"Not only did people look the other way, but they went after the women who came forward and accused him."

"And so it doubled down on not only bad behavior but abusive behavior. And then people attacked the victims."

Says Kathleen Sebelius, the former secretary of Health and Human Services and Kansas governor, talking with David Axelrod on his show "The Axe Files."

Sebelius extended her criticism to Hillary Clinton, and the Clinton White House for what she called a strategy of dismissing and besmirching the women who stepped forward—a pattern she said is being repeated today by alleged perpetrators of sexual assault—saying that the criticism of the former first lady and Secretary of State was "absolutely" fair. Sebelius noted that the Clinton Administration's response was being imitated, adding that "you can watch that same pattern repeat, It needs to end. It needs to be over."

It's still too little, too late. Too easy to say this now when it's convenient. Nevertheless, good to hear.

"President Trump's private comment earlier this week that the House healthcare bill was 'mean' is having a lingering, and potentially devastating, effect on his credibility among House Republicans."

"Members are still talking about Trump's comment, and their frustration that he'd throw them under the bus is likely to damage his ability to negotiate on major items like infrastructure and tax reform."

ADDED: Doing the tags for this post I started to type "mean" and was pleased to see it autocomplete to "meanies." I wouldn't make a new tag for "mean" at this late date in the life of the blog, but it was great to see that there is a "meanies" tag and to use it again. I had not used it since August of last year, when I had a post titled "The 3 meanest men Hunter S. Thompson ever met — one was Jimmy Carter" — "He will eat your shoulder right off," said Thompson, who also had this description of Hubert Humphrey that amused me by sounding like Trump:

His hair was bright orange, his cheeks were rouged, his forehead was caked with Mantan.... No! I thought. This can't be true! Not now! Not so soon! Here was this monster, this shameful electrified corpse – and raving and flapping his hands at the camera like he'd just been elected president.

Not so funny now that Trump actually is President... or is it?

I've only used the "meanies" tag a few times over the years, perhaps because I don't think of it unless the word "mean" is used. I see I had it here in January 2014, when Ron Paul said that the media will "get meaner and meaner when you run for president" and "pick you apart," and I wondered — assuming the media was going to be very mean in the 2016 election season — who we'd enjoy seeing bullied. Maybe Trump did well because he absorbed and deflected meanness better than anyone else.

The post that caused me to make the new tag "meanies" happened in October 2013: "Are Republicans following a 'don't be mean' strategy, and — if so — is a good strategy?" Very interesting! The Republicans do have a complicated issue around meanness! And, look, it was about Obamacare:

"Don't Drop the Soap is a controversial prison-themed board game designed by art student John Sebelius as a 2006 class project at the Rhode Island School of Design."

"The game received criticism for its content, most notably for the game's treatment of prison rape. Sebelius also received notice for being the son of Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius and U.S. Magistrate Judge K. Gary Sebelius. The game officially went on sale on January 31, 2008 in Lawrence, Kansas and through Sebelius' personal website, and is considered to be similar to Monopoly in its gameplay."

Wikipedia entry discovered in the context of researching my post "On the new 'Late Show' last night, Stephen Colbert facilitated an anal rape joke told by Elon Musk."

January 2008 — that was just as Kathleen Sebelius was going up for confirmation. The Washington Post had an article —  "Game Changer: John Sebelius" — quoting him: "We both recognize she has a job to do and I have a job to do. It’s reciprocal of being prideful of your family and making sure everyone knows where my intentions were with the game. There was no ill will when the game was created; that’s why the support was there. It’s definitely reciprocated. I don’t see her having a problem getting confirmed."

Kathleen Sebelius is a walking joke, literally.

At the White House Correspondents Dinner, Obama exploits the woman for laughs acting as if his slide show is broken and then calling someone out to fix it. Sebelius is the sight-joke punchline.



Hey! War on Women… don’t you think? I've also posted this at Instapundit, where I'm guestblogging this week.

Obama's stint at the lectern was terrible overall, by the way. For example, he made a joke about the missing Malaysian airplane. It's an occasion to laugh at CNN, and joking about the media is the thing to do at the Correspondents Dinner, but the President of the United States should not be laughing about the death of hundreds of human beings.

Andrea Mitchell asks Kathleen Sebelius: "Along the way, what was your low point?"

On "Meet the Press" this morning. And Sebelius said:

Oh, Andrea, it would have to be the time I curled up into a little ball and cried all day. If it weren't for all the ice cream... people say I wasn't good at planning for all the things that could go wrong, but I did have the foresight to load the freezer with chocolate-chip Haagen Dazs... I cried and cried and consoled myself with ice cream and I tell you, Andrea, if it weren't for all that ice cream, I would have committed suicide.

Actually, that's not what Sebelius said. That's what I said watching "Meet the Press" and thinking Andrea Mitchell had resorted to an absurdly girlie question.

What Sebelius actually said was: "Well, I would say that the eight weeks where the site was not functioning well for the vast majority of people was a pretty dismal time. And I was frankly hoping and watching and measuring.... " etc. etc. Pretty dismal, but not emotional in any personal way.

Obama hugs Sebelius.

But check out the look on his face.

Kathleen Sebelius resigns as HSS Secretary; Sylvia Mathews Burwell to be nominated.

"The departure comes as the Obama administration tries to move beyond its early stumbles in carrying out the law, persuade a still-skeptical public of its lasting benefits, and help Democratic incumbents, who face blistering attack ads after supporting the legislation, survive the midterm elections this fall."

Burwell is the director of the Office of Management and Budget. Does she have what it takes to give Democrats the boost they need in the elections? She's "a Harvard- and Oxford-educated West Virginia native with a background in economic policy" who's supposed to "bring an intense focus and management acumen to the department."

When is an extension not an extension?

When you just testified that you were not going to give another extension.

Okay. I hope you're doing well on this morning's quiz. Here's question 2: When can the administration exceed statutory deadlines without needing to procure statutory authority? I'll make this one multiple choice (with all the quotes taken from Charles Krauthammer's effort at answering the question):

a. When "the administration decides that morning" that's "how it wants the law to read."

b. When it's "sort of comical" or "cynicism raised to the level of comedy."

c. When the administration is dealing with "one of the longest laws in American history, thousands of pages," so that no one can really be expected to "refer[] to section 706-b, or whatever," so "none of [the words] really matter."

d. When they "were lying when they said... the deadline wouldn't change" and "Everyone knew they were lying."

e. When "nobody really cares" about the statutory text or the fact that it's been lied about.

f. When you actually don't want any deadline, because you want an endless period of open enrollment, because you want to let people wait until they have a big medical expense before they buy insurance, because that's the way to "send all the companies into bankruptcy."

g. All of the above.

h. All of the above except f.

The 10 finalists for Time's Person of the Year.

I know. I hate getting suckered into this annual nonsense, but the list presents some interesting options"

Bashar Assad, President of Syria
Jeff Bezos, Amazon Founder
Ted Cruz, Texas Senator
Miley Cyrus, Singer
Pope Francis, Leader of the Catholic Church
Barack Obama, President of the United States
Hassan Rouhani, President of Iran
Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services
Edward Snowden, N.S.A. Leaker
Edith Windsor, Gay rights activist

It's not going to be Assad. If we were going to do Bad Guy persons of the year, somebody more dramatically bad would have won recently, like Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein. It would be pathetic to reward Assad with that kind of attention. What about Vladimir Putin? He's not even on the list of finalists, probably because he's already won, back in 2007.

Scratch Hassan Rouhani. He hassan done enough yet.

"Considering Which Head or Heads May Roll for a Troubled Website Rollout."

A NYT headline... head- or heads- line.

Is severed head covered in the Obamacare-conforming plans?

The article, by Michael D. Shear, begins:

For weeks, the president and his aides have said they are not interested in conducting a witch hunt in the middle of the effort to rescue the website.

But they've gotten interested. Apparently, a witch hunt is just the right distraction for the holiday season. But heads are rolling, so the image is a guillotine — a reign of terror. But feel free to picture hangings (witch execution, American-style) or burnings at the stake (if you want to go medieval).

The possible targets include Kathleen Sebelius, the health and human services secretary; Marilyn Tavenner, the head of the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services; Mike Hash, the head of the health and human services health reform office; Michelle Snyder, the chief operating officer at Medicaid and Medicare; Henry Chao, the chief digital architect for the website; Jeanne Lambrew, the head of health care policy inside the White House; David Simas, a key adviser involved in the rollout; and Todd Park, the president’s top adviser on technology issues.

Don't pick all women. That would look bad. Maybe Mike Hash and Todd Park, I'd say, just going on the optics of the names. You just need heads. Which heads would look best on a pike?



Ha ha ha. Remember George Bush's head on a pike? Those were the days! Oh, the distractions of yore! What would distract the folks today? Will Obama traipsing about the country for 3 weeks, right up until Christmas Eve eve, do the trick? Think of all the pretty, empathetic people that can be lined up behind him. Just like a choir of Christmas carolers... bringing good tidings of great joy. But heads must roll! It's execution time. More apt for the Easter season, but Christ, you know it ain’t easy/You know how hard it can be/The way things are going/They’re gonna crucify me.

No, no, no. Our modern Messiah must survive. The metaphorical executions must be directed somewhere lower down. I say Mike Hash and Todd Park and then throw in a lady too. Kathleen Sebelius. No, make it Marilyn Tavenner.

That's a nice array of heads. Enough of a purge to settle you down until the new year?

Tom Brokaw, David Gregory, and Chris Matthews daintily allude to Obama's masculinity deficit.

On yesterday's "Meet the Press," Tom Brokaw said it was "just inexplicable" that the Obamacare website "suddenly landed the way that it did, in utter chaos." The President should have pressured "Kathy Sebelius and other people" about the "rollout" which was "going to be our big play for the second term."

"Big play" picks up on that football metaphor Obama used 4 times in his November 14th remarks. "We fumbled," he said, though in real football, it's an individual player who fumbles. But here was this "big play," and somebody fumbled. Was it "Kathy"?

The moderator David Gregory, immediately steps up to frame the next question in macho terms: "Who's got the muscle?" The manly (though 50-years-dead) JFK somehow shoulders his way into the conversation. Gregory turns to Chris Matthews and says:

You were making the point to me this week about, you know, where's his Bobby Kennedy? Who's got the muscle? When the president says, and he did say, "The user experience of this website is everything," who had the muscle in the White House to get it done and make sure the president gets what he wants?

Muscle, muscle, muscle. If a right-winger had phrased the question that way, somebody would call this misogyny. These 3 men — Brokaw, Gregory, and Matthews — are hankering for a muscular man who can nail the big play. He depended on a Kathy when he needed a Bobby. And here's what Chrissy Matthews said:

Everybody goes to their battle stations when there's chaos. 

I'll see you your football metaphor, and raise you a military metaphor.

You always go to where you've been arguing before. But I've always been arguing this president doesn't have a chain of command, a very clear line of authority and unique responsibility. I remember Sebelius, who I like of course, most people do like her, she's a public servant. 

She's liked. Kathy's likeable enough. She's a good servant.

But when she was asked, "Who's in charge?" in that committee, under oath, she started to talk about someone, the head of C.M.S., who handles Medicare and Medicaid. Among 30 or 40 other responsibilities, this person had the rollout responsibilities.

And was "this person" male or female? Female. Marilyn Tavenner. Can you say her name without vaulting back in time to your old macho icons Jack and Bobby? They knew what "responsibilities" to give their Marilyn.

Matthews reaches even further back, to an even manlier man:

Look at Japan, the occupation of Japan, it simple: Put one guy in charge, Doug MacArthur. 

Put one guy in charge. Doug. Call him Doug, not Douglas. Not — in the style of "Kathy" — Dougy. He's Doug. And there was a guy! Put one guy in charge.

You put somebody in charge and they're uniquely responsible for its success or failure. Obama doesn't do things that way. He's got floaters, like Valerie Jarett, floating around. 

Floaters. Like Valerie Jarrett. The disrespect! They can't even spell her name right in the transcript. Floaters, like Valerie Jarrett, floating around. Matthews being a good Democrat somehow feels secure that the double meaning of "floaters" won't bring on the accusations of racism that would surely have burst forth if a Republican had talked about Jarrett like that.

He doesn't want to have a real chief of staff, like a Jim Baker.

He's saying — it's hardly subtle — that Jarrett's not a real man. You need a man. A man like Bobby or Doug or Jim.

He doesn't want to give authority to people, and I think it's been a real problem.

So what does this say about Obama, not wanting to bring in real men, who take charge, who make the play, who exert authority? He's not man enough to work alongside real men? He needs to play with the ladies, ladies who don't know their place — who dither and float?

"So let it be written" — 5 million lines of code... and "a couple of hundred functional fixes" on the "punch list" they're "pretty aggressive" about getting to.

You know who Tony Trenkle is? No, of course not. You didn't know who he was and you didn't notice the other day when he was thrown under the bus to appease you. Some appeasement! That was supposed to distract us the other day, by happening at the same time as HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius was slated for more exposure:

She made her comments at a hearing of the Senate Finance Committee hours after the Obama administration disclosed that the chief information officer at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services would retire. His office supervised the creation of the troubled website.

The official, Tony Trenkle, will step down on Nov. 15 “to take a position in the private sector,” according to an email circulated among agency employees. He has supervised the spending of $2 billion a year on information technology products and services, including the development of the website.

Okay, then. Trenkle down. Feel better yet? But let's look at Sebelius:

Ms. Sebelius said officials had a list of “a couple of hundred functional fixes” that had to be made so the website, HealthCare.gov, would work smoothly for most users by Nov. 30, a deadline set by the administration.

“We’re not where we need to be,” Ms. Sebelius said. “It’s a pretty aggressive schedule to get to the entire punch list by the end of November.”

Oh, the punch list! The list of a couple hundred things they've noted need fixing. They haven't fixed them yet. They've just noticed a couple hundred things, in there in that 5 million lines of code. Get on it, code-writing peons:



Or do you prefer "Look, Daddy! Paste it!"?

The Sebelius lie: "We didn't have the luxury of [more website testing] with the law that says, it's go time on October 1."

On "Fox News Sunday" today, Chris Wallace played a video clip:

KATHLEEN SEBELIUS, SECRETARY OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES: I think that there -- in an ideal world would have been a lot more testing. We didn't have the luxury of that with the law that says, it's go time on October 1.

He then said:

But it turns out, that is just not true. Take a look at this. "According to the law, the enrollment period shall be, "as determined by the secretary." Secretary Sebelius. Nothing about October 1. So, she decided to go ahead with this plan of October 1ST.

Incredible... not just that she would lie but that she'd lie about something so easily shown to be false. Just astounding.

Another Barry Blitt New Yorker cover about Obama.

"When I heard that the troubled Obamacare Web site was built by a Canadian company, of course I felt personally responsible," says Blitt (because he's from Canada). "I’ll be happy when the glitches are all worked out and everything’s running smoothly, so I can put this all behind me."

Nice drawing. The sentiment is rather stickily sweet for the circumstances, but it's The New Yorker, shoring up support for the once-beloved President.

The Obamacare website doesn't show which plans cover abortion.

NPR reports:

The issue came up Wednesday when Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius testified on Capitol Hill.

"If someone, a constituent of mine or someone in this country has strongly held pro-life views, can you commit to us to make sure that the federal exchanges that offer that is clearly identified and so people can understand if they're going to buy a policy that has abortion coverage or not?" asked Rep. John Shimkus, R-Ill. "Because right now, you cannot make that determination."

Sebelius appeared to be caught off guard by the question.

"I don't know," Sebelius replied. "I know exactly the issue you're talking about — I will check and make sure that is clearly identifiable."

So she knows the issue. She'd have to know that. She knows people care intensely about this. But she purports not to know whether the website discloses this information? Why didn't she attend to the responsibility to enable people to avoid policies that cover abortion? NPR reminds that that it was "part of the deal that got the law passed."

Let's remember that the law just barely passed. Go back in time and replace the assurance about this one point with the truth about what would happen, and would the law have passed? Continue this thought experiment, replace each point of encouragement — e.g., the $2,500 savings, the promise that you can keep what you have — with what we now understand to be true. This law only passed because of a profound violation of democratic principles. At this point, I'd say that the congressional Democrats and the President have a moral obligation to reopen the legislative process.

Are Republicans following a "don't be mean" strategy, and — if so — is a good strategy?

Yesterday Rush Limbaugh was complaining about the Republicans in Congress not going after Kathleen Sebelius.

She was sent out there today to absorb every bit of damage... but I don't know that the Republicans did much damage.

It's like they're afraid to. It's like there's still a fear of going after Obama, or going after Sebelius, just from the consultant level of the party or whoever's running the Republican Party. There seems to be some instruction that's gone out from on high to back off. "Don't even get close to making it look like it's personal! Don't be mean!... don't be critical, 'cause this thing's imploding itself, and it'll go down"...

But isn't that a good strategy for the GOP? Stand back and let Obamacare topple on its own. Don't give the Democrats the opportunity to blame Republicans or to distract people with their old go-to strategy: Portraying Republicans as mean.

Rush would prefer Republicans getting aggressive. Sebelius is "clearly the punching bag." "She's a sponge. She's supposed to soak it up and smile and take it." Riiight. Punching the 65-year-old lady is the way to go. Seems to me that if they sent her out there to be a "punching bag" (or sponge!) they were hoping Republicans would take hard enough shots to make her sympathetic. Which she so far is not.

Obviously, though, avoiding anything that anyone can ever call mean is a hopelessly ineffectual approach to a competition. Interestingly enough, it's something that has traditionally impeded females. And it's not even a good way to avoid meanness, this fear of being perceived as mean.

Years ago, my sons and I overheard a young girl yelling — over and over to someone who must have called her mean — "I don't want to be mean!" For years, in our house, we'd use that line "I don't want to be mean!" for various humorous purposes. Why are some people so shaken up, so manipulated by the horrible possibility that they might be mean?

So what should the congressional Republicans be doing? How to be effectual without fueling the other side's "Republicans are mean" game?

"I am as frustrated and angry as anyone," claims Kathleen Sebelius, apologizing... stalling for time...

"You deserve better. I apologize. I am accountable to you for fixing these problems, and I’m committed to earning your confidence back by fixing the site.”

In the Washington Post account, it says: "She pledged that the glitches are 'fixable.'"

Did she say "glitches"? I'd like to know, because I think they need to move on to a new word. "Glitches" is so 3 weeks ago. It was intended, back then, in the early days of HealthCare.gov, to calm us... to palliate... and it just doesn't work that way any more.

Also old and increasingly intolerable: politicians claiming to be as or more emotional that the people they are hurting.

At least Sebelius toned it down a step from Obama's "no one is madder than me." It's possible to step it up and present oneself as the angriest person. Even Obama did not go there. He merely said no one is madder. So maybe some people are equally mad. Sebelius's rhetoric seems milder, but in fact, it too is a claim of matching the level of anger of the most angry person.

I know it's the old empathy routine, but I have no empathy for them and their empathy routine. For one thing, these people are actually pretty calm, and given the amount of time they had leading up to the opening of the website, it's not believable that they approached their task with great energy and passion. It seems to me that the timeline was set for political reasons, to skirt the 2012 elections and to make good-seeming things hit at the point when it would help most for the 2014 elections.

For another thing, would you really want the angriest person in the world working on your incredibly complicated technical problems? I know most people don't experience the images in language as concretely as I do, but in my mind, when the President of the United States says there is no one madder than he is, I picture a total lunatic in the White House.



Okay, now, you can pull Kathleen's head out of the teapot. She's joined the fellowship of politicos who assure us they're at the top level of madness.

Hey! Teapot. Nice image:

"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked....

Alice had not gone much farther before she came in sight of the house...

The White House....

... it was so large a house that she did not like to go near till she had nibbled some more of the left-hand bit of mushroom.

Yeah, we're calling that "the blue pill." Obama said you're going to need it.

There was a table set out under a tree in front of the house, and the March Hare and the Hatter were having tea at it; a Dormouse was sitting between them, fast asleep....

"Take some more tea," the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.

"I've had nothing yet," Alice replied in an offended tone, "so I can't take more."

"You mean you can't take less," said the Hatter; "it's very easy to take more than nothing."...

"At any rate, I'll never go there again!" said Alice, as she picked her way through the wood. "It's the stupidest tea-party I ever was at in all my life!"

So... find a better tea party.

Tina Brown's war on men: "End the Damn Dickmanship!"

She's not just railing against sexting, but against "testosterone," generally, as a driver of bad behavior.

The no-secrets era of social media makes one consider the built-in risk factor of nominating high-testosterone men to positions of power at all.... Perhaps we need some kind of sexual DUI test developed to tell us what is likely to happen when middle-aged libido meets a whiff of power.

And politics is not the only arena to require this test. 

She goes on to talk about some boat and train accidents, caused by cock, in her view. By contrast, there are women:

Think about some of our prominent women in Washington right now. Can you ever even imagine—forgive me, Secretary—Katherine Sebelius uploading a crotch shot of herself on Instagram? Or Janet Yellen ordering up male hookers during downtime at the Federal Reserve? It’s preposterous.

Can we imagine females causing sexual wreckage? A year ago, we were imagining Janet Napolitano "turning the department [of Homeland Security] into a female-run ‘frat house’ where male staffers were banished to the bathrooms and routinely humiliated." I would have forgotten that had Tina Brown's screed not reminded me.

Brown's pushing the old female superiority theory, which is the sexism that was once used to keep women out of politics and business. We're too delicate and too prissy to do what needs to be done. And what if it were a substance like testosterone — a liquid squirting through ducts — that could be extracted and measured and reported to voters and employers? Tina Brown says she wants that information, so we can discriminate. Imagine the world she suggests but doesn't really want us to imagine. Everyone gets a masculinity score, and we judge his/her fitness for power accordingly.

Ironically, Tina would probably score very high. How much testosterone fueled the headline "End the Damn Dickmanship!?

"Should Sebelius step in and do something? No. She doesn’t have all the facts."

"... said New York University bioethicist Arthur Caplan. Acting under pressure from a media savvy family 'or the noisiest person in line' is bad policy, he added."

The Sebelius Shakedown... the Pigford scandal....

There's such a dense pack of scandals that some of them have already passed beyond notice. As for the rest of them... people are getting tired....

Is that how it works? Something else that might happen is a swirling amorphous feeling that there are scandals everywhere, the administration is scandal-plagued, and everything about government falls into disrepute. There's nothing to expose or solve anymore. Everyone becomes cynical and dismissive and won't even listen to the explanations or pay attention to any specific facts and answers that might emerge.

Ah! They're all a bunch of crooks!

Of course, Republicans are hoping people will end up with the opinion The Democrats are all a bunch of crooks!