The Ricochet Podcast - Spanish Peanuts

Episode Date: October 25, 2013

Direct link to MP3 file The Ricochet Podcast returns with two members of the podcast bullpen getting up to the plate: The Hemingway’s Mollie Hemingway and Need To Know’s Mona Charen discuss the politics of procreation, being a Cards fan in a Red Sox world, and rousing debate on why the shutdown strategy didn’t work. Batter up! Music from this week’s episode: Big Brother by David Bowie The Ricochet... Source

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I do not like green eggs and ham. Mr. Gorbachev. That's Sam I.M. Tear down this wall. I do not like that scene. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. That's what I'd say if Rob was here, but he's not. Luckily, we've got Troy Sinek in his stead.

I'm James Lilacs, and our guests today are Molly Hemingway and Mona Charan. We've got 500 million lines of code ready, so let's have ourselves a podcast. Well, actually, I misspoke there. We've got about 490 million lines of code that are working. The 10 million lines that aren't apparently got rid of Rob Law. And we're going to fix it. We're going to reconstruct Rob from the cybernetic memory. And he'll be on soon enough.

But, you know, Rob's gone. Peter's here. And Troy's here back as well, too. Hi, guys. Welcome. This is Ricochet Podcast number 187 brought to you by Audible.com. They are the leading provider of spoken audio information and entertainment you can ever want. And, of course, you know

you can listen to audiobooks whenever and wherever you want. If you go to audiblepodcast.com slash ricochet, burn that in your memory, you'll get a free audio book and a 30-day trial. And also by Encounter Books. Our pick this week is a book. Indeed, it's called Terms of Engagement, How Our Courts Should Enforce the Constitution's Promise of Limited Government by Clark Neely of the Libertarian Institute for Justice. Encounterbooks.com slash ricochet, 15% off the list price for this or any other title.

And now, Peter, I believe here is where you step into the capacious shoes, the loafers, if you will, the sockless loafers of Mr. Long, and tell people why they should join Ricochet. And once we've got all this commercial blabber out of the way, we can get down to the ways in which the administration is destroying the nation. Peter, take it away. That's exactly right because we're about to get down to the ways the administration is destroying the nation. You should join Ricochet because it's the right thing to do. Isn't that terrible? I sound as though I'm laying something on people as if I were an NPR host. Forget that.

You should join Ricochet because it's fun. You should join Ricochet because it actually does get read and listened to and paid attention to in Washington. And we have plenty of journalists. I could start naming names, but I haven't cleared it with them, so I won't. But plenty of journalists who check in at Ricochet and view it as a kind of rolling focus group. So they see an issue getting discussed. Reverse McCarthyism.

I have a list. 50 journalists. But I will not name it. Actually, we can name one name. John Podhoretz sent around – scanned on his computer and sent around to all of us a handwritten note that he had received from the minority leader of the United States Senate, Senator Mitch McConnell, complimenting John on his performance on the then most recent podcast he had recorded with Jonah Goldberg and Rob Long. So we know that the most important Republican – well, after Ted Cruz, of course, the most important Republican in the United States Senate listens to Ricochet. I'm not quite sure, by the way, whether John sent that around because it was signed by a famous figure or because John gets so many more complaints than fan mail that he wanted us all to see it. In any event, join Ricochet to have a voice and join Ricochet for the fun. Well, fun it is.

And Troy, I was reading your last post in which I was thinking this guy is getting that – has that aptitude for pop cultural references that some people like to say Jonah excels at. I think you're just as good and sharp and funny to read. But here you are now in person, so be sharp and funny. Tell me exactly why the rollout of Obamacare is or is not going to be the straw that finally breaks the back of the illusion of competency of the federal camel. Oh, man, that was awful. Well, it certainly gets us closer. I don't know if it's the actual straw, but I don't know if you noticed there was a post earlier this week. I can't remember whose the original post was.

It may have been mine actually, humbly he said. And John Gabriel, one of our other editors, mentioned in the comments that he had been at an anniversary dinner with his wife over the weekend out in Arizona and that he had overheard at the adjacent table a group of about a dozen young workers at a local tech firm who it seemed like had finally had the scales dropped from their eyes because they had all realized what the practical implications for Obama – that Obamacare delivered for them were and I think this is the thing that you're gonna see you know the administration is over a barrel in the sense that the the CBO estimate that I've seen is that they need 2.7 million young people young healthy people to sign up for these exchanges by the start of next year to make it work which is

a problem if they can't get to the damn policies themselves. But B is doubly problematic when they get there and the premiums that they're looking at are two times as high and the deductibles are three times as high. I mean I think the one reason we don't have to be quite as worried as some people have been that once the entitlement portion of this kicks in, that the whole game is lost, is because it doesn't operate exactly like a conventional entitlement program insofar as the costs are also transparent here. And I think that makes it much different. Really? The costs are transparent. Why do you say that?

The costs are transparent for the people who are subsidizing the people who are benefited is what I'm saying. So the folks who are going on to these exchanges, a lot of whom wouldn't have had to otherwise except for this was something I wrote about earlier this week. If you're one of the 14 million people who's bought a policy on the individual market, a lot of those policies are functionally illegal at this point because the Obama administration has laid down ten requirements that every insurance policy has to have. So an unmarried guy like myself has to have maternity coverage and coverage for substance abuse. Trevor Burrus, Jr.: I think you have to have coverage for the mental health relating to the substance abuse of a child that you don't have. Peter Robinson, Jr.: Right, precisely.

So all that to say that those folks, the folks who are paying for the folks who are subsidized are seeing it in a much more direct way than you do with a lot of other entitlement programs. Got it. So name that figure again. It's 2.7 million. 2.7 million I think is the CBO number, yeah. By when? I don't remember the exact date. It's next spring, spring of 2014. So Obamacare has to be so slick and so enticing and so much fun to use and sold so convincingly to young people that the government gets 2.7 million people to purchase health insurance who don't need it in order to work. Is that not correct? Dr. Michael Smith Right. Otherwise, you end up upside down financially on the whole thing. And then of course the secondary problem that you run into there is that if you get a substantial amount of people, which you will, who are turned off by the rate shock that's involved here, well then you got to find them through the individual mandate.

So the problem is in order to get there, if you have a sufficient number of those people, then you're going to have the political backlash that comes when the bill comes due for all of them. So then you have a choice. Do you, in order to prop up the finances, fine all those people and deal with the backlash? Or do you say we don't want to deal with the political fallout and so we don't enforce it and then we're still upside down on the finances? They can't win. They can't do either. Neither one of those wins. When you say find those people, are you talking about levying the $90 or $100 fee tax penalty, whatever it is, against people who themselves may not even be filing taxes?

The government actually has to go out and send letters to these kids who don't think they have to file? Is that what you're talking about? I don't know if it – I don't know how it extends to that group. But yeah, anybody who doesn't sign up – and there's actually some confusion about this. Ezra Klein wrote about this earlier this week, that there's the dollar figure that gets thrown out a lot, which I think is – it's a very low figure. I think it is that $90 or $100 figure. But it's that dollar figure or 1% of your taxable income, whichever is higher. And if you don't continue paying it in the second year, it's 2 percent of your taxable income.

In the third year, it's 3 percent of your taxable income. So it's a ratchet. All right. All of this because, of course, we have – I think the general impression amongst the younger voters who went, yay, Obama, and voted because this is great and it's cool and everybody's going to get something, is that instead of having to go to the hospital and not pay for it, you will go to the hospital and the government will pay for it. I mean in no instance did you actually pay for anything. It was just a shifting of this imaginary obligation. So I mean I don't think people really got the fact that they had to buy insurance. This wasn't that you were going to go and get a plastic O-card

that you could slap down anywhere and get any sort of health care free. I mean, I love this. That's why I absolutely love to see two things. One, people realize what's happening, and two, realize that even when the government tries to take over this much of everything, they are absolutely gobsmackingly, jaw-droppingly incompetent at doing so. So we're going to have hearings this week, right? We're going to be – or next week.

We're going to be talking to Sibelius. We're going to be talking to contractors. How do you think that's going to play out, Peter? Well, I mean it will be just delicious for us. She's just going to have one irate – is she going before the Senate or the House or both? I can't recall which. I know she's at least going before the Senate. Oh, the Senate.

OK. I almost hope that it's the House because, of course, then you have 30 people and they'll all turn up for this hearing, of course. And every single one of them, Senate or House, is going to feel compelled to open by giving a long and really quite angry speech about, and Secretary Sebelius, let me read you another email I've just received from another one of my constituents. They will feel compelled to do that because they are getting these emails, and those little speeches will be for rebroadcast that evening back in their own states. And so it will go on and on, and she will be on the defensive because why? Because she doesn't actually know what because why? Because she doesn't actually know what she's doing. She doesn't have answers to these questions. 500 million lines of code need to be rewritten. And Kathleen Sebelius, who was a so-so governor of Kansas, is enough of

a tech expert to understand why this needs to be done, how you get it done, what it costs. She has no idea what she's doing. I have the feeling, actually, this is something I was thinking about putting up a post, and I think I actually will. But I know that we have a number of engineers at Ricochet. Don Tillman is one, John Walker is one. I can name them because I've read their posts and found them interesting, enough to sort of sear their names into my mind. But I really want to know if Obamacare is fixable, even in principle, is it fixable? Or is rewriting 500 lines of code engaging in a major feat of technology and marketing? Is that simply inherently unlikely, if not impossible,

when you're asking the federal government to do it. In any event, let's put it this way. That's a pretty good question, I think. And the answer for a layman like me is in doubt. And all of that means that Kathleen Sebelius is in for a really rollicking, good time for us, horrible time for her. The headline of the Wall Street Journal this morning, it's not online, but it's on on the paper edition is Dems Uneasy with Healthcare Law. That's just what you wanted. I didn't think we'd get it for six months. Here it is before Thanksgiving and they're already starting to look for the exits. Great.

Yeah, and the other thing that Sebelius let slip earlier this week – I don't know if her numbers are right. But she was interviewed and I don't remember where it was. This may have run in the journal actually, but I could be wrong. They had two years to put this thing together. Oh, yes. And she let slip that, well, if we had done it correctly, it probably required five years and an additional year of testing.

So they crammed the six-year project into two years. This is what you get. I do think – I mean to James' point, the government management of this, I mean the fact that the website was overseen by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which has no relevant expertise for something like this and doled out – It's just not believable. As it normally is, doled out contracts to three or four different, three or four dozen different companies. It would have been a disaster regardless, but it is more of a disaster because it was

done on that time frame. Yeah. So one more, at least to me, it's an interesting point. It says something all these years into the administration of the presidency of Barack Obama. We're now in what year six, five or six. And we're still we still find him in some ways elusive, enigmatic. What does he really how far to the left is he real? I think this whole experience

has established one thing for us, beyond doubt. And that is, he really believes in the ability of the federal government to do almost anything. He is a genuine believer. And here's why I make that point. Because anybody, I say this not from personal knowledge, but because I have lunch with people like this. I live in this world. Anybody with experience of technology, building websites and so forth, let's just be very straightforward about it.

Ricochet 2.0, our own project, we just got an email from Todd Loudon, our CEO this morning, saying it looks as though the launch is going to have to be delayed for a couple of weeks. Some unexpected kinks have come up. Every project I've ever heard about works just that way. It's complicated, difficult work. And Barack Obama would have known, had he given it any thought, that his presidency was on the line, that a number of Democratic senators who are running for re-election in more or less Republican states will have their careers on the

line. And they still jammed this thing through in 18 months. Why? Because they really are so naive and such, for them, it's an article of religious belief that they believe so implicitly that they seem never to have questioned it, even when for them, everything was at stake that the federal government could pull it off. Staggering to me but I think that's just dispositive. The man is a believer. Or lazy and uncurious. And uninformed about the basic nature of the world that supposedly he presides over. We had all these people in 2008 who were thrilled by Barack Obama because he was cool and tech savvy.

There was this tech savviness that just floated around him and a number of emanations that this guy got it. Like he could really sit down at a computer and type a little bit. You kind of suspect that he could hit the hoops from midcourt. He could probably program. He could run his staff better than anybody else. There was nothing really in his toolbox that he couldn't pull out and do. And so all of a sudden to be revealed as a guy who still is punching away at a blackberry and has absolutely no idea what has evolved in an effort like this should, again, make a couple of the scales fall from the people in the 20-something bracket who thought he was just Jesus come back to life. So here's the problem though well it's not a problem for for us because there's not a republican who ever voted for this

thing but this has and the metaphor that i keep hearing people say is it's a titanic no no it's the website is not the titanic the titanic left port successfully and went somewhere. And even when it hit something, it took a while to sink. This is like putting the bottle on the – cracking the bottle on the christening of the thing and it shatters and the ship sinks right there in the spot. No, no, no, no. This is more like Katrina, some say, because it's one of those things that reveals something about the administration. No, that's not right. This would be like Katrina if the Bush administration had had three years to prepare for a hurricane that they themselves had requested arrive. Right. In that case, if that had been the case –

That is beautiful, James. You're exactly right. That's beautiful. Yeah, but if that – I mean if this was Katrina, really we would be seeing dispatches from inside the tech centers where frantic, frantic people are trying to fix what Barack Obama and Sibelius has left to us. There is actually a book about what happened when Katrina hit a hospital and what they went through with absolutely no preparation whatsoever. It makes you think about what's going to happen when all of a sudden their systems are tied into a distant, unresponsive computer. But if you'd like to know that, Five Days at Memorial is the name of the book. Sherry Fink is the author, and you can hear it.

You can hear it all you like for free at audible.com. If you go to audiblepodcast.com slash ricochet, you will get not only access to the Internet's leading provider with over 100,000, et cetera, et cetera, titles that you can listen to, you'll get the whisper sync technology that allows you to pick it up here, leave it there, read the book here.

It's just astonishing how it works. In any case, audiblepodcast.com slash ricochet is your way of clicking and thanking them for sponsoring this, the podcast. Anybody have some recommendations before we go to our guests? Yeah, I'll give you one because I think we're, what, a week away from Halloween, if you care about such things, which generally I don't. But – I hate Halloween. I don't hate it. It's just – no, I don't feel like dressing up like – go on. With people going door to door, I'm always forced to be civil to children, which as you know is a problem for me.

My recommendation for something that's not bad Halloween reading and it is available on Audible is the short stories of Ambrose Bierce. If you've never read Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary is a book I think that everybody should read. But Ambrose Bierce was a veteran of the Civil War and wrote some amazing short stories, both war stories and ghost stories, all available in this collection. So I'd recommend that from Audible. It includes an occurrence at Owl Creek creek bridge which is probably his best and has been done over and over and over i think the twilight zone did it suspense radio did it it was a big popular tale peter do you have one yeah i do i haven't listened to it yet but i'm uh and i'm not quite sure when i will get to it maybe over the holidays but scott tarot has a new novel out and for me that's automatic i just when scott tarot he writes scott tarot chicago lawyer um he's written a book well

he takes a while what two or three years between his novels but he has a new book out they're always crime procedurals they always involve a lawyer working at the lower grittier edges of the legal system in kindle county, which is a fictional Cook County, Chicago. And this new book is called Identical. It's by Scott Turow. That's really all I need to know. I'm going to download it and listen to it. Excellent. All right. Three choices. There you go. Audiblepodcast.com slash ricochet. Start your 30-day trial. If you haven't already, I don't know what's stopping you. The holidays are coming up. You'll be taking a trip. You'll want something in the car, in the plane. There you go. All set up, ready to roll.

And speaking of being set up and ready to roll, we hope, let's welcome back to the podcast Ricochet editor and podcaster herself, Molly Hemingway. Molly's a senior editor at The Federalist and a longtime journalist who worked as a peer in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, LA Times, The Guardian,

think of a publication. She's been there. She was a 2004 recipient of a Phillips Foundation Journalism Fellowship, and we are happy to welcome her back to the podcast. Molly, hello. How are you all doing? We are just doing grand. You're with Troy and Peter and me here in Minneapolis. We've been discussing the wonderful efficiencies of the federal government

on display this last week as everything falls down around the administration's new website. What's your take on this lasting effect on whether or not people think, you know, does this change how people think about Barack Obama and the efficacy of the federal government? I'm less interested in whether it changes the way people look at Barack Obama, but I do think it's good news for people who have been trying to convey that these government programs don't work out so well. I mean, we were thinking that it would take many decades to tell that story. We didn't expect the swiftness of this story to be told so easily.

So I think that's good. Molly, first of all, I want to congratulate you on the bravery it takes as a St. Louis Cardinals fan to be even appearing in any public forum today. What happened? Anybody who reads Ricochet knows Molly Hemingway is a devout

St. Louis Cardinals fan. She's also a Denver Broncos fan, which is a little irritating. That's a surplus of riches. But you actually just wrote about the Cardinals for The Federalist a couple days ago. Tell us what was in that piece. Yeah, I was writing about the trend of hating on the Cardinals, which makes no sense to me. I mean I totally understand disliking them or being very hurt that they beat your team. But this hatred that has been popping up in various sports forums, I thought was silly. Now, I wrote about it and I can say that

I got to experience some of the hatred firsthand. And my husband just couldn't believe it, you know, because I write about things that are very contentious as a rule, religion, abortion, things that reasonable people get up in arms about. But I have not been called the names I have been called since defending the Cardinals as a team not worthy of hatred. What's the wellspring of that attitude? Like I get it if it's the New York Yankees. It's a big market. A lot of people have attitudes towards the city of New York, not to mention you've got a team that's been successful for a very long time. I mean, but there's not a lot of flash with the Cardinals, doesn't seem like. There's not a lot of ego on

display. What's people's gripe? That's actually the gripe for some people. So Drew... Oh, I love this country. Yes. Drew Magary at, I don't know how to say his name, but at Deadspin wrote that they're like the church casserole that you eat. They're just boring. So that's actually kind of what set me off about it was that if you're going to hate them, you have to have good reasons. I don't actually hate the Yankees. I hate the Red Sox. But you can hate teams.

You just have to have good reasons for it and I think buying your way to world championships is a totally legitimate reason to hate a team. But just because a team plays well with no-name players year after year, that doesn't seem to be a very good reason. How can you possibly invest hatred and that much emotion in a collection of strangers who have been assembled for a commercial purpose in another city? I did feel like I was living the – have you read that Frederick Exley fan's notes? No. Oh, it Fan's Notes? No. Oh, it's such a good book. You all should read it. Oh, I know I should.

I just – I had my brief period of sports enthusiasm for the Minnesota Vikings before I realized that this was just all a total sham and some wonderful theatrical manipulation. And ever since I stepped back from that, it's been a happier life. Right. That's kind of what A fan's notes is about. And I was thinking as I was experiencing this, you know, there's just no reason to be calling people misogynistic names just because you really don't like

sports. You know, I mean, just of all the things in the world to get carried away about, sports is probably, and I say this as a fanatic, you know, you have to keep it in check. Go ahead. James, Peter here. I sort of came have to keep it in check. Is it for people who go ahead? I, James, Peter here. I, I sort of came to sports fandom late in life, uh, sort of through my kids.

Actually, once they began playing sports, I became more interested in it and then they go off to college and I remain interested in the sports. And I will tell you, James, this will not be sufficient reason to re-interest you in the Vikings, but it, it gets me by. It gives me something to talk about in the barbershop, and that is not nothing. And furthermore, when you've got a team playing nearby, for example, the Giants are up the road here from where I live, and then Stanford, I live on the edge of the Stanford campus. It is a wonderful convening mechanism. Friends can go to a game and just relax and talk about something that's not politics and not religion and not business. So those are two items that are not nothing even if it is a kind of theatrical fraud.

It's harmless, right? The harmlessness of it is – I understand all of that. And this is one of those situations where even though I do not personally share the enthusiasm, I have absolutely no problem with other people doing so. This is a skill that seems to be in short supply in a lot of America today. If I don't get what you like, you should stop liking that. Don't be liking that because it annoys me that somebody does because I don't get it. I have no problem.

It's like that's the problem with the gun debate in this country. You have people who are afraid of guns, don't like guns, hate gun culture because they think it turns people into NASCAR lunatics, and then want to pass a whole bunch of laws because they don't get it. But here's the question. When you mention that it's a substitute sometimes for talking about politics, the amount of emotion and vitriol and idiocy that I see poured into a great deal of political discussions these days seems to come from a segment of the population who otherwise would be sitting in sports or is the sort of team ethos, my side versus yours, just infected just about every single aspect of American society today? That's a good one. That's from Ali. thinking of it this way because sometimes I get annoyed by people all across the spectrum for, you know, they get very defensive about their team and they think less about what's rational or what's good for the country. And they think more about whether their team is being hurt or

whether their team is on the advance. And I think looking at it that way, I mean, that's a, it's great. I love it. You should write that up. Yeah. I don't know what I said. I just kept talking until I reached what I thought to be sort of a questioning inflection and then I shut up. Molly, since you brought up earlier with the Cardinals thing, Deadspin, we should take Deadspin out for their more substantive piece that you wrote on this week about fecundophobia. Explain that Deadspin piece, which is really just sort of jaw-dropping the further you go through it. Well, it was just this little short piece, again, at Deadspin about Philip Rivers, who's the quarterback for the San Diego Chargers, a man who I know very little about. But apparently he responded enthusiastically to a field goal, a successful field goal. And so Deadspin put up a gif of the reaction he had to this and they called him an intense weirdo. And so the entire piece was six sentences long and the final two sentences mocked him for his family size.

They were like, and also he's about to have his seventh kid. So there are going to be eight people on earth with this Philip Rivers DNA. So it's like a really stupid, typical deadspin piece. But I thought it was fascinating that the fact that he has had seven children with his one wife is grounds for mocking him as an intense weirdo, when in fact, that's completely normal behavior. And in fact, having sex with your wife normally results in having children and where are we in the world today? And there are so many examples that I go through other examples of people making fun of people for large families.

It's really interesting to me that now the new norm is women who keep their wombs like as barren as possible and anything – any deviation from that is now considered abnormal and mockable. Right. And these pieces are being written by sunken-chested East Coast little elites with testicles the size of Spanish peanuts. We know that. And there's a great fear of that sort of

lusty middle American enjoyment of life. Right. Because if you have seven kids, you can't fit them in an apartment in New York. And if you can't live in an apartment in New York, there's no point to living. The days when you actually would have people like the Mather family who would name their children Increase.

I just love that. Increase Mather. Go forth and do your name. Because this is how you fill the world and spread the word. So you're right. I mean, I was looking at, Molly, I was looking at some tweets about somebody who was making fun of another family where I believe they had 20 kids. OK, that's that's a lot.

That's a lot of kids. That's where I draw the line. But at the same time, you have to applaud these people if they want it and they can afford it. And they're not being, you know, your typical Daily Mail story of some yabble on the dole who's demanding that the council build her a bigger house because she's going to have her sixth. So, yes. What is it, though, about deadspin and the internet culture itself that you think has led to this kind of – this enshrinement of the barren womb and the man who fears increase? increase. Well, I was thinking of this other example also related to Philip Rivers, which was ESPN asked him four questions that they had found from fans or something. And one of the questions was, how can you have six kids? Because the seventh is on the way. Nobody can be a good

father to six kids, no matter what their profession. And Philip Rivers responded very graciously about how, in fact, it is doable. But I think that maybe what we're seeing is people wanting to justify their own approach to this. You know, we do have an approach to childbearing. We obviously have a fertility rate that's plummeting. We do think that, you know, no kids is ideal or maybe, you know, just a couple. Any deviation from that is an outlier. And it might just be that people are very sensitive to how they themselves aren't procreating like the Mathers of old or just Americans from a few decades ago. And so they're trying to sort of justify their own behavior or something.

I don't know. May I step in here as not as a master of procreation, but as a – not a prodigy, but somewhere at least in the media and probably on the – slightly on the far side of the bell curve here as a father of five. number one son who's a junior at college and he announces that over christmas break winter break of course because you're not allowed to call it christmas break break some friends have organized a trip to the cayman islands and the cost is only going to be about a thousand dollars to which father replied well enjoy yourself if you have the money to spend on that go right ahead and of course you know what would happen. At the other end, there was a, I was, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a moment here. I'm spending X to give you an education. We have potholes in the driveway because I'm spending this money on your education.

I've taken your mother on one Caribbean vacation and that was on our honeymoon 23 years ago. You get me to pay for a Caribbean vacation for you. The day after, your mother and I return from our second and there's no such trip planned. Okay, so that's sort of me being what it's like to have kids. On the other hand, my wife and this just seems to me, this to us has been so normal, so implicit in the way we've approached our family

that I don't quite understand the other view. And what I mean is that to us, the kids are luxuries. If you're fortunate enough to be doing reasonably well in life, why wouldn't you put it into a kid instead of into a Mercedes and a bunch of Caribbean trips? trips. That's what I don't get, that as we've become more and more – well, as the economy – by every measure, two things have happened over the last – over the post-war period. Family size has dropped precipitously and everybody has gotten richer. It just seems to me that as you get richer, you have kids. What's better than having a kid? So, Molly, I don't quite get it. Yeah, I don't. It's kind of interesting that we are so wealthy right now and that we have so few kids. And I think Jonathan Last put it well in his book, What to Expect When No One's

Expecting, which is to say that having children actually is difficult and they do cramp your style and they do keep you from going on Caribbean vacations. And it would totally make sense not to have any if they weren't so important and if they weren't so great. But I have also – my wealth is pretty much in my family and my children and my – I don't think I would have a sad life if I didn't have children. But I've enjoyed – I've just enjoyed my family more than anything, more than I could have possibly imagined. And I wish other people knew that. It seems obvious,

doesn't it? I mean, you and Mark have not had, I'm sure you have your moments like I had with my son, where I wish I had a little more money or get off my back, but you never have a serious moment in which you say, well, we've got X number of kids. I wish we could send that one back.

Never. It just doesn't happen that way. Well, you have to keep the receipt, of course. Otherwise, you can charge back on your card a little bit difficult. Molly, you know we feel bad about letting you go, but we know we're going to see you very, very shortly, of course, in your own podcast and at Ricochet.com. So thank you for being here today and for starting this conversation,

which we're going to now take up with Mona. Thanks, guys. Have a great day. Thanks, Molly. Say hi to Mark. She did point out, I believe, in that piece that she wrote that while they make fun of the guy with six kids, they don't make fun of the guy who's got six kids by five mothers. And we had this tragedy of a local Vikings player whose son was killed. And it was the son by a mother who was in the other side of the country living with another man

who was not also the father of the boy, which is not the optimal life arrangement. At some point, you think there ought to be a guy getting down on his knee and presenting a ring. But even something as quaint as engagement sounds old these days. In any case, and speaking of engagement and the terms of which, there's a book out called Terms of Engagement, How Our Courts Should Enforce the Constitution's Promise of Limited Government,

and it's by Clark Neely of the Libertarian Institute for Justice, and it is our featured spot this week from Encounter. Here's the praises. The new Supreme Court session begins soon. This one's timely. They're going to be considering cases on abortion, racial preferences campaign, financing the EPA, stuff that matters to all of us. Now, this is a book that debunks the concerns about, quote, judicial activism or the so-called conservative majority in the Supreme Court. To the contrary, Nellie says, the Supremes have been asleep at the bench. You know what? Think about this. Of the 1,000, I'm sorry, the 15,817 laws passed by Congress between 1954 and 2002, the Supreme Court struck down just about two-thirds of 1%. Stop. Note, there's somebody in the comments last

week who said this isn't completely fair because not every law comes up before the Supreme Court. True, but the Supreme Courts have struck down less than one-twentieth of one percent of the million-plus state laws. And of course, the same thing applies there. But why is that? What do we need to do to make sure that the laws that are passed might be brought before the Supreme Court? All of this is contained in terms of engagement, how the courts should enforce the Constitution's promise of limited government. Now, if you go to counterbooks.com, you'll get this for a special price for the listeners. And if you enter the coupon code Ricochet, you get 15% off this or any other title.

Encounter, we thank them for sponsoring the podcast. Now, gentlemen, I believe that since we're – well, wait a minute here. Is it really fair to have two female guests and start talking about child rearing and birth and the rest of it? Isn't that a bit sexist of us or are we just playing to strength? Well, you're the one who's running the show, James. It's all your fault. Wow. Yes.

There is a place for you in the Obama administration. I'm still stuck on the testicles the size of Spanish peanuts. That just shut me down to tell you the truth. I've got a brain freeze andicles the size of Spanish peanuts. That just shut me down, to tell you the truth. I've got a brain freeze, and it's still in a deep freeze now. So, James, over to you. All right, absolutely. Mona Charon is a nationally syndicated columnist, longtime writer for National Review, co-host with Jay Nordlinger of Ricochet's Need to Know podcast, and we welcome her back to the podcast. Hey, Mona, I haven't seen you since a ship on bygone days, but it's glad to have you here.

Very happy memories. Great to be with you. You know, we've been talking a bunch of stuff, but the one thing we haven't done this week is shatter the whole Republican unity by discussing the rifts that opened up over the shutdown. Now, you took a lot of heat for not agreeing with the shutdown strategy. How is that playing out for you now when people ask you why you thought what you did? Well, I said in a recent column that this shutdown showdown opened a vein of anger, revealed a vein of frustration, anger, fury. And certainly there's been a certain amount of name-calling, too. Anybody who thought that the strategy that was followed by Cruz and Lee and FreedomWorks and Heritage Action has been denounced.

And, you know, it's gotten to the point where I'm now waiting to be accused of, you know, deviationism or rootless cosmopolitanism or something else and purged. But I'm hoping – Yeah. Hey, Peter. Hi. It's Peter here. David Limbaugh and I kind of go back and forth on this. He and I had a running – I was against the shutdown strategy. You and I are of one mind there.

David was pushing for the shutdown strategy. You and I are of one mind there. David was pushing for the shutdown strategy. So it happened. I didn't get my wish. It happened. But as of, oh, a few days ago, you know what? I find myself thinking, and I put it to you to find out whether you, who have a much better mind and watch this stuff more closely, find yourself thinking this too.

No, it's true. But I'm actually happy that the shutdown took place. I'm actually happy – I'm unhappy that Ted Cruz was quite so loudish about it at certain moments. The use of the term surrender caucus was just absurd when he was applying it to people who had been fighting the fight since he was in diapers. Still, I find myself feeling today that because the Republicans – and let's face it, they were shoved into it by Ted Cruz and Mike Lee and a handful of others. Because they made that stand, we now have terrific clarity about what is now taking

place on everybody's computer screen, which is that Obamacare is just collapsing. And there is no doubt among the press or the country that the Republicans are against it. And if you turn against it, too, they're your party. Isn't there – wasn't it clarifying in the end? Might this not turn out all right? Peter, you have a gift for looking on the bright side. As bad as that, eh? Look, I don't actually think that there was any doubt where Republicans stood on Obamacare. If they've made anything clear over the last number of years, let me get rid of that phone.

If we've made anything clear over the last three years, it's that... Ted Cruz calling for you, Mona, right now. Yeah, exactly. They're going to... Hang on, let me just... There. I've ripped it from the wall. Sorry. So, you know, I actually think there was a little bit of line jumping there on the part of Cruz who, you know, maybe one of the smartest people we've ever elected, uh, to anything in America. Nevertheless, I think that, um, by saying, you know, well, you see Obamacare is unpopular and nobody can forget that Ted Cruz was against it. Well, that's kind of line jumping. Every, every Republican was against it.ously so. All right. Now, it's over. I happen to think we would have been better off substantively and possibly even politically if, for example, the Vitter Amendment had passed, which it would have done had not Heritage Action and others blocked it by threatening to use it against Republicans who voted for it. What was the Vitter Amendment? It was the resolution that would have said that members of Congress and the executive and their staffs all have to participate in Obamacare. Now, that would have been something to dare Obama to veto. That would have been a really good message. And if assuming that he caved on that,

which I think there was a good chance he might have, we would now also have all those members of Congress with a very personal stake in seeing that Obamacare not be implemented. But okay, we are where we are. All is not lost. Mona, could I from California, as a friend, and partly and partly frankly for the sake of having the fun of watching you push back, could I push a little bit on that? Yeah. When you say there was no doubt that Republicans were opposed to Obamacare because they voted against it, this actually is not a fabrication for the matter of debate. This is true. Going into a month or six weeks ago, out here in California where we pay much less close attention to politics day by day and moment by moment, I had sensed that there was now an element – it was unclear quite where the Republican Party as a party stood. There was the Tea Party.

That was an element. But the overall party, there was a kind of willingness to sigh, resign ourselves to Obamacare and try to contain it, try to fix it this way, try to fix it that way. But there was a question about whether the Republican Party as a national institution might not simply be resigning itself to this thing, partly because certain governors, including John Kasich, who used to be a very conservative – I think he would argue he still is conservative. Rick Scott down in Florida. Republican governors had gone ahead and played pretty with the federal government and agreed to set up – to participate in setting up these new exchanges. Rick Perry, certain Republican governors refused to do so. But I had felt that where the party stood on Obamacare had gotten blurred. Well, OK.

You're absolutely right about a couple of governors, though most of the governors in the country and who, by the way, most of them are Republicans, did not sign on with Obamacare. It was definitely a loss, Kasich and Scott in Florida. But there was in Congress an effort, there were other attempts to, for example, delay the individual mandate because the administration had unilaterally decided to delay the employer mandate and to do other things that would keep pushing off the day when the thing gets implemented further into the future with the hope that with the next election, we could then be in a position to repeal it.

Now, okay, you know what? It's all in the past now. Hopefully, Republicans can find a unified strategy going forward for trying to rid the country of this thing. And now we have the aid and, you know, we have the help of Obamacare itself. I've said we should let Obamacare do the talking for us. It's going to persuade more people that the Republicans have a point than anything any of us could have said. You know, Edmund Burke said,

example is a school of mankind. They will learn it, no other. And this is example. Now they're going to see exactly what it is we were so upset about. Maybe you're right, Peter. Maybe the big fuss, the shutdown, was a way of underlining that point.

Perhaps. I'll grant you that. But I think going forward, we need to have alternatives ready to go off the shelf. Some of them have been outlined in places like National Affairs, Yuval Levin's

publication. Ideally, they would be reforms that would deal with the problem of pre-existing conditions because of all the things that Obamacare supposedly was aimed at eliminating, that's the one problem that really does deserve attention. And there are ways to deal with that that wouldn't involve dragging down the entire

one-sixth of our economy with it. Right. Hey, Mona, I know Troy and James want to get in as well, but I have two more questions for you. One is this. Do you have a feeling yourself or from talking to folks back in Washington about whether Obamacare, whether the exchanges, which are now receiving all the attention, you go online to sign up and it just doesn't work or you get delay after delay. The exchanges aren't working. Is that fixable? Out here in California, I'm of two minds about it. Nobody, no software company out here

has any hesitation in bringing a product to market that isn't quite right. They can fix it. They'll refund. If certain customers have a problem, they'll extend their membership for a year. But you bring it to market, you get started with it and you start working on it. So that's one argument. On the other hand, the incentives in the federal government are such that nothing really gets – do you have the feeling that they can't fix this or can't fix it in time or that they may be able to pull it off? Well, I have the feeling that this is the tip of the iceberg. The Obamacare exchanges are complicated, needlessly so, partly because the law is 2,700 pages and partly because they wanted to disguise the actual pricing from the consumers, which is not how most businesses work, right? Most businesses want you to see the price.

They wanted to conceal prices from people and that was part of why the thing got so sticky and complicated and just doesn't work. But it is the tip of the iceberg because built into the structure and the incentives of Obamacare are problems that go beyond computer glitches. For example, the fact that you can wait until you're sick to purchase insurance, which is a guarantee. And then you cannot be charged a higher rate because you're sick. So those two things right there are enough to tank any insurance system. And nothing about fixing the websites is going to fix that.

So what kind of calculation was the administration making? They knew, as Troy pointed out, Kathleen Sebelius has now let slip that they really needed five years and then a year of testing before rolling it out to the country if they were going to get it right. So they knew at the senior most levels that this thing wasn't quite going to work. Their calculation was what? That the press would see them through the rough spots, that they'd be able to subsidize, they'd be able to create an interest, a political support for this among the poor. What were they thinking? You know, I cannot imagine except this.

I can only guess that they think Obama's great strength is how cool he is. And, you know, they were going to use the Obama cool. He was going to have all these celebrities and sports figures and, of course, the man himself out there exhorting young people to purchase this product. And he's so great and he's such a cultural phenomenon that the young people would just step in line and Jon Stewart would be playing the background music and Stephen Colbert would be piping his pipe and the young people would dance after those guys and do what they wanted, I guess. I can't imagine what else they were thinking. If you were Kathleen Sebelius, how would you be preparing right now for your hearings before the Senate next week? Let's see, Hemlock? It's going to be very, very tough for her. And she's going to, you know, if I were Kathleen Sebelius, I would go to Hillary Clinton for lessons on how to survive a tough congressional grilling, because Republicans are very bad at grilling Democrats or anybody in congressional hearings. And remember the Benghazi hearings. I mean, they had Hillary right in their crosshairs and they let her go and she just wriggled right off the hook. So Kathleen Sebelius should ask Hillary how it's done, how you say, oh, it's very complicated and our top people are working on that and blah, blah, blah.

So it's not out of the realm of possibility that Republicans will blow this opportunity and Sibelius will wriggle free. Mona, this is Troy Sinek. Good to talk to you. Hi, Troy. How are you doing? Great. How are you? Good. I wanted to ask you a question about the GOP thing because you had a column on this recently. How are you doing? give very little thought to political principles or ideologies. I wish they were all Hayekians, but they're not. I think it's exactly right. I mean those of us who operate in this world tend to have, I think, a disproportionate

idea of how many other people think that way, and it's just probably not the way the electoral works. So with that in mind, I mean it seems from that premise that the ideological pitch for these people that you're describing is probably not going to have much traction. What does the GOP have to do going forward if this is sort of the lay of the land for the broader electorate? I mean how do you change from where we are now to be a little bit more effective if this is your target audience? Right. I do think that the party needs to get away from these purity purges and toward thinking of that average voter and thinking what does that voter need in his or her life. What are they thinking when they go into the voting booth? is going to promote policies that improve their lives, who will provide a better climate for employment, who will simplify – I think after Obamacare, that will be a big plus. I think that will be something that Republicans can argue.

They'll liberate you from the burdens of Obamacare, the higher premiums and all that. Also, you can look at policies where Republicans have been successful in cities. It was thought that New York City was ungovernable, that New York was destined to spiral ever further downward into chaos and disorder. And by electing Republican leadership with Giuliani, the city was able to achieve a renaissance. Now, New Yorkers have forgotten that lesson, and they're about to go back to the very policies that got them into trouble in the first place. But this will be an opportunity for

Republicans to say, look, our policies will work, will bring you what you want, what you need. I think they have to be thinking of the average voter. And, you know, I'm interested, Mike, I've been critical of Mike Lee about the shutdown, but I think Mike Lee's tax proposal, for example, is very good because he has a tax proposal out there that would give a benefit to parents who are raising children. And that's a very important function in our society that ought not to be punished. It ought to be rewarded. Mona, Peter here one more time. You and I came of age in the Reagan White House.

When Ronald Reagan was elected, the illegitimacy rate in this country was a little under 10%. It is now over 40%. Among Hispanics, it's over 50%. Among African Americans, the last figure I saw was 72%. That is millions of single parents, grandparents, struggling to raise children in what used to be called, now the phrase seems almost quaint, broken homes. Isn't it true that those people, all the polling suggests that single women in particular, single parents, single mothers in particular, vote overwhelmingly Democratic and for reasons that make perfect sense.

They need help. They want to be taken care of. Obamacare at least putatively addresses those needs, suggesting that it's going to be a practical way of making their lives easier and better. How can Republicans who in their bones believe that what you need to do is scale back government, set the private sector free, and then wait to see what happens because what happens will be better for you. But that's a two or three step cold logical argument. It isn't the immediacy of saying here, what's in my hand goes into your hand. I have a gift for you. I have something to make your life better. And the country is just different now than it was when we came of age. So how do Republicans address that?

Right. I, you know, as you know, Peter, I totally agree that the breakdown of the family is a systemic problem for the country but also for the Republican Party. Because we tend to be the party of self-reliance and people who are married are in a much better position to be self-reliant and not need help from the state. The more people who are raising children alone, the more likely they are to vote Democrat because they feel the need to be helped and protected and they don't have those mediating structures helping them. And understandably so. Understandably so.

Understandably so. Yes, yes. They are reading their position in life correctly. They need help, right? Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, yeah, they do. Although I wish they had thought this through before they had children without husbands. But in any event, because the life that you can get

with the state supporting you is much inferior to the life that you can get by being married. But in any event, here's this actually, we're now going to circle back to what we began with because this is one of the reasons that I did not like the defund effort because I thought the argument was framed as Obamacare is going to give people something that they are going to love so much that the minute it is bestowed, it will never be able to be taken away. You're going to love this program. It's going to be terrific. So good that we can't let you have it. I think that is a very destructive message. And I think it's not true. The fact is the number of people who are going to be eligible for subsidies is fairly small. Most people, and don't forget, 85% of people, single mothers and otherwise, 85% of people were happy with the healthcare that they had before Obama and the Democrats cruised in and decided to change everything. Most of the people under Obamacare are going to be net losers. They're either going to lose their coverage, they're going to see their premiums go up, they're going to see their deductibles go up, or in some way they're going to feel that they have lost something,

not gained something. And don't forget that in the Clinton years, when family structure was already well along toward the decay that you and I both decry, the Democrats lost control of the House because people were very alarmed about Hillary care. Why were they alarmed? Because they felt something was going to be taken from them. Similarly, the Democrats, as recently as 2010, lost control of the House because a certain number of voters felt that something was being taken away.

Now they're going to see they were right to worry about it. Can I – just one last form. So Obamacare – because I seldom get a chance to sit down and chat with you, Mona. Now that I've got you, I really want to know the answer to the following question. And the following question is this. Set Obamacare aside for one moment. What is the Republican message? What does Ted Cruz or Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell or Chris Christie have to say to a woman of 31 or 32 who's possibly on food stamps, possibly working two jobs and got three kids, two of them boys who are teenagers who are rough to handle. What does the Republican Party have to offer aside from, you know, you should have thought this through before you got divorced or before you had these children out of wedlock.

Aside from that argument, what does the Republican Party have to offer to such a voter? Well, for one thing, a growing economy. This is critical because it is far, far preferable for every person to have a good private sector job, no matter what their personal situation is, than to be reliant upon food stamps and upon the fairly, let's face it, it's still meager, the support that the state provides to people. Very, very hard to get along on that. Most people would prefer to see the private sector unleashed and a more robust job market. So that's the first is a poor program. That's what they say.

They want everybody to be on Social Security, not just those who need it, because otherwise they're afraid there won't be political support for maintaining the program. I think that's not true. I think the history of the American people shows they're very generous toward the less fortunate and as we should be. But the idea that in order to provide support for those who are truly needy or fall upon hard times or for whatever reason, you know, this mother that you described, you know, maybe one of her kids is sick. You know, obviously that's a situation where you do want to provide help. But you can't see also, you know, then being asked, well, right, so that means we also have to be sending a check to Warren Buffett every month? You know, that doesn't make sense. Right. So you frame it that way, I think. Yeah.

Or just make the point that once these things get put in place, they are never, ever taken away. That Obamacare, once passed and fully funded, becomes the helium, the Mohair helium subsidy, the Mohair helium cowboy poetry subsidy. It can never be uprooted. You know, James, I'm not sure that's really true. We did reform welfare. Reform? Yes.

Right. But that's a basic concept with many iterations. When you have a big act like this, getting rid of it root and branch, what examples do we have of that? I mean we reform it. We still have Obamacare. We still have the Affordable Care Act. Well, actually – well, I think Obamacare stands a really good chance of being eliminated at some point. I'm actually – I'm long-term optimistic about that because I think

it is such a disaster. But the reform of welfare, going back to that for a second, I mean, you say welfare still exists, but it was so dramatically altered. People thought it couldn't be done. But, you know, we changed the incentives really dramatically, and it was the greatest reduction in child poverty that had ever been achieved in America after we changed that law because people started going out and getting jobs, and a lot of the perverse incentives that were built into the law were eliminated. It was a triumph. It was a social policy triumph. It was a social policy triumph. Now, a lot of it has been vitiated, unfortunately, under the Obama administration, which doesn't feel the need to change laws. It just decides to change the way they're implemented unilaterally, which is thoroughly aconstitutional. But that's another problem for another day. The fact is that it is possible to change bad laws. And it's the case, if we think back to the 90s,

if Bill Clinton had vetoed welfare reform one more time, he vetoed it twice. If he had vetoed it a third time, he was warned that he would not be reelected. So he signed it. There was that much of a groundswell. I could see a similar groundswell to repeal Obamacare once people get a really good taste of it. And the way to do that then is to convince the American people to let Barack Obama stand for a third term as president and then tell them that unless he modifies the ACA, he won't get that third term.

And then that will be for the Republicans viewed as a time for our side. Mona, as the employer says to the guy who is going to put him over the limit at which he has to pay insurance for the guy, we're going to have to let you go. And we thank you so much for showing up in the podcast today. Thanks. Nice to be on the mothership. We'll see you later. We hope to have you back soon. Thanks, Mona.

Thanks, Mona. Thanks, Mona. I do have to go and pick up a dog. Such is my life. I just want to read you this. This is the New York Times today. Emboldened by intense public criticism surrounding the rollout of the online insurance exchange. Not that it doesn't work,

but there's been criticism of it. Republicans are emboldened. Republicans in Congress are refocusing their effort from denying funds for the health care law to investigating it. Ah, now we have the investigation, which is just, of course, punitive and petty. In changing tactics, Republicans hope to tamp down the continuing public criticism of their previously fruitless attack on the Affordable Care Act, one that led to a 16-day government shutdown. You see how the New York Times is sort of nudging you in the direction of what you should be thinking about?

Yeah, continuing public criticism. I read the other day from the AP that one of the reasons charitable giving was down this year was because the middle class was reacting to the government shutdown. So there's somebody in Kansas who isn't going to cut a check to the food shelf for Thanksgiving dinner because he's thinking, my, my, my, that shutdown now over could happen. It's just – it's absolute nonsense. I go through this entire newspaper today. As a matter of fact, on CNN for that matter, looking for something about a story that popped up yesterday about Saudi Arabia severing diplomatic ties with America, which was sort of news there for a while.

And now seems not to be news at all. The only piece we had in the paper about Saudi Arabia was they're going to protest women who wanted to drive themselves. You know, next week after discussing the fruitless attempt to reshape America in the form of the ACA, next week we should talk about the administration's foreign policy because I seem to remember something about a country with S. And it wasn't Saudi Arabia and it wasn't Sweden. There was a fierce moral urgency that we had to do something and it will come. Troy, do you know what I'm talking about?

What country am I talking about? It's amazing, isn't it? Syria is gone. I don't think and i don't think it'll come back they do something that's equally dramatic as before i think the president played for time and i think it played out his way it's embarrassing it's humiliating but i don't think it comes back no i don't think so either um boys boys i just i have in front of me here the wall street journal online i was of course delighted

to hear james read the wall street the new york times spin it though they may what the the subtext of that article is it ain't working obamacare ain't working and now to make our happiness complete on the wall street journal online at this momentans for political union unravel in Europe. Oh, the great unraveling. Over to you, James. You've got to go pick up a dog. You've got to get us out here. I do. No, the unraveling, the plans for political union, as Paul Harvey may have said, the most important story today are always, there's sometimes the ones that are buried elsewhere and don't seem to be spinning and popping off the thing that's got everybody's attention. But this is interesting. And the failure of the ACA and this disastrous rollout is no small thing.

And it's going to mean something to a lot of people. And it's helpful. It's instructive to our side. It's a great opportunity. I can't wait to see how we're going to blow it. But maybe not. Maybe not. That's why you go to Ricochet so you can argue about how we're going to blow it.

Or you can propose solutions for how we can. Or you can bask in the fact that we didn't. We advise you to go to Ricochet.com and argue about how we're going to blow it or you can propose solutions for how we can or you can bask in the fact that we didn't. We advise you to go to Ricochet.com and sign up, of course, to become a member. Get skin in the game as Rob will say when he's back someday. And so that you can listen to James Lilac's The Diner. Oh, that little one. Back at Ricochet.com. Yes, my little podcast hosted by The Diner.

We thank them for that and Audible for sponsoring that as well. And, of course, Encounter. Go to Encounter Books and enter the coupon code RICOSHET and get this week's book or broadsides from the past. Edify yourself at a lower discount price. Thanks to Encounter for sponsoring this. Troy, again, great. Probably see you next week while Rob is deep in creative labor.

Peter, as ever, enjoy California. And gentlemen, we will see you at the comments at Ricochet.com. Next week. Thanks, guys. Don't talk of dust and roses Or should we powder our noses Don't live for last, dear K-Paz Or should we powder our noses? Don't live for last, escape us Give me steel, give me steel

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