Andrew Breitbart, dead at 43; suddenly, during a late-night walk, of apparent heart failure, during the GOP primaries.
The Obamacare birth-control coverage* provisions kicking in -- and kicking up a storm -- in the middle of those selfsame primaries.
...And every time the primary has an interesting race, a major celebrity dies just in time to knock it out of the news cycle.
I'm not paranoid, but if I was in the 'noid business, I'd be pairing them off and readying them for sale in anticipation of a boom market.
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* As the "compromise" offers were described, it occurred to me that none of the principals involved in figuring them out had grasped the futility of offering what amounts to plausible deniability and a system of cut-outs to people who operate in the certainty that an omniscient Deity is keeping track. This kind of mess is exactly what the First Amendment was supposed to cause the fed.gov to avoid. See what happens when you try to cheat the operating system? --No, they don't.
The fact that Mr. Breitbart was also getting ready to release tapes of Obama from his college days is surely a coincidence.
ReplyDelete*adjusts tinfoil helmet*
You're pretty accurate on your read of the compromise, and the lack-of-understanding by the lawyerly types of the mindset of the religious leaders.
ReplyDeleteOn the broader front, I do have some tinfoil somewhere. If your supplies run low, that is.
The "compromise" was rather typical of the incompetence of the White House - it does not work for those Catholic non-profits that are self-insured.
ReplyDeleteIts almost like Obama and his staff don't actually know how our health insurance business actually works ...
What compromise? The pre-compromise mandate is what has been published in the Federal Register.
ReplyDeleteSkeptically, would you feel better if I called it "the compromise as described in the media?"
ReplyDeleteA websearch on birth control federal compromise turns up page after page of the not-much-of-a-change.
Frickin' autocomplete.
ReplyDeleteI think he may have had a heart problem. He WILL be missed. My thoughts and prayers are for his family. I am sorry for their loss. IMO, good man down. Too soon,
ReplyDeleteI'm with you -- the topic of the post was how convenient the timing of this news story is for distracting from the previous outrage-du-jour.
ReplyDeleteYet, as you say, a websearch on *birth control federal compromise* turns up page after page of commentary on how recalcitrant Republicans and church leaders are for rejecting it and/or how economically and morally the comporomise is exactly the same as the orignal policy.
I just find it curious, in a sort of aserisk-leading-to-a-footnote-way, that the "new" policy was announced with great fanfare on 10 February, yet the old policy was actually made law on the 17th of February. Not "functionally" the old policy, or "objectively" the old policy, but word-for-word and letter for letter the old policy.
The media did not need any distraction by the death of a celebrity. By misdirection and manipulation of attention, the Administration managed to keep them talking about "new policy" even as the old policy was set in stone. Ask 20 people on the street, and whether they agree with the contraceptive mandate or not, I doubt even one would know that the most-objected-to version of the policy is what actually became law.
Anyway, it's your blog, this is too long, and it's veering off topic anyway.