You're goddamn right I ate all the Reese's Peanut Butter Cups while you were at school! pic.twitter.com/CLnqyYJ123

— Stephen Green (@VodkaPundit) November 3, 2015

Kentucky Republican Gov.-elect Matt Bevin, right, and his wife Glenna react to the cheers of supporters during his introduction at the Republican Party victory celebration, Tuesday, Nov. 3, 2015, in Louisville, Ky. Bevin has defeated Democrat Jack Conway to become only the second Republican governor in the state in four decades. (AP Photo/Timothy D. Easley)

It was a bad night in my beloved-but-ever-more-Blue Colorado, where the Left succeeded in letting Denver keep excess marijuana tax revenues, raised taxes in Colorado Springs, and killed off school reform in JeffCo. But overall it was a very good off-year election for a few specific Republicans and for the right in general.

Let’s go to Rick Wilson for the details of what happened in Maine and in Washington state:

First, on economics, which is always the secret underpinning of every presidential election, and most races down the ballot. Ballot questions on taxes and the economy are particularly interesting: in Portland, Maine, a ballot initiative to raise the minimum wage to $15 crashed and burned spectacularly. I’m not sure if I can emphasize enough…PORTLAND. It was defeated by local businesses who made direct contact and appeals to their customers, using some aikido to cede a bit on the question, but arguing that $15/hour was “too far, too fast.”
…
Three other economic questions were resoundingly answered in dark-blue Washington State last night. Ballot proposition 1366 cuts Washington State’s sales tax from 6.5% to 5.5%, but more interestingly, puts a political trap on the table. The liberal Washington legislature can keep the tax rate at 6.5%, but it will have to submit a 2/3 vote of both houses of the state legislature to do so, putting Members on record. The liberal wish list of spending in Washington has been outracing the wallets of the state’s population, and this brake on their spending is surprising, and smartly constructed. Washington voters also overwhelmingly approved removing a recent 11.9 cent gas tax increase, and the removal of recent business tax hikes that exempted the software industry, which can only be seen as a small victory against crony capitalism.

At WaPo, Laura Vozzella and Jenna Portnoy have the story on Terry McAuliffe’s wipeout in Virginia:

Republicans held onto the Virginia Senate in fiercely contested elections Tuesday, leaving Gov. Terry McAuliffe without legislative leverage or political momentum as he works to deliver Virginia for his friend and ally Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2016.

The outcome was a blunt rebuke to McAuliffe (D), who had barnstormed the state with 24 events over the past four days and who portrayed the elections as a make-or-break moment for his progressive agenda.

That must have been an especially bitter loss, since a pickup of just one seat would have given the Democrats effective control of the Senate, and McAuliffe his only effective allies in the state legislature.

Oh effing well — serves him right for teaming up with Mike Bloomberg and his out-of-state money in support of gun control:

Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe led a well-financed effort, with help from deep-pocketed donors and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s gun control group, to help his party in a handful of competitive races. Republicans were helped by the Republican State Leadership Committee, a Washington-based GOP group largely backed by corporate interests that invested heavily in key races.

In a closely watched Richmond-area open seat, Republican Glen Sturtevant narrowly defeated Democrat Dan Gecker to hold a seat currently held by retiring GOP Sen. John Watkins.

Message to Dems: Keep running on gun control, please.

And then there’s Kentucky.

Brett LoGiurato explains that Kentucky voters are, well, stupid I guess:

The Bluegrass State’s Democratic governor, Steve Beshear, embraced the law colloquially known as Obamacare — even though he wouldn’t dare call it that. The state set up an exchange, called Kynect, that thrived in 2013, as the federal government’s website was mired in disaster.

And it expanded the federal Medicaid program, signing up more than 375,000 people over the first year of the expansion. One study found that the expansion could inject as much as $30 billion into the state’s economy through 2021, in the form of tens of thousands of new jobs.

But most of Obamacare’s success in the state is under significant threat after Republican gubernatorial candidate Matt Bevin won Tuesday night’s election.

If ♡bamaCare!!! was such a success in Kentucky, then why did Kentucky voters just fire the guy who implemented it — to a guy who promised to “rip up every last shred” of the law?

The good guys suffered a body blow in yesterday’s off-year school board election up in Jefferson County, where the new conservative majority was successfully recalled into oblivion:

The fight in the swing district was significantly more controversial than a typical school board election. At issue were three members of the board elected in 2013 — Ken Witt, John Newkirk and Julie Williams — who ran on a reform platform of expanding school choice and increasing transparency.

All of the members were recalled by large margins. Sixty-three percent of voters opted to recall Newkirk, and just over 64 percent of voters chose to recall Williams and Witt.

The members’ move in 2014 to review a new Advanced Placement U.S. History curriculum, criticized by Republicans, drew national attention. Williams proposed that the board consider whether teachers should present materials that emphasize “positive aspects of the United States” and respect for authority, free enterprise and individual rights, rather than encouraging or condoning “civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law.” Hundreds of students walked out of their classrooms and teachers called in sick, shutting down multiple schools in the district.

The unions fought hard and they won. We have to fight harder and do better.

Scott Walker showed the way in Wisconsin, but until we have a conservative governor here of similar mettle, then sometimes we’re just going to take hits like these.

One teacher lost 50 pounds eating nothing but McDonalds for 90 days — and that’s making heads explode on the Left.

American actor Robin Williams, center, makes a joke as he is escorted by U.S. soldiers at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan Thursday, Oct. 17, 2002. Williams entertained U.S. soldiers with the 18th Airborne Corps and the 82nd Airborne, both out of Ft. Bragg, N.C., as well as reservists and National Guard. (AP Photo/Lynne Sladky)

Was it depression or disease?

Many had thought that Williams was depressed over being stretched financially after several divorces, and being forced into movies he’d rather not have to make. But it turns out the actor was suffering from Lewy body dementia:

His widow, Susan Williams, is speaking out this week for the first time more than a year after his death and raising awareness of how Lewy body dementia had devastating effects on her husband in the weeks before he died.

“Lewy body dementia is what killed Robin,” Williams said. “It’s what took his life and that’s what I spent the last year trying to get to the bottom of, what took my husband’s life.”

Lewy body dementia results after specific protein bodies cause problems with thinking, mood, movement and behavior, according to the National Institute of Health.

It is fairly common and currently affects about 1 million people in the United States, according to the NIH. Typically, the disease strikes people at age 50 or older.

An autopsy revealed last year that the beloved actor had early-stage Parkinson’s disease and Lewy body dementia.

Doctors examining autopsy reports told Susan Williams the disease progression was one of the worst they had ever seen.

There are no known treatments to stop or even to slow down the brain cell damage caused by Lewy bodies, and the symptoms include “confusion and alertness that varies significantly from one time of day to another or from one day to the next,” delusions, and “malfunctions of the “automatic” (autonomic) nervous system.”

Williams based his career on his quick wit and impressive physical comedic skills. To have suffered from that kind of dementia — I can’t even imagine the devastation.

The inevitable logic of antisemitism trumps the logic of deterrence, writes George Will:

To Hitler, “Ethics as such was the error; the only morality was fidelity to race.” Hitler, who did not become a German citizen until 11 months before becoming Germany’s chancellor, was not a nationalist but a racialist who said “the highest goal of human beings” is not “the preservation of any given state or government, but the preservation of their kind.”

And “all world-historical events are nothing more than the expression of the self-preservation drive of the races.”

Now, assume, reasonably, that Iran’s pursuit of a potentially genocidal weapon will not be seriously impeded by parchment barriers such as the recent nuclear agreement. And assume, prudently, that the Iranian regime means what it says about Jews and their “Zionist entity.”

Then apply Snyder’s warning: Ideas have consequences. The idea of anti-Semitism is uniquely durable and remarkably multiform. It can express a mentality that is disconnected, as in Hitler’s case, from calculations of national interest.

Hence an anti-Semitic regime can be impervious to the logic of deterrence.

“Never again” means nothing to those who gladly would.

Russia’s all-but-cancelled T-50 PAK-FA stealth fighter is just super, apparently:

The head of the Russian air force recently announced that their new “5th generation” T-50 (or PAK-FA) stealth fighter was passing all its flight tests and was now expected to enter service in 2017. This is surprising because in March Russia announced that they were reducing the number of production T-50s to be built by the end of the decade from 52 to 12. Russia already has five development models of the T-50 flying, although one was damaged in a fire. The Russian announcement did not cover specific reasons for the change. But Indian Air Force officials have been criticizing the progress of the T-50 program for over a year. This aircraft is the Russian answer to the U.S. F-22 and according to the Indians, who have contributed $300 million (so far) to development of the T-50, they are entitled by the 2007 agreement with Russian to have access to technical details. The Russians were accused to refusing to provide development updates as often and in as much detail the Indians expected.

Unless India calms down or Russia changes its mind again about procuring a decent number of T-50s, then don’t believe the denials.

Building a fifth-generation jet is hard, and Russia is still two decades behind us.

If #JebCanFixIt then it probably isn't broken.

— Stephen Green (@VodkaPundit) November 2, 2015

Coincidence, I’m sure.

Erick Ericsson reports:

Carson has a problem beneath the polling numbers — his fundraising.

Everyone focused on Carson’s “impressive $20.8 million in the third quarter“, but few noticed that he burned through $14 million of it with $11 million going to raise the $20.8 million.

That’s pretty substantial. More problematic, Carson has built his fundraising engine on a direct mail program. Direct mail programs take a long time to become sustainable. Long term, Carson will be doing fine off direct mail. But in the short term, i.e. next year, Carson is going to have trouble.

What people do not realize about direct mail is that the costs are front loaded. Candidates spend a great deal of money building a mail file, harvesting a mail file, recycling a mail file, and harvesting again. The printing, postage, and commissions take a lot. In some cases, the candidates do not even have direct access to the mail file, which the mail house keeps until debts are paid.

To be sure, this is not money Carson has to work for. They keep churning letters and senior citizens keep writing checks. It is a win-win. But it also inflates what he has actually raised.

I can tell you his email fundraising efforts are strictly amateur hour. I get three of everything, including the rare “personalized” message. And when I say everything, I mean just that — the Carson campaign sends out alerts to people in Colorado about his next perusal appearance in South Carolina or wherever. There’s no little tailoring and zero filtering.

Finally, I had to create a mail handling rule to send all the Carson stuff directly to the circular file.

It’s no bold prediction that if Carson gets the nomination, Clinton’s high-tech, Google-powered machine will clean the floor with him.

You may have already seen that Anonymous posted the names of over 1,000 alleged members of the Ku Klux Klan.

But this USA Today story caught my eye for what it didn’t say in its coverage of two American politicians:

The data dump began to hit PasteBin, a site used to share and store text and computer code, on Sunday evening.

As of Monday morning there had been four listings, including 57 phone numbers and 23 email addresses. Some also included spouses of the supposed KKK members.

Sen. Dan Coates (R-IN), whose name appeared on one list, Tweeted Monday that he was in no way involved with the KKK.

Of course Coates denied the allegation and of course I believe him. Anybody dumb enough to join the KKK in our modern age is too dumb to get elected to the Senate.

Then there’s an arguably less likely candidate for KKK membership:

The mayor of Lexington, Kentucky says he’s not a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Anonymous postings saying he is are “false, insulting and ridiculous,” Jim Gray said in a statement on Monday.

Gray was responding to the release of names of purported KKK members by someone claiming to be with the hacktivist group Anonymous.

“I have never had any relationship of any kind with the KKK. I am opposed to everything it stands for. I have no idea where this information came from, but wherever it came from, it is wrong,” Gray said.

As an openly gay politician, you’d think Gray would have trouble getting into the meetings, and of course he’d never be caught wearing white after Labor Day.

But while USA Today properly put Coates Republican party affiliation, they failed to mention that Gray is Democrat.

Are we forbidden now from mentioning the Klan and Democrats in the same story together? Will we have to rewrite the history books to leave out Senator Robert Byrd’s (D-KKK) long affiliation with the violent white power group?

Or have we already?

Horace Dediu explains how young peoples’ viewing habits has begun an ugly war between Silicon Valley and Hollywood:

Paying $150/month to watch incontinence and erectile dysfunction ads—at a time not of your choosing—is preposterous for the young. They may like the programs but not the way they are packaged, delivered or interrupted. They are not smarter than their parents. They, like their parents, took to new technology more quickly. What makes the technology new is also what lets its makers separate the content from its delivery. These new technologies allow “modularizing” or unbundling that which was was integrated/bundled and thus allow their developers to focus on the customer’s real jobs-to-be-done.

Unsurprisingly, incumbents have responded by throttling access to original programming–an asset over which they still exert influence as distributors. Netflix and Amazon are taking the path of responding with their own blockbuster productions. Although Silicon Valley has more capital to deploy than Hollywood this battle of attrition is by no means one that incumbents will win, and generally, it’s not going to be pretty.

Both Silicon Valley and Hollywood lean left, but a savvy GOP ought to look for regulatory means to peel the Valley away from the Democrats, and leave them stuck with Hollywood’s dinosaurs.

Precious snowflakes can’t handle liberty.

Firepower cannot compensate fully for a lack of hulls. SSN shortfalls can lose the US Navy the next war. https://t.co/mLD5rJMeMR

— John Schindler (@20committee) November 2, 2015

The oceans aren’t shrinking, but our submarine force is — and will continue to shrink indefinitely:

There’s little chance of the Navy boosting production of new submarines, which cost more than $2.5 billion apiece. Even the current shipbuilding plan is arguably too expensive. “If the Navy received the same amount of funding (in constant dollars) for new-ship construction in each of the next 30 years that it has received, on average, over the past three decades, the service would not be able to afford its 2016 plan,” Labs wrote.

“CBO’s estimate of $18.4 billion per year for new-ship construction in the Navy’s 2016 shipbuilding plan is 32 percent above the historical average annual funding of $13.9 billion (in 2015 dollars). And CBO’s estimate of $20.2 billion per year for the full cost of the plan is 28 percent higher than the $15.8 billion the Navy has spent, on average, annually over the past 30 years for all items in its shipbuilding accounts.”

To partially compensate for the shrinking undersea fleet, the Navy and some representatives in Congress want add more missiles to the subs. The sailing branch had planned to add a 70-foot hull extension to one new Virginia-class boat per year starting in 2019 at a cost of around $400 million per extension. The “Virginia Payload Module,” or VPM, adds four vertical missile tubes to the two tubes that current Virginias already feature.

The VPM tubes each pack seven Tomahawk cruise missiles. The existing tubes are smaller and fit only six missiles each. In other words, today’s Virginias carry 12 missiles. A future Virginia with a VPM could carry 40 missiles.

More missiles is always nice, but a submarine can’t be on patrol if it doesn’t exist.

And please allow this landlubber to remind you one more time that “I dread any further cuts to the Navy.”

Clinton Foundation spiritual advisor Leona Helmsley.
(AP Photo/ Ed Bailey)

Promises, promises:

A series of articles published as Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign kicked off this spring noted that the Clinton Health Access Initiative, set up in 2002 as the Clinton HIV/AIDS Initiative and spun off from the foundation in 2010, had not fully complied with aspects of a conflict-of-interest agreement negotiated before the former first lady and senator became secretary of state in 2009. The HIV program did not seek a State Department ethics review of several donations from foreign governments, including Switzerland, Rwanda, Sweden, Papua New Guinea, and the Belgian region of Flanders, officials said, while also acknowledging that the initiative also failed to publicly report its donors at all after the spin-off.

An April 2015 Reuters story reported that Clinton Health Access Initiative spokeswoman Maura Daley conceded that the nonprofit organization made errors reporting the amounts of government grants on its 2012 and 2013 tax filings and said the group planned to refile those returns with the Internal Revenue Service,

However, in a recent exchange with POLITICO, Daley denied the initiative ever committed to refiling and said no revised forms are being prepared.

Tax laws are for the little people.

From Wired, a very strange story about Facebook chief product officer Chris Cox’s latest move:

“I am mandating a switch of a whole bunch of my team over to Android, just because people, when left up to their own devices, will often prefer an iPhone,” Cox said yesterday during a briefing with an unusually large collection of reporters, many at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California, and many others watching via online video from locations in other parts of the world. No, Facebook has not developed some sort of vendetta against Apple. Nor is it compelled to suddenly endorse the products of arch-rival Google. This is a practical decision.

Though the iPhone may be the preferred device in Silicon Valley, Facebook now serves over 1.5 billion people across the globe, and a vast swath of these people—especially newer users in emerging markets—use the social network on Android phones. As Facebook seeks to reach ever more people around the world, Cox says, he wants a good portion of his team on the world’s most popular mobile platform “so that they can be reporting bugs and living in the same experience that most Facebook users experience today.” Make no mistake: his team isn’t small. He’s the company’s chief product officer.

Given the money savings and productivity increases IBM is enjoying by letting its employees switch to Apple products, you have to wonder how Cox’s demand is going going over with Facebook workers.

CKE Restaurants CEO Andy Puzder explains the “slow motion implosion” of ♡bamaCare!!!:

One problem is that nearly half of the 10.5 million uninsured people eligible for ObamaCare are between the ages of 18 and 34—and young people tend to be healthy and unwilling to pay for pricey coverage they don’t need.

But propping up ObamaCare requires this group’s subsidizing the medical costs of the aging and ill. So far, no luck. It makes sense for healthy young people to pay a penalty rather than purchase the insurance. And in 2015 that’s what 6.6 million people did, according to the IRS. Next year the minimum penalty increases to $695 or 2.5% of income above $10,000, whichever is greater. In many cases, that’s still much cheaper than insurance.

At our company, CKE Restaurants, we offer eligible employees ObamaCare-compliant coverage. We used federal guidelines and set our employee monthly contribution for the least expensive Bronze plan at $1,116 a year, or about 25% of the annual premium. The company pays the rest, and the deductible is $5,500. But even when next year’s higher penalty kicks in—2.5% of income above $10,000—an employee would need to earn more than $50,000 a year for the penalty to exceed the premium.

Longtime Sharp VodkaPundit Readers™ have known for a long time — since before ♡bamaCare!!! was even signed into law — that young people would likely avoid signing up for exactly the reasons detailed here by Puzder.

It’s a sure thing the Administration knew it, too. And that Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi were also clued in.

They knew it would go broke. It was designed to go broke.

♡bamaCare!!! was a money and power grab, the biggest in American history.

After vowing to end two wars, Obama may leave three behind – The Washington Post https://t.co/ZEavmAMlj4

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) November 1, 2015

In just one term, nobody could be expected to clean up the mess Obama inherited from his first term. https://t.co/S9bLfldnPw

— Stephen Green (@VodkaPundit) November 1, 2015

It’s the technology, stupid.

Ben Smith nails it on the meta-level of what’s wrong with Jeb Bush:

In 2015, Bush’s political strengths — a discursive, engaged speaking style and a famous name — are weaknesses in a roiling digital space dominated on the right by the quickest, loudest, most self-consciously outsider voices. And his weaknesses hurt more. Bush conceded last week that debates are “not my forte.” (They’ve never been.) Debates, though, now carry outsize importance. They’re the only time you have voters’ attention in this noisy environment.

And the problem with that noisy environment is that it’s not just about having campaign operatives of the Twitter age, or appearing in short candid-style videos for Facebook, or being an early adopter of tech — it’s about understanding that politics is the noisy environment now.

This isn’t about his age; some politicians make themselves care about technology, and Hillary Clinton’s emails include her puzzling to figure out emojis and LinkedIn. Jeb, by contrast, likes to dismiss the digital space where his campaign was dismantled while he sneered and left it to the hired help. “Look, I don’t follow Twitter, I don’t worry about it,” he said recently.

Contrast that to the incumbent president’s resigned mastery of the new ecosystem.

Fiorina, Rubio, and Trump (but mostly Trump) are the only GOP contenders who seem to understand new media, and all three of them together aren’t as savvy as Obama and his team.

The time to wake up to this was the morning of November 7, 2012, but little has changed since then.

Ai Weiwei Lego art project. Tim Marlow the Artistic Director at the Royal Academy of Arts, deposits some Lego into a BMW 5 series sedan parked in the Royal Academy’s Courtyard in central London, during a photo call for a new international art project by Ai Weiwei. Picture date: Friday October 30, 2015. Visitors to the Royal Academy of Arts will be encouraged to donate Lego blocks through the vehicle’s sunroof. The car will remain in the courtyard from Friday 30 October until the end of November 2015. Photo credit should read: Nick Ansell/PA Wire URN:24594790 (Press Association via AP Images)

This story breaks my heart a little:

Art galleries around the world are collecting plastic pieces for the dissident Chinese artist after the Danish toy company refused to supply its product for his latest project.

Ai, whose work is often critical of Chinese authorities, says Lego last month refused a bulk purchase order from an Australian gallery where he plans to build a new artwork on the theme of freedom of speech.

Ai called the move “an act of censorship and discrimination,” but Lego says it can’t endorse the use of its bricks in projects with a “political agenda.”

Lego bricks are one of the great expressions of freedom in children’s toys, and to see the company cave to Beijing’s censors… that’s sad.

Good on the museums for donating to Ai what Lego refused to sell to him.

Mike Nelson explains how ends, ways, and means must be combined to form a coherent strategy — and what happens when they don’t mesh up:

As early as the Summer of 2011, and as recently as September of this year, President Obama has stated that the removal of Bashar Assad as president of Syria is an American goal and a required condition to bring resolution to the Syrian Civil War. In addition to calling for Assad’s ouster, President Obama said that the Syrian regime’s use of chemical weapons would be “a red line for us, and that there would be enormous consequences if we start seeing movement on the chemical weapons front, or the use of chemical weapons. That would change my calculations significantly.” After multiple reported chemical attacks against the Syrian people in 2013, the U.S. considered both kinetic and diplomatic options which were scoped down to focus exclusively on the Syrian chemical capability. Ultimately, Assad surrendered many of his declared chemical weapons through an international agreement brokered by Russia to avoid U.S. action in Syria. However, American tunnel vision on the chemical weapons seemed divorced from a larger context within the Syrian Civil War. If Assad’s endstate is to remain in power, and a way by which he will pursue that end is to conduct attacks against populations supportive of the Syrian Opposition, then this brokered surrender of chemical weapons merely removed one of many means from Assad’s range of options to achieve his endstate. In fact, Assad has continued this method of attacking populations aligned with the Opposition on a far greater scale using conventional explosives (and is some cases alleged to have continued chemical attacks with chlorine and mustard gas), all without answer from the United States. While the removal of WMD from a malign actor is an inherent good, in this case the U.S. must recognize that the removal of one capability from Assad has done nothing to either advance the American goal of his departure, nor to deny him the means to achieve his ends.

Read the whole thing.

“Talk loudly and carry a small stick” seems to be the order of the day.

Nice kitty.
(Image courtesy Kellogg Company)

Criminal mastermind Nebraska Woman has been caught red-handed:

An intoxicated woman was bitten by a tiger after she broke into a zoo and tried to pet the animal, police said.

Jacqueline Eide, 33, reached into the predator’s cage after she allegedly entered Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha, Nebraska, early Sunday — just hours after Halloween.

“If you pet a tiger you will most likely get bitten”
There was no merciful repeat of Daniel in the lions’ den, however, and Eide suffered a “severe trauma” to her left hand, the Omaha Police Department said in a statement.

She was driven to hospital by a friend, where police said Eide was aggressive and showed signs of intoxication by alcohol or drugs.

You know you’re not supposed to do that, right?

Maybe:

The Federal Reserve Board released an updated version of its large-scale model on the U.S. economy that may hold clues into why policy makers pivoted at their meeting earlier this week toward a December interest-rate increase.

The revised inputs and calculations on Friday suggest the economy will use up resource slack by the first quarter of 2016, according to an analysis by Barclays Plc, and that also indicates Fed staff lowered their near-term estimate for how fast the economy can grow without producing inflation — a concept known as potential growth.

“The output gap appears closed,” said Michael Gapen, chief U.S. economist at Barclays’s investment-banking unit in New York. “This means further progress would lead to resource scarcity and potential upward pressure on inflation in the medium term.”

A justification for multi-trillion-dollar quantitative easing was that the Fed could unleash just the right amount of inflation at just the right time.

That was most of a decade ago, and the dollar has remained stubbornly uninflated. Once inflation does come — and maybe this is the signal we’ve been waiting for — I remain dubious of the Fed’s ability to keep it restrained.

We’ll see.

Another day, another bevy of crony capitalists walking off with your tax dollars and your neighbor’s insurance:

Federal officials have a secret list of 11 Obamacare health insurance co-ops they fear are on the verge of failure, but they refuse to disclose them to the public or to Congress, a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation has learned.

Just in the last three weeks, five of the original 24 Obamacare co-ops announced plans to close, bringing the total of failures to eight barely two years after their launch with $2 billion in start-up capital from the taxpayers under the Affordable Care Act.

All 24 received 15-year loans in varying amounts to offer health insurance to poor and low income customers and provide publicly funded competition to private, for-profit insurers. The eight co-ops to announce closings served populations in ten states: Iowa, Nebraska, Kentucky, West Virginia, Louisiana, Nevada, Tennessee, Vermont, New York and Colorado.

As these co-ops fail, nearly half a million Americans are set to lose their Affordable Care Act coverage.

That Means It’s Working™

…that the CNBC exec in charge of last week’s comically revealing debate is a former Clinton staffer? Of course you would:

Brian Steel, senior vice president of communications at CNBC. He was the executive on hand. He is a former Clinton White House staffer, who held three positions under Bill Clinton. He was a domestic policy adviser to Vice President Al Gore, he served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Policy Development and associate director of the department’s Office of Public Affairs. Isn’t that a coinkidink? Hey!!! I just realized, Bill Clinton’s wife is running for president isn’t she?

So a former staffer for Hillary Clinton’s husband was in charge of a debate in which moderators asked questions like “Aren’t you running a comic campaign, Donald Trump?” and “Can you do math, Ben Carson?” and …well, you get the idea. Steel said that he was in charge of planning the event and revving up publicity for the event. Wouldn’t choosing the moderators be part of the planning of the event? That might explain why a debate on the economy didn’t pick Jim Cramer or Rick Santelli to be the main moderators, since they are the biggest stars with the most knowledge of the subject at hand.

When I say “comically revealing,” I don’t mean anything comic was revealed of the GOP contenders. Of course I mean CNBC’s systemic bias and John Harwood’s leftwing trollery were comically revealed to the entire world.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton poses for a photo with a member of the audience after speaking during a campaign event at Clark Atlanta University Friday, Oct. 30, 2015, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

The “high crimes” in the Constitution’s impeachment clause refers not to the nature of the crime, but to the high status of the offending officeholder. An offense need not be an actual part of the criminal code to warrant impeachment and removal from office. In other words, just being really awful at your job could get you removed from it. That’s a powerful check on the executive and judicial branches — if the political will exists in Congress to use it.

That’s a mighty big “if.”

The next two words are “and misdemeanors,” indicating that the Founders thought that mere misdemeanors by officeholders could be grounds for removal from office. That’s supposed to keep our officeholders on a tight leash, but in practice it hasn’t always worked that way.

In office, Clinton’s use of an unsecured private email server ought to have been an impeachable offense for the “high crime” of being too inept at her job to keep it. Clintonemail.com was the high-tech equivalent of sending old-fashioned radio communications unencrypted over public airwaves all across the globe. In the old days, a King would have summarily executed his foreign minister for such treachery. These days, the King gives her his tacit blessing to become his successor.

On Friday there was a minor brouhaha because “the White House is reportedly seeking to keep some emails between President Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from being released anytime soon,” but that’s of not much concern. If a president and his secretary of State can’t maintain private correspondence, then effective foreign policy is impossible — the White House should be allowed broad latitude to keep private communications private. But the impeachable point of the matter is that the president and his secretary of State weren’t maintaining private correspondence — clintonemail.com makes it a near certainty that their communications were being read, perhaps in near-realtime, by the Russians, Chinese, and maybe even the Iranians.

What was that about the need for private correspondence being a necessity to an effective foreign policy? Look at the shambles of Obama’s foreign policy if you harbor any doubts about Clinton’s impeachably criminal negligence as SecState.

Of course, the existence of clintonemail.com didn’t come to light until after Clinton had left office, rendering her immune from impeachment. It does however raise the question of why no one at State or in the White House questioned her reliance on a private email server, or why nobody seems to have given even a cursory look into its security.

More broadly, this incident raises the question of what to do with someone who committed impeachable offenses, but didn’t get caught until after leaving office.

A young Billy Joel & company doing the ragtime-infused bluegrass number, “Travelin’ Prayer.”

Originally recorded with session players for 1973′s Piano Man, it really deserved the live treatment it gets here with Joel and his usual partners in crime.

Drummer Rhys Clark and longtime Joel bassist Doug Stegmeyer open this thing up like a fast-moving locomotive, but things really take off after the piano and banjo come in.

Fred Heilbrun on banjo is just scary good, but I’ve never found out much about him apart from that he played scary good banjo on this song, live and on the studio recording. I’m not exactly a bluegrass aficionado, so if anyone has any info on him, please stick it in the comments.

The sax might seem out of place here (it wasn’t on the album version) — it sure does work though. I think that’s Richie Cannata playing, but it’s difficult to tell underneath the ’70s fro and facial hair.

Best as I can recall — I would have been about six at the time — this performance was the first time I ever heard or saw Joel. I used to stay up way too late on the weekends, even at that age, and watch Burt Sugarman’s Midnight Special and Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert with the volume down so low that it’s amazing I heard anything at all.

It’s a shame there isn’t much of a market for musical shows like those anymore, programmed and hosted by talented producers instead of programed by computers and hosted by telegenic veejays.

Ah, well — I pray at least we’ll always have YouTube.

As God is my witness, I thought 25-foot-tall inflatable pumpkins could fly.

— Stephen Green (@VodkaPundit) October 30, 2015

“Now that’s an accent.”
(Still courtesy Rimfire Films)

Huh:

The Australian accent is the product of colonial settlers getting drunk, according to one of the country’s speech experts.

Dean Frenkel, a tutor and lecturer at Victoria Unviersity in Melbourne said that while it also had origins in Aboriginal, English, Irish and German, the Australian accent is partly a result of their ancestor’s love of alcohol.

There’s no way that could be roight, mate.