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October 2013

Posted by Laurel Conrad on October 23, 2013 21 Comments
With less than two weeks to go before the Virginia gubernatorial election, candidates Terry McAuliffe and Ken Cuccinelli (aka Sauron and SpongeBob Squarepants) are each receiving campaign support from some pretty well-known political figures. On Saturday, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton offered a “rousing endorsement” to an audience in Falls Church, Virginia for Democrat candidate Terry McAuliffe. (Whom some in Virginia have branded “Terry McAwful”) This week, former President Bill Clinton is set to join McAuliffe at five different campaign events in Virginia. Meanwhile, Rick Santorum is on team Cuccinelli. His PAC,  Patriot Voices, is calling for volunteers to “Join our Strikeforce and help Ken Cuccinelli become the next Governor of Virginia!”

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 22, 2013 33 Comments

We've seen years of offensive name calling and antics from Alan Grayson. He called a Federal reserve lobbyist a whore, and most famously claimed that Republicans want people to die quickly. Grayson's latest, however, is his worst yet, via NRO, Dem Rep. Uses Burning KKK Cross to...

Posted by Mandy Nagy on October 22, 2013 25 Comments
The fallout of the launch of the Obamacare website continues, and as the administration spins and deflects questions, media outlets are digging deeper for answers that are sure to bring new concerns to light.  And that's aside from all the other general concerns about the impact of the law itself. The Washington Post came out with a report yesterday that contained a few key pieces of information that reaffirms what many have already suspected.
Days before the launch of President Obama’s online health ­insurance marketplace, government officials and contractors tested a key part of the Web site to see whether it could handle tens of thousands of consumers at the same time. It crashed after a simulation in which just a few hundred people tried to log on simultaneously. Despite the failed test, federal health officials plowed ahead. When the Web site went live Oct. 1, it locked up shortly after midnight as about 2,000 users attempted to complete the first step, according to two people familiar with the project.
Later in the report, it indicates that "U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park has said that the government expected HealthCare.gov to draw 50,000 to 60,000 simultaneous users but that the site was overwhelmed by up to five times as many users in the first week."  CGI, which worked on the shopping and enrollment applications, reportedly built it to accommodate 60,000 concurrent users, according to the Post.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 22, 2013 19 Comments
At first I thought this was a joke, a parody.  But it's real. As part of it "ingenius" marketing, a coalition of progressive groups has started a Thanks Obamacare website and Twitter account. The Colorado affiliate has produced the ads imaged above. This is Obamacare on drugs. They should tax the keg as a medical device, and then see how much the Bros love their Obamacare. Here's the full set of ads, most of which encourage dangerous behavior because, hell, they've got Obamacare:

Thanks Obamacare Ads

Here are some of the individual ads, with my commentary:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 22, 2013 26 Comments
Greg Pollowitz at National Review asked, Which Is Worse: ‘High Cheekbones’ or ‘Redskins’?
A few things are bothering me about Bob Costas calling the term “Redskins” a slur on Sunday night. One, Democrats had absolutely no issue when then senate candidate Elizabeth Warren justified her Native American heritage with her “high cheekbones.” That’s the same as me saying, “Can’t you see I’m half-Jewish from the size of my nose?” If it was anybody but liberal-darling Warren, there would be outrage at her saying such a thing. But since Democrats have tacitly endorsed “high cheekbones” as politically acceptable, I vote to rename the Redskins “The High Cheekbones.” The song even works, “Hail to the Cheekbones! Hail Victory!”
For those of you who don't remember, Elizabeth Warren supposedly (doubtfully) relied on "family lore" to justify checking the Native American box in order to get herself put on a short list of "Minority Law Teachers" and "Women of Color in Legal Academia" as she was climbing the law school ladder towards Harvard Law School.  Among those stories (now cast in doubt) was about her Aunt Bea and high cheekboned ancestors:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 22, 2013 26 Comments

It's not just 5 million lines of code, folks. It's not just having to call Verizon to the rescue. It's not just that it doesn't work now. The Healthcare.debacle website is a harbinger of doom because it reflects the fundamental inability of government to run such a sweeping...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 22, 2013 13 Comments
Dick Cheney appeared on Hannity, and stated what all thinking people know to be true, Obama is the radical in Washington, D.C., not the Tea Party: FMR VICE PRES. DICK CHENEY: I'm not unsympathetic to the frustration, I think, that's led many Americans to sign on for or become part of the tea party. I'm as frustrated as anybody else can be, but I think we have a situation where the circumstances in Washington, the inability and the unwillingness of the this administration to come to grips with our basic long-term debt problem, for example. The frustration out there is very, very high. And so when I see people talking about the tea party, I don't think of the tea party as extremists the way some of the folks in Washington want to describe them. The extremist in Washington is Barack Obama. He's the guy that wants to fundamentally transform our health care system. He's the guy who has done enormous damage to America's standing in the world. To the extent there is an extremist or radical political view in Washington these days, I believe it is the president of the United States.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 22, 2013 12 Comments

It's the dawn of a new era in TaxProf's quarterly law professor blog rankings, as he explains, Law Prof Blog Traffic Rankings: Below are the updated quarterly traffic rankings by page views of the Top 50 blogs edited by law professors for the most recent 12-month...

Posted by Anne Segal on October 22, 2013 14 Comments
Navigate to the Hoboken, NJ, public schools website --a town just across the Hudson from New York City -- and you'll find a front-page announcement that since 2008, Hoboken has based its pre-school and kindergarten curriculum on "Tools of the Mind," also known as "Cultural-Historical Theory." Based on the work of Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, the Tools of the Mind website proclaims that it is "rooted in cutting edge neuropsychological research on the development of self-regulation/execution functions in children." Dig a little deeper on your site, and they describe how regulation of the child is accomplished:
  • Children practice delayed gratification.
  • Children learn to suppress their impulsive behavior because to stay in the play, they have to abide by the rules.
  • Children practice regulating each other’s behavior.
The site describes the role of parents in encouraging their children to be regulated with tips like playing "stop and go" and "freeze" games:
Parents can encourage children to practice self-regulation at home by establishing routines. For example, they can help their child to set an alarm clock that will ring when it is time to go to bed, so the child can “regulate” his or her own bedtime. Now it’s the child, not the parent, saying, “It’s time.”

Posted by New Neo on October 22, 2013 18 Comments
Japan may be about to find out. As you might imagine, the "don't want to have sex" crowd in Japan doesn't include all the young people, not by a long shot. But it's a worrisome percentage, especially considering that this is an age group where the blood usually runs hot. As you also might imagine, the phenomenon involves more women than men, although the number of guys is not insignificant:
A survey in 2011 found that 61% of unmarried men and 49% of women aged 18-34 were not in any kind of romantic relationship, a rise of almost 10% from five years earlier. Another study found that a third of people under 30 had never dated at all. (There are no figures for same-sex relationships.) Although there has long been a pragmatic separation of love and sex in Japan – a country mostly free of religious morals – sex fares no better. A survey earlier this year by the Japan Family Planning Association (JFPA) found that 45% of women aged 16-24 "were not interested in or despised sexual contact". More than a quarter of men felt the same way.
A sex and relationship counselor in Japan has this to say:
"Both men and women say to me they don't see the point of love. They don't believe it can lead anywhere," says Aoyama. "Relationships have become too hard."
I very much doubt they're actually any harder than they used to be. But their rewards are a great deal less, especially in Japan, so the cost-benefit analysis is quite different. The article goes on to describe the reasons: women in the workforce whose promotion chances end at marriage and who often quit after having children because Japanese firms demand such unusually long hours of its employees, hosts of young people living with parents, ease of single living, and immersion in the world of computers rather than entering the messy fray of human contact. There are other possible reasons that the article doesn't mention. I merely list the factors that come to mind; one could easily write a book on the subject:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 21, 2013 11 Comments
One week ago we posted about how a new website exposed The Truth About Palestinian Rock Throwing. We featured a video exposing the The Wadi'a Maswadah Hoax, about a 5-year old Palestinian rock thrower allegedly "arrested" by the IDF.  In fact, the child was brought to his parents, contrary to media hype, which ignored a culture that pushes young children to the front lines.

Wadi'a Maswadah Hoax screen shot

The website has a second video, about the misleading media narrative surrounding an Israeli driving into a Palestinian boy in East Jerusalem, The 2010 E. Jerusalem Ambush-Hoax:
On October 8, 2010 major elements of the Western and Arabic “news” media engaged in a campaign to elicit sympathy for a two pre-teen Palestinian boys, whom they claimed were “run down” by a Jew in E. Jerusalem. The situation was greatly aggravated by dramatic photos and selectively-edited videos, which, on first glance, seemed to support this incendiary allegation. In reality, these children – along with a gaggle of international “news” photographers – waited at the bottom of a hill for Jewish cars to roll past, at which point the children hurled rocks at it, and actually charged the car as it attempted to swerve to avoid hitting them.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 21, 2013 40 Comments
who collectively have done more damage to Obamacare the brand than Republicans in Congress could have dreamed. The problems, according to the NY Times, are deep, deeeep, deeeeeeep, Contractors See Weeks of Work on Health Site:

NYTimes - Contractors seek weeks of work

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.... 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.

You know what we need according to Michael Scherer of Time? For Obama to get Mad:

Posted by A.F. Branco on October 21, 2013 5 Comments

Note: You may reprint this cartoon provided you link back to this source.  To see more Legal Insurrection Branco cartoons, click here. Branco’s page is Cartoonist A.F.Branco...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 21, 2013 49 Comments

Legal Insurrection Version 1.0 was the old Blogger template. Version 2.0 was the custom designed Wordpress template initiated in June 2011. This Version 2.1 is a redesign of the home page to accomplish the following: 1. Featured Posts. Adding the ability to keep featured posts on the home...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 20, 2013 13 Comments

Been away all week at a conference in Orlando. Thanks to Mandy and other contributors for covering. Remember, there may be a partial shutdown of LI on Monday morning, for "maintenance." What did I miss? Update: The Washington Warrens! ...

Posted by David Gerstman on October 20, 2013 14 Comments
Last year the big technology news was how President Obama's re-election campaign used technology to beat Mitt Romney. This year's big technology news is the failure of the introduction of Obamacare's healthcare exchanges. https://twitter.com/JayCaruso/status/390835631493898240 Last year, even before the election, President Obama's IT operation got noticed. A June 2012 article in Politico asserted:
The depth and breadth of the Obama campaign’s 2012 digital operation — from data mining to online organizing — reaches so far beyond anything politics has ever seen, experts maintain, that it could impact the outcome of a close presidential election.
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