I think that this CNN op-ed by David Gergen illustrates just how damaging the clumsy debut of the PPACA’s portal was to the Obama Administration:

(CNN) — Someone in the Obama White House clearly has a good book to write one day: “How Not to Do Rollouts.”

With one hapless episode after another, the rollout of the President’s plan to destroy ISIS is beginning to rival the less-than-splendid debut of the Obamacare website.

President Barack Obama’s critics may take some glee from the recent missteps, but they shouldn’t. Going to war is serious business, especially when the conflict promises to be long and messy.

For the nation’s sake, our dysfunctional politics needs to become functional on this one or we put too much at risk, starting with the lives of our men and women in uniform.

That’s why it is imperative and urgent that the Obama team and their allies take a deep breath, pull themselves together and get this war effort on solid footing. Instead of becoming defensive, they need to go on offense, showing the world they are firmly in charge and on a winning path.

Just to clear the fog from Mr. Gergen’s understanding, the purpose of the White House’s policy in Iraq is “showing the world they are firmly in charge” rather than “on a winning path”.

That having been said, I find that a pretty fair illustration of the damage that the Obama Administration did to itself last year when it insisted that Healthcare.gov be opened for business on schedule rather than when it was ready. I’m sure they had their reasons but I suspect they’re finding that it casts a pall over every action they take or will take.

I also predict that its legend will grow and it will increasingly be portrayed as much worse than it actually was, hard as that may be to imagine. It will become a symbol of overreaching, under-accomplishing federal government programs of every stripe for the foreseeable future.

I didn’t want to let this pass without commenting on it since it touches on several point I’ve mentioned here from time to time. Tyler Cowen asks, in economistese (“What is the market failure in data storage and protection at the retail level?”, why (large) retailers aren’t more security-conscious:

There’s been another accident and data leak from Home Depot, and some people are claiming the company was negligent, so I was thinking what kind of market failure might be present. One problem is this. They store your credit card number whether you buy one thing at the store or make fifty trips over the course of two years. So, if you don’t trust a store, at the margin you only get one chance to make a decision whether to give them your credit card number by shopping there or not. You are comparing the total expected consumer surplus from having a relationship with the store at all against the data privacy risk. Such blunt, once-and-for-all trade-offs are not always conducive to good marginal incentives.

If Home Depot acted as he is suggesting, there’s more going on than a “market failure”.

Quite a number of years ago the payment card industry agreed on a set of security standards. Under those standards if Home Depot is acting as Dr. Cowen suggests, Home Depot is not “PCI compliant”. Merely storing the credit card is an unacceptable security risk. What they are supposed to do is pass the credit card immediately on to a processing organization that will “tokenize” it and pass the token back to them for storage and re-use. Home Depot should be subject to substantial fines for its recklessness.

IMO laws, regulations, and standards are for the little guys. They are mechanisms by which larger institutions fend off competition from smaller ones. They are rarely enforced against large institutions, the large institutions recognize that, and, consequently, have few incentives to comply.

I really need to check in on McSweeney’s more regularly. Here’s an amusing list of ways to make classic movies less sexist. Gone With the Wind sounds about right:

Rhett kisses and grabs at Scarlett against her will. Scarlett informs Rhett that though they are married, she still has autonomy over her body and has the right to refuse sex. The pair ascend the staircase in thoughtful conversation, and Rhett wakes up the next morning glowing with newfound feminist awareness.

Read the whole thing at least if you want a lift from Ebola, beheadings, and the exploding stock market.

When I read this I thought of this. It’s good for you!

If they’d adapt that wheel to power the electronics they’d really be on to something.

For some reason Doug Bandow’s bios do not mention where he grew up. David Goldfield’s CV says that although he was born in Memphis he grew up in Brooklyn. I on the other hand grew up within walking distance of a Civil War battle, not much farther from a slave market, numbered among my schoolmates people whose great-great-grandfathers had served on opposite sides in the American Civil War, and I had two great-great-grandfathers who fought for the Union. I think that explains my visceral reaction when Mssrs. Bandow or Goldfield write that the Civil War was unnecessary.

It was necessary as surely as it is the case that there are still people south of the Mason-Dixon Line who refer to the American Civil War as “the War of Northern Aggression”, sometimes but not always humorously.

It was baked in. The Civil War was the price that we paid in blood for the U. S. Constitution. I think they are dismissing this too quickly:

A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become lawful in all the States, old as well as new — North as well as South.

Their claim is the claim that the South would willingly have abandoned slavery or that slavery’s opponents would willingly have allowed it, assertions for which I find little evidence. Lincoln’s election was a signal that slavery would be abolished, the South took it so, and acted accordingly.

Mark Judge’s Jesuit high school in Maryland was founded just about twenty years before the Jesuit high school I attended in St. Louis was. He clearly learned somewhat different things from the Jesuits than I did. Not that I didn’t learn the thing he lists as what he learned from the Jesuits. It’s that I learned other things as well.

For example, intellectual clarity. What he summarizes as “have an extracurricular activity” I would state as it’s not enough to be be a great scholar or a fine athlete or a winning debater. You should be a great scholar, a fine athlete, and a winning debater.

And in debate you shouldn’t merely go for the win. You should go for the kill.

For the sake of argument imagine that on any given issue the only consequences that you need to be concerned about are the political consequences. You don’t need to worry about economic consequences in the case of an ill-considered economic policy. You don’t need to worry about adverse reactions from other countries or foreign organization as a result of foreign policy decisions. And so on. Just the electoral political implications. I think that’s a much better if over-simplified explanation for the president’s words and actions than Peggy Noonan’s explanation:

A man who personally picks drone targets, who seems sometimes to enjoy antagonizing congressional Republicans, whose speeches not infrequently carry a certain undercurrent of political malice, cannot precisely be understood as soft.

But we focus on Mr. Obama personality and psychology—he’s weak or arrogant or ambivalent, or all three—and while this is interesting, it’s too fancy. We are overthinking the president.

His essential problem is that he has very poor judgment.

And we don’t say this because he’s so famously bright—academically credentialed, smooth, facile with words, quick with concepts. (That’s the sort of intelligence the press and popular historians most prize and celebrate, because it’s exactly the sort they possess.) But brightness is not the same as judgment, which has to do with discernment, instinct, the ability to see the big picture, wisdom that is earned or natural.

Mr. Obama can see the trees, name their genus and species, judge their age and describe their color. He absorbs data. But he consistently misses the shape, size and density of the forest. His recitations of data are really a faux sophistication that suggests command of the subject but misses the heart of the matter.

Take the president’s decision to oppose ISIS/ISIL with bombs, support for imaginary Syrian moderate rebels, and non-existent allies who will commit troops to the campaign but not “boots on the ground”. I think the complete package of the president’s views inclusive both of rhetoric and practical steps can only be recognized when viewed solely through the lens of domestic electoral politics.

The president must do something. The bloody heads of Americans and Brits beheaded by ISIS form an unassailable argument. Failing to react forcefully to those provocations won’t pick up seats in Illinois, New York, or New Jersey. Those seats are already solidly Democratic. Lack of a forceful reaction might lose seats in Louisiana, Iowa, and Alaska. The merits of the threat posed by ISIS just don’t warrant a committed response. Consequently, a response that falls short of a committed response is the best possible political judgment.

As I have said before, I don’t fault the president for not wanting to commit troops to Iraq and Syria because I don’t think the threat to the United States posed by ISIS/ISIL warrants it. My sole complaint is that the president does not appear to be willing to assuage the concerns of the American people and sell his plan to them.

English politicians are breathing a sigh of relief as the Scots vote remain part of the United Kingdom by a substantial margin:

Scotland has voted to stay in the United Kingdom after voters decisively rejected independence.

With the results in from all 32 council areas, the “No” side won with 2,001,926 votes over 1,617,989 for “Yes”.

Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond called for unity and urged the unionist parties to deliver on more powers.

Prime Minister David Cameron said he was delighted the UK would remain together and said the commitments on extra powers would be honoured.

Mr Cameron said the three main unionist parties at Westminster would now follow through with their pledge of more powers for the Scottish Parliament.

“We will ensure that those commitments are honoured in full,” he said.

After dismissing the possibility that the Scots would vote for independence until late polls suggested a much closer decision that had been anticipated, party leaders responded with ineffectual panic.

Early analysis suggests that the old, the young, and the Highland and Island Scots voted for Scotland to remain part of the United Kingdom. Speculation on the Highland and Island Scots is that they preferred a seat of government far away in London to one closer at hand in Edinburgh.

I’m full of questions today. As you know I rarely write here about sports or sports-related matters. It’s generally just not something that interests me.

However, I do have a question about the rash of suspensions of NFL players over charges of spousal abuse and/or child abuse. Is there a racial and/or cultural element in the outrage? I think there is. For example, I think that corporal punishment of children is much more socially acceptable among African Americans and rural whites than it is among, say, middle class suburban whites living in the Northeast.

I also notice that no one has asked if the wives or girlfriends of these NFL players strike them.

Just for the record I don’t think people should strike their children, spouses, or significant others. If you beat a dog, it does not cause the dog to express the behavior you might be looking for. Rewards are much more useful in eliciting behaviors than punishment. It may make the dog mean or furtive, however. We aren’t that much different.