2 Million People Down, 13 Million More To Go--to be dropped from plans they like

Even NBC News put up a shorter version of that montage, which includes the line, "NOBODY IS TALKING ABOUT TAKING [YOUR CURRENT INSURANCE PLAN] AWAY FROM YOU."

And contrary to what the Democrats are trying to say now, those instances were NOT all in campaign mode, some were after he was elected. (Besides, when is Obama ever NOT in campaign-mode?) Regardless, it's called "Bait and Switch" in the real world. Obama lied about what we were going to get, with ObamaCare, with HIM:

CBS NEWS: "Obamacare: More than 2 million people getting booted from existing health insurance plans"

"As many as 80 percent of people who don’t have a company-hosted plan or insurance through the Medicare or Medicaid government programs may have to find new health coverage, said Robert Laszewski, an insurance-industry consultant in Arlington, Virginia. About 19 million people are included in this market."

Eighty percent of 19 million is about 15 million.

Democrats also now are saying that it's a tiny group that's being adversely affected and thus it isn't important. One even called the amount of people (see above) losing the plans they like as "chump change" (go watch the video of him saying it).

So how many are being forced to change by ObamaCare who might not want to drop the plans they have now, compared to the whole population?

Until this month, consumers who weren't insured through their jobs were allowed to buy insurance that provides the best value based on their own needs. One of every 10 private policies is sold through the individual market, covering about 7% of the U.S. population under age 65. Some states have ruined this market through regulation and price controls, and in others costs can be high. But the individual market works well for millions of people, who can choose from many plans—from Cadillac coverage to cheaper protection against catastrophic illness.

SEVEN PERCENT OF YOU ARE S.O.L.

because Obama lied (I lost count at 23 times in the clip above), about this. I don't think that's "chump change."

And the lie Obama told was the central defense of ObamaCare that sold people on supporting it:

"...as anyone can tell you, if Obama had been honest about the trade-offs in his signature piece of legislation, it would never have become his signature piece of legislation. So please, don’t tell me the lies don’t matter."

"The president and the Democrats lied us into a bad law...the truth is, [Obama] wants you to pay for coverage you'll never use (mental-health services, cancer wigs, fertility treatments, Viagra) so the money can be spent on somebody else."

[Viagra? Eww. Abortions? Yeah, and there goes my religious freedom.)

"[Obama Care] raises rates most sharply on precisely those Americans who up until now were doing roughly what we should want more health insurance purchasers to do: Economizing, comparison shopping, avoiding paying for coverage they don’t need, and buying a level of insurance that covers them in the event of a true disaster while giving them a reason not to overspend on everyday health expenses...

"...the potential problem with Obamacare’s regulation-driven “rate shock” isn’t that it doesn’t let everyone keep their pre-existing plans. It’s that it cancels plans, and raises rates, for people who were doing their part to keep all of our costs low."

"The fact that Obamacare does nothing to rein in costs while providing an open-ended insurance subsidy may be good news for hospitals and insurance companies, but it's bad news for taxpayers, on whom this increased burden will ultimately fall."

Remember: the young and healthy are the ones ObamaCare MUST HAVE in the exchanges in order to even remotely keep this from blowing up in our faces and forcing the rest of people's costs to skyrocket:

The youngest and healthiest of the group are under 26 and will now be able to stay on their parents' plans. This group will add nothing to the pool of premiums (but will use services). Among those older than 26, the ones who qualify for the largest subsidies will be more inclined to sign up.

In truth, the premium levels themselves are based on nothing but assumptions. It is true that those lucky enough to actually get through the website's technological maze have seen (unsubsidized) premiums that are lower than similarly constituted plans in the private market. But those low prices are only possible because no one knows what the new pool of insurance holders will look like. They assume it will look like the pools that already exist. But they won't.

Of course, the incentives for the young and healthy to drop out, and for the sick, old and the heavily subsidized to drop in will mean that the post-Obamacare pool will have very different actuarial arithmetic than the current pools. But all of that is as yet unknown. The numbers we see now were put there just to make us feel good. But once the economics kicks in, look for them to rise quickly.

...Since the biggest factor driving health care costs higher in the first place has been the over use of insurance that results from government-provided tax incentives, and the lack of cost accountability that results from a third-party payer system, Obamacare will bend the cost curve even higher. The fact that Obamacare does nothing to rein in costs while providing an open-ended insurance subsidy may be good news for hospitals and insurance companies, but it's bad news for taxpayers, on whom this increased burden will ultimately fall.

...unlike other major entitlements, like Social Security and Medicare, that took years to produce red ink that was far in excess of original assumptions, the financial shortfalls in Obamacare should show up very quickly.

CNN finally voicing questions on Obama's "I Didn't Know" Management Style:

And George Will, on the same topic:

Ruth Marcus, another Washington Post columnist, an Obama-favoring liberal, also finally has to speak up:

The menu of current problems feels far more perilous because these go to issues of core competency to govern:

Eavesdropping on foreign leaders. The choices here are unflattering. Either President Obama did not know what his spy agencies were up to, in which case he is not fully in control of the reins of power after nearly five years in office, or he knew, in which case he did not think through the obviously inadequate cost-benefit ratio and his aides are misleading the public now.

It's tempting to write this one in all caps, but I'll confine my alarm to italics: How could he not know? If he did know, how could he think the information gleaned could possibly be worth the risk of having foreign leaders discover the surveillance?

Syria. No, Mr. President, this is not a problem solved, critics-jumped-the-gun situation. Even if the country had been transformed into the Garden of Eden, the herky-jerky nature of the administration's approach -- drawing a red line, failing to enforce it, trumpeting enforcement, then suddenly shifting to Congress -- does not portray the president in a flattering light. This is first year of first-term amateurishness, not the workings of an experienced president and well-functioning national security machinery.

More important, even assuming the threat of chemical weapons has abated, Syria is no paradise. As my colleague Michael Gerson aptly phrased it, "Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is finding ways to attack women and children that the world finds more acceptable." Watching your child die of starvation does not strike me as dramatically more pleasant than an excruciating but quick death by sarin gas. If the president is feeling good about his Syria policy, he needs to think again.

Oh yes, health care. The president's signal domestic policy achievement. Probably the most important legacy of his administration. Time for italics again: So how could the rollout of the website be so bad?

Democrat California Senator Dianne Feinstein is calling for an "immediate investigation" into all intelligence activities, and decries the NSA spying on Germany Chancellor Angela Merkel and other heads of state. But apparently, the National Security Council may not agree:

National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden issued a statement that would not confirm that surveillance on all foreign leaders would cease, only that a review on the appropriate posture when it comes to heads of state had been under way since the summer and decisions were still being made.

Obama can trot out Jay Carney all he wants to SAY that "the United States is not monitoring and will not monitor the communications of the Chancellor [Angela Merkel]", while not saying. one. word. about PAST buggings of her phones, but it isn't washing with Merkel et. al:

(this transcript from the Daily Kos of all places)

Q Thanks, Jay. I want to follow up on your comment in yesterday’s briefing about how the United States is not and will not monitor German Chancellor Merkel’s communications. Lawmakers in Berlin have objected to that answer because you didn’t say whether her communications were monitored in the past. So I want to ask you, has the United States monitored the Chancellor’s phone calls in the past?

MR. CARNEY: Nedra, we are not going to comment publicly on every specified, alleged intelligence activity. And as a matter of policy, we have made clear that the United States gathers foreign intelligence of the type gathered by all nations. As I mentioned yesterday, the President spoke with Chancellor Merkel, reassured her that the United States is not and will not monitor the Chancellor’s communications. And we have also said, broadly, that, at the President’s direction, we are reviewing the way that we gather intelligence to ensure that we properly balance the security concerns of our citizens and allies with the privacy concerns that all people share.

So I have nothing more for you on that except to say the President and the Chancellor spoke. I made clear what our policy is, and when it comes to specific allegations about intelligence matters, we have diplomatic relations and channels that we use in order to discuss these issues that have clearly caused some tension in our relationships with other nations around the world, and that is where we are having those discussions.

And we are also, at the President’s direction, engaged in a review of the way that we gather our intelligence and making sure that we properly balance the security concerns that we have and our allies have with privacy concerns of everyone.

Q Despite that phone call between the President and the Chancellor, she seems to still be pretty upset. She said today that trust with the United States now has to be built anew. And Germany’s Defense Minister is saying that Europe can't simply return to business as usual in the midst of these allegations. So is the White House concerned that not fully responding to these allegations has harmed the relationship?

MR. CARNEY: We have direct communications through diplomatic channels at the highest level and other levels with our very close allies in Germany, and the United States greatly values our close cooperation with Germany on a broad range of shared security challenges. And as the President has said, the United States is reviewing the way that we gather intelligence to ensure that we achieve that balance that I spoke about.

Beyond that, I'm just not going to, in this case or in other cases, get into specific allegations that have been made in published reports. We're reviewing the way that we gather intelligence. We are discussing the issues that have caused tension, the reports that have caused tension in some of our relationships directly with the countries involved. And we're going to continue to do that.

Carney issued 354 words of PolitiSpeak to answer the question, "Has the United States monitored the Chancellor’s phone calls in the past?" with a "NO COMMENT."

Takes after his boss.

Neither can any of the rest of us buy his malarkey:

If Obama's ignorance of this [NSA's tapping of the phones of German Chancellor Angela Merkel] seems dubious, consider that a German weekly reports that Army Gen. Keith Alexander, the NSA chief, briefed Obama on the Merkel wiretaps back in 2010.

Ridiculous or not, pleading ignorance has become routine for Obama whenever a scandal arises.

I am quite amazed that, now, those who support(ed) Obama are finally forced, by his repeated ineptitudes and know-nothing "shock and awe" over all the "unforeseen" problems under his watch, to report and do something about it. I just hope it's in time to reverse the damage done.

And in the OMG department: Healthcare.gov was released Oct. 1 in the ALPHA testing stage!!!!!!!!!!

I have never used that many exclamation points. EVER. But it warrants it.

NO serious software program or website has EVER been released for public, general consumption or even pre-testing in the history of computers, in anything less than BETA stage, and even then, with major caveats that it was not-ready-for-prime-time. (I was an early, early user of the Google search engine in Beta before it was released to the general public, and I must say it was flawless then in running circles around Yahoo, Dogpile and any other alleged search engine at the time)

For launching in Alpha stage, this RealClearPolitics.com article points out, "The vendors, the White House and HHS are equally responsible for this mistake."

This is clearly the White House's and HHS' fault: "...the contracts related to HealthCare.gov were not awarded until 2011 and the site requirements were not completed until March 2013."

So they had a grand total of six MONTHS, and they wrote 500 MILLION lines of code in that time??