CBO: ObamaCare will cost $1T, still leaves 30 million uninsured

A net decrease of 16-17 million would still leave about 30 million uninsured, according to the figures thrown around by ObamaCare advocates.  It would simply exchange individuals in the uninsured category, and those most likely to lose their coverage would be those in lower-income jobs, as well as people working in small businesses and startups.

We would spend a trillion dollars to achieve a net result of solving a third of the uninsured problem.  We could have exceeded that by simply paying for private insurance.  Assuming an annual cost of $5,000 for basic catastrophic and wellness coverage, we could purchase 20 million plans for the ten years, without overhauling the rest of the American health-care system.

But that would be akin to the “public plan,” which the trillion-dollar CBO cost estimate doesn’t cover.   The inclusion of such a plan would remove the incentive for employers to offer insurance at all, which would create many millions more uninsured.  At the same time, the public plan would undercut private insurers in the individual markets, pushing people who got kicked out of an employer group plan towards the Medicare-like coverage — and accomplishing single payer by default.

What would be the real cost of ObamaCare?  Well north of a trillion dollars. We’ll see if the CBO updates the figures with the analysis of the dynamic impact of the public plan in the coming days, or whether the CBO gets suddenly quiet about it.

Khameini orders mullahs to probe vote count

So much for divine intervention.  Khamenei and the GC may need to find a way out of their predicament, and this could be the first signal that Ahmadinejad might have to go under the bus.  If the level of anger and unrest grows in Iran, the people will want to see some heads on spikes (perhaps literally), and the mullahs will want to ensure that theirs are not among them.

Of course, that’s why they have Ahmadinejad in the first place.  The mullahs use the president and the assembly for two reasons.  It gives the illusion of participatory democracy in a country strictly run by a panel of theocrats, which keeps the pressure off of the mullahs most of the time.   When the pressure becomes too intense, as it appears to be getting at the moment, this mechanism also provides handy patsies to toss to the crowds.

Video: Biden on Iran

Anyone who thought that Ahmadinejad didn’t at all times represent exactly what the Guardian Council and Supreme Leader Ali Khameini want is projecting Western politics onto Iran — a huge mistake. As this election shows, the GC and Khameini get exactly what they want. Ahmadinejad didn’t get elected president the first time because the people of Iran wanted an obscure mayor of Tehran to run the country; the GC wanted Ahmadinejad for their own reasons. He is entirely their creature, which is why they made sure that the election this week was nothing more than a formality, although they certainly botched it badly in the end.

Note that he also dodges the question of whether Iran is a democracy. That reflects Biden’s Inspector Clouseau approach to Iran in this interview. He’s talking about “counting the votes” in an election in which the mullahs hand-picked the candidates, including the now-arrested Mirhossein Mousavi, the supposed “reformer” who found out a little late that he was just a sop to the masses. The vote count is about as relevant as the tallies for an election in Soviet Russia during the Cold War. The problem isn’t the vote count; it’s that the election was never free or fair from the very beginning.

The administration seems to keep laboring under the delusion that Iran is anything other than a theocracy run by a group of mullahs who hold all of the real power, and have no intention of sharing it. Elections are just a way to mollify the 70 million Iranians by offering them the illusion of power sharing. When the administration wakes to that fact, then they will understand that all of this handwringing over polls and vote counting is entirely ludicrous, as is the notion of continuing to offer dialogue to a regime that has made the perhaps-fatal mistake of making all of this even too obvious for the Western media.

And remember that Barack Obama chose Biden as a running mate for his foreign policy expertise.

Diplomat’s murderer released from Gitmo

There was a time in American history where the murder of US citizen, and especially a diplomat for the US or UN, would mean a relentless search and doom for the perpetrators.  Apparently, those days have long since disappeared, perhaps about the time the US repeatedly offered its hospitality to Yasser Arafat, also implicated in the murder of an American diplomat in the 1970s.  Now, even when we have one in custody, we release them.  Great deterrent; I wonder how the diplomatic corps feels about this development.

Zuhair wasn’t just a random Afghani or Saudi picked up by accident.  By his own admission, he participated in the bombing of the USS Cole, and the Bosnians want him for a terrorist attack there, apart from his involvement in the murder of William Jefferson.  Why not give him to the Bosnians instead, even if we were inclined to release him at all?

The Obama administration has all but surrendered to al-Qaeda with these releases.  If the murderer of an American UN worker and a participant in the USS Cole bombing can get set free, then who would Obama keep in custody?  The administration is rapidly making membership in al-Qaeda and participation in terrorism against the US a no-risk proposition.  (via Thomas Joscelyn, whose post should be read in full)

Video: Letterman non-apologizes to Palin; Update: McCain scolds Letterman

Letterman: When I joked about Palin’s daughter having sex, I meant Bristol, not Willow

Video: Palin on Today

Obama the Humble declares there will be no more "dictating" to other countries. We should "forge partnerships as opposed to simply...

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An admirable sentiment. It applies to everyone — Iran, Russia, Cuba, Syria, even Venezuela. Except Israel. Israel is ordered to freeze all settlement activity. As Secretary of State Clinton imperiously explained the diktat: "a stop to settlements — not some settlements, not outposts, not natural-growth exceptions."

What's the issue? No "natural growth" means strangling to death the thriving towns close to the 1949 armistice line, many of them suburbs of Jerusalem, that every negotiation over the past decade has envisioned Israel retaining.

It means no increase in population. Which means no babies. Or if you have babies, no housing for them — not even within the existing town boundaries. Which means for every child born, someone has to move out. No community can survive like that.

This idea is not only logical, not only accepted by both Democratic and Republican administrations for the last decade, but was agreed to in writing in the letters of understanding exchanged between Israel and the United States in 2004 — and subsequently overwhelmingly endorsed by a concurrent resolution of Congress.

Yet the Obama State Department has repeatedly refused to endorse these agreements or even say it will honor them. This from a president who piously insists that all parties to the conflict honor previous obligations.

The entire "natural growth" issue is a concoction. It's farcical to suggest that the peace process is moribund because a teacher in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem is making an addition to her house to accommodate new grandchildren — when Gaza is run by Hamas terrorists dedicated to permanent war with Israel and when Mahmoud Abbas, having turned down every one of Ehud Olmert's peace offers, brazenly declares that he is in a waiting mode — waiting for Hamas to become moderate and for Israel to cave — before he'll do anything to advance peace.

In the 16 years since the Oslo accords turned the West Bank and Gaza over to the Palestinians, their leaders — Fatah and Hamas alike — built no schools, no roads, no courthouses, no hospitals, no institutions that would relieve their people's suffering. Instead they poured everything into an infrastructure of war and terror, all the while depositing billions (from gullible Western donors) into their Swiss bank accounts.

Obama says he came to Cairo to tell the truth. But he uttered not a word of that. Instead, among all the bromides and lofty sentiments, he issued but one concrete declaration of new American policy: "The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements," thus reinforcing the myth that Palestinian misery and statelessness are the fault of Israel and the settlements.

Obama’s Cairo speech: Surprisingly good

Obama: Oil-rich nation’s nuclear-power aspirations “legitimate”

The inconvenient fact? Iran has all the resources it needs for energy production now.  In fact, with the money they’ve spent on nuclear technology, they could have built oil refineries that would have reduced or eliminated their depending on imports for gasoline, producing it themselves from their own abundant supply.  Absent sanctions, Iran could make a mint each year off of oil revenues and produce all the energy they need for domestic consumption, too.

So why do they pursue nuclear power?  They want it for something other than energy production, although they’ll take that, too. Since they also spend a lot of money testing and launching rockets these days, the conclusion is a lot less difficult than Obama makes it.  Iran has mainly illegitimate motives for pursuing nuclear technology.

Poll: Americans oppose closing Gitmo 2-1, relocating detainees to US 3-1