My thoughts on the recent Supreme Court rulings

First and foremost, with respect to the first ruling in King v. Burwell, I owe Pik an apology. I had defended Chief Justice Roberts way back when for taking a strategic long view with an eye to setting up Obamacare for the kill later on. But Roberts' arguments in King now clearly show he sees the Court's role as one of providing a legislative rehabilitative salvation for the law rather than ruling on the text of it. That, and getting more Likes on Facebook.

He, at least I think Roberts is the one who made passing reference to this, is right on one point, though. It's fully in the hands of Congress to repeal and/or replace Obamacare as it sees fit. This is entirely as it should be. We shouldn't be hoping SCOTUS will do our difficult work for us any more than we should be hoping Roberts will shoot our dog for us to spare us the unpleasantness of the task. Now the situation is crystal clear: elect a Republican Congress with spine and a Republican President to sign their work into law and handle this whole matter the right way, as the writers of the Constitution intended.

Now, with respect to today's opinion in Obergefell there is one enormous question that immediately eclipses everything else: who will be the third and greatest fool in the Greater Fool Theory of Publishing to sign up to lose money on Rod Dreher's BO book? Dreher has been positively leaving a trail of bodily fluids the last several days in eager anticipation of today's ruling coming down as it did, because what's bad for Christian conservatives is good for anyone wanting to push a snake oil cure for what just hit them.

Aside from some unknown publisher's as yet unbooked losses, though, let's work through what today's Obergefell ruling really means.

First, if you're Rod Dreher or Ace at AOSHQ and you're reprising Bill Paxton's "Game over, man!" (NSFW) scene from Aliens, here's what's really going through your head: "Okay, I'm bent over this stump, I've dropped my pants, oh, my, what will happen to me next? Will they use a lube? Oh, it would be so much more terrible if they didn't use a lube, wouldn't it? It would! It would! I can hardly wait!"

Since I myself am not stump broke like Rod Dreher, here is, alternatively, what is going through my head.

A cohabitation license issued by the State must be available to all comers in order not to discriminate, which carries this interesting little clusterbomb implicit within it. Nothing in Obergefell mandates for two-person marriages or against triad or larger unions, plus, this is no longer the States' problem, not even the Feds' - it effectively rebounds right back to SCOTUS as soon as it arises.

Whether you wish to call two guys cohabiting for butt sex marriage or a dog show remains entirely up to you. If you whine, "but they'll make me call it marriage!", see stump broke, above.

If your church recognizes gay unions, consider getting another church that does not. Those that do not do so voluntarily can not and will not be forced to do so.

As for federal funding, if you can be bribed, please send your name and the particular favors, skills, goods, or elite access you are willing to barter for money to Keith care of EQE so that I may consider whether I have a need to buy you and use you for my own ends in some capacity.

In the meantime, the betting pool is now open on the publisher even more stupid than Judith Regan turned out to be.

Remember the future?

While others are retreating to cozy corners to masturbate psychologically and rhetorically, conservatives might be interested in at least two things that will decide how their lives will be shaped if they defer on making those decisions themselves instead.

Near term, King v. Burwell goes to oral argument before SCOTUS March 4 - 48 hours from now. If King wins, Obamacare immediately becomes a failed state, like Libya and Somalia. That structural vacuum will demand filling, and the first and loudest call will be for Republicans to immediately replace what was lost - exactly as it was before.

Doing nothing is not an adult option. However, there are contingency plans in the wings. Legislation to enact the best consensus option had better be ready to drop in June or whenever SCOTUS finally rules, or Republicans can probably expect a growing public PR beating to begin on both legislative and presidential fronts heading toward November, 2016.

- - - - -

If Republicans don't want to look up unexpectedly one day to find this smiling face lecturing them from behind the presidential seal, it's long past time to get vaccinated. Why Ben Carson has become the alternative boyfriend while the far more intellectually and politically estimable - and electable - Shelby Steele is not being groomed and being made ready for the inevitable ethnographic face off escapes me entirely.

Sooner or later, Republicans are going to be forced to deal a serious presidential alternative to the "old white men" slur, and the time to recognize that is before sooner gets here.

Obamacare: The Olestra of Government Programs

Thank you, Ed Gillespie!

Thank you, Ed Gillespie, you win the prize which I have been saving for the person who brings up what my father always brings up whenever we get on the health care topic.

My plan begins by addressing an anachronistic aspect of the tax code that’s rooted in World War II wage and price controls. Those who get health insurance through their employer get a tax break, but those who purchase it on their own generally do not.

Most people don't know that this whole practice of paying for employees insurance came about as the result of employers not being allowed to pay people above a certain amount. No, we're not making this up.

The Emergency Stabilization Act was passed in October 1942, which placed wages and agricultural prices under control. There were immediate wage restrictions, and in order to attract labor, the employers offered a range of such fringe benefits as pensions, medical insurance, paid holidays, and vacations. Because the foregoing were not paid out in cash, they did not violate the wage ceiling. Controlling output proved easier than controlling wages.

And I can't say I dislike the tax credit numbers. My family would save $7,500.00 per year which would bring us down to pre-Obamacare premiums. Imagine that. Back to Eddie G., the man of the moment:

Obviously, enacting legislation along these lines will require a Republican president. That will be more likely if over the next two years the Republican majorities in Congress pave the intellectual way through hearings and committee reports for a positive Obamacare alternative that the Republican presidential nominee can take to the electorate.

Yes. Let's hope.

Charles Krauthammer on Jonathan Gruber: "We're hearing the true voice of liberal arrogance"

Daily Caller has the scoop, but this video is a little longer one I found on Youtube.



Text from the Caller piece:

This is exactly what conservatives have been saying for four years, what we’re hearing now is the true voice of liberal arrogance. They believe this. They believe that the voters are stupid, as he said, and they believe that they know the right way, they have to lead the masses to the Promised Land, and they can only do it by deception. And that’s what he said openly: ‘We wanted to get the bill, we didn’t care about how we did it, so we lied about everything. We lied about if you can keep the plan, knowing that you can’t keep your plan. We lied about the fact this would be a transfer of wealth, a massive transfer of wealth.’ Because, as Gruber said, had they known that, it would never have passed. They lied about every aspect of this, and I think that is what has been charged all along.

And it is a scandal of the media that this has to be discovered in the sixth year of the presidency rather than talked about at the time, when it was obvious they were lying about all this. The idea of it being a transfer of wealth was known from the beginning. But they got away with it.

And now another video of Gruber has surfaced where he states that Obamacare passed because “the American people are too stupid to understand the difference.”

I hope Justice John Roberts is watching this drama unfold. Obviously he is numbered among the huddled masses of hapless, duped Americans. If Gruber brings the whole mess down then man, it could be beautiful to watch.

Jonathan Gruber Tries To Hide His Remarks

Props to Patrick Howley for uncovering this bit of video from Jonathan Gruber, one of the primary architects of Obamacare.

I decided to post this video, even though many people have already seen it. Shakespeare said "at the length truth will out" so we must be at the length vis-à-vis Obamacare because the truth is beginning to gush out.



Here's the text of the clip:

“Mark [Pauly] made a couple of comments that I do want to take issue with, one about transparency in financing and the other is about moving from community rating to risk-rated subsidies. You can’t do it politically. You just literally cannot do it, okay, transparent financing…and also transparent spending.” Gruber said. “In terms of risk-rated subsidies, if you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in—you made explicit that healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed, okay. Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass…Look, I wish Mark was right that we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not.”

Of course there were a lot of people who predicted the truth. Avik Roy from Forbes has this to say:

Gruber made an argument that many of Obamacare’s critics have long made, including me. It’s that the law’s complex system of insurance regulation is a way of concealing from voters what Obamacare really is: a huge redistribution of wealth from the young and healthy to the old and unhealthy. In the video, Gruber points out that if Democrats had been honest about these facts, and that the law’s individual mandate is in effect a major tax hike, Obamacare would never have passed Congress.

So this is all sort of infuriating, if you have any fury left. But now we get to the fun stuff.

The University of Pennsylvania which had originally hosted and posted this has now pulled down the video from their site. But this is an attempt on the part of Jonathan Gruber and company to pull their pants up after they got caught. It's already on Youtube, and I downloaded it last night via Keepvid as I'm sure many other conservative geeks did, "just in case". I think it's comical that these people still believe they can say whatever they want in public, but then flip out if anyone quotes them. This story goes hand-in-hand with the story of Lena Dunham sexually abusing her little sister as reported by Lena Dunham in her book. (I like to refer to the incident as "Lena Done-her".)

But that's not all. It appears that the Snopes.com mafia has been called in to cast doubt upon the incident as conservatives have reported it. Here's how they phrase the claim:

"Obamacare architect" Jonathan Gruber recently said Obamacare only passed due to the "stupidity" of the American voter and a lack of "transparency," and video footage of his remarks was deleted from the internet.

Then they call this claim a Mixture of true and false. They accomplish this by pointing out that a Daily Signal article refers to the clip as a "newly surfaced video", which I don't see anything false about, but they paint as a mischaracterization, and refer to the clip as a "newly-circulated video" in their lame conclusion.

While the newly-circulated video of Gruber's remarks is unedited, the comments are neither recent nor complete, and whether the originating source attempted to pull them from the Internet at one point remains unclear.

What in the world remains unclear about what happened? The Snopes page, which is marked 10 November 2014, is pretty high up in the Google search results for Jonathan Gruber currently, about the 7th entry on the first page. Bing has it on the 4th page. Of course I don't have evidence, but this just feels like an attempt at damage control. Snopes has formerly been exposed as untrustworthy and biased, but hilariously the best Gruber and company can get from them is a rating of "Mixture" on the propaganda piece. It should get a rating of Mostly True which they sometimes give out if they're being generous to Gruber, but it appears that even Snopes won't damage their cred further by giving it a False. Factcheck.org doesn't have anything up yet.

Gruber is the fat kid trying to hide behind the phone pole during a hide-and-seek game. His remarks will live on and place him permanently on the elite social-planners' Hall of Shame for calling the American populace stupid, and as a leftist poster child for the ends justifying the means.

Sometimes hatred turns to pity

Sometimes hatred turns to pity. And I think that's kind of a Christian thing. I think Tolkien wrote something about that in one or two of his books.

A reader emails us:

A belated response to the Damon Linker suck-up post.

I've long since given up regular visits to Rod's blog (for reasons we all are familiar with) so it's good to drop in here and see the capsulized chronicle of Rod's decline and fall—something I do have the time for.

I used to hate Linker, seeing him as an opportunistic snake in the grass, a 21st century Maria Monk.

Then I saw a video of his wife, and now I think I just pity him. To imagine him picking up small change here and there as a freelancer and online "editor" but mostly surviving as a house-husband to a shrill, strident, man-jawed associate professor is to imagine something I would view as a living hell. As he writhes in the flames of this torment, I can understand if his cries are blasphemous and his shrieks are libelous.

The video is proof that even Ph. D.'s can be brainwashed.

Here's some supplemental reading material which might shed some light on the subject.

I hope this is true

I hope this article is true and ObamaCare is about to die a horrible screaming death. Excerpt:

The ruling puts ObamaCare in legal limbo, even with a less-influential court, the 4th Circuit, issuing a conflicting ruling. The administration says it will request an en banc hearing before the entire 11-judge DC Circuit, which is weighted in Obama’s favor, with seven Democratic appointees.

But the issue is plainly headed to the US Supreme Court eventually. Two other federal appeals courts are deciding challenges almost identical to Halbig. Any disagreement among them will force the high court to rule.

Don’t bet that Chief Justice John Roberts will save ObamaCare again: The issue here is the clear language of the law — and twice in recent months the Supreme Court has emphatically declared that the executive branch must execute the laws, not rewrite them.

Betsy McCaughey wrote tons of anti-ObamaCare books, so there might be some wishful thinking going on here. But still I hope she's right.

Wonderful Precision of the Miraculous ObamaCare Signup Number

And polls continue to show the public still hates the law. So despite their cute and loud cheerleaders, their team bites. I hope they lose big.

How can the Obamacare Individual Mandate possibly work?

I've wondered this for awhile and James Capretta wonders too.

ObamaCare’s architects were always ambivalent about the mandate. They knew compulsion was necessary to make their system work — but, fearing a backlash, opted for a fairly weak penalty for those who didn’t obey. Oops: They wound up with a mandate that still provokes resentment, yet probably won’t work.

The US Supreme Court weakened the mandate even as it was saving ObamaCare. The law’s authors hoped that the mandate would create the perception that insurance enrollment is now obligatory, but the high court made it clear that Congress has no authority to institute such a requirement. The justices ruled that the mandate could stand only as an optional tax, not as a fine for noncompliance.

So you’re not breaking the law by not buying (overpriced) ObamaCare-compliant insurance; you’re just making the legal choice to pay the tax instead.

I normally love the idea of an "optional tax". But my guess is that the money collected from this "tax" will be a fraction of what it will cost to pay those administering the tax. The regular non-optional tax payers—you and I—will pick up the tab as usual.

So, for instance, a 31-year-old single man making $30,000 in Columbus, Ohio faces a tax of $198.50, more than $2,000 less than the cheapest option in Ohio’s ObamaCare exchange, even including his taxpayer-funded subsidy. For a 36-year-old San Diego woman making $40,000, the tax is $298.50, or nearly $2,400 less than the cheapest policy on the California exchange. She’s not eligible for a subsidy.

ObamaCare can’t work if the young and healthy don’t sign up in large numbers — yet the law creates a clear incentive for them to opt out.

There’s more: The law also guarantees that you can always choose to buy during the next annual enrollment period — so if you fall seriously ill and find that ObamaCare has become a better investment, you can buy it then.

Which leads to my favorite pull-quote:

The ObamaCare law thus made insurance a less valuable product for most people, even as it pushed up the cost of buying it.

Classic. He has another good article about what Republicans can and should be doing about Obamacare which I hope the good guys in congress will take to heart.

Walmart / Obamacare Cost Comparison

Finally! Conservatives are getting in on the infographic market. Formerly most of these were ridiculous visual fabrications of Occupy nutters.

Now don't get me wrong. I'm sure this graphic is fraught with the typical misrepresentations to which all such over-simplifications are prone. But it will make all the right people howl and that makes it worth it.

Obamacare Karma

H/T Dennis Prager. It's always a great story when the cheerleaders get their comeuppance. Dennis highlights this paragraph:

It is not lost on many of the professionals that they are exactly the sort of people — liberal, concerned with social justice — who supported the Obama health plan in the first place. Ms. Meinwald, the lawyer, said she was a lifelong Democrat who still supported better health care for all, but had she known what was in store for her, she would have voted for Mitt Romney.

Obamacare is a bitch that bites the hand that feeds it.

The Children's Crusade

Just about anything I could write would subtract from the sheer joy and magic of this narrative, so, as we aspiring scholastigators like to say, just read the whole thing:

Hard Sell: Going door-to-door for Obamacare

If you're drinking something in front of your computer, swallow and put it down. If you have a cold, blow your nose first.

TAC discovers Obamacare!

Not a day after that pants-on-fire lying liar Keith had the temerity to claim that not even a glancing bird-dropping mention of Obamacare stained the TAC web site but whuddya know, the green fairy of inspiration miraculously lurches to its feet and prompts Our Working Boy to phone in a post on that very topic, an issue obscured in the world as it has been these last several weeks by, well, anything else it was remotely possible to write about. And what a comprehensively perfunctory roundup it was, too!

In a sulking voice that could only be more taciturn if it were begrudgingly grunting out a response above a week's worth of whiskey and wildebeest-impacted piles, Reporter Rod finally reveals all to those dozens of us who previously had no clue:

The perfect storm of mistrust. Intentionally or not, Obama misled people to get this thing passed, and his team constructed a failed website that they cannot fix in a timely way. You can gripe about GOP knotheadedness, but these problems of Obama’s are entirely self-inflicted.

OMG! Could this be true? O. M. G.

And then, like the Roadrunner.....Meep-meep-okay-boss-I-did-like-you-said-now-lemme-outa-here-and...mercifully, mercifully back to Paris.

Beautiful, carefree Paris, where life forever trickles through a sugar cube. As it should.

Colorado and Washington ignore federal health care laws with impunity

So why can't every other state?

I'm referring of course to federal health care laws regulating commerce in and the consumption of leafy green weeds of the Cannabis and Indica families. Come on, you didn't really think those federal laws were there because of marijuana's funky smell, did you? No, they're in place because the feds have thought for a century or more that smoking weed is bad for your health, so bad they'll put you in prison for subjecting yourself and others to its dangers.

Here, though, is where we take a right turn from what you might have thought was going to be a pot-legalization post into what is in fact an Obamacare-ignoring state by state post.

Remember, insurance companies and the policies they offer are (or were) state-, not federally-licensed, pretty much as 10th Amendment as you can still get in this day and age. What would it take to return them to that condition unconditionally?

Why, to do exactly what Colorado and Washington states have done with respect to their marijuana laws: ignore the feds, and proceed as if the management of health insurance was as much a wholly state matter as the management of marijuana.

To be sure, the main reason Obama and Holder are standing around holding their bongs with respect to the moves by Colorado and Washington is that pot-smokers are a larger Democratic Party constituency than they are a Republican Party one, so yes, the non-prosecution of Coloradans and Washingtonians under federal anti-marijuana drug titles is also an egregious case of corrupt selective federal judicial prosecution.

Still, this brings us finally to where everything ultimately really does get decided in politics: civil obedience or disobedience to whatever domination is proposed, and the ultimate recognition that the fault that we are underlings lies ultimately with ourselves. Not with the bogeyman we might make of the amateur community organizer Obama, or the purring Harry Reid, or the supercilious Pelosi, or the vague shadow army of the lefties, or the main stream media, or anyone else behind Obamacare. With ourselves, for passively submitting to it. If you want your obeisance, you can keep your obeisance. Period.

Legislative potheads in Colorado and Washington just rolled back a century of obedience to federal anti-marijuana laws. At this point in the absurd tragicomedy still unfolding across health insurance, how hard would it really be for state legislatures truly concerned for their citizens' health insurance to do exactly the same thing with Obamacare?

Pre-apology Propaganda

Guess who came up with some of the most damning material on Obama's "If you like your plan" lie? The White House!



I have a computer, not a "lot of free time." But I have common sense. Plus an insurance plan that doubled in price. Raising your costs because of onerous regulations isn't being a bad apple. It's called "staying in business".

Obama's weak apology is far too wordy, just like every time he talks. He should have just said, "I misspoke. What I meant to say was if *I* like your plan, then you get to keep your plan."

Mark Steyn: "In entirely non-ideological, technocratic, utilitarian terms, Obamacare is a bust."

With regard to outreach, Steyn continues his tradition of apocalyptic stand-up and gets the messaging pitch-perfect for the majority of Americans. "Obamacare don't work, Ma."

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been opposed to government health care because, as I’ve said in at least two books, it fundamentally redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state into one closer to that of junkie and pusher. But that’s a philosophical position. Others prefer constitutional arguments: The federal government does not have the authority to do what it’s doing. Dear old John Roberts, chief justice of the United States, twisted himself into a pretzel to argue that, in fact, the government does. But he might as well have saved himself the trouble and just used Nancy Pelosi’s line: Asked by a journalist where in the Constitution it granted the feds the power to do this, she gave him the full Leslie Nielsen and said, “You’re not serious?” She has the measure of her people. Most Americans couldn’t care less about philosophical arguments or constitutional fine print: For them, all Obamacare has to do is work. That is why the last month has been so damaging to Big Government’s brand: In entirely non-ideological, technocratic, utilitarian terms, Obamacare is a bust.

The emphasis is mine, not because I don't find the philosophical, economic, moral, ethical and constitutional arguments compelling, but because that is where we are now. There is enough to blast about Obamacare now that you don't have to bring up what Reagan thought about government-controlled healthcare systems, nor what chapter of Socialism Ludwig von Mises would have added Obamacare to, nor what Sarah Palin wrote on Facebook about Death Panels. Improving Obamacare with a laughably-named "tech surge" is a worthless exercise in turd-polishing. There is no way they can get to 46,000 signups a day by March, unless maybe they get Michelle Obama's imaginary Facebook friends on welfare and SSA simultaneously and sign them all up.

Steyn ends with the line "Obamacare is not a left–right issue; it’s a fraud issue." I agree. Conservative I-told-you-sos are worthless at this juncture.

Why "Obamacare"?

Why should conservatives, that is, conservatives who want to elect Republicans, continue to deliberately short-change their political prospects by thoughtlessly continuing to call the ACA "Obamacare"?

Consistent with his role as a nobody who really hasn't done much of anything else as President for the last 5 years except live large and play golf, apart from pitching the lies about keeping your insurance Obama really had very little to do personally with creating the ACA monster either. So who did?

The Democrats did. Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, all the Democrats who voted for it, and those industry insiders who wrote it and who will make out like bandits from the Democrats' legislated funding of their interests did. The Democrats as a group created the ACA all by themselves. Unlike almost all other legislation, the ACA is a purely partisan achievement of the Democrats alone, all by themselves.

So why not weld the blame permanently in place where it belongs and call it Democratcare? Not catchy enough? Because Obama is the transient Democrat president and we owe it to both the Democrats and the news media that puts Obama in the news every day to honor their temporary titular chief by continuing to call it "Obamacare"?

In 3 years Obama the cipher will be gone, but like a massive toxic chemical spill the Democrat ACA, even its ineradicable remnants (just try to reinstate underwriting for pre-existing conditions now), will be poisoning health care markets and business in general for decades to come.

So why allow the very culprits who wrought this thing to ever escape its legacy? A Democrat can distance himself from Obama. He can't ever distance himself from a disaster that carries his very own political party name, though.

"I'm a Democrat. You may have heard of me. There's a rotting albatross stinking up your lives named after me. It's called Democratcare. Should I count on your vote?"

Democratcare. It's the gift from the Democrats to generations to come, and as a political party as a whole the Democrats should be given eternal, unrelenting credit for their gift - by name.

"That's that hard part again!"

This cartoon reminds me of Obamacare.



Jerry's Uncle Paco has a high opinion of his own performance and just has to stop now and again to explain why he's having trouble with the hard parts. Jerry is smiling delightedly the entire time because he loves Paco and patiently supports him even though his friend, well, sucks.

Go on over to Dailykos or other places where they love big government and you can read all kinds of love pieces about how fabulous Obamacare is. Like this one. Even though a majority of Americans think it's a train wreck and now have hard evidence to support their belief.

This will be a fun day for Sebelius in Washington DC. My advice to her is to start crying at a strategic point so she appears to be human. My advice to Republicans is to throw water on her like Dorothy does to the witch in Wizard of Oz.

But seriously, doesn't it seem like Sebelius and company are whistling past the graveyard here? From another article:

A component of the online system that has been working relatively well experienced an outage Sunday. The federal data services hub, a conduit for verifying the personal information of people applying for benefits under the law, went down in a failure that was blamed on an outside contractor, Terremark.

"Today, Terremark had a network failure that is impacting a number of their clients, including healthcare.gov," HHS spokeswoman Joanne Peters said. "Secretary Sebelius spoke with the CEO of Verizon this afternoon to discuss the situation and they committed to fixing the problem as soon as possible."

Jeffrey Nelson, a spokesman for Verizon Enterprise Solutions, of which Terremark is a part, said: "Our engineers have been working with HHS and other technology companies to identify and address the root cause of the issue. It will fixed as quickly as possible."

There's the new line. "We've identified the problem and it will be fixed as soon as possible." Sounds an awful lot like Paco's "That's that hard part again." Someone from CGI is going to write a book about this debacle, and none of it will be a surprise any more than this little factoid revealing the affirmative action/cronyism behind the website development.

One-size-fits-all doesn't lower prices

Here's a sobering article about reality in the wake of Obamacare's utopian promises. 400,000 people get cancellation notices from their health insurers. Here's my favorite excerpt:

As a replacement, Regence BlueShield is offering her a plan for $79 more a month with a deductible twice as large as what she pays now, but which limits her potential out-of-pocket costs to $6,250 a year, including the deductible.

“My impression was...there would be a lot more choice, driving some of the rates down,” said Malean, who does not believe she is eligible for a subsidy.

Regence spokeswoman Rachelle Cunningham said the new plans offer consumers broader benefits, which “in many cases translate into higher costs.”

Why would you think there would be a lot more choice with greater regulations? These companies have to offer more benefits under the regulations of the Obamacare law. A consumer must by a high-end plan. The only reason I can keep my plan for the present is that it is a grandfathered plan, i.e., I've had it since long before 2010. But I am paying much more for it, trust me.

Liberals love one-size-fits-all. It's a corollary to their fetish about equality. "Spread the misery around" should be their motto.