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Spin that screen and see what prices come up for you!  Sheesh….

An Obamacare software glitch is now incorrectly tabulating how much people must pay for health insurance, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.

“There’s a blanket acknowledgment that rates are being calculated incorrectly,” a senior health insurance executive told the WSJ. “Our tech and operations people are very concerned about the problems they’re seeing and the potential of them to stick around.”

Government officials, however, say they are not worried and promised the Obamacare insurance exchanges will be ready to go on October 1. “We continue working with [insurers] and we are confident that on Oct. 1, consumers will see accurate premium costs, including tax credits,” said Medicare spokesperson Brian Cook.

Randomness in this case is a huge bug, not a feature.  And when the techies are concerned and the bureaucrats are acting like Kevin Bacon near the end of Animal House, I feel sorry for those folks who have no choice to be the “first adopters”.

You know, this is the whole purpose of the system: 

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All states have some version of NH’s DCYF – Division of Children, Youth, and Family – that services families in need or “at risk” (including “Child Protective Services”).  Many do good work – and some do not.  Including the one that decided that a family, who allowed their 11 year old son in NJ to dress in camos and hold a .22 rifle that looks like those that gives gun-grabbers the swoons, just HAD to be investigated and did her best “Do you know who I am?? (and that I can take your kid away if I want!)” when they refused her entry without the proper paperwork (er, like a warrant) and ended up with an unconstitutional search.

Their thinking was probably “this kid is in imminent danger” – which he was certainly not.  Well, how about a new definition of “imminent danger” that would allow social workers unfettered access to someone’s home simply because the family is putting a child at risk – for serving food outside the Government’s “suggestions”:

Imminent means “right now and within seconds (or perhaps hours)” – letting a kid have a pint of ice cream or a few Ding-dong is worthy of Government taking charge of that family or, given some mentalities of some social workers, removal of that kid for “child food abuse”?   This is the Progressive mantra at its worst, especially with Medicare / Medicaid recipients mentioned in the video, in that:

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Yes, that is right – landing on a street in Boulder, CO., this National Guard Blackhawk had to land on the street.  And the pic is starting to go around the ‘Net (I spotted the story at BlackFive).

Now, Boulder is where all the rain fell (multiple inches on a number of days) and the damage is immense and people have perished and are missing.  Guard copters have been flying supplies and people around – but like in times like this, they must land in populated areas.  Depending on the local vegetation / trees, landing in a street (wide, of course) makes sense to transfer people and that material.

Now, I have not yet found out if it is a a joke or for real, so I’m not sure what to think so I’ll just repeat what BlackFive had:

So ridiculous it’s funny…and sadly idiotic.

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Through serendipity I’ve ended up working in HIT (health information technology). I take 50 calls a day with independent insurance agents/brokers to navigate the hoops to qualify to sell on the FFM (Federal Facilitated Marketplaces). The Government websites they need to access to register are riddled with random error messages, and simply attempting to log in to complete this process routinely fails. The agents/brokers are, to a person, terrified. If they cannot complete this process by October 1st (the deadline) they are hosed. Nobody knows what to do, and this will only get worse when millions of consumers join the fray of the marketplace. It appears nobody scaled the back end to accommodate this exponential growth. And now?, It’s too late. It’s like the owner of the White Star line getting a telegram about the Titanic sinking and saying “We need to order more lifeboats.” And these are the smartest guys in the room? #soscrewed. For obvious reasons, don’t use my name please…

(H/T: Instapundit) I work for an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software company: we do manufacturing soup to nuts.  From the receiving dock to inspection to inventory to shop floor to QA to picking and packing to shipping, we do it.  We handle the engineering bits, the work enters, the scheduling, purchasing, and financials (and a whole bunch more around and in between).  We do small companies, divisions, and entire corporations ($5 mil to billions in revenue).  And one thing that we (and all other ERP companies) know, is test, test, test,test, test…and more test.  Single function test, departmental test, cycle tests, flow tests – to complete simulation tests with rigorous results checking.  Months and months spent before throwing that GO LIVE switch.

Oh, and did I forget something?  Oh yeah – load tests.  Do you have enough hardware to support X number of users doing N number of “stuff”?  Can your network support the traffic?  What happens when you go from 1 location to 3?  3 to 10?  Country wide (we’ll leave international aside for purposes of Obamacare)?

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I’ve been meaning to get back to this for a while; from WMUR’s Political Standing from 9/6/2013:

Kelly Ayotte: She takes the down arrow on behalf of all New Hampshire Republicans. All these problems are now her problem. They are too big, even for NHGOP Chair Jennifer Horn.

Now there’s a declaration that is about as wrong as it gets.  The MAIN job of the NH GOP is to get candidates to run.  Period.  That’s it, seemingly (er, I can think of a lot of things, and if you’ve been reading the ‘Grok for any period of time, I’m guessing you know what some of those are).  And there is ONLY one person responsible for this, and that is the NH GOP Chair, Jennifer Horn.  While some might see Kelly Ayotte, being the highest elected Republican official in NH, as being the “titular head”, getting people to run is NOT her responsibility.  And Pindell is dead wrong in trying to lay this on Ayotte.  When you are the Chief, the buck stops with you (regardless of what President Blameless says).

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I have two rules for the folks that write at GraniteGrok:

• Rule #1: Adult themes, kid friendly

I do not want to hear that Janie and Johnny ran to their parents and asked “Mommy, what does this mean?” and then the parents come to me and ask “Oh REALLY!!!”

• Rule #2: Write when you can on stuff you want to, just don’t violate Rule #1.

Apparently, even before I can get all the videos up from Cornerstone’s sold out event, some Common Core materials are already sending fourth grade kiddies to Mommy and Daddy over their homework assignment:

“What’s a pimp?“

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The third speaker of the night was Jane Robbins.  She is a Senior Fellow with American Principles Project. Her works includes education policy, student privacy and parental rights issue and has drafted state legislation on educational transparency and sovereignty. Ms. Robbins began her career as a labor lawyer for an Atlanta firm, after which she worked for the firm as director of associate training and writing coach. Since then she has taught legal writing at Emory Law School, presented legal-writing workshops for firms in Atlanta and Washington, DC, and served as a writing consultant for several Atlanta firms. In the past several years she has handled a variety of legal projects for different firms and organizations. On behalf of APP, Ms. Robbins writings have appeared in, among other places, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The New York Post, and Public Discourse. Ms. Robbins is a native of Pendleton, South Carolina, and is a graduate of Harvard Law School and Clemson University.

Part 1:

Part 2 and previous videos after the jump:

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Update and Bumped: NBC News via Instapundit:

…But law enforcement officials told NBC News they believed he arrived packing only the shotgun, which he bought last week from a gun dealer in Lorton, Va., about 20 miles from Washington.

Hmm, reported by Instapundit, this seems to have been scrubbed from the report: The officials also said Alexis obtained the assault rifle used in the shooting from a gun safe on the naval base. There’s where he may have also obtained a handgun, according to authorities.  That would mean more crimes attributable to Alexis – and no background check required or used.

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We do not know why evil people do bad things to innocents.  We do not know what lurks in their hearts or in their twisted souls that allows them to harm others for what seems to be random or unknown reasons.  Our hearts and prayers go out to the families affected by this evil man’s decision to put himself and his emotions / reasons before that of the peoples’ lives he took and those he hurt.  Nothing will or can bring them back – may God comfort you in only ways that He can.

Sad to say, the usual suspects already are up in arms (pun intended) about another shooting incident.  US Senator Diane Feinstein (CA-gungrabber), never one to consider that EVIL is the source of this and not a hunk of metal and plastic, said today:

“This is one more event to add to the litany of massacres that occur when a deranged person or grievance killer is able to obtain multiple weapons — including a military-style assault rifle — and kill many people in a short amount of time. When will enough be enough?” asked Feinstein. “Congress must stop shirking its responsibility and resume a thoughtful debate on gun violence in this country. We must do more to stop this endless loss of life.”

The California Democrat is one of the Senate’s leading advocates for further gun control measures at the federal level, including an assault weapons ban.

That is true, but not strictly true;

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