Last Call For Zee Germans

Nate Silver crunches the numbers and argues that this year's German World Cup winning squad may in fact be the most powerful and dominant national soccer team ever assembled.

One simple way to compare World Cup winners is by their goal differential throughout the tournament. Germany, with 18 goals scored and four allowed, comes out at a plus-14. This is tied for the best goal differential ever for a World Cup champion; Brazil also scored 18 goals and allowed four in winning the 2002 tournament.

Plus 14 through 7 matches is insane, although if you toss that 7-1 thrashing of Brazil and turn that into 2-1, that would put the Germans at a much more average plus 9.  So what else is in the 2014 German team's favor?

The World Football Elo Ratings provide one way to account for all these factors: a team’s strength going into the tournament, its dominance during the tournament itself, the quality of its competition, and whether it was aided by playing at home. 

Germany’s Elo rating was high to begin with at 2046, which is stronger than a number of World Cup winners. But it gained 150 more points throughout the World Cup (about half of them by beating Brazil 7-1), finishing with a rating of 2196.

That's 40 points better than any other World Cup winning team ever.  I don't think we'll ever see a team this good again.  These guys are the best of the best.

Other teams — notably Spain from 2008 to 2012, and Brazil under Pele — had longer sustained stretches at the apex of world football. But Germany is young and deep. Mario Götze, who scored the winning goal in the final Sunday, is 22. Thomas Müller and Toni Kroos are 24, and Mesut Özil is 25. The Germans have a good chance to go in as the favorites in the 2018 World Cup in Russia. 

Still, the competition is going to be tough. At the start of the next tournament, Brazil’s Neymar and Colombia’s James Rodríguez will be just 26, and Lionel Messi — despite playing in his fourth World Cup — only 30. France is perhaps a player away from competing with the world’s best teams, and after having won FIFA’s Under-20 World Cuplast year, it could make that transition soon. This is a great era for the international game, and that makes what Germany accomplished all the more impressive.

From an American sports perspective, Germany didn't have a Michael Jordan or LeBron James, but they are instead the San Antonio Spurs, a collection of very good, All-Star players all on the same team and who perform well together.  It's a franchise that has quietly won 5 NBA championships in 16 seasons.  Center Tim Duncan may not be the best player in the NBA, just like Germany's Thomas Muller isn't the best soccer player out there compared to Brazil's Neymar or Argentina's Messi, but Tim Duncan now has five rings and nobody can tell him boo.

I'd call the Spurs the best NBA squad in the last 15 years, easy.  Germany is all that and more in the soccer world right now, and yeah, 2018 you would have to consider them the favorites too.

Judd Gregg Has Amnesia

Remember Judd Gregg, former GOP senator and governor from New Hampshire?  He has a new column at The Hill predicting how a Republican Senate in 2014 would go, and it's hysterically funny fan fiction.

The election of a Republican Senate will not be a signal from the hinterlands that people want more of the same. It will be a directive to stop acting like peevish politicians and start governing for the good of the nation. 

If this instruction is ignored, it will almost certainly mean that the next time around — the 2016 elections — the Republican Congress will face stiff punishment from voters. 

Thus, there will be a considerable motivation for a Republican Congress next year to make things happen.

If voters were interested in making things happen why would they elect more Republicans, when Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell swore they top priority of Senate Republicans was making Obama a one-term President by doing nothing?   Go home Judd, you're drunk.

But since this will still be a divided government and the GOP may hold only the barest of majorities in the Senate, this new Congress is not going to be able to address Main Street issues unless it does so in concert with the president. 

So the next question is this: What incentive is there for the president to come into the room? He has not done this in a meaningful way in the first six years of his term, and indeed doing so seems to be anathema to his personal views of governance.

Yes, at every step of the way, President Obama has "refused" to work with Republican senators, including the fact he nominated Judd Gregg as Commerce Secretary as one of his first acts, only to have Gregg tell the President to go screw himself a week later.

Every time President Obama has offered to work with Republicans, they have told him to screw off.  Now they are suing him.  You're right, Mr Gregg, why should President Obama come to the table?  Look in the mirror and you'll have the answer as to why not.

Saying What The President Cannot

Attorney General Eric Holder is a good man in general, but his ability to say what President Obama cannot say about race and the brutally racist attacks this administration has suffered through in the last six years is one of his most powerful traits.

Attorney General Eric Holder said Sunday he and President Obama have been targets of “a racial animus” by some of the administration’s political opponents.

“There's a certain level of vehemence, it seems to me, that's directed at me [and] directed at the president,” Holder told ABC. “You know, people talking about taking their country back. … There's a certain racial component to this for some people. I don’t think this is the thing that is a main driver, but for some there's a racial animus."

Holder said the nation is in “a fundamentally better place than we were 50 years ago.” 

“We've made lots of progress,” he said. “I sit here as the first African-American attorney general, serving the first African-American president of the United States. And that has to show that we have made a great deal of progress. 

“But there's still more we have to travel along this road so we get to the place that is consistent with our founding ideals,” he said.

He also is one of the few people willing to call Republican voter suppression of black and Latino voters what it is.

The attorney general also pointed to Republican efforts to enact stricter voter ID laws in southern States as evidence that more needed to be done to protect minority rights. Republicans have maintained the efforts are designed to prevent voter fraud, while Democrats say instances of fraud are exceedingly rare, and far outpaced by the minority population that does not have identification that would be unable to vote. 

Holder called the laws “political efforts” designed to make it “more difficult” for “groups that are not supportive of those in power” to “have access to the ballot.” 

“Who is disproportionately impacted by them? Young people, African Americans, Hispanics, older people, people who, for whatever reason, aren't necessarily supportive of the Republican Party,” Holder said, adding that “this notion that there is widespread in-person voter fraud is simply belied by the facts.”

I am grateful for President Obama, but Eric Holder's contribution to civil rights and fighting for them cannot and will not be overlooked by history either.

StupidiNews!

• An attack on an apartment complex in east Baghdad that was being used as a brothel has killed 34 as militants raided the building.
• Authorities say a marijuana farmer in Northern California is responsible for setting a wildfire that is currently burning 3,700 acres near the town of Igo.
• Germany's Mario Goetze scored in the 113th minute to give Germany its 4th FIFA World Cup championship, defeating Lionel Messi and Argentina 1-0.
• Apple is denying Chinese accusations that the iPhone is a security risk that is being used to track the movements of citizens.
• DARPA is looking into "human memory-saving devices", investing $37.5 million into new research involving brain patterns.

Last Call For What Domestic Terrorism Problem, Part A Lot

Enjoy your visit from the US Secret Service, folks.

Sharing a photo on her Facebook page of President Obama’s recent visit to Texas, the founder of the Moms With Guns website commented on the photo, stating: “Where is an assasin (sic) when you need one?”

The post has since been taken down and the Moms With Guns Facebook account has been closed by founder Kathy Perkins, but not before Liberaland was able to save a screen capture, seen below.

One commenter, Todd Thozeski of Seven Hills, Ohio, commented on her Facebook share, “Duh,’ while Liberaland noted another wrote, “I know…I’m amazed it hasn’t happened yet.”

There's no conceivable, possible reason to believe that any of the people advocating for open carry firearms rights are in any way a threat or danger to anyone, because why do you hate MURICA and FREEDOM and EAGLE, stupid libtard?

Added below, she asserts, “We Will NO LONGER Tolerate Your Tyrannical Abuse!” possibly in reference with to Thomas Jefferson’s advice that “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure.”

No reason at all to ever confuse this with a call to armed revolution, nope nope nope.

GOP Minority Outreach, Con't

Today's contestant on "Why Latinos should vote Republican" is Texas GOP Rep. Michael McCaul, head of the House Homeland Security committee:

"It’s very heart-wrenching as a father to see that — mothers with their babies," McCaul said on "Fox News Sunday." "I also saw some 17-year-olds that I thought looked more like a threat to coming into the United States."

The congressman showed little sympathy for young migrants crossing the border. While he said that some may qualify to stay in the U.S., that most needed to be sent away as a "message of deterrence."

What about them made them a threat, Congressman?

The fact they were Latino teenagers?  That's all it takes when you're a white Republican from Texas, I guess.  It's not like non-white men in the US are used to being perceived as a "threat" simply because they're not white.

I mean, it's not like Republicans consider immigrants to be a threat just because they are immigrants.

The leader of an effort to rally a Bundy Ranch-style militia at the Texas border said this week that his troops were fighting for "national sovereignty."

"We have patriots all across this country who are willing to sacrifice their time, their monies, even quit their jobs to come down and fight for freedom, liberty and national sovereignty," Chris Davis said, as quoted by Rio Grande Valley TV station KRGV.

Davis would not tell KRGV how many members make up his group, Operation Secure Our Border, nor offer an outline of when and where the group planned the deploy along the Texas-Mexico border.

Davis, who has been identified as a member of the Second Amendment activist group Open Carry Texas, also reportedly released a YouTube video recently in which he issued a warning to those migrants crossing the border illegally: "Get back across the border or you will be shot."

Keep up that minority outreach, guys.

The New Bar For Scandal

Washington Post scold and GOP operative Ed Rogers demands a special prosecutor in the "massive" IRS scandal involving Lois Lerner, and he has taken it upon himself to make this happen using the power of the adversarial press.

Anyone paying attention to the Internal Revenue Service scandal has been waiting for the next smidgen to drop. Well, two more hit pretty hard this week. At the president’s next encounter with the media, I will scream collusion if no one asks him for his exact definition of a “smidgen,” and if he thinks he has seen a smidgen of corruption yet. At this point, only the most gullible or culpable can continue to claim there is no compelling evidence in this case. Given the delays, lies and stonewalling, there is no viable argument against a special prosecutor.

It's not the first time he's called for this, either.

The corrosive effect of this diminishes America’s legal authority and makes for bad politics for the Democrats in November. How can the Democrats defend these “lost” e-mails? Who in a competitive 2014 race can keep a straight face and say they believe this president’s claims? If I were a Democrat, I would take Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp’s (R-Mich.) good advice and support a special prosecutor. It is the only way for Democrats to put distance between themselves and this grotesque violation of the public trust.

Because Ed Rogers clearly has the best interests of the Democratic party in mind. It is, after all, Obama's fault that Iraq blew up, Obama's fault that our foreign policy is a mess, that the good jobs news in 2014 is in fact 100% meaningless, and that nobody believes in climate change.

In other words, if you want to know what idiocy the GOP is cooking up in their bubble of stupidity, Ed Rogers will gladly tell you.  Interestingly enough, he thinks impeachment is a terrible idea.

Go figure.

Last Call For A Winner Among Losers

The argument that the Hobby Lobby decision is somehow a "liberal" decision never fails to amuse me, but that's what Minneapolis Star-Tribune columnist Brett McDonnell posits in his article this week, chiding the left for being "close-minded" to the "freedoms" that the decision brings.

Is RFRA a conservative power grab giving religious lawbreakers a “get out of jail free” card?

History suggests otherwise. RFRA reversed Justice Antonin Scalia’s 1990 opinion that denied protection to Native Americans who used peyote in religious ceremonies. The dissenters in that case were Justices Harry Blackmun, William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall — three of the leading liberals in the court’s history. Those liberals lost in court, but Congress vindicated them three years later by passing RFRA.

Democrats controlled both the Senate and the House at the time, and RFRA passed by a 97-3 vote in the Senate and unanimously in the House. That is not a typo.

Bill Clinton signed RFRA into law.

Thus, liberal titans on the court, in Congress and in the White House vigorously supported RFRA’s strong protection of religious liberty.

Why? . Because RFRA reflects the core liberal values of toleration and respect for diverse viewpoints. In a world with a litter of laws and a rainbow of religions, even well-intentioned laws sometimes seriously burden some believers. If we can ease that burden by modifying the law while doing little damage to the law’s legitimate purpose, we make it easier for diverse groups to coexist.

The court plausibly found that a modest extension of an already-existing accommodation for some religious organizations to corporations like Hobby Lobby would avoid burdening religious beliefs without hurting the company’s employees.

What we have in Hobby Lobby is an opinion grounded in corporate social responsibility and respect for diverse points of view. The Supreme Court’s five conservatives have delivered a profoundly liberal opinion. Too bad so many liberals don’t seem to realize it.

Here's the problem that Prof. McDonnell clearly does not understand:  Hobby Lobby's religious freedom comes directly at the financial expense of female employees of the company.  They will now have to pay full price for contraception, something the the company itself gladly chose to cover while RFRA was in effect.  In fact, Hobby Lobby didn't change its tune until another law, the Affordable Care Act, was passed.  Only then did it become a "religious burden" to the company.

There is nothing "liberal" about the Hobby Lobby decision.  It penalizes financially only one class of employees -- women -- and does so in a way that allows multiple corporations to penalize employees at their direct expense, for a variety of reasons.

The decision has already been expanded to include all forms of female contraception, and leaves the door open for these "closely held" family owned companies to continue to push their beliefs upon employee at their monetary expense.

That's clearly unconstitutional, but what does an individual's right to freedom from religion?  It apparently no longer matters.

A Mess Of Your Own Making

Jewish Republicans are suddenly alarmed that with Eric Cantor gone, there won't be any Jewish Republicans in Congress anymore.  Keep in mind there are plenty on the Democratic party side, including DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and NY Sen. Chuck Schumer, but Cantor was it.  And that's got Jewish Republicans kind of upset.

The stinging defeat last month of Eric Cantor, the House majority leader and the highest-ranking Jewish politician in American history, has created the possibility of Republicans having no Jewish representation in the House or Senate for the first time in more than a half-century.

“Sometimes, a Jewish person just wants to be able to go to Congress and speak with a Jewish person,” Beverly Goldstein, a Republican donor from Beachwood, Ohio, explained in the hotel lobby after a meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition.

“And Chuck Schumer is not it for us,” she added, referring to the Democratic senator from New York.

Excluding the soon-to-be-retired Mr. Cantor, there are now 31 Jewish members of Congress — 30 of them Democrats and an independent senator from Vermont, Bernard Sanders, who generally votes with Democrats.

And of course, the party of right-wing Christian Dominionist theology is having trouble figuring out why there's no room for non-Christians in it.

Decades after a Reagan era that was relatively rich in Jewish representation on the Republican side of both the House and the Senate, Republican Jews are grappling with what it means for a party that casts itself as the protector of Israel to potentially not have a single one of its children in Congress. Some Democrats, of course, depict Mr. Cantor’s loss as the removal of a final fig leaf from what has become a homogeneously Christian party with little room for religious and ethnic minorities. Others said the loss of Mr. Cantor, a conservative standard-bearer deemed insufficiently conservative by voters who preferred a Tea Party challenger, revealed the Republicans’ exclusion of moderates of any stripe.

There are Jewish candidates running for Congress on the GOP side this year.  Meet Adam Kwasman, proud Tea Party Republican.

Mr. Kwasman, a product of Jewish day school in the Tucson suburbs who says he tries to make Shabbat dinners with his parents whenever possible, is the Jewish candidate most affiliated with the Tea Party, opposing gun control and any form of amnesty on immigration and talking about bringing “Kosher Tea” to Congress. He was endorsed by Joe Arpaio, the Maricopa County sheriff who has been the subject of a Justice Department investigation because of his crackdowns on undocumented workers. House analysts consider Mr. Kwasman the underdog against a more moderate Republican in the August primary.

No room for moderates here, regardless of your religious creed.  Maybe that's the message.

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• Four years after leaving the team for the Miami Heat in a highly publicized event, NBA star LeBron James says he will again return to the Cleveland Cavaliers.
• For the second time in as many years, California's state Supreme Court has lessened the state's "Three Strikes" sentencing law.
• Israeli airstikes in Gaza continue as the death toll among Palestinians reaches 100, with the possibility of a ground offensive if Hamas militants do not stop rocket attacks "soon".
• Russian President Vladimir Putin has paid a visit to Cuba to meet the Castro brothers as he's offered to write off 90% of the island nation's Cold War-era debt to Moscow.
• In response to a petition to allow electric carmaker Tesla to directly sell to customers nationwide, the White House says consumers will have to take it up with state regulators.

Last Call For The Price That Won't Be Paid

Doug Mataconis makes an honest attempt to fathom what the GOP is up to with impeachment:

Among the Tea Party and the hardcore GOP base, though, it seems as though impeachment is well on the way to becoming yet another one of those articles of faith, right along with absolute belief in the fact that Fast & Furious, Benghazi, and the IRS targeting story are the worst Presidential scandals in American history. In fact, notwithstanding the fact that the leadership opposes impeachment and knows that it would be a political disaster, it remains to be seen whether this impeachment talk remains something confined to the fringe of the GOP and the conservative or if it starts to become a more mainstream idea to the point where the leadership in Congress finds itself forced to “do something” in response to pressure from the base. That pressure could increase if the GOP captures the Senate in November and the base of the party finds itself energized in the manner it was after the 2010 midterms. It could also become an issue if and when the lawsuit that the House of Representatives intends to file against the President ends up going nowhere, as I fully expect that it will.

It will.  Expect the last two years to be nothing but chaos.  Your semi-regular reminder:  for all the damage that Republicans did to their "brand" in 1998, two years later Bush was President, and then two years after that, he allowed 9/11 to happen on his watch and America rewarded the GOP with total control of the government for 4 years, which led to the financial crisis of 2007-2008.

Republicans didn't exactly lose when they impeached Clinton.  They won, and handily.

Method To The Madness

Orange Julius's stupid stunt suing President Obama for not implementing the ACA employer mandate quickly enough seems not only moronic, but specifically designed to piss everyone off on both the left and the right.  I'm pretty confused about it too as nobody on the right will be happy without Boehner pulling a Mola Ram and ripping Obama's heart out on live TV, and the rest of us are just pretty much disgusted with Boehner's complete loss of control over his asylum patients as they loot the country.

Steve M looks for answers among the insanity and figures Orange Julius has managed to survive this long for a reason (where Cantor after all has not).

So Boehner's announcement that the suit will be just about the employer mandate lands as an intentional damp squib, making the whole thing seem like harmless stunt politics, while the draft resolution enables the House to participate in any Obamacare suit. And I do mean "participate in" -- the language of the resolution says that the House "may initiate or intervene in one or more civil actions on behalf of the House of Representatives" regarding Obamacare. So joining someone else's suit is a distinct possibility (or even joining multiple suits attacking multiple aspects of the law). 

The point is that the legal eagles of the conservative movement are attacking Obamacare from a lot of different angles, any one of which could be the Roberts Court's way of finally killing it. Unlike most liberals, I continue to think that Obamacare might ultimately be overturned -- though I think the strategy on the right at this point is to let the courts do it, rather than elected officials. The party as a whole probably doesn't want to run on the "accomplishment" of having thrown millions of people off the employment rolls -- but maybe members of the House, with their gerrymandered, blood-red districts, wouldn't mind running reelection campaigns after being parties to the suit that made Obamacare fall.

So that's where we are now on this front. I imagine the crazies will amend Boehner's legislative draft and add a few crazier provisions to it -- but he's started with a bid that lowballs the crazy. As I keep saying, he's got enough low cunning to have kept his job in this crazy environment, so I continue to think he knows what he's doing.

I admit I hadn't thought of this particular angle, mainly because on the scale of 1 to 10, the plan is completely bonkers with a side of crackpot.  If the goal was to have to courts destroy Obamacare, Chief Justice John Roberts had his opportunity to do so last summer when he had four SCOTUS votes calling the entire bill unconstitutional.  For whatever reason, he didn't do it.

Maybe Boehner's trying to force his hand again or something, but the plan seems to now be, as with abortion, to weaken the laws so badly through Congress and SCOTUS that it does collapse, and maybe then Roberts will come to bury it.

And then the GOP comes in with a 95% identical plan that doesn't have the GOP trying to destroy it, and lo and behold, Republicans fixed Obamacare.  I think that's the real, final plan.

Drawing The Lines, Then Crossing Them

In a giant case of "Well no kidding" a federal judge has determined that the completely GOP-controlled Florida state legislature purposely and illegally created congressional districts in order to benefit Republicans when they were redrawn in 2012.

In a ruling released late Thursday, Circuit Court Judge Terry Lewis blasted the Republican establishment that created Florida's congressional map, saying they "made a mockery" of transparency, allowed for "improper partisan intent" and he ordered that two of the state's 27 districts drawn in 2012 violate the Fair District standards. 

In his 41-page ruling, the judge rejected challenges to districts in South Florida and that Tampa Bay but said that District 5, held by Democrat U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown, and District 10, held by Republican U.S. Rep. Dan Webster, "will need to be redrawn, as will any other districts affected thereby."

Pretty straightforward stuff here.  You give one side all the power, it does what it can to maintain that power, through illegal means.  For all the screaming and whining from Republicans about DEMOCRAT TYRANNY and other such nonsense, it's Republicans who cheat to win.

Lewis blasted the role of the political consultants saying "they made a mockery of the Legislature's transparent and open process of redistricting" while "going to great lengths to conceal from the public their paln and their participation in it. 

"They were successful in their efforts to influence the redistricting process and the congressional plan under review here,'' he wrote. "And they might have successfully concealed their scheme and their actions from the public had it not been for the Plaintiffs determined efforts to uncover it in this case." 

He concluded, however, that the circumstantial evidence proved that the political operatives "managed to find other avenues...to infiltrate and influence the Legislature." He drew no conclusions that legislative leaders were aware of the scheme, but he noted that Legislative leaders destroyed almost all of their emails and other documents related to redistricting, as did the political operatives.

So there was most likely a conspiracy and e-mail evidence was destroyed.  Yet, you won't see this on FOX News.  Remember, Florida voted for President Obama in 2008 and 2012, but 17 of 27 districts --63% --have Republican representatives and registered Democrats outnumber Republicans in Florida 39%-35%, with 23% independent.

Somehow, like Ohio, and Pennsylvania, Florida has way more Republicans in the House than it should, and a judge finally called them on it.

Lewis also concluded that the trail of emails and secret documents, which GOP operatives fought to keep out of the record, proved that "Republican political consultants or operatives did in fact conspire to manipulate and influence the redistricting process. 

"They accomplished this by writing scripts for and organizing groups of people to attend the public hearings to advocate for adoption of certain components or characteristics in the maps, and by submitting maps and partial maps through the public process, all with the intention of obtaining enacted maps for the State House and Senate and for Congress that would favor the Republican Party."

So yes, the whole point is to win, regardless of what the people of Florida actually want.  This is what real "voter manipulation schemes" look like,a dn when it's done, it's done by Republicans, time and time again. Getting fair districts is the only way to get these clowns out of the House and out of our hair so we can get back to governing this country rather than setting it on fire.

StupidiNews!

• Researchers in Mississippi have discovered that the baby they believed was "functionally cured" of HIV after being treated has detectable levels of the virus once again in her system.
• Amazon is seeking FAA permissions to field test flying delivery drones outdoors near Seattle as founder Jeff Bezos wants to make the idea of "Prime Air" delivery service a reality.
• President Obama cautioned both Israeli and Palestinian governments about escalation and offered the services of the US as a third party to broker a cease fire.
• Gourmet cupcake chain Crumbs, which shuttered its stores on Tuesday, may get a new lease on life from reality TV show "The Profit".
• The White House has nixed its pick to head the US Patent Office after stiff political and corporate opposition emerged over former Johnson & Johnson intellectual property lawyer Philip Johnson.

Last Call For The Collapsing Collapsers

Jon Chait punches Reason Magazine's Peter Suderman in the mouth over the glibertarian denial of Obamacare working:

And yet, in another way, the conservative media has provided a useful lagging indicator of Obamacare’s progress. The message of every individual story is that the law is failing, the administration is lying, and so on. The substance, when viewed as a whole, tells a different story. Here is how Suderman, to take just one example, has described the continuous advancement of the law’s coverage goals: 

January 21: The prognosis was so grim that Obamacare might not have yielded any net reduction in the uninsured (“it appears possible that there has been no net expansion of private coverage at all”).

This is the ridiculous position Suderman took six months ago.   This is where he is now:

July 8: A New England Journal of Medicine report that 20 million Americans have gained insurance under Obamacare, argues Suderman, is probably too high (“it’s too early to say exactly how many so far — only that 20 million is almost certainly an overstatement”).

Chait finishes him off deftly:

We have gone from learning that the law has failed to cover anybody to learning it would cover a couple million to learning it would cover a few million to learning that it has probably insured fewer than 20 million people halfway through year one. The message of every individual dispatch is a confident prediction of the hated enemy's demise, yet the terms described in each, taken together, tell the story of retreat.

And yes, the "Obamacare will collapse/death spiral/massive premium spikes/groundswell for repeal!" people are wrong, because those clowns are always wrong about everything important.  And yet, people will still take Peter Suderman and Forbes's Avik Roy and US News's Jim Pethokoukis seriously, even though every ridiculous thing they said about Obamacare turned out to be so amazingly wrong, they should all be fired.

At least they can get affordable health care when that happens.