Dana Milbank is a liberal columnist at the Washington Post who has enraged liberals overnight. Why? This column. It concludes, “Obamacare has been undermined by the very entity they had used to validate it.”

As I noted on twitter yesterday, during the 2009-2010 fight over Obamacare, the left told Republicans, “Live by the CBO, die by the CBO.” The GOP had been convinced the CBO would show Obamacare destroying the economy. But the CBO only looks ten years out and the law was structured to punt a lot of costs down the road. So when the report came in, miracle of miracles, the CBO claimed Obamacare would fix the deficit, create jobs, solve poverty, cure erectile dysfunction, and raise the dead.

Live by the CBO. Die by the CBO. They’ve look again. The Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, turns out to be deeply destructive.

Page 128 of the report notes that

CBO’s updated estimate of the decrease in hours worked translates to a reduction in full-time-equivalent employment of about 2.0 million in 2017, rising to about 2.5 million in 2024, compared with what would have occurred in the absence of the ACA. Previously, the agency estimated that if the ACA did not affect the average number of hours worked per employed person, it would reduce household employment in 2021 by about 800,000.25 By way of comparison, CBO’s current estimate for 2021 is a reduction in full-time-equivalent employment of about 2.3 million.

On page 125 of the CBO report we find that, “there is no compelling evidence that part-time employment has increased as a result of the ACA. On the one hand, there have been anecdotal reports of firms responding to the employer penalty by limiting workers’ hours.”

The left wants to focus not he first part of that. They should focus on the second part because of what is on page 124 of the report.

Beginning in 2015, employers of 50 or more full-time equivalent workers that do not offer health insurance (or that offer health insurance that does not meet certain criteria) will generally pay a penalty . . . . Businesses … may respond to the employer penalty by seeking to reduce or limit their full-time staffing and to hire more part-time employees.

There’s also this from page 124:

Over time, CBO expects, the penalty will be borne primarily by workers in the form of reduced wages or other compensation, at which point the penalty will have little effect on labor demand but will reduce labor supply and will lower employment slightly through that channel.

The CBO, in other words, finds anecdotal evidence of a shift to part time work, but no compelling evidence of an increase yet. But, based on the employer penalty coming online in 2015, the CBO expects both reduced wages and an increase in part-time work.

It’s all in the report. It has left liberals arguing over the meaning of “is.”

If the CBO Report wasn’t bad enough, the Los Angeles Times covers the real world implementation of Obamacare. It is horrific.

A month into the most sweeping changes to healthcare in half a century, people are having trouble finding doctors at all, getting faulty information on which ones are covered and receiving little help from insurers swamped by new business.

Experts have warned for months that the logjam was inevitable. But the extent of the problems is taking by surprise many patients — and even doctors — as frustrations mount.

The whole story is just devastating. The things conservatives said would happen are happening. The best the left can do is claim the lie is truth and the truth is a lie.

So what are the Republicans doing? They’re going to shift the battle to immigration naturally.

Genius.