News, Views, Links -- Part V; Op-Ed From WSJ; A Sinkhole In Louisiana

ObamaCare will collapse under its own weight -- op-ed, WSJ.

What the GOP's Defund-ObamaCare Caucus is failing to see is that ObamaCare is no longer just ObamaCare. It is about something that is beyond the reach of a congressional vote.

As its Oct. 1 implementation date arrives, ObamaCare is the biggest bet that American liberalism has made in 80 years on its foundational beliefs. This thing called "ObamaCare" carries on its back all the justifications, hopes and dreams of the entitlement state. The chance is at hand to let its political underpinnings collapse, perhaps permanently.

If ObamaCare fails, or seriously falters, the entitlement state will suffer a historic loss of credibility with the American people. It will finally be vulnerable to challenge and fundamental change. But no mere congressional vote can achieve that. Only the American people can kill ObamaCare.

No matter what Sen. Ted Cruz and his allies do, ObamaCare won't die. It would return another day in some other incarnation. The Democrats would argue, rightly, that the ideas inside ObamaCare weren't defeated. What the Democrats would lose is a vote in Congress, nothing more.

A political idea, once it becomes a national program, achieves legitimacy with the public. Over time, that legitimacy deepens. So it has been with the idea of national social insurance. 

Of course, that is just the beginning. Go to the link to see why ObamaCare will collapse. The writer has it 30% correct. He is just missing one piece.  A piece in my mind that is the 800-pound gorilla. I'm reminded of the 800-pound gorilla with regard to O'BamaCare every time I visit Wal-Mart.

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The other day I mentioned that Disneyland will tweak its policy of letting the physically challenged move to the head of the line. Today, the WSJ has a short op-ed on the same.

The New York Times

This is fascinating. I think we first saw it on YouTube. Now it's the lead story on the front page of the NYT under the photograph: Almost nothing in Bayou Corne, La., has been the same since a voracious sinkhole formed in 2012, and a year later, it’s still swallowing trees and belching methane: the Bayou Corne sinkhole. 

More than a year after it appeared, the Bayou Corne sinkhole is about 25 acres and still growing, almost as big as 20 football fields, lazily biting off chunks of forest and creeping hungrily toward an earthen berm built to contain its oily waters. It has its own Facebook page and its own groupies, conspiracy theorists who insist the pit is somehow linked to the Gulf of Mexico 50 miles south and the earthquake-prone New Madrid fault 450 miles north. It has confounded geologists who have struggled to explain this scar in the earth.

And it has split this unincorporated hamlet of about 300 people into two camps: the hopeful, like Mr. Landry, who believe that things will eventually settle down, and the despairing, who have mostly fled or plan to, and blame their misery on state and corporate officials. 

Is Occidental Petroleum involved? See the story at the link.

The Los Angeles Times

A lot of interesting articles but nothing for the blog today.