [rates] but you tax the economic actors at zero," he explains, "you get the actual economic actors incented to hire people, to do capital spending. It's not the coupon clippers that are making those decisions. It's the people at the operating level."
As an added bonus, wiping out the corporate tax eliminates myriad opportunities for crony capitalism and corporate welfare. "How do the lobbying groups and the special interests work in Washington? Through the tax code. There's no more building plants in Puerto Rico or Ireland and double-leasebacks and all this stuff. If you take corporate tax rates to zero, that's gone. But in terms of the fairness argument, you are taxing the shareholder. So you eliminate double taxation. To me it could be very, very good for growth, which is a huge part of the solution to the debt problem long-term. You can't do it without growth."
Amid the shutdown nonsense, this week's debt-ceiling accord did create an opening for some reform before the next deadline early next year. So what should Republican reformers like Paul Ryan do now?
"I would go for something simple that is very, very tough for the other side to argue, for example, means-testing Social Security and Medicare," which would adjust benefits by income. He notes again his impending eligibility for a monthly government check.
"I don't need it. I don't want it. I could also make the argument that every health expert will tell you that wealthy people live 4.5 years longer than the middle class or the poor. So I'm going to get paid 4.5 years more than the middle class or the poor," he says. "It's not that many dollars, but I think it would be a great symbol in seeing exactly how serious they are."
But Mr. Druckenmiller is not sure, so soon after the failed attempt to defund ObamaCare, that Republicans should demand entitlement reform in exchange for the next debt-limit vote this winter or spring. "Maybe they need a break," he says. "I think a much more effective strategy would be for them to publicly shine a light on something so obvious as means-testing and take their case to the American people rather than go through the actual debt limit."
If Mr. Obama rejects the idea, "then we will really know where he is on entitlement reform." For this reason, Mr. Druckenmiller views means-testing as "really the perfect start—and it should only be a start—to find out who's telling the truth here and who's not."
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2)Dangerous Times: Is Rouhani Rolling Obama?
By James Lewis
When Mullah Rouhani was smiling for the abject media in New York the other week, Obama got double-teamed but good. The President of the United States asked to meet Rouhani three different times and was refused three times. Then when the truck bomber of the U.S. Marine Barracks of 1984 flew back to Tehran, he granted POTUS fifteen minutes on the phone. And then his boss, Ayatollah Khamenei, publicly disavowed his puppet by telling the media that Rouhani should never have done it.
Today, Obama is sending American arms to 60,000 Al Qaida-linked rebels in Syria, and he is still agitating for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jordan. The Center for Security Policy has just publicized a complex money-laundering network of Muslim Brotherhood shell corporations funneling millions of dollars to Obama, Hillary, and probably other U.S. politicians and media corporations. Meanwhile, rogue nukes keep getting closer, while our self-deluded left keeps Americans blind to danger.
2)Dangerous Times: Is Rouhani Rolling Obama?
By James Lewis
When Mullah Rouhani was smiling for the abject media in New York the other week, Obama got double-teamed but good. The President of the United States asked to meet Rouhani three different times and was refused three times. Then when the truck bomber of the U.S. Marine Barracks of 1984 flew back to Tehran, he granted POTUS fifteen minutes on the phone. And then his boss, Ayatollah Khamenei, publicly disavowed his puppet by telling the media that Rouhani should never have done it.
And there you have it: Three humiliations in a row as Obama bowed and bowed to Rouhani, a contemptuous 15 minute phone call so the U.S. media could glorify Obama's "breakthrough," and then Khamenei pulls out the rug. Rim shot, maestro!
So much for Obama's pathetic bows to bloodthirsty tyrants. If our liberals were capable of shame and embarrassment they would be dying of shame over Obama's "diplomacy" in the 
Middle East. But people who live in layers of deception and self-deception can't recognize a slap in the face to their hero even if it resounds all over the Middle East. The mullahs achieved their purpose, to soften Obama up for the talks going on between Kerry and the Persian rug sellers out of the limelight. Obama is now deeply, humiliatingly invested in getting that Jimmy Carter photo op, between Iran and Israel, with his arms spread wide to celebrate another piece of paper promising peace.
Middle East. But people who live in layers of deception and self-deception can't recognize a slap in the face to their hero even if it resounds all over the Middle East. The mullahs achieved their purpose, to soften Obama up for the talks going on between Kerry and the Persian rug sellers out of the limelight. Obama is now deeply, humiliatingly invested in getting that Jimmy Carter photo op, between Iran and Israel, with his arms spread wide to celebrate another piece of paper promising peace.
Rouhani at the UN has all the makings of a phony peace, which is why Bibi Netanyahu is now in the role of Winston Churchill warning about Hitler before the Munich appeasement of 1938. Netanyahu is the only leader in the world who is telling the truth, and secretly everybody knows it: That the mullahs are violent fanatics with a totalitarian war theology. War priests who ordered hundreds of kids on motorcycles to blow themselves up in Saddam's minefields are going to make mincemeat out of Western metrosexuals. In the hard world of international power plays, Obama is now known as a habitual liar who had to be rescued from his own folly by Vladimir Putin. The mullahs know that Obama desperately needs another ego victory before his term ends three years from now. In just one year they may have fully enriched uranium. Are they really going to surrender their Key to Paradise to please Obama? Gimme a break.
The last time a big Democrat was rolled by a nuclear mass-killer it was Madeleine Albright, who actually waltzed with Kim II on a balcony overlooking thousands of skeletal North Korean soldiers, goose-stepping on the street below, while Maddie and Kim were whirling to the "Blue Danube" waltz. We do provide the dictators of this world with a lot of laughs.
Jimmy Carter must have known about Khomeini's war theology -- even the State Dept couldn't be that negligent -- and still allowed Khomeini overthrow the Shah, who now looks like the most progressive ruler of Iran in the 20th century. Carter's betrayal of the Shah opened the door to Muslim imperialism, the greatest threat to the world today.
Democrat are treacherous. Bill Clinton had four chances to take out Bin Laden before 9/11/01, and refused every single time. The result was 9/11/01. Our contemptible media blamed George W. Bush, naturally, but it was Bill Clinton who failed to prevent 9/11. Don't think for a moment they don't know the truth. They are not stupid.
Today, Obama is sending American arms to 60,000 Al Qaida-linked rebels in Syria, and he is still agitating for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jordan. The Center for Security Policy has just publicized a complex money-laundering network of Muslim Brotherhood shell corporations funneling millions of dollars to Obama, Hillary, and probably other U.S. politicians and media corporations. Meanwhile, rogue nukes keep getting closer, while our self-deluded left keeps Americans blind to danger.
Do you see any pattern in liberal "foreign policy?" It is strategically harmful to America and the civilized world. The Global Jihad would not be rising without support from America, Europe, and the United Nations. Pols like Obama are somehow convinced they will benefit from radical Islam, but they will be swallowed up as soon as the time comes. Islamists hate socialists, and kill them when they take power. We just allowed the mullahs kill the socialist Mujahedeen Khalq in Iraq, who have fought against the mullahs for almost forty years. Our little peace present to Tehran.
Our lo-info media are thrilled, as usual. Peace is right around the corner.
Every day since 1979 the mullahs have led the national chant: "Death to Israel! Death to America!" Today they are hinting they might drop the "Death to America!" part if Obama is very nice to them. But Islam is a global imperialist theology, and all infidels must die or surrender.
The crucial question is whether Obama's hunger for grandstanding will allow the mullahs to roll the United States one more time. Does he really want to stop Iranian nukes? Or does he just want the false glory of media worship? There is nothing in the public record to show that Obama cares about American security, not to mention Europe's and Israel's. Even if he cared, he still keeps screwing things up. Obama's pathetic "healthcare" website is typical. And the sharks are circling.
Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is sounding the alarm over and over, and therebydrawing the rage of our media lynch mob. There is no bottom to their shamelessness. They keep digging deeper.
Today Israel is getting closer to acting on its own. In 1981 the Israeli Air Force knocked out Saddam Hussein's nuclear reactor without warning. In 2006 the IAF destroyed Syria's nuclear reactor near the Euphrates River, again without warning. Now that the U.S. government is so deeply infiltrated by Muslim Brotherhood agents, don't expect Netanyahu to ask Obama's permission to act.
Iran's nearest neighbors would welcome a fast decapitation strike, because nobody wants to live with a nuclear Jim Jones cult next door.
Obama makes empty threats, but Netanyahu does not. Obama let the clock run on out Iranian nukes, and somebody has to stop them, because "charm offensives" won't do it. Bibi is the designated hitter now, because everybody else is hunkering low in their foxholes.
As the ancient saying goes, "when you go to kill the king, do not miss."
2a)Obama’s potential release of $12bn of frozen Iranian assets would be followed by $35 billion from Europe
Tehran stands to gain access to nearly $50 billion if the Obama administration decides to free up $12 billion of frozen Iranian assets in the US, inevitably followed by Europe’s release of another $35 billion. The White House was reported Friday, Oct. 18 to be weighing a proposal to offer Iran access to these funds “in installments” against "steps to cut down on its nuclear program."
This plan offers Barack Obama a way to ease sanctions on Iran, while avoiding political and diplomatic fallout in Congress and from Jerusalem that would result from an attempt to get the sanctions legislation repealed or amended.
US lawmakers and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu continue to call for harsher measures against Iran, after the Geneva conference last week failed to achieve any breakthrough in the controversy on Iran’s nuclear program.
Although its delegation avoided any pledge to suspend uranium enrichment and offered no plan to dismantle its enrichment facilities, US officials complimented the Iranian position as “more candid and substantive” than in previous diplomatic encounters.
Indeed, according to our sources, the Iranian delegation advised the six world powers on the opposite side of the table to simply accept Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s fatwa as an ironclad pledge of the Islamic Republic’s commitment to refrain from developing a nuclear weapon and continue to pursue a peaceful program.
As for a substantial proposal to cut back on their nuclear operations, the Iranian negotiators said firmly: Sanctions relief first; concessions only at the end of the road.
As for a substantial proposal to cut back on their nuclear operations, the Iranian negotiators said firmly: Sanctions relief first; concessions only at the end of the road.
Ahead of the next round of talks on Nov. 7-8, the Obama administration hopes to warm world opinion to the proposition that Iran’s leaders, especially President Hassan Rouhani, Foreign Minister Javad Zarif and his deputy Abbas Araghchi, need more incentives for concessions. They must be able to show their doctrinaire colleagues at home that diplomacy and smiles win more than intransigence.
Even before the Geneva conference, the White House was already putting in place the plan for relieving sanctions by the release of frozen funds - which is why the US delegation included for the first time the Director of the OFAC (the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control), Adam Szubin.
Asked by CNN what Szubin was doing there, senior US negotiator Undersecretary Wendy Sherman said:
“The purpose of having our sanctions team here with us is because … Iran wants to get sanctions relief. But they also have to understand what the range of our sanctions are, what they require, how they work, what it takes to implement sanctions relief, what sanctions we believe need to stay in place.”
Even this gesture failed to elicit from the Iranian delegates any concrete concessions. The obviously fed-up senior Russian delegate, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov, summed up his impression of the conference by commenting sourly that it was “…better than Almaty" (where the last round of talks took place in April) but offered “no guarantee of future progress.”
Nevertheless, President Obama is determined to keep up his strategy of appeasing Tehran and showing Congress and the Israeli prime minister that they are wasting their time by trying to stop him easing sanctions on Iran, because he will bypass them with presidential decrees.
Most of all, Obama is set against allowing himself to be persuaded by Netanyahu’s arguments of the terrible danger posed by a nuclear Iran.
Foreign Minister Zarif put his oar into the conflict between Washington and Jerusalem Friday with this comment: “There is a high possibility that the talks will be disturbed by various efforts on the part of Israel,” he said. “This reflects Israel’s frustration and warmongering.”
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3)
“No SOB ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor, dumb SOB die for his.” — George C. Scott, as
General George S. Patton
Who else but Republicans would give a standing ovation to the coach who just led them into a humiliating defeat?
It happened Wednesday, as some Republicans saluted U.S. House Speaker John Boehner and patted themselves on the back for being willing to lose a fight over principle. “We won a moral victory,” one GOP lawmaker said.
And what do you call a politician who just won a “moral” victory?
A “loser.”
Which is why good ol’
“Bipartisan Barack” relished the chance to mock the GOP yesterday with his comment: “Don’t like a particular policy? ... Go out there and win an election.”
Enjoy the moment, Mr. President. If the GOP is dumb enough to lose on purpose, you deserve it.
But I predict that — like the phrase “If you like your health coverage, you can keep it. Period.” — this will come back to haunt him.
At this moment, the GOP is at its lowest point and the Democrats are at their highest. President Obama is gloating over a political win handed to him by Republicans who picked a stupid fight (ending Obamacare immediately) and used stupid tactics (tying it to the debt ceiling).
But what did Democrats actually win? Did the president get a blank check? Is Obama-care beyond the reach of this Congress or the next?
Those two fights are ideal political territory for the GOP.
I don’t even have to write about how dismally awful the Obamacare rollout is going. Hilariously, Democrats are telling themselves that, by next spring, it’s going to look much better.
Uh ... guys? You haven’t even started forcing people to buy it yet. And already, according to Kaiser Public Opinion, 54 percent of Americans have a “very unfavorable” view of the individual mandate.
And guess which specific part of Obamacare the Republicans just forced every Democrat in the House and Senate to explicitly vote in support of?
Bingo.
Between now and next November, millions of Americans are going to find out that a) they’ve lost coverage they like; b) their premiums are going up; or c) both. Even the “Friends of Obama” will be getting bad news that their special-interest delays and exemptions are ending.
To paraphrase P.J. O’Rourke: If you think people hate Obama-care now, wait until they have to write a check for it.
Then there’s the debt and spending. Polls show that a majority of Americans would rather bust the debt ceiling and default than add to Obama’s record-setting deficits. Do they really mean it? No, but it shows how much Americans hate this debt — hate it at the political cellular level.
Hey, didn’t members of one party just spend weeks outraged over their inability to get a “clean” debt ceiling increase? Doesn’t one party truly own the “borrow more to spend more” mantle today in a way they didn’t just a few weeks ago?
Ask yourself: A year from now, when the stupidity of the shutdown fight is long gone, who would you rather be: Team “Obamacare Sucks And We’ve Got Too Much Debt”?
Or Team “I Voted to Shut Down the Government Rather Than Change Obamacare or Spend Less Money”?
I know what you’re thinking, Democrats. “They’re Republicans. They’ll find a way to screw this up.”
And two months ago, you’d be right. But Tea Party politicians are still, in the end, politicians.
And to quote U.S. Rep. Trey Goudy (R-S.C.), a former prosecutor and current Tea Party fave: “I didn’t lose many cases in court, and I haven’t won many cases here in Congress. It’s time to re-evaluate my tactics.”
3a)
Does Obama Know? Does Obama Care?
America needs an accounting of the health-care debacle.
Last night on Twitter, your humble columnist observed: "There's only one thing that can save ObamaCare now. AN OBAMA SPEECH." We were kidding, naturally--alluding to President Obama's endless series of speeches in 2009 and 2010 in which he tried, unsuccessfully, to sell "health-care reform" to the public, and to subsequent laments like this one from Drew Westen in August 2011: "Nor did anyone explain what health care reform was supposed to accomplish . . ."
But then it occurred to us that the American people really do deserve a presidential address on ObamaCare. No, not as punishment for re-electing him, or at least not mainly for that purpose. Rather, because 2½ weeks after the launch of the "exchanges" that are supposed to be ObamaCare's operational centerpiece, it is clear to almost everyone that they are an administrative disaster. In this crisis, there is an opportunity: to recognize an impending economic and humanitarian disaster, and to act in time to avert or at least minimize it.
That requires a willingness to face reality and a capacity for leadership. So far Obama has shown little evidence of either. CNN reports that in an interview with an Iowa TV station Tuesday, the president said: "I am the first to acknowledge that the website that was supposed to do this all in a seamless way has had way more glitches than I think are acceptable."
Let's let longtime ObamaCare enthusiast and Journolist founder Ezra Klein answer that: "So far, the Affordable Care Act's launch has been a failure. Not 'troubled.' Not 'glitchy.' A failure." A language note: One suspects the ObamaCare debut will make it impossible for anyone ever again to use the word "glitches" unironically.
This is galling for multiple reasons. For one, he was lecturing members of Congress, every one of whom (with the exception of three appointed senators) holds his office by virtue of having won his most recent election. Granted, Obama won his too, but with the help of an abusive IRS. And the country now faces a crisis because in 2009 and 2010, when it came to health care, Obama and his fellow Democrats failed to act in accord with the advice he now dishes out: "Don't break it."Yesterday Obama delivered remarks at the White House, in which he made only an oblique reference to ObamaCare: "You don't like a particular policy or a particular president, then argue for your position. Go out there and win an election. Push to change it. But don't break it. Don't break what our predecessors spent over two centuries building. That's not being faithful to what this country is about."
How serious a crisis? As Megan McArdle has warned, "if the exchanges don't get fixed soon, they could destroy Obamacare--and possibly, the rest of the private insurance market." The Wall Street Journal reports today that "insurers say the federal health-care marketplace is generating flawed data that is straining their ability to handle even the trickle of enrollees who have gotten through so far." Examples:
Scott & White Health Plan in Temple, Texas, has received 25 enrollees from the federally run exchange so far. "There are some missing data elements that are requiring a lot of research on our part," said Allan Einboden, the health plan's chief executive. "If we'd received 5,000 and they all had to be worked, that's a lot of extra administrative costs," said Mr. Einboden, who said he expects the problems to be fixed.
After realizing that some applications listed up to three spouses in a single family, Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Nebraska, which has about 50 health-law enrollees, had to "stop those enrollments from going through the automated process," said Matt Leonard, the insurer's sales manager. "It takes an automated process and turns it into a manual process," he said.
At Priority Health in Michigan, health-plan staff are calling new customers to confirm each of their "couple of dozen" enrollees accurately picked the plan, said Joan Budden, chief marketing officer, after realizing some had enrolled in multiple health plans, likely owing to user error linked to slow healthcare.gov response times. "Sometimes they pushed the [submit] button three times," Ms. Budden said.
Sioux Falls, S.D.,-based Avera Health Plans has called each of its 21 incoming customers to make sure the data are correct.
The heart may not bleed for insurance executives burdened with administrative costs, but this is actually a serious threat to the ability of Americans to get insurance. Under a provision of ObamaCare known as the "Medical Loss Ratio," insurers in the individual marketplace are required to spend at least 80% of all premium dollars on medical care. If the exchanges are "fixed" so that many more faulty applications get through, the new administrative costs will have to come out of the insurance companies' bottom line, making it harder for them to stay in business.
The Journal article notes that the largely nonfunctional exchanges may also worsen the "adverse selection" problem that comes with redefining insurance as a redistributive scheme:
As consumers struggle to navigate healthcare.gov, some health-plan executives worry that only the sickest--those who most expect to need insurance--will persist in seeking coverage. If younger consumers who are on the fence about buying coverage find the process too onerous, insurers may end up with too few healthier members to offset the costs of less-healthy enrollees.
It's not obvious, though, that functional exchanges would be less nightmarish in this regard than nonfunctional ones. After all, if no one could sign up, there would be no adverse-selection problem. If everyone could, the ratio of healthy people paying above-market premiums to sickly people paying below-market ones would perhaps be higher than it is now--but the overall scale of the problem would be far greater.
In any case, it doesn't seem as though a quick fix is in the offing. "The federal health care exchange was built using 10-year-old technology that may require constant fixes and updates for the next six months and the eventual overhaul of the entire system," reports USA Today:
"I have never seen a website--in the last five years--require you to delete the cache in an effort to resolve errors," said Dan Schuyler, a director at Leavitt Partners, a health care group [founded] by [the father of] former Health and Human Services secretary Mike Leavitt. "This is a very early Web 1.0 type of fix."
"The application could be fundamentally flawed," said Jeff Kim, president of CDNetworks, a content-delivery network. "They may be using 1990s technology in 2.0 world."
National Review Online's Yuval Levin repeats many of these themes in a lengthy and thoughtful overview based on not-for-attribution interviews with "several officials of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (the HHS agency that is running the exchanges), and with a number of reasonably well placed insurance company officials in Washington." Although Levin is an opponent of ObamaCare, none of his sources are. Yet some of the stories they tell are so horrific, Levin doubts they are true:
The character of the conversations I had with these very knowledgeable individuals in the last few days reminded me of something: It reminded me of the daily intra-governmental video conferences and calls in the wake of hurricane Katrina in 2005. I was witness to many of those, as a White House staffer. What I saw in the first days of the disaster quickly fell into a pattern: local, state, and federal officials on the ground would report on what they knew directly--which was often grim--and then they would pass along information they'd heard but hadn't gotten first hand, which was often much more grim but almost always ultimately turned out not to be true. Some of these stories went public (remember the shootings at the Superdome? They never happened). Some didn't. They were often reported with a kind of detached authority that made them believable, and they were a function of living in panic amid an unbelievable situation over time.
Reassuring, isn't it? The whole piece is worth a read, but here's the conclusion:
For me, and for other critics of Obamacare, the problem with the law was never about these technical matters. I didn't think the system wouldn't work because the government couldn't build a website, but because the basic health economics involved is deeply misguided and would take the (badly inadequate) American health-financing system in the wrong direction. So these problems only seem like a prelude to other, larger problems. But Obamacare was also always going to be a test of the sheer capacity of the administrative state to actually do what it claims the authority and ability to do. At this point, it looks as though we may be witnessing a failure of the administrative state on a level unimagined even by its staunchest critics. We may be. But we'll have to see.
If we can't be sure of the magnitude or details of the disaster that is ObamaCare, it is in substantial part because the administration is stonewalling. USA Today quotes Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of health and human services, as saying Wednesday: "I will be the first to tell you that the website launch was rockier than we wanted it to be." Note the similarity to the shifty language of Obama's Tuesday quote: "I will be the first to acknowledge . . ." Both claim to be "the first" to say things everyone knew two weeks earlier and are grossly understating what everyone now knows.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee plans a hearing next Thursday on the exchanges' failures, but Politico reports Sebelius has declined to testify and HHS "has not committed to sending any other officials." Jon Stewart, by contrast, didn't need a subpoena to get her on his show.
Meanwhile, government and industry insiders with knowledge of the fiasco are intimidated from talking to the press, according to multiple reports. The Journal reports that HHS officials "have pressured insurers to refrain from commenting publicly about the problems, according to executives at four health plans, who asked not to be named. The HHS declined to comment."
USA Today reports that John Engates, a technology executive, "said HHS has been opaque about the problems, and the tech industry doesn't know the extent of the issues. 'There's no secrets leaking out,' he said. 'I'm sure everyone's looking for something to change the direction of the conversation, but it's just not there.' " And Levin reports that in addition to his acquaintances, "I approached several additional people at CMS who politely declined to discuss the exchanges."
The Hill reports that "White House press secretary Jay Carney said Thursday that President Obama was seeking 'accountability' from federal employees working to fix glitches with the ObamaCare website." Carney added that "the president was 'not happy' with how the rollout had gone."
But it is not the job of federal employees to keep Barack Obama happy. It is the job of federal employees including Barack Obama to be accountable to the people. This disastrous law was a product of Obama's willfulness. It is up to him to account for its results, and to devise a plan to minimize the damage. So far there is no indication he is even making an effort.
3b)Health Law’s Rocky Debut Puts Sebelius in Cross Hairs
Law's Supporters Criticize Her Management of the Rollout
Kathleen Sebelius keeps running into trouble, whether on the road, where she is out promoting the new health-care law, or back home, where she is struggling to resolve the technical woes that have hobbled its debut.
Mrs. Sebelius, the nation’s top health official, was in Tampa the other day to promote the “online shopping experience” of the federal website where uninsured Americans can now select coverage. Christopher Dawson, who sat to her left at the staged event, had tried for a week to enroll. Like others, he was foiled by “error” messages.
“I felt like she was trying to make it seem better than it is,” the 20-year-old University of South Florida senior said afterward.
The website failed Mrs. Sebelius, the Health and Human Services secretary, during her appearance to tout it last week in Pittsburgh. Uninsured residents, including 41-year-old LaKesha Lowry, tried to sign up on laptops brought in for the special event. But the system was down, Ms. Lowry said, with instructions to “Try again later.”
As the chief advocate for the Affordable Care Act, Secretary Sebelius is scrambling behind the scenes to address the website’s technical failures. With anger growing over the inability of consumers across the U.S. to access the new online marketplace, Mrs. Sebelius has become the target of late-night spoofs and calls for her resignation.
“It’s tough to take these shots,” said Secretary Sebelius, who made clear in an interview she wouldn’t resign. “But I will take them until we get this right.” She and other officials say the site is slowly improving.
Yet even some of the law’s supporters criticize her management of the rollout, particularly after it became clear the site’s troubles weren’t just “glitches,” as Mrs. Sebelius had first said, but broader design defects.
After two weeks of review, the HHS secretary concluded, “We didn’t have enough testing, specifically for high volumes, for a very complicated project.”
The online insurance marketplace needed five years of construction and a year of testing, she said: “We had two years and almost no testing.”
In her role as HHS secretary, Mrs. Sebelius is traveling around the U.S. to persuade people to sign up for coverage. The new health-insurance exchanges must have broad participation to make the program economically viable.
Mrs. Sebelius is also pressuring private companies working on the website, including CGI Group Inc., she said. “I called on the contractor to get its A-team here and give us 150%,” Mrs. Sebelius said. CGI declined to comment, a spokesman said.
Overall, she said, the website is functional and “we will hit the mark” within the law’s six-month open enrollment period that began Oct. 1. “I’m not throwing out the system and starting over,’” she said.
At the 6:30 a.m. exercise class in the HHS gym, Mrs. Sebelius begins the first of five or six daily meetings with Marilyn Tavenner, administrator of Medicare and Medicaid. Between abdominal crunches and weightlifting sets, Mrs. Sebelius has for the past two weeks started her day quizzing Ms. Tavenner, who oversees the website.
Mrs. Sebelius convenes meetings, often three times a day, to monitor progress against the technological snafus. “I can’t fix the website myself,” she said. “But I’m working around the clock to find out what we know in extraordinary and honest detail, hold our contractors and our team accountable, and accelerate the timeline to resolve the problems.”
Mrs. Sebelius, who updates President Barack Obama almost daily, said she would see if the government was entitled to any refunds, once the work is done.
Mr. Obama was “not happy” with the exchange rollout, and “has insisted that everybody work 24/7 to fix the problems that exist,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said Thursday. The president, meanwhile, declared his “full confidence” in Mrs. Sebelius, the White House said Tuesday.
The government hasn’t disclosed how many people have signed up for the program. Mrs. Sebelius said enrollment numbers would be released monthly, beginning in mid-November.
“Mrs. Sebelius’s approach isn’t building confidence,” said Timothy Jost, a health-care law expert and professor at the Washington and Lee University School of Law in Virginia. “She should be forthcoming on what’s gone wrong, where things stand and what specifically she’s doing to fix it.”
Efforts to resolve website problems came as the government shutdown sent home half of Secretary Sebelius’s 80,000 employees. Climbing into an SUV after the Tampa event, she slipped from high heels to flats and grabbed a lunchtime salad. The latest crisis, she said, was “another challenge that’s no worse than the near-death experiences” the health-care law has encountered over the past three years.
Beside solving the technical problems, Secretary Sebelius, a former two-term governor of Kansas, must also persuade about half the states to extend the law’s Medicaid coverage. “She has a tall order to get all states on board,” said Utah Gov. Gary Herbert, one of the GOP governors who hasn’t yet agreed.
This week, the politics turned nasty. Sen. Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican who voted for her confirmation in 2009, called on Mrs. Sebelius to resign. So has Newt Gingrich. On Twitter, there is #FireSebelius.
Mrs. Sebelius’s education in rough-and-tumble politics began at an early age. Her father, Jack Gilligan, a liberal Democrat, served in Cincinnati city government, the U.S. House of Representatives and was governor of Ohio. Mrs. Sebelius’s brother, John Gilligan, recalled their father “was running for some office practically all the time.” Sometimes called a Communist, “Dad took a lot of heat,” Mr. Gilligan said, “but Kathleen learned to absorb the pressure and criticism…even when she was putting up yard signs.”
After her father’s death last month, Mrs. Sebelius said at the memorial service that he taught her “political courage.”
The Catholic schoolgirl left home for Trinity Washington University in the nation’s capital, where she met her husband, Gary Sebelius, whose father was a Republican congressman from Kansas. After settling in Topeka and having two sons, Mrs. Sebelius—like her father, a Democrat in a largely Republican state—successfully ran for the state Legislature in 1986 and for insurance commissioner eight years later. In 2002, she was elected governor—becoming half of America’s only father-daughter governors—and re-elected four years later.
An early supporter of Mr. Obama in the 2008 presidential campaign, Mrs. Sebelius turned down a couple of Cabinet-level posts until offered the HHS job.
Becoming health czar for a president pledged to deliver health insurance to millions of uninsured Americans presented “the perfect opportunity,” said Kathy Greenlee, who worked with Mrs. Sebelius at the Kansas insurance commission and is now an assistant secretary at HHS: “Kathleen knows everything there is about insurance, and she’s always been a health-conscious jock.”
With her husband, a judge, staying behind in Kansas, Mrs. Sebelius devoted nearly all of her time to the job, living near HHS headquarters on Capitol Hill. Most mornings, the 65-year-old HHS secretary runs 4 miles, often before or after the gym, with her security detail trailing on bike and SUV.
Mrs. Sebelius took on health issues that attracted national attention. In controversial decisions on reproductive health, she blocked over-the-counter sales of the so-called morning-after pill for girls under age 17—later overturned in court—and required most employers to cover birth control in employee health plans, initially with narrow exemptions for some nonprofit religious employers with objections to birth control.
Last summer, she didn’t intervene to allow a dying Pennsylvania girl to jump to the top of the adult transplant list. The child’s mother said Mrs. Sebelius was letting children die.
At the time, Mrs. Sebelius said she didn’t want to set a precedent for politicians to meddle with transplant rules developed by experts. The family sued, and a court overruled her decision.
But nothing in her five years as HHS secretary compared with the opposition to Mr. Obama’s signature law. “The president appreciates Kathleen is very steady, and doesn’t wilt or waver under fire,” said David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s former senior adviser.
After the health-care law was enacted and survived a Supreme Court challenge, Mrs. Sebelius became the quarterback of its implementation. Gearing up earlier this year for the exchange rollout, she was denied $1.5 billion from Congress for operations and promoting the new insurance options.
Of late, she has hit the road to whip up community support with so-called navigators trained to help people sign up for coverage. She looked for help from mayors and local leaders, she said, because “they see the costs of not having care up close and personal.”
Mrs. Sebelius has encountered resistance at the state level. Florida last month, for example, forbade navigators from using county health departments to help people sign up for the program. Since then, Mrs. Sebelius has made four trips to Florida, which has the second largest uninsured population in the U.S.
Then there was the budget battle. GOP lawmakers, led by tea-party groups, last month began their push to deprive funding for the health-care law.
Mrs. Sebelius caught TV snippets of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz during his marathon Sept. 24 session on the Senate floor. The next morning, after hearing that Sen. Cruz had read the Dr. Suess book “Green Eggs and Ham,” Mrs. Sebelius told her staff it was the wrong story to illustrate his opposition to the law.
In the book, the character Sam resists tasting green eggs and ham but after sampling the dish, he decides he likes it. Once Americans “take a taste” of the health-care law, Mrs. Sebelius said, “they will like it, just like Sam.”
Republican foes triggered a partial government shutdown on Oct. 1 by refusing to pass a budget unless it “defunded” the health-care law. That day, as consumers clogged the government website for its opening, Mrs. Sebelius furloughed half her workers. She appeared in the Rose Garden beside Mr. Obama as he declared he wouldn’t give in to Republicans.
Two days after the federal website launched, Mrs. Sebelius was in the middle of an emergency meeting to review the shutdown’s impact on her agencies—including the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control—when alarms sounded in the windowless conference room.
Outside, police engaged in a car chase that ended with the killing of a woman who had tried to ram a White House barrier. “We’re in a safe place,” Mrs. Sebelius said during the lockdown. “Let’s keep going.”
By the second week, with mounting software and capacity problems on the site, Mrs. Sebelius performed damage control. During a round of national TV interviews, she said, “Today is better than yesterday, and we’re hoping in the very near future to have a seamless process.”
During an appearance on “The Daily Show,” she addressed viewers crucial for the health program’s success—young adults, whose participation is needed to spread the costs of care in the new system.
“We’re going to do a challenge,” host Jon Stewart said on the TV show. “I’m going to try and download every movie ever made, and you are going to try to sign up for Obamacare, and we’ll see which happens first.”
Despite the growing pressure, Mrs. Sebelius appears calm. She relaxes listening to jazz, or occasionally slipping into movie theaters on Sundays.
At a meeting Tuesday, she got out her iPad for a briefing but first showed her deputy a new video of her 1-year-old grandson George. Then she turned her attention to the government’s beleaguered website.
Mrs. Sebelius has personal as well as professional interest in getting it to work. “My 29-year-old son is an entrepreneurial artist who is too old to be on his parents’ plan but has a job that doesn’t come with health insurance,” she said. “So he is also going to be in the marketplace looking for coverage.”
She plans to return home to Kansas this weekend, where she will navigate healthcare.gov with her son John, she said, “and see for myself every step of the way.”
3c)Sebelius on the Run
The HHS Secretary refuses to testify about ObamaCare's rollout.
The Affordable Care Act's botched rollout has stunned its media cheering section, and it even seems to have surprised the law's architects. The problems run much deeper than even critics expected, and whatever federal officials, White House aides and outside contractors are doing to fix them isn't working. But who knows? Omerta is the word of the day as the Obama Administration withholds information from the public.
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is even refusing to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in a hearing this coming Thursday. HHS claims she has scheduling conflicts, but we hope she isn't in the White House catacomb under interrogation by Valerie Jarrett about her department's incompetence.
The department is also refusing to make available lower-level officials who might detail the source or sources of this debacle. Ducking an investigation with spin is one thing. Responding with a wall of silence to the invitation of a duly elected congressional body probing the use of more than half a billion taxpayer dollars is another. This Obama crowd is something else.
What bunker is Henry Chao hiding in, for instance? He's the HHS official in charge of technology for the Affordable Care Act, and in March he said at an insurance lobby conference that his team had given up trying to create "a world-class user experience." With the clock running, Mr. Chao added that his main goal was merely to "just make sure it's not a third-world experience."
No doubt a hearing would be a spectacle—with TV cameras on hand—but Mrs. Sebelius can't hide forever. Even pro-entitlement liberals want to know about what went wrong and why, how much if any progress is being made, and whether the ObamaCare website Healthcare.gov will be usable in a matter of months—or years.He didn't succeed. Whatever is below third-world standards would flatter the 36 federally run exchanges as they've started up. But perhaps Mr. Chao or someone else, if not Mrs. Sebelius, can answer even the simple question of how many Americans have managed to enroll for coverage. HHS could easily resolve any confusion but it won't even talk to Democratic allies, friendly reporters and what it calls the insurance industry "stakeholders" that it will need to make ObamaCare work.
More disclosure might also help HHS preserve a scrap of credibility, given that none of its initial explanations has held up. Right now, no one trusts a word that emerges from Fortress ObamaCare.
To take one example, this week the Associated Press obtained an internal HHS memo from September 5, 2013 specifying the Administration's monthly enrollment targets—a half-million sign-ups in October, 3.3 million by December 31, and so on. Asked about this by AP, HHS not only declined to say if it is meeting its projections. The department issued a statement claiming that "The Administration has not set monthly enrollment targets." The spokesman did not cite the classic Marx Brothers line, "Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?"
Eventually Mrs. Sebelius will have to make a real accounting of this government failure to someone other than the TV comic Jon Stewart, and perhaps she can also explain why the people who can't build a working website also deserve the power to reorganize one-sixth of the U.S. economy. For now, the Administration that styles itself as the most transparent in history won't reveal the truth—perhaps because it is afraid of what the public will find.
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