Month: October 2013

Stay calm. Here’s what we paid for the Obamacare site:

[T]he fact that Healthcare.gov can’t do the one job it was built to do isn’t the most infuriating part of this debacle – it’s that we, the taxpayers, seem to have forked up more than $500 million of the federal purse to build the digital equivalent of a rock.

Update from a reader:

The Digital Trends piece on the cost of Healthcare.gov mis-read the government contract award documents and has walked back their “Healthcare.gov cost half a billion dollars” claim. Their post has been updated (rather mendaciously, I think). Here’s one blogger’s explanation of how they may have misread the contract costs.

Mike Masnick blames the way government hands out contracts:

[I]t appears that the federal government basically handed this project over to the same crew of giant government contractors, who have a long history of screwed up giant IT projects, and almost no sense of the “internet native” world.

The Sunlight Foundation (link above) figured out the list of contractors who worked on the site, and noted that the big ones not only are well-known DC power-player insiders, but they’re also big on the lobbying and political contributions side of things. You’ve got companies like… Booz Allen Hamilton, famous for promoting cyberwar hype and employing Ed Snowden. There’s defense contracting giant Northrup Grumman. Then there’s SAIC — which I can’t believe can still get government business. This is the same firm that famously was given a $380 million contract to revamp the FBI system, on which it went $220 million over budget, and then saw the entire system scrapped after it (literally) brought some users to tears, and the FBI realized it was useless in fighting terrorism. SAIC is also the company that NYC Mayor Bloomberg demanded return $600 million after a city computer project (budgeted at $68 million) actually cost $740 million. SAIC has a long list of similar spectacular failures on government IT projects.

Here’s what I don’t believe. I don’t believe the Obama campaign would have entrusted their polling and GOTV apparatus to these companies. So why do they take government less seriously than they do their own campaign? This is not the change we can believe in. And it better get fixed fast.

Ezra is admirably candid about Healthcare.gov’s failures:

The public is giving Obamacare’s roll-out low marks:

Just 7 percent of Americans believe that the rollout of President Obama’s health care law has gone very well, according to an Associated Press-GfK poll.

But, as the Dish noted last night, support for Obamacare has gone up since its launch. Ezra thanks the GOP for throwing Obamacare a lifeline:

Republicans have chosen such a wildly unpopular strategy to oppose it that they’ve helped both Obamacare and its author in the polls. This could’ve been a week when Republicans crystallized the case against Obamacare. Instead it’s been a week in which they’ve crystallized the case against themselves.

Yep, it was, in retrospect, an even worse gambit than it seemed at the time for the GOP not to wait and see how Obamacare was rolled out before their mass hostage-taking of America’s collective credit. But I’m still aghast at the rank incompetence at the White House as well as the lack of accountability.

Where, for example, is Valerie Jarrett, who purportedly had a key role in over-seeing this massive project? What does she have to say for herself? Why does Kathleen Sebelius still have her job? If this were a private company and she were responsible for rolling out a critical new product and came up with this nightmare, she wouldn’t last the week. If you want to persuade us that government can help people, then why give us a case-study in incompetence and then risible accountability? It is not good enough to say the GOP saved them. They should not have needed to be saved.

Meanwhile, Allahpundit asks if Ted Cruz will ever admit he was wrong:

I’m tempted to say that it’s just one poll, but on the ObamaCare question, it’s actually not.

John McCormack of the Standard pointed out to me this afternoon that Rasmussen also spotted a small rise in O-Care’s popularity from the beginning of September, when it was at 41/52, to October 4-5, when it blipped up to 45/49. …  The Cruz strategy for defunding (or delaying) ObamaCare was, as I understood it, to stand firm even if it meant a shutdown and then wait for public opposition to the law to build to the point where O would have no choice but to cave. The only two major polls about the health-care law that have been taken after the shutdown, though, show its unpopularity decreasing. Where’s the populist groundswell that’s supposedly going to make Obama blink? Would five polls prove that the strategy wasn’t working? Ten? We know how this theory of populist revolt could be confirmed, but how could it be falsified?

And this while the roll-out has been about as disastrous as I could have imagined. Call me crazy (and they do), but perhaps the simple idea of actually being able to get affordable health insurance is popular! Amazing idea, I know. Even if the initial roll-out should confirm every Tea Partier’s paranoid conviction that the federal government is a useless, unresponsive, money-sucking pile of mediocrity.

Well, in this case, under Obama, it has been.

George Packer deconstructs September’s spate of Islamist violence:

American wars in Muslim countries created some extremists and inflamed many more, while producing a security vacuum that allowed them to wreak mayhem. But the origins of the slaughter are overwhelmingly internal—sectarian, tribal, political, economic. At its source, the violence flows from ideas, terrible ideas, about the meaning of Islam, the character of non-Muslims, and the duties of Muslims. These ideas are promulgated in mosques and coffee shops and schools, and on satellite TV and the Internet, with the aid of conspiracy theories, half-truths, deceptive editing, and lies. They are remarkably impervious to the ebb and flow of U.S. foreign policy.

He covers a new effort to combat these ideas:

At the end of September, the State Department announced the creation of a joint U.S.-Turkish fund to combat Islamist extremism, called the Global Fund for Community Engagement and Resilience. The goal is to raise two hundred million dollars over ten years, from governments and private donors, and to identify and finance grassroots groups around the Muslim world that will do the difficult work of opposing extremist ideas at home. These groups would take on the Islamists where they live, in mosques and community centers, in chat rooms and on social media. The American role would be very much in the background; citizens, organizations, and governments of key Islamic countries, such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, would take the lead.

Kansas and Arizona now require proof of citizenship to vote in state and local – as opposed to national – elections:

The dual methods are in response to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in June that bars Arizona from rejecting federal voter-registration forms that don’t include proof of citizenship, which is required by both states. To comply, both plan to provide those voters with ballots listing just federal races. … State officials say they have little choice: the high court didn’t invalidate the statutes that require proof of citizenship to vote in state and local races. Critics say the mandates are designed to impede ballot access for minorities, the poor and older residents who may not have the needed documentation, such as a passport or a birth certificate.

One of those critics is Emily Badger:

This idea will have two obvious and unfortunate consequences:

It will create mass confusion (TPM writes that Kansas is envisioning four different registration scenarios involving two different registration forms, with some people left ineligible to vote in any election). And by creating greater barriers to registration specifically in non-federal elections, the idea threatens to particularly impact elections for offices like mayor, city council, and state representative. We already know that turnout in local elections tends to be dramatically lower than in national ones, with direct implications for who gets elected.

Benen warns, “The Republican war on voting didn’t end in 2012; it metastasized.”

Engrossed by their smartphones, passengers on a San Francisco Muni train didn’t notice a man on board brandishing a pistol until he had shot and killed a student. City authorities have expressed concern about the passengers’ “collective inattention to imminent danger.” Will Oremus elaborates:

San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon told the Chronicle he worries that technology is exacerbating the problem. “These weren’t concealed movements,” he said. “The gun is very clear. These people are in very close proximity with him, and nobody sees this. They’re just so engrossed, texting and reading and whatnot.” Authorities have been warning for years that people’s texting, browsing, and gaming habits make them more vulnerable to phone-snatchings, not to mention being beaned with a basketball by Baron Davis. But Gascon is among the first to suggest that smartphone users are putting their neighbors at risk as well when they block out the world and lose themselves in Candy Crush.

But Lex Berko charges that smartphones have become a scapegoat:

From personal experience, I know I’m just as unaware, perhaps even more so, when involved in an intricate fictional plot as I am when I’m trying to win a game of Dots. If each passenger had been reading instead of playing Candy Crush, answering text messages, or whatever else they were doing (quite frankly, they could’ve been reading an e-book), how would that change our perception of this crime or other similar situations? … We would never hear officially sanctioned statements about balancing our love affair with books in order to minimize crime. We love books, we read books in public, and sometimes reading books in public means not noticing other things going on. But replace books with phones and it’s a different tale entirely.

And Joe Eskenazi makes an uncomfortable point:

Authorities are preaching vigilance, which is probably a smarter thing to do than play Angry Birds. But left unsaid is just what the hell a train full of vigilant people were supposed to do if they noticed a man waving about a pistol – a man, specifically, in search of a random passenger to murder. What then?

(Photo of texting Muni passengers by Flickr user ejbSF)