Brad Delong asks the following question about AEI:
Is Everybody at the American Enterprise Institute in Thrall to Their Tea-Party Political Masters?
Come on guys! You can’t all be hacks, can you?
Yes, they can all be hacks as it is quite a comfortable living being a hack….
balconesfault
Considering the fate of David Frum, I think what we see is a clear evolutionary process.
Those who are not hacks do not survive at the AEI.
Napoleon
Isn’t that where Norm Ornstein is at?
Quinerly
Ornstein is there and he has bucked them. He’s also frequently on NPR….kinda mavericky!
Sasha
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” ― Upton Sinclair
wvng
As others noted, Glen Ornstein is the anti-hack at AEI.
Ash Can
OT — apparently, House GOP “leaders” are about to make some kind of statement. What’ll you bet Boehner mumbles something about Obama and the Dems not wanting to cooperate and turns the mic over to Cantor, who says the same thing, and the two of them leave without taking any questions?
Paul in KY
@Sasha: One of the greatest and most true quotes of the 20th century.
Gravenstone
Brad, perhaps?
TaMara (BHF)
@DavidTop: OT, but I just had to help walk a client through the CO health care site this morning and already things have changed and improved.
I’m now hopeful. I’ve been holding off whining too much (no really, that was me restraining myself LOL), figuring that by next year it would look quite different. Well it’s not even a month and it looks better.
Howlin Wolfe
@Gravenstone:@wvng: Bred DeLong, Glen Ornstein, what’s in a name? This is just a blog, after all.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Mumphrey, et al.)
Everybody but Norman Ornstein. How he’s kept his job there over the years is more than I’ll ever understand.
mclaren
Hackitude is the new American expertise.
Shithole America can’t keep its bridges from collapsing or its streetlights lit. Shithole America can’t manage to provide medical care for its population. Shithole America can’t offer minimally acceptable internet speeds (up to the level of, say, Bulgaria) to its population. Shithole America can’t quite win any of its endless foreign wars when faced with such formidable enemies as fifteen-year-old boys who are armed with bolt-action rifles.
But when it comes to producing hacks, boy, Shithole America is world-class. We’re world-beaters when it comes time to churn out ignorant incompetent assholes who spew meaningless fustian. If there were a Nobel prize for hackitude, what with Tyler Cowen and Robert Lucas Jr. and John Boehner and Newt Gingrich and George Will and Norman Podhoretz and George Stephanopolous, America would sweep the field.
mclaren
@TaMara (BHF):
Yes, the alleged “Obamacare online meltdown” is a non-story. These kinds of online clogs and glitches get sorted out fairly fast. As long as the underlying information architecture isn’t hopelessly munged, bug-fixing the code and adding servers to balance the load will probably fix the most glaring problems. As for information interportability among different health care providers and different layers of the U.S. medical system (as, for instance, from the level of doctor to hospital to insurer, as opposed to sharing info laterally twixt different specialists working on the same patient), that’s still an issue for the way-behind-the-times American medical IT systems, but from all reports that’s getting worked on intensively too.
Short version: I don’t expect the ACA website bugs to be permanent. The whole system probably won’t have to be shuttered and re-engineered from the ground up, if the reports I’ve heard about it are accurate. The reported problems seem to be more along the lines of typical roll-out bugs. Shoot, when Windows 1.0 got released, it didn’t even have any printer drivers, and when Apple originally released System 6.0 its serial driver was so munged that if you tried to run a MIDI sequencer it crashed the Finder hard. So these kinds of teething problems on big system rollouts are not unusual.