Insurers getting the wrong data from Obamcare exchange site.

The biggest threat to a massive expansion of the liberal state is its own website.

"Most of the stuff inside government is not awesome, cutting-edge, cloud-based, and responsive."

Don't expect to see cuts for programs like these in the shutdown "deal."

Are conservatives actually winning?

Meet the terrible company behind the terrible Obamacare website.

The New Yorker's Elizabeth Kolbert writes about Jonathan V. Last's book What to Expect When No One's Expecting and gets it completely wrong.

Here's what Kolbert says:

On board the ms Noordam sailing from Italy to Greece, with a break from both sightseeing and panels, it seemed advisable to me 1) to ignore the goings-on in Washington, and 2) to find time for an article I'd set aside to read, Harvey Mansfield's "Machiavelli's enterprise" in the October New Criterion. Mansfield uses the occasion of the 500th anniversary of The Prince to provide an explanation of the famous first paragraph of its fifteenth chapter. In doing so, Mansfield provides an extraordinarily compressed but accessible account of Machiavelli's significance as the founder of modern philosophy and of the modern world. It's my pick for best article of the year.

Earth to the GOP: It's about Obamcare, folks.

Who's "winning" the shutdown fight? We won't know for months.

But on the GOP side, maybe it's Paul, Christie, and Ryan.

Another day, another example of Obamacare sticker shock.

Winston Groom’s legendary Forrest Gump is the iconic bystander who stumbles into the company of historically significant figures—and even, in the case of Elvis, supplies signature bodily gyrations. What follows will claim no such force or influence. But when it comes to unusual brushes with historic figures, it may qualify as a minor footnote.

A reunion marking the hundredth anniversary of the founding of my high school—Nicholas Senn, on the northside of Chicago—is to be held this month, and I shall not be attending it. I am one of those people who had a good run in high school. A minor athlete, a member of most of the school’s better clubs, a boy who went out with pretty and pleasant girls, I had mastered the arts of conformity, and in high school they brought me much happiness.

It’s sometimes the case that the most forgettable historical figures furnish the most enduring lessons. Here, Michael J. Gerhardt excavates the remains of some of our least memorable—and least popular—chief executives, along the way adroitly reconstructing the political, legal, and historical legacies that descended, along with these forgottens, to a shallow grave.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, meeting with his son Elliott at the beginning of the Casablanca conference in January 1943, went out of his way to voice his revulsion at the ugliness of British imperialism by referring to his transit through the tiny British colony of Gambia:  

Dirt. Disease. Very high mortality rate. .  .  . Life expectancy—you’d never guess what it is. Twenty-six years. These people are treated worse than livestock. Their cattle live longer!  

"What is it like,” asks Tim Birkhead, “for an emperor penguin diving in the inky blackness of the Antarctic seas at depths of up to 400 m[eters]?” And what is it like “to feel a sudden urge to eat incessantly, and over a week or so become hugely obese, then fly relentlessly—pulled by some invisible force—in one direction for thousands of miles, as many tiny songbirds do twice each year”?

Last month, Angel Echevarria, an off-duty Department of Homeland Security official, was arrested in Florida for pulling his gun and shooting a car that allegedly cut him off on the highway. According to police, Echevarria had absolutely no legal authority to do this. The episode was a classic “road rage” incident, and Echevarria is lucky he didn’t harm any of the passengers in the car, which included a 2-year-old child. 

What Erica Grieder has succeeded in doing with this book is what few journalists have been able to do: The Texas Monthly editor and one-time Southwest correspondent for the Economist has captured the twin realities of a state that is easy and tempting to mischaracterize. And she avoids the traps that both liberals and conservatives often fall into when evaluating a state with 26 million people, diverse and cosmopolitan cities, and Republican leadership.