The Arena

Purchasing health insurance under Obamacare via the federal and state exchanges is notoriously difficult for a variety of reasons. It’s so difficult that even though 4.7 million people so far have lost their health insurance due to Obamacare, by the end of November fewer than 400,000 had successfully signed up for private insurance through the federal exchange.

Regardless of the various and sundry reasons why it is so, we can safely stipulate that it is extraordinarily difficult to purchase insurance through the Obamacare exchanges. To put in perspective just how hard it is, we have compiled a list of the top ten items that are shockingly easier to purchase in America than health insurance under Obamacare. Here they are in no particular order.

1. A Car: Buying a new or used car is one of the easiest big-ticket items to buy in America. Financing at relatively low interest rates is available even to people with poor credit ratings. Unless your credit is severely damaged and your debt to income ratio is totally upside down, chances are you can walk into a dealership and within a couple hours walk out with the keys to a ...

The Washington Post is brazenly and shamefully politicizing the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre by using the one year anniversary of the shooting as pretext to run a story about “gun violence”.  In their eagerness to make a renewed push for unconstitutional infringement of the 2nd Amendment they have asked people to send them stories they can use as examples. Apparently “gun violence” is rare enough that the Washington Post, with its army of reporters and layers and layers of fact checkers can’t find these stories on their own; they have to rely on crowdsourcing.

What should be a time for private mourning and somber reflection has been made into an abjectly political event by a newspaper that is more interested in pushing a statist political agenda than treating the Sandy Hook victims and their families with the dignity and respect they deserve. It is sad and outrageous that this once respected institution would stoop so far as to use this somber anniversary as pretext to launch a political offensive. And yet, here they are, doing just that. After all, if they were interested in writing a balanced and objective piece would they not also have asked for examples ...

The latest National Journal headline declares that Millennials are abandoning President Obama wholesale. According the NJ byline a majority of Millennials would vote to recall the president.

This is both shocking and unsurprising. It is shocking for the sheer magnitude of the reversal in this voter demographics’ views of the president. We should not forget that this group more than any other embraced the bumper sticker “Hope & Change” slogan. They turned out en masse to elect Barack Obama president. Twice. Most recently just a year ago.

But it is altogether unsurprising that the reversal should happen. The president’s policies, particularly on health insurance, health care, and massive data gathering are substantially predatory on the young. Obamacare, by design, forces young and healthy people who use little to no health care services to purchase health insurance they do not want, do not need, and cannot afford, in order to subsidize the health insurance of older and less healthy people who tend to use lots of expensive health care services.

Of course all of this was true and knowable before either of the last two presidential elections but the facts didn’t pierce the ...

Well, this is something for fast food workers to consider when the progressive agitators ask them to go on strike. There will surely be a number of employers who are seriously considering an automated fast food workforce in order to cut costs: Automated hamburger robots make 360 burgers and hour. H/T Instapundit.

Don’t look now but there’s an oil boom going on in Texas!

“Oil production in Texas has hit its highest monthly rate on record, more than doubling in less than three years, according new federal data.

The state pumped 2.7 million barrels of crude per day during September, the highest monthly average since at least January 1981. Texas oil production had been declining since the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s monthly record-keeping began in 1981. But the tide abruptly turned in 2008 with the beginning of the shale oil and gas boom.”

Read the whole thing here.

In late 1863 as the Civil War raged on it was not a foregone conclusion that the Union would be saved. The armies of the Union followed costly victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg with devastating losses at Chickamauga and a long siege at Chattanooga. Against this backdrop of loss, suffering, and uncertainty, President Lincoln still found reasons for gratefulness and joy which led him to issue the following Thanksgiving proclamation.

By the President of the United States of America.

A Proclamation.

The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God.

In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has ...

“Sellin’ hope’s like sellin’ soap, son, I’ll tell you why. You can’t make either one without a little bit of lye.”

Fifty years ago today President John F. Kennedy fell to an assassin’s bullet in Dallas, Texas. His violent and untimely death wounded the heart of the nation, shocked the world, and still haunts us to this day. In the search for words to honor and remember, most focus on Kennedy’s policies but fail to capture the man. It is somewhat ironic then that perhaps the best speech memorializing President Kennedy was delivered by one of his successors of the opposite party. Here is President Reagan’s June 24, 1985 tribute to President Kennedy.

It always seemed to me that he was a man of the most interesting contradictions, very American contradictions. We know from his many friends and colleagues – we know in part from the testimony available at the library – that he was self-deprecating yet proud, ironic yet easily moved, highly literary yet utterly at home with the common speech of the ordinary man. He was a writer who could expound with ease on the moral forces that shaped John Calhoun’s political philosophy; on the other hand, he possessed a most delicate and refined appreciation for Boston’s political wards and the characters who inhabited ...

One of the most famous speeches delivered by an American president, Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address echoes through history and still rings true in our hearts. On this, the 150th anniversary of the speech, it seems right to reread and reflect on Lincoln’s immortal words as quoted by ABC News.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated ...

In a recent Rose Garden press conference designed to mitigate crumbling public confidence in Obamacare, President Obama hailed the story of Jessica Sanford of Washington State as a great success. Ms. Sanford, a fifteen year uninsured single mom sent the president an emotional email informing him that through Obamacare she finally signed up for affordable health insurance – it’s the perfect story to illustrate that the law works and that the uninsured are getting coverage. Unfortunately for the president, the story wasn’t finished and Ms. Sanford still can’t afford insurance.

As the Weekly Standard confirms, it turns out the president spoke too soon. Ms. Sanford did indeed sign up for health insurance through the state run exchange in Washington but she had not fully completed the process when the president told her story. In the days following the press conference, Ms. Sanford received a series of letters informing her that the subsidies calculated through the exchange were too high and would be reduced….to zero. The subsidy’s elimination made insurance once again unaffordable and forced Ms. Sanford to withdraw from the enrollment process. The narrative, as they say, is no longer operable.

There are ...