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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Obamacare Website to New Yorker: Drop Dead

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Ted Rall
This week, we wrap up a personal saga of bureaucratic incompetence and institutional corruption: my attempt to sign up for Obamacare. The Affordable Care Act officially launched three weeks ago. As one of 50 million uninsured Americans, I’ll pay a tax penalty unless I purchase for-profit insurance from a wildly profitable corporation (the healthcare sector pays its CEOs the highest salaries) via my state’s “health insurance marketplace.” Alas, my first attempt to shop for a plan ended four hours into the process, when New York’s website crashed and ate most of my info. Two weeks later, I was able to register. But the system couldn’t tell me if I’d qualify for a subsidy, or whether any of the plans cover my doctor or local hospital. As the leaves pile up and I head out to buy a last-minute discount pumpkin just in time for Halloween, will the system work — the one that was supposed to launch three weeks ago?…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Ted Rall Registers for Obamacare, Part II

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Ted Rall
Crashes, More Crashes and Sticker Shock This week: I shop for Obamacare so you don’t have to! Last week I spent six hours shopping for Obamacare on New York State’s healthcare marketplace website. Officials had estimated that it would take the average person seven minutes. Either because I am not an average person or because the Obamacare people are idiots, I spent six hours setting up an account. You can’t log in without an account. There were many questions. The site ran painfully slowly. But I slogged through. (more…)
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Ted Rall Signs Up For Obamacare, Part I

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Ted Rall
Here’s How It Went My pre-October 1st cartoon about the then-impending launch of the Affordable Care Act (henceforth to be referred by the initially insulting, then appropriated, now drolly cute Obamacare) anticipated that the websites for the 50 states’ “healthcare marketplaces” would immediately crash. Even after all these years and all this crap, there are still Obama defenders and they jumped down my virtual throat. Faithless! They cried. They were right. I am faithless. And I was right about the crashes. Though the pro-Obama media made excuses for the Administration’s lack of preparedness: “But it remained unclear whether the array of problems — many people received messages saying the system was down, and others were unable to create accounts to buy insurance — stemmed more from heavy traffic or from flaws in design,” reported The New York Times. I’ll pick “(b) flaws in design.” Cuz, like, it shouldn’t have surprised anyone that millions of people would check out those sites…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Is Rand Paul America’s #1 Liberal?

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Ted Rall
Libertarians Replace Democrats as Warriors Against Crazy Presidents There once was a time (before the 1980s) when liberals were a powerful force against executive overreach. Democrats like George McGovern opposed wars of choice. Democrats like Frank Church exposed the CIA, which led to an executive order (by President Ronald Reagan!) that banned political assassinations. A Democratic Congress held impeachment hearings against Richard Nixon, in part because he violated the privacy rights of a few hundred Americans by tapping their phones. Millions of lefties marched against the Vietnam War — it didn’t matter that the president was a Democrat. Things have changed. A “liberal” president and his Democratic congressional and media allies aren’t fighting the good fight. They’re committing the worst crimes. And so, following what Chris Hedges called “the death of the liberal class,” where the Hellfire missiles fly and in streets that ought to be full of protesters, naught but crickets, here’s what’s left: The most liberal politician in…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Why Isn’t Organ Donation Mandatory?

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Ted Rall
  America’s Weird, Enduring Respect for Corpses This week America’s news media obsessed over the shooting deaths of 12 people in Washington. The usual arguments over gun control seem irrelevant since there isn’t much that could have been done to prevent those particular killings. It was a navy base. Even in England, members of the military have access to automatic weapons. And even if we were inclined to start locking people up for hearing voices or feeling strange vibrations, we can’t build enough mental asylums to hold all of them. On the other hand, it is estimated that 18 people die every day due to a national shortage of organ donations. This crisis can be solved. Don’t worry: this is not one of Those pieces calling for you to consider signing the donor section on the back of your driver’s license. My solution is more radical. When you die, the government should take your organs. The transplant shortage is acute.…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: We’re Not War Weary. We’re Suspicious.

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Ted Rall
  Americans Aren’t “War Weary.” Obama is Just Lazy. Americans, our pundit class has decided, aren’t going along with President Obama’s hard-on for firing cruise missiles into Syrian cities because they’re “war weary.” Bullshit. True, the wars have cost us. At 12 years and counting, the illegal and unjustified U.S. occupation of Afghanistan is America’s longest war. We’ve been in Iraq — following one of the most brazen acts of aggressive warfare in our blood-soaked history — for 10. Eight thousand American soldiers have gotten themselves killed; more than 50,000 have been wounded.  (To conform to the journalistic standards of U.S.-based opinion writing, I shan’t mention the hundreds of thousands of Afghans, Iraqis, Pakistanis, Yemenis, Somalis and so on slaughtered by U.S. invasion forces.) As tragically wasteful as those casualties have been, the price we’ve paid has been low by historical standards. Roughly 700 U.S. combat deaths a year is a drop in the bucket compared to, say, Vietnam (6,000…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Breaking Bad

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Ted Rall
Obama’s Illegal War Against Syria Barack Obama wants to fire cruise missiles at Syria. As president of the nation whose military possesses the most lethal firepower of any society in history, he obviously has the ability to start this war — his sixth major front, after Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya and Pakistan — if he wants to. But does he have the legal right? The answer is no. Not if the basic architecture of the Constitution, the separation of powers, remains in force. Not if the Founding Fathers’ originalist intent, and their understanding of English at the time, means anything. Not if America’s treaty obligations, which after ratification carry the full force of U.S. law, are more than pieces of paper. Might makes right; the victor writes history. No doubt, in the perhaps-not-so-distant future, if the United States is formally constituted as an empire, with Syria one of its outlying provinces or a vassal state, no one will care how…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: 7 Questions You Should Ask About Syria

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Ted Rall
Lightening-Quick Obama Makes Bush’s “Rush to War” Look Slow and Methodical Ten years ago, George W. Bush and his henchmen were beginning their war against Iraq. They wanted to invade hours after 9/11. But conning Congress and the public into invading a country that posed no threat to us delayed the invasion until March 2003. This week, as the media celebrates the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington and Martin Luther King’s iconic speech, it is shock- and awe-inspiring to see how far America has come. Where it took a white president a year and a half to pour on enough lies of omission, contextual lapses and leaps of logic to gin up a stupid, illegal war in the Middle East, our black president did it in a week. Here we go again. A Baathist autocrat is in American crosshairs. The justification: WMDs. Also, he “kills his own people.” Which we haven’t cared about before. But: WMDs. Ten years…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: The Failure of Tahrir Square 2011

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Ted Rall
Not a Revolution, Just a Useless Protest Two years ago, when I was in the Occupy movement, my comrades and I argued about revolution. Was revolution necessary? What is it? The split that destroyed our movement — as it did the Left during the Sixties — pitted revolutionaries against reformists. The most frustrating part of the debate, however, wasn’t ideological. It was linguistic. Even on the Left, few Americans know what revolution is: the violent overthrow of the ruling classes. In a revolution, everything — beginning with the power structure — changes. The Tahrir Square encampments that led to the ouster of Egyptian autocrat Hosni Mubarak were a huge influence on Occupy. But we couldn’t agree about what they meant. Was Tahrir a “revolution”? No doubt, the 2011 Arab Spring was a powerful mass movement. Everyone agreed about that. For reformists — people who want to fix the system rather than replace it — Tahrir Square was a perfect example…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Right-Wing Liberals

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Ted Rall
Learning the Lessons of Egypt  I’m not much for sports analogies, but any athlete knows about the home field advantage. It’s easier to win if you play your game, not your opponent’s. This is even more true in politics. Playing by your enemy’s rules is a mug’s game. For whatever reason, conservatives and right-wing activists — the latter distinguishable from the former because they want to push past stodgy establishmentarianism into radical reactionism (e.g., fascism and its close relatives) — understand that he who makes the rules usually wins the fight. Whether it’s the aggressive redistricting of Texas voting districts engineered by Karl Rove on behalf of Republicans, or the brutalist media activism of FoxNews and other Murdoch properties like The Wall Street Journal, or hiring goons to beat up election officials during the 2000 Florida recount, right-wingers get that politics is war, no Queensbury rules. Only victory matters. Leftists — not soft, smooshy liberals but real, honest-to-a-nonexistent-God socialists and…
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