I'm Paying For It, I Might At Least Consider Using It

Thanks to ObamaCare, our health insurance rates are going up by four figures.

On the plus side, my insurer has informed me that my coverage now includes sex change treatments.

Here within the Catican Compound, we're trying to figure out how to best make use of this.

Who Knew It Was This Easy?

President Obama has just decided that ObamaCare implementation ought to be delayed for small businesses. Just like almost everything else he's done with his signature bill, it's purely dictatorial. Charles Krauthammer has a great piece on it today with this payoff line.

The law remains unchanged. The regulations governing that law remain unchanged. Nothing is changed except for a president proposing to unilaterally change his own law from the White House press room.

That’s banana republic stuff, except that there the dictator proclaims from the presidential balcony.

Who knew making laws was so easy? Apparently, if a president is provided a sufficiently broad framework, he can simply wave his royal scepter and make decrees based on some foundational bill. Where does it stop? If Congress passes a budget, can he declare to the country that he's decided to move $50B in spending from this department to that?

Who is going to challenge any of this?

It seems to me like Congress is spineless and supine. If they cared about the role laid out for them in the Constitution, there would be a crisis right now as they demanded a ruling from the Supreme Court on the legality of all of this. I don't get the impression that they care one whit.

On the plus side, El Presidentes tend to be snappy dressers.

An Obamacare Talking Point For Your Thanksgiving Dinner Conversation

Following the lead of our Peronist President and his minions, lots of people are coming up with Obamacare talking points so we can have an ... interesting time at the Thanksgiving table, screaming and gesticulating and quoting figures and statistics at each other. Here at The Scratching Post, we wanted to join in the fun, so here it goes.

Your Official Feline Theocracy Obamacare Talking Point For Thanksgiving Dinner

Matthew 25:40 - ‘Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.’

If you want someone to have healthcare, take care of it yourself. In the end, you have to do that anyway. The heart of Obamacare is that the healthy and wealthy will pitch in to take care of the sick and needy. Nothing is stopping any of us from doing that.

When the thing finally falls to the ground in flaming wreckage and is dismantled, the needy will still be there and you will still be there. If you were so hot to pitch in a couple of thousand bucks of your own cash to take care of another person's health care, do it without the government. In the end, what difference does it make to either you or the needy person whether or not the government is orchestrating it? You weren't planning on doing anything else with that money anyway. If you need everyone else to be forced into the program before you'll lift a finger, you've got bigger problems.

If the needy person requires expensive care, then governmentalize yourself* and get a group together to pitch in. After all, government is the name for things we all do together. You don't need el presidente to gather up $20K from 10 friends, do you?

At this Thanksgiving, stop talking politics and start talking action. The parable of the Good Samaritan is not about the creation of an inter-governmental working group on road safety, it's about you, personally, taking care of someone else.

What better time than Thanksgiving to make plans and get going with something real?

Tomorrow, let's all visit the local homeless shelter and find out who we can help with the $8,439 we've collected!

* - Be careful with this talking point. Governmentalizing yourself is somewhat autoerotic to certain political persuasions.

Hilarious!

Conversational Inigo Montoya

Making some espresso today, I wondered how charming it would be to serve it with an Inigo Montoya twist.

Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. Here is some espresso. Prepare to die.

It's so versatile! It could be used for almost any occasion to make it more, err... festive!

Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. Welcome to our dinner party. Prepare to die.

Imagine if your kids' teachers greeted you with this.

Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. Welcome to back to school night. Prepare to die.

At work, it would really pack a punch.

Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. Sit down for your annual review. Prepare to die.

The ways to use this are practically limitless. When this starts sweeping the nation in a viral manner, remember that you read it here first.

Clouds Over San Diego - With A Surprise Ending!

I shot and uploaded this in 1080p, so it might be worth a full screen viewing. If it isn't, you've only wasted 60 seconds of your life.

It's All About You

So the NYT's resident hate-filled spinster has spun a new, sneering column against men. It's not particularly fascinating with the exception of this little snippet at the end.

Which brings us to a recent Sarah Silverman tweet: “Dear Men, Just b/c we don’t need you anymore doesn’t mean we don’t WANT you! Love forever, Women.”

An appropriate reply from a similarly misogynistic man would read something like,

"Dear Sarah, thanks to the abundance of other women putting out and making porn, we don't want OR need you any more. Go away."

That's not a very good response as it only applies to the smirking Sarah, something that Sarah herself is unable to see. Her tweet should have read,

“Dear Men, Just b/c I don’t need you anymore doesn’t mean I don’t WANT you! Love forever, Sarah.”

That change is the essence of modern, secular morality. You have found what works for you and do it, regardless of what happens to others when they follow your lead. Dig this.

Children living in households with unrelated adults are nearly 50 times as likely to die of inflicted injuries as children living with two biological parents, according to a study of Missouri data published in the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics in 2005.

50 times is a whole lot. It's kind of telling, actually. If, for example, you looked in a friend's freezer and found two quarts of ice cream, you might not think much of it. If you found 100 quarts, you'd wonder if he was a loony.

50 times difference, illustrated by neckerchiefs*.

Fear not, however, because Sarah isn't bothered by any of this. After all, it's not her kids getting abused. Nor is it Maureen Dowd's. So Sarah and Maureen don't need men. Those abused kids need men, married dads to be exact, but not our two harpies. They're not big on worrying about such things because their time is spent mocking traditional marriage and men in general. There's no need for them to be concerned about it.

After all, they're compassionate and non-judgmental.

Well, when it comes to themselves, that is.

* - You thought I was going to say dogs, didn't you?

Sunset Surfer

This was the scene last night at the appropriately names Sunset Cliffs.

I left the original large, so it's worth a click!

On Failure And Its Lessons

So my daughter didn't make her high school's varsity soccer team. She had played 6 years of club ball, worked out on her skills on her own using what I'd taught her about deliberate practice and even worked with a private trainer on her speed over the summer and fall. I have no doubt in my mind that she put in far more effort than any other girl on that team.

My girl is 5' 3" tall. When we played club games, almost everyone else on the field was a good 4" taller than her. A taller girl means longer legs, longer legs means greater speed. After he cut her, the coach told me that the only thing that held her back was her speed. She just couldn't keep up with the pace of the game.

She was distraught when she learned that she hadn't made the team. She'd missed out on club teams before, but she'd never had a rejection like this one. She really wanted it and had worked like crazy for it. She wondered if all of her work had been a waste of time. As her dad and her biggest fan, I had to suppress the pain I felt and help her pull lessons out of the wreckage all the while letting her know that I couldn't be prouder of her or love her more. I had hoped that her soccer career would end with a celebration of her senior year participation on the varsity team. Instead, it's ended in her junior year before the season even begins.

Ouch.

Among the lessons I'm hoping to help her learn are these:

• How good you have to be to rise to the top of your field
• Hard work doesn't guarantee success, but the lack of hard work guarantees failure
• Deliberate practice works - she saw this in the dramatic change in her skills when she started using it
• Life was richer and more passionate when she was pursuing her goal even if she didn't make it
• Eventually you may be limited by your innate abilities, but you can go a lot farther than others expect through hard work. Her last two seasons of club ball had her facing off against opponents much larger than her and she was always able to hold her own
• You can outsmart many of your limitations. She played outside defender and while she was never able to leap frog the midfielder in front of her and play offensive ball, she learned how to play defense so that her lack of speed wasn't much of a disadvantage

Finally, there is pain and failure in life. You can only avoid it by never trying to accomplish anything and in the end, that way leads to inner despair. She's a tough girl and I'm convinced she's going to have a happy and successful life. This is just a new turn in the road, not the end of everything.

On the plus side, she went full Cheick Tiote on a bunch of girls during tryouts and flattened them. She may not be fast, but, by God, you know she's on the field.

Mission Trails Sunset

I left it big. I think it's worth a click.

Hilarious!

I loved this.

I Wonder If They're Reading Peter Drucker In The White House

With so few Administration appointees actually familiar with running a project where a deliverable other than a research paper was expected, do you suppose they're all taking crash courses in project management right about now?

Dig this.

They are letting it be known that House and Senate Democrats are increasingly frustrated, bitter and angry with the White House over ObamaCare’s botched rollout, and that the president’s mea culpa in a news conference last week failed to soothe any ill will.

Sources who attended a meeting of House chiefs of staff on Monday say the room was seething with anger over the immense damage being done to the Democratic Party and talk was of scrapping rollout events for the Affordable Care Act.

“Here we are, we’re supposed to be selling this to people, and it’s all screwed up,” one chief of staff ranted. “This either gets fixed or this could be the demise of the Democratic Party.

That doesn't sound too good. I'm picturing the icy hand of fear gripping them as they all realize that none of them have ever done anything like this before. Now that the wheels have come off, they're probably desperate to learn how to make this thing work, the way an explorer would be tearing through his translation book trying to communicate with the cannibals who are about to cook him, bouilli dans du vin aux petits oignons.

I would imagine that Compassionate Commie Valerie Jarrett would agree with Heartless Capitalist Pete on this one.

Eventually Things Get Better

... because reality can't be denied forever. Dig this piece over at Cafe Hayek about the link between the breakdown of the traditional family and the rise in income inequality. Good stuff. Once you're exposed to that linkage and you start to think about it, it's pretty tough to go back to using racism / theft / oligopoly / deregulation / leprechauns stealing my money as excuses for the inequality we see.

We prude-bloggers won't be lonely for too much longer. As the State collapses and social safety net budgets get slashed, the smoke screens that concealed the situation will vanish.

A Blind Surfer? Crazy!

Dig this.

Why Reinstate The Canceled Plans?

So King Obama waved his royal scepter the other day and decreed that if you liked your plan you may keep it again and anyway it was never his fault that you lost it in the first place. Now the insurance companies can opt to untie the Gordian knot of risk calculations and regulatory hurdles and reinstate the plans.

Why would they?

Dig this.

The health-insurance companies...would be deluged with lawsuits by insureds who claimed that the policies were illegal and wrongly denied coverage for this or that treatment. The insurance companies themselves would get into the act, filing suits to be compensated for payouts they’d made based on the illegal policies. The Obama “waiver” would avail them of nothing in a court, where a judge would be obliged to follow the law, not Dear Leader’s enforcement preferences.
...
Obama has no constitutional leg to stand on in violating — and, by his waivers, encouraging violations of — the Obamacare law. The insurance companies have no hope of immunity.

Anyone want to bet that the Administration would send briefs in support of the insurance companies to any and all court cases covering consumer lawsuits based on blatantly illegal health care plans? Perhaps it's more likely that the progressives infesting the White House, who hate Big Insurance like it's a tool of the Devil, would relish the chance to finish off those for-profit schweinhund once and for all and would actually encourage lawsuits behind the scenes.

If she wants to hook up with that super cute, vegan guy from the Queer Film Studies class, she can sue her insurer for not providing the necessary unguents, antibiotic poultices and latex doohickeys as required by law.

And then there's this.

“It’s a whirlwind, my friend,” says David Oscar, communications chair of the New Jersey Association of Health Underwriters. “I’ve been dealing with Jan. 1 renewals since the beginning of November. Now I’ve got to go back? For me as a broker, as a person who represents insurance carriers, I have egg on my face, because now I have everybody sending me an e-mail saying, ‘Hey, Dave, I heard on the “Today” show this morning that I can keep my old plan.’ ”

How do you explain to your old customers that they can have their old policies back, but at much higher prices without looking like a predator? The prices will have to go up as the renewed policies will take the place of the overpriced, healthy person policies mandated by the ACA so the insurers can remain solvent. It would be far easier to simply point to the ACA legislation and all of the state-specific regulatory hurdles and wistfully say that as much as you'd like to, there's no way to bring the dead policies back to life.

Meanwhile, you cut off all funding to Democratic candidates and pour money like water into Republican coffers to get this toad of a law utterly repealed. It's either that or bankruptcy and then single payer.

Serving The Underserved

... or is it the undeserving?

Earlier this week, I worked at Catholic Charities Food Resource Center. There was the usual assortment of lovable folks - a 78-year-old Filipina who was delighted to be selected for a Thanksgiving prize basket, a hapless, mid-40s couple who were married earlier this year but were now homeless*, an elderly, obese black woman in a wheelchair who was sunshine itself and so on. There was one guy in particular that stuck out in a different way.

The dude was a Hispanic gangsta. Mid-20s, a real tough guy. He had two tears tattooed under each eye, marking him as someone who had killed a person, served four terms in jail or both. He knew I saw the tattoos and could tell from my face that I knew what they might mean. As I helped him through his choices, I marveled at the surreal aspect of it all. Here was a guy who had preyed upon others coming in to receive love and support from Catholic volunteers. It was like sandpaper meeting cashmere.

For all the windbaggery on this blog about marriage and morality (Dean calls me his favorite moral scold), I was so grateful to God that I had a chance to show affection and warmth to this guy.

I even got him to smile a few times.

I pray that I brought him a little closer to You.

* - More on this in another post. Serving the homeless can be so unbelievably gut-wrenching.

Simplified: Why It's Only Going To Get Worse For Obamacare

Obamacare is coming apart faster and more comprehensively than anyone could have believed, like three Hindenburgs colliding over a melting-down Chernobyl while the Titanic sinks in the Pripyat River nearby. Yesterday, President Obama held a news conference where he offered a fix that effectively added a massive train derailment into the mix.

We can expect more of this. Much more of it. Progressives academics have no clue at all how anything works and the government right now is being run by progressive academics. Every interaction with managing and creating real things provides new shocks to them. Yesterday was the perfect example. People are losing their health care because the monstrous law we passed torched millions of existing policies? No problem! We'll tweak the rules so you can keep your coverage! Now it's off to the golf course for a relaxing round or two!

That particular 175-car freight train of toxic chemicals went off the tracks and crashed in flames within a few hours. State regulators in Washington, Oregon and elsewhere refused to go along and insurance companies, probably using sock puppets and squeaky voices, tried to explain to the graduates of Harvard and Princeton in Washington, DC that the infrastructure behind health insurance plans is slightly more complicated than picking out the right organic endives for Michelle Obama's Victory Salad tonight. You can't turn policies on and off like flipping a light switch.

Again: the president's proposed solution to a total catastrophe was revealed as unworkable within hours.

Obamacare is going to get worse and worse for a very simple reason. It now exists in reality and not in some fantasy world dreamed up by the Committee for Social Justice at Dartmouth. The people proposing solutions don't understand how anything works and they're in charge of the nation's entire health care financial apparatus which is coming apart right before our eyes. There is zero chance that naive, egotistical, ignorant academics are going to manage an insanely complex, multi-dimensional, real-world crisis that's evolving as fast as this one.

On the plus side, the flames will provide light to the workers trying to stop the radiation leaks at the reactor!

Proposition 13 and Obamacare

So Slick Willy came out and said that President Obama ought to allow people to keep their health insurance if they like it, just as he had promised. The President agreed. Say they did that and allowed all policies to be grandfathered in.

What happens to the new policies, the ones with no grandfathering?

Here in California, we have the same kind of thing with property taxes under Proposition 13. Rate hikes and reassessments were limited due to government abuse back in the 70s and now we have identical houses right next to each other with wildly different tax bills because one has remained in the same hands and the other has been sold at least once - selling being one of those times when the state can reassess your property.

Very quickly, the inequities of grandfathered health insurance will be obvious. Some middle-aged men will be paying for Sandra Flukey coverage - birth control, abortions, mental health treatment for delusional disorders - and some won't. How's that going to play out and for how long? Do you get to keep your grandfathered policies forever? Do 70-year-old widowers see gynecologist coverage slowly phased in over 5 years so that their non-grandfathered poker buddies don't get too upset over their higher premiums?

Crazy stuff to think about, man.

The coolest thing of all is that whatever exceptions and modifications are being written, they are happening in the middle of a huge crisis where the time to react is short. That's bound to result in some fun unintended consequences.

Change things? Nonsense! Everyone needs ho-surance!

How I Found Livingstone in Detroit

... or something like that.

After being inspired by the book Willpower to read some of Henry Stanley's African adventures*, I picked up How I Found Livingstone in Central Africa on Audible. I'm a half hour in and the book is terrific. Having marinated in illegitimacy statistics and scoped out the resulting videos from cities where civilization has collapsed along with the traditional family, I was struck by a passage from the second chapter of Stanley's book.

I remember what Capt. Webb, the American Consul, told me on my first arrival, when I expressed to him my wonder at the apathy and inertness of men born with the indomitable energy which characterizes Europeans and Americans, of men imbued with the progressive and stirring instincts of the white people, who yet allow themselves to dwindle into pallid phantoms of their kind, into hypochondriacal invalids, into hopeless believers in the deadliness of the climate, with hardly a trace of that daring and invincible spirit which rules the world.

"Oh," said Capt. Webb, "it is all very well for you to talk about energy and all that kind of thing, but I assure you that a residence of four or five years on this island, among such people as are here, would make you feel that it was a hopeless task to resist the influence of the example by which the most energetic spirits are subdued, and to which they must submit in time, sooner or later. We were all terribly energetic when we first came here, and struggled bravely to make things go on as we were accustomed to have them at home, but we have found that we were knocking our heads against granite walls to no purpose whatever. These fellows—the Arabs, the Banyans, and the Hindis—you can't make them go faster by ever so much scolding and praying, and in a very short time you see the folly of fighting against the unconquerable. Be patient, and don't fret, that is my advice, or you won't live long here."

Modern translation: don't be too harsh on the folks who live in Detroit or East St. Louis or Newark. Immersed in a culture of self-destructive behavior, you'd find it pretty hard to resist the tide, too.

* - Stanley is a first-ballot inductee into the Willpower Hall of Fame.

Thanks, Obamacare!

It looked fake. It wasn't.

The road to Detroit is paved with stuff like this.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

Hahahahahaha!

Like generations before them, many young women like Ms. Gadinsky are finding that casual sex does not bring the physical pleasure that men more often experience. New research suggests why: Women are less likely to have orgasms during uncommitted sexual encounters than in serious relationships.

Hahahahahahaha!

"Haven't you read," he replied, "that at the beginning the Creator 'made them male and female,' and said, 'For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh' ? So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate." (Matthew 19:4-6)

Hahahahahahahahaha!

Devout, married Catholics have the best sex of any demographic group, the Family Research Council said at an event Wednesday, pointing to a collection of studies from the last several decades...

The notion that Catholics have better sex isn't a new one, especially coming from Catholics. In 1994, Andrew Greeley, a Catholic sociologist and priest, published "Sex: The Catholic Experience," which released a litany of new statistics: 68 percent of Catholics professed to have sex at least once a week versus 56 percent of non-Catholics; 30 percent of Catholics had bought erotic underwear versus 20 percent non-Catholics; and 80 percent of devout Catholic women approved of having sex for pleasure alone.

Winning.

Cheezburger of the Day

I thought this was sweet.

Source

Good Morning

This morning's skies here in San Diego.

Well, That Explains The Guy With The Eyepatch Following Me On Twitter

Time Magazine has a site where you can find out how much you're worth to Twitter. I'm worth $114, but the more interesting thing is the potential eyeballs per day for my Twitter feed.

It's an odd number.

Well, OK then.

Comment Of The Year, Finalist

This comment is as full of teh awesome as you might hope to find on the web.

Preface: Article about only one person in North Carolina managing to sign up for Obamacare.

Standard Progressive Comment: Quit complaining...why have the Republicans not unveiled a Health Plan?

The best reply of all time: The plan for freedom does not require a website. Bite me.

My day will be full of sunshine and happiness because I read that.

Married, Middle Class People Are Racists

... and here's the proof.

1. Extremist teabaggers are racist.
2. Ken Cuccinelli is an extremist teabagger
3. Married people voted for Ken Cuccinelli 

   

   Extremist teabaggers in red, fact-based people in blue

4. Middle class people voted for Ken Cuccinelli 

   

   Bigoted rednecks in red, open-minded people in blue

5. Ergo, married, middle class people are racists.

It's a good thing we're working so hard to destroy traditional marriage. When you think about it, this makes the gay marriage thing a double win for civil rights!

H/T: Mollie Hemingway

Sanctus Real - Lead Me

I heard this on Pandora, found the YouTube video and thought I'd share it with you. I thought it was a beautiful testament to what a man ought to be.

Enjoy.

Negative People Are Bad For Lambs

Have you ever noticed that whenever you're around people who want to tell you how lousy things are - their jobs suck, the traffic was horrible, the weather is unbearable, etc., you feel like you've got to go along and tell them how awful something is in your own life? It's like they're Serious and Important and if you're not suffering as well, you live life like a lamb playing in a meadow. For me, at least, it's a real effort to remain cheery under such conditions.

Personally, I prefer the lambs playing in the meadow.

Image Of The Day

I was going in a totally different direction today when I came across this blog post with the image below.

Awesomeness squared.

God Help Me, But I Think This Looks Pretty Good

This Is Me

... with my Newcastle United mug, my Jonas Gutierrez jersey, my daughter's NUFC baseball cap, our son's Newcastle wool cap ...

I think life is best lived with many passions - your teams, your kids, your spouse, your faith, your parents, your hobbies, whatever you can put your heart into. Howay the lads.

The Best And The Brightest

... created Obamacare and it ended up a total train wreck.

In watching the Obamacare catastrophe evolve, one thought in particular has been going through my mind: there aren't any excuses this time. The law was passed without any need to negotiate or compromise with the infidels on the right and then it was implemented by an Administration full to the gills with Ivy League (and equivalently credentialed) geniuses. If this sort of thing was ever going to work, this was the time.

I've read the comment threads of many articles describing the unfolding chaos and there's an undercurrent of excuse-making that suggests the implementation was somehow polluted by conservative impurities or profit-mongering on the part of the insurers and contractors. That leads to the question, just how perfect did the world have to be in order for Obamacare to work?

Maybe we just don't spend enough money on colleges and the people creating Obamacare weren't sufficiently educated. (Image source.)

Nothing Says "Compassion" Quite Like Blowing Our Kids' Money

The Chicago Tribune has a must-read piece today on the Windy City's massive debt problem. They've borrowed and borrowed and borrowed and it turns out they've been spending the money on normal operating expenses. That's like using your credit card to buy groceries week after week and not paying it off.

Chicago. Because Detroit was lonely being the only big city to declare bankruptcy.

I don't have time to do this right now, but an interesting graphic would be to take the debt projections for Chicago and mark the years when the city leaders retire and then also mark typical life milestones for someone who is currently, say, 22 years old - marriage, kids, buying a house, etc. It might bring home the point that Rahm Emmanuel and Richard Daley will be gone and on our kids' tab when the debt bomb goes off.

I wonder when the youth of America will get wise. Soon, I hope.

A Magpie Miracle?

True story. This morning, Newcastle played the early game. I was able to watch the first half before I had to get ready to go to the Cursillo Mass and get together. Newcastle were playing Chelsea. You had to figure Newcastle was going to lose by at least four goals, Chelsea is that good. Thanks to a very gutty performance by the Magpies, at the end of the first half it was still a scoreless tie.

I got ready for church and drove down to Chula Vista for Mass. I checked Twitter before I got out of the car and found out that Newcastle had scored a goal and was leading 1-0 with 8 minutes to go. I went into church and debated whether or not to leave my phone on to secretly check Twitter for game updates. I decided not to, so I turned the phone off, figuring I was offering it up to God.

Three minutes later, a shaft of light no bigger than my chest comes in through the stained glass window on the far side of the church and the only thing it illuminates is the Newcastle logo on my t shirt. At that moment I knew exactly what had happened. And sure enough when I checked the score after church on Twitter it had. Newcastle had scored another goal and beat Chelsea 2-0.

A sign from God? A miracle? Total, ridiculous coincidence? You decide. All I could do was laugh.

:-)

Obamacare Is Fascism

I was clicking around the Interweb Tubes this morning and I came across Charles Krauthammer's latest piece. Here's the snippet that jumped out at me.

Sure, you freely chose the policy, paid for the policy, renewed the policy, liked the policy. But you’re too primitive to know what you need. We do. Your policy is hereby canceled.

Because what you really need is what our experts have determined must be in every plan.

The essence of fascism is that you can keep your private property and personal decisions, so long as you do what the government wants you to do.

You're out of line with the Supreme Health Board, citizen. We cancelled your policy and have issued you one appropriate for you.

Forward.