Sunshine and wispy clouds this Thursday afternoon on California’s north coast — though, there’s some ominous-darkly, thunderhead-looking clouds to the east over the mountains, us folks next to the ocean are experiencing a nice little respite from fog city.
A slight, chilly breeze seemingly coming from the north, but no one’s complaining.
And the news center-stage this mid-afternoon is apparently all Obamacare — and what a mess.
The president held a presser earlier on the latest dump-nugget for the Affordable Care Act — a re-enactment for “substandard plans” in the health care law. The ACA has been a disgrace so far, first with the horribly-handled boondoggle with the website, which continues, then Obama blubbering nearly-non-stop about how folks could keep their own plans under the law, but actually they can’t, and a shitstorm ensued.
And today, the president reversed himself: “These were two fumbles on a big game,’’ he said. “But the game is not over.”
Looks bad from here, though.
Not only is ACA getting whacked, Obama shit in his mess kit with his press conference. I listened to snatches of it on NPR at work, but way-didn’t get the smack-down.
A sense from the Washington Post: Barack Obama’s long press conference, mostly focused on Affordable Care Act troubles, isn’t exactly getting rave reviews as much as it is giving people an opportunity to speculate on which sound bites will sound great in GOP attack ads. Over on Twitter, pundits have compared it to the first Obama/Romney debate from last fall.
Read some Twitter feed back at HuffPost — don’t jell well. The public is getting fairly fed up with Obama, too.
On Tuesday, the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute revealed in a national survey the president’s job approval rating is at 39 percent — worse yet — and even with women he’s clipped, only 40 percent of them like what he’s doing.
This clincher came from Tim Malloy, assistant director at the institute: “Any Democrat with an 11-point approval deficit among women is in trouble. And any elected official with an 8-point trust deficit is in serious trouble. President Obama’s job approval rating has fallen to the level of former President George W. Bush at the same period of his Presidency,” Malloy said.
And speaking of going further down — The Dick is one hard-hearted fuck.
Via Yahoo:
Former Vice President Dick Cheney says he is thankful for his new heart, but doesn’t spend much time thinking about the person who donated the vital organ to him.
“When I came out from under the anesthetic after the transplant, I was euphoric,” Cheney, who underwent the life-saving procedure last year, told Larry King in an interview slated to air Thursday on Ora TV.
“I’d been given the gift of additional lives, additional years of life.
“For the family of the donor, they’d just been [through] some terrible tragedy, they’d lost a family member.”
…
“The way I think of it from a psychological standpoint is that it’s my new heart, not someone else’s old heart,” Cheney continued.
“And I always thank the donor, generically thank donors, for the gift that I’ve been given, but I don’t spend time wondering who had it, what they’d done, what kind of person.”
Shitty, but not surprising.
And this it seems is a bad oops:
Scientists at Bangor University in North Wales have inadvertently killed Ming the Mollusc, which it turns out was the world’s oldest living animal.
The ocean quahog — a type of deep sea clam — was found in Iceland in 2006 and found to be 405 years old.
However, while taking a closer look at it, researchers found that it may be a hundred years older, pegging it’s age at 507 years old.
But this process, opening its shell to put it under scrutiny, led to the death of the mollusc.
No longer the world’s oldest ‘living‘ animal.
And finally, justice to the unjust. JP Morgan, the humongous bank, created a Twitter sh#tstorm today, but of the way-bad kind.
From Bloomberg:
JPMorgan Chase & Co., the target of at least eight Justice Department investigations, was mocked and taunted by Twitter users after asking followers to send questions to an executive using the hashtag #AskJPM.
The online forum, which the bank canceled late yesterday, was intended in part to give college students an opportunity to communicate directly with a senior executive, said Brian Marchiony, a spokesman for the New York-based company.
“#Badidea! Back to the drawing board,” the bank posted less than six hours after its original post, which drew more than 6,000 responses from users in that span, according to social media tracking service Topsy.
The #AskJPM hashtag had more than 24,000 posts on Twitter as of 10 a.m. New York time, according to Topsy.
“If you’re in the banking industry with what’s happened over the last five years, it might not be a good idea to go out and solicit comments on social media,” said Brad Adgate, a senior vice president at marketing firm Horizon Media Inc. in New York.
“They are paying all these fines and billions of dollars to the federal government. I question the timing of this.”
…
“It is a jolt of reality, and the reality for JPMorgan is ugly,’’ said Erik Gordon, a business and law professor at the University of Michigan.
“The bank is highly visible and greatly disliked.’’
Read some of the posts at The Big Picture.
And onward into the evening.
(Illustration above found here).