Michael sent me this story.

The hospital bills are hitting Larry Basich’s mailbox.

That would be OK if Basich had health insurance. But he doesn’t.

Thing is, he should be covered. Basich, 62, bought a plan through the state’s Nevada Health Link insurance exchange in the fall. He’s been paying monthly premiums since November.

So he should be golden right? Nope.

Yet the Las Vegan is stranded in a no-man’s-land where no carrier claims him, and his tab is mounting: Basich owes $407,000 for care received in January and February, when his policy was supposed to be in effect. Instead, he’s covered only for March and beyond.

Basich has begged for weeks for help from the exchange and its contractor, Xerox. But Basich’s insurance broker said Xerox seems more interested in lawyering up and covering its hide than in working out Basich’s problems. Nor is Basich the only client facing plan-selection errors through the exchange, she added.

Xerox, meanwhile, said it’s working every day to fix Basich’s problem, and its legal counsel is routine.

In the rollout of the Affordable Care Act and its insurance exchanges, you can find a success story for every failure. But Basich’s case is extreme.

That’s what I’d say.

WHO’S RESPONSIBLE?

Short answer? Obungler and the Dimocrats.

Basich said he began trying to enroll on Oct. 1, the day the exchange website went live. Like many consumers, he fought technical flaws during multiple sign-up attempts. In mid-November he finally got through and chose his plan: UnitedHealthcare’s MyHPNSilver1.

“It was like reaching the third level of Doom,” Basich said of the torturous sign-up process.

If you want to really muck sumpin’ up, get the gummint involved.

Basich paid his first premium on Nov. 21, and within days the exchange withdrew the $160.77 payment from his money-market savings account. Because Basich paid a month before the Dec. 23 deadline, his coverage was to begin Jan. 1.

Weeks ticked by, but Basich received nothing to confirm he had insurance. Nevada Health Link kept telling him he was enrolled, but UnitedHealthcare said he wasn’t in their system.

It goes on and on and keeps getting worse. The Dimocrats passed a horrible bill to fix a nonexistent problem and in doing so made things worse.

Of those “40 million” Americans who didn’t have coverage, many of them were young people who didn’t think they needed coverage. These are the same people that Obummercare counted on signing up. That’s the only way to make Obummercare “work”. There are two flaws. First, they allow many of the young people (those under 26) to remain on their parents’ policies and second the fine (or tax as Chief Justice defined it) is less than what they would have to pay for a policy.

This is what you get when you force a huge bill through Congress without anyone reading it or holding hearings on it so everyone would know (this excludes the CBC since many of them like Corinne “gradulate the gator” Brown, Hank “Guam is gonna tip over” Johnson, and Sheila “can the Mars Rover see the flag that the astronauts planted” Jackson Lee are too stupid to comprehend what was in the bill.) what was in it and what effect it would have on the economy and healthcare in America.

ExSpeaker Blinky made one of the dumbest statements I have ever heard a politician say when she said, “We have to pass the bill so we can find out what’s in it.” That should have had her laughed off the podium but since the LSM is pretty much the propaganda arm of the Dimocrat Party (or as Insty sez, “Dimocrat operatives with bylines), she got a pass.

No, we should know exactly what’s in the bill before we pass it. That’s what committee hearings are for, but the Dimocrats were so intent on getting a healthcare bill passed that they rammed it through Congress without a single Republican vote and now people like the dude in this story are taking it in the ass.

If this guy voted for Harry Reid and Oblunder, I have no pity for him because he did this to himself.

Elections have consequences.

We’re doomed!

Toejam sent me this one.

And here’s his record.

The source for the chart is here. This only covers his first four years in office.

It doesn’t say much for the American electorate that they voted to give this dooshbag another four years to continue his destruction of America. Worst president since Jimmah Carter. As Insty sez, “Right now the Carter administration is the best case scenario.”

We’re doomed!

Saw this vent in the Atlanta Urinal and Constipation.

The “American Dream” is a myth. You will almost certainly be born, grow up, and die, in the same economic grouping in which you were born.

What a booger eatin’ moh-ron! This guy is obviously a loser. I was born into a lower middle class family, prolly in the bottom 20%. Today, my family would be on food stamps. Somehow, both my sister and I managed to move to the top 20% where we are now.

I worked with a black dude here in Atlanta when we were both IBM instructors. He was the son of a Mississippi sharecropper. He joined the Air Force, learned electronics (like I did in the Navy), and leveraged that into a job at IBM. He also learned how to speak and write standard American English. He could speak Ebonics with the brothers but he realized that learning to read and write standard American English would help him succeed. He became an instructor teaching mainframes, and then moved into management. He hated Jesse Jackson and Al Tawana Brawley Crown Heights Riots Freddie’s Fashion Mart Arson Sharpton and saw them for what they are, RWPPs who were in it to enrich themselves and not to better the lives of poor blacks. I’m sure he must have voted for Obungler the first time. Not sure what he would make of him now.

Another story about him that I have written before. IBM used to have a program where IBMers would speak at schools to tell children they could succeed. He would go to inner city schools. Not only did he speak well, but he dressed well, and like me, he drove BMWs. Naturally, this well spoken, well dressed black man who worked for a corporate giant was branded an Oreo and an Uncle Tom. He once told me how frustrating this was. Here he was, in his words, “offering a hand to pull these poor children mired in poverty up and all they wanted to do was to pull me down”.

I saw other stories like this in my time at IBM. Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell have written many columns about how people don’t stay in the same ranking over the years. Many college students start out in the lowest 20% but over their lifetimes, move up the scale. Many others get out of poverty by getting an education, developing a work ethic and not having children they cannot afford and waiting until after they marry to have children. That alone, moves them from the bottom 20%. My family remained there because my father was an alcoholic and got fired from many jobs on account of his drinking problem.

The American Dream still exists. Unfortunately, with our failing gummint schools, it’s a little harder to succeed, but with hard work and an education it’s still possible.

Many readers have informed me that the missing Malaysian airplane has been found. They even sent me proof of it.

Got stuff to do today so I’ll post an email I got from Ron.

Seems like nearly everybody is offering that clip of Gowdy excoriating the whole rag-tag mob of parasites and blowhards in Congress. Well, that’s o.k. by me. Time for that to happen, and time for some housecleaning while we’re at it, and some new criteria – such as term limits.

The way I see it, party politics has nothing whatever to do with leadership and government. It’s just a big game to the politicians, like “Dodgeball” or even better, “Keepaway.” One side gets the ball and then does everything it can, legal or not, to prevent the other side from getting hold of it.

While they’re s’posed to be earning their allowances by mowing lawns or delivering papers or trimming hedges, they’re over on the vacant playing Dodgeball. While they’re s’posed to be sitting down doing their homework and reading assignments, they’re on the playground playing KeepAway. While they’re s’posed to be handling the nation’s problems with deficit spending, growing debt, moribund economy, and border problems, they’re out on the stump playing “Power! Power! Gimme my Power!”

They really couldn’t care less if Mom and Dad slip and fall on the driveway ‘cause they didn’t shovel it, or if black mold is growing on the wet clothes they left in the garage, or if the dog didn’t get taken out and left a string of Post-It notes all through the house and an exclamation mark by the back door.

And many of the people in Congress can’t even tell you what document begins with “When in the Course of human Events” or which one starts out “We the People.” I bet I can even find some who are completely unaware of the fact that the Old Testament is actually the Hebrew Bible, and I’m sure at least some of them can’t tell you which is the first book of the New Testament or where the words “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

I’m not a practicing Christian, but I can tell you that. And I know the difference between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and the Gettysburg Address and the Oath of Office and who the governor of my state is and who are my senators and who is my district representative. Some members of Congress don’t even know how old the Constitution is, much less what it says.

Some liberals, and I bet some members of Congress, believe that the Constitution gives citizens the right to abortions. Wrong. The document never mentions the practice, even obliquely. And some don’t know the difference between the First and Second Amendments. And some of those who do STILL don’t understand the wording of the Second. It doesn’t GIVE the right to bear arms; it says that the right is common sense which pre-exists the document and “shall not be infringed.” In other words, it PROTECTS the right.

The problem with many liberals is that they believe only in those parts of laws and documents which support their agenda. The nation’s CEO and Chief Cop insist that they can suspend, delete, modify, or simply ignore laws or provisions of laws which they don’t particularly like for political reasons.

Here’s the problem: most reasonable people with good fundamental education and basic common sense understand that in a nation of over a quarter million adults, achieving unanimity on ANY issue or controversy is not going to happen. People live next door to each other who completely disagree on abortion, nuclear power, same-sex marriage, stem-cell research, immigration reform, the ACA, global warming, and dozens of other serious matters.

But 99.9% of the time those people don’t come to blows or erect barricades or give speeches on TV to condemn their neighbors. They still respect each other’s property, each other’s privacy, each other’s rights. Most of those people are still Americans, and simply disagreeing on legalization of Mary Hoona or OKenyaCare or income tax brackets doesn’t make them any less patriotic than disagreeing on Sweet Sixteen brackets or the SuperBowl.

Liberals simply use the Constitution as a club when it’s in their interests, just like Feinstein, who backed up the CIA surveillance activities UNTIL she learned that they might be looking into HER private communications. She suddenly she invoked the 4th. And Lerner, who ignored her department’s mandate to be non-partisan, going after conservative PACs until she got caught, at which time she invoked the 5th.

Some of them don’t even like the Constitution and call it “outdated” and “old-fashioned” and created by slaveholders and white-wigged good ol’ rich boys. They just use it when applicable either to force their will on everybody else or save their asses when they get caught bending rules, regulations, and laws.

Barraco Bummer is a liberal. He’s also a socialist. But if he could read and understand economics and history, he’d realize that socialism simply doesn’t work. Never has worked anywhere on as large a scale as the US, and as Maggie Thatcher said, it looks great on paper ‘til you start running out of other people’s money.

Soetoro bases all his policies on theoretical models (which, again, look good on paper) and takes advice from ivory-tower professors who can’t succeed in the real world, so they teach economic, political, and social theory in liberal universities. Just today, three of the richest and most successful businessmen in the country – Gates, Buffet, and Bloomberg criticized Barraco’s plan to raise the minimum wage to $10.10, saying that it will inhibit growth and cause some people to lose their jobs.

What Ozulu doesn’t see is that minimum wages jobs were never intended to be permanent careers, merely first steps on the path to success. Everybody knows that it’s impossible to raise a family on today’s minimum wage unless you’re living in Mom’s basement and driving Dad’s car to work. The point is, of course, if minimum wage is your career goal, you’re a professional loser and won’t succeed if the minimum is raised to $50/hour.

As the left drifts farther and farther away from the truth, its hate toward those who live by and tell that truth grows exponentially. And until those 535 jerkwads in D.C. remember that they’re servants, not aristocrats; until they learn that their children aren’t any more important than a dental hygienist’s in Topeka; until they learn to love their country more than their job security, we will remain a once-proud nation in decline, trying our damnedest to make Kruschev a prophet.

I could have interspersed comments throughout this post like I usually do but Rom pretty much said ever thing that I would have said.

Toejam, who is Irish, sent me this one.

George sent me this one.

That’ll show him!

E. J. Dionne had another stupid op-ed in this morning’s Atrlanta Urinal and Constipation that said Obumbler needed to go on offense against the Republicans. Yep, in his mind, like Oblunder’s mind, they’re the real enemy, not Putin and the Russians. He wrote the following sentence.

Shamefully, but effectively, many of them made Obama, not Vladimir Putin, the prime culprit in Putin’s invasion of Crimea, hanging the word “weak” around the president’s neck.

That’s because it’s true E. J., you liberal twit. Obeavis is weak. He stopped us from giving Pojand and Czechoslovakia a missile defense shield without asking anything in return from the Russians. He told Putin’s minion Medvedev that he would have more flexibility on eliminating our nukes after he was reelected. He plans to cut our military to pre WW II levels. That sounds pretty weak to me. We’re witnessing Jimmah Carter’s second and third terms. Under Jimmah, the Russians invaded Afghanistan. Under Obutthead they invaded Crimea. Both times because they knew a Dimocrat president would do nothing about it.

And as for chiding Republicans and calling them shameful, you were silent when Harry Reid said on the Senate floor, “This war is lost.” referring to Iraq before the surge. That’s pretty shameful to me. Liberals fantasized on the assassination of Chimpy McHalliburton Bushitler even going so far as making a movie about his assassination. That sounds pretty shameful to me. The Dimocrats in Congress were far harder on Bush 43 than the Republicans are on Oboner so take your “shamefully” and ram it up your shameful ass. GFY! On the bright side, you are in the running for AOTW.

Art sent this one to me. Yannow, I always wondered in high school whether the symbolism and other stuff they taught to me in novels and poems I had to read actually existed. For example, in Moby Dick did the Pequod symbolize the world or was it just a whaling ship? Did anyone ask the author?

I read sumpin’ by Harlan Ellison once where a Jesuit analyzed one of his short stories, I Have No Mouth, And I must Scream, and confronted the author with his analysis of the symbolism and what the story meant. Ellison, after much thought, replied to the Jesuit, “Father, I think you’re stuffed right full of wild blueberry muffins.”

A brouhaha ensued wherein Ellison refuted every point the good priest had made in his analysis – he wrote it so he ought to know what he meant – and then asked him if he knew so much how did he miss the fact that one of the main characters was black? It even said in the story, “her ebony skin”.

So, here is a St. Pat’s joke about that.

At the National Art Gallery in Dublin, a husband and wife were staring at a portrait that had them completely confused.

The painting depicted 3 black men totally naked, sitting on a bench. Two of the figures had black penises, but the one in the middle had a pink penis. The curator of the gallery realized that they were having trouble interpreting the painting and offered his personal assessment. He went on for over half an hour explaining how it depicted the sexual emasculation of African Americans in a predominately white, patriarchal society. ‘In fact’, he pointed out, ‘some serious critics believe that the pink penis also reflects the cultural and sociological oppression experienced by gay men in contemporary society’.

After the curator left, an Irishman approached the couple and said, ‘Would you like to know what the painting is really about?’

‘Now why would you claim to be more of an expert than the curator of the gallery, asked the couple?

‘Because I am the artist, who painted the picture,’ he replied. ‘In fact, there are no African Americans depicted at all. They’re just three Irish coal miners. The guy in the middle went home for lunch.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

I once worked with an Irish dude and asked him why he didn’t take off work on St. Pat’s Day. He told me the serious Irish dude’s took off work the day after St. Pat’s when they had their celebration hangovers.

I thought I had already posted a pun. CRS Syndrome. Here’s one from Pete in Baltimore.

A MAN is standing a bar when he hears a voice coming from the peanut bowl. “I really like your tie,” it says. “You’re smashing, you are. You’re really lovely.” Surprised, the man picks up his drink, and walks to his table. Passing the cigarette machine, he hears another voice. “You and your wife are ugly, fat and stupid,” the voice says.The man is baffled and asks the barman what is going on.

“I’m so sorry,” says the barman. (more…)