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President Obama likes to make promises. He wants to assure people that they will be able to keep whatever they already have, yet at the same time expand the power of the state, contrary to the Constitution and at the expense of the individual.Consider the centerpiece promise of his Presidency, which has been exposed as an all-out lie:
Obamacare: "If you like your health care plan, you can keep it." Result -- millions lose their health insurance, pay higher premiums, lose doctors, etc. Obamacare has been anything but affordable, and no one, not even the growing number of Democrats fearful about keeping their seats in Congress, are campaigning on the perceived strengths of the disastrous legislation.
Now, let's apply this metric about promises, keeping, and the rest:
2009 Stimulus: "If you like your tax dollars, you can keep them." Ha! The nearly one trillions wasted on non-existent Congressional districts or diverted to raising bureaucrats' salaries may have stimulated the arrogance of the Washington Beltway elite, yet did very little in terms of reviving economic growth in the United States.
Dodd-Frank: "If you like your bank, you can keep your bank." Result - Big banks get bigger, with bigger fees, and the smaller banks facing bigger regulations, reducing their power and efficacy.
Common Core: "If you like your education, you can keep it." The result: a convoluted take-over of public education, with data-mining and rushed curricular standards which teachers are having a hard time keeping up with. Add to this convoluted rollout the data-mining controversy, the over-difficult mathematical manuevers, and we have "ObamaCore".
Internet Dominion: "If you like your Internet Security, you can keep it." The Fairness Doctrine has risen up as an important line of argument in free speech, when in truth such an idea is based on the sad notion that liberal-leftist radio should have equal resources to compete with right-thinking, conservative, and individual liberty based radio. The free market of radio and Internet choice could not be clearer: people do not like liberal radio. They do not want to hear leftist talk on the squawk box.
Second Amendment: "If you like your guns, you can keep them." President Obama has issued several executive orders, bypassing Congress, to implement more regulations and strictures on the right to keep and bear arms. These outrageous forced measures have raised the alarm and ire of New England gun owners, particularly in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, who are refusing to register their guns with the state government, where local law enforcement are sending the message that they have no intention of confiscating guns, although that seemed to be the original intent of Connecticut's law.
First Amendment: "If you like your Freedom of Speech and the Press, you can keep them." Press freedom has declined in the United States, often a result of leftist interest group intimidation. The President has his own enemies list, and allegations against the DOJ have revealed that officials seized the phone records of AP reports. Now First Lady Michelle Obama has banned the press from accompanying her to China, where the locals are getting fed up with her demanding ways. President Obama's administration has frequently Freedom of Information Act requests, and so has Attorney General Eric Holder.
Foreign Policy: "If you like your country's standing in the world, you can keep it." President Obama's apology tour to the Arab world, his silence following the Green Revolution in Iran, his reticence following the broadening Syrian Civil War (including the red line which Bassar al-Hassad crossed, danced, and erased). Now, Vladimir Putin has taken advantage of the perennially passive foreign policy of this Presidency, annexing Crimea following by a military venture and a forced plebescite in the region, taking advantage of the political upheaval in Kiev, Ukraine between pro-West and pro-Russia factions in the former Soviet Satellite.
Israel: "If you like the Jewish State, the Jews can keep the Jewish State." From the arrogant argument for land-swaps to his passive in-assistance to Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak, to Secretary of State John's Kerry's about the viability of a central Israeli identity, Obama has sent a not-so-subtle message about his disregard for the integrity of Israel in the Middle East. Former New York City Mayor Ed Koch was so disgusted with President Obama's sorry treatment of Benjamin Netanyahu and the American-Israeli friendship, that Koch endorsed a Republican to replace the disgraced Anthony Weiner in a 2011 special election race for a three-to-one Democratic seat in the NYC burroughs (the Republican won by ten points).
Whatever President Obama has promised, the results have been anything but worth keeping. This President has been anything but professional, whether respecting the United States Constitution or faithfully executing the laws of the land, including his own.
I have a new phrase, one which will likely resonate with voters in 2014:
"If you like your President, you can keep your president." Result? Impeachment on January 3, 2015.
Rita Rizzo, 60, owns a management consulting firm for nonprofit groups and government offices in Akron, Ohio, with her husband, Lou Vincent, 64. Vincent, who suffers from Type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure, has gone without health insurance for 10 years. "We got 30 denial letters," Rizzo told me last week.
ReplyDeleteThree years ago, Rizzo got a hip replacement. Her own insurance premiums were going to rise by $500 a month, to about $800, so she chose instead to triple her deductible to $6,000 to keep the increase to a mere $150 a month.
The couple used a $5,000 tax-deductible health savings account to cover her out-of-pocket expenses; Vincent's medication, which ran to $178 a month; and his blood work-ups, at $2,400 a year.
In December, Rizzo signed up for Obamacare. She now has a policy that covers her and Vincent together, including all his meds and lab work, for $379 a month, with a $2,000 family deductible.
"I feel like I died and went to insurance heaven," she says.
But you haven't heard Rizzo's story unless you tuned in to NBC Nightly News on New Year's Day or scanned a piece by Politico about a week later. In the meantime, the airwaves and news columns have been filled to overflowing with horrific tales from consumers blaming Obamacare for huge premium increases, lost access to doctors and technical frustrations — many of these concerns false or the product of misunderstanding or unfamiliarity with the law.
While Rizzo was working her way to thousands of dollars in annual savings, for example, Southern California Realtor Deborah Cavallaro was making the rounds of NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, CBS, Fox and public radio's Marketplace program, talking about how her premium was about to rise some 65% because of the "Unaffordable" Care Act. What her viewers and listeners didn't learn was that she hadn't checked the rates on California's insurance exchange, where (as we determined for her) she would have found a replacement policy for less than she'd been paying.
With the March 31 deadline for 2014 enrollment in individual health insurance just days away, more questions are being asked about the mismatch in publicity about the Affordable Care Act by its opponents and supporters.
The millions of beneficiaries of the measure — families excluded from insurance because of high premiums or preexisting medical conditions, low-income individuals made newly eligible for Medicaid, seniors receiving a new subsidy for prescriptions, women granted the legal right to affordable maternity coverage for the first time — seem to be absent from the news media or political ad campaigns. But you can't turn on your TV without seeing a well-produced 30- or 60-second spot featuring a purported tale of woe.
"Why aren't Democrats taking this simple approach to defending Obamacare?" asked Slate.com in a recent headline.
Good question. But we know right-wing tools like Artie Schapler--he of the "stupid-is-as-stupid-does" school of fringy echoes--continue to spread overheated bullshit that merely repeats ad nauseum Koch-sponsored misinformation and outright lies. Or, as Artie calls it, "blog content".
Well, well....
ReplyDeleteWisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R), an ardent Affordable Care Act critic, is now encouraging residents to transition into new health plans under the very reform law that he once refused to help implement.
Walker told the Washington Examiner’s Philip A. Klein that he has instructed state agencies to work with individuals who are transitioning into plans offered on Wisconsin’s Obamacare marketplace. That includes both the previously uninsured and poor residents just above the poverty level who are being siphoned out of the state’s Medicaid program, BadgerCare, and into private ACA plans under Walker’s conservative alternative to Obamacare’s optional Medicaid expansion.
Just two years ago, Walker was singing a very different tune. He had refused to create a statewide ACA marketplace — thereby also forgoing significant federal funding for Obamacare outreach efforts — and said he wouldn’t lift a finger to help implement the law until the Supreme Court decided the law’s fate. In fact, Wisconsin’s spending on ACA outreach is the lowest in the nation at just 46 cents per capita.
Walker eventually went even further than that. He said that he wouldn’t do anything about the health law at all until after the 2012 November elections, in the hopes that Mitt Romney would win and repeal the law, making implementation efforts moot.
But now that Obama has been re-elected and the ACA is actually going into effect, Walker is admitting that it could provide a boost for many Wisconsinites. “I don’t want people to fall between the cracks,” said Walker in his Examiner interview. “[U]ntil we can change and come up with something better to replace the law, we still care about our constituents, we still want people to do well.”
It’s a tacit acknowledgment that Obamacare is actually a good deal for the more than half million uninsured state residents. Some of the poorer Wisconsin localities, such as Racine County, suffer from disproportionate numbers of early deaths and STDs and have higher rates of infant mortality.
“A lot of people think that Republicans like me would want to sabotage the law by making it hard or difficult for people to sign up,” said Walker. “I think that’s somewhat shortsighted by our critics, because what we care about more than anything are the people we represent.”
More than 71,000 Wisconsinites signed up for private plans through the state marketplace between October 1 and March 1, according to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
One of Art's heroes jumps on the ACA bandwagon. What's a know-nothing blogger to do?
From Bren, Who commented on my Canada Free Press:
ReplyDeletehttp://canadafreepress.com/index.php/comments/61937
"I would SO LOVE to see this happen! If any one US President deserves to be impeached, it would be Obama. What a shame that our first African American President is such a disappointment. But it's not about the color of his skin, it's all about the color of his Socialist agenda. This is a great opportunity for America to show the world that WE THE PEOPLE will not tolerate an agenda that wishes to tear down what our forefathers built...and spits into the faces of each and every American that has died fighting for this country.
Obama must go!
Posted by Bren on 03/25 at 10:03 AM | #
Dream on, Artie and Bren. Reliably stupid, as usual. And that "it's not the color of his skin" qualifier, Bren? You are a racist, ignorant waste of flesh and plasma.
ReplyDeleteGreat news! President Obama announced today on a call with volunteers that the number of Americans who have enrolled in health insurance plans under Obamacare has hit six million.
ReplyDeleteWith several days left to go before open enrollment ends on March 31, the administration has met its target. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that Obamacare enrollment would hit six million by the end of its enrollment period.
Repeal, my ass!