Tuesday, December 17, 2013

The same 2 stories discussed in the last blog continued to dominate the news.  To these were added the death of Mandela, and the freezing of most of the East Coast last week, and the Middle East this week.

1.       The continuing sage of Obama care.

2.       The continuing dance with the Iranians.

3.       The Cold spell

4.       The death of Mandela

Obama Care

I did not fully understand the reason for the Atomic Option.  Besides making it possible to nominate and appoint Obama appointees, the nuclear option clears the way to pack the DC Circuit Court of appeals which is defined as follows in the Wikipedia:

While it has the smallest geographic jurisdiction of any of the United States courts of appeals, the D.C. Circuit, with eleven active judgeships, is arguably the most important inferior appellate court. The court is given the responsibility of directly reviewing the decisions and rulemaking of many federal independent agencies of the United States government based in the national capital, often without prior hearing by a district court. Aside from the agencies whose statutes explicitly direct review by the D.C. Circuit, the court typically hears cases from other agencies under the more general jurisdiction granted to the Courts of Appeals under the Administrative Procedure Act. Given the broad areas over which federal agencies have power, this often gives the judges of the D.C. Circuit a central role in affecting national U.S. policy and law.^[1]

It has been the path to the Supreme Court for Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, Ginsburg and Kagan. Packing the court makes the appellate process for challenges to the Obama Care excesses so much more difficult. 

In the meantime, the Obama front end seems to have improved to the point of accepting information and probably storing it without too many errors.  Unfortunately, the back end (database management, searches through the various government departments for the status of an applicant in order to evaluate whether he/she receives government support) seem totally undeveloped, or developed so poorly that they have been uncoupled from the front end.

As a result, applications are not being routed to Insurance Companies electronically, and money is not being accepted to seal the deal with these companies.  On January 1^st, millions will be out of insurance and the next and first serious crisis will occur as some start dying because of that law.

Cathleen Sibelius has asked the companies to permit late payments, permit use of doctors which are no longer under contract with the companies, and accept people who simply claim to have insurance.  We’ll see how that works out.

The continuing dance with the Iranians.

The White House added to the list of companies and people on its Iranian Black list, and the Iranians declared that they were abandoning the talks and left for Iran.  They also reacted angrily about prospective sanctioned being considered by the House. The State Department announced that the Iranian’s move was just a short pause to determine the next steps.  The Kabuki dance continues.

The Cold spell

A very cold period has gripped the US and Europe over the past few weeks.  6 inches of snow in Jerusalem is unheard of in recent history.  But we seem to create funny cartoons showing disasters caused by global warming only when Hurricanes, Tsunamis, and other warm weather events happen. 

The death of Mandela

Mandela was a great man whose heart could forgive the people who sent him to jail for 27 years, and even made it possible to work with them to create a peaceful transition to democratic rule.  I hope South Africa has the lack of more leaders like him in the future. They certainly lack them in the present