Sometimes it seems like things are upside down.
Barack Obama and his Obamacare administrators are continually making laws, through blogpost (suspending the employer mandate) and bulletin (suspending the individual mandate).
All this year, House Speaker John Boehner has been taking criticism from all quarters.
He is a squish selling out to the Obama administration and the Democrats, many conservatives charged when he engineered bipartisan (mostly Democratic) approval of higher tax rates on high earners rather than go over the fiscal cliff.
Democratic National Chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz says that Obamacare will be a vote-winner for Democrats in 2014. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says the same thing.
Perhaps they really believe that. But the numbers in polls conducted since Oct. 17, when the end of the government shutdown put the spotlight on the rollout of Obamacare, tell a different story.
Watching the twists and turns of American foreign policy while reading Christopher Clark's "The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914" is an unnerving experience.
The defects of the Obamacare website have become well-known. But the problems with the law go further than the website. These problems are not incidental, but central to its design and the intentions of its architects.
Colorado, writes National Journal's always insightful Ronald Brownstein, is"America, writ small." "A microcosm," he goes on, "of the forcesdestabilizing American politics."
Of course, Colorado is not entirely typical of the nation. It has America'slowest rates of obesity, for example -- because of a young population andbecause most Coloradans live a mile or more above sea level. You burn morecalories there just getting out of the car and walking to the mall.
Sherlock Holmes famously solved a mystery by noticing the dog that did not bark. In the recent government shutdown/debt ceiling fight, there was a five-letter dog that didn't bark: T-A-X-E-S.
It's not just Republicans who are unhappy with Obamacare. Labor union leaders have been complaining too.
In July, the presidents of the Teamsters, United Food Commercial Workers union and UNITE-HERE (combined membership: 2.9 million) wrote a letter to congressional Democrats saying that Obamacare will "destroy the very health and well-being of our members along with millions of other working Americans."
Amid all the tussling over the government shutdown and the debt ceiling, a couple of bombshells went off in the blogosphere that may prove of more enduring importance.
What to make of all the polls on the government shutdown? You know, the ones that say that, to varying degrees, congressional Republicans are being blamed more than Democrats and Barack Obama.
