Despite the government shutdown, Vice President Joe Biden is vacationing at Camp David this long weekend. He's joined at the Maryland retreat by his family, including his wife (Jill Biden), children, and grandchildren.
The vice president is also there with "essential" government workers, who must work despite the government shutdown. That includes his Secret Service detail, as well as the Secret Service details assigned to the rest of his family, and other support staff. They are protecting the Bidens as they vacation -- but aren't getting paid because of the federal shutdown.
The vice president's public schedule simply reads:
WEEKEND GUIDANCE FOR THE VICE PRESIDENT
Saturday, October 12 - Monday, October 14, 2013
The Vice President and Dr. Jill Biden will be at Camp David. There are no public events scheduled.
Monday is Columbus Day, a federal holiday.
But Biden's absence from D.C. during the government shutdown hasn't gone unnoticed.
“I’m glad that negotiations are going on ... I’m disappointed that twice … we were close to a deal and the Democrats moved the goalposts, in light of the polling data,” Republican senator John McCain said this morning on a Sunday show. “Maybe we need to get Joe Biden out of the witness protection program.”
But there's no sign Biden will be back in D.C. today to help negotiate a resolution to the government shutdown.
Instead, he's busy at Camp David, where there are bowling lanes, tennis courts, hiking trails, and even a skeet shooting range.
Secretary of State Kerry and Afghanistan's Karzai say they are this closeto an agreement that will keep some U.S. forces in the country after the big, 2014 pullout. As Indira A.R. Lakshmanan & Eltaf Asefy Najafizada of Bloomberg report:
After two days of negotiations in Kabul, both leaders said the remaining obstacle to concluding the deal is whether Afghan representatives will endorse the U.S. having legal jurisdiction over international forces accused of committing crimes in the country.
This is what is known as a "status of forces" treaty and failure to negotiate one successfully with the Iraqi government led to a total American pullout.
And, as Michael Yon reports, the prospects an SOF deal with the Afghanistan government are well short of good. And the long-term consequences, detailed by Yon in this sobering report, are a long, long way short of good.
A New Mexcio man recently saw his health insurance premium triple due to Obamacare:
"Health insurance premiums are skyrocketing for some New Mexicans," says a local anchor. "The insurance companies say it's because of the Affordable (health) Care Act."
The reporter adds, "Talk about sticker shock." And points to a man, George Pitts, who used to pay $139.63 for health insurance. "Now his cheapest option: triple the price at $431."
Pitts says he was "shocked" and that he's "never had a bill of any kind double" like this.
His insurance plan blames Obamacare for the rate increase.
The New York Times looks at some of the Obamacare problems:
WASHINGTON — In March, Henry Chao, the chief digital architect for the Obama administration’s new online insurance marketplace, told industry executives that he was deeply worried about the Web site’s debut. “Let’s just make sure it’s not a third-world experience,” he told them.
Two weeks after the rollout, few would say his hopes were realized.
For the past 12 days, a system costing more than $400 million and billed as a one-stop click-and-go hub for citizens seeking health insurance has thwarted the efforts of millions to simply log in. The growing national outcry has deeply embarrassed the White House, which has refused to say how many people have enrolled through the federal exchange.
Even some supporters of the Affordable Care Act worry that the flaws in the system, if not quickly fixed, could threaten the fiscal health of the insurance initiative, which depends on throngs of customers to spread the risk and keep prices low.
“These are not glitches,” said an insurance executive who has participated in many conference calls on the federal exchange. Like many people interviewed for this article, the executive spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying he did not wish to alienate the federal officials with whom he works. “The extent of the problems is pretty enormous. At the end of our calls, people say, ‘It’s awful, just awful.’ ”
Reuel Marc Gerecht and Mark Dubowitz, writing for the Washington Post:
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani is lying when he says the Islamic Republic has never had any intention of building an atomic weapon. Defecting Iranian nuclear engineers told U.S. officials in the late 1980s that the mullahs’ program, then hidden, was designed exclusively for such arms. Everything Western intelligence services have tracked since then matches those early revelations.
U.S. participation in the upcoming negotiations doesn’t appear to be premised on an expectation of Iranian veracity. If it were, President Obama wouldn’t send his secretary of state until Tehran had come clean about its past deceits. The exemplary behavior of South Africa’s often-mendacious apartheid government when it decided to go non-nuclear — total transparency about the militarization of its atomic program — isn’t expected from Iran. The clerical regime has already dropped the bar through its “facts on the ground” intransigence: more than 19,000 centrifuges built and a heavy-water plant nearing completion. Washington doesn’t want to go to war again in the Middle East, and the Iranians know it.
The administration and Congress are gambling that sanctions will be enough to overcome the regime’s chronic dishonesty. Economic pain will be so intense, the theory holds, that eventually Tehran will play by Western rules.
In other words, supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Revolutionary Guards and Rouhani — who had a not-insignificant role in developing Iran’s nuclear program in the 1990s — would be willing to admit that “evil incarnate” (Khamenei’s update to the “Great Satan”), against which the Islamic Republic’s very identity has been built, has defeated their nuclear aspirations.
Janet Yellen, dubbed “Ms. QE Infinity” by some wags because of her support for printing money to create jobs, and her willingness to pierce the Fed’s long-held 2 percent annual inflation ceiling, will have more to worry about than monetary policy when she steps into Ben Bernanke’s ample shoes on February 1. There is the small matter of regulating the nation’s banks, a chore made difficult for her by two unrelated facts.
The first is that she does not have as firm a theoretical grasp of regulatory issues as she does of monetary policy. Second, her relations with fellow Fed governor Daniel Tarullo are reported to be more than a little fraught. And Tarullo, a one-time Obama campaign adviser still close to the White House, has primary responsibility for the Fed’s bank-regulation program. The differences between Tarullo and Yellen is not doctrinal – both favor aggressive regulation – but personal, which unfortunately often proves to be the more difficult to overcome.
While attention focuses on the will-she-won’t-she- taper-soon guessing game popular with traders and the business press, the problems faced by America’s banks receive far less attention. And they are many and non-trivial. Indeed, the more important question is whether the world has changed sufficiently to cause us to wonder whether the big beasts of the banking world are on course to becoming heavily regulated, boring financial utilities, more like your local electric company than like the money-spinning, risk-taking institutions of the good old days before Lehman Brothers made its noisy exit from the financial sector. Put differently, did Brookfield Office Properties, a large New York City landlord, have it right when it changed the name of its World Financial Center complex to Brookfield Place in recognition of the ongoing shrinkage of the demand of big banks for commercial office space in the world’s financial center?
The first problem for the banks is that the end of the refinancing boom – trading in mortgages with relatively high interest rates for ones with lower rates, and paying a nice fee for the privilege – is cutting into profits. Wells Fargo, which writes 30 percent of all mortgages, reported yesterday that mortgage applications in the third quarter dropped to $87 billion from $146 billion a year earlier. Layoffs have inevitably followed. Citigroup and other leading lenders have laid off a total of 7,000 workers in their mortgage departments, and more pink slips are sure to follow.
The second is lower loan growth. U.S. companies are rolling in cash, and are able to borrow directly in the markets without bothering to have a chat with their friendly bankers. This particular version of disintermediation – going directly to the market to borrow money – deprives banks of the handsome fees they once charged big businesses in need of loans. Add to that a recovery too anemic to make it necessary for many companies to expand, and the banks that once treated potential borrowers with a certain hauteur now find themselves beating the boardrooms for business.
It was a fitting match, yesterday, in Pittsburgh. Kathleen Sebelius and her failing health care plan and the struggling Pittsburgh Steelers, whose coach has resorted to desperate measures such as banning:
… all games from the Steelers’ locker room [including] billiards, ping-pong and shuffleboard.
The Steelers are mighty, with more Super Bowl wins than any NFL franchise, but this season is a disaster. They have lost all four of their games, thus far, and are last in their division, behind teams they once brushed by on their way to the playoffs. Cleveland, for instance.
"Cleveland?" long time Steeler fan might say, crying into his terrible towel. "Cleveland. This can't be happening. Somebody do something. Ban billiards in the locker room … suit up Bradshaw … send Polamalu on a blitz …"
Meanwhile, in Washington, Ms. Sebelius's team is struggling with the rollout of the Affordable Care Act, especially the website, with maybe one percent of the people who log on managing to navigate it all the way to a successful sign-up.
Sebelius and Steelers Chairman Dan Rooney were at an enrollment and education event on Thursday at Heinz Field to promote Healthcare.gov,
The event was about as successful as the Steeler's season, thus far:
About 20 people armed with laptops and certified by the government to sign up people for coverage were meeting with uninsured people, answering questions and fruitlessly trying to access the website.
LaKesha Lowry, 41, came to the event to find out about her health insurance options [but] was not able to access the site, even with the help of a certified application counselor. “It said, ‘Try again later,' ” Lowry said.
One wonders if Sebelius couldn't have gone to Denver, instead, and done an event with Peyton Manning. He completes everything.
After Senate Democrats blocked GOP efforts to defund Obamacare, House Republicans voted for a number of modest compromises: delaying the individual mandate as long as the business mandate is delayed, repealing the medical device tax, and the Vitter amendment ending Congress's special treatment under Obamacare. Nearly two weeks into the government shutdown, Senate Democrats and President Obama have been unwilling to compromise on anything.
Now, Senate Republicans are putting another Obamacare measure on the table as part of negotiations to fund the government and raise the debt ceiling: Requiring the government to verify the eligibility of Obamacare applicants before they receive subsidies.
As The Hill's Alexander Bolton reports, Senate Republicans unhappy with a proposal in the House to pass a clean debt limit bill without funding the government are "coalescing around their own proposal to pair a short-term debt-ceiling increase with a year-long stopgap to fund the government."
The Senate GOP plan would fund the government for a year at a level agreed upon during the 2011 debt limit talks, repeal the medical device tax, and require that the eligibility of Obamacare applicants be verified before they receive subsidies.
"Medicare and Medicaid are already fraught with fraud. I don't think we want to start Obamacare even worse by not even attempting to verify incomes," Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin tells THE WEEKLY STANDARD. Johnson says he would like to see an end to Congress's special treatment or the anti-fraud measure "attached to any increase to the debt ceiling or any continuing resolution agreement."
Politicians are notorious for pointing to "waste, fraud, and abuse" when they want to pretend to cut spending without actually cutting anything. But the No Subsidies Without Verification Act addresses a real issue, as the Washington Examiner's Philip Klein explained in an article calling for such an anti-fraud bill.
In July, the Obama administration announced that enforcing the law's regulations to prevent fraud "would involve a large amount of systems development on both the state and federal side, which cannot occur in time for October 1, 2013." According to the Wall Street Journal, the bill could save taxpayers as much as $250 billion over a decade.
The findings of the newly released NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll are simply brutal for congressional Republicans. Not only are they getting the lion's share of the blame for the government shutdown, but President Obama's numbers have actually improved. Worse, Obamacare's numbers are improving, as well.
That poll caused quite a sensation on Twitter last night, and while it is worse for Republicans than recent readings from the Associated Press's poll, NBC News/Wall Street Journal has a long track record of solid readings. This is not a result to be taken lightly.
Moreover, it makes empirical sense considering the message coming from congressional Republicans in the last week—or perhaps better put the lack of a message. Marc Thiessen of the Washington Post aptly labeled this the "Seinfeld Shutdown," a shutdown about nothing. That is not how it was supposed to be, of course. It was supposed to be a shutdown about Obamacare, but Republican leaders were quickly sidetracked by low-hanging fruit like the closure of the National Mall, Harry Reid's gaffes, and Obama's refusal to negotiate. Tactically, this might have made sense, but strategically it was a terrible move. If the shutdown was supposed to be about Obamacare, then that should have been the only topic Republicans discussed.
Moreover, insofar as Republican leaders have discussed Obamacare, they have done so ineptly, and have repeated Mitt Romney's grievous mistakes from 2012. Looking at the topline numbers on Obamacare, we can see it is very unpopular, but dig a little deeper and only about 30 to 40 percent of people believe that the law will make them worse off. This is a significant failure in political communication by the Republican party. Government agencies like the Congressional Budget Office and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have warned since 2010—in their dry, technocratic rhetoric—that Obamacare was going to harm middle class families. For weeks now stories have been trickling out about people receiving letters from their insurers notifying them that their rates are being doubled. For over a year we have similarly heard stories about hiring freezes or hours being cut because of Obamacare. And yet despite all this hard data, the public still has not connected the dots.
Republicans seem to have been spooked by threerecentpolls suggesting that the American public is siding more with President Obama than with the GOP in the budget and/or debt-ceiling battles. But neither poll asked what is perhaps the key question: Do you know what the Republicans’ position actually is?
The guess here is that, if that question had been asked, it would have shown that the vast majority of Americans have no idea what Republicans are holding out for, or on what terms they are willing to end the (very partial) government shutdown—or, for that matter, raise the debt ceiling. The further guess is that most who do claim to know the Republican position would likely state it erroneously, thinking that Republicans are either demanding the repeal of Obamacare (which is how many Democrats have disingenuously characterized the GOP position) or the defunding of Obamacare (not the current GOP position). This, in turn, points to the real problem: Republicans are failing to communicate, and to reiterate, their quite reasonable, quite moderate position to the American people.
The following poll question likely would have yielded very different results:
House Republicans have passed a budget to fund the federal government, delay the health law’s individual mandate for one year, and overturn what they say is a lawless and unfair exception to the health law for Congress. Senate Democrats and President Obama have rejected the Republican budget because they oppose its 1-year delay of the individual mandate and because they say the health law’s treatment of Congress is lawful and fair. Whose position do you favor?
Last night, the organization formerly known as President Obama's reelection campaign, Organizing for Action, held an Obamacare event in Greenville, South Carolina. The event was called "Obamacare and You!"
"Let's discuss what this Affordable Care Act means for you and your community. This session will help you understand the benefits and will equip you to spread the word about the benefits of Obamacare in your community. Come out and get the facts!!," the event advertisement said.
But it wasn't widely attended. Only two people, in addition to the two organizers, showed up.
Here's a picture of the two participants:
It looks like, however, organizers had planned for many more:
… it is hardly a surprise that UMich consumer confidence slumped to its lowest since January having fallen 3 months in a row. This is the 2nd monthly miss in a row - and biggest 3-month drop in 25 months
What, after all, has transpired lately to inspire confidence?
Ben Geman's story goes on to report a statement from House Natural Resources Committee chairman Doc Hastings (R-Wash.):
“Why now, after more than a week of refusing to allow States to pay to keep National Parks open, is the Obama Administration suddenly reversing course? It appears they are truly just making this up as they go along, as they have put out one inconsistent policy after another.”
Or, perhaps, the feds feel they have made their point. You want to look at Mt. Rushmore, buddy, you've got to go through us first.
Now, they can appear reasonable.
One hopes that when the dust of the "shutdown" has settled, the people in the states will remember the offer and take Washington up on it.