Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Hey, Barry. Did you hear the one about 'cutting your losses?'

(My new American Thinker post)

You know that you are in trouble when the cheerleaders are not cheering for you.

The NY Times, cheerleader "numero uno," posted a story that won't make anybody happy in the White House:
"Federal contractors have identified most of the main problems crippling President Obama's online health insurance marketplace, but the administration has been slow to issue orders for fixing those flaws, and some contractors worry that the system may be weeks away from operating smoothly, people close to the project say.   
Administration officials approached the contractors last week to see if they could perform the necessary repairs and reboot the system by Nov. 1. However, that goal struck many contractors as unrealistic, at least for major components of the system. Some specialists working on the project said the online system required such extensive repairs that it might not operate smoothly until after the Dec. 15 deadline for people to sign up for coverage starting in January, although that view is not universally shared. 
In interviews, experts said the technological problems of the site went far beyond the roadblocks to creating accounts that continue to prevent legions of users from even registering. Indeed, several said, the login problems, though vexing to consumers, may be the easiest to solve. One specialist said that as many as five million lines of software code may need to be rewritten before the Web site runs properly. 
"The account creation and registration problems are masking the problems that will happen later," said one person involved in the repair effort."
The Washington Post, also a cheerleader but not "a yes we can screamer," has a devastating post:
"The problem here isn't just technological. It's managerial. The White House's senior staff -- up to and including the president -- was blindsided. Staffers deep in the process knew that HealthCare.gov wasn't ready for primetime. But those frustrations were hidden from top-level managers. Somewhere along the chain the information was spun, softened, or just plain buried.   
The result was that the White House didn't know the truth about its own top initiative -- and so they were unprepared for the disastrous launch. They didn't even know they needed to be lowering expectations. In any normal corporation, heads would roll over a managerial failure of such magnitude and consequence."
So nobody told the president? 

Obama in the dark on Fast & Furious and the IRS scandals?  And now, nobody told him that the website was not ready?

It may be time to pull ObamaCare aside for a year and try it again later after more testing or a complete overhaul.

My guess is that the Obama White House fears that the AHCA will never leave the repair shop if it goes there.  They fear that the GOP will cut the funding or the 2014 elections could kill it permanently.

On the other hand, the whole thing is collapsing because it does not deliver results.

What a mess! 

Who would have believed this after so much campaigning to repeal ObamaCare?

Who would have believed that a software program would override Chief Justice Roberts, the 2012 election and "hope and change" hype.

P.S. You can hear CANTO TALK here.







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Obama punts so much that you'd think he is trying out for an NFL team

(My new American Thinker post)


The bad news from last week's "shutdown show" is that nothing got fixed

The good news is that people overseas are noticing it, as we read in The Economist:  
"For a long time American politicians have poured scorn on their European peers for failing to deal with the euro crisis.
This week Washington equalled Brussels on one measure of dysfunctionality and surpassed it by another.
The way in which the Democrats and Republicans, having failed to reach any agreement, decided to "kick the can down the road", was deeply European.
The deal allows the government to stay open till January 15th and the debt ceiling to be raised until February 7th.
Just as America's economy seems to be recovering, with the promise of GDP growing by 2.7% in 2014, it could face another shutdown of the kind that has just sent consumer confidence to a nine-month low and knocked back growth in the fourth quarter by an estimated 0.6 percentage points."
I agree. We "punted" to next year and set the stage for another show again. President Obama will punt again and push us into another crisis. 

Someone should tell President Obama that his hometown Bears already have a punter.

You can hear CANTO TALK here.





Tags: President Obama no leadership To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the My View by Silvio Canto, Jr. Thanks!

Why didn’t we hire “the best and the brightest” in the first place?

(My new Babalu post)
Has anybody seen Secretary Sebelius?  She is apparently up in Massachusetts and avoiding any serious questions about this disaster known as the ObamaCare roll out.
She did say that the search is on for "the best and the brightest", i.e. the top tech people in the country to fix the Affordable Health Care Act website.
My question is this:  Why didn't we hire the best and brightest before?  What was that $600 million contract for?  Did we pay top dollar for the B-team?
Perphaps "the best and the brightest" wanted no part of this for two reasons:
1) This is not really about health care.  This is about expanding the role of government into areas such as the doctor-patient relationship.    
2) The "best and brightest" understood just how complex this enterprise was going to be, as Ezra Klein reported today: 
"HealthCare.gov is monstrously complex. The Times reports that there's more than 500 million lines of code -- of which more than 5 million lines may need to be rewritten. And that code is interfacing with computer systems (and computer code) at the Internal Revenue Service, the Social Security Administration, state Medicaid systems, insurers like Aetna, and more. Even the best programmers would have trouble figuring out what's going on -- much less what's going wrong -- quickly.The truth is that the Obama administration is, to a much greater extent than it would like, dependent on the very people who built HealthCare.gov to fix it. They're the only people who know what's going on inside the system."     
This is a mess!
And Gallup has President Obama's approval at 44%!

P.S.  This is Canto Talk:


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Tags: ObamaCare, why didn't hire the best and brightest  To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the My View by Silvio Canto, Jr. Thanks!