The Council Has Spoken!! This Weeks’ Watcher’s Council Results – 10/25/13

The Watcher’s Council:

South Carolina Tea Party Coalition: The Tea Party movement may only be a few years old, but the beginning of the movement is often misunderstood and misreported. While the tea party is often portrayed as being purely an anti-Obama movement, the truth is that the Republican Party has always been as much a target as President Obama and his administration.

Once again, the Council has spoken, the votes have been cast and the results are in for this week’s Watcher’s Council match-up.

This week we had a tie in our Council category between Joshuapundit’s The Dirty Secret Behind ObamaCare No One’s Talking About and The Right Planet’s ObamaSoft — The World’s Worst Rollout in History, who applied his knowledge of software engineering to give us a wonderful and well written in-depth look at exactly how big the colossal failure of the ObamaCare rollout was.

In accordance to our by-laws, that means I get to put on my Watcher’s hat and break the tie, and there’s no question – The Right Planet takes the honors this week!

Here’s a slice:

Watching the disastrous rollout of the online healthcare exchanges has really left me shaking my head, and not just for the obvious reasons. The rollout of Obamacare has been described as nothing short of abysmal, leaving some to question why the administration would go ahead with the launch of a busted site. Numerous problems have plagued the debut of the Obamacare healthcare exchanges; and a number of experts are questioning the soundness of the site’s architecture.

But Obamacare supporters are attempting to slough off all the errors associated with the online exchanges as simple “glitches”–to be “expected” with such a revolutionary, comprehensive web-based system.

Well, if there’s something I do know a bit about, it’s software engineering. My background is in client-server development with an emphasis on web applications. Developing distributed applications that must communicate with multiple servers and clients was my field of expertise. I designed relational datebase schemas and ER diagrams; I modeled and mapped the application layers to the data layers using UML and OOD, I wrote the complex SQL queries and stored procedures to access the data layer from application layer; and I dealt with the interface issues and graphical design on the front-end as well. It’s been about five years since I worked for a consulting firm as a software engineer. So forgive me if I may use some “old school” terms in this article. But I’d like to take a deeper look at this whole healthcare software disaster known as healthcare.gov from purely the software engineering perspective.

First, on a bit of a sidenote, I’m surprised by the reliance on a web interface to implement the state healthcare exchanges. Is the assumption that the 30-40 million that are allegedly uninsured and desperately need Obamacare have access to an iPad, laptop or computer? Ironically, in spite of Obamacare (a.k.a Affordable Care Act) and all promises contrary, estimates are there will still be 30 million left uninsured. But I digress.

The debut of healthcare.gov is one of the worst software rollouts I’ve ever witnessed. The president was forced to hold an emergency press conference in the Rose Garden, playing the part of Salesman-in-Chief. The administration and the liberal media are portraying all the software errors as “glitches.” Well, FYI to the liberal media and the CEO of Obamasoft, we don’t refer to fatal program errors as “glitches,” not in software world.

The preferred description for a so-called software “glitch” is a bug. Almost all software contains bugs of some kind. That’s why updates, patches and new versions of software will always be the norm. People aren’t perfect, nor is technology. Software is “alive.” You can’t just code it once and leave it at that; it must constantly be refactored and improved, since technology constantly changes. The big difference between a bug and an error is, typically, a bug will not cause the application (program) to freeze or crash.

For those who have no clue about the software development process, it might help to start off with a bit off a primer on some technical terms and concepts that will hopefully give a better understanding on the challenges of developing and implementing the healthcare.gov online exchanges.

The term application has an important meaning in software engineering. In a general sense, a software application can be thought of as a computer program. But, in a strictly technical sense, a software application is commonly comprised of numerous computer programs.

There are significant differences between what is called a stand-alone application and a web application. A stand-alone application is a computer program like Microsoft Word that installs directly to your computer’s local hard-drive (HD). A web application resides on a remote computer (server), not the client computer’s local hard-drive, and must be accessed via an internet connection. Typically a web application is accessed via a web browser like Firefox, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Safari, etc. This is referred to as a client-server architecture–meaning: two separate computer programs communicating with each other.

Much more at the link.

In our non-Council category, the winner was Mark Steyn with Whose Islam? submitted by Joshuapundit… in which Steyn wonders out loud at the West’s strange insistence that terrorism fomented in the name of Islam has nothing to do with Islam. Do read it.

Okay, here are this week’s full results. Only Rhymes With Right was unable to vote this time, but was not subject to the usual 2/3 vote penalty:

Council Winners

• *First place with 4 1/3 votes! – The Right Planet – ObamaSoft — The World’s Worst Rollout in History
• Second place with 3 1/3 votes – Joshuapundit – The Dirty Secret Behind ObamaCare No One’s Talking About
• Third place with 1 2/3 votes – Liberty’s Spirit – Cultural Relativism and the Decline in Societal Decency
• Fourth place with 1 1/3 votes – Bookworm Room – Yale Prof. offers a revealing glimpse into the Ivy League’s epistemic closure
• Fifth place with 1 vote – VA Right! – Obamacare Now Officially a Laughing Stock – Time to Pile On!
• Sixth place *t* with 2/3 vote – The Mellow Jihadi – Sefton, a cavalry horse who refused to die
• Sixth place *t* with 2/3 vote – The Noisy Room – The Tea Party And The Mad Hatter
• Sixth place *t* with 2/3 vote – Nice Deb – ACORN Offshoot Tapped To Help With Multi-State ObamaCare ‘Navigator’ Drive
• Sixth place *t* with 2/3 vote – The Political Commentator – Bill de Blasio for Mayor? Will the official color of NYC be changed to red?
• Seventh place *t* with 1/3 vote – GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD – The Future of Counter Terrorism
• Seventh place *t* with 1/3 vote – The Razor – League of Denial Seals The Deal For This NFL Fan

Non-Council Winners

• *First place with 4 votes! – Mark Steyn – Whose Islam? submitted by Joshuapundit
• Second place *t* with 2 2/3 votes – Caroline Glick – Israel and the new Munich submitted by Noisy Room
• Second place *t* with 2 2/3 votes – Yuval Levin/NRO – Assessing The Exchanges submitted by The Glittering Eye
• Third place *t* with 1 1/3 votes – The Tower – Iranian President, Supreme Leader Rail Against “Zionist Regime” submitted by Simply Jews
• Third place *t* with 1 1/3 votes – Sarah Palin – D.C’s ‘Corrupt Bastards Club’ submitted by The Watcher
• Fourth place *t* with 1 vote – Yale Global Online – The Dragon’s Spear: China’s Asymmetric Strategy submitted by GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD
• Fifth place *t* with 1/3 vote – The Strata-Sphere – Anatomy Of A Government FUBAR ObamaCare Style submitted by The Right Planet
• Fifth place *t* with 1/3 vote – Narratively – Nick Brown Smelled Bull submitted by The Razor
• Fifth place *t* with 1/3 vote – Newsbusters – Dem Rep. Steve Cohen: Tea Party Republicans Are ‘Domestic Enemies’ We Took Oath To Defend Against submitted by Rhymes With Right

Honorable Mentions

• Ask Marion – Hypocrisy… And the Devil
• The Independent Sentinel – Obama Plans to Give Billions to Iran If They Keep Talking to Him
• The Pirate’s Cove – If You Won’t Reduce Your Big Carbon Footprint You Hate Children

See you next week! Don’t forget to tune in on Monday AM for this week’s Watcher’s Forum, as the Council and their invited special guests take apart one of the provocative issues of the day with short takes and weigh in… don’t you dare miss it. And don’t forget to like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter… ’cause we’re cool like that!

Technorati Tags: Watcher’s Council,Choices,bloggers,blogosphere,Veterans,collection of articles,news,news nuggets,alternative media,Progressivism,you be the judge,Educate Yourself,Get-involved,knowledge,Obamaland,Hypocrisy,ObamaCare,Trainwreck,Middle East,Tea Party

Obama Assists Bain Takeover at OMB and Tries to Hide It

Red State:

It looks like President Obama is assisting in a friendly takeover of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), by Bain Capital.

As you may have heard, earlier this year Obama picked Jeff Zients to lead the OMB. You might not have heard that Zients worked at Bain from 1988-1990. The Zients White House biography did not originally admit that fact.

Now Obama has appointed another former Bain consultant, Boris Bershteyn, to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), which is part of the OMB. Recognizing how awkward this is for Obama’s re-election campaign, Bershteyn’s tenure at Bain has been edited out of his official White House bio. This is an obvious and glaring attempt to hide Obama’s friendly Bain takeover of the OMB.

The audacity of Obama’s hypocrisy in attempting to hide his Bain takeover of the OMB, while continuing to attack Romney’s private sector service at Bain and refusing to condemn the despicable ad by an Obama-supporting super PAC that attempts to link Romney to a woman’s death from cancer (completely unfounded), knows no bounds.

Even worse, Obama’s Bain takeover of the OMB completely undermines the core of the Obama campaign’s argument about Romney’s private-sector experience. After all, just last month last month Obama said:

“When some people question why I would challenge his Bain record, the point I’ve made there in the past is, if you’re a head of a large private-equity firm or hedge fund, your job is to make money… That’s part of the American way. That’s part of the system. But that doesn’t necessarily make you qualified to think about the economy as a whole, because as president, my job is to think about the workers. My job is to think about communities, where jobs have been outsourced.”

Obama has obviously changed his mind, and private-sector experience at Bain no longer disqualifies one from public service. The proof is in the pudding, Obama just appointed another Bain man to be head of Regulatory Affairs, arguably one of the administration positions most impactful to Americans’ lives and well-being. The Bain argument has always been a nothing-burger designed to distract the media and voters from the real issues. Obama himself just proved it.

This obviously shows that Bain Capital types and it’s Founder Mitt Romney are much more suited to fix the economic crisis America faces than the overwhelmed and inexperienced President Obama and his advisors who helped put us here. Guess Team Obama is just giving Team Romney a head start  with these appointments!!  Add the Ryan, Chairman of the House Budget Committee VP pick to the equation and the choice in November is clear and obvious!

“Obama Appoints 2 Former Bain Consultants.....What A Hypocrite!” …City-Data Forum

h/t to MJ

Related:

Obama puts another Bain alum in his budget office ... –  You just can’t make this stuff up!

Energy Loan Watchdog is an Obama Donor

Court strikes down EPA coal rule

CBO warns of significant recession if Congress doesn’t act to avoid fiscal cliff  -  Predictions have worsened because Obama’s economy is so much worse than expected (Just announced another 4000 jobs lost since last week.)

Exposed: The “Free” Energy Hoax 

Pew Report: Middle Class Has Suffered 'Worst Decade in Modern History'

Seems both the Occidental and Columbia College Records of President Obama’s show he is listed as a FOREIGN EXCHANGE STUDENT  -  and indicate that Obama attended "under the name Barry Soetoro and received financial aid as a foreign student… Connection Here?  It shows a pattern of a lifetime of smoke & mirrors and lies…  How can we trust him to lead our country and make decisions for us and future generations…

Haven’t heard about most of this?  Gallup: 60 Percent of Americans Believe Media Are Biased Toward Obama and the Left

Technorati Tags: Bain Capital,smoke and mirrors,Obamaland,OMB,OIRA,Mitt Romney 2012,Romney-Ryan,Liar-in-Chief,one-term Obama,Office of Management and Budget,debt,finance,economic crisis,Obama hypocracy,CBO,EPA

Sorry Charlie… The Real Nancy Pelosi

Sorry Charley...

No more StarKist Tuna for me .....

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's home district
includes San Francisco.

StarKist Tuna's headquarters are in San Francisco, Pelosi's home district.

StarKist is owned by Del Monte Foods and is a major contributor to Pelosi.

StarKist is the major employer in American Samoa employing 75% of the Samoan work force.

Paul Pelosi, Nancy's husband, owns $17 million dollars of StarKist stock.

In January, 2007 when the minimum wage was increased from $5.15 to $7.25, Pelosi had American Samoa exempted from the increase so Del Monte would not have to pay the higher wage.

This would make Del Monte products less expensive than that of its competitors.

Last week when the huge bailout bill was passed, Pelosi added an earmark to the final bill adding $33 million dollars for an "economic development credit in American Samoa"

Pelosi has called the Bush Administration "CORRUPT" and many other things !!!

How do you spell "HYPOCRISY" ?

SHE'S SHAMELESS....

EVERY AMERICAN SHOULD THIS, PLEASE PASS IT AROUND ....!!!

Posted by Teri Wade at AsaMom

What Went Wrong

Piling up debt, gaffes, and hypocrisy, Obama & Co. are sinking…

We are witnessing one of the more rapid turnabouts in recent American political history. President Obama’s popularity has plummeted to 50 percent and lower in some polls, while the public expresses even less confidence in the Democratic-led Congress and the direction of the country at large. Yet, just eight months ago, liberals were talking in Rovian style about a new generation to come of progressive politics — and the end of both the Republican party and the legacy of Reaganism itself. Barack Obama was to be the new FDR and his radical agenda an even better New Deal.

What happened, other than the usual hubris of the party in power?

First, voters had legitimate worries about health care, global warming, immigration, energy, and inefficient government. But it turns out that they are more anxious about the new radical remedies than the old nagging problems. They wanted federal support for wind and solar, but not at the expense of neglecting new sources of gas, oil, coal, and nuclear power. They were worried about high-cost health care, the uninsured, redundant procedures, and tort reform, but not ready for socialized medicine. They wanted better government, not bigger, DMV-style government.

There is a growing realization that Obama enticed voters last summer with the flashy lure of discontent. But now that they are hooked, he is reeling them in to an entirely different — and, for many a frightening — agenda. Nothing is worse for a president than a growing belief among the public that it has been had.

Second, Americans were at first merely scared about the growing collective debt. But by June they became outraged that Obama has quadrupled the annual deficit in proposing all sorts of new federal programs at a time when most finally had acknowledged that the U.S. has lived beyond its means for years. They elected Obama, in part, out of anger at George W. Bush for multi-billion dollar shortfalls — and yet as a remedy for that red ink got Obama’s novel multi-trillion-dollar deficits.

Third, many voters really believed in the “no more red/blue state America” healing rhetoric. Instead, polls show they got the most polarizing president in recent history — both in his radical programs and in the manner in which he has demonized the opposition to ram them through without bipartisan support. “Punch back harder” has replaced “Yes, we can.”

Fourth, Americans wanted a new brand — youthful, postracial, mesmerizing abroad. At first they got that, too. But after eight months, their president has proven not so postracial, but instead hyper-racially conscious. Compare the Holder “cowards” outburst, the Sotomayor riff on innate racial and gender judicial superiority, and the president’s Cambridge police comments. All that sounds more like Jesse Jackson than Martin Luther King Jr. Demagogues, not healers, trash their predecessors at the beginning of every speech. When a once-eloquent president now goes off teleprompter, the question is not whether he will say something that is either untruthful or silly, but simply how many times he might do so at one outing. Some once worried that George W. Bush could not articulate our goals in Iraq; far more now sense that Obama is even less able to outline his own health-care reform.

Fifth, even skeptics are surprised at the partisan cynicism. A year ago, Democratic leaders such as Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Barack Obama praised organizing, dissidents, and protest. Today they have become near-Nixonian in demonizing popular resistance to their collectivized health-care plans as mob-like, inauthentic, scripted, Nazi-like, and un-American. There are still ex-lobbyists in the government. High officials still cheat on their taxes. Hacks in the Congress still profit from their office. The public is sensing not only that Obama has failed to run the most ethically clean government, as promised, but indeed that he is not running as ethically clean a government as the predecessor whom he so assiduously ridiculed.

Sixth, there is a growing fear that Obamism is becoming cult-like and Orwellian. Almost on script, Hollywood ceased all its Rendition/Redacted–style films. Iraq — once the new Vietnam — is out of the news. Afghanistan is “problematic,” not a “blunder.” Tribunals, renditions, the Patriot Act, and Predators are no longer proof of a Seven Days in May coup, but legitimate tools to keep us safe. Words change meanings as acts of terror become “man-caused disasters.” Hunting down jihadists is really an “overseas contingency operation.” Media sycophants do not merely parrot Obama, but now proclaim him a “god.” New York Times columnists who once assured us that Bush’s dastardly behavior was proof of American pathology now sound like Pravda apologists in explaining the “real” Obama is not what he is beginning to seem like.

Seventh, the Obama cabinet is sounding downright uncouth and boorish. The tax-challenged Treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, unleashed a profanity-laced diatribe against bank regulators. Hillary Clinton’s recent outburst in the Congo, captured on YouTube, was something out of Days of Our Lives. Joe Biden cannot speak extemporaneously without causing an incident with the Russians or misleading the public about swine flu. Attorney General Holder sounds like a tired scold, only to be overshadowed by the president’s off-the-cuff cuts about the Special Olympics, Las Vegas, and the Cambridge police. Press Secretary Robert Gibbs makes Scott McClellan sound like a Cicero by comparison.

Eighth, we were all appalled by Wall Street greed and the notion that an individual could take $100 million rather than one or two million as a bonus. But the Obama remedy for that obscenity was to conflate Goldman Sachs or AIG with the family orthodontist or local asphalt contractor whose 80-hour weeks might result in an annual $250,000 income. Worse still, the public impression is that while small entrepreneurs may pay up to 65 percent of their income in new state and federal income taxes, payroll taxes, and surcharges, those on Wall Street have been bailed out and have cut various deals with upscale liberals in government.

Ninth, Democratic populism turned out to be largely aristocratic elitism. Obama spends more money on himself than did Bush. The liberal Congress has a strange fondness for pricy private jets. Those environmentalists and racialists who lecture us about our ecological and ethical shortcomings prefer Martha’s Vineyard and country estates to Dayton and Bakersfield. Offering left-wing populist sermonizing for others while enjoying the high life oneself is never a winning combination.

Tenth, Americans no longer believe this is our moment when the seas stop rising and the planet ceases warming. Instead, there is a growing hopelessness that despite all the new proposed income taxes, payroll taxes, and surtaxes, the deficit will skyrocket, not shrink. There is foreboding that while apologies abroad are nice in the short term, they will soon earn a reckoning. And while the productive classes pay more of their income, and while government grows and entitlement expands, there is a sense that what follows will not be thanks for either taxes paid or benefits received, but even more anger that neither is enough and that much more is owed.

Obama’s popularity might rebound with a natural upturn in the economy, continued low energy prices, and good will for our first multiracial president. But then again, it could get even worse if the recovery turns into stagflation, gas prices soar, and the identity-politics lectures amplify. The next six months should be interesting.

— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.